Shine of the Ever Read online

  “Breaking out the big guns?”

  “Hardly. Anyway, he’s cute. And tall. Take a peek.”

  I picked her phone up off the vanity and put in the passcode. She had the app open to his photo. Six-foot-five, green eyes, athletic build. A man of few words, from the bio. Probably stupid.

  “He looks like your type,” I said. I flicked through the photos: man with three similar-looking friends; man in sports jersey; man holding someone else’s baby; man with fish—the usual. “Does he eat carbs?”

  “I don’t date boys who don’t eat carbs.” She turned to pluck the phone from my hand. She whisked the makeup brush across the tip of my nose. “Seriously, Amit, you should come out sometime. All you do is work.”

  I went into the kitchen without answering her and turned on the stove even though I didn’t really want to drink tea. I was on the schedule for that night, actually, but hadn’t mentioned it to Amanda. I didn’t like coming home after the night shift and smelling her sex through the apartment. She brought these men over on the first night, left lipstick stains on my wine glasses, let them sleep in her bed until late morning. Once I stopped telling her when I was going to be gone, though, there were no more mystery guests. That was our unwritten agreement: She could fuck whomever she wanted, but not where I could hear it.

  “Would you zip me?”

  She trotted after me, heels clicking on the bamboo floor tiles. She turned around and presented me with her bare back. She was scented with Chanel Mademoiselle and baby powder. Catnip. The zipper teeth were jammed, so I picked at the seam until it loosened, then eased the tab up.

  “This is getting tight,” I said. “It was baggy on you a few weeks ago.”

  “I think I put it in the dryer by accident,” she said, pushing her bleached hair over her shoulders. She styled it in crispy curls. Her selfies were fabulous, and when I saw her all made up like this, I noticed the components of her face that made her so striking: the wide-set eyes, bow lips, and delicate brows. Men, she told me once, didn’t notice subtle things like artificial cosmetic colors or shapes. They couldn’t differentiate between an unnatural blush and a real one; all they knew was that they liked it. Amanda knew it. Amanda could work it.

  “I can’t believe you don’t eat everything in sight at the restaurant,” I said. “I would weigh a ton.”

  “My last date told me I smelled like apple pie.” She winked at me over her shoulder, took her bag, and checked her phone. “My Uber’s here. Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Be safe,” I said, like always, like it ever made a difference.

  * * *

  I have perfected the art of acting straight. In locker rooms or when I’m shopping or even on the street, I know how to talk to women in a way that suggests: I am like you and I am not a threat. The best way to do it is to sweeten my voice, make it higher, and offer compliments that include the words so cute. I always mention my boyfriend, who is an imaginary person, or my partner, who doesn’t exist unless I close my eyes, and I see Amanda, taking up the whole bathroom or leaving her clogs in the middle of the floor, or scrolling through the Humane Society website and crying because of all the kittens nobody will adopt, or forgetting to put the groceries away so that the frozen things all melt into separate lumps in their plastic and cardboard containers, or making my bed for me as a surprise and leaving a handful of pansies in the middle of it, or feeding me a bite of buttercream frosting on the end of her special icing spatula. For six years, I’ve come home to her. Both of our names are on the mailbox.

  My imaginary boyfriend is taller than me and doesn’t mind that I look like a dyke. He likes tomboys, I tell the girl changing next to me in the locker room, trying to keep my eyes away from her. Mine’s like that too, she says, as though commiserating. I wish I could just let myself get fat, quit the gym. Acting straight means nodding when women describe the lengths they go to catch a man, keep him, and please him.

  This stranger popped her breasts out of her sports bra practically in my face because we didn’t see each other. When I act straight, my personal space disappears. Men touch me without asking. Women don’t mind standing too close to me. Erasing myself seems like a small price to pay for feeling less alone.

  Amanda is the only one who knows, because there is no way I can keep up this performance all the time. Acting straight is tiring, and, when I come home and flop onto the couch, I can feel those behaviors leaving me, one at a time.

