ABBY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2015
I undertook a penitential journey to a block-long silvery cube in far uptown Manhattan, a megastore devoted to tools for creating household order. I rose early, leaving plenty of time so I could be there, a lone supplicant, waiting, when the turbaned security guard unlocked its gates and admitted me with a solemn bow. I bought myself a brand-new broom, hefty, janitorial, aluminum with black bristles, suitable for cleaning a warship or a crematorium. With my new broom, I returned to Brooklyn and began to sweep the floors. The planks that bore my boys’ first toddles. Despite the new finish, the invisible tiny footprints serpentined all over the wood, down the hall, into the kitchen, and train tracks and bright plastic rings and blocks were still scattered across the grain.
The men from Pinsky’s Moving and Storage arrived mid-morning, hand trucks loaded high. It was strange, how much I’d missed our things. The jumbled box of flashlights and extension cords, the blue plastic laundry basket filled with pots and pans. They held meaning and memory and comfort, these bland ingredients of family life.
I cleaned the stairs, working my way up, step by step, pausing now and then to steady myself, leaning hard on my heavy-duty sweeper.
All I’d wanted to do was to create, to unfurl that will and honor that gift, and lately all I’d done was destroy, and destroy, and destroy.
Twiz saved me. She’d grabbed the sledgehammer right out of my hands, told me to run. She dodged the police, when they’d finally caught up to the Brigade’s rampage on Wall Street, but a few others spent two nights in jail and were now facing charges. I gave Pete a fat envelope, money from the insurance, that Dennis and I had earmarked for new furniture. He gave it to Dmitri, who had set up the group’s legal defense fund, with help from his mysterious parents.
The detective might have been able to ease the jailed members’ way, if he’d been trustworthy. Apparently he was not. Still, with awful persistence, he lingered inside my head. I tried to drown the memory of his touch with lists of chores and items to buy. When his face appeared before my dreaming eyes, I swiped it away.
Dennis and I would have to reconstitute our marriage. Or would we decide to disband the entire venture?
I reached the top step of the steep and narrow flight, cradling the filled dustpan. Searched for a trash bin in which to empty it.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, then, to find her there, in the scorched bedstead in my sullied master bedroom. Asleep. Sunlight sifting through her hair to find the gold bits, catching the sheen on the dirty mattress. I’d ordered a new queen-sized the day after my tryst there, and it leaned against a wall downstairs, plastic-wrapped, a new set of sheets in a bag beside it.
The drawer of the bedside table was open. Had she gotten into my sleeping pills? Please, no.
I grabbed the bottle, and it rattled, still mostly full. No, then. She simply needed rest.
Her legs were bare, tan from summer, her heels calloused. The tenderness I felt, standing over her. This wayward being. It was like seeing a wild bird trapped in my room. How had she gained entry? Maybe she’d slipped in during all those comings and goings, electricians and carpenters, the doors flung open wide to let floor varnish air and dry.
I listen to her breathe. Could I hear her breathe? Or is that me.
She opens her eyes then. Tears leak out of the corners.
We are in a bad place, she says. Her voice sounds scratchy, an old recording.
I know.
I didn’t sleep for two whole nights, she says. Finally I ran. I ended up here.
She raises herself on her elbows, looks around at the modest room—the small fireplace defunct since the days of coal, the closet yawning open, emptied of our smoke-stinking clothes. My easel. Her eyes stop on my latest work, viridian with ash worked into the oils. She stares at it a long moment, appraising. I hold my breath.
I wish I could paint like that, she finally whispers.
I feel relief, a coolness washing through me.
She turns to me. Her face so round and vaguely there, a moon in daylight.
You will, I say.
No. This thing is going to kill me. He is going to kill me. You should see what we’ve been up to.
I did see.
She smiles, sadly. So you say.
He dies at your hands.
And as these strange, stiff syllables leave my mouth, I want only to take them back. The shock of them. The shock in my body, and in her eyes.
Why did my lips and tongue offer up those words?
The blast wave of this idea, the stricken look on her face, push me backward. I am stumbling, backward, away from her, out the bedroom door, but there really isn’t room to back away, in that slot-like vertiginous house. And me already unsteady as it goes.
The floor disappears under my feet and my brain registers that I have stepped into the open air at the head of the staircase, I am hurtling, windmilling, backward and down.
As I fly, a thought: I already know how this feels.
How long did I lie at the bottom, in a pile? It was Dennis who found me, fresh from the airport. With Benjamin in tow.
