JESS

SUMMER 1979

An alarm system, a dog, a gun. These were the options before her. Insufficient or terrifying or absurd. Picturing herself with a weapon made Jess want to laugh or scream. Once, she would have thought it impossible to imagine that fractured version of herself, but now it came with sickening ease. Eaten alive by fear with a gun in her hand. Isabella arriving through a door, a window. And then what? Jess hated every ending that choice demanded.

She called Zack. She needed to hear her brother’s voice, though she couldn’t even be sure she had the right number. He changed or disconnected it every few weeks, certain his phone was being bugged by the FBI or the Motion Picture Association or both. Whenever Jess expressed frustration over how difficult he was to contact, Zack responded with stories of fellow film dealers woken by midnight knocks, handcuffs, interrogations in bare-bulbed rooms.

Since those early film-collecting days in his room above Ruth’s garage, Zack had become a major player in the underground market, moving prints of lost classics and Hollywood hits. The vast majority of the prints were illegal, duped or stolen from the studios. But to Zack, this wasn’t a crime. Film was an art, and he was saving it from the greedy, shortsighted executives who saw nothing but profit and loss up on the screen.

The real trouble came from other stolen films moving through the network, private movies of the rich and famous. Intimate, secret, compromising moments. Zack didn’t talk much about these films. When he did, it was in terms of rumor and innuendo, reels of celluloid or videotapes that might or might not exist. If they existed, they were a means to an end, a source of income to fund his preservation crusade.

Jess had always thought Zack’s paranoia was unwarranted or exaggerated. It didn’t seem so crazy now. He of all people might understand her panic. But after a few more rings a recorded operator’s voice came on the line: We’re sorry. This number is no longer in service. He must have changed it again.

An alarm system, a dog, a gun, a hotel. Jess threw some clothes into a bag, unsure how much she would need. Two days’ worth, three, a week? She thought of those timid guest stars on TV cop shows, stashed away in a motel by the interstate, told to lay low, dye their hair, change their name. Witness protection. They were always found, though, weren’t they? At some point in the episode the long-feared hand comes knocking.

She checked in to a hotel by the airport, a bland, gray-toned high-rise catering to business travelers, less a destination than a pause on the line between two points. Everyone in motion in the hallways, the lobby, in and out of conference rooms, the restaurant and bar. Waiting for the elevator, men in suits and women in skirts and blazers moved briskly around her, no eye contact, no touch. Maybe this was safety, she thought. Invisibility.

At the windows in her room, past the rising floaters, the city smeared before her in a smoggy haze: the clutch of towers in Century City, continuing along Wilshire and into downtown, the web of streets and freeways like veins in a body, movement in every passage. Far to the north and west she saw a small gray tuft hovering over the hills, the first dark breath of smoke. She had heard warnings on the radio driving down. It was the beginning of fire season.

She needed a drink. She needed to decide what to do next, where to go where she would be safe, if such a place still existed.

From her bag she pulled out a dark skirt and blouse, sheer hose, black flats, the pair of small emerald studs Gabe bought her to celebrate that shopping mall commission years ago. This was the kind of outfit she once wore to meet with potential clients and funders. The blouse hung off her shoulders now, the skirt was loose at the waist. She had lost weight in the last two years. But this way, at least, she would look the part. She could imagine she was here scouting a future project rather than hiding from the repercussions of the past.

She had a drink down in the bar, her attention pulled to a TV showing a baseball stadium in Chicago, what looked like a riot in progress. Hundreds of people ran from the stands toward a bonfire in the outfield. Some held signs and banners, Disco Sucks, throwing records like Frisbees. The police tried to push them back but the people kept coming, dropping over the outfield walls, scaling down the foul poles, undeterred by the smoke filling the stadium. Other fires flared along the basepaths and people danced around the flames, what looked like thousands now, shaking their arms at the sky, overtaken by joy or anger, a shared mania to burn.

Jess retreated from the violence filling the screen, across the hall to the restaurant, a quiet, dark steakhouse. She set a cocktail napkin on her table and held a pen in her hand because this was what she once did in places like this, when she was able to see them as possibilities. Tonight the napkin stayed blank. She was only playing a part.

She noticed him sitting a few tables away. He was sturdy and blond, fair-featured. He wore a crisp blue suit. He looked, in some canted way, like a movie version of Alex: larger, clearer, sanded smooth of all the rough edges. Her first impulse was to tell Alex—I saw this guy who looked like the actor who would play you in a movie—because Alex would love the idea of a doppelgänger out in the world. But that wasn’t possible, so instead she snuck glances at this stranger, feeling a misplaced physical longing. She was truly disappearing now, chasing ghosts.

