ABBY, JANUARY 7, 2015
I saw myself last night. I drove right by myself. In a taxi, through a winter rain, coming home very late from work, on a shadowed block southwest of the Holland Tunnel. I gazed out the cab window, worn down from my day, and then suddenly she appeared, emerging from a dark doorway in silver platform sandals and a pink velvet coat.
Me. The way I used to be.
I yelped at the cabdriver. Stop! Please stop! He stopped, and I scrambled to pay him, snagging my tote loaded with unfinished paperwork from the office that I’d packed to not finish at home. And my purse holding cell phone and tampons and hair product, and in its deepest corners, a putty of crushed energy bar and compromised ibuprofen gel caps. I gathered up my bags and I leaped. It was raining, a very suspect sea stretched out between the cab and the curb, so I leaped.
The girl—this glimpse of myself—stood back there at the corner, slipping a coin into a pay phone. The mere fact of that pay phone. Extraordinary.
Then I noticed the man. He must have come out of the doorway too. Still holding the receiver in one hand, she—the girl—me, I mean, me—turned toward this young man, this tall boy, dark animated hair. He crossed to her, walking with shoulders hunched, face hidden under an umbrella, and leaned over her to allow her its benefits.
I gulped air, gawking. My hands felt numb.
They stood under the umbrella, very close together, talking. I glanced at the dented graffitied doorway, and sure, yes, that had been a nightclub and I had done my time in its pounding, dusky rooms, but hadn’t that place closed in the last millennium? Now he turned and saw the cab—my cab—just pulling away from the curb and this guy, this kid, starts to run after it down the block and gives one of those piercing fingers-in-mouth whistles—a practical skill I have always appreciated—and as he runs his umbrella—I can see it’s the five-dollar street-corner type—flips inside out in a gust and shimmers under the streetlight like a wet black lily bloom and I look at her and she’s looking at him and I know that look. Or I should say, I remember that look.
And then. She walks by me, maybe four feet away on the wide watery sidewalk and doesn’t shift her eyes in my direction, not in the slightest. She’s looking down, and I understand why: the silver platforms, the cratered old sidewalk, a broken reef of wooden pallets. She’s picking her way through it, she’s clutching her coat—it’s buttonless and just a little tattered, the color of raspberry pudding, and not waterproof, not warm at all.
I recall precisely how it felt to wear that coat, its chill silky lining, the shiver as you shrugged it over a slip dress. I remember how the wind and the water went right through it. On a raw night, that silky lining could make you feel colder than if you were wearing nothing at all.
The coat was purchased at the Salvation Army on Eighth Avenue and Twenty-Second Street. Still there, I believe.
He is holding the taxi door open. His smile is dimpled, in the shadows, his expression wryly pleased. She climbs in—I climb in!—and he abandons his blown-out umbrella in the curb, bends his lanky self into the back seat, and I can glimpse her legs and those shoes before the door shuts.
The rain taps my scalp with tiny wet fingers, and my nose is dripping. Through the cab window I see them kissing already—her hand—my hand—on his hair, and the car pulls away. And she’s gone.
I’m gone.
I briefly consider running after her.
I quickly release that idea into the rain. By the curb, the umbrella flutters slightly, with a sheen, like a wing just plucked from a prehistoric flying insect. I pick it up. I sniff it. Don’t ask me why. It smells like a wet umbrella. Though it is clearly a bit mangled, I collapse it into my tote. Don’t ask me why.
Peer down the empty street.
Not a cab, not a taillight. Only, a few blocks down, a yellow traffic signal strung in midair, blinking stupidly.
I feel shaky and breathless, slightly dizzy and maybe a tiny bit weepy then. I saw her, it was me. Me. It was most definitely none other. I was beautiful and maybe twenty-two and now I’m gone—that was some vision, some message, and I didn’t get to understand it. The vision vanished and left me soaked and cabless. My husband would be swirling his vodka and ice in front of his laptop. My sons would be rampaging through first-person shooters in their room, flouting school-night guidelines.
And I’m here on this sidewalk, southwest of the Holland Tunnel, so drenched that my best cashmere cardigan is exuding a hint of its mountain goat origins, and my most expensive work heels, the ones I wear only on days when the boss is in the office, are ruined.
I muster my interior subway map and begin walking, a bit wobbly, toward the nearest stop, three blocks away.
My name is Abigail Wilhelm Willard and I am forty-five years old. No, wrong. I am forty-six years old. Not ancient, I suppose, but old enough to forget momentarily exactly how old I am.
I work as a senior art director at the largest pharmaceutical company in North America. I live with my beloved husband, Dennis, and my sweet teenage sons, Pete and Benjamin, in a narrow Brooklyn two-story house with crusty old moldings and chipped marble mantels and a boiler due to break down this winter.