The summer had come to its end.
SESSION NOTES
A back in treatment. Abusing substances. In terrible struggles with the young man in her life.
But more than that. She says she has split into two somehow. Acute schizophrenia? A difficult diagnosis but one I perhaps need to consider.
She seems so unstable, I fear I might not see her here again, though she assured me I most definitely would.
ABBY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2015
“It’s called ‘Stallion,’ Ma. This is the color.” Benjamin held aloft a swatch. His room would be the final painting job, and he wanted it black. At the hardware store, Dennis and I argued against it, but in the end, we acquiesced. School was about to begin. Benjamin would be in the tenth grade and, stunningly, Pete in twelfth. There was so much to attend to. Let the boy paint his room black.
Gianna was with us, just two days back from her summer job in Los Angeles, where she served coffee to many movie stars while interning at a wellness center. As we waited for the paint to emerge from the jiggling mixing machine, she ran through a long list of celebrities major and minor, who got the hot stones, who got reiki, and who had bad toenails. I hung on her every word.
After Dennis found me in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, he told Benjamin to call 911, but, in a state of semi-awareness, I urged him not to. I’m fine, I insisted. Thinking of course what emergency care might cost. In the meantime, the movers were still building a city of boxes. Dennis stood over me, pondering for a minute, running a hand through his hair, which was yellow again from the salt and sun of his homeland. Then he declared, “Screw Dr. Singh. We need an upgrade,” and he maneuvered his phone out of his pocket. “Mariah will know someone.”
“I have a shrink appointment tomorrow,” I said, rubbing my temples, which seemed to be sinkholes, pressing inward.
“You think this is all in your head?” he said with the phone at his ear. “I don’t.”
He left a message asking Mariah to call him. Then I realized he was dragging his suitcase up the stairs, and I had a frightening thought—was she still up there?
But all he said was “Oh, shit, we need to replace this ruined mattress.”
Yes, I ordered it, it’s here. New sheets too. I tried to tell him but my vocal cords produced only a strangled whisper.
Later that night, with both of us settled atop the fresh bedding, I reached toward the nightstand, looking for the relief of my insomnia meds. I felt an unfamiliar shape instead. It was a small silver matchbox. Printed with one word: Mobius. Yes. That was the name of the club, the nightclub of the collapsed umbrella, the running boy and the raspberry coat. The night I lost my taxi. Mobius offered little boxes of matches, in those long-ago days of cigarettes.
I slid it open. Inside, no matches. Instead, a chip of pinkish-beige paint.
ABBY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2015
Had Dr. Merle Unzicker wizened even more, summering? Her eyes seemed a bit more squinted and sunken, her nose more protuberant. I sat on the sagging sofa, across from her wheelchair. Dr. Merle regarded me from somewhere inside her wrinkles. Her head bobbed. I interpreted that as a signal to speak.
“I’ve taken some big steps.” I chuckled, nervous. “Or mis-steps?”
“Yes?” Her voice was clipped, quiet.
“The first thing I did when I moved back into my house was fall down the stairs.”
She emitted a small grunt. “Oh dear.”
“And I’ve been getting into activism,” I said.
“How so?”
“My son Pete led me to it. A political movement, in a way. I am finding it interesting,” I said.
“An optimistic act,” she said.
“I suppose so,” I shrugged.
“And your work? Your art?”
“I’ve been painting in the ashes. With the ashes.”
Dr. Merle cocked her white-fuzzed head to one side, just a few degrees, like an ancient, inquisitive poodle, her eyes in a squint, almost closed.
“But there’s this other person, this girl . . . who is . . . troubling me.”
She nodded. “Yes. I know.” She faintly cleared her throat. I sensed she was about to spit out a pearl of wisdom. I sat up on the couch, hands on my knees, waiting.
Waiting.
And waiting.
Was she asleep?
I peered at her for a long time. It seemed like a long time anyhow. I could hear her gently rattling breath and the hum and thump of blow-dryers and disco music.
Dr. Merle had, seemingly, fallen asleep. Her feet folded in on themselves, like little fronds.
I stood up and began to tiptoe out of the room. “You have been given a gift,” she said as I moved past her chair. “You must use it.”
I froze. “Oh. Yes.” I looked down, right down to the top of her head, the scalp more like membrane than skin. “My art, my painting? I should use that gift?” I stuttered.
