The Atlántico Hotel employees were told to leave everything—their worries, their moods, their questions, their lives—back of house, where they could pick them up after their shifts if they desired. This suited Evelyn just fine. The pills she’d bought in the alley behind Mac’s Club Deuce on Fourteenth and Collins were working, maybe too well. She’d popped half a Vicodin for the cramps; half a Valium for the low hum that got her through her shifts at The Spa. By eight-twenty-two, when she was punching in, the hands of the time clock blurred but her nerve endings were mollified.
“I am three minutes away from slapping her, for real.”
Tatiana— tall, bossy, with the carriage of an athletic ballerina—was rolling towels alongside Evelyn, and bitching about Gloria, their manager, again. When she talked to guests, Tatiana’s voice was warm and soothing, like the Red Flower massage oil the spa concierges had tested on their arms during a run-through of the treatment menu. But tucked away in the spa dispensary between the men’s and women’s locker rooms, her words took on an edge.
“Girl needs management training,” Tatiana muttered. “For real.”
Evelyn had thought working in a spa would be calming. All that new-age music and lemongrass. If Tatiana would just shut up, Evelyn would have everything she’d come to Miami for: a beautiful, serene, blank, blank slate.
Tatiana stepped back to assess the fruits of their labor. Rows and rows of pure white face cloths, stacked on the counter like fluffy oversized lines of coke. Each one expertly rolled. The 2IC, Enrique, had deemed Tatiana and Evelyn the best towel rollers of the bunch, and he used to work at the fancy ESPA Spa in Sunny Isles, so he knew what he was talking about. He was the one who taught them the technique: First, you found the tag that poked out from one edge of the towel. A useless addition. You made sure the tag was tucked inside the first fold you made—lengthwise. Then you rolled the cloth firmly and tightly and you placed it on top of the others with the thicker seam end of the cloth facing inward, so it was out of sight.
Despite their job titles, the spa concierges had exactly zero in common with the hotel concierges who sat in the lobby peddling tickets to Marlins games and “hard-to-get” dinner reservations they made on OpenTable. In the Spa, they were glorified cleaners.
Twenty minutes till their break. Tatiana dropped into a squat and reached up to stretch her arms out against the edge of the counter.
“Uhhh,” she purred. “Yeah.”
Evelyn, with a dull pain blooming in her lower back, followed her lead; leaned forward, bent her knees, and dropped into a squat. A sharp stabbing pain shot through her abdomen. She grasped the counter to steady herself and felt a fingernail scrape the edge of a face cloth. She stumbled, her feet kicking out from beneath her, and hit the floor—hard. There was nothing she could do but watch dozens of expertly rolled face cloths rain down from the pile, unfurling, unrolling, and scattering all over the floor. They settled on top of Evelyn with a soft white sigh.
“Lynn! What the fuck is wrong with you? Lynn?”
Tatiana loomed over her, waiting for an answer, but Evelyn said nothing, even when she realized that Lynn was her. Gloria had decided that this would be Evelyn’s name at the Spa, since there was already an Evelyn who was a massage therapist and that was way more important than a spa concierge. It was fine. She didn’t need to be Evelyn here, and certainly not Evie. No one liked Evie. Evie burned bridges. Evie was gone.
Break time at last. Evelyn took a seat at the table by the cafeteria’s door, joining Jean-Paul, a dishwasher she’d met during orientation. Evelyn had made a point of not making friends in Miami, but Jean-Paul’s soft-spoken demeanor distinguished him from the brash young hotel staff. At orientation—dress code, smart casual—most of them wore jeans. Only Jean-Paul was dressed in business attire, a belt, shiny shoes, the whole shebang. He spoke haltingly during the intros: he had moved to Miami from Port-au-Prince eighteen months ago. He spoke English, French and Creole. When the corporate orientation leader asked who’d inspired him most in the world, Jean-Paul hesitated before whispering, “My sister,” without raising his eyes from the HR packet sitting in front of him on the table. Through his orange dress shirt, Evelyn could make out the shadow of an undershirt. He had dressed with such care. He was giving his all for this opportunity. Something about that undershirt penetrated her diazepamed veneer, and unwelcome questions followed.
