New Haven Noir

Innovative Methods by Alice Mattison

Lighthouse Point Park

A cloud obscured the sun as we rode down the shadowed driveway into the park. The staff ushered the kids off the bus, watching to make sure nobody strayed. Wind blew across Long Island Sound. The kids looked smaller here than inside the residence, though some were almost adults. The jagged line of teenagers moved toward the massive old stone lighthouse above the rocky beach, the restored carousel, and the pavilion with its picnic tables.

We let them hang out on the stony shore before lunch, waving them off the battered wooden fishing pier, which was posted with Danger signs. It was too cold for swimming. The water was gray, its surface broken by wind. Some kids didn’t go near the water, but others tried to see how close they could get without wetting their shoes, and ran back as the water slid forward.

I zipped up my windbreaker and pulled the sleeves over my hands. I’d been working as a clinician at the residence for a little less than a year, and this was my first picnic. I usually saw the kids one at a time for psychological testing and counseling, and some didn’t recognize me here. Maybe I looked different — they certainly did. I hadn’t known that Luis owned a Yankees jacket, that laconic Tiffany had a loud voice and spoke in obscenities.

We distributed lunch in the pavilion. Gulls wheeled and descended. Above the woods beyond the parking lot, two hawks circled.

Next the kids would ride the carousel, and after that, I’d been told, Dr. Frank always offered boat rides. The kids couldn’t learn Frank Gillingshurst’s last name, and by analogy some called me Dr. Jennifer, though I’m an MSW. Dr. Frank had driven his black pickup, with his boat on a trailer, and parked in a lot near the water. A staff member would go along on each boat ride, and others would keep an eye on those waiting on land. Years ago, a fifteen-year-old had run away from the picnic and was picked up by the police after hitchhiking halfway across Connecticut.

As I ate my apple, Dr. Frank strode toward the trash can and opened his big, muscular hand above it, releasing the remains of his lunch. He walked away without looking back; a napkin floated to the ground. He was a well-built white man with thick eyebrows. He was somewhat famous: Frank Gillingshurst, early in his career, had become a leading practitioner of an innovative form of child therapy involving unusual informality between therapist and client, and sometimes bluntness on the part of the therapist. He’d published a book, which I’d read. It made me uncomfortable, though I couldn’t quite say why.

Dr. Frank climbed into his truck. The black pickup with the boat trailer rolled out of the lot, the slim white speedboat large and anomalous on land. The truck descended a sloping gravel road to the boat launch below, then turned and backed slowly toward the water. Dr. Frank got out and did something to the white boat. He returned to the truck, backed up a little farther, then climbed out again. A girl said she needed the bathroom, and I accompanied her. When I returned, Dr. Frank had eased the boat into the water, where it rocked slightly. The anchor, a coffee can filled with concrete, lay on the shore, and the truck was on its way back to the parking lot. So far that day, he had not acknowledged my presence.

Dr. Frank was the only member of our party, resident or staff member, who didn’t ride the carousel. We had full use of it for an hour. Apart from one or two other supervised groups, the park was empty.

I rode a black horse that went up and down. The happy, tinny music was — paradoxically — sad. As a child, I loved and feared carousels. This one exhilarated me, and it made me forget what was going on in my life. Frank stood staring, and each time I circled I saw his gaze, his thick pale eyebrows. When I stepped off the platform, I stumbled.

He looked at me at last. Okay, Jen?

A little dizzy, I said. Your turn.

I’m good, he said. The yearning music started up once more. The horses rose up and plunged down, their graceful legs bent forever, seeming taut with ungratified desire as they circled within the wooden shell, which looked as if a strong wind might blow it down.

We shouldn’t have let him come, Frank said.

Who? I said, though I knew.

Gavin. He hasn’t earned a picnic.

The picnic isn’t something they earn, I said.

Oh, he would have understood. Then he said, Diane overruled me.

Diane was the director, now circling and waving, rising and descending on a white horse with brown spots. She smiled broadly, her big square glasses glittering. Her straightened hair held its shape, and she wore a ruffled blouse under her pantsuit.

I tried to pick Gavin out of the group revolving past me. We didn’t fill much of the carousel, and the kids were lonely figures here and there. Gavin was a stocky, moody, light-skinned boy with a big forehead, now astride a brown horse that didn’t go up and down. I wasn’t his therapist but I knew him — a boy with a serious diagnosis who’d been thrown out of several schools for fighting, a couple of times with a knife. The first time I saw him was at a staff meeting at which Frank explained some of his theories. Then Gavin was invited in, and he spoke in a loud, clear voice about an abusive father, about trouble with the police, about anger he couldn’t control — until now, because Dr. Frank helped him.

Gavin was not one of those who came forward when boat rides were offered. There was a little shoving, as half a dozen vied to be in the first group. The wind had picked up. I managed not to be the assisting adult on any of the rides. Some children wandered off down the beach, throwing rocks into the sea, pretending to throw them at each other. Some circled the locked lighthouse.

Only two kids fit into the boat along with Frank and a staff member, so even though some didn’t go, the rides took time. The motor was loud, and the boat leaned on its side and swung in reckless — or seemingly reckless — arcs through the gray water, beyond which West Haven and the taller buildings of New Haven were visible in the distance under the gray sky. The kids screamed as spray pelted them, and the wake started up curls of foam that broke on the shore with a bit of a crash. The first ride made some waiting kids decide not to try it, but others stepped forward.

So there was some confusion about who had been in the boat and who had not, how many kids had wandered off along the shore with the shift supervisor and her assistant. I was annoyed at how long it all took. I wanted coffee, but the concession stand at some distance along the beach was closed for the season. It started to rain. Diane — her hair now slightly less neat — climbed out of the boat, waved an arm, and called, Okay, enough! Everybody back to the bus!

It wasn’t until we were all seated inside that the shift supervisor counted us and we realized someone was missing. Gavin, the kids said, before the adults figured out who it was. Diane and I hurried off the bus. Now the park seemed vast — there was a playground I hadn’t noticed before; the beach wrapped around meadows and parking lots. In the other direction was the woods.