She let out a strange impatient sigh. “No. No. Not that.” Her head moved again, the mildest shake. “A much more vital gift.” The veins on her skull throbbed slowly. “The chance to know yourself.”
Blue rivulets on snow-white ground. Pulsating.
“To love yourself.”
She dismissed me with a wave of her gnarled hand. “I will bill you,” she said.
September 10, 2016
From: GarrettShuttlesworth@physics.humboldtstate.edu
To: J. Leverett@deepxmail.com
It’s been 16 years since I was in NYC, since my divorce and departure from Columbia. I’ll aim for a collegial atmosphere with the Canadian brain doc—just hope she’ll come with an open mind and be ready to have it blown.
ABBY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2015
From Mariah’s climate-controlled storage sanctum in the Bronx, a team of brawny balletic art handlers delivered nearly a hundred paintings to the carriage house. We watched as they carried them up to the studio and, when they ran out of room there, propped them downstairs in the living room, on the sofas and on the eighteen chairs that surrounded the dining table. She’d asked me to come help, to brainstorm with her on new frames and weigh in on curatorial choices for the inaugural show at the Jillian Broder Space, to open next spring in a Civil War–era warehouse overlooking the East River. It would be the biggest gallery the city had ever seen.
Mariah handed me a wine globe brimming with green-gold fizz. “Made with grapes from the family land on Crete,” she said. “Kind of prickly and tarty and sweet. Like you,” she laughed. We clinked glasses, then I wandered, contemplating the patterns and progressions, the incontrovertible evidence of her genius and energy, of her productivity and her aspirations and her ambition. Two decades of dauntless work. She wanted to reframe it all. It would cost a fortune.
I lingered over the spiral series, carmines and crimsons and titanium whites, laid out on the floor under the sunny windows. Laid flat, with the bright rays glancing over them, the textured brushstrokes rippled and roiled like the surface of a pot just about to burst into full boil.
Mariah joined me there, gazing. “I have a favor to ask you,” she said. “It’s Jillian’s sixtieth birthday at the end of the month, and I felt obliged to throw her a bash.” She turned to me, and for the first time I could recall, she looked embarrassed. “Would you and Dennis be there as my dates? Poor Hyde, he’s been texting me photos of his penis, as if that would lure me back.” She showed me one. It made me very sad, this mottled pink offering, springing hopefully from a general hairy darkness. She told me she knew the end was near when he tried to prescribe a diet that would melt her belly fat. “I realized I was fonder of my belly fat than I was of him,” she said.
She chuckled down at her phone, but when she met my gaze again, I saw vulnerability there. Though the notion of celebrating Jillian Broder—if I had a bête noire, she was it—made my belly fat clench, I would do this for Mariah.
We stood gazing at her spirals, and we talked a bit more about her show, and about Matthew Legge-Lewis, and his overtures to me. “I can’t wait to go to your vernissage,” she said. “Soon enough you’ll be outgunning me.” She reminded me of the time in school when she and I showed work together in a critique session, and the class clearly preferred mine over hers. After that, she said, “I made sure never to be in the same class with you again. I would go to the registrar and sneak a peek at your course load, just to be sure we didn’t end up together.” She shook her head at the memory. “Bremer actually told me I should study your brush technique.”
Envy is twinned with admiration, and admiration is often suffused with love. As the two of us shuffled her work around the room, millions of dollars’ worth of pigment and fabric, pairing this painting with that print, marking frames that would be replaced, I realized that love was now the strongest current that ran between us. I loved her, and this was the key reality. The other, the alternate Mariah reality—what was happening or had happened with Dennis—could play out beyond the wall of my perception. I would not try to establish its dimensions, trace its outlines. I would not delve.
I write this now and I realize how bizarre, how unnatural even, this position is or was. But not all things in love can be explained. In fact, most things in love cannot be explained.
I stared up at the portrait of her mustachioed progenitor. “I like the family wine,” I said.
“He would’ve liked you,” she said. “Eye for the ladies.”
“I’m probably a bit to the left of his comfort zone, lately,” I said.
“Yes, that reminds me.” She opened a closet and pulled out a bag of placards. “You forgot this when you moved out.” She lifted one. “No Pasaran.” Smiled up at me. She handed me the bag. “You just keep on fighting the good fight, babe. That is exactly what makes you who you are.”
ABBY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2015
“Missus, nice to see you.”
“Abby,” I said. “Just call me Abby.”
“And how are you, friend.” Milo Petimezas peered into the car at Pete.
