ABBY, APRIL 6, 2015
Spring came wafting into town one night while we were all asleep. Trees bristled with buds one morning, and then the next, it seemed, were blossoming with slutty abandon. Rushing to work and home again, I tried to catch their fragrance as I dashed by.
This evening, I detoured to walk through the gardens in front of Rockefeller Center. All the years I’ve lived in New York, I have never missed seeing the tulips in bloom there. Flowers are a mundane obsession for an artist. But they lure me.
Above the buildings, the sun’s last rays strobed on fast-moving clouds. People leaned over the rows of red and yellow and white blooms, bowing and waving as the tulips did the same.
I found a bench, sat next to my big work-stuffed bag. I unzipped my boot slightly and rubbed my cramped calf. Would I be able to get a seat on the subway home? Red frilled tulips shivered. My gaze wandered over them then came to rest on a couple leaning on the rail surrounding the flower beds. The woman, the unruly honey-hued hair.
The unmistakable pointy chin above the fake fur collar of her coat. The man faces away—but of course, I know who it is. She leans against him, and her hand is under his scuffed suede jacket, going up and down his back. I can see it moving under the fabric, a buried rhythm, like the bass line of a complex piece of music.
The couple turns and stares up at the buildings, seeming to discuss something they see up there. Behind them, a row of white tulips flicker in the breeze, foam on a fast-falling stream.
She looks so happy. I have forgotten the feeling that inspired that look. Deep, fresh infatuation. Straight from the wrapper, fresh from the source. Her smile astounds me. How long has it been since I smiled that way, so that my soul haloed around me, practically visible?
Then, though it is hard, so searingly hard, my eyes focus on him. So it is not scary enough that I should be haunted by myself. Now him too.
But I want to look. I want to see. My eyes, my hardworking-mom-and-wife eyes, feast on the boy in a way that, in a more evolved part of my brain, horrifies. Because this kid is what—twenty-three or -four?
But I look at him, half a head taller than her, long dark lashes, dark brows, straight brown hair flipping over his ears, strong cheekbones, strong nose, something watchful, hopeful, and slightly blurred in that face, a face out of a Manet painting, something classical and eternal about it. I gaze at him, and the buried river overflows its banks. I allow myself to remember, bits of him rising up through my mind like bones resurfacing in the flood, his clouded smile, the camera in a beat-up leather sheath, the apartment outfitted with a wooden wire-spool table and folding patio chairs and a shelf filled with pulpy old noir novels and philosophy books. My oddest Christmas ever, spent in the drafty, sprawling East Village apartment of his parents and his childhood, overlooking a snow-swept Tompkins Square, sitting around a spread of deli containers with his father, the alcoholic high school history teacher, and his mother, a masseuse who kept an array of electric sex toys on the kitchen counter next to the coffee maker. She threw tarot for us and told me my fate was bound up with her son’s, you will draw your last breaths together, she said.
When I met him, he was working two jobs, as a waiter at a Marriott in Midtown and doing paste-up at a disreputable classifieds newspaper. The night we met, he told me he’d been carrying three plates of cream cake across the ballroom when Rabbi Meir Kahane was shot a few feet in front of him. He kept a bloodied polyester napkin tucked in a plastic bag in his closet. He showed it to me the third time I slept over. After we’d been fucking for around a month, he admitted that he’d been dabbling in various street drugs, had been for years, but always under control, he said, and he never shared needles, and he was in the process of kicking. He had plans, he said. Witnessing that assassination had awakened a desire in him, a thirst to be close to bloodshed and action, and to photograph it. He had that old camera, inherited from his Ukrainian grandfather, a Red Army photographer who used it to document the Battle of the Dnieper. He was aiming to become a Robert Capa. He would venture to war-torn places. And you too, he said, to be an artist you have to see everything, he said. In the meantime, he’d bought a police scanner and snapped photos around the city, pedestrian deaths, murder scenes, occasionally selling a shot to one of the tabloids. He used the darkroom at his paste-up job and earned extra cash for film by picking up an occasional bartending shift. Down at the bar where we first met.
