This was what had caught her once, and held her here: once you stepped beyond the slot machines— and even these held a certain glinting allure— the casino was beautiful. White-and-gold ceilings arcing high between mahogany pillars, complicated parquet floors and thick carpets. When everything else around her had been squalid, there had always been this. This place had always held beauty even when it was killing her and the beauty reached her even now, even knowing what she did about how much could be lost here.
Sasha walked under mahogany archways into the hush of the poker room, where games were playing out at a dozen tables, bought into a no-limit game and sat with her chips in a small tower before her. After all these years of effort, of Gamblers Anonymous meetings, she was disappointed by an inescapable sense of homecoming.
The blinds were laid and the cards dealt. For a moment Sasha didn't want to look at her hand. She hesitated for so long that the man sitting beside her— a pinch-faced small person in a cowboy hat— glanced curiously at her. But she did look, finally, and it wasn't terrible. A jack and a nine, both hearts. There was hope there, or she could still fold and not have lost very much. Sasha raised a small bet and put in twenty, the first chips sliding away from her over the felt. She half-wanted to snatch them back and leave immediately before she lost anything important, but she forced herself to sit still. The flop was a two, a five, a queen. Nothing enormously useful, but the fourth card— the turn— was a ten of hearts and she felt the old quickening. It would be difficult, she realized, to hold on to herself here. She was thinking of Delirious Things, of northern lights and snow. She would go to Alaska! A half-formed idea that became a plan between the turn and the river card. She had always loved Florida but if her life was changing into something unrecognizable then she wanted Florida's opposite, she wanted winter and cold landscapes under northern lights. She would be alone there, but she was alone now. The river was the eight of hearts. She had the best hand and won three hundred dollars.
Her next two hands were useless and she folded, and after this she lost track of time. There was the smooth wood at the edge of the table under her fingertips, a faint scent of orange oil, the clicking of chips. She glanced up and the person next to her was now a large woman with a clipped northern accent. Sasha hadn't noticed when the man with the cowboy hat had left, or she'd noticed him leave but had forgotten it. There were tells and bluffs all around her, patterns in the cards. The stacks of hard disks by her hands rose and fell and rose again.
Her table was the nearest to the bar. She looked up and across the game and saw William Chandler watching her from a barstool, a jacket over his Parks Department uniform. He was sipping an amber liquid caught between ice cubes.
"I hoped I wouldn't find you here," he said. She wasn't sure if she'd heard him or if she'd read his lips, but she was certain of what he'd said to her. There was something unreal about the room now, the lights too bright, sound muffled.
"I know," she said. "I'm sorry." She knew she'd spoken aloud, but no one at the table glanced at her. The man across from her wore reflective glasses and a baseball cap, most of his face hidden. She couldn't tell where he was looking, so she tried not to look at him.
Sasha had a good hand, a king and a jack of spades, and the flop held a ten of the same suit. She held her breath. The turn was the nine of spades, the river was the queen and she'd just won, she realized, an extraordinary sum of money. The chips moved across the table toward her. She assembled them into careful towers. She was up two thousand four hundred fifty dollars. In the next game she lost seven hundred of this but it came back to her quickly. She couldn't remember having asked for a glass of water but one had appeared beside her chips, and she realized dimly that it was William who had set it there. Impossible to tell, in this room without clocks or windows, how long she had been here now. It had to have been a while, all these hands and the cast at the table around her still changing, the large northern woman with the clipped accent replaced by a larger red-faced man. She tried to remember all the hands she'd been dealt, but couldn't. William was watching her from the bar. She nodded at him in what she hoped was a reassuring way.
In her new state, she decided, Alaska or someplace else with snow, she would clean the wood of her home with orange oil. She liked the scent of it. The cards in her hands now were a two and a six, unmatched suits, so she folded and let her gaze slide over the room. This room was the promise: if you win enough at these tables you might move forever through rooms like this one, places with solid shining mahogany and warm colors, potted palm trees, high ceilings. All the interiors of your life might be elegant after this, opulent and always clean. Her next hand contained a pair of aces that brought towers of chips sliding over the table toward her and it was some time after this, although she wasn't sure how long, when she heard William Chandler's voice behind her.
"Sasha," he said, "it's time to stop."
His voice broke the spell. She looked at the pile of chips before her and realized, waking from the dream, that she was up a little over six thousand dollars.
"Fold," she said. The game was almost over. She watched the showdown, the dealer's hands sliding the stacks of chips toward the man with the reflective glasses, who broke into an exuberant grin. Her legs were unsteady when she stood. William took her elbow. He helped her cash out her chips and in the gray twilight of the parking lot they stood together by his car. She felt dazed and emptied out.
" Thank you, William." Her voice was hoarse. "What time is it?"
" Eight o'clock," he said. "You working tonight?"
"I got someone to cover for me," she said. "I don't have to be at work till ten. I didn't know how much time I'd need."
"What now, then?"
"Let's go to the ocean."
"The ocean?"
"I'm leaving Florida soon," Sasha said. "I don't know when I'll see it again."
"Okay, then, the ocean. You have a spot in mind?"
"There's an access point at the end of Cordoba Boulevard."
"Fine," he said. "I'll follow you."
She started her car. These mechanical motions, automatic pilot. William's headlights in the rearview mirror. She usually felt more sharpness and purpose in a car than elsewhere but now she drifted through the twilight, palm trees approaching and falling away in the windshield, her headlights a thin glaze on the half-dark streets. Stay awake. Stay awake. She had to remind herself to blink but she felt sleep crowding close around her, a chaotic darkness at the periphery. It would be easy to slide. She wondered where Anna was, but that thought was pure agony and she shied quickly away from it. The six thousand seventy dollars from the casino were divided here and there on her body, some in the zipped inside pocket of her jacket, some in her handbag, some in her sports bra between her breasts. These tropical streets where she'd lived all her life. The long passage down Cordoba and the darkened sea at the end. She parked the car and walked out on the sand in the still salt air. There were three condominium towers by the beach here, but the units hadn't sold. Almost all of the windows were dark, one or two lights shining high above.