I used to be an artist, a painter of abstracts, mapping my interior life with outbursts of color—that is true. But that was in another life. This life is about my husband and my children and my work. I am known at my office for my ability to slice through bullshit and lay an idea bare and then quickly act on that idea and make it real.
I am not a flake and I don’t see things that aren’t there.
My interior life pretty much stays inside.
And I have never been one to dwell on the past.
And yet. Was it not true that lately I’d been falling into an underworld, just before sleep? Plunging into a fog, where I glimpsed half-remembered shadows so unsettling, they jolted me awake again?
I remember that, when I was her, I lived on Twelfth Street in the far west of Greenwich Village. I rented a room in an apartment, a five-flight walk-up, with a balcony.
It was there, when I was her, that my life split like an atom.
The flash still blinds me. I find it hard to look.
For twenty-four years, I have averted my eyes.
From the session notes of Dr. Merle Unzicker, psychotherapist (CONFIDENTIAL)
A reports a night of wildness with a young man, whom she believes is named Jamie. All she can recall, she said, was the city seen upside down, her head hanging backward over the side of his bed as it shimmied toward the wall.
How do you feel about it, in the light of day, I asked her.
Like this is all I ever want out of life, she said.
ABBY, JANUARY 8, 2015
Whether to tell Dennis about her. What was the name of that tall running boy?
I stared at the side of my husband’s head, his jaw, his familiar shell-pink ear, its curves etched like grooves in my brain from so many nights lying next to him, gazing. His shaggy hair, which every summer still turns deep yellow, as if honoring the memory of his youth on a California marine base, the wild mustard and apricot orchards along the air strip, the surf days at Huntington Beach with his brothers. The five Willard boys had been transplanted from Minnesota’s frozen lakes to the dry flats south of LA, and they grew up hearty and athletic, raised by partying parents on a diet of comic books and Captain Crunch. They all slept as deep as the dead, Dennis most of all. He was the adored youngest son, the only one who had turned his sights east, who somehow wrangled a full scholarship to the graduate program at Rhode Island School of Design, the country’s loftiest art school, driven by some impulse the rest of them simply couldn’t understand.
If he hadn’t met me, at that art school, he’d probably have moved back there, to the baked streets of Tustin, I thought now, as I watched his chest rise and fall beside me. He would’ve married a fellow Californian and lived in a house with a lemon tree.
A finger of urban light trembled on the ceiling above. I was able to dredge up a Jamaican flag. That tall boy had a black-green-gold Jamaican flag over his bed. I never saw him again.
I slipped out from the envelope of warmth—my husband generated enough body heat to melt an ice floe—and padded into the hall to stare into my tote, hung on the banister at the head of the stairs. The umbrella had dripped all over my work papers and turned them halfway to pulp.
Clearly I’d been projecting. Captivated by a moment in some random couple’s life, because it so closely coincided with some deeply embedded memory I didn’t even know I still had. This was ridiculous. I gave up a cab on a rainy night for a memory I’d forgotten?
It almost made me laugh out loud, as I headed into the bathroom for a pee. The silliness of it. Hallucinating about my lost youth, the road not taken, etc.
I washed my hands. I regarded myself in the mirror. Age forty-six, wan with winter, tinge of red around the nostrils, in a blue nightgown, its cotton thinned from many washings.
That girl. That year. How it reverberates in me still, though the precise outlines of its events remain shrouded in my memory, as if half-seen through a storm of dust.
It could have been funny. Leaping out of a taxi into the freezing January rain to gawk at a young girl who looked like me.
I gazed into the mirror, and it felt not funny.
I would have given her a piece of my mind if we had been able to talk.
A piece of your mind. An odd phrase, isn’t it? A mind can’t be divided into pieces. Can it?
In my nightgown, in the rain, I threw the umbrella away, stuffing it deep in the trash can near our front steps. I shivered, looking at the metallic threads twisting under the streetlights, the row houses huddled shoulder to shoulder, faces gleaming wet, the inelegant South Brooklyn jumble, brick and vinyl-siding and brownstone, the muffler shop and the vacant lot. At the corner of Fourth Avenue, a sopping mop of English sheepdog squatted while its owner huddled beneath the awning of the new café.
I stood there staring at it all, in my nightgown, in the rain. A wave of nausea swept through me, then receded.
No, I was not going to tell Dennis, my weary surfer of the days and the years, my hardworking partner in life, waging battles of his own to balance dreams and realities, about this so-called vision, or mistaken impression, or buried fragment reemerged on a slippery Tribeca sidewalk. Chalk it up to a very long day at the office, uncomfortable clothing, shitty weather, and not enough protein at lunch.
Forget it, I told myself, as I climbed back into bed, my gown dotted with cold drops.