No. I won’t let myself go to that particular memory now. I stop myself. I tear my gaze away, struggle to rezip my boot. But he is holding her now, he leans back against a concrete planter. Now he’s pulling her to him, one leg between hers as they stand in this clench, and his hand is in her hair. I am impaled by the sight. The pronounced veins on the back of his hands. The twisted rope bracelet around his wrist. His hair sliding over her face as they kiss. And the way her body presses into his.
I just need to run. I grab my bag and eject myself from the bench, rushing past them without looking, my boots clicking away beneath me. Toes too narrow, heels too high.
And then I stop. I turn. The girl and the boy still stand in their embrace, more fervent now than before. I don’t know what to do next. And then I do. I walk up to face them. Excuse me, I say. Their heads jerk up.
I don’t understand why this is happening, I say.
You again, she says.
I turned to him. And you too.
A ring of paler blue around the irises. I’d forgotten.
You don’t understand, I say. I am seeing myself here. The timbre in my voice is rising, though I’m trying to hold myself together.
She clutches his arm. Let’s go, she says.
I’m ready when you are, he says. He stares at me, distressed.
I stare back. It is too much, seeing him here, standing in front of me again, after everything.
After the break. Because now, out of the murk, the void in my brain that swallowed our history, his and mine, comes a thought:
Eli Hammond no longer exists.
And then an image: his body, far below me, under the settling storm of dust.
Lying dead, in the garden, flung down in all his beauty.
The next thing I remember, I was five stops past home on the F train. My entire psyche was flooded with panic. No, more than that. With panic and terror. My head pounding with it, pulsating even—I felt as if my skull were expanding and contracting rapidly under its thin cover of skin and hair. It must be noticeable, must be ballooning in and out like the throat of toads I used to see, back in Massachusetts, in the damp summer evenings when they’d hop up from the little brook at the edge of the lawn and hunt bugs under the porch lights.
No one around me seemed to notice my head. The subway car was crowded, but they were all lost in their own lives. When the doors opened, I stood, steadied myself, crossed the platform, and caught a train the other way, toward home.
ABBY, APRIL 9, 2015
Mariah Glücksburg lives across from the Armory on Sixty-Seventh Street, in a carriage house with a rooftop studio enclosed in glass and a garage on the ground floor, in which she kept a gleaming black SUV and a vintage Vanagon that she used for summer painting excursions all around the country, sometimes driving herself all the way to the tip of the Yukon to find a certain yellow in the sky.
By the elevator at SVA, she’d punched in my cell number, and this morning, my phone flashed her address and an invitation for cocktails. Dennis wasn’t included. “Tell her I say hello,” he texted as I left my office to head uptown, and somehow I read the text as dismayed.
The night was cool, the house was warm. She showed me into a large lofty-ceilinged space, kitchen, living room with a black marble fireplace, miles of low white-suede sofas and immense windows opening onto an enclosed garden. “I’m stripping down,” she said, taking off her blouse, down to a simple navy camisole underneath. Her arms were alabaster, honed. “Indoor heat is so drying to your skin,” she said, scooping ice into two glasses, then pouring whiskey over the rocks. “Women our age, they get so avid, so kind of tightened up. But you, Abby. You seem different. You’ve held up well.”
She set the glass in front of me, dark gold liquid in sweating cut crystal. Heirloom crystal, I supposed, from the fallen Greek royals. A life-sized painted portrait hung over the mantel, a heavy-browed military man with medals and ribbons on a sash, a tiny poodle on his arm, a revolver on a columned pedestal. Next to that was a small portrait of a teenage girl in a pink frock. It could have been Mariah, with the dark upswept curls and the cheekbones. She followed my gaze.
“Both were painted by the studio assistant of John Singer Sargent, when the artist was a very old man in Vevey,” she said. “Not bad. That’s great-great-grandpop, and the little one is my great-aunt Thea.” She frowned. “She was known for sleeping with major Nazis.” She swirled her glass and flopped onto the sofa across from me, crossing her ankles on the vast coffee table, atop a stack of art books. “I prefer baseball players,” she said with a smile. “And you?”
