Chapter 3: Amy
Amy sighed as she closed the door. If only she had a better apartment, she could have asked Bobby to stay. She would have enjoyed his company; everyone at the club was rough and unfriendly, and it would have been nice to have someone friendly to talk to.
There was a sudden scratching at the door, and she smiled as she opened it again. Carl wanted to come in. She closed the door, reached down, felt for him. He sensed her hands groping for him, and he pushed up against her arm, purring. She scooped him up, her hand finding the spot just behind his ear that he liked to have scratched, and his purring increased in volume as she rubbed him. "Ah, Carl," she sighed. "You're my best friend, you know that?" She crossed the floor to her couch, avoiding the coffee table from long habit (she had learned where everything was, and never moved the furniture, so by now she could navigate her apartment with little problem.) Her cane was sitting by the front door, ready for when she had to go out again.
"I met a guy today, Carl," she said to the purring weight in her arms. Carl flicked an ear back; she felt it twitch under her caressing fingers. "Yes, a guy. I know, you're not used to them coming around, are you?" she giggled sadly. "Neither am I. All my experiences with men have been mostly uncomfortable ones." She scratched idly for a moment, staring sightlessly in the air in front of her. "I don't know. Bobby seems different. He's got such a kind voice, and he helped me get up the stairs even on my twisted ankle." She sighed. "I wish I had a better place. I would have asked him to stay. But I felt his arm when he took my hand, Carl, and I felt the fabric of his clothes. Very good material, much better than anything I own. He has money, Carl. And I'm just a poor, penniless girl nobody wants or loves." She sighed again, and buried her face in his fur.
Carl rolled over, still purring, and lay on his back while he batted at the dark sunglasses that covered her eyes. She laughed gently, then pulled the glasses off and leaned forward to put them on the coffee table. Carl left her lap, springing onto the coffee table to play with the dark glasses, and Amy sighed and got up.
Her ankle really hurt, and she was hungry. Groaning, she got up off the couch and wandered into her kitchen. She didn't really have a lot to eat. She opened a packet of instant soup, then grabbed her kettle from a cupboard and held it under the tap.
The water that came out of the tap smelled terrible, and she turned the water off as she bowed her head over the sink. "No," she moaned. She'd forgotten that with the electricity gone, the water purification system that cleaned the drinking water for the building wouldn't work. She dipped a finger into it, then brought the finger to her lips, testing it. It tasted as bad as it smelled.
She thumped the kettle down on top of the small burner she had purchased and turned it on. Its flame was fed off a propane tank, much like a grill would; it was the only way she could cook her food when the electricity went out. She waited until the kettle was whistling cheerfully for two minutes, then took it off and poured the water into her Styrofoam soup cup. She left that sitting on the counter as she went into her bedroom.
She took off her shoes and put them carefully beside her sneakers on the floor beside her bed, then stripped off her shirt and pants and wriggled into her black biker shorts and cotton tank top. It really was hot tonight; and in her apartment, with no windows, the air hung heavy and still. Carl would not be with her that night; any moment now he would scratch at the door to be let out again, and disappear for the night. The apartment was too hot for him. She wondered enviously what he would see, slipping down moonlit alleys, maybe finding a female cat to comfort himself with. She would love to be free like that, be able to come and go as she pleased without having to carry that awful cane and feel her way around. People could be very unsympathetic toward blind people; and the world, in general, was not built for blind people. She rarely went to the supermarket; her next-door neighbor would go for her, because Amy couldn't see what it was she was picking up off the shelves. She couldn't see the numbers on the bills she handed the cashier; she had gotten cheated several times when the cashier had given her less change back than she should have gotten and pocketed the rest. Restaurants generally didn't have Braille menus, so she only went to fast food places where she could order some common item that she knew they would serve…on the rare occasion that she could afford to eat out like that.
She hated her life. Oh, how she hated it. And all because she was blind. Tears filled her eyes, and she sat down on her bed heavily.