Frank was walking toward his truck, about to load his boat, when Diane called to him sharply and waved him over. He didn’t get upset. This kid’s not like the other one, he said. Then he added, in a voice that made Diane frown at him, Gavin’s a coward at heart. He won’t find his way out of the park. Frank spoke slowly, as if he were reading lines he couldn’t quite make out in dim light. Or as if he’d been caught unawares — well, of course he had been, just like the rest of us; but he was claiming that he wasn’t surprised, that this was almost ordinary.

I told myself that he was right, and that Gavin’s disappearance probably had nothing to do with other things that had happened. Downtown New Haven is at the bottom of a U-shaped curve in the shoreline, and the park is at one tip of the U, separated from the rest of the city by a narrow residential area next to the water, and then the mouth of a river that’s crossed by a highway bridge. This was unfamiliar territory to our kids.

Nothing to worry about, Frank continued. I’ll drive him back. Then I’ll return to load the boat. No, wait — Gavin will help me load the boat. It’ll do him good.

But we don’t even know where that child is! Diane said.

He’s behind a nearby tree, Frank said, patting her on the arm. I know Gavin, he continued. All the trouble is bluster. He wants to be found — just not in front of his friends.

We’ll keep the kids on the bus, I said. We can wait.

I didn’t think all Gavin’s trouble was bluster, and I knew Frank didn’t think that either.

Absolutely not, Frank said. They know I take him places. Tell them I’m driving him back to the house.

I hesitated. Frank, I said, at least I should stay. I’ll help you look.

Nonsense, he said, and all but pushed Diane and me onto the bus.

I’ve asked myself many times why I allowed myself to get on the bus. There was no reason why two searchers would be any less effective than one — obviously they would be more effective, no matter who they were. The truck was big enough that all three of us could have ridden back to the house together. I think Diane didn’t chime in and encourage me to stay because she was desperate to pretend things were normal — and Frank alone with one of his own clients would be very normal. He’d taken two girls hiking in a different park a few weeks earlier. Diane was arguing with herself, I found out later, about whether it was essential to call the police immediately. Gavin was sixteen. If the police were alerted it would be terrible for the residence, terrible for Diane. It might also be terrible for Gavin if he were found by the police: he was a known juvenile offender; he was a black teenager. It would be much better if we could consider his disappearance something that concerned no one but us, a problem we could solve easily.

My immediate response when Frank sent me off was shame, as if I’d proposed a sexual encounter and he’d said he didn’t find me attractive. Or attractive any longer.

One afternoon a few weeks after I was hired, I stepped out of my office and observed Frank, whom I scarcely knew, peering through a corridor window. Something about the way he stood, or his amused expression, drew me in. He seemed as if he were about to say something outrageous: I was detecting that he wasn’t a docile follower, but a skeptical observer. I was not happy in the job, which would lead nowhere. The administrators were competent but unimaginative. I needed a friend who’d raise an eyebrow — and Frank had such grand eyebrows.

Out the window, sitting on the front steps — though it was winter — were two girls. They’re deciding whether to sneak out, Frank said.

The kids were allowed on the porch, but no farther.

How do you know? I said.

Nobody sits on the steps in this weather. They’re making sure nobody sees them, but they’re not too bright — they haven’t thought of windows.

Will you stop them?

No. He shook his big blond head.

They could get into trouble, I said.

Girls get into trouble by getting pregnant, he said, but they won’t want to miss supper, and they can’t get pregnant between now and supper. They’ll just walk to the convenience store and buy cigarettes.

They’ll get lung cancer, I said.

That I can’t prevent, Frank said. He turned from the window. He was outrageous but not too outrageous, I decided. He took an emphatic step or two, then called over his shoulder, I hear you’re from Philly.

So I caught up to him.

Me too, he said. We should get coffee.

I’d like that, I said.

The first time we had dinner, we ended up at my apartment. I’d never slept with a man who had such big bones, such vigorous arms and legs. Frank was on all sides of me: we were Leda and the Swan. His arms glowed — his arm hair was golden too. When eventually he got out of bed that first night, he clutched his lower back and then pulled a vial from his pants pocket, swallowing a handful of pills without water.

What’s wrong?

Sciatica.

I’d have brought you a glass of water! I said.

He said, I can find the faucet. I don’t need water.

He took many pills and never with water. You’re addicted to prescription painkillers, I said a few weeks later, and he shrugged, which startled me: I had intended hyperbole. By then I was dependent on the sex, maybe a little in love, or, at least, more vulnerable than I liked. Frank would stick his head into my office and say Tonight? or Dinner? without bothering with conventional greetings and inquiries. That felt thrillingly intimate. He couldn’t get enough of me — but then he might become impatient and resentful, as if we were only in the same room at the same time because I’d tricked him. My stories about my middle-class, ethnically mixed family (I’m half Korean, half Jewish) bored him, and he said so. His cynicism about the job went beyond my irreverent jokes about Diane’s love of rules or her assistant’s fussiness about paperwork. He dismissed the administrators from his mind, as if of no consequence.

When Frank talked about himself, he generally began with ambition, though I sometimes learned about something else as well. Hearing about a prestigious conference in Vancouver at which he’d been invited to speak, I learned that he was afraid of airplanes, though he flew often. I learned about the conference in bed, when he took a call after we’d finished.

I’ve been hoping for this, he said. I know what I want to do.

What do you want to do?

His talk, he explained, would include videos of him working with Gavin. He said, One of my students is taping us. And after I show the videos — then I introduce Gavin himself! He paused, then added, I’d better bring a chaperone. He has an uncle. My research money will pay for their plane tickets.

Frank had some kind of university appointment.

Videos? I said. What about confidentiality?

No last name, Frank said. He stood up, rubbed his back, and went to the bathroom.

But still, I said when he returned.

Still what? I just wish I didn’t have to fly!

Confidentiality.

No last name, he said again. I have his permission, of course. And he’s being photographed from behind.

Why bring him? I said. If you’ve got him on video...

Q&A, he said. They’ll eat it up. It all has to do with teenagers getting past anger — not letting it get them into trouble.

What do you do that’s so different? I said. I too spent hours every week with angry teenagers, and I knew that any of them might get into trouble at any minute.

He was silent. Gavin’s going to be the subject of my next book, he said then. I’m writing a proposal. There’s interest.

From the people who brought out your last book?

From agents. That was a university press. Now I’m going big time.

Soon, I calculated, Frank would be offered a more lucrative job in a bigger city.