“Hmm. OK,” Pete stammered. The guy made him nervous and I did not blame him one bit.
“Dmitri will be out,” he said. “He is probably fixing his hair.” He grinned at me through his beard, stiff hair gleaming in the steady rain. “You going bowling, then?” I guess this is what his brother had told him.
I smiled and nodded. “Yes. Keeps them off the streets, right?”
He shrugged. “Streets can teach you a lot, Mrs. Willard.”
The Petimezas house was a bulky gray box of brick, framed by statues of lightly draped Grecian women. When we’d stopped in front, we saw Milo in the open garage, leaning against his hot yellow Mustang, looking a bit indistinct through the scrim of the downpour, as if seen on an old TV. He nodded to me as our car pulled into the driveway, flicked his smoke away, strolled out into the storm, not seeming to notice it at all.
Dmitri appeared and climbed into the back seat. Milo gave the hood a couple of blows with his hand. “Have fun, bowl good,” he said.
The house on Monsignor Murphy Street seemed to have listed a few degrees farther west, and the curb in front was strewn with soaked garbage, diaper boxes, broken bikes, a gawping old washing machine. We all sat there for a minute, watching a plastic bucket roll back and forth in the wet wind. “Looks like one of the neighbors has been cleaning house,” said Dmitri.
It was the day before Jillian Broder’s birthday party. The glancing dregs of a hurricane had settled over the city, promising lousy weather for the event. The Brigade was gathering tonight for an emergency meeting. Pete said a message had come via the dark web, not that I knew what the dark web was, or where one might find it. Pete was supposed to be working on his college application essay—the topic was “How I Overcame My Speech Disability” as suggested by the nice lady with the spider plants in her office. (What was her name? She seemed a relic from another time.) But the essay would have to wait. He intended to be at this dark-webbed, rainswept emergency meeting. I’d agreed to drive him and Dmitri to these forsaken flats.
“Thanks for the ride, Abby,” Dmitri said politely as he slid out of the car.
Pete turned to me. “You coming in?”
How much he looked like her at that moment, as he turned his head to me, the pointed chin, the dark-light eyes.
“You go.” I took his hand and pressed it to my cheek. “And be careful, my darling.” His pudgy little boy hand, his big, bony almost-man hand. Warm flesh of my flesh.
Dr. Tristane Kazemy, SEPTEMBER 26, 2016
Laurin cornered her by the microwave, as she stared in at a revolving dish of boeuf bourguignon, her mostly uneaten entrée from last night. She’d squabbled with Samir all through a candlelit dinner at Bistro Cinq. Then broke off with him via text.
You are on thin ice, said Laurin, coming up close behind her.
Yes? she replied. She remained fixed on the buzzing box. Her blood pounding suddenly, her lungs contracted.
I know you are pursuing that case again. Wasting my lab’s time, he said. On an ordinary brain. On a pile of nothing, an American lady with a bad case of nerves. It is nothing!
The beep sounded. She opened the door and extracted the steaming plate. I carry the largest caseload of any fellow here, she said.
You do your duties. But I fear—
You must know your Latin, Doctor? She regarded him through the vapor. Ex nihilo nihil fit. From nothing comes nothing. She sidestepped him and headed for the door. Therefore, you have nothing to fear.
ABBY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2015
Dennis and I stood silently at the coat check set up in the front hall, listening to the roar from the riotous rooms beyond. I handed over my dripping raincoat but kept my silk scarf, wrapping it around my bare-shouldered dress, shivering a bit in the air-conditioning. In contrast to the rain-soaked streets, Mariah’s carriage house seethed with humanity. Glittering, chattering, exclaiming in little bursts, craning this way and that to see who they could see, and to see who was seeing them. Women in tall black boots, like armor for their skinny little legs. Angular eyeglass frames. Carefully cultivated chin scruff. All of this backed by Mariah’s artwork, eloquent, numinous, and, to the joy of everyone near it, stratospherically expensive.
At the center of the living room stood Jillian Broder in a gunmetal-gray silk suit, severe and thin as a scalpel. The shimmery long hair was gone—instead, she wore a snow-white buzz cut. Her long earrings swayed as she received greetings and searched the crowd for important faces.
I turned to Dennis. “Should we say hello?”
As we edged into her orbit, she spotted me. She was still nodding at someone else and talking. “Gruesome, just gruesome what some people will do,” she said. “But look, it is the elusive Abigail Willard.” She extended her hand to signal me closer. “One of New York’s unheralded brilliances. One of the lost tribe.” We air-kissed, and she rested a palm on my cheek for an instant. “You are still beautiful. Bereftly beautiful.”