Her sight had deteriorated after the long-ago car accident that scarred the left side of her body, but she hadn't been faced with completely losing it. Even years of neglect when she was in Blackstone Orphanage, under Mr. Gilmore, hadn't destroyed her sight. That had come later.
She still remembered, vividly, the burning of the orphanage. She had lost control of her pyrokinetics, completely, and burned the building to the ground when she went inside it to retrieve the one object she had left from her parents; a slim little volume of her favorite Shakespeare play, King Lear. The book she had left with the man she had thought was her friend, and then had betrayed her, forgotten about her after he had promised.
Charles Xavier.
"He promised," she wept, tears falling from her sightless eyes. 'He promised to come and visit me in prison…" and he never had.
She had killed, so she figured she'd deserved to go to prison. Mount Haven was the government-run prison for mutants. She had been incarcerated there, and at first she had been confident it wouldn't be that bad.
Then the guards and some of the other inmates had taken an 'interest' in her…and in a prison that was bad. She had held them off, telling them that Charles would come to visit her, and if she was bruised or harmed, she would tell him, and they would get into trouble. They had backed off. But months went by and he never came. When they finally decided that he was never going to come to see her, and she had been lying, they dragged her from her cell and beaten her up for lying. After that, she was just fresh meat for everyone.
Then on her eighteenth birthday a guard decided to give her a 'birthday present' and entered her cell. She had fought him, kicking, screaming, hitting, biting, until a flailing fist had blackened his eye. Cursing and screaming, he had dragged her out to the small prison yard, tied her down to one of the concrete benches, and taped her eyelids open. He had left her there for three hours during the time of day when the sun shone directly into the courtyard. She had screamed in pain as the sun burned into her eyes. The guard had come back out, cursed her, and dragged her back into the prison. She had been tossed into one of the solitary confinement cells; a pitch-black concrete cell with no light, no bed, nothing. She had been given bread once a day, and water twice a day for a week. When they deemed her sufficiently punished, they tossed her back into her cell; but it made no difference to the light, because the sun had damaged her eyes irreparably.
The other inmates had left her basically alone after that, as did the guards. They were perhaps a little frightened that she might tell someone what had happened; but her spirit had broken during that hellish week; the pain in her eyes, the starvation and sensory deprivation in solitary, had finally convinced her that no one cared about her, no one would help her, no one loved her. She remained in Mount Haven for three years after the loss of her sight, then the prison board reasoned that her powers could no longer be a danger to anyone, since she could not see to control them. Two months before she had been released, they had a tutor come in and teach her some of what she needed to know to get along. The tutor had shown her the Braille alphabet, supplied her with a cane and her sunglasses, and taught her to walk and get along without sight. When she was released from Mount Haven, six years after she went in, she had nothing but the clothes on her back (supplied by the prison administrators) a hundred dollars in her pocket, the knowledge of the Braille alphabet, and her cane and sunglasses.
Amy had spent six months in a halfway house for homeless people, but being blind seemed a signal to the other homeless people to paw over her and try to get her under their smelly, unwashed bodies. She had finally found a job at a small Mom-and-Pop grocery store bagging people's groceries; by saving the tips and the thirty dollars a week they paid her she managed to get a room at a small bed-and-breakfast place. There, for almost eight months she found peace; the mistress of the house was kind, and she helped them by learning her way around the dining floor and taking trays to the people at the tables. Here too, she received tips, many people struck by her friendly demeanor and attractive features. Then one night the innkeeper, a chronic alcoholic, tried to force himself upon her. Amy had fled the place, never to return; she could not force herself to sleep with him. Fresh in her mind was the memory of the indignities she'd been forced to endure in prison, and her body was the only thing she had left that was still hers. She would not give that up.