One night at the beginning of summer, Frank and I met at a restaurant. He was late, and came in looking rushed, whipping his napkin from the place setting. Did you order for us? he said.

I wouldn’t have dared order for him. When we were finally eating, he said, I just confiscated a gun.

From who?

He shrugged. That’s why I was late.

From Gavin?

Gavin? Of course not. Gavin doesn’t have a gun!

Who, then? How did you find out?

I’d rather not say.

But don’t you have to turn him in? I said. A gun was serious. The client might be sent to a more restrictive facility.

I’m not turning him in, Frank said.

You’re not? What then?

I’ll keep it. When he’s ready, he and I will take it to the buyback program. They’ll pay me, and I’ll give him the money.

Won’t he just buy another gun?

By then he won’t want one.

I suppose he’ll spend the money on books, I said drily.

In Latin, Frank said. Greek.

We ate. Where is it now? I said.

Frank shook his head.

It’s not in your pocket, is it?

Forget it, he said.

I’d intended to work on reports that evening, but had decided to postpone them when Frank suggested dinner. I expected that he’d come home with me. But at the end of the meal, which he paid for, I thanked him, mentioned the reports, and left while he was pulling out his credit card.

After that Frank was less interested in me. I was sure he blamed me for timidity. I blamed myself. Obviously Frank wasn’t dangerous! I liked him for his outrageousness, I scolded myself — but apparently I couldn’t handle someone who went beyond making lame jokes about the administration and actually tried innovative methods — risky ones, yes, but taking risks led to progress.

Then, one evening, he phoned: a quick, impersonal call. Can I come over now? When he arrived he accepted some Scotch and sat down on my sofa. I have a proposal for you, he said. I don’t mean I’m going to propose!

I didn’t think you did, I said. You’re not down on one knee.

I felt flustered, unable to be at my best — too needy.

The organizers of the conference in Vancouver, he told me, were so pleased by his plan to bring Gavin, and by the video Frank had sent, that they had offered to make him one of the main speakers in the plenary session. They’d pay him a good sum, as well as expenses. The only problem, his contact had said, was the unfortunate, unspoken message conveyed by the fact that Frank was a white man and Gavin a black boy. The pairing — and the absence of a speaker of color, or a woman, in what would now be a longer part of the program — might seem insensitive.

That’s all that troubles them? I said, but Frank kept talking. The organization, he explained, prided itself on its diversity, and on making clear to the public (Frank’s segment would be filmed and offered to news organizations) that all clients aren’t black, all therapists aren’t white. So they’d made Frank’s featured participation contingent on his bringing along a nonwhite colleague, preferably female. Would I be willing to join him?

You’re not in the videos, of course, he said, but you can interview Gavin before the Q&A — bring up concepts the videos don’t get to. Or accuse me of invading his privacy! You’d like that. A little controversy will be perfect.

I’m not black, I said. I wanted to do it, and I knew I shouldn’t. I said, Isn’t the idea that you should have someone black with you?

They said nonwhite, he said.

I’m mixed, I said. Maybe ask Diane? But I didn’t want him to ask Diane.

Frank turned his head quickly. Diane can’t hear about any of this! he said sharply. Diane thinks I’m a show-off. Then he said, And at this point in your career, the exposure will be fabulous for you.

I had thought of that. I’d never been to Vancouver. Frank and I would have hours together on the plane and in the hotel. Gavin and his uncle would be present much of the time, but even so... I wondered how much money I’d get. I began to think about what I might ask Gavin in our public conversation that would make the whole thing ethical after all.

It would be easy not to tell Diane, whom I respected: I didn’t want to know her opinion.

I didn’t say yes, but Frank talked as if it were settled, and I didn’t argue. From his chair he reached to stroke my arm with one finger, then put down his drink, stood, and took me in his arms.

When I awoke in the night he was asleep beside me — naked, sprawled, the blanket twisted around one leg. I got out of bed and crossed the room to the chair where he’d laid his clothes. In his left pants pocket I could see the outline of his bottle of pills. I put my hand into his right pants pocket and felt the flat leather billfold he carried, and something made of metal. I snatched my fingers back, then let the tips graze the edges of the object: the barrel, trigger, and grip of a small handgun.

A few weeks later I heard shouts from the lunchroom while I ate a sandwich at my desk. My next client told me Gavin had gotten into a fight.

Really? I said. I didn’t think I should ask who started it, but the girl told me anyway. Gavin had claimed that another boy shoved him while he ate. He jumped up, punching.

My client said, That boy touched Gavin. She reached out a finger to show me.

There were a couple of other fights.

Frank and I didn’t spend time together during those weeks. Late one afternoon, I stuck my head into his office. How can you claim he isn’t angry? I said. I couldn’t begin to say whether I was asking a legitimate professional question, trying to find out the status of my participation in the conference, arguing with him, or looking for a way to go to bed with him.

Oh, that’s part of the story, Frank said.

He didn’t ask me to sit down but I took the client’s chair. He was at his desk. Backsliding, he said, but accepting appropriate punishment — it makes it more convincing. He’s lost some privileges — he gets that. You worry too much.

That was all, and I soon left. Embarrassed to be caught worrying again, I bought my ticket. Frank had explained that we’d be reimbursed after the conference. But the next time we talked — outside the facility, a week or so later, as we headed to our cars — he said Gavin was refusing to go to the conference. No videos, no trip, he said. The little shit.

Oh! I said. I stopped, clutching my tote bag full of reports. Frank, I said. I was uncomfortably aware of all the fantasies of this trip I’d been allowing myself. And the ticket was expensive.

Not a big deal, he said. I’ll reason with him. But I can’t until he calms down.

What if he doesn’t calm down? I said.

He will. He sounded stern. I wanted him to be right so we could go to the conference — but also because I wanted his theories to be true, so as to prove that my doubts were unfair: I wanted my lover to be the distinguished psychologist I had thought was seducing me, not a smooth-talking fake.

I think he misread my expression — or maybe he read it too well. Look, I know what I’m doing! he said with real anger. For the first time, there was uncertainty — desperation — in his eyes, and he didn’t look as if he knew what he was doing. It was a hot, sunny afternoon in September, and we were standing on a cracked sidewalk two doors down from the residence, which had a parking lot so small we often couldn’t use it. His car was parked at the curb where we stood; mine was half a block away. Brown leaves were accumulating, though the leaves on the trees were still green.

