DECEMBER 19, 1999
In the slanting light of late morning, Jane strides across the frozen grass, up to the house next door. She lifts a brass knocker, raps with force.
The teenage girl opens the door. “Shh,” she says, a worried expression on her face. “My mother is asleep.”
“What’s your name?” Jane says.
“Hen. Hen Vögel.”
“Take me to see it, Hen. The art in the photograph, in Berlin. Please,” she adds.
Hen nods. “Give me five minutes,” she says. “Drive your car down to the road and wait for me there. I’ll meet you.”
In her car, Jane does as Hen has instructed. She waits, nervous, fiddling with the radio, then the car’s seat-warming function—turning it on, then off, then to medium, then off again. Hen finally appears, with her fluffy hair and spotty chin. Jane unlocks the door for her and, when she has her seat belt on, reverses down the driveway and is soon out on the road, heading back to the city she came from the day before.
There is silence at first, until Jane turns on the radio. Loud heavy metal music fills the car. Jane adjusts the volume and Hen glances at her.
“It’s not my favorite,” Jane says, feeling defensive. “I just had it on for driving.” She nods at the radio. “Put on what you want.”
Hen spins the dial until it lands on Alt Radio Berlin, then shoots a worried glance at Jane. “They’ll probably play some Lightning Bottles. Is that okay with you?”
“Of course,” Jane says, forcing nonchalance. “I’ve played those songs so many times they don’t affect me anymore.” But this isn’t true. The songs, all of them, have deep meaning for her. And Elijah’s voice always has an effect on her. But she doesn’t say this to Hen, just focuses on remembering how to get back to Berlin, on keeping up with the other drivers on the road and staying in her lane.
It takes two hours to get to the city, and no Lightning Bottles songs come on the radio. Jane thinks of questions she might ask Hen, to fill the awkward silence. Some of them are inane—What school do you go to?, that sort of thing. And some of them aren’t. Are you sure you aren’t trying to hurt me, deceive me? Do you know what this means to me? In the end, she says nothing, and neither does Hen.
They get to the city, and Hen suggests she go as far west as she can and find a place to park. Jane does, then turns off the car.
“Okay,” she says, as if trying to reassure herself.
“Okay,” Hen repeats. Jane glances at her sidelong. “Let’s go,” she says. “It’s a ten-minute-or-so walk from here.”
Berlin has changed in the years since Jane was there with Elijah, but there are still utilitarian communist-era structures on the east side of the city and mostly neoclassical apartments and various buildings on the other. An apple half and an orange half, stitched together into a city that bears a scar—but Jane wonders if everyone feels freedom a little differently here. If they appreciate it more. They must.
Jane and Hen walk west. Bicycles lean against walls and fences or in piles beside patio picnic tables. Café tables are filled with people drinking beer from froth-topped mugs, wearing coats and hats against the December afternoon’s chill. Clouds of smoke and plumes of frosty breath hover above their heads before dispersing. Jane wonders all at once if she and Hen look like friends, or sisters, perhaps. She has not worn a disguise today—no sunglasses, no hat—and she realizes she should have thought of that, but not being alone feels, in a way, like its own disguise. Jane Pyre is always alone.
They follow the beacon of Berlin’s TV tower, a concrete arm bisected by a tiled stainless steel orb, topped with a red-and-white-striped antenna. Hen is walking fast. Keeping up with her distracts Jane from thinking too much about the last time she was here, but she can still feel the shadows of herself, walking on this same sidewalk, standing with him, just there—not knowing their time was running out. Hen ducks down a street lined with shops and restaurants, and they enter a dim alley. Hen slows, and Jane realizes she knows this place from the photo Hen showed her back in her kitchen. Her heart rate accelerates. This is it.
The afternoon sun filters through the space above the buildings, illuminating the riot of color on the brick walls. Faces, animals, dancing figures. Words. Some in German, some in English, the languages weaving together. “God Ble$$.” “Liebe.” “Concrete Makes You Happy.” “Donnerwetter.” “Death to Tyrants.” Spray-painted and stenciled artworks, glued-on playbills, paintings of animals, people, planets, ideas. She spots the wolf from the photograph, the rainbow moon, the Day of the Dead mask.