She had lived on the streets for a few months after that, sleeping in homeless shelters, eating at soup kitchens, and singing for money. It hurt to have to panhandle and beg, and more than once she wondered if she could find Charles Xavier's mansion again and beg him to take her in. But trying to find the place was next to impossible, for a blind, friendless woman; and she was terrified of getting lost if she tried to find his house herself. And she wasn't sure she would be welcome; he had never visited, and she wasn't sure he would even remember her anymore. And she had, over the six years she had been in prison, come to hate him. He had promised, and he'd broken his promise. He knew she had no one else. And even if he had forgotten, there had also been Jean, and the others; if they really had cared someone would have remembered her. The fact that they hadn't meant they didn't care. So she struggled on.
Then one day, as she was sitting on the edge of a fountain singing for money a man had spoken to her. He had a small nightclub, he told her, and he was looking for new talent to sing. Would she consider it?
The place disgusted her, especially when she found out that the other girls who worked there were expected to assuage the customers' other hungers. She had told him she would not do that; and he had said she would not be forced to sleep with the customers, though he did tell her she could make enough money to be comfortably off if she did. A lot of the customers approached her and asked; while Amy had never considered herself especially pretty, there was something about her that made one want to turn and give her a second look. But she declined all the offers, and remained a singer only.
The other women who worked at the club shunned her. They thought she considered herself too good for the horizontal work they did, and her cool reserve irritated them. Amy was hurt, but she did her best to ignore it all, coming in only to sing, collect her pay, and leave.
Mr. Andover, the owner of the club, saw the money he was losing by not having Amy under the customers. Several of them, upset by her rejection, had never come back. Angry at her refusal, he had docked her pay severely, hoping that that would convince her to participate in the other business of the club. But Amy had taken the cut in pay stoically, moved from the apartment she had been renting to a much cheaper one farther from work and in a much worse area, and continued to sing only. And then he had docked her pay again, a couple of weeks ago, and money got tighter than ever. She had confided her troubles to the kind old lady who lived next door to her, and the woman had told her she should think about giving in. It was only her body, after all; they couldn't touch her mind, or her soul. And as her tiny hoard money shrank she had started to seriously consider it.
Sighing, Amy broke off her musings and went to the kitchen, retrieving her now-cold cup of soup. It was only money, and only sex. Mama Tali was right, whatever they could do to her body, they wouldn't be able to touch her soul. And no one had to know. She could move out of here to a better apartment, and maybe her new friend Bobby would come to visit her, and she could afford to let herself care about someone other than herself again.
Carl scratched at the door, and she got up to let him out. She finished off the soup fairly quickly, and sat wondering what to do. Normally she would listen to the radio or TV, the sound of other voices comforting her loneliness, but tonight even that tiny escape was denied her, since there was no electricity. She picked up her book to read, but it was too hot, and she couldn't concentrate, and she had already read it over so many times she knew it by heart.
Overwhelmed with loneliness, she retreated into her bedroom and slammed the door, ignoring the fact that everyone in the building could hear it, and curled up on her bed, crying, until she finally fell asleep.
She woke some time later, her stomach cramping urgently. She knew the feeling; boiling her water hadn't gotten rid of all the bad stuff in it, and her stomach was rebelling. But her body was fighting equally hard to keep it all in; she hadn't had anything else to eat today. She crawled into her bathroom, her body shaking and her stomach cramping, and bent over the toilet. The smell of the stagnant, rotten water in the toilet (the sewage pipe had gotten backed up somewhere) triggered her vomiting reflex, and she heaved up what was in her stomach.
But the water was already firmly in her system, and nothing was going to help it until her body flushed it out. She curled up in a corner of the bathroom, ignoring the sharp edges of the loose tile that cut into her skin, and shook with the heaves that wracked her body and cried. She would have to do it. She couldn't continue to live here. She would go see Mr. Andover the next day and tell him she would take customers.