“Well . . . Dennis and I are still together.”
“Ah,” she nodded. “That stuck.” I saw some subliminal flicker in her eyes. Maybe something had happened, then, between those two. I had never been certain. I chose not to say anything at this particular moment. Choosing to tuck that information away.
She sipped deeply, continuing to eye me. “You always gave off sort of a damaged-beauty vibe, a bit of a tragic heroine, when I’d see you around,” she said. “Back then.”
I laughed. “Hardly. I did arrive in a muddle, I guess. I had a rough time in this city, just before I came up to Providence.”
Could I tell Mariah about the young man who somehow died in the garden then rose again at Rock Center? About the year of Eli, just before I met her? No, I most definitely could not. “I wouldn’t be that age again for anything in the world,” I said.
“Agreed,” said Mariah. “I was a fucked-up little thing.”
“You?” I laughed. “You were a blazing inferno.”
She invited me then up to her studio, a soaring space with clerestory windows on three sides, through which one could see the swanky neighboring apartment buildings bowing over, almost in supplication to her work. The walls were covered with works in progress, mostly in shades of ivory, cream, white, layered and meticulous with brushwork that appeared tiled or woven, and floor-to-ceiling flat shelves were filled with paintings, which she listlessly pulled out, here and there, to show me. She had a period of stripes, a period of swoops, a period of circles. I’d seen many of these works before, in the Times, in ARTnews, when I’d been able to bring myself to look at ARTnews.
Then she turned to me. “And you’re back at it. I’d love to see your new work,” she said.
“Oh, not any time soon,” I said. “I’m really not ready.”
“Doll, you were born ready,” she said. She threw herself down on a lushly cushioned chaise and gazed at me. “You were always a better painter than me.”
I drained my sweating glass and said nothing.
“You knew that, right?” she said. “If you didn’t, Abby, you were the only one.”
ABBY, APRIL 14, 2015
What it feels like: my heart is a box with rusty hinges. Some change is forcing it to open, millimeter by recalcitrant millimeter. The hinges scream, painfully.
I don’t know enough about you, he texted.
What do you want to know?
What were you like as a girl, where’d you go to school. How come your kid is a commie.
Pete is not a communist.
Ha, I know. But come on, give me some history on Abigail Willard. I want to know more.
I’m sitting in my cubicle. I would like to flee my home, my family, my life, to paint, to wander, to experience this new man. I allow myself to imagine us tangled in warm, well-worn sheets, letting the city run outside, allowing the morning to drift into afternoon.
Just as she gets to do.
How much more? I text.
April 16, 2016
From: J.Leverett@deepxmail.com
To: GarrettShuttlesworth@physics.humboldtstate.edu
I can free up funds for data modeling. Not that I have a clue what that is. But for this case, whatever it takes. I officially apologize for calling you geekwad the whole time we roomed together freshman year. You read poetry, you talked about antimatter and entropy. I was a dumb shit.
ABBY, APRIL 19, 2015
Standing at my easel, I feel like an open bucket, a rain barrel. I like to imagine the top of my head open, and the colors pouring in from some higher plane, some great source. Not God, not the sky. Instead, it’s the bright storm of energy that clangs and sloshes over and around every existing thing, energy and light and the juice that powers us. In my best moments, I can almost feel it burgeoning, primed to release its bounty, to make life richer, and deepen into art.
The trick though is remembering to stay open to it. Our heads close off, in this twenty-first-century world. Every time you peer into a screen, direct your eyes there, the roof on your head slides shut. When you feel downtrodden, your whole being slides downward, and the lid closes. When stressed, anxious, angry, energy is pulled down, the door closes.
And who among us, the working stiffs, the frazzled parents, isn’t always contending with at least one or two of these down-dragging states, at almost all times?
The better painter, Mariah said.