And then she sees what they came here for. Just one square poster, large, painted in muted gray, much less noticeable than the other paintings here—except to Jane. It’s all she can see now that she has spotted it. To her, it glows incandescent. It looks like an album cover, maybe. Adam sits alone on a stool, a guitar in his arms. “The Secret Adventures of Adam & the Rib” is spray-painted in black across the top. She steps closer. In Adam’s thought bubble are the words she saw through the magnifying glass back at her farmhouse: 2,400 miles was a long way to go for guitar lessons. She reaches out to touch the poster and is disappointed at how cold it is. But what did she expect? For it to be warm, for it to feel alive?
What if someone else understands what this is? She looks around at the people in the alley. They sit at picnic tables, eating and talking, paying no attention to her or this painting. Her gaze becomes searching, but she stops herself. Elijah is not here. He can’t be.
Can he?
“What do you think?” Hen says in a low voice, and Jane almost laughs. Such a simple question, with no simple answers.
“I’m not sure.” Her voice is hoarse, the way it would get during the months of her life when she barely spoke to anyone. Her gaze returns to the art because it’s all she wants to look at. She focuses on the smaller details now. There are tiny squares across the bottom—and these are in color. They are so small she has to crouch down to see them clearly.
The first square is a small painting of the Los Angeles coastline, a vista familiar to Jane. It’s the view leading to Malibu, near where she and Elijah once lived. The painted shades are pastel, waxy, and out of focus. It reminds her of the way the smog in LA made everything look like a fuzzy scene out of an old movie.
The next tiny square features Adam and Rib standing on the boardwalk in Venice Beach. He’s lifting her by the waist, and she’s laughing up at the sky, a champagne bottle dangling from her fingertips.
The third: Adam and Rib lying on a batik blanket, the pattern of it re-created with such perfect precision it takes her breath away. The couple is on a deck, under a star-strewn sky, fingers laced as they stare upward. “When our first album goes platinum, I’ll buy this place for you,” Adam says to Rib. “No matter what, we’re keeping the car,” Rib replies. And in the fourth square, Adam and Rib are in an orange convertible, driving away. Next, they’re standing on a beach, at the top of a cliff, staring out to sea. Rib is in a white dress, Adam is in a suit. There are storm clouds on the horizon.
The final square is black as night, no stars, only stark white block letters: Find the last place we kissed.
“It’s a clue, right?”
Jane is startled by Hen’s voice. It suddenly feels wrong to have anyone with her at all—to have her memories laid out on a wall like this, too. She looks around, frantic, for a discarded can of paint. Something, anything, to cover it up with.
“This can’t be here,” she says, and she hears how scared she sounds.
“Hey, are you okay?”
Jane is not okay. She’s panicking. It’s so sudden—and it’s always like this. She presses her hand against the wall as anxious thought eddies swirl in her mind. I want him to be alive more than anything. But if it is him, if this is real, it means he did it on purpose. He left me alone, on purpose. He let me suffer all this time, and he could have done something. But he didn’t.
She tries again to breathe and hears herself gasp.
“Hey,” Hen says. “It’s okay. Try counting. One, two, three… breathe out—one, two, three… breathe in. Close your eyes.” Jane squeezes her eyes shut against her tunneling vision. She listens to the teenage girl’s voice, suddenly so mature and assured. Like she’s done this many times before. “Now, open your eyes. Look around you. Tell me three things you can see.”
“The brick wall,” Jane says. “Snow on the ground over there. And…” She looks to the wall. “This poster.”
Hen nods. “Now, name three sounds you can hear.”
“Your voice. A bird. Someone talking, at that picnic table. A woman.”
“Name three parts of your body.”
“My feet. My hands. My legs.”
A long pause.
“How do you feel?”
“Better,” Jane says, and this is only true in that she can breathe again, and less true in that she is now embarrassed to have had a meltdown in front of a stranger. “How did you know what to do?”