I tensed. I didn’t want him angry with me. I said, No, no, of course he’ll calm down. Of course you know what you’re doing! My foot played with a piece of broken sidewalk.

But he stared at me, his eyebrows too dignified for failure. His blue shirt seemed to be sticking to him. I turned protective. If you can’t talk about Gavin, I said, aren’t there others?

He shrugged and turned away, opened his car door, and got in.

It will work out! I called lamely.

I didn’t hear from him after that. At work we barely spoke.

One Friday — maybe two weeks after that conversation and a week or so before the picnic — the day was chilly, so I wore a jacket to work. When I left that evening, Frank’s door was open and I called, Goodnight! as I passed, but he didn’t answer. I went downstairs, left the building, and was almost at my car when I remembered the jacket. I had left it in my office. I would want it over the weekend. I turned back.

Now Frank’s door was closed, and I heard voices as I neared it. The sound of crying. In a rough, sarcastic voice, Frank was saying something I couldn’t quite make out. It sounded like break. Break, sure, the break, of course, the break! It was the tone that stopped me, a kind of wild rage. I didn’t know what he actually said — still don’t. Then I heard something more clearly. I guess the crying was quieter. You really are worthless, Frank said. I don’t care what happens to you.

I didn’t decide to open the door and walk in, I just walked in. Gavin was crying but standing up, his arms tensed, ready to strike; Frank was sitting at his desk. Gavin was small for his age, I realized, but he moved like a man as he faced Frank.

Frank looked up, startled. You don’t believe in knocking?

You scared me, I said.

So knocking isn’t required when you’re scared? His voice was heavy with sarcasm. Sorry, I didn’t know about that rule!

Gavin turned and dropped his arms. He looked embarrassed.

Gavin, I said, do you want to come with me?

He glanced from one of us to the other. No.

We can go now and tell Diane what just happened. Dr. Frank shouldn’t talk to you that way. She could assign you to a different therapist.

No, Gavin said.

I think you should mind your fucking business, Frank said. You have no idea what’s going on in here.

I know it’s not all right, I said.

Frank said, Gavin has made it clear that he doesn’t need your help. Right, Gavin?

Gavin nodded. I didn’t know what to do. I went downstairs, but Diane had gone for the day. I left the building, again without my jacket, and drove home. All weekend I tried to decide what to do. Finally I phoned Frank. I’m sorry I walked in on you, I said.

No, he said. I’m the one who should apologize. I understand why you did. I sounded insane. But I wasn’t — truthfully, I wasn’t.

Can we get coffee? I said. What he’d told me was a relief. I wanted to hear his explanation. I wanted to get back to what we’d had before. Somehow. I wanted what had happened to go away, and maybe he could tell me why I didn’t have to keep thinking about it, why I didn’t have to act on it.

I pointed out to myself that I had no way of knowing what went on between Frank and his patients. Maybe this was some kind of role-play, some kind of exercise. I knew it was harmful, but surely, I told myself, it would be better to persuade Frank that what he had done was not appropriate than it would be to tell Diane what I’d heard. He’d lose his job. Anyway, I’d heard clearly only part of what he said.

We met at a coffee shop. I suppose he knew that whatever else I wanted, I still wished to go to bed with him. When he came in, he leaned over to kiss me on the lips, then bought himself coffee and pulled his chair around to the side of the table, so we were shoulder to shoulder.

Who have you told? he asked.

Nobody.

I knew it! he said. You’re too smart to get upset about something you don’t understand. You trusted me, on some level. I was right to sign you up for the conference — we think alike, Jen. We’ve got a good future.

Is the conference still on?

Well, Gavin didn’t want to go downstairs and tell Diane I was yelling at him, did he?

I said slowly, He was too scared of you to be honest with me.

No, Frank said. I think I understand Gavin. Anger is ordinary to him. He knows I’ll scream at him when I’m angry — he gets that. I respect him enough to tell him candidly what I think.

That he’s worthless?

At that moment, when he was saying no to me? Yes, that’s what I thought. I don’t always think that. He knows I don’t always think that.

I let myself believe him. Coffee turned into dinner and dinner turned into bed. I’m glad we’re colleagues, Frank said as we headed into my apartment. I’m glad we’re lovers, don’t get me wrong — but I’m even gladder that we’re colleagues. Which of course was the most romantic thing he could have said to me.

I phoned Frank twice in the hours after the picnic, when he and Gavin didn’t return. Leaving for the day, I stopped at Diane’s office. Her eyes were heavy and she seemed small and rumpled behind her desk. She said, I don’t even know his cell.

I gave her Frank’s number and she called him, but he didn’t pick up. She left a message asking him to phone her, as I had.

I didn’t tell Diane I intended to drive back to the park. It was still raining. There was traffic on the Q-Bridge and then it took me a long time to drive through the neighborhood that bordered the Sound. Everything seemed deserted when I parked in the lot where the bus had been. It wasn’t dark yet. Frank’s truck remained in the other parking lot, the trailer behind it, still without the boat.

I pulled up the hood of my windbreaker and set off toward the pavilion, the lighthouse, and the shore. The rain obscured the buildings across the harbor. The wind was stronger than before. As I approached the top of the slope above the water, I saw the boat rocking in the same place. I took out my phone and called Frank again, and while it was ringing, I caught sight of him. He was on the shore, at a distance, head down, in a raincoat I didn’t remember. It must have been in the truck. He made slow progress. He was dragging something — something heavy — and then he bent as if to lift it. He laid it on the ground and stopped, bending his knees in a way he sometimes did; he said it relieved the pressure in his back. I didn’t leave a voice mail. Instead I hung up, then used my phone to take a picture of him. But he was too far from me; nothing would show. I stepped back from the edge of the hill.

He had been struggling forward, I saw, for a long time. I didn’t know if the burden he dragged was Gavin. If it was Gavin, I didn’t think Frank would have shot him. Maybe he’d stuffed pills down Gavin’s throat, without water, as he stuffed them down his own, and Gavin was unconscious. Was it that hard to subdue him? And why was Frank walking on the shore, not toward his truck? He stopped again to rest, then dragged whatever it was a few more feet. He was heading toward his boat.

