Andy felt his breath come easier once he crossed the entrance into Central Park. This was always the way it was for him. The air suddenly became less dense, and somehow more satisfying. Time was different too, making each breath longer and deeper.
The nighttime pedestrians who lingered on the outskirts of the park with their dogs or cigarettes or worries of the day barely noticed him—another kid in a denim jacket with a large, worn backpack, shrouded in shadows. He quickly made it past the convention party construction site, now quiet but ominous in the darkness. The lone overnight security guard stationed in a booth near the fake Lincoln Memorial eyed Andy for a moment, but then returned to his iPhone.
The deeper into the park Andy traveled, the less noticeable he became. If he ever felt safe, it was here. He couldn’t really explain that—didn’t even want to try, for fear that understanding would cause it to unravel—but it was true. He could walk by the creepies and the preds without causing a glimmer of recognition or interest in their eyes. The only exception was the old black guy with the long coat. He always seemed to notice Andy, but only with a nod or a wave. There was no menace to that man, just presence.
Fifteen minutes in, Andy passed through a dense ring of Ailanthus altissima, improbably lush despite the tons of city concrete just beyond throwing distance. As Andy approached the rock formation hidden within these trees, he felt the sharp change in temperature. It was usually at least ten degrees cooler near the rock.
By any rational explanation, the cavern should not have been here. Some days Andy could almost swear that it wasn’t. He would look for the thin crack in the rocks for an hour or more before he would finally find it and slide down into the space below. And if the cavern really was here, then by the sacred rules that govern all things in New York, it should have been vandalized or taken over by squatters or sealed up by the Parks Department as a hazard. Nevertheless, here it was, just as pristine as the first day he’d found it; the only squatters in it were the ones he always prayed he would find.
Andy took off his backpack, fished out his flashlight, and found the crevice without any trouble this time. He slid in feetfirst, holding the backpack over his head. The tunnel led him downward at a forty-five-degree angle for about fifteen feet and then dumped him into the empty cavern.
The cavern was tall enough for Andy to stand in, although he could actually touch the stone ceiling if he reached straight up and stood on his toes. The floor of the cavern also was stone, but it was dry and spread out before him for about three hundred feet.
Andy opened his backpack and heard the first stirrings of movement from the cave opening. He smiled at the sound. They’d probably been smelling him since the park entrance, but they wouldn’t trust odors alone. “C’mon now,” he called into the dark. “I don’t have all night.”
Andy sat and removed the contents of his backpack—first his violin case, then the cubes and slices of meat carefully wrapped in plastic and foil. The one he called Pacino, a big, brooding female pit bull with a scarred muzzle, came first. She tenderly took a cube of sirloin from Andy’s open hand and then moved off. Penny came next, a copper-colored short-haired mutt of maybe fifteen pounds. Others followed—Onyx, Greybeard, Ginger, Shadow, Gold. They were each gentle with him, as if they recognized him as one of their own, and he had no doubt they would circle to defend him if it ever came to that.
Andy didn’t know how many strays in total actually lived in the park or how many called the cavern their home. Different dogs showed up on different days. He had named nine of them, but assumed there were probably more who never came forward. He couldn’t blame them given some of the scars he saw.
In minutes almost all the food was gone. Andy held back a single chunk of meat for the one who always arrived after the others had eaten. A warm current of air touched his cheeks and then she was there—a beautiful mix of husky, golden retriever, and shepherd, with doleful brown eyes and a badly damaged right ear. The ear had been torn or cut off so close to the dog’s head that it was little more than a memory. She came to him and gently took the meat before settling beside Andy with a sigh.
Andy spent many nights in the cavern under the protection of the one-eared stray. He once had tried to take her out of the park, but that had proven impossible because she had turned into a screaming terror when Andy brought her near the park gate. That was the one and only time he tried. He understood the park was her home; Andy would need to come to her. And he did.
The one-eared girl had been his first find and she had eventually brought the others to him. These creatures were cautious and almost impossible to find against their will in the huge expanse of the park. To the outside world, they were all but invisible.
Growing up in the city, Andy had often heard about the legend of the Central Park Pack—that a group of stray dogs had formed a tight-knit unit around a leader and roamed Central Park subsisting on rats, squirrels, and pigeons. The lore was that they would come to the protection of people about to be assaulted or robbed in the park. A few robbery victims swore that this was true, but those reports were always dismissed. No one had ever found conclusive evidence of a park pack, only the rare injured stray or stray sighting. In the way that New Yorkers celebrate the odd, the misunderstood, and the mysterious, the Central Park Pack had assumed a near-mythical status in the city—somewhere north of natural wildlife and just south of Sasquatch.
Andy didn’t know if he had found some recent incarnation of the fabled park pack. He just knew that, as stated in the legend, it had saved him.
When all had eaten, Andy rose with his violin, rosined his bow, and began to play. The music he selected for the cave was always the same—the violin half of the concerto for violin and viola he had started writing but could never finish. Only one other human had heard the piece and Andy had promised himself that no one else ever would. He was afraid that what he had written might be beautiful and he didn’t want to bring a thing of beauty into this world. He played now for only one reason. Even though he could perform only half of the notes, when they bounced back to him from the sides of the cavern, he imagined she was accompanying him. Then Andy’s always-fragile shroud of time and memory parted. With the one-eared dog beside him, he allowed the individual threads of notes to entwine and become strings, and the strings to become rope.
The rope pulled him backward to Alexa. He was piking.
Their music had introduced them.
A special summer program at Juilliard for the college-bound musically gifted… a hot classroom… a pleated skirt… blue eyes narrowed in concentration… her fingers almost as long and agile as his… a shared glance and then a smile.
It was the warm glow of her tone on the viola and the power of his timbre on the violin during the Mendelssohn that actually brought them together after class one evening. He had nothing except his violin and his scars. She had a family that wanted her to be something unique and specific—Juilliard, Oberlin, summers split between the Hamptons and music studies with the best of Europe.
The offer of coffee… that surprised first kiss, the clean, sweet taste of her mouth… then the second… the smell of her hair, like sandalwood and fresh-cut grass.
One night led to seven more. Andy at first assumed it was a mistake or that she would be gone as soon as she understood who he was, but she remained. She asked him questions and he answered without lies.
Weeks later Alexa took Andy home to her parents’ huge apartment on Central Park West to show him off.
“Relax,” she tried to convince him. A doorman… clean white walls… oil paintings in the hallway of squiggles and lines… staring at his battered shoes, waiting… judgmental frowns… “Beneath you,” her father sneered.
They sent the boy away, disliking him instantly for everything he didn’t have. Alexa left with him.
The two met frequently after that night, but always within the shelter of the park. They weren’t virgins when they met, but for all they came to feel for each other, they might as well have been. There were many secluded places in the park and Andy knew most of them, but they discovered this rock formation and the hidden cavern together. Here, under the beam of a powerful flashlight, they played for each other and soon began composing their own concerto. Their fantasy was that if they could complete the music and perform it for her parents, they could prove their bond was unique and worth protecting.
He and Alexa had once been inseparable.
He believed they still were.
At the middle of the adagio, Andy’s bow clattered to the stone floor. The last echoes of rope thinned to strings, then to threads, and, finally, to the silence of his present. The composition remained incomplete, locked at the exact same measure. Andy had tried to finish it, but that had proven hopeless; even though he could see the entirety of his past, he could no longer envision a single note of his future.
Andy dropped to the ground, his back against the wall and his knees drawn to his chest. The one-eared dog joined him first, but the others quickly followed. They made a tight circle around him, paws and fur next to skin and hands.
Eased by the comfort of their touch, Andy soon fell asleep.