What was she doing there? But also: Where else could she be? She had blown everything up for a few good fucks with a man she thought she’d been in love with back in New York. It turns out what Daniel loved was fucking her. Evie, his idea of her. He also liked the guardrails of his marriage—to one of her former employer’s top clients. Miami was Evelyn’s penance.
“How’s the Spa?”
Mercedes, the head of housekeeping, plopped down and commandeered the table where Evelyn and Jean-Paul ate together in companionable silence.
“Fine,” Evelyn replied, putting down her fork. “Jacuzzi’s already broken, though.”
“Lord almighty,” said Mercedes. “All that money and they can’t get nothing right.” She shook her head and scooped up a mouthful of rice and beans. After a few bites, she murmured an mmm-hmmm. Cleaning fourteen hotel rooms a shift made for a hearty appetite.
“You’re not eating,” she said, glancing at Evelyn’s plate.
Despite her bouncy curls and musical laugh, Mercedes had the all-seeing eyes of a sweetly tyrannical grandmother.
Evelyn shook her head. “Not hungry.” She’d piled her plate with lasagna and soggy romaine, but one whiff of the cheap meat had turned her stomach. She nibbled on a piece of dry bread. All of a sudden, she felt hot. The cinder block walls of the cafeteria closed in. Evelyn left her tray on the table and ran to the locker room.
Mercedes was outside the bathroom door when she came out, her face flushed.
“So, are you hungover or pregnant?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Evelyn said, pushing a few strands of damp hair behind her ears. She didn’t drink anymore. She gestured at the hall behind Mercedes.
“Break’s over.”
But Mercedes just stood there, her eyes scanning Evelyn’s face before sweeping over her body, which, in the ill-fitted spa uniform, gave little away.
“Hmm. You got that look about you.”
“What look?”
“I’d go get one of them tests if I were you,” Mercedes said, her penciled brows hoisted high.
“You’re crazy, Mercedes. But thanks for your concern.”
Evelyn pushed past Mercedes, swallowing to fight off the next wave of nausea, counting the weeks since she’d seen Daniel. She almost bumped into Jean-Paul, in front of her at the time clock. He looked over his shoulder at her with an unreadable expression.
“See you soon, Jean-Paul,” Evelyn said. But he averted his eyes, turned, and headed for the hotel kitchen.
Back to the hum of dead time between clients. Too much time to muse on what Mercedes had said. The relaxation lounge was all white everything, very Elle Décor. White walls, white modular couches. Pale eggshell daybeds facing the stupidly blue-green ocean. The whole spa was designed to encourage guests to forget their lives, but even beneath a layer of Valium, it took Evelyn back to the spas of her past; locations she visited as a photo assistant on travel shoots—the Ciel Spa in L.A.; the Como Shambala Spa on Parrot Cay. Soulless work she’d fallen into straight out of an internship. Evelyn never had the balls to pursue the kind of photojournalism she’d sworn she would when she was doing her arts degree in Sydney—work that meant something.
She spied a lone thread of white cotton on the floor and leaned down to pick it up. On her shift, the lounge was spotless. It helped that there had only been two guests all day. A black flash shot by outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. A cat? It disappeared into the bushes that separated the lawn from the pool deck and the plants shook.
Daniel’s house in Westchester, according to Google Street View, had rose bushes in the sweet green yard. Evelyn tried to picture him in that faux-Colonial split-level house, but she couldn’t do it. She’d only ever seen him in bars and hotel rooms. Looking at the photo of his house, the only thing she could imagine was his wife on an oversized couch, from Restoration Hardware or Room and Board, something way nicer than CB2. The baby asleep in a fancy crib, and his wife folded into an angry curve, a mirror of the cul-de-sac outside. Had he made amends yet? Was that even possible?
Evelyn paced the blond wood floor of the relaxation lounge and felt in her pocket for the shell she’d been carrying around in her pocket all week. It was parched, the broken edges softened by the waves, the sand, the sun. When she’d found it on the beach and peered inside, each crack in the surface quietly revealed a flash of purple. It was chalky, like the pastel bath bombs from Lush her mother had loved so much. Evelyn pushed her thumb into the curve of the shell, over and over, as if searching for something.