“I am not bereft,” I said, trying to chuckle.
The corners of her mouth turned down and she gave a little sigh. “No, of course not. Except that, well, I would love to see what you’re painting sometime.” She dropped her voice and looked at me with concern. Her eyes were arctic blue. “You are working, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I answered with a tight smile.
She turned to a tall, big-bellied man with gray wooliness on his face and gray curls that wound down the back of his neck. “Charles, Abigail was one of my earliest finds, plucked right out of RISD back in the bad old days. And she is perhaps the most talented colorist I’ve ever known. Now she works in—what is it—the medical equipment industry?”
“Pharmaceuticals,” I said.
“Pharmaceuticals,” she said. “She designs boxes.”
“Visual branding,” I said.
“But I don’t mean to denigrate, you know that, sweets.” She gestured to the man. “This is Charles Moffat. Of Charles and Kay Moffat. The collectors.”
“Of course,” I said, reaching for his extended hand.
“So nice to see you,” he said warmly.
“And this is my husband, Dennis”—I gestured—but he was no longer beside me. He’d melted away somewhere. “Well, Dennis Willard, he’s a wonderful sculptor.”
“Very muscular,” said Jillian, and waggled her brows at me.
“I’d love to see your work sometime—and his.” He put his arm around Jillian. “This lady has an unerring eye.”
Jillian chuckled and laid her hand on his chest in a way that left no mistake. She’d fucked him.
“Do you have a card?” said this Charles Moffat, collector. “I’ll have my assistant call you to set something up.”
“I have work to show,” I stammered, “but nowhere to show it. I don’t have a studio at the moment.”
He and Jillian looked at me. I could see a haze of doubt beginning to film their eyes. And then, suddenly, I blurted, “But Dennis does. We can show his work and my work there.”
“Fine, email my assistant,” said Jillian with a note of finality. “I’ll play go-between.” She took Moffat by the arm and started to lead him away.
I called after her: “Happy birthday, Jillian,” but if she heard me, she didn’t acknowledge.
Three cocktails later, I still hadn’t found Mariah. Weren’t we here for her sake, after all? I circumnavigated the room, sidling through the crowd. Scanned the white sofas (thronged, no Mariah), peered into the hallway leading to the bathroom (silent line of people checking phones, no Mariah), and the kitchen pantry (crates of wine and two sequined beauties in a glommy embrace, no Mariah).
And, come to think of it, where had Dennis disappeared to?
At the back of the kitchen, near the service entrance, stood the door to the elevator, and the narrow staircase rising alongside it. Did I dare check the upstairs bedrooms? The studio with its capacious chaise, where Mariah liked to stretch out for afternoon naps?
I wavered.
Then I noticed a compact man in a leather jacket and black leather sneakers standing on the landing of the staircase. He appeared to be studying one of our hostess’s small, early collages. “Excuse me,” I called. “Have you seen Mariah?”
The man shook his head. He never even turned around. Rude art-world monster.
Maybe look outside first? I could use the fresh air.
Then, Forest Versteeg near the coat check. Running a small brush over his beloved’s back. He chuckled as I approached. “Our car is half canine. I never travel without an arsenal of lint removal devices.”
“And this jacket is a fucking fur magnet,” Matthew Legge-Lewis added, turning around and tugging at the hem of his velvet blazer. We exchanged embraces, and then I asked them if they’d seen Dennis. Perhaps he’d stepped out front to share someone’s weed—hadn’t he’d done that at the auction, after all?
“The only thing we saw out there was a pack of gnarly, angry, soggy people in black,” Matthew said.
“Oh? Have they stopped letting guests in? It is overstuffed in here . . .”
“Those hooligans are not guests! Are you not aware of what’s going on out there?” said Forest.
“Is anyone aware of what’s going on out there?” said Matthew. He turned to his husband. “I need a drink,” he said. “Before they shut this shitshow down.”
JACARANDA PINK COILS, glistening with droplets of hurricane rain. This is what the colorist would see first. Pink locks quivering in gold-orange streetlamp light, shaking with every bellowed syllable. “Hey hey ho ho, fascist royals got to go.” The fuchsia, the marigold.
But also, everywhere, the black.
Dmitri in black. Giant Vincent in his tiger-striped tattoos and black. Twiz in black. The entire crew, on the black asphalt, black face coverings pulled up high, right beneath their eyes. But I knew who they were.
