I Stripped to Keep My Boyfriend in School, and He Sold Me to the Man My Brother Died Owing novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Marker
In a freight broker's van behind the Lakeshore Club, Brett tells Iris her marker is sold. She is put in a trunk, carried to a lodge, set on her feet by her dead brother's best friend, and demands his reason out loud.
"You're not going home tonight," Brett said.
He said it to the windshield, with both hands on the wheel of a freight broker's van behind the club.
It was two in the morning, the first Saturday of December, and I was still wearing the dress they give the late girls.
The heater ticked.
My feet hurt, and my tip envelope was in my lap, and I had been planning to ask him to stop for coffee.
"What does that mean?" I said.
"It means I owe the club's book eighty-four thousand dollars."
I laughed, because it was too big a number to be real.
He didn't laugh.
"Brett, that's not funny," I said.
"I know it's not."
"Eighty-four thousand. How?"
"Football, mostly," he said. "Then trying to win it back."
"You told me you were interning at the broker's."
"I do intern there. That's why I have the van."
I stared at the side of his face.
He had a good face, with a jaw and gelled brown hair that I had paid to have cut every month for two years.
I had put twenty-three thousand dollars of my own into that face.
Rent on the apartment, his tuition, his car, the gym, and the watch on his wrist that he said was a gift from his uncle.
I had paid it by working the late bar five nights a week and dancing in the private room on Fridays, for men who tipped in folded cash and never looked at my eyes.
I never told my friends about the Fridays.
I told them he was worth it.
"Somebody has agreed to take your marker," Brett said, "and the debt with it. For a year."
"My what?" I said.
"Your marker. Your name on the book," Brett said. "It's easy, Iris. It's like a job."
"A job doing what?" I said.
"Staying where they put you."
He still hadn't looked at me.
"I'm sorry," he said, in a voice he had practiced in a mirror.
"I thought you'd be fine."
My hand was already on the door handle.
It was locked from the outside, and the button under my palm did nothing.
"Open it," I said.
"I can't."
"Brett, open the door."
"If I don't do this, they'll break my hands, Iris," he said. "Or worse."
"So they'll break mine instead?"
"No. Nobody's going to hurt you. They promised."
His jacket was lying across the seat between us, and his keys were in the pocket nearest me.
I slid two fingers in and closed them over the ring.
He didn't notice.
He was watching the mirror.
A black SUV had pulled in behind us with its lights off.
"There," he said, and sounded relieved.
The passenger door of the van opened from outside, and a man's hand closed on my arm above the elbow.
A second man took the other arm.
I screamed once, and a glove came down over my mouth, and the glove smelled of salt and rubber.
I kicked the dashboard, and I kicked Brett, and he flinched and put his hands up as if I were the one hurting him.
"Don't," he said. "Don't, Iris, they said you'd be fine."
They carried me to the SUV with my heels off the ground.
They didn't speak.
The trunk was already open, and I saw carpet and a folded blanket, and then they put me in it.
The lid came down, and everything went black.
The engine started under my face.
I lay on my side with the keys cutting into my palm and made myself count.
I was a nursing student.
I had stood over a man whose heart stopped on a Tuesday afternoon, and I had counted compressions out loud.
I could count turns.
Left out of the lot.
A stop, a long wait at a light, and then the bell of the lift bridge in Canal Park, ringing twice.
Then a long straight road and a hum under the tires, and I knew it was the shore road because the cold came up through the floor and found me.
The dress was made for a warm room, and I had bare arms.
I put my hands between my knees and kept counting.
Forty minutes later the pavement turned to gravel, and the gravel went on and on.
The SUV stopped.
Doors opened, and snow squeaked under boots.
I heard men talking, low, and one of them laughed.
I got the keys into my fist so the metal couldn't ring.
The trunk lifted.
Cold hit me, and bright light, and the smell of pine and woodsmoke and frozen lake.
I saw a yard of trampled snow and a stone lodge with every window lit.
Two men in dark coats stood at the edge of the light.
A third man stood over me and put his hands under my elbows.
He lifted me out as if I weighed nothing and set me on my feet in the snow, and let go of me at once.
I stood there swaying, and I looked up.
His hands were shaking.
I noticed it the way I'd notice it on a patient, before I noticed anything else.
Then I noticed the face, the pale eyes and the cropped ash hair and the scar on his left forearm where his sleeve rode up.
Toby Reinholt.
I had not seen him since my brother's funeral, two Februarys ago, when he carried the box up the aisle by himself and wouldn't let anyone open the lid.
"Iris," he said. "Don't scream."
His voice was low and level.
"Nobody here will touch you."
I didn't scream.
I hit him.
I put my whole body into it, open-handed, across the left side of his face, and the crack went out over the yard.
His head turned with it.
Nobody moved.
He turned his face back to me slowly, and a red mark came up on his cheekbone, and he said nothing at all.
He let me.
I scanned the yard.
Two at the edge of the light, two by the SUV, and one on the porch.
I looked at the door behind him, and at the dark trees past the porch.
I opened my fist and flung Brett's keys as far as I could.
They went over the roof of the SUV and landed somewhere out in the snow beyond the light, and the jingle stopped.
"If I'm kept," I said, loud enough for all of them, "I'm kept by the man who says why."
"Out loud.
"Tonight.
"Or I walk to the road in this dress, and you can explain the frostbite to the Duluth police."
The wind moved in the pines.
Toby's eyes went to the dark where the keys had gone, and came back to me, and the corner of his mouth moved.
It was not a smile.
"Then come inside," he said, "and I'll give you the first one."
I looked at the door.
I looked at the cold.
I walked up the steps ahead of him on my own two feet.
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