She would get a test on her way home. Then what? Getting fired from the photo agency—which happens when you sleep with a client’s husband—had stripped away her health insurance. And, technically, her work visa, too. What Evelyn was doing, this shitty minimum-wage spa job, was illegal. And, since Dobbs and the red storm of twenty-twenty-four, so was abortion in Florida. First after fifteen weeks, now six. Maybe she could go back to New York? Sure, she could scrape together the plane fare, but then what? Daniel wanted nothing to do with her. And even in New York, Planned Parenthood had been gutted. Those conservative fucks had come in guns blazing. Things had gotten grim, fast. Returning to Sydney as someone who’d let the good life slip from her grasp was out of the question. Evelyn was still paying off her mum’s debts. Dodging long-distance collections calls.
Mercedes again. In the employee locker room this time. They were supposed to change back into their street clothes before leaving the premises, but Evelyn couldn’t be bothered. Her mind was on the baggie of Valium in the top drawer of the nightstand back at her sublet. She stayed in her uniform pants and the white button-up, hanging just her sweat-stained blazer in her locker. Mercedes sidled up to Evelyn, and without looking at her, pried her fingers open, placed a piece of paper in her palm, and closed her fingers around it. She squeezed Evelyn’s hand. Her fingers were pudgy, like Evelyn’s mother’s, before she got sick.
“They’ll take care of you,” Mercedes whispered. “Quiet, like. No fuss.”
Evelyn rolled the piece of paper between her fingers like a worry bead. Banged her locker shut and shoved the key and the piece of folded paper into her pocket, next to the shell, which she gave a self-soothing stroke.
“Take care, mi amor.” Mercedes patted Evelyn on the back.
Evelyn slung her canvas tote over her shoulder and filed out of the employee exit, past security and into the swampy night. Huddled into the back corner of the S bus, she uncurled the piece of paper. There was a handwritten phone number on it, a three-oh-five. And in scratchy block letters, were two words: LA LINEA.
“This is not a good pregnancy.”
The lady in the green scrubs frowned. Evelyn appreciated the scrubs, even though the dingy room above a cigar shop in Little Havana felt nothing like a real doctor’s office.
“What? What do you mean?” Evelyn said, sitting up.
Mercedes wouldn’t have sent her into one of those bogus “crisis pregnancy centers,” would she? Evelyn pictures the gold cross at her co-worker’s neck. Was it possible that her Christian charity extended to deception?
The slick of lube against Evelyn’s thigh was cold as the woman removed the sonogram wand. The woman’s back was turned as she fiddled with the machine.
“Ectópico,” said the woman quietly. “Embarazado ectópico.”
Evelyn wiped herself with the tissue placed next to her legs and rearranged the scratchy towel across her lap. She sat up on the massage table masquerading as an exam table. When she’d first seen this room, she’d wondered when she could discreetly reach for her phone and take a photo. That was before the smell of tobacco and now this news turned the occasional wave of nausea into a bombora.
“Nothing on the scan,” the woman continued. “Means baby is in wrong place.”
“Wrong place? Where?”
The woman shrugged. “No sé.”
Evelyn’s heart banged in her chest. Usually she was the one saying no sé. People saw her dark hair and dark eyes and assumed she could speak Spanish. The words pounded in her head: No sé, no sé, no sé.
“But the blood test?” she asked. Since Mercedes had cornered her outside the locker room, she’d had all the symptoms. “You said—”
The lady in scrubs had been all business before, but now she looked spooked.
“Test is right.” The woman shook her head. “You’re pregnant.”
“Okay, but—”
“You need the hospital, Miss.”
“What? Why?” She couldn’t afford the hospital. Also: wouldn’t blood tests there also show signs of her drug use? What she’d been taking was legal, sure, but she had no prescriptions. “You can’t help me here?”
The woman shook her head. She was already pulling the paper off the massage table behind Evelyn, shoving it in the bin.
“Hospital. But sssh, okay? You didn’t come here.”
The woman didn’t offer Evelyn her money back and Evelyn couldn’t bring herself to ask. The woman opened the door and conferred with a man sitting sentry in the hallway. Beside him, Evelyn could make out the thin limbs and bedazzled jeans of a young woman. How old? Evelyn craned her neck but the woman was striding back into the room, blocking her view.