If this were true . . . could it be true? Bremer, warning that I needed to honor my gift, to safeguard it. Why hadn’t I.
I had done instead what adults everywhere on the planet strove to do, dedicated themselves to securing a safe perch in a hostile world, and there was no dishonor in it.
But painting was my language, and I had fallen quiet all these years. That’s what Eli had said, he said, you don’t talk as much as some but you spill your feelings here, in this work. I can still feel his hand touching the surface of my painting, coming away wet, and how it made me so excited to see my oils on his fingers, though he’d marred the work, I didn’t care, I took his hand and pressed it to my black T-shirt and wore his mark, in pale blue and violet, for the rest of the year.
I knew now. I remembered. Eli didn’t break my heart by leaving. He broke it by dying. I tried to make sense of this notion, which shattered—all over again—the underpinnings of my present life. I failed to make sense of it.
And it was all so long ago.
My memory of it was just gone.
Like he was gone. Long gone.
How could it be?
On this Sunday April morning I stood at my easel. I tried to will the roof open. The household was warmed by the sleepy breathing of my family, a mellow early sunlight was seeping into the rooms, and Dennis was spread out in the bed behind me, dreaming with a faint frown. I picked up the palette, yellow into gold, inviting something soft, something like buttery milk. I began to lay down a ground.
ABBY, APRIL 20, 2015
An Evening on the Riviera arrived in spitting rain. The rain frizzed blow-outs, blurred mascara, disheveled the well-groomed. Joanie Werner stood under the arch at the top of the school’s front steps, her curls gone wild, the silver sequins on her tunic dress scattering the light from the streetlamps. She waved at us.
“My artists!” she cried. “Wait till you see! Your work looks museum-worthy in there.” She threw an arm around Dennis and kissed his cheek. He looked at me, baffled—he’d never met her before. Then she kissed me, rum on her breath.
She turned from us and gazed down the rainswept block. “Have you seen Stan the Weatherman? He’s calling our live auction. I’m his designated handler and he’s twenty minutes late.”
We left her to her vigil and hung our wet coats up on the rack by the door to the gym. Dennis looked dourly handsome in a dark blazer and black jeans. I had nixed the bolo tie.
“You don’t like me to have flair,” he’d complained.
“Not in your personal dress, no.”
He’d flung the bolo tie and one of its pronged longhorns left a minor gouge in the wall. We’d been arguing all day over one thing or another—who had vacuumed last and when, why our gas bill was so high, and who had forgotten to take Benjamin to the dentist. The nerves, I had to assume. Nerves about the auction—because it was the first time either of us had shown a work in public in years.
Cardboard palm trees and signs read NICE and SAINT-TROPEZ and CANNES; the bartender wore a striped T-shirt and a jaunty yachting cap. We both ordered vodka and tonic and took long first sips.
A man I recognized vaguely as the dad of one of Pete’s classmates approached and handed us each a numbered paddle. “For the silent auction,” he said. “Spend freely and often!”
“Actually, don’t,” Dennis whispered as we moved away.
He was shaky, more shaky than ever, about his job. He had heard from his boss’s assistant that expense accounts were being reviewed.
Gift cards from local boutiques, coupons for hot stone massage and waxing. Dennis wandered off to check out a pair of mountain bikes parked in a corner. I idly browsed the jewelry table, arrayed with pendulous necklaces made by some of the craftier moms. A hand-knit scarf, seed-stitched, in peacock blue. I made a twenty-five-dollar bid on that, to get my number on something, just to be able to say I made an effort to shell out.
Then. My painting—the black bird, on an easel in the corner. And next to it, Dennis’s steel sculpture from the coat closet, a stack of flat, raw-edged circles, four feet high, complex and surprising from many angles. It had been in the closet since Pete was about five and had almost pulled it over on top of himself.
No one was around, so I glanced at the sheets of paper, laid out on a nearby table, where prospective buyers were meant to scribble their bids. The uninterrupted whiteness was blinding, blizzard-esque, arctic. No one had bid for the black painting, and no one had bid on the circles.
