I am the woman in white. James stands on the curb with his overnight bag as if he’s waiting at the wrong bus stop. It makes me sad. I take his arm. His eyes are fixed on Eva’s red car; she turns and is gone, leaving only a wisp of tailpipe smoke at the corner by the market she often stops at to buy cigarettes on her way back to New York. Not today. She had called me earlier to say she was going away and wouldn’t be seeing James for a while. That’s not like Eva, but I understand, and maybe she’ll be back or maybe it’ll be just James and me from now on. She loves him, so I have hope, but sometimes hope is hard. I nudge James and smile at him. Vacant. It’s cold and Christmas decorations will be up soon — tinsel strung, blown-up Santas, snowmen painted on windows. I’m a simple wreath girl; the world’s full of too much sparkle as it is.
I have to shop for James, though. Last year I bought him one of those little iPod Shuffle things and had a friend’s son download the White Album on it. James liked it. I think he did. I’d better get him inside. We walk up the stairs, take two lefts, and follow the long hallway to his room. I take off my coat so he can see my white uniform and he looks at me as if he thinks he has seen me before. He does this every day; white is soothing. The color of angels.
I will spend the weekend with James. It’s all planned. We’ll go for a walk along the river and watch the scullers in the late afternoon when the coming night air draws mist from the water. I like the end of the day, that enveloping pause between two worlds; just like Kurt used to stand on his back stoop drinking a beer at twilight and breathing in the city. Vera told me that in the long letter (book) she wrote me while she was institutionalized, after she killed my father. He didn’t know about me. I was just a smattering of substances in Vera’s belly when she pulled the trigger. Poor Kurt, mistaken for the man from Marrakesh who never, never was, or was he? That’s what I don’t know.
Vera’s book is so convincing I get goose bumps when she describes “this speck of shadow trailing me across two continents.” They never found him; they judged her mind, her imagination, guilty.
I never told James that Vera died of an overdose. It happens so easily in institutions, pills hidden, stored up, a dispensary door left unlocked, a sympathetic orderly. The report said she “expired” between early-morning rounds. It must have still been dark. I imagine she slipped away, scared at first, but then succumbing, like drowning. Maybe in her final moments my mother believed that the “evil chameleon” from Marrakesh would never catch her. She was free. They cremated her and for years her ashes were kept in an urn on a shelf in a storage closet. No one claimed them. They disappeared when the institution was renovated to take patients with insurance.
I won’t tell James. This is my secret. I don’t know if he ever knew anything about Vera after Kurt died. James went to live with his grandparents in Florida and then on to college and into the newspaper business. Maybe Vera wrote to him from the institution, the place where I was born and taken from before I even suckled, handed over for adoption. I doubt it. Vera only wrote that long letter-book to me, her daughter. That’s what I like to think. But James and I were orphans, taken in by people who loved us, yes, but raised away from the magic of Kurt and Vera. It must have been magical; listening to James talk about the time on Virginia Beach with Vera laughing in her straw fedora and Kurt sleeping on the sand and getting burned and the waves crashing down and the Impala, with its top down, waiting to whisk them away like a flying carpet. I would have loved even a minute of that. I won’t tell James he is my half brother, either. I’ve decided I could not bear his forgetting such a thing so cherished minutes after I uttered the words. I will keep it to myself. It is enough that I have found him and can check his blood pressure, sit with him by the window, and lay his clothes out in the morning. He’s reading his old newspaper clippings. They don’t register; all those lands and cities, all that joy and suffering he witnessed and wrote about mean nothing to him now.
Vera was a writer, too. On page sixty-seven in her letter-book she tells me: “Daughter, will I ever see you? I am trapped behind this wire and stone, and there is no way to you. Where would I look? I am good with maps, but maps need destinations and I don’t know where they’ve taken you. But you are safe. A good couple loves you, this is what they tell me. They give me shreds of news from the world beyond, the world where you are growing up without me. I will write some more later. They’re bringing my pills — yellow, blue, and white — and after I take them I get drowsy and I sit in a chair on the lawn and take my slippers off. The grass tickles my feet. Sometimes I think I see the man from Marrakesh, this Mounir, standing outside the iron fence in the shadows. But the people here tell me there is no one there, only tree branches moving in the wind. But that’s what they would say, wouldn’t they?”
James puts his newspaper clippings on the windowsill and stands and looks down the street. He is agitated; he gets this way, I think, when a memory flashes inside him and almost brings him back, but then leaves him. This is what doctors call Depletion. A terrible word. I hate to see it written in the charts, reducing someone to such a sad description. Science and medicine are cruel, but I suppose they must be. James turns from the window and sits on his bed. He stares at me as if I am a riddle.
“Do you know Kurt and Vera?” he says.
“Tell me about them.”
“Not far.”
“Will you take me there?”
“Yes.”
I help James into a sweater and a coat. I tie a scarlet scarf around him.