The next time he stopped, I phoned him again, and this time he answered. Frank, I said, what’s going on?

I can’t find him, Frank said. I don’t know why I was so sure. I feel terrible.

I took a few steps back. Should I call the police?

There’s one more place I want to look, Frank said. After that, if I don’t find him, I’ll call the police. You’re at home?

Yes, I said, glancing left and right. I’m at home.

Diane is leaving me voice mails, he said. Call her and tell her what I told you. Tell her not to call the cops.

Okay, I said. I ended the call. Then I dialed 911. I wasn’t coherent but they listened.

I couldn’t have said clearly what I was starting to think. Frank would row out, I guessed. A motor might be heard. He would slide Gavin into the water, and call the police after rowing back to shore. The book Frank would write — Gavin lost forever, just as his doctor’s theories had begun to help him — would be devastating, with details no one could deny about moments in Frank’s office. Throughout the book there would be difficult moments, like the scene I’d witnessed, and the therapist would bravely confront his own limitations. It would end with a sad chapter about the psychologist’s fruitless search, his new understanding — as days passed and the boy was not found: not in the park, not in the surrounding city, nowhere — that life for kids like Gavin is even harder and more unpredictable than he had imagined. A much more exciting book than one about Gavin’s resistance and Frank’s anger.

I hurried toward the park entrance. The rain was heavier now, and I was soaked through, freezing — but I wished I were even more uncomfortable, so as to have something simple to think about, something that could be remedied. The police car came quickly, but it felt as if I waited for a long time. I pointed the way down the gravel drive toward the water.

Spring Break by John Crowley

Yale University

So the last proj I did junior year at Spectrum Cumulus College was with my bud Seymour Chin, who was in Singapore — I was in Podunk, OH. It was a proj in Equality Engineering, required, tough but not so. We picked Toiletry and had scads fun and then did the CGIs, and we thought if the world had these johns and janes it would be equal more, definitely. Remembering now the probs we thought up. “Transgen women can’t go in the women’s jane, hey,” Seymour said. “They’re men actually, they might abuse.”

“Nah,” I said. “They got no interest, yah? What you got to do is keep the lesbians out. They could abuse. They got an interest.”

“Obvi.”

“Ident,” I said. “Run a kit. Ten thousand self-ID’d lesbians amalgamed in half-length pix. Surveillance cams can scan and match in.9 seconds. Match, they get sent to the john.”

“Harsh.”

“Gentle it. Just a few words.” I flashed him words: Please use the adjoining facility.

“I see a problem.”

“Yah?”

“Yah. No one in the john knows you’re a les.”

I pondered. “So if they go in the john men could abuse.”

“Yah.”

So all that was actually utter dumb and from old, but I was on propranolol and Seymour was drooping, four a.m. Singapore, which is five p.m. mytime the day before. Next meet we switched the thinking to unigender, made progress. Can’t remember how we scaled it, but we got PASS on it and that’s what counts.

Then: Spring Break! My first Spring Break, because costs. Fam decided this time to go in on it for me, because PASS. Max lucks!

All over the world, Spring Break time.

Received welcome package in gmail, unzipped it. Nice oldtime fonts. Heyjoe! Great year, yah? Now’s for rest-n-rec, yah? As a fulltime student of Spectrum Cumulus you hereby receive a special invitation to Spring Break at our Grandparent College, “Yale”!

Went on a bit about Yale, this place, the oldness, the motto — Luxe y Vanitas, same as ours — and the many years that SCU.edu/sg and Yale had worked together, and-cetera. Pix and vids, leafy, stony, grassy. This was to be so fun.

Then Seymour Chin checked in. Seymour hates-hates to type like words, so what I got back was a string of emojoes to express. I got the meaning right away.

“Heyjoe, we not on?” I flash.

Seymour has affluenza — nose running, coughing, sick like a dog. (Do dogs get specially sick? Don’t know. Never had one.) Not going to make it, not on day one anyway.

I’m on my own at Yale.

So it used to be I guess that Spring Break was in the you know spring, like March. Everybody left Campus and went to crazy-hot places to party — not like now. But who wants to go to New Haven in March? If not snow, rain, ice, and-cetera. So they do it in June, which was when back then a student would get their diploma. And since there’s nothing else going on there then these days, good time. But they still call it “Spring” Break. Know what? You can actually get a train ride (take a train, they say) from New York up to New Haven, get off. There’s a Shuffle that meets this train and takes you to Campus. Town is wastrel, but then you drive through this stone portal — like in a fantasy RPG — and there you like are.

Wow. The place is old. The buildings look like castles. Old corroding I guess granite. Pointy windows. Pointy tops. Pointy everything. And what happened just as we drove in and down this avenue? Bells started ringing. They were playing songs, but with bells, somewhere up in a tower. Ancient songs I remember from as a kid. I sort of teared up a little it was so amazing.

We were led through another portal into this big square of lawn, a quad it was called — four sides, get it? — where there were long tables and these young guys and women were waiting to hand us stuff, all of them waving and saying Welcome and Hi and Get in Any Line. The spring-breakers were some of them zonkered with sleeplessness, come from around the world like Seymour Chin did or actually didn’t, others up for it and giving high fives and whatnot. The woman I came up to checked my name/pic on their pad, and started piling things in front of me, calling out the names as they did it. Sheets and stuff! Orientation materials! One six-pack beer! One swechirt (with huge white Y on it)! Goodie bag! Hat!

It was a blue flat cap — blue for Yale, Old Blue — and it had a number on the front, 2017. “What’s that?” I asked them.

“What’s what?” they said.

“The number.”

“Heyjoe, that’s your class!” They took it and put it on my head and tugged it down, laughing, really white teeth. “Class of twenty-seventeen!” they said, and shook my hand. “Welcome to Yale, Yalie!”

So the hat and the number were for the old-time scenics too. I laughed with them — they were sort of actually quite hot. “2017!” I told them. “That’s like my dad’s year!”

“Yeah!” they said.

Actually my dad didn’t go. Because army. But if he had.

I loaded all this stuff up plus my kit and started off. A whole bunch were headed for the dorm we were assigned, only it wasn’t called a dorm, it was called a college, which they said in this special way, a College. Why a college in a college? Who knew. My orientation pack explained, probs. And it was a castle too. It had a fucking coat of arms over the archway. All of us pouring in through the iron gate yelling, like overthrowing peasants, minus torches.