Nearby, on a small easel, sat the only other artwork for sale. A little acrylic of a sailboat. It had at least fifteen bids, the highest $2,350.
I picked up the pencil laid atop the bidding sheet for Circles in Repose—that was what the closeted sculpture was called. It had earned Dennis the most prestigious grad-student award at RISD, the Huntington Prize, granting him a cushy job teaching undergraduate studio art and a stipend of ten thousand dollars. He’d won it at the end of our first year in Providence, right around the time we’d realized we might be in love. It had seemed a door opening to a far-flung vista of happy years, a winding ribbon of road that led to fulfilled expectations.
I glanced over at the bar, where I’d last spotted Dennis. He was nowhere in sight. I wrote down my paddle number, along with a bid: $2,400. Just to get the ball rolling. Just to give it some momentum.
Then I hit the bar myself, bought another vodka and tonic. I greeted a few people I knew, asked about their kids and their jobs and so on. I made another circuit of the gym, but couldn’t see Dennis anywhere. Finally, I headed out toward the coatrack and restrooms, and then I saw him standing in a back hall, where the door stood open to a loading dock. A dad with a long gray ponytail passed him a joint. It was the first time I’d seen him smoke in years.
“This is Larry,” he said. “Kind enough to share his medication.”
Larry saluted me with a finger. “To this type of event, I always bring a little something. Keeps me calm.” He offered the joint to me with a little bow.
I smiled and shook my head. “It makes me paranoid.”
“She used to love it,” Dennis said to Larry with a sigh.
“Didn’t they all,” Larry said. He took a long drag.
The weatherman’s voice boomed down the hall. The live auction had begun. The three of us watched the rain and listened to people spend their money—three thousand here, sixteen hundred there. A membership to a golf club on Long Island. A trip to Nova Scotia. Lunches with famous authors and backstage tours of Broadway shows.
Finally it was time to go. We bid Larry goodbye and Dennis helped me on with my coat.
Joanie Werner was huddled with some of the other parents of the auction committee, tabulating bids from the silent portion of the event. She looked up as we walked past. “Your painting sold for twenty-one hundred bucks!” she said. “And your sculpture, Dennis, sold at twenty-four hundred! So exciting!”
A genial dad seated at the next table asked for our bidding paddles to be returned and compared their numbers against the bidding sheets. “OK . . . my man, so looks like you won a painting. Untitled by Abigail Willard,” he said to Dennis. “And let’s check your number, madam . . . well, hey, you won a sculpture. Circle in Repose.” He smiled up at us. “Congratulations! That’s a nice haul. So will you folks be paying by cash or check this evening?”
ABBY, APRIL 23, 2015
Three days have passed. Time enough for us, Dennis and me, to process the idea that we paid almost five thousand dollars for our own work. The black bird went back on its nail, and I insisted his tilted circles should find a spot in a corner of the living room, but then yesterday, Benjamin knocked it over, leaving a splintery white gouge in the wood floor and severely bruising his big toe. It was stashed in the hallway closet again. And we have settled upon the idea, Dennis and I, that perhaps our work was too good for its setting, there among the paper palm fronds and poker chips of the ersatz Riviera.
Then today, Pete was crying, in the backyard, sitting wedged in a child-sized plastic chair, one of a pair we’d bought so many years ago, now muzzy with city grime on their backs and undersides. His long legs stretched into a blackened plastic kiddie pool, cracked on the bottom, bright colors and cartoony bunny faces managing to be both besmirched with black moldy stuff and faded by the sun.
One time he pooped in that pool, sitting as a little naked fat baby in the sunshine. He smiled, he pooped. I scooped the little floating biscuits out with a cup.
When angry, anxious, despairing, Pete loses his speech again. I can almost see it bleeding out of him in these moments, as blood drains from a frightened face.
When it happens, Dennis will try to touch Pete. Approach him, try to envelop him in a bear hug, or, if our boy won’t allow that, then simply a hand on his arm, his back, his burst of dark hair. Breathe, he’ll say, just breathe. It’s OK, it’s all going to be OK.