I rolled over, plumped up my pillow. Set the alarm for fifteen minutes early so I could race to the deli to buy a clamshell of black-and-white cookies for Benjamin’s ninth-grade bake sale. Went to sleep.
Tried to, anyhow.
January 9, 2016
From: J.Leverett@deepxmail.com
To: Tristane.Kazemy@montrealneuro.ca, GarrettShuttlesworth@physics.humboldtstate.edu
Attached is a compressed folder containing diary entries extracted from Abigail Willard’s hard drive, plus other pertinent docs and images.
Please be aware: while it was launched under the auspices of my office, I am the sole instigator and overseer of this strictly classified investigation. Reply only to this email address, a secure end-to-end encrypted account.
Regarding the “session notes” from Dr. Merle Unzicker: Psychotherapy records are protected under HIPAA privacy rules; these in particular, but all files here, are highly confidential.
An additional request: I humbly ask you to excuse the personal nature of my involvement with Ms. Willard, as revealed here.
I’ve recruited each of you because of your specialized expertise. This case has unsettled me, I admit that. My hope is that, through your analysis, the many mysteries about Ms. Willard’s role in the bizarre and deadly events of 2015 will be resolved. Then I can put this matter to rest.
ABBY, JANUARY 12, 2015
Riding in a vanilla-scented sedan with Benjamin, my fourteen-year-old prince of the ninth grade, and Pete, sixteen, a junior, notably sulky. Once again, I’d had a restless night; once again, we got a late start to the morning hurdle sprint, the breakfast, the lunch-packing, the scramble for gear and homework. And so this aromatic car was summoned (plastic air-freshener pod stuck to its dash), another twenty dollars torched. At least I could hitch a lift with them down Flatbush Avenue, and enter the subway six stops farther along my route, fewer blocks to walk through this morning’s cold fog.
Benjamin drummed his algebra textbook in time to the driver’s radio grooves; Pete locked in to his phone.
But as we neared the narrower streets near the school, Benjamin said, “What’s going on, Mom?” Red light, blended into the January mist, knots of parents and kids milling on the sidewalk. Pete even looked up from his phone. “Whoa,” he whispered.
The street was jammed up with fire trucks and ambulances, so we clambered from the car and walked the rest of the way. Police officers rolled crime scene tape across the school’s entry, the wide sandstone arch carved with laurels and shields and other triumphant Victorian frills. The headmistress, Elizabeth Vong, ushered us and a bunch of others further along—“Side door, please, side entrance.” Pete’s ginger-bearded rhetoric teacher—Mr. Lavin? Lavine?—shook his head at us and said, “Cleaning staff found a suspicious item in a trash can by the front office . . . they’ve got to sweep the whole vestibule now.”
“What’s a vestibule?” said Pete.
“It’s a severed foot,” said Benjamin, waving his phone. “Ethan just texted me, it’s in a Gristede’s bag, and it’s either a foot or a baby.”
“There’s no foot in the trash can,” scoffed the teacher. “Do not monger rumors. Get to class now, boys, the bell is ringing.”
“MARIAH GLÜCKSBURG IS TALKING AT MOMA,” my cubemate Bethanne announced as the lunch hour arrived. Leaning toward her desktop screen, she grinned adorably at a mini version of herself there, her round face haloed by the dark nimbus of her hair. She was using the computer’s camera to slick on a fresh coat of plum lip color. “Come along?” She stood and slung her purse over her shoulder. Bethanne knew I had gone to school with this art-world luminary. She was just trying to be thoughtful.
I smiled and said I had mock-ups to finish. I left a few minutes after she did, decided to trek the eight or ten blocks northwest to a new noodle shop Bethanne had discovered. She was addicted to sleeping with chefs. “I objectify them,” she confided. “It might be kind of a fetish.” I took her restaurant recommendations seriously. Wind, by now having banished the fog, pushed and pulled me a bit, noontime shadows sliced down from the tall buildings and fell darkly across the avenue. I turned onto East Forty-Seventh and tried to think about Benjamin’s birthday present. What did he say he wanted? A something or other for his gaming console?
And then I stopped.
She was there. I mean, it was me. Again.
She sat on a bench centered behind a wide many-mullioned window.
I had forgotten about the Tradesmen’s Library. An eccentric holdover from a century ago, a private lending library that anyone can join for a small fee. The collection was heavy on early American history and forgotten novels by forgotten authors of the 1940s and ’50s; the air smelled of must and burnt coffee. It was exactly the kind of place that would have charmed me, that did charm me, when I first moved to New York.
Here it was, still extant, a short walk from my office on a block I never visited anymore.