I have seen actually a lot of dorms, the boys and women in their little rooms, bunk beds, the stuff that happens. Squeeing and flaming on, the micro cutoffs and docked Ts, pizza boxes, selfies. Actually, now I think of, a lot of that was in porn. Vintage porn, but it gave you the scenics. The room I actually got was not like a dorm room. It was more fantasy RPG. The monk’s lair or hmmever. A marble fireplace. Like wood walls made of oak. Dropped my stuff and sat down on a futon couch and felt a little — you know — I don’t know.

But you know what? The john/jane was also like from another age. Urinals? Yes. Had to try one. Everything we designed out in our Toiletry proj. Flashed Seymour Chin but no emojoes in response. Then seven guys and a woman came in and it was sorting out the rooms and the beds (the wood room with the vampire-castle fireplace was just to hang in) and we cracked the comp six-packs and the night began. Hoo-hooting and woo-wooing from all around the quad.

I put on my droops and the gimme swechirt and 2017 cap, went out with my class into the quad. There was plenty of light there but most of the buildings, classrooms, and such were all dark inside. Way up far-off on a hill was a regular-type building, part of the Science Center I think we got told, lit up normally but looking so far away. These old parts had been left behind years ago.

I’m not that great in crowds — always have this impulse to say things, right, like actual things and not just tags. The Meaning of Life. Sometimes I guess I put people off. Anyway thinking like this I got away from the quads where the spring-breakers were. Thinking of all these buildings being full long ago, now when it’s all collabs across the world, actually better for sure, but still there was a kind of sadness to feel, just wondering what it would have been to go to classes in those buildings and throng around the quad all day hugging books, talking to professors like f2f. Maybe I was born too late.

Tomorrow was going to be utter. We go to class. We hear a lecture by some heyjoe about some subject. Like we walk all together into one of these lecture halls with seats that have these paddle arms where you put your notebook and take notes with a pencil. I got a pencil in my goodie bag. No paper. Maybe the note stuff was like for kidding.

By now I was somewhere that was pretty empty of spring-breakers. The buildings felt like they were sort of looking down on me, like looming. Up in the corners of buildings and on the edges and gutters were these faces — little heads of monsters or like demons. Staring, grinning, showing teeth. Not for kidding: they were there.

Freaking out a bit. What happened to everybody? Was this still Yale? I went past a building that was like a giant white cube, with squares on each face, sort of like a ginormous Rubik’s Cube without the colors. Not old. Not old but cold. And then when I hooked a left and a right there was the most, the tallest, the most looking-at-me building ever. It had to be a church. I’ve seen churches. This was the churchiest church I’d ever seen. The steps that led up to the churchy-pointy door were worn away, by a million feet going up and down a million times. I stood in sort of shock. Ancientness.

Then I saw that the door was open. A little. I could tell that if you went up and pushed on it, it would open more.

So I did.

See, what I learned: that you can be born too late, and really old things can seem, like, familiar to you. There’s a sadness. What it is, it’s more of an entrancement. Which is on the whole not a good thing, because you can just wander on and never come back. Not that knowing this was any help, as it turned out.

The church was just like in this VR tour of somewhere I did once. It was huge and empty and gray. The pillars of it ran together into arches high up. There were little windows made of colored glass, pictures in glass made long ago, or looking like it. What wasn’t there were all the rows of seats to sit in and like worship. It was empty, it was the emptiest place I’ve ever been in. It made you gulp. The VR tour not so much.

I went over to one of the pillars and put my hand on it, the stone, worn by the ages. Cold and rough. Not even VR can give you feels. I was liking this when a weird feeling came over me, like somebody was nearby.

Somebody was. I don’t know how he came up to me that close without making a sound, but when I turned I saw him and I did the guh-guh-guh thing.

“Looking for something?” he said. I didn’t know then how long I was going to be listening to that voice, or how much I would want to not hear it. He was a little guy with a round head, almost bald, with this farcey mustache. Smiling.

“Is this,” I said, “a church?”

“No indeed,” he said. “Or in a way, yes, a church. A Cathedral of Thought. It is in fact a Library.”

“Wow.”

“Yes.”

“And who are you?”

“I am,” he said, “the Librarian.”

“Wow, so a Library.” I took a few steps farther in, and he kept close to me. “And you’re a Librarian.”

“I am the Librarian. There are no others. Not anymore.”

What’s that ancient movie, Seymour sent me snips once, a Cathedral, and this ugly messed-up heyjoe who loves the bells and climbs up the tower to ring them? For some reason I thought of it now.

“Why,” he asked, “does your hat have the number two thousand seventeen on it?”

“Oh, ’cause I’m a student, and that’s my class.” I could tell he didn’t quite get it. “I don’t really know why I’m here, I just...”

“Oh, I know why you’ve come here,” he said, getting a little too close.

“You do?”

“Because you’re a Student. You’re drawn to books.”

“Actually not so much.”

“You love books.”

“Um.” I made that look — eyes sort of closed, shoulders up, hands out to show they’re empty. Like hmmever.

“You don’t. You don’t. Like books. You hate them.”

I laughed. “Well they’re sort of heavy, you know? A whole lot of them together especially.”

He laughed at that, kind of wildly, which made me think I was making a like good impression. Poor guy. His eyes were sort of bulge-y, that condition, you know? And they sort of vibrated. Not his fault, but.

“So books?” I said. “Where are they?”

“In the stacks.”

“Stacks? You mean all piled up?”

“Well, ‘stacks,’” he said with the double-finger-waggle. “Called stacks. All neatly placed on shelves. You went up, up...” — he pointed up, like to heaven, to the ceiling — “and got the one you wanted. If you were allowed.”

“Uh,” I said. “Who’s not allowed?”

“Students,” he said. “Haha, too bad for you. Haha, not true, you could, but long ago, no.”

“So...”

“We-ell,” he said, as though I was little kid, “what you did was, you looked up the book in the card catalog. You see those cabinets over there? They’re all that’s left of the system, and they’re now actually empty. But once there were hundreds of cabinets, and each drawer in each cabinet held hundreds of cards, all in alphabetical order” — here he stared at me with his goggle eyes vibrating, like to make sure I understood what that is, which I do, sort of — “and the card told you what the book’s call number was, and then you looked at that sign over there, which told you where in the Library that range of numbers was.”