  “You’re an alto,” she told me when she first moved in. “Your voice.”

  “Maybe I have a cold,” I said, but she didn’t bring it up again.

  I used my straight woman behavior at work, too, because it put the victims at ease. Police procedure was stressful enough; did they really need another thing to worry about while I scanned their bodies with the black light and swabbed for samples in their most protected places? The only place I wasn’t straight, aside from home, was on my dating profile.

  * * *

  When Amanda was gone, I logged in and flicked through the profiles of women who were supposed to match with me. Were they queer the same way I was? None of them looked like me. The gay girls were all short, under five-foot-four, and I couldn’t imagine leaning down to kiss one of them. They were child-sized. I couldn’t touch one without thinking about work, the businesslike handling of underage bodies and children with scabbed knees. The trauma stuck to me like the scent of rubbing alcohol. I tried short girls sometimes, because there were so many of them, but I couldn’t make myself get interested. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, but whoever it was needed to feel substantial in my mind. I didn’t want a lover who fit in my lap. I didn’t want to feel like anyone’s mother.

  Nobody on the app caught my fancy, though I had a few messages. They were all the same. I read each one without responding. One of my fears was that I would see someone I recognized, someone from the lab or, even worse, one of the victims or one of their family members, that they would find my profile, with its clear-cut orientation and the “don’t let straight people see me” box checked, and suddenly realize that the gloved hand that slid the speculum into them for Exam Group A tests was not a straight woman’s hand, or even really a woman’s hand, although the way I was built suggested lady, female. I learned a long time ago that giving people the words they need in order to know how to treat me was important. I am physically female, but I am not a woman. I am not attracted to men, though I do not hate them or find them repulsive. I avoid pronouns when I refer to myself or others. I have an ambiguous name, short for nothing. The messages usually ask about it, but I can’t say anything intelligent; there isn’t anything to say.

  In the bathroom, I picked up Amanda’s toothbrush and pressed the tip of my tongue to its bristles. Her toothpaste, different from mine, crackled over my taste buds. Maybe her date was inhaling her breath right now, getting her lipstick on his face. Straight women don’t have these thoughts. They cheerfully toss their shiny ponytails and go to bed with a bounce in their steps, thinking, Gee, I hope she’s having fun. When they say “girlfriend” it means something different from when I say “girlfriend.” The cord to Amanda’s hair dryer protruded from the drawer, a tangled black plastic vine. I tried to shove it back and, as I did, my eye fell on a long white box with the Clearblue logo on it: advanced pregnancy test, rapid results. The box was open; one of the two plastic sticks was already used. I didn’t see it in the trash; she must have taken it at work. I shook out the other test and looked down into the blank window. Women saw their futures in these things.

  When I touched anything of hers, I put it back exactly the way I found it. If she had something to share with me, she would. Until then, I just collected the evidence. I knew she only lived with me because she couldn’t afford to live alone. She had a whole life, separate from mine. That didn’t stop me from loving her.

  * * *

  I was mostly swing shift at t
he lab, four days on and two off. Techni­cally I was part of the Portland Police Association even though I’d never even shot a gun. I explained this to Amanda once, and she just nodded.

  “You look like a cop,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I mean, you look like a cop should look. Serious. Trustworthy. Not a real cop.”

  “I’m not a real cop.”

  “There you go.”

  She was the pastry chef at a nice restaurant downtown, a fancy bistro that printed a separate dessert menu with her name at the top. She made banana cream pie with chocolate caramel sauce, tiramisu and mousse, and panettone with bergamot marmalade. She cooked a lot at home, too, mostly overnight sourdough pancakes and little cookies, the kind ladies have with their tea. Our place smelled like heaven, like powdered sugar and Meyer lemon mixed together in sweet almond paste. One time she made a whole tray of cream puffs filled with huckleberry cream and glazed with honey, sprinkled with bee pollen and raw sugar—fairy food.