“It’s cold. Do you want gloves?”
“No.”
We walk outside and cross the street and take a right at the tailor’s — an old Armenian man whose glasses have so magnified his eyes that they look like floating blue moons — and then we walk straight for seven blocks, and that’s when James begins to know where he is.
“It’s Clare Street. That’s my old house.”
“Someone else lives there now, James. You left many years ago.”
“Yes, but this is it. Kurt boxed in the basement. He’d hit the punching bag so hard, the house shook.”
“This way.”
“That’s St. Jude’s. Kurt and I came here on Saturday nights. He played tennis on Sunday, so Saturday was our mass day.”
James and I step through the church gate and walk over a sidewalk cracked by elm and chestnut roots. We haven’t been here in a long time. The church is not well tended these days; most of the congregation moved to the suburbs and broken panes of stained glass have been replaced with colored cellophane. A boy — he’s not here today; it’s nearly winter — mows the cemetery grass and clips around the gravestones. The trees lend a sense of peace. James and I walk the rows toward Kurt. I hear a shuffle behind us.
“Jim Ryan?”
The priest is bent, white-haired; his clerical collar too wide for his thin neck. A dark coat hangs off him, and he balances on a cane, a bronze cross dangling over his chest. The cold makes his nose run, and he sniffs and pulls a handkerchief from his pocket, but with his unsteady hand the handkerchief dances before him like a puppet. He is frailer than when James and I last saw him, and I don’t know why he is alone out here in this weather.
“Jim, it’s me, Father Heaney.”
James steps closer. He peers into Father’s eyes. James hugs him and starts to weep.
“It is you.”
“Not gone yet, Jim. Not gone yet, although some days I feel the Lord tugging fierce. I’m retired now, Jim. They gave me a room in the rectory, not the big one I used to have; that went to the new head honcho. I’m up near the attic in that little room we used to store stuff in.”
Father laughs, looks to me, and dips his head. It has been a while, but he knows James is lost. I brought James here two years ago and explained his condition. Father said a prayer over him back then, made the sign of the cross and kissed him on the forehead and told him that the Lord would keep a light on inside James and one day James would find it. I’d stop in from time to time and visit Father, asking him about Kurt and James in the days before Vera. One afternoon, he was sweeping the vestibule when I came in and sat in a pew. He slid next to me and I told him that James was my brother and Kurt my father; he held my hand and as we stared at the white marble of the altar and up to the golden crucifix, I felt a burden lifted.
“You’re here to see Kurt, huh, Jim?”
“Yes, Father. He and that time, the one summer, are the clearest things to me.”
“I know, Jim.”
Father’s cane taps the broken sidewalk. I walk close behind him in case he stumbles. James is at his side. Kurt’s resting place is the third one in from a tree, between Bobby Laughlin, a welder, and Chris O’Boyle, a rookie cop shot and killed one night on patrol. I still cry when I see Kurt’s grave, and I’m crying now, looking at the gray stone, pretty calligraphy around its edges and a cross at its center, laid on this ground before I was born. James kneels and runs a finger across the shallow rivulets of Kurt’s name and dates. He takes off his scarf and polishes in slow circles, a dull gleam rises through the grit. He stands and drapes the scarf over the stone.
“I always felt bad, Jim, that Kurt and your mother weren’t buried side by side. Her family bought their plots years before she met Kurt. She lies over there, near the corner along the fence. You knew this once, but you may have forgotten. You visited her when you were a boy, before you moved away, and you’d sit over her for hours reading her words out of that dictionary of yours. You loved words. You used to try to disguise your sins in big words when you’d come to confession. I guess you thought they didn’t sting as much that way.”
“Do you still read mystery novels, Father?”
“I do.”
Kids walking home from school hurry past the cemetery. Little tilted armies with book bags dangling. James looks toward them and back to the brown grass beneath his feet. The sky feels like snow.
“The day before Kurt died we swam in the ocean beyond where the waves begin to lift and curl. The water is calm out there, Father. We floated and talked. The tide moved deep beneath us. We could see specks of people on the beach, but we couldn’t hear them. Even the seagulls were silent. Kurt told me about the ships he painted and how far they sailed, and he told me to make sure I see the world because he said he wondered what it would be like to be standing on one of those ships as it sailed into a faraway port.”
“You saw a lot of the world, Jim.”
James steps back from the grave. Father holds his one hand. I hold his other. We stand in silence. Lights click on in nearby row houses, silhouettes in windows, dinners on stoves, homework undone. The factory and dock men will be heading home soon, walking through alleys beneath sputtering streetlights, opening doors and listening to voices that will carry them toward sleep. There is peace in the twilight. James’s scarf blows off Kurt’s marker and tumbles across the dead. The scarlet is pretty against the gray. The scarf lifts in the wind, twirling like a bird or a bright rag toward the coming moon.