“You called the number?” I dialed with a finger, another finger to my ear, like in oldtime cartoons means call me.

“No no. You’d write it on a paper. And ask a clerk to go find it.”

“Every book had a different number?”

“Every book. Every. Single. Book.”

“Of like how many?”

He bent over so close to me, with this creepy suspishy smile, that now I was thinking that he, or well they, was maybe gay or bi. “Millions,” he said.

That sort of staggered, yah? Millions?

“You want to see them,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“Don’t know,” I said. “Do I?” I looked away and up and around, the darkness was like solid, there was no sound. Place was entirely soundproof, with all these books — like a million pounds of insulation.

“Jeez. They must be unbelievably valuable. I mean worth a lot.”

“Not really so much,” the Librarian said coldly. “Not one by one. All the really valuable ones — they’ve been taken out, they’ve been put with all the most valuable ones in that big marble cube — you saw it, right? — the Beinecke. And locked up so no one can steal them or handle them or even see them except the big shots, who don’t care much anymore anyway.”

He looked up to the spaces overhead, as though he could see the books up there, in stacks. “What’s here are the ones they don’t care about. Oh, they aren’t valuable, no. They’re just here. Abandoned. This building’s kept safe and locked and a few lights on until they can decide what to do with them. Ha. Pretty clear what they’ll decide.”

I thought: place had not been locked when I arrived.

“Listen to me,” he said. “I’ll tell you something no one knows but me. There is one book in this library that is unique. If they knew it was here they’d take it and put it in with the Audubon Elephant Folio and the Gutenberg Bible and all the rest over there. Because you know why?”

“Why.”

“Because there is only one copy of this book in all the world.” His nose was almost touching mine, far back as I pulled, and he whispered, like somebody might hear, “It’s one thousand years old. It’s covered in gems. The pages are made of the skin of goats, pounded so thin you can almost see through it.” He smiled this mad smile. “Only one copy. It’s never been kindled. It’s not on the Internet Archive. It can’t be accessed online. It is fabulously valuable.” He goggled at me. “This book is mine.”

“Okay,” I said. Mostly I was trying to picture jewels stuck on a goat’s skin, and getting nowhere.

“You want to see it?”

“Yes. Maybe. Sure.”

He let out this strange sigh, as though deflating, like after you’ve held tension a long time. “Yes,” he said. “You do.” He jumped up, dusted off his core-droys, and set off, wagging his hand for me to follow.

I followed.

He took me down the hall to this place that would have been an altar, if it was a church, and then around and through a little door.

“Up,” he said.

This was a different space, narrow not big, closed not open, low-ceilinged, tight.

“The stacks,” he said. Slowly by slowly we went up the zigzag stairs. They made this ringing noise in all that silence. His steps, my steps. Now and then we go through a padded door and then up again. There was an elevator, but a lock bar bolted over it. He’d look back at me grinning, like a dad taking a kid for a treat.

There were so many books. Endless. Lonely. Fearsome. Looking at me, like those demon faces. Thinking their words, reading themselves to themselves.

I knew we were high up now, but it didn’t feel like it; it felt like being down in a mine. There was only a light now and then, and it was just an emergency or like a nite-lite. “What’s that smell?”

“Books.”

It was a strange smell, musty or mildewy but dry and not ick, sort of appealing actually, like I don’t know what, a nice cave or a grandma’s bedroom or. It smelled... old.

He turned down a narrow passage and ran his hand gently across some books, looking no different to me than the others. “Poe,” he said. “You’ve read Poe, of course.”

This suspishy look in his eye made it clear I was supposed to say Of course, but of course I couldn’t. “A little, maybe,” I said. “I think I played the game a few times.”

He took one out, opened it, and spoke words, not like he was reading them, like he was remembering them or making them up. “There was a discordant hum of human voices!” he whisper-yelled. “There was a loud blast as of many trumpets! There was a harsh grating as of a thousand thunders! The fiery walls rushed back! An outstretched arm caught my own as I fell, fainting, into the abyss. It was that of General Lasalle. The French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies.”

The Pit and the Pendulum. Didn’t know that then. Sure do now.

He closed the book gently, like it might be hurt if he smacked it shut, and put it in its place like putting a baby to bed. Patted it.

“Up,” he said. He pushed me along to the next stair up.

Then another smell, almost not there at first, then more. Not nice, bad. Something dead, dead rat like we once had in the basement.

“Books,” he said.

“Not books,” I said.

“Up,” he said. “It’s up this way.” He pushed me ahead of him through another padded door and up another metal stair. It was starting to feel a little close-to-phobic. “Where’s this book?” I said. “I gotta go. There’s a party. There’s a class.”

“Here!”

There was an empty space in the ranks of shelves, where they’d been sort of dismantled somehow. He grabbed my shoulders and turned me toward it. I was done here, hey, I wanted out, and wondered if I knew how to get out. “Okay,” I said, “just a peek, then we go, yah?”

“Shut up,” he said. He gave me a shove in the back, he growl-shrieked, and then that’s all I knew. I guess a minute or two, or seconds, and things appeared again, like coming into focus. I’d got hit on the head. Hit on my fucking head with something by this fucking heyjoe.

I reached out to smack him, and I couldn’t. Fucker laughed.

I was stuck to the metal shelving. With zipties.

“What the fuck,” I said, calmly. I even tried a little laugh.

“What indeed,” he said.

“Heyjoe,” I said. “Come undo. I can’t.”

“I see that you can’t.”

Getting so weird. He was looking at me like I was a big goodie bar.

Then. This happened. No shit. He turned and from the shelves across the walkway he started pulling out handfuls of books and plopping them down around me. Then more. “You’ll be happy here,” he said. “Right here with the other book lovers, haha. Yes. One on each side of you. Kyra I think was the name. And Ira. Or something. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. You’ll be right in the middle, like Alice.”

“Shut up,” I said. “Get me out.”

“You won’t have much,” he said. “And soon you won’t need much. Oh, but you’ll have what no one else does. You’ll have books!”