  “Nobody at the lab’s going to appreciate these,” I said. I held one between my thumb and finger. It shone with sweetness. My mouth watered.

  “But I made them for you. You can just leave them in the break room. Come on,” she said.

  “What am I going to say?”

  She pressed a sheet of wax paper into a shallow Tupperware container. “Don’t say anything, then. Just say your friend made them.”

  My friend.

  “I guess it’s more of a pie and coffee kind of place, right?” She picked up the first puff with a pair of tiny silver tongs and nestled it into the box. “There are forty-two of these. We can’t eat all of them.”

  I ate the one I had taken and stuffed my sticky hands in my pockets. She was biting her lip, the way she did when somebody had hurt her feelings. “I’ll take them, okay? They’re perfect. You didn’t have to do this.”

  “I wanted to. Quit acting like I’m nice.”

  But she was, mostly, nice. I think that’s why it worked out. In bed, before I went to sleep, I added up the nice things she had said and done and thought of how I could possibly repay her. She wouldn’t like that—me keeping count—but that’s just the way it worked. The special cream puffs were gone by the first coffee break on my shift.

  “What were those, Amit?” my manager Jeff asked. “Blueberry?”

  “Huckleberry.”

  “Amazing,” he said, and kissed his fingers, making them explode from his lips like a firework. “Whoever says that food isn’t love is missing out.”

  Later that morning, I did a basic kit on a dazed seventeen-year-old girl who’d been roofied at a party and then sodomized by the friend she thought was going to take her home. I held her hand and scraped under her nails, trying to capture any hair, skin, or other DNA that might be trapped there. She leaned toward me while I wiggled the curved manicure tool against her nail bed.

  “I’m almost through,” I said. “I’m sorry I can’t be more gentle.”

  “You smell like magic donuts.” She leaned her head on my shoulder. I wasn’t supposed to, but I let her stay there until the sample was done.

  Amanda’s date with the most recent Tinder guy was probably fine, because I didn’t hear from her until late the next morning when she texted me from the restaurant.

  You should come get coffee and I’ll give you one of the scones I’m working on, she said.

  I replied, Twist my arm.

  * * *

  When she brought the tiny white plate and the cup on its pearly saucer to my two-top in the corner, I noticed that she had gained weight. She was thicker through her arms, and her waist was starting to disappear. She was tying her apron higher than usual.

  “I know, I need to go shopping,” she said when she saw me eyeing her. “My jeans don’t fit. I should quit eating at work so much.”

  “You could borrow mine, but you’d have to cuff them.”

  “You’re like a foot taller than me! And anyway, I love shopping.”

  I hate shopping. But I nodded and offered to go with her on my next day off. Because it wouldn’t be a hassle or anything, and I could drive, I said. The scone was delicious. She’d smeared it with sage butter. I pressed the crumbs with my fingertip and ferried them to my mouth.

  At the secondhand store, she picked out three pairs of dark Dickies, work pants, and a vintage silk blouse that hung on her like a tent. Usually, she spun around in front of me or at least clucked to me from the fitting room about how something looked. You like this top? It looks like something my dad would wear. But this time, she walked straight to the cashier’s station with her arms full of clothes, plopped them on the counter, and pulled out her wallet. I was bending up the brim of a funny-looking felt hat when she called to me from the doorway.

  “You’re ready to go?”

  “I knew what I wanted. Plus, it doesn’t matter if they’re not flattering, it’s just for work.”

  “Not that shirt, though.”

  She smiled, the first real one I’d seen on her in a while. “I’m taking a few days off next week. I’m due for a mini vacation. That guy from Tinder wants to take me to the coast.”

  “Fun,” I said. I didn’t say: Most of the stories I hear at work start that way. I didn’t ask for his full name or even his address because I knew that Amanda didn’t keep track of things like that. I didn’t tell her about the woman I ran a test kit for last month, whose “boyfriend” shot her up on Dilaudid and sold her to a bachelor party. I didn’t tell Amanda that, when blood is mixed with the sample, it makes it difficult to isolate a single attacker’s DNA.