“He will give you a ride,” she said, indicating the man in the hall.
“No. I’ll get an Uber,” Evelyn said. She wanted privacy, darkness. Hospitals were bright, loud, overcrowded. But the woman was so insistent. And the pressure in Evelyn’s abdomen had swept like an angry bushfire into the valley of her lower back.
“Will I have to stay? Overnight, I mean?” she said, reaching for her tote, which held her phone and her underpants, scrunched up into a ball. The shell she’d been carting around was in there, too.
The woman shrugged and closed the door. Evelyn hurried into her panties and jeans. Bloated and tender, she left the top button undone. She had barely stepped into the hallway when the door of the secret La Linea office slammed behind her. It wasn’t just one young woman sitting on the plastic folding chairs in the hallway—there were three of them. With their heads drawn down to their phone screens, Evelyn couldn’t tell how old they were, but the friendship bracelets, worn-in slip-on sneakers, and anime stickers on their phone cases said it all.
Through the window of the janky black Camry, the city was bright, sweltering. On one side of the highway, boats were stacked up on racks like clean dishes waiting to be put away. Squat pastel houses with bars on the windows zipped by. Billboards: WeBuyUglyHouses.com; Mega Millions Jackpot! Signs for 95-South, signs for 95-North. Overpasses, exits, cranes frozen in place next to half-done condos. The A/C blasted over the Latin pop on the radio. A sharp twinge announced itself on Evelyn’s right side, beneath her hip. The car shot past Miami’s glossy downtown and onto the causeway like a toy car heading for the buoyant promise of South Beach. Blue water on either side, hulking white cruise ships in an orderly line. Behind them, the cargo cranes. Evelyn remembered how pretty their ladder-like heights looked at night, lit up against the inky water. In the hot throb of the sun, they simply loomed, uncaring. The first time she’d seen them, she’d gone to reach for the camera bag that had always been by her side in New York. But she’d left all her equipment behind when she’d fled. There was no need for a DSLR and a case full of lenses when you were starting over. Evelyn closed her eyes and saw silhouettes of palm trees behind her eyelids. The Uber driver fiddled with the radio, bypassing hip-hop, and stopping on an oldies station. A song from the ’70s, by the band America.
Evelyn was back in the Kingswood, a big boat of a car, hurtling out of Sydney, singing along. Evie lifted her tiny hands up above her head, lying on the back seat. If she wiggled her pinkies, she could almost reach the car door.
They were happy then, when her dad was driving his own car, instead of a truck. When her mum had a whole week off from the hospital. When they were together. Before her dad had taken off in search of what he no longer saw in Evie’s mum.
“Do di doo doo. Do di doo doo!”
Her dad joined Evie for the chorus and she sang louder. Her mum didn’t sing; she just shook her head and laughed.
“Mum, mum!” said Evie, watching her mother’s gleaming black hair slide across her brown shoulders. She turned around. But the sun was shining too bright, right into Evie’s eyes, and she had to blink. She couldn’t see if her mum was smiling at her or not. She couldn’t see any of her face. All she could see was shadow.
Inside the emergency room at Mount Sinai hospital, on the edge of Biscayne Bay, Evelyn’s shoulder ached. Her insides folded over on themselves. From behind the curtain, there were voices, quiet and urgent. At first, she was hoping that the lady of La Linea was wrong, that she wasn’t pregnant at all. Irrational hopes dashed by the few words she could make out: Risk. Nine weeks. That word again—ectopic. A pause. Surgery? More murmuring. Rupture. The last word made Evelyn think of aperture. People forgot nowadays, but with a proper camera, the right aperture was everything. Could make or break a photo.
Evelyn leaned back against the pillows. Nine weeks. She’d only been in Miami for a month. That last night with Daniel in New York—tearful, angry—was six weeks earlier. But they counted pregnancy not from conception but the first day of your last period. Which made her nine weeks pregnant. An abortion was illegal at six. She hadn’t even known she was pregnant then. No idea at seven weeks or eight.
She exhaled through her nose. There was a foul smell somewhere nearby, barely concealed by the hospital-grade antiseptic. Evelyn could feel the debt piling up with each minute she waited—for what? She wasn’t sure what would come next. Other than the next wave of pain. They wouldn’t give her anything for it. Exchanged pointed glances with each other when she enquired.