I had discovered the library when I’d started my first job in the city, right after college. I’d head there during my lunch breaks to sit on that bench in that very window. I would read old books and, since they usually weren’t very good books, I’d look up from their pages quite a bit and gaze at the working people passing by in their raincoats, their pumps with the worn heels, their faces with the vertical furrows between their brows, carrying plastic sacks holding their midday salad-bar pickings or last night’s uneaten chicken legs brought from home. I’d swear to myself that I would never end up like them, a tired wage slave searching for a cheap lunch or toting a bag of leftovers from some sad far-flung fridge. Ever.
So now I’m seeing this girl, this girl who is me—no doubt about that face, those hands—and I’m entirely aware of the disdain with which this girl is viewing the office workers walking past, one of whom is me.
Everything else in the city seems to drop away. I long to stop and stare—but I can’t simply stop and stare. So I keep moving, and soon I am circling the block. Every time I pass the library, I slow to look. She has turned back to the book she is reading—a very fat one. I try to spy the title, but can’t.
Sumptuous brown waves, blonder on the ends, gathered in a high loose ponytail. The slight widow’s peak.
The skin, January-pale with faint gray crescents under the eyes, betraying late and sleepless nights.
Strong brown brows, thick fringe of lashes on downturned eyes.
Biting on a thumbnail. The remains of a magenta manicure.
One leg folded underneath her, the other tapping the floor in a chunky-soled shoe.
On turn two around the block, I begin to laugh. What insanity is this? I have discovered a twenty-something girl who looks like I used to look in the Bill Clinton era. She has stolen my 1991 clodhoppers! Maybe she found them moldering in the back of a Goodwill store.
Wait until I tell Dennis. He will find this funny.
On the third pass, I soak up all the details so that I can regale him.
On the fourth pass, she glances up and our eyes meet.
Something lurches, in my brain.
Sliding. Tumbling.
For a beat she regards me—maybe with a flicker of interest, or maybe not. Then she simply looks away, the way you do when you catch a stranger staring. She bows her head back to her book.
My heart folds violently.
What I remember about her. About when I was her. And what I cannot remember. What is beyond recall.
Somehow I steer myself back to my desk. I skip lunch.
SESSION NOTES, Dr. M. Unzicker
A’s boss says a fresh college grad at the entry level needs to make better use of her midday break. Networking lunches, etc. For her future at her job.
This future doesn’t interest her.
She feels she is waiting for something else to happen.
ABBY, JANUARY 20, 2015
Threading through sidewalk bottlenecks to my stop that evening. Clouds collided in the dark gust above Bryant Park. I thought, for the first time in years, of Eleanor Boyle.
She had been my anchor point at twenty-two, when I was that girl. She’d been a year ahead of me at Western New England State, another cash-strapped and ambitious small-town girl who’d opted for the cheap local college while scanning the horizons far beyond it. She landed in New York first. Eleanor swore every other word and she taught me all about clubbing, though we never called it clubbing—maybe the term postdated our actual clubbing days. She wore secondhand silk lingerie, 1930s bed jackets and slips, when we went out, and I’d wear those silver platform sandals, the coat, and underneath an orange jersey dress from the Fiorucci store. Spaghetti straps, red roses printed around the hem.
Confession: I still have that dress. I slept in it, until it almost fell apart. I have never thrown it away.
Now I’d seen the silver shoes, the pink coat, that used to go out on the town with my nightgown.
How many years since Eleanor and I last spoke? Fifteen? No, closer to twenty.
If I called her, perhaps I could ask her: Are you seeing the former you? Is this something that happens to all of us, while passing over the middle tipping point of our lives?
I had to laugh again. This strange latter-day double of me, tossed into my path by a town with a twisted sense of humor.
The subway steps were littered with drifts of spilled packing peanuts, skittering in the windy evening, urban seafoam, city snowdrift.
I couldn’t call Eleanor after so much time has passed and talk about such a thing.
These sightings, these oddities just need to be ignored, I told myself, and swiped my way toward an impatiently waiting train.
BUT THOSE CLUBS, I thought, my hands wrist-deep in soapy warm water later that evening. Rubbing the remains of our pork-chop dinner from the pan. The clubs, the doormen, the clustered hopefuls outside. Those ropes would be unhooked for us, invariably. Eleanor and me. We’d always been so pleased, so surprised. Never bothering to think about why they’d automatically give a nod to such a duo, unescorted, out past midnight on a Tuesday night and dolled up in cheap, cheeky clothing. Not caring that tomorrow we’d be sneakily sleeping at our desks, chin resting on one hand, the other hand idle on the keyboard, perhaps not even showered, perhaps still smelling of adventuring. The perfect club bait. We didn’t let that get in our way.
An experience junkie. That’s what I used to call myself, when I was her. And it had brought me almost to ruin. This much I know.
Pete walked in behind me, towering, telescoping arms reaching for the cabinet overhead. “I’m shooting paintball with Dmitri Saturday,” Pete said. “His brother Milo is taking us, it’s somewhere out, Dyker Heights, I think.”