  She saw my expression, though. “Amit. It’s just two nights. He’s fine.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You did, though. You did.”

  We got a hamburger at Mel’s on the way home, and I let her eat my fries. She looked at her phone the whole time, not really talking to me. In the corner, above the milkshake machine, a small monitor played the TV-edited version of Runaway Bride. Julia Roberts’ smile filled the square screen; her mouth was like a shark’s, so wide I expected to see more than one row of white teeth.

  “Where on the coast?”

  “Just let it go, Amit. I’ll text you so that you know he hasn’t dismembered me. When I get home, it’s back-to-back weddings and banquets. I need a break.”

  I went back to my burger. Amanda’s fingers darted into the red plastic basket, removing one fry at a time. Julia Roberts laced up her running shoes.

  “I’m going to miss you, that’s all,” I muttered.

  I am positive she didn’t hear me.

  * * *

  Almost four weeks went by when all I saw of Amanda were her dishes in the rack and her three pairs of sensible pants rumpled on top of the washing machine. She did text, sometimes, mostly about how she needed another vacation after that last one with what’s-his-face. She was rhapsodic about his shortcomings, which I think was mostly to make me feel better. She told me how work was and how the sous put in his notice without telling anyone in the kitchen and how they’d caught one of the waiters secretly drinking the triple sec. She shared all the gossip. This was her way of making up to me when she knew she’d done something that rubbed me the wrong way. She never said she was sorry, exactly. She just gave me more of her attention.

  Amaretto or vanilla bean? she texted.

  For what? Cake?

  Angel food that isn’t boring.

  That was my cue to jump in with a joke, about angels or sponges or something, but I’d just swabbed semen from the rectum of a four-year-old boy and I wasn’t in the mood. I clicked my phone off and set it screen-down on the break room table.

  Jeff sat down across from me. “You want a coffee?”

  “No. Just a minute.”

  Because of the job, the nature of it, we weren’t expected to a
dhere too strictly to the employment law-mandated break structure. Anyone who worked there for more than a year got used to the chronic emotional exhaustion. One hour into your shift, you might feel the floor start to fall out from under you. Or it could be that, after ten days on call, when the slideshow of images, of pink meat, and scared faces, and endlessly folding the white exam sheets, and emulsions of body fluids, and the sudden pressure of their hand over yours when it hurts, and the March 2008 issue of People magazine in the waiting room that nobody reads, and the tools, and the inspiring flower poster, and the quiet, the absolute quiet of someone who has been silenced by what’s happened to them, catches you up in its zero-gravity suck and suddenly you are the one upside-down, sitting in the break room and staring at the square green digits on the microwave clock while they reorient themselves into different shapes that mean different times.

  “Those little donuts you brought in that one time,” said Jeff. “Those were good.”

  I rubbed my eyes. “My roommate made them.”

  “Really good,” he repeated. “How long have you two lived together?”

  “Six years. She’s a pastry chef. Those were cream puffs, she was testing the recipe for work.”

  “Six years, and she can cook like that!”

  I smiled at him. “She’s great.”

  “Definitely a keeper,” Jeff said. His eyes were on mine, full of secret messages. “Amit and Amanda, that’s cute.”

  I sat back in my chair and slid my phone into my lap. “Thanks,” I said.

  “You ever think about having kids?”

  “Not really.”

  He wiped his hands on his thighs. “She sure can cook.” He got up from his chair.

  Why didn’t I correct him? I thought about all the things I could have said. But why should I set things straight? Maybe I didn’t want to.

  Almost another week passed before I saw Amanda again.

  “I’m so fucking tired,” she said. She drew the black liner over her lashes, making a cat-eye shape. “I look like Amy Winehouse.”