And this always, when I see it, ignites even more turmoil in my brain, in my chest, because I both believe and do not believe it’s going to be okay. I love and hate my husband for his reassurances, for his demeanor of steadiness. It feels to me like the bedrock of our family’s life, and its fault line, the shiftiest quake zone in the most volcanic region on earth. This because, so often, I simply don’t buy it—the comforting vision he’s selling—and I know that often he doesn’t either.
And how do I react, when Pete becomes stymied and speech-strangled? I feel the hot steel cord tightening around me, the cord that is still umbilical, the searing live wire. I become his cracked mirror, refracting his despair, mixing it with my fear for him and my love.
I try not to show him my distress. I try to pull myself together and be a grown-up, of course.
What do you want to tell me, my darling? How is it we have so many secrets from each other? Things you don’t tell me, and I have things I don’t tell you. I used to deal daily with your poop and we had no secrets, no space between us.
I took his hand into mine. A warm and alive object that had once rested in my hand so often, it seemed an extension of my body. My son, do you remember walking around the city hand in hand, day after day, along shop aisles and subway platforms, across every street crossing, every square of every sidewalk, miles and miles hand in hand?
He pulled it away. He squeezed his eyes closed and rubbed them, taking a long shaky breath. Reddened splotches down the sides of his nose, a few small angry pimples on his chin. He gave his head a little shake, as if to toss the tears away.
I didn’t want him to catch me watching him, so I stared down at his feet. His sneaker still bore that legend: ANTIFA RAGE BRIGADE. And now another, I hadn’t noticed: DAX VIVE. This, I recalled, was one of the scribblings in the bathroom at school, per Vong.
Maybe this would help him find his words again, to talk about this. As he settled a bit, I leaned over and ran my finger over the inked white canvas. “Who is Dax?”
“Some kid killed by fascists, ten years ago. In Italy. Dax Cesare. He’s famous there.”
“Why this concern about fascists? Is that from your AP Modern Euro class?”
He snorted. “No.” He looked at me directly, rims of his eyes still a bit swollen and pinky-red. “This is a coming storm. You just don’t want to see it. You want to bury yourself in your cozy life.”
I let the words sink in. But I do feel danger, every minute, I wanted to say. My cozy life is closer to calamity than you would ever dream, my dear one.
You don’t say that to your struggling child.
“Believe it or not,” I said, “I still have ambitions and desires. Things I want to create. Even moms have dreams.”
His lips bent into a smirk, but I could see him considering this, a little furrow in his forehead.
“It becomes hard to hold on to it,” I said.
“A giant part of the problem is late-stage capitalism,” he said.
At least he has found a passion. “So how did you truly get into this, sweetheart,” I said gently. “Was it that Dmitri?”
“No. No. No. It was not that Dmitri.” He stood abruptly. He paced a bit, his jaw muscles clenching. He made some soft swallowing sounds, as he sometimes did when his tongue got locked. Then he turned to me. “Open your eyes, Ma. This is me. Now. This is who I am now. It’s real. It’s happening. Really real and really happening.” He turned and stalked into the house.
ABBY, APRIL 24, 2015
Really real and really happening.
In the hotel room in the late afternoon, I heard sirens through the thick curtains. They grew louder as I sat in the desk chair, smoothing my hair in the mirror there. Allowing myself to study the reflection. Allowing myself to rest for a bit with what I saw. A seasoned woman in a black sweater, about to fuck someone new for the first time in twenty-two years. Feeling the enormity of it, and at the same time thinking this does not matter. This woman, she is a temporary assembly of atoms, here so short a time, she belongs to no one and nothing.
Why did I text him? A slow day at the office, a bad morning at home. Those weren’t the reasons, of course. There were no reasons.
I sat resting my palms on the cool of the glass-topped desk. The wailing vehicles passed beneath the window and then sounded farther and farther off. As they traveled away, I let them tow everything with them but the things in this room.