She didn't know how loud her sobs were until suddenly a hand touched her arm. She sobbed weakly and leaned into the touch; the smell of Mama Tali's perfume and the feel of her dry, wrinkled skin against Amy's told her who her visitor was. "I…I drank some of the water, Mama," she sobbed. "I had to, I'm s-s-so hungry and thirsty, and now my stomach hurts, it really really hurts, oh, Mama, what have they done to the water this time?" She bent double, shaking and crying. "I'm going to die, oh, Mama, I want to die, nothing could be worse than this, not even whoring myself out could be worse…"
"You are not going to die. Silly girl. Come with Mama, now." And the older woman wrapped an arm around her and helped her stand. She led the girl through the dark apartment, out into the hall, and into her own apartment, and here there was some relief, because Mama Tali had gotten her ancient, battered old generator to work, and she had a fan going. The cool air washed over Amy's fevered skin, and she sighed.
Mama Tali dropped the shaking girl into a chair and went to a cabinet over the sink, taking down a bottle. She shook it up, poured some into a battered spoon, and held it in front of Amy's lips. "Take it," she said. "Medicine. It will help your stomach feel better." Amy swallowed it obediently.
Half an hour later she was seized with stomach cramps, even stronger ones this time. She ran to Mama Tali's bathroom, bumping into chairs, tables, and other furniture along the way, and threw up, then voided her bowels as well. And afterward, as she crawled weakly out of the bathroom, feeling the cramps abate and thirst set in, Mama Tali helped her sit in another chair and gave her sips of bottled water until her stomach finally calmed.
"Thank you, Mama," she said weakly. The old woman shook her head.
"Such a polite child. Come on. Take this." And she shoved into Amy's hand several coins. Amy could feel the cool hardness of dollar coins, the ridges on quarters, the smooth thick edge of several nickels, and the flat copper disc of pennies. 'Go down to the store at the corner and buy yourself some bottle water. Better for you than this sewage here."
"Mama," Amy felt the weight of the coins in her hand and tried to give it back, but Mama Tali folded her fingers over the fistful of money and led her over to the door.
"Don't argue with your Mama, child. Go." She closed the door firmly, and after a moment she heard Amy's halting footsteps traveling the hall to her own apartment to pick up her cane.
* * *
Amy stirred and sat up, moaning at the ache in her head. Her skin was dry, though, and when she touched her forehead she was no longer sweating.
The knocking at her door came again, and she sat up. She walked to the door, found the knob, and pulled it open.
Carl streaked past her legs, but she barely noticed his entry because her nose was filled with the odor of Mr. Andover's expensive cologne. "Mr. Andover?"
"Amy. I came to ask if you might reconsider. Someone heard your singing last night, and he said he will give me a generous 'donation' to the club if you will spend the day with him. He wants to pay me a thousand dollars, girl, and you will get four hundred of it if you go with him."
Four hundred dollars! Amy's eyes widened. Who would pay that much for her?
Andover grabbed her arm. "You're coming with me. I don't care what kind of squeamishness you have going, you are going to go with him today. I need that money too badly." He started to drag her out, then wrinkled his nose. 'Whew. You stink. What have you been doing, throwing up on yourself? Clean up before we go. I'll wait."
Amy sighed. She had made up her mind last night she was going to do this; might as well be for this amount of money. Four hundred dollars…she could go back to her old apartment with that amount of money! "I can't shower, Mr. Andover," she said. "The water's dirty."
"Oh for God's sake," Andover got up. "Come with me. You can use the girls' shower at the club, and then I'll take you to his house. He's waiting there for you. Be glad, girl, most of my girls never see the fancy places these rich people have." Taking her arm in a firm grip as if he was afraid she would change her mind, he started to tow her out of the building.
Amy stopped him as she saw Mama Tali in the hall. "Mama Tali, take care of Carl for me, please? He's in my apartment." And then Andover tugged her arm again, and she followed him meekly out, getting into the backseat of his long black Lincoln with him. She didn't see Mama Tali come out of the apartment building behind her to watch the car drive off.
