None of us actually remember when we started working at the bar. Or much before then. I assume that – at some point – I was born. Then there’s a bunch of static. Now I’m here.
A ruddy man in a tight, sweat-stained t-shirt orders an old fashioned. He’s spent the last week cleaning out his dead mother’s house. She asked him to give his sister the family cookbook, even though he’d always wanted it. It’s wrapped in a blanket on the passenger seat of his truck right now. He hopes she’ll never notice or, if she does, never bring it up.
We use brown sugar in our old fashioned here. Add a dash of bitters and muddle. Whiskey, rocks, and soda. This is a temple, a place of great power, so maraschino cherries on plastic sword toothpicks are available by request only.
I slide an ashtray across the bar to the sweaty home cook. He begins to mouth the words “I don’t” before he sighs and pulls a loosey from a sandwich bag hidden in his inner coat pocket. Somewhere, I feel my god smile.
People often say Subway Bar is the last smoking bar in New York, but they’re wrong; we are. We’re located in an extraplanar bubble that can be accessed from anywhere in the material plane, so we are technically in Brooklyn. And Budapest. And Davao. And McMurdo Station. We’re even in Staten Island.
The bar doesn’t have a name. Whether that’s marketing or part of the power or both is anyone’s guess. We staff all have our own names for it, though.
Yousuf calls it “The Glass Door” after the frosted glass front door (not creative, but poetic). James and Siobahn call it “Veil & Fog’s Speakeasy” (they’re kinda pretentious). Ijemma calls it “The Bar that Serves as the Temple for the God of Secrets” (we’re fucking). I just call it “Kayfabe’s Bar & Grill.”
The bell over the door chimes as the woman enters, her eyes downcast in the dim amber light. She shuffles to the last seat and scoots it an inch or two closer to the wall until it scrapes up against the baseboards.
I look over at Yousuf and James. They both avert their eyes. Siobahn is in the kitchen microwaving burritos for a four-top, and Ijemma is absolutely in the weeds dealing with the besuited throng of executives coming from a convention. So fuck me, I guess.
I slide the woman a cocktail napkin and lean across the bar on my elbows with as much friendliness as I can muster. Keeping her head down, she raises her eyes, meeting mine over the thick pink plastic rim of her glasses.
“What can I get you?”/ “I’ll do a Daiquiri please,” we say simultaneously.
I fill a shaker with ice and squeeze a lime into it. I grab an unlabeled bottle of light rum from the shelf (I’m not using well rum for a Daiquiri — it’s not like we charge money for anything anyway). Then I reach for my honey bear and squeeze a tablespoon in there. If James or Ijemma had been paying attention, they would have scolded me for not using the simple syrup, but I like the body and the way it complements the citrus without dulling it. I mean, it’s a sour. Let it be sour.
Shake. Strain. Serve up. I set it on a coaster in front of the woman, still bundled in her coat. She nods her thanks, and I stock my garnish tray just to busy myself.
I’m up past my wrist in a jar of olives when I hear her pipe up.
“I’m sorry. About last time.”
I turn around, and she’s still there, still huddled, still barely looking up. Really, the only difference is that her glass is now mostly empty.
“I wasn’t sure I’d be allowed back in here,” she chuckles, as if she was putting the thought in my head for the first time and wanted to defang it, just in case.
I glance over my shoulder and everyone else is conspicuously, pointedly busy. More absorbed in the sidewalk they could not be, and they make sure I can tell they will not be able to cover for me. Assholes.
“We don’t 86 anyone here,” I sigh, hoping that’s enough.
The woman relaxes. She turns the stem of her glass between her fingers, staring at the waves made in what’s left of the cocktail.
A child, no older than 13, wanders through the door. Not uncommon. The first time a kid sneaks out of their bedroom at night to go meet a friend or just discover what their world is like during the sleeping hours, they find their way here. We keep a selection of fun sodas just for them, or hot cocoa to calm their fearful nerves.
The woman tenses as she watches Ijemma guide the kid to a corner booth with a selection of coloring pages and worn crayons. She downs the dregs from her glass and signs for another.
This time, I feel her eyes fixed on me as I prepare the Daiquiri. As I strain it into a chilled glass, she finally says the thing I hoped she wouldn’t.
“You really do look like her.”
I feel myself turning away slightly to hide my face even a bit. “Sorry. Can’t be helped, I suppose.”
“No. I suppose not. I know it’s not logical, right? It’s been, what–” she pauses, like she’s forgotten what year it is outside the bar. “–12 years since I last saw her. She would have…she looks different by now.”
My hand goes to my right shoulder blade and the bruise lingering there from her last visit pulses in reply. Whatever she keeps in that faux-leather handbag is solid and heavy; I’ll give her that.
She winces. “I’m so sorry. I’m so embarrassed. I don’t…,” she struggles to articulate herself and then stops. “Are you all right?”
Now that she’s picked her head up, I can see her round cheeks and nose, both flush from the Daiquiri. Her creased forehead and eyes, the jowls that seem to warp the corners of her mouth downward. She looks 20 years older than she probably is, but still warm. In another circumstance, I can see myself hugging her until our shoulders and necks ached.
I feel my muscles release and the rest of the bar staff relax along with me. I’d be eavesdropping too, if I were them. There’s not going to be any bullshit right now. Though if she has a third Daiquiri, who knows?
“I’m fine, it’s nothing that hasn’t happened before.”
“You probably aren’t allowed to tell me your name,” she says, still expectantly.
“Eva.”
“Is that your real name?”