“My mother has attacks like this,” Hen says. “When she tries to leave the house.”
“Oh.” Jane feels a stab of pity.
“Why are you so afraid it might really be him?” Hen asks.
“It’s not that,” Jane says, but she’s lying. She’s terrified it might be him. But she’s also terrified it might not be. She turns her back to the wall. “Thank you for showing me this. Let’s go.”
“Wait—that’s it?”
“I appreciate you bringing me here, but I need to take you home.”
Hen points down, toward the words: Find the last place we kissed. “This is a clue. Only you can find it.”
“My lawyer will be in touch about the NDA.”
“But you have to—”
“Hen, I know. But I have to do this alone. It’s time for you to go home.”
“No,” Hen says, her voice as firm as the brick wall they’re standing in front of. “No way. I won’t sign anything.” Her voice has grown loud and people are staring. “And I am not going home. Not yet.”
Jane glances around. “Please, could you be discreet? If someone else finds out what this is—”
“I just want to know if it’s him,” Hen says in a quieter voice. “I think I deserve that, for leading you here.”
“I can’t risk this getting out.”
“I have no one to tell.”
“You couldn’t even tell your best friend.”
“I don’t have a best friend.” Hen lifts her chin, and again, Jane feels a stab of emotion.
“Your mother.”
“She wouldn’t understand. She’s not well.” Hen touches her forehead, as if to indicate where her mother is not well—and Jane feels that stab of empathy again. Mothers are supposed to be the wind for your kite, your soft place to land if you need it. Jane never had that either—except, briefly, in Alice. This girl contains hurts Jane recognizes and some she doesn’t. Some that are beyond her. But that doesn’t matter, Jane tells herself. Everyone in the world has been damaged in some way. “I’ve kept this secret for months,” Hen continues. “Why would I spill it now? I just want to know,” she repeats. “I want to be part of this. Please.”
Jane doesn’t answer her. She turns back toward the poster.
“I think about it all the time, you know,” Hen says after a moment. She’s come to stand beside Jane. She’s too close; Jane takes a step away. “How much he loved you. How everyone says you’re so terrible—but you can’t be that bad if he loved you as much as he did. He said in an interview once, that Barbara Walters one, that you were the reason he could sing. The reason he could be safe in the world. He said you were everything to him.”
“The Barbara Walters interview,” Jane repeats. “Which every fan said I forced him to do, wrote him answers on a script for. You don’t believe that?”
A pause. “I never understood what the point of it would have been. So no, I guess I don’t. I thought he was telling the truth. But no one wanted to believe any of it. It was weird. I did though.”
Jane looks at her. “All of it?”
Hen nods. “All of it.” She clears her throat. “I’m sorry I yelled at you like that yesterday. That wasn’t fair.”
Jane nods. “It’s fine,” she says. “You aren’t the first.”
“So?”
Jane knows she will probably regret this—but also that her life is full of regret. “Our last kiss was at the radio station, in front of the TV tower,” she says. “Right before we left for the concert you were at. We were arguing—we argued a lot that day—and he kissed me, probably to try to get me to be quiet.”
Hen’s eyes light up. “The tower is just a few minutes away. We passed it on the way here.”
“I know.” Jane reaches forward, traces some of the letters on the poster with her finger. The A, the R. Their secret names—given to them by someone who only wanted to hurt them. But it took away the power. It could be Kim, Jane tells herself. He hates her enough to want to trick her. But he’s also never been so nuanced in his revenge. She’s not certain he would be capable of this. “So, we’ll go there,” she says. “We’ll see if we can find anything—but then I’m taking you home. No matter what we find there. That’s the deal. It has to be.”
“Let’s go, then,” Hen says, and sets off down the alleyway. Jane notices she hasn’t promised her anything as she looks over her shoulder and says, “You coming?”
“I just need a minute,” Jane says. She bends down and looks at the squares across the bottom of the painting one last time. Her past, rendered in paint, plastered onto cold brick. And despite everything that happened, these memories still make her smile for the briefest of moments.