Then he knocked on the door and it began in the little entry, my back pressed up against the light switches.
He wrapped one arm around my waist, his hand found a space where my sweater rose up, his hand found the skin over my hip, his mouth was on mine. I ran my fingertips over his face, soft and rough, and his ruthlessly trimmed hair, a bit bristly, nothing shaggy or beachy about him, this man seemed incredibly tart and clean. I breathed him in deeply, kissing his neck, lime and ice and metal.
He stepped back then, picked up my hand and kissed it with a smile. “Not to rush,” he said.
I sat down on the bed and bent to slip off my shoes. “Good to see you, again, Detective,” I said. I felt bravado. Whether it was false or not, I just decided to go with it.
“Glad you got in touch,” he said. His teeth were even and pearly and small. He unbuttoned his shirt, approaching, until sleek cinnamon-hued skin filled my field of vision, and though I felt doubt and fear tickling at the fringe of my consciousness, I willed myself to stay in the moment, brushed my hands down over all his exhilarating strangeness and let all thinking cease as I lay back, my grip asking him to follow me down, falling and falling and falling.
He was still asleep, when I left him there, five in the evening, for the subway home.
Crossing the lobby it struck me again: how far off center I’d strayed. How very askew. Not only doing what I’d just done, but choosing this hotel in which to do it. The Marriott on Lexington and Forty-Ninth. The gunshots, the rabbi’s blood pooling on the ballroom parquet, I remembered now how Eli looked when he told me about it, gesturing with those wiry restless arms, his eyes glittering.
Back then, I didn’t understand its significance. I’m not sure Eli did either. He was just excited by his proximity to the crime.
But historians who analyze such things now say that Meir Kahane’s killing planted the seed of hate that reached full fiery flower on September 11, 2001.
By 2001, Eli had been gone almost ten years.
And now, as I hurried across the hotel lobby, a bit breathless, mouth and heart and pussy a bit swelled up and a bit raw, head lowered though it was unlikely I’d run into anyone I knew, I thought, even the year 2001 was spiraling away into distant history.
I stepped out of the hotel into a downpour. Across Forty-Ninth Street, I thought I saw a girl in a raspberry-colored coat, lingering, loitering, as if waiting for somebody, an umbrella hiding her face.
ABBY, APRIL 27, 2015
A phone buzzes differently when the news is very bad.
“Pete has confessed,” said Headmistress Vong. “And there is a detective waiting to see you.”
It wasn’t who I feared it would be. Instead, a round-shouldered and wide man in a beige windbreaker was standing next to Pete when I entered Elizabeth Vong’s office. He introduced himself as Lieutenant German Pizziali. He had crossed black eyes. Dennis rushed in right after me, disheveled, face a bit sweaty after running from the subway, and he hurried to Pete and took his hands and said, “Are you OK, sweetie.” Our boy looked scared out of his wits.
“Confessed to what? Is this a criminal proceeding, has he had legal representation?” Dennis demanded. I felt a wave of immense gratitude for him.
“Yes,” I chimed in. “What kind of due process do you have here? And anyhow what’s the charge?”
“Don’t say another word,” Dennis said to Pete, placing his hand on our boy’s head.
“The trash can incident. The investigation has finally been completed,” announced Vong, enthroned behind her desk.
“We had a backlog, only two guys on staff, our juvenile-crimes lady is out on baby leave,” explained Pizziali.
“Pigeons. Decapitated,” said the headmistress.
“Pigeons?” I looked at Pete, who avoided my gaze.
“Headless,” the detective said, “pigeons without heads.”
“Is it illegal to decapitate pigeons in this city?” Dennis demanded.
“Pigeons are conscious beings,” said Vong.
Pizziali shrugged. “Flying rats, I always say.”
“And we believe it is connected to the bathroom graffiti. Because there was a bit in the bathroom . . .” Vong looked down at the open file, scanning. “Off with their heads.”