“There’s a chance,” I shrug and grin, my canned response to this frequently asked question. It’s simultaneously true and false. Here, I’m Eva. What I was before, if I was before, I have no clue. Maybe it was Eva. Maybe it was something else.
The woman chuckles without mirth and shakes her head. “I’m Maria. My daughter’s name is Gaia.”
“It’s a very pretty name.”
“It is.” She stares into the clouds of her cocktail. She’s slowed her pace significantly, barely sipping at this one.
Suddenly she wraps her scarf back around herself and swings off her stool.
“I suppose I have to settle up.”
“Ready when you are.”
Maria’s forehead drops to her hands for a moment. When it raises again, her eyes are wet.
“I’ve never told anyone this. People have asked around the edges of it but…I’m almost – not quite, but almost – more scared of finding her than of never finding her. Like even if I had her back, I’ll never fully know what happened over twelve years. Not the way I need to know. Like until I have every detail, I’ll keep imagining something worse in their place.
“That’d be torture. But I’d take it in a second.” She sighs. “I have to.”
***
I take a deep breath and nod. Tab cleared. Maria tries to down the rest of her cocktail but stops partway through. She has hit her limit. She wavers as she walks toward the door.
I’ve turned back to stocking the bar when I hear Maria behind me from the threshold.
“Eva?”
Maria’s eyes are shining, deep and cold like a bay covered with an oil slick.
“Do secrets ever really get out of here? Not small ones, either. Not cheating husbands or thieving CEOs.”
“Or both,” I quip. She doesn’t seem to notice.
“But like deep ones. The tangly ones. Are they ever really known?”
“Sure, all the time.”
Maria’s eyes grow focused, much more sober than they were a minute ago.
“How?” She asks.
“Hire a private investigator. Scour the internet. The usual ways.”
“And if that doesn’t work?”
“Then you might never know.”
Maria’s jaw tenses, the warmth leaves her eyes. The back bar nudges my waist. Without realizing it, I had backed up against the wall.
“And if that won’t work?”
Suddenly everyone else in the bar feels very far away. I haven’t dealt with one of these customers, so I only know what to do from the stories of the rest of the crew.
I hold eye contact with her for a moment, enough that she follows my gaze right away when I turn to look at the office door. Past the foosball table, past the bathroom, looming at the end of the hall. The second lightbulb in that small passage is always burnt out, creating a dark envelope of space that surrounds the office.
“But,” I say, trying to draw her attention back to me.
“But what?”
“Like, you can’t just go back there. You’re asking for it to give up a secret. You need to offer something greater.”
“What counts as greater?”
I hold up my hands and try to add some warmth, some comfort into my shrug. But it’s still a shrug. “You’ll find out when the door opens.”
Maria’s eyes turn up toward the decorative tin ceiling and clench shut. Her lips twist and shift, wrestling down whatever words she’s trained herself not to say.
“I’ll give you a minute to decide.” I pull a draft of a stout for an elderly woman wearing a hospital gown. As I slide it gently to her, I hear Maria speak up over my shoulder.
“The police always thought my boyfriend was involved,” she says, staring past the colorful liquids lining the mirrored back bar. “Anthony. They never told me why. I think it was just…they didn’t have any other ideas and, well, that’s so often the case.
“Gaia had always been into weird, spooky stuff. ‘Alternative’ things, gods and goddesses. So some people thought it was Satanists or something. Some people told me she just needed independence, that she wasn’t a child anymore and if she needed to build a life away from me, I should respect that. I really tried, Eva.
“One day I felt one answer was true. The next day a different one. That was one of the worst things, y’know? The shifting foundations. And I woke up this one morning, and I felt so sure Anthony was it. So sure, he tricked me. I sprained my wrist beating his side of the mattress.
“We went for a drive. He didn’t notice when I buckled my seatbelt; we usually didn’t bother. We got off into the empty place north of town, before you get into the foothills. And I just…asked him for the truth. He said the same thing he told the cops. That he had an alibi, that he would never. It just made me so mad because I finally felt so sure, and he was telling me I was wrong.
“I didn’t plan to do it. I just accelerated. I don’t think I was planning to do it. I remember looking up and seeing that big cottonwood. I didn’t put a lot of faith in my seatbelt, either. Proved me wrong; I’ve worn one ever since.”
I realize for the first time that she walks with a slight limp, and I catch the slight sheen of a scar behind her ear.
“I’m sure people have had their suspicions. They’re too decent to tell me to my face. Guess that’s more of an open secret.
“The next day, talking to the police, I finally saw the footage. I mentioned I had never seen it, and the detective thought he was being friendly. I knew I was wrong before he even hit play. Anthony was at work all night when Gaia disappeared.
“I couldn’t eat for a week after seeing that. People thought it was grief. That was nine years ago now.”
Maria’s muscles release, and she leans on her elbows over the bar. I keep looking back and forth between the top of her auburn hair and the frame of the door. I didn’t expect what I would feel, how much I wanted that door to open for her. I like knowing, learning. I want her to have that.
A quiet grind and a final clank fill the bar as the deadbolt on the door creeps open.
Maria rises, her eyes full of apprehension. She looks back to me. I can’t help but smile when I gesture her down the hall.
She reaches into her bag and pulls out a colorful 10 note from her wallet. She slides it across the bar.
“Oh, we’re not allowed to–,”
“Please,” she says. “You really do look like her.”
As she inches down the hall, I slide the bill into my pocket, checking to make sure no one sees. I don’t even know what I would use it for, but it feels warm and real to keep a secret of my own.
Saoirse Flynn is a writer, performer, and podcaster who loves stories about weird things happening to humans and human things happening to the weird. Originally from Denver, they now live in Zagreb with their partner, child, and cat.