The Virgin Cure by Ami McKay Page A

Motioning to the sign and then to herself she said, “Fortune teller—that’s me.”
    A man’s voice echoed from the dark of the backroom. “Lottie,” he grumbled. “Come to bed!”
    She pushed me out to the step. “No Mama here,” she insisted, and shut the door.
    I looked around, wondering if I’d forgotten where I’d lived. Perhaps Mama had been right all along about the dangers of not keeping track of my hair.
    Standing on the curb, I waited on Nestor for as long as I thought safe, but he was gone. He must have thought the woman on the doorstep was my mother and that all had ended well. The streetlight closest to Mama’s door was just the same as when I’d left—glass cracked on two sides, the post leaning as if it were too tired to stand straight. In its faint glow, I saw that Chrystie Street, too, was just as it had always been—dark and hungry, waiting to devour the weak.
    I picked up a piece of broken brick from a pile of rubble and hid it in the palm of my hand.
    Head up, eyes ahead, move fast, don’t run .
    “She’s gone, dear,” Mrs. Riordan explained after she’d let me through her door. “You didn’t get word?”
    “No.” I sat down on the wobbly stool she’d offered me. The death notices of a hundred paupers came to mind. No one has come forward to claim the body and it is probable she will be buried in Potter’s Field . The back page of the Evening Star was never without them. “Was she sick? Did someone hurt her?” I tried to push away the thought that Mama had come to a terrible end.
    Mrs. Riordan took my hand. “Oh, no, dear child,” she sighed. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just she left Chrystie Street some time ago and I don’t know where she’s got to.”
    After I’d gone, Mama had strutted around for a week, bragging about the fine lady who’d taken me into her house with too many rooms to count. And then she’d disappeared. Her place was nearly empty when Mr. Cowan came to call, nothing in the rooms to speak of except an old frying pan sitting on the rusted stove. It was clear she’d planned to go.
    “He wasn’t too pleased, as you can well imagine. He claimed your mother robbed him blind, that she hadn’t paid rent since July. Make sure you watch for him when you’re about. He’ll take what she owes him out of your hide if he can catch you.”
    Staring at me with sympathy, Mrs. Riordan asked, “Have you any place to stay?”
    “No,” I replied. I had no one in the world but myself.
    “Then you’ll stay here with me,” she said. “There’s not much room, I know, but it’s a place to rest your head. Get a proper night’s sleep and in the morning you can begin again.”
    Mrs. Riordan’s house was nothing more than a shack—one in a row of makeshift shelters that had been tacked on to the back of the tenements. Mostly let by immigrants fresh off the boat, they were an easy way for landlords to make fast cash. People got out of them as quickly as they could, moving to a spot on the floor of a distant cousin or friend—a place with proper walls and perhaps even a window or two. Poor Mrs. Riordan had travelled in the opposite direction. Her status had slipped away bit by bit, until this shack, crumbling and sad, was all that remained between her and the street.
    “I’ll take the wall side, dear,” she said, pulling back the tattered quilt covering her bed.
    I curled up next to her, unsure of our closeness, but thankful to have a place to sleep. She smelled of fish and smoke, and every time she exhaled there was the slightest hint of turning milk in the air.
    As I tried to settle down, I heard the twitchy pinch-pinch-pinch of rats in the wall. Mama always said that rats would eat anything, including the fingers and toes right off a person’s body while they were sleeping.

In a single year, a female rat can produce two-hundred-and-eighty-five offspring. The best ratcatchers in New York are revered for their talents. At dawn, they rise like