She shifted in the bed, tried to get comfortable.
Surgery? one of the doctors said again. Silence. Then the curtain was shoved open and a nurse appeared to check Evelyn’s heart rate. He wrote something down and left again, pulling the curtain behind him. Not all the way though. Now she could hear the doctors better. Catch whole sentences.
“Let’s go with the injection. OB said no to surgery.”
“Covering their asses.”
“No, it’s the suits. Pandering to the fucking governor.”
“It’s not like she came in asking for an abortion,” said the younger of the voices. “She could rupture.”
“State doesn’t care.”
“Metho it is then.”
“Call Pharmacy. It’ll take an hour to get down here.”
“Wait—is that even… I mean, can we… ?”
There was the flick of papers, footsteps on linoleum. The phone ringing and the beeps of medical machines doing their work unseen in the cubicles around her. All those strangers trying to decide what happened to her body.
Evelyn moved onto her side but the pressure was still there, all across her bikini line. She was naked under the soft, faded blue gown that tied at the neck, her back and legs bare on the hospital sheets.
Methotrexate. A new word she heard the doctors murmur. Only it wasn’t new. Memories of a Sydney hospital surfaced. The slow, steady drip of poison into her mother’s veins.
A new nurse arrived. One with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and a no-nonsense demeanor, the lilt of a Jamaican accent. She handed Evelyn a pile of forms, pointed out where to sign.
“They tell you what this is?” she asked, unwrapping straw-shaped implements, unscrewing a large syringe.
“No.” Evelyn paused. “But I know they use it for chemo.”
The nurse looked over her shoulder. Mild surprise.
“Mother,” said Evelyn.
“Ah. Well, the side effects are the same in this case, hon: Nausea, vomiting—”
“Dizziness,” Evelyn added.
“Yes, ma’am. You may also experience heavy bleeding.”
The nurse snapped on a pair of blue gloves, moving smoothly. Evelyn wondered how many times she had given this injection before. The doctor had said ectopics were rare.
“Excuse me?” she asked, her voice catching.
“Yes, hon?”
“Is this… well, you know… is it safe?”
Evelyn nodded at the curtain around them, at everything that lay outside. Every voice that had weighed in on what was happening, and the ones that might, if and when they were to hear about it. The nurse stopped copying down a serial number and followed Evelyn’s gaze.
“Look,” she said after a beat. Two. “There is a chance this is a chemical pregnancy—meaning it will just resolve on its own.”
Resolve. A cold closure of a word.
Could she risk it, though? What if she waited until it was too late. It was almost too late, wasn’t it? By law.
“But if I were you,” the nurse began. She stepped closer to Evelyn. “I’d take this shot.” Didn’t look at her but lowered her voice as she tended to the medication and syringe in front of her. “Pretty soon, this won’t be an option. It’s already like that in Texas, you know. Alabama. Unless you’re writhing in agony and about to die, they’ll turn you away.”
The nurse drew the toxic solution into the syringe—a big one. She placed a blue gloved hand on Evelyn’s gown-covered knee.
“If I were you,” she whispered again. A soft but firm conditional. “I seen your bloodwork. Don’t want them turning you away because of that either.”
Tears pricked the corner of Evelyn’s eyes but she blinked them back and nodded at the nurse.
“It takes a few minutes for the drug to disperse,” the nurse said. “Some people like to watch a video on their phone or something. You wanna do that?”
Evelyn shook her head. What would she watch; kids dancing on TikTok?
“Give me a second, though?” she said. She reached for her tote, hanging from a hook on the table next to her gurney. She pretended she was looking for something while she reached for the shell at the bottom of her bag. She took a breath, one of those long yogic ones through her nose, stroked the shell, and put the tote back down.
“Okay. Ready.”
“You got someone to drive you home?”
“No, I’ll Uber.”
The nurse looked up from her tray, really looked at Evelyn’s face for the first time. What did she see? Just another stupid young woman who should’ve known better? Evelyn thought of the pink string, the friendship bracelets, and wondered how the girls she saw in Little Havana were doing. How she herself would have been if the pregnancy had been viable and La Linea had sent her home crampy but empty.