“How old is this brother?”
“Old, like twenty-five.”
I smiled. “So, did you ever hear what was in the trash can?” I said. “I thought we’d get a robocall from school.”
“False alarm, I guess.” Riffling around, rustling packages. “I need cookies,” he said. “You need to go to the store.”
I turned, dripping suds on the linoleum. “You need to ask your dad to go to the store.”
Because this was what governed life now. The endlessly scrolling list of our needs. The clockwork peregrinations as we hunted and gathered to satisfy those needs. Where did desires fit in?
Pete stood there investigating the far reaches of the cabinets, where stale crackers often could be found.
“We could bake cookies, maybe this weekend.” I dried my fingers on a towel.
“I could get into that,” he said, and he turned to me and grinned, his dark eyes lit up.
“I need to buy flour then.” I hugged him—and as with every hug these days, his body felt different to me, rangier, ropier, the cushioning of childhood melting away. He returned my hug for a delightful instant, then squirmed, recovering his composure.
And I noticed it then—all down one side of his jeans, a spattering. Black-red dots. A spill or a splatter. “Is that blood?”
“Paint,” he said. “I was in the art room today.”
“Paint,” I said. He was always talking about how he had no interest in art of any kind, and never would. He wanted to study economics. What else would you expect? Child of the struggle.
LONG AFTER MIDNIGHT, I descended to our cave-like basement. One wall was lined with the racks Dennis had built when we’d moved in fifteen years ago, to store my old paintings, which were wrapped in brown paper and filed on their sides—a bit like those old library books, it occurred to me now. I wrestled with the drawer of a dented file cabinet, covered, as everything down here was, with a fine grit sifted from the rooms above. In the drawer, embedded in a schist of yellowing receipts and letters, I found my ancient address book. The spine half-broken, green fabric cover torn and patched with duct tape and a Tower Records sticker.
Eleanor’s last phone number was there under B.
And look. Scribbled inside the front cover. Mariah Glücksburg’s name, a long ago landline, and the address of that little house in the harbor flats.
Scribbled haphazardly, as things happened during my first year in Providence.
In the tumultuous year after I was her—the girl of the musty library and the dusky nightclub. The experience junkie.
And there. On the last page, scrawled in his own hand. Eli Hammond. His building number on Avenue C.
Staring at these pencil marks. A faint map of a lost and somehow perilous region. Somehow dangerous. How?
Maybe I actually could talk to the girl. Maybe I could tell her a thing or two.
Ridiculous.
What would I tell her anyway. Steer her clear of some half-remembered trouble? Or direct her straight toward it?
Because, if you could change the outcome, would you change the outcome?
Weigh all you once lost against all you stand to lose.
An impossible equation. An evil sort of math.
Also, ridiculous. Insane. This was a random girl. A cluster of strangely evocative matter that had sailed across my trajectory. She was not me. Seriously.
In any case, I climbed the stairs and slipped the address book into my bag.
ABBY, JANUARY 24, 2015
Pete shattered a window at a house in Gravesend. A brick landed in the kitchen sink. He hadn’t been shooting paintball. He had been committing petty vandalism with this new pal of his, Dmitri. The brick had dinged the aluminum basin and caused the owner’s dog to shit the floor.
The call—“May I please speak to the legal guardian of Pete Willard?”—came from the Mill Basin precinct, a squat art-deco shoebox that sat an anxious eighty-dollar ride away from my office through sleet and traffic. I found my son sitting on a bench in a begrimed, crowded hallway. I tried to hold my temper and asked for an explanation.
“It was direct action,” he said. “The homeowner is a known fascist.”
“A fascist?” I was baffled. “Isn’t that a bit last century?” Then I saw he was crying. Just a few slick droplets, down his cheeks, swerving around his nose and over his lip. He wiped at them with his sleeve. I wrapped my arms around him and murmured in his ear. “Please don’t worry, sweetheart. It’ll be OK. But was it this new friend? Because this isn’t like you.”
“Yeah it is like me,” he said. He shrugged me away. “It’s not like you.”
This last word landed on me like spit.
Basketball, action films, video games. Yes, he cared about these things. Political philosophy? Not to my knowledge. But what did I know about him, now, this month, this week, this new year. So much newness all the time. Six more inches, forty more pounds in the last eighteen months, and, perhaps it stood to reason, a few more ideas in his head. Still, I wondered about the new friend, Dmitri, who’d joined the class midway through last term—out of the ordinary, at their painstaking, orderly private school. Pete had introduced me to him at pickup, a coal-eyed kid climbing into a snarling black car. “A 2015 Mercedes S550,” Pete said as it roared away. “Best parent ride by far.”