The man sat alone, squinting at a brochure in the candlelight, a pen in his hand, making notes or corrections. He saw her looking and smiled, then nodded toward the empty chair on the other side of his table. Joining him would be out of character, but what character was she now? If another version of Alex was here, then it stood to reason that she could also become someone else.

When she arrived with her drink he stood and introduced himself as Carl Cook, from Guelph, Ontario. He was the western U.S. sales representative for a Canadian textile manufacturer. He held up the brochure, a little awkwardly, as proof. He was on his way to Phoenix but there were mechanical problems with his plane so they had diverted to L.A. for the night.

They sat and ordered more drinks. Jess told him that she was an artist commissioned to design an installation for the hotel. He asked what kind of installation and she said that she didn’t know yet. This was the beginning of the process—staying in a place for a couple of days to get a feel for it, to understand its rhythms, its spaces and movements. He smiled, looking perplexed and impressed. Then he reminded her that she hadn’t told him her name. She introduced herself as Anne Del Mar, what sounded like a soap opera name, but there it was, spoken with preposterous ease. Anne with an e, she told him, doubling down. She thought he would laugh, seeing through the ridiculous fabrication, but instead he said, “It’s very nice to meet you, Anne.”

Carl asked about her work, and Jess found herself describing projects she had never made, stillborn sites that existed only in her sketchbooks and head. Anne Del Mar’s projects, maybe. She gave them names and locations, construction anecdotes, falling deeper into the disguise. She was beginning to feel safe here, the further down she went. Carl was a good listener. He asked questions and for the first time in she couldn’t remember how long she had answers.

She noticed that what she had first thought were small checks on his tie were actually birds, a repeating pattern of birds in flight, so she risked one small truth among the lies, telling him about Vol, the installation she had created in an old barn in the Loire Valley. She had spent a few days there, just as she was doing here, getting the feel of the place, looking for clues.

“Clues to what?” Carl asked.

“That’s the question,” Jess said. “Clues to something that I can’t quite feel or see. Until I do.”

The clues she found at the farm in France were the large flocks of birds that flew over the barn at the same time every day. Due to what seemed like a peculiarity of the air currents, the flocks passed the barn and then turned, again and again, before they finally found the direction they sought and wheeled away to the south. She brought in Gabe and a crew and they cut openings in the roof, creating a giant camera obscura that projected the shadows of the birds down into the empty barn, where the shadows then flew along the floor and walls, soaring, turning, passing through and away.

“That was where I got this,” Jess said, touching her scar. “I fell from the scaffolding.”

The farmhouse across from the barn was a bed-and-breakfast, and Clarice, the woman who owned both, wrote to Jess a few months after the site was completed. She said that the barn had become something of a destination. Guests told her they felt as if they were flying within the flock. Adults and children stood in the center of the barn with their arms out like wings, turning in place. Others said that it felt as if something was passing through them—not the birds, really, but something of the birds, an essence that moved in their bodies before the birds took flight again.

About a year later, during a week of gallery visits and meetings in Paris, Jess returned to spend a couple of nights at the bed-and-breakfast. It was the off-season, and the only other people around were a young Irish couple. Clarice said that they had spent every day that week inside the barn. They’d lost their child recently, due to circumstances they didn’t offer. Jess sat at the window of her room in the farmhouse and looked out at the gyroscopic flocks of birds and then down to the barn, which now seemed so full of loss that she could imagine the walls and roof blowing apart.

On her final morning there she encountered the couple in the courtyard. Clarice had told them that she was the artist responsible for the site. That was the word she used, responsible, as if directing blame for whatever the couple felt inside the barn. But they greeted Jess with a bruised and shaken warmth. They wanted to thank her. They couldn’t quite explain why they spent so much time here, they said, during a trip where every hour was planned with destinations and activities designed to exhaust them into forgetting. They didn’t know exactly what they felt when they were inside, the young man said. The father. He couldn’t describe it. Looking back to the barn, the space above where the birds returned every morning, the mother said, Maybe it’s peace, or something like it.

Jess never told anyone this story—not Gabe, not Alex. She didn’t think it was hers to tell. But sitting across from Carl she felt a sudden juvenile desire for him to believe all those stories of transformative experience spun around her pieces. A man dreaming again for the first time after a stroke; a young couple finding some measure of peace within their grief.

Carl wanted to know more about Vol, the details of its construction, how a camera obscura worked. It occurred to Jess that she was giving something away, that if Carl really wanted to investigate he could discover, fairly easily, that Jess Shepard was the artist behind Vol. But here in the dark restaurant it didn’t feel like a possibility. It didn’t seem like anything would ever leave this place.

