Michelle Hoover - Bottomland

The next week at the shop, I couldn’t think. My threads snapped, the pedal growled under my feet, and the needle caught my thumb. I wrapped it bleeding with a strip of cloth. Charlotte didn’t say a word unless it hinted at my sister’s name. At lunch, I took my break away from all the talk, but the bell came fast. I hated those needles and scraps, the dark in the daytime, and that dragon that burned at a touch. Myrle had been out every night, and still not a letter. If I had kept the first, I could open it like something new under our lamp and read it like she was still talking to me, which she wasn’t. I’d keep it under our mattress and listen to her voice in my sleep. I’m sorry , she’d say. I didn’t mean. I never wanted to leave like that.

A cry from the corner. Charlotte shot out of her chair. “That’s Abigail.” The machines stopped and the lot of us went running after her, shoving to see. Abigail was on her feet, one hand out and the other clutching her face. She spun from one girl to the next. “Do you see it? Can you get it? Get it out!”

A girl gasped. “It’s her eye.”

Charlotte crouched in front of her, catching her arms. “Easy, Abigail. You just stay still.”

“What’s this here?” called the foreman.

Abigail’s hand was full and bloody now, her voice keening. Charlotte held her waist, calming her. From between Abigail’s fingers, something glinted hot and sharp.

“Out of the way. Here, here.” Pushing Charlotte aside, the foreman caught Abigail under his arm and ran her from the room. Shut away in the elevator, the sound of Abigail’s cries fell floor by floor to the street.

“What was that?”

“A needle break,” Charlotte said. “Happens.” She grimaced. “I got one in my cheek once.”

I backed away. The floor was stained with Abigail’s bleeding. This place, it cut every single thing. My sister and me, it cut all of us in half.

“What’s wrong with Dolores?” another girl let out.

Dolores sat at her machine. The chairs around her were empty, Abigail’s thrown to the floor, but Dolores gripped the seat of her chair like it might drop from under her.

“Don’t tell anyone,” she whined. “Don’t you dare.”

But already we could smell it. Her lap soaked and a puddle on the floor.

“We’ll get you out of here,” Charlotte said.

“But I can’t.”

Charlotte grabbed her coat and tied it around Dolores’ waist. We got her to her feet. The other girls watched in a line like sheep.

“You girls best get to work by the time he’s back,” Charlotte snapped. She gave them a look, but I knew she didn’t care a dime about work, foreman or not. She wanted them to worry about anything but us.

Outside it was already close to dark. We walked the mile or more to Mrs. Keyes, Dolores shivering. “What about Abby?”

“Poor thing.” Charlotte bit her lip. “But I’ve seen worse. We’ve got to think she’ll be all right.”

We turned into the alley just as Myrle rounded the corner. My sister ducked her face into her collar, her eyes on her feet. If she saw us, she pretended she didn’t.

“Gotta go,” I said. Charlotte called after me, and Dolores, she was holding my arm. But it was Myrle, running off again to wherever she went. It was my only chance to find it.

Across the river, around the Loop, to the money part of town that we never came near. I finally caught up with her. Myrle was standing in front a theater that read C-H-I–C-A-G-O, the words bright underneath:

NORMA TALMADGE

ON SCREEN

THE SIGN ON THE DOOR

When a woman at the entrance raised a fuss by handing her coat to the ticker taker, fur hat and all, Myrle was already in.

“Hey!” the usher called when I tried it. “You got a ticket?”

I reached into my pocket.

“No ticket, no show,” he said.

“But. ”

He shooed me off with his glove.

“Fifty cents,” the man at the counter said.

I reached into my pocket. Two quarters and a dime. All the extra I had for the month.

“If you don’t got it. ”

“I got it.” I snatched the ticket out of his hand.

Inside, the ceiling was high enough to hurt necks. Red carpet and gold, a light of a hundred diamonds overhead. I felt dark as dark with all the fancy people there, the women in dresses down to their heels. White-gloved ticket takers of all things. A flight of stairs that swept to the upper floors like a tongue. Myrle, she was nowhere. balcony, my ticket said.

The lights flickered, the organ stamping. The place seemed to move underfoot, the balcony so high it felt like falling. I had to catch shoulders as I climbed the steps. When I found her, Myrle was sitting at the back in her coat, as high as she could get. That music, it was a reedy kind of roar. So full of light and air, I wondered how the place could hold so much at once. Myrle sat with her eyes closed as if that sound were just for her. And here it was, everything she’d been hiding in her head.

“Esther.” Myrle leaned forward enough to nearly pitch herself out of her seat. She didn’t seem surprised I was there. “Do you see it?”

“What?”

“Just wait.”

But all I could see on the screen was a woman locked in a room. She had skin whiter than cream, a mess of curls on her head. She sure looked a star. She was trying to pick a lock, and behind her a man lay on a bed as if sleeping, but he wasn’t. He had a gun in his hand, on his chest the bloom of something dark. On the other side of the door, the sign do not disturb.

“The man was going to blackmail her,” Myrle whispered. “But her husband shot him trying to protect her. Then he locked the room and left. He didn’t know she was already hiding in there, a plan of her own.”

The music was fast as running now, the sound jumping off the walls like bees. Norma was tearing at the door with all she had.

“Does she get out?”

“Sure. But not the way you think.” She closed her eyes. The light from the screen was bright as suns. Already Myrle seemed to have left me behind.

“You don’t want to go home, do you?”

“Home?”

“The farm.”

She gave a quick shake of her head.

I reached for her hand. “What happened to your ring?”

“It hurt.” Her fingers were puffy and fat. “Let’s go.” She took my arm and we scooted by people’s knees. I didn’t want to leave, not with the woman so close to breaking out of that room and my fifty cents, but Myrle was already down the stairs, her grip so tight I had to run to keep from falling. A mess of voices yelled at us from the seats. When I reached the bottom of the stairs, Myrle let go of my arm. She was out the doors, heading to the lobby. She didn’t look back. In a flash, she was on the far side of that ruby floor, going along like something was chasing her. But the only thing behind her was me.

It took a few blocks to catch her. Myrle was breathing hard, walking in fits and starts. At the door of the boardinghouse, she pulled up short.

“Esther,” she said, “don’t tell Mrs. Keyes.”

“Tell her what?”

“Anything.”

When the door flew open, Keyes was in a fit. “Where have you two been?”

Charlotte stood at her back. “Is she sick?”

I didn’t say a word, but Myrle was still breathing like that, leaning against the frame. Mrs. Keyes drew her up the stairs. In our room, Keyes snapped the door shut and laid her on the bed. She opened Myrle’s coat, touched her forehead. She touched her stomach. Her hand jumped and she touched her stomach again.

“What is it?” Charlotte asked.

Keyes washed a hand over her cheeks. “Never thought a girl this old wouldn’t know her birds and bees.”

“She’s pregnant?” Charlotte asked.