I tried again to text Dennis. He wasn’t answering—but I knew he had a meeting about a hockey arena project, somewhere upstate—was it Poughkeepsie? I wish I’d listened closer to him, but who catches every detail, every day, of a spouse’s work reportage?
Down the hall, a man shouted about a nuisance summons. “I am not a fucking nuisance!” he yelped, flapping his arms.
And while I dug in my purse to find a tissue for my sniffling Pete, the other half of my brain took in the detective observing us, clearly waiting to speak to me. The long-limbed cantilevered stance, with one shoulder against the wall, hands in the pockets of his precisely cut sports coat. A pleasing vertical composition, a tall graceful shape. Dark hair trimmed short to tame a wave, threaded with tarnished silver. A face that seemed shadowed even in the stark fluorescence.
“We’ll charge him as a juvenile,” this detective was now saying to me, “but be aware that Homeland Security may need to do its due diligence. Take him home now, we’re all done, but you’ll be hearing from me, Mrs. . . .”
A slow smile, embellished along one side with a single dimple. A smile strategically deployed to reassure me, maybe.
“Willard. Abigail. Homeland Security? For a brick?” I willed my voice not to shake, put my hand on my boy’s sharp shoulder, I could see him slumping lower in his chair.
“Welcome to my world, Abigail.” He handed me a fat stack of forms. “A win for the terrorists—all these years, they’re still killing us on the paperwork front.”
“What’s next? Do we need a lawyer?”
“Depends. The complainant holds those cards right now. Try not to fret.” He reached into his jacket, thick caramel-hued wool, and pulled out a small loop strung with red beads. He sat down next to Pete and slipped the string around my boy’s wrist. “Ever seen these? Worry beads. Best way I know to work out the stress,” he said. “I learned it from a bad guy I arrested three times. This hooligan stayed frosty through extortion, narco trafficking, and murder-one trials. Never broke a sweat, beat the rap every single time,” he said. “He’s a happy Brooklynite to this day.” He thumped a hand on Pete’s shoulder, then rose again and turned to me. “My contact info is on the forms—I’m always checking my email. And that’s how I’ll keep you in the loop.”
Did his hand linger on my elbow just a few seconds longer than needed, escorting us past the yelping nuisance guy in the hallway of Brooklyn Precinct 63?
I wanted to say something about that hand on my elbow, about the gift of those beads. I wanted to demand of him: How different would all this be if we were not white, not from the Slope, if my kid didn’t attend that painstaking school?
I said nothing though. I wanted to get us out of there. Maybe I was imagining it, the hand on the elbow. But the benefits we enjoyed, by virtue of who we were: unmistakable.
When we reached the station exit, he held the door open for us. “And look what else, you charmed citizens,” he said, as if he’d been reading my mind. “The sun came out for you.” It was true, the ugly block was bathed in low orange rays. “It’s like you just can’t lose.”
He turned to Pete. “You want to change the world? Invent an app.” My boy nodded silently, face downcast.
The detective smiled at me again. In the strange light, his eyes looked like beaten bronze, and his skin was tawny. He might’ve been biracial, or a mix of Mediterranean stock, or just about anything. He was clean-shaven with an undertone of dark beard, a slightly crooked nose and a square chin. I wondered who he was, with the vague sense that I would keep wondering.
“I think there’s going to be an upside to this little incident,” he said. “Now we just watch and wait.” He tossed me one more dimple, then disappeared as the door swung shut.
Later, an email from him. None of the gruff world-weariness you’d expect from a New York cop—his written words struck me as courtly somehow. Intimate, even? He reassured me that he’d handle Pete’s case carefully. “I want to put your mind at ease. This is a juvenile case and the legal fees will work in our favor. The complainant may drop the charges.” And then, “Please call me anytime, happy to meet with you at any point in or out of the station. Here at your service.”
And his name and rank. Lieutenant Detective, Criminal Enterprise Squad.
“Criminal enterprise.” A broken window, a dinged sink, a prank by teens on a sleepover? Does that qualify as a criminal enterprise?
Criminal enterprise. Homeland security. What did my darling bumble into here.
“In or out of the station.”
I reread that bit.
“It’s normal boy stuff,” said Dennis, when he arrived home at last, late that night, yes it had been Poughkeepsie, and it had been a meeting over martinis, judging by his bleariness. He loosened his tie, unbuttoned his rumpled shirt, and tossed them both on the bed. He always shucked his work clothes as soon as possible, preferring to stroll around the house shirtless and barefoot in a pair of faded low-slung shorts. I had to admire how he pushed back against middle age, working out at a little weight bench in the basement and surfing at Rockaway every weekend from early spring into almost December. He cut corners in some areas, but not there. But ever since I’d met him, in all ways, even in his art, he inclined toward the physical. Now he encircled me with his arms, pulled me to him, the firm, lightly fuzzed warmth of him. “My brothers and I once tried to explode an empty oil tank at the abandoned hangars.” He laughed. “At least our boy didn’t create a Superfund site.” He spoke into my hair. “This is a phase, Abby, you’ll see.”