They ordered more drinks. Carl had a warmth that Jess perceived, or decided to perceive, as genuine. She knew he could be lying as well. The things he told her about himself were tangential to any facts of real meaning. Stories about travel and growing up in the country. He had strong, expressive hands, and he gestured as he spoke, a skilled salesman drawing his listener close. He might not even be Carl Cook of Guelph, western U.S. sales representative. Or he might be, and the sin was in the omission, the wife and children back home. But she chose to take him at his word, as he seemed to have taken Jess at hers. An unstated agreement.

She could see a path here. A new name, new persona. Leaving the hotel and boarding a plane. Landing in Phoenix, Sydney, Seoul. Maybe she could create again, live again, as someone else.

They went up to his room rather than to hers. Riding in the elevator, Jess said she’d like to see it for research purposes. Neither of them laughed at the joke, the weight of the coming moment beginning to press.

Maybe it’s peace, or something like it. Had the young mother really said that? It sounded too perfect, too rehearsed. The neatened end of a story, tucked in like the corners of a bedsheet. Or had she, instead, told Jess about their son, and then their days in the barn, the shadows moving across their arms and faces, and then gone silent, staring at Jess until Jess looked away?

In his room Carl kissed her and she felt nothing. She hadn’t been with anyone since Alex’s death. Another retreat. She tried to move back into her body. He began to unbutton her blouse but she didn’t want him to touch her, not yet. She lifted his hands away and led him back to the bed. She pulled off his tie and unbuttoned his shirt, then stepped away and watched him undress in the dark, glimpses of pink skin in the dim room. She unzipped her skirt and slid it down over her hips. Folding her arms behind her back, she unhooked her bra and stood naked, a cold draft swirling around her ankles. Stay here. Stay inside yourself. She was whispering and hoped he didn’t hear. He pulled back the bedspread. There was a formality now that Jess thought she could handle, expected movements and gestures. She placed her palms in the curly hair on his chest and eased him back and then lifted herself over his hips and reached down for him, guiding, lowering her weight.

Sex with Alex had been intensely physical, muscular, bruising. Afterward she would lie awake, sweat cooling between her breasts, behind her knees, her fingertips touching scratches on his skin and sore spots on her own. It was as if they were grappling with some presence that existed only when they were together. Physically he was so much stronger, but he wouldn’t let her win, so Jess used every tool at her disposal: teeth, nails, unexpected submissions and offerings so he would lower his guard, a blind animal smelling blood, and then she would turn the tables again.

Jess imagined that the sex between Alex and Christine was gentle, comforting, a balancing counterweight to their own ongoing conflict. But where was her balance? Both with and without him she was lopsided, incomplete.

Carl moved slowly, gently, following her lead. She tried to feel his body beneath and within, his hands on her arms, his eyes on her breasts and then up to her eyes and then closed. When he said a name, she didn’t know to whom he was speaking, and then she remembered. She was Anne. She had been Jess and now she was Anne and then who would she become?

Afterward, Carl asked more about Vol. He wanted to know what species flew over the barn at what times of year. When he was a boy he had had a junior ornithologist’s guide, and for a while made notes and drawings of birds he had seen. Jess asked where it was now, and he shook his head. He said he hadn’t drawn a bird in twenty years.

“The northern lapwing,” she said. “The golden plover.”

Carl smiled, his eyelids heavy. He repeated the names, looking up at the ceiling, the arcs of paint there like flight paths, turning and then away.

“Anne,” he said, “those sound like beauties.”

When Carl began to snore she dressed quietly and left his room. Back in her own, she sat on the carpet by the windows and waited for morning. In the dark, Isabella appeared again, holding her metal canister above her head. Jess had always seen rage in Isabella’s face, murder in her eyes. But now, staying for once in that remembered moment, she wasn’t so sure. The gallery’s security guard was still so far away; Isabella had plenty of time to strike again. Maybe it wasn’t rage. Maybe it was fear or confusion, the face of a girl wondering what she had done.

Outside, the smoke above the hills was spreading, lit by the sun’s first red paring to the east. The edges of the city dissolved in the bloody light. If she sat here that light would pass over her, too. She would disappear. This was what Alex had felt, in those final moments speeding down Beverly Boulevard. Finally, she knew. She watched that terrible choice open before her, barreling unmoored toward that tree.

She showered and dressed back in her own clothes, leaving Anne’s folded on the bathroom floor with the towels. At the checkout desk she saw Carl heading into the restaurant. He smiled, a little sadly, and nodded, and Jess tried to accept this kindness, to absorb it as strength in the face of what might come.

From a courtesy phone she called the Serranos’ number and waited for the cowboy to answer.