The pack of protesters stretched clear across the street and halfway down the block. So many people in black. (Later Pete would tell me that extra bodies had been mysteriously mustered, unfamiliar men, from Jersey and as far away as Baltimore.)
A forest of signs scrawled with blood-red spray paint: ANARCHY NOT MONARCHY, NAZI BLOOD MONEY, and THE PAST IS PRESENT.
And there, in the center, my boy. Black hoodie, black bandanna. I stumbled down the front stoop—yes, I was definitely slightly soused—and grabbed Pete’s arm. “This was the emergency action?”
“Go back inside,” he hissed, shaking my hand from his arm.
Dmitri spotted me then. “This house stands on blood money, the bodies of Greek freedom fighters and the Jews of Europe,” he cried, over the chanting. The dark energy in his eyes, once again. “The Greek royals were Nazi-loving fascists, Abby! Read your history!”
“Mariah is not a Nazi,” I shouted. The words scraped my throat. The sidewalk was atilt. Or was it me.
Pete reached out to me then, perhaps he saw me teetering. He put his mouth close to my ear. “I tried to talk them out of this,” he said. “But the truth is the truth, right, Ma?”
I shook my head weakly, the world spinning, I clutched his arm. The shouting of the crowd swirled into my ears, my brain. The sight of them stirring the thick air with their fists and signs made my mind fly to Eli. To A.
I was still that girl, really. I still wanted what she wanted.
Truth, freedom, passion?
Didn’t I want these things?
The answer boiled up first in my abdomen, then bubbled up through veins, filling vesicles just beneath my skin. My skin practically steamed. Sweat prickled on my hairline.
My neck was on fire. My scarf suddenly felt too tight.
Loosened my scarf. Breathed for a moment. Deeply. Then I pulled the fabric up to cover my nose and mouth. I stood next to my son, taking my place. In rage, at the greed-fest inside, at Jillian, her acolytes, the billionaire collector, the swiveling, craning lot of them. Rage at the notion that any of this had anything to do with what mattered.
The others were raising their fists. Shouldn’t I do it too—for Pete? For Benjamin. For Dennis. For Mariah even. She would understand. For the young woman I was, and the old one I would become. Didn’t this feel like a good fight?
I made a fist and punched the black sky.
It ignited a shocking sound. A deep thrumming thump. Then a messy burst of crackling red sparkles, bouncing off the carriage house bricks, reflected off the wet sidewalk, in the glass windows of the house. A small puff of sulfuric smoke.
Pete and I exchanged astonished glances.
Someone had tossed a firecracker.
Dmitri appeared, the red sparks gleaming in his eyes. “Shock and awe,” he shouted, nodding toward the back of the pack. “Firework mortars, harmless. The Jersey guys brought them.”
The sound thundered in small echoes down the block, and now the chanting and the general mood upshifted, striking a more frenzied note. Up at the top of the stoop, the horrified faces of Matthew and Forest, among others, peered through the front windows.
Then a second incendiary popped. It was a soft bass thunk, almost a dud, but I saw another flash of red in front of Mariah’s garage, and heard panes of glass breaking. A feeling drenched me, a burst water balloon of dread. Surely the cops would be called now, surely this was nowhere I wanted my son to be. I grabbed Pete’s arm. I pulled the scarf off my face, and urged him farther back into the crowd, out into the street. “Wait a second, Mom, wait!” he said.
We turned to see many partygoers pouring out of the house now, some shouted insults flew back and forth. A shoving match almost erupted between towering Vincent and Jillian Broder. “Bring it!” she snarled. “I dare you.” But he chose not to bring it. A ragged breathlessness and a sense of jangled nerves hung over the crowd, the antifa and the art world facing off, warily regarding each other. A confused restraint seemed to prevail. Distant sirens could be heard.
I held fast to Pete’s arm. I could feel myself still swaying.
Under each streetlamp, a cone of gilded mist.
Then. BOOM. Louder, by many multiples, than those firework pops.
A single horrendous blast.
All of us in the street felt it in gut, ears, bones. As one organism, the crowd flinched, recoiling from the blow.
Mariah’s garage door lay smoking on the sidewalk, peeled off the house like a dead fingernail. A greasy cloud belched out of the opening. As it cleared, everyone seemed to gasp in unison.
Black dress, red blood. She lay on the floor. Standing over her, a stunned and soot-covered man.