ABBY, JANUARY 27, 2015
Life normalized, as it does. Today Esther Muncie peeked, puppet-like, over the top of my cubicle wall, bleached corkscrewed curls twitching, frenetic: “Got something for me? Client wants that deck by five. That means twenty-three needs it by four.”
I nudged my monitor in her direction.
“Lavender?” She frowned. “Too gyno.”
“What color do you think they’d like in a stomach?”
“Color is your competency, Abby. Not mine.” Her little puppet head disappeared, a shout rolling back toward me. “More options asap, if you please!”
Color is your competency, Abby.
Gray carpeting on the floor, nubby gray fabric on the wall, gray molded plastic all around the edges of my domain. But then, up above, the big square window, a box of sky from this seventeenth-floor vantage. Looming over my desk, the square pane of glass, entirely filled with a sharp, glancing blue on this winter morning.
Sometimes I considered this window my painting: I’d ease back into my chair, raise my face to it, admiring. Different each time I looked. Pink fish-scale clouds on a turquoise ground. A wispy white contrail against deep violet. A speckling of charcoal on cement as pigeons dove toward their nests. Snow flurries in urban dusk: a static of pale orange. I would claim this twelve square feet as mine, a work produced by a union between the great world and my longing for it.
At art school, at RISD, they told me that color would give me a career.
Certain moments stay so crystalline in the mind.
For example, the day in Providence when Bremer summoned me to his office. And I sometimes remind myself that art historians place Hans-Dietrich Bremer more than once in Mougins, drunk and disorderly with Picasso, and noted that he had sketched Jacqueline Roque a number of times, alongside Pablo, and also on his own—and that, in Taos in the early seventies, he built an adobe studio that was used for many years by Agnes Martin, whom he called Magsy. The master had summoned me to his office, one day toward the close of my final year. Stacked grapefruit peels, fresh deposits on top of dry and drying, formed a leaning tower on one corner of his desk. He prepared two pouch-tobacco cigarettes with a squeaky little rolling machine. It took a very long time, and I sat there, unable to think of a thing to say. I remember his eyes bright and watery and set deep among many soft and mottled folds as he finally looked up from his task. Lit the cigarettes in his own mouth, then handed one to me with shaking hands. People are always hungry for color, he said, and not many can use it like you do.
I had never smoked a hand-rolled cigarette before. Trying to pick the ticklish threads from my tongue without letting him see.
You, mademoiselle, have a gift for this.
What are your plans, once you leave here?
Are you in love with the young sculptor? Willard his name is?
Will you return to New York with him?
Where you came here from, correct?
Think, though.
Because I have seen what happens to the girls.
They do not always honor their gifts.
He blew plumes through his thick lips.
Color is my competency.
The stomach could be a pale orange, maybe.
ABBY, JANUARY 31, 2015
Black dawn on a Saturday. I flung myself onto the shore of consciousness, desperate for it. Dreams of a plate-glass department store window, splintering and shattering, valuable goods exploding into flames, falling, falling. The realization that I’d triggered this horror, via something hot and unstable and atomic, born of my body.
That phrase—born of my body—was still echoing in my mind as I lay there, awake.
Relinquishing a cozy bed on a dark frigid morning was preferable to this.
Dennis turned over, a heavy log rolling in a deep current of sleep. On his bedside table, his phone, packing tape patching its cracked screen, and the salted-ginger chews, an obscure brand from India that he bought online, many boxes at a time, because they were the only thing that helped when his old craving for cigarettes kicked up.
Dennis is my final man. I met him after I’d been in Providence a few months, still stunned, lost, still emerging from whatever I’d left behind in New York. A handsome hale soldier of art, he seemed, in the Sturm und Drang of the welding studio, decked out in canvas coveralls, covered with grease and paint, an old pair of safety goggles pushed back into his wild blond hair. A cheerful tank commander. I was awed, as were plenty of our classmates, by his brawny constructions, scrap metal cut and bolted into puzzling and brash aquatic forms, and the prestigious scholarship, and the unassuming confidence of this creative savant of southern California, who read no art theory and swept up many student prizes. When we started talking marriage, I hesitated, because I thought my art would perennially fall in the shadow of his.
That was my fear, when it was clear that our destinies would be linked.
I needn’t have worried, though. Not about that, anyhow.
Perhaps I’ll get up and sketch. Perhaps I’ll draw.
Funny thought to have. It had been a long time. Neither Dennis nor I made much art anymore. In fact, we made none.