“No man around right now?” The nurse surveyed her instruments.
“No, ma’am.” Not ever. Not really.
“No kids?”
“No.” For some reason, that’s when Evelyn lost the battle to hold back the tears.
“It’s okay, sweetheart.” The nurse said the next part matter-of-factly: “I’ve had seven miscarriages.”
“Jesus.”
“That’s right, Jesus,” said the nurse. “He’s the one that got me through it.” She tapped at her computer. “Seven babies God needed someplace else.”
Evelyn wiped her eyes. A lot of good God had done for her church-on-Christmas Eve Catholic mother at the end. At least the nurse had kept any judgment her Christianity might have blessed her with to herself.
The nurse motioned for Evelyn to roll over. “You ready?”
The methotrexate went into a muscle in Evelyn’s ass. There were pills they used for medical abortions, too. Used to, before the Republicans tightened up telemedicine again. Not that anyone in the ER was calling the procedure an abortion. This was “the best treatment we can offer you for your condition.” What they were offering, which they would stop offering in the months ahead, when word came down from Legal, was to treat Evelyn so the cells, lost somewhere outside her uterus, would not rupture, cause internal bleeding, and kill her.
The prick of the needle. She sucked her teeth.
“Breathe, hon.”
And Evelyn did. She would do anything the nurse told her. Evelyn’s mother was a nurse, too—before she became a patient.
To stop thinking, Evelyn cataloged the cubicle around her, as if setting up for a shoot. Hospital blanket, whiteboard, a portable IV drip (“just in case”). She wished she’d taken a photo of that room in Little Havana. People should know about this, she thought.
“Sorry,” said the nurse when she gently drew the needle out.
“It’s okay,” said Evelyn. The pinch of pain was clarifying. Like the first gasp of ice-cold water on your skin. It was done. The methotrexate coursed its way through her pelvis. She pulled the gown down to cover herself and stood up. There were images coming together in her head. Hallways and makeshift gurneys. Young women and the hidden citizens stepping up to help them. A story that needed to be told.
She could walk just fine but there was some rule about being wheeled out to the hospital entrance, so she was in a wheelchair. Evelyn thanked the orderly and stood up gingerly.
She was checking her phone—the Uber was three minutes away—when she saw a familiar figure out of the corner of her eye in the hospital foyer. He was in a different uniform, black slacks, blue button-down, the hint of an undershirt, but the sight of him allowed Evelyn to exhale.
“Jean-Paul.”
“Evelyn. Are you okay?” Jean-Paul always called her by her real name, even after everyone in the Spa made the switch to Lynn.
“Yes. I’m okay.” And she was, she thought. “What are you doing here?”
Jean-Paul pointed at the plastic name tag on his shirt pocket. “I work here.”
“In the kitchen?”
Jean-Paul smiled—a real smile. An honest smile. “No. Here, I am a translator.”
“Oh. I had no idea.”
Evelyn chastised herself for being surprised he had more than one job. Then, she recalled the way he’d turned away from her by the time clock. He must’ve heard Mercedes bothering her about taking a test, heard her question.
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” said Jean-Paul.
A maroon Hyundai pulled up outside the automatic doors.
“This is me,” said Evelyn. She took a step towards the door. Winced and waved Jean-Paul away when he stepped forward to see if she needed a hand.
“Jean-Paul?”
He looked up.
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, too.”
The doors opened and Evelyn stepped into the lucid light of the afternoon. She fingered the inside of the shell, safely nestled back in her pocket. On her phone, she toggled over to her Contacts and pulled up a number she hadn’t dialed in weeks. Nine weeks.
“Evelyn. You’re alive,” said her agent from ten floors above Houston Street.
“I am,” Evelyn replied. She was. “And I have an idea for a shoot.”
The car was pulling out of the hospital grounds onto the highway when she realized what she’d been doing with the shell—returning to it again and again, searching for some tiny cove of comfort. The withered curve of her mother’s hand.
Rebecca Wallwork is the author of New Kids on the Block’s ‘Hangin’ Tough’ (Bloomsbury, 2016). Her fiction and non-fiction work has been published in Islandia Journal, The Washington Post, and Slag Glass City. Rebecca holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida International University, and is based in Miami Beach.