ABBY, APRIL 28, 2015
I am sorry to hear about this latest with Pete. But I will reach out to Pizziali, I know the guy. Leave it in my hands. I was glad to hear from you, even if the circumstances are not the best. I wanted to get in touch, but you said not to, so I’ve been waiting. Thinking of you, probably too much.
I’m reading this text, past midnight, when the doorbell rings.
Beside me, Dennis doesn’t stir.
A knock now, insistent.
I peek through the window alongside the door. A figure, dark against the dark, glint of metallic shoes.
Fresh from clubbing, perhaps.
My heart clenches, stops, I feel a wooze coming on. Her? Here?
When I open the door, we stare at each other. Hard to say who looks more frightened.
Have you gotten your head straight? she says.
I am dumbstruck to see her, to realize that she has found me, instead of the other way around.
No, she says. I can see that you haven’t.
And then, at once, a thought comes to me: bundle her in your arms, bring her inside, show her—show yourself?—your life. The good in it. Despite the recent turbulence.
I swing the door wide and gesture her forward.
She raises her brows in surprise, but steps inside.
I usher her along the hallway, into the kitchen, where we will be farther away from the sleepers upstairs. She is absorbing the house, in all its cluttered corners, keys and mail on a table, the sofa strewn with rumpled pillows, man-sized shoes left with their tongues lolling on the rug. She turns slowly around, examining every inch, it seems, with unblinking eyes.
Then she whispers, who is that?
I whip my head around. A slow-moving shape turns the corner at the foot of the stairs. One of the boys, Benjamin, maybe? Wandering sleepily for a glass of milk, as he has been known to do, in the middle of the night.
In a bit of a panic, I lunge for the basement door, urge her down the stairs. Thankfully, she moves fast, gripping the wobbly banister and feeling her way. I follow, shutting the door softly behind us. As I reach the foot of the stairs, I can hear the fridge opening now, a cabinet, a glass being set down on the countertop.
A tiny bit of light leaks into the gloom from a back casement window, and my eyes adjust. She is staring at the shelves of my wrapped paintings. She reaches out and runs her hand over one rectangular spine. Fine grit slides down the paper to the cement floor. She looks at me. Abigail, she whispers.
I say nothing.
Is this your work?
I say nothing. She continues to brush dust from the paper-covered flats. It is your work, she says. Do I see a glaze of tears on her face, or is it in my eyes? Above us, I hear the footsteps of my son, back along the hallway, up the stairs.
You need to go now, I say.
The street is deserted, the night sky moonless and cloudless, just a few pinprick stars mutely watching. I am appalled at myself for inviting her in, I will her to disappear. She trips over our buckled front walk, steadies herself. Then she turns to face me, to face the house. She looks up at the roofline, down to the low stoop, scanning the whole of our little domicile. She looks at me.
Burn it down, she says.
She turns and takes a few steps into the darkness and then she vanishes. I sink to the hallway floor. I wake at five in the morning, still lying there.
Dr. Tristane Kazemy, APRIL 30, 2016
This past weekend, she’d bored a date, an investment analyst named Samir, with her musings about the meningioma, about how she couldn’t see it but perhaps she could almost sense its presence, lurking in those images.
“Or maybe there’s just nothing there,” he said. He would rather discuss the poire pochée or the lavender sorbet that they were sharing in alternating spoonfuls.
She couldn’t talk anymore about food. Food was the only thing anyone in Montreal wanted to talk about anymore.
Samir turned out to be a skilled kisser, able to activate a current, and she would have liked to take him to bed. It had been a while. But the North American Neurological Association conference was in session. Her superiors had flown off to the designated resort in San Diego, and they had not invited her along this time. They tried to frame her being left behind as some kind of advancement—she would “direct coverage of the lab.” “This could be a kind of test flight,” Laurin had said with a smile in the weekly floor meeting, “for our doctoresse.”
No matter, she thought. Let them hit golf balls and sun themselves. She had a plan. She agreed only to meet Samir now and then for a sip of red wine at Bar le Pins, after which she would return to the much more compelling brain of Abigail Willard in the lab.