A splash of water on my face and then a long hot shower. In the kitchen, I sat at the table with a blank sketchbook open. I warmed my hands around my coffee mug and I thought about her.
Before Dennis, before Providence.
So many of the events are lost, vanished. Most of 1990, 1991.
But certain visuals stay.
Eli Hammond’s face.
The building on West Twelfth Street—the five flights of pitted marble steps, the paint-peeling cast-iron banister to help you along the way. At the top, a fire door with a round glass eye in the center.
Now I wondered: What if I stood in that hallway, peering into that peephole? Would she be there on the other side? Would she see me?
Of course not. This would be how I could rid myself of these sightings.
These hauntings.
And so, I find myself there, standing on West Twelfth Street, before dawn on this ice-crusted January morning. A Saturday morning. Just me and the well-padded deliverymen steering their dollies of dairy crates into the grocer on the corner, faces blurred by exhaled clouds. I study the panel of buzzer buttons. No names next to them, only remnants of ancient labels, old bits of tape. But of course I know it’s 5B. I hold my breath and I buzz.
Silence. Long silence. Relief seeping in. I could go to that twenty-four-hour coffee shop on Greenwich Avenue—still there? I think so—and have scrambled eggs and wheat—make that rye—toast and still be home before my household begins to stir. The boys will sleep adolescently into early afternoon. Even Dennis, on the weekends, rarely raises his head from the pillow before ten.
And then the door buzzes. Loud. And then the lock opens with a clunk.
Now is the time to run. But instead I enter the foyer, with a grim sense of simply getting past this personal trial. I realize: Whoever had buzzed me in and is currently waiting by the door of 5B at 6:45, now almost 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning, is likely to be testy. I slip my phone out of my pocket, punch it to glance at the launch-screen photo of Dennis, Pete, and Benjamin, in front of last month’s Christmas tree. Holding it in my hand as a security measure, I climb up the stairs.
I round the fourth flight and there she is. Peering through a crack in the chained door at the head of the stairs. There I am, just a sliver of young me. Mussed hair, ratty pink pjs, prettily pointed chin. Squinting out of a dark slit at the fluorescent blaze of the hallway.
At me. It is me. Look at that freckle above the eyebrow.
Hello, I whisper.
She pulls the door open just an inch or two more.
I whisper. I’m just . . .
I can’t think of a way to explain. What am I just?
Warning you, I say.
She frowns, pursing her lips.
Something gets broken here.
Her eyes widen. Then she shuts the door, a sharp retort. A lock thunks. And then another, and a third.
Many locks on every door, back then.
SESSION NOTES (CONFIDENTIAL)
A could not regain sleep that morning.
She showered, dressed.
At the coffee shop down the block, she ordered scrambled eggs and rye toast. She found a pencil in her bag, turned the place mat over. She began to draw.
Dr. Tristane Kazemy, JANUARY 31, 2016, Critical Care Surgery Fellow, Neurological Institute and Hospital, Montreal
The blood-brain barrier. La barrière hémato-encéphalique. She swerved toward the wide lane up Montroyal, wishing she could choose the steeper way through the woods, but it was too icy this day, this season. In fact, her fingertips were aching, and once again she swore she’d find time this week to stop at the shop on Rue Stanley for real running gloves, something microfiber and heat-retentive.
The light on the snow made her eyes go all spots, but then she had spent the last hour in the dark lab, streaming video. The buffering was stuttered, but the images of Alexandre Carpentier performing his 2008 thermal ablation, crossing through la barrière hémato-encéphalique on a sentient patient, had moved her deeply. Quite profound, quite astonishing, to be able to gaze into a man’s open, questioning eyes—to speak to him even—and peer at the same time into his skull. The mind and the brain, at the same time. A la fois.
She needed a fleece gaiter too. The scarf Maman had knit for her, though so lovely and rose-pink, scratched her face as she bounded up the path. It collected a damp frost where her breath passed through.
Even now, at her desk, the massive files from the case in New York were downloading, terabytes worth being gulped from the vast cloud. This police official, Leverett, had found—and read!—her doctoral thesis (Lesser-Known Behavioral Impacts of Congenital Neuropathological Abnormalities) online. So. Despite the scoffing of Laurin and Buccardi, her seniors at the lab, despite their dismissing her theories as outré, she’d sent her best thinking into the universe. And apparently, the universe had taken notice. As if it understood much better than she did the force of her will. As if its attention had been lured by the ferocity of her desires, as if it had been inspired to engage with her narrative. Because the ink was barely dry on her degree, and still the universe had seen fit to send her this stunning opportunity. The uncanny case of a wife and mother of two, a working person with a workaday job, an ordinary person brutally overtaken by the extraordinary. The deep stream of data was cascading this very minute into her hard drive. The thought made her run faster.