He was piling up the books any which way, pressing them against me. Working like a madman. I almost couldn’t see over them now. I could hear the Librarian breathing, almost panting, like — well, like panting.

“For shit’s sake!” I cried. “For the love of Mike!”

“Yes,” said the Librarian, calm-cold, still piling books. “For the love of Mike.”

There was no more light now. I was behind the wall of books. It was black dark. I couldn’t even read the titles. I started yelling. I knew it was no good, but I did it anyway. Actually it wasn’t a plan. I just did it.

“Calling for help?” the Librarian said, and I could hear the sneer. “Who do you think will come to your rescue here? Pip? Holmes? Allan Quatermain?”

I didn’t know those guys. Or any guys. My wrists were bleeding from fighting with the zipties, you can’t break a ziptie, this I knew but still.

“If you need me,” he whispered into the cracks in the bookpile, “I will be downstairs. In Reference.” And he laughed like a maniac, which he actually was. I could hear his feet go down the metal stairs. “No!” I yelled. “I love books! Books! BOOKS!”

Nothing. No sound. Probs I gave another scream. I don’t actually remember. In a Library no one can hear you scream.

How long was I in there, behind the books? A day? Days? I blacked out, then came back, and there were books. I believe I peed my pants. When I was alert I could only see books; also when I was passed out. Once I thought I’d got free and was reading one, but that wasn’t factual. It seemed all the time that the books were actually coming closer to me, like pressing in, the stacks squirmishing forward to crush me. He came back once. I heard his feet. I thought he’d had a change of heart. I sort of moaned-pleaded, I could hardly speak; he nosed around like some rat sniffing for what he could get.

“Help,” I whispered. “Oh help.” Then I wandered away again into nowheres and when I came to he was gone again.

I was done for. Like Kyra and Ira. I could see them in my mind, skeletons hung up with zipties like corpse pirates, behind their books. I was just in the act of passing out again, for good this time, the books smothering me in revenge — and at that exact second I heard footsteps, foot-dings, on the stairs, not one person’s but two or three’s, coming up from below. Then came this wild kungfu yell and the books were pushed away, this side, that side, and a little light came in. An outstretched hand caught my arm.

It was the hand of Seymour Chin. The Singaporean had reached New Haven. The Library was in the hands of its enemies.

What I remember after that is not much. Seymour Chin looking at me like his face was going to pop — I’d never seen the man in the body. Behind him this very large diversity person in body armor, Yale blue, their hand on their gun, looking like they’d seen a well you know.

Then I fainted.

So what it was that happened, which I learned later in the Yale hospital where they checked me out: Seymour’d followed a thumbnail microtag we worked on freshman year — our first proj! I installed it on myself way then and forgot! Amazing he could trace his way up through the stacks, but that was what the tag was supposed to do, and damn it did.

Seymour explained about the rumors. Hadn’t I heard them? The Old Campus Vampire. No I hadn’t. Heyjoe, everybody tells them for giggles, just. But some people really had disappeared over the years, maybe just wandering in the empty buildings or like looter-ish. Never found. Seymour was very into stories like that in gaming and such. But not kidding? Not one kid, he said. The Library Ghoul. The Book Fiend. We had to laugh, but it wasn’t actually funny. Because it wasn’t just Kyra and Ira. It was others. They’re still looking.

“Heyjoe,” he said to me when we’d left the hospital and got out from around the media collected there. “Still time. Let’s go to the College, get a beer. Wet T contest! So I heard. Rock out!”

Seymour too loves old things.

“Not for me, Seymour, sorry to say.” I checked my watch, saw messages and-cetera. Relief. “Love you, heyjoe, but you know what?” I said. “Spring Break’s over. I need to get back to the real world.”

Then I see it’s the Library Fiend. Like looking at me out of my watch. Startled, very. Then I see it’s like Foxnews, it’s his what, arraignment? In this dim New Haven courtroom. He seemed so small. When the public defender person said something about a psych-eval he piped right up, and his weird eyes started revolving. “True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” He tried to get to his feet but a cop shoved him back. “The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?”

Well fuck yes you are, heyjoe.

“Poe,” I said. “I bet.”

“Hmmever,” Seymour said. He was guiding me along the street through the crowd. They were going in and out of the tech stores and the clothes and shoes and such. But not into one store, on a corner, that seemed closed. We got closer and it looked closeder. But it wasn’t. There were lights on inside, and on the window was written BOOKS.

I stopped.

“I wonder,” I said. “Poe.”

“Oh no, heyjoe. Step away from the door.”

“Just books, Seymour.”

“Heyjoe,” he said, tugging. “You can’t be too careful.”

Silhouettes by Chandra Prasad

Wooster Square

“It’s not the same one.”

The shopkeeper tried to hide his disappointment and annoyance. He was clutching a copy of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. It was a small miracle that he had the book at all. “Look — good shape,” he insisted, gesturing to the gold-embossed cover. He flipped through the pages, revealing mostly crisp, stainless paper.

“It’s not the one I used to have,” the customer, a young man, replied. “Mine had a sphinx — with wings — on the cover.”

The shopkeeper shook his head, struggling to understand. Nearly everyone who entered his shop spoke Italian, usually infused with the southern cadence of Amalfi and Atrani. It was disconcerting to encounter a person like this, someone with no trace of the old country.

“I give you discount...” the shopkeeper said, beginning to despair. It had been terribly slow all week at his store, which mainly sold dry goods. Maybe he should shutter the little alcove of English and Italian books he kept in the back. He could use the additional space to sell fresh bread and his wife’s homemade salami. Books were an indulgence few could afford these days.

“I don’t want it. But would you keep an eye out for the one I do want? The one with the sphinx?”

The shopkeeper nodded, although he didn’t quite understand. He didn’t like this customer, who spoke tersely, without warmth or congeniality. Still, business was business. He would try to find another copy. One with a different cover. That much he understood. “Come back in a week,” he called out as the young man left, the bells jingling on the door behind him.

The man walked slowly down Court Street. He took off his brimmed hat, trying not to perspire on what promised to be another scorching day. He was conscious of his limp, although it was subtle now, not the problem it had been when he was a child. But he was sure people noticed it: the contrast between his youthful appearance and elderly hobble.

He passed several men — metal nails in their mouths, hammers in their hands — boarding up yet another building. The economy had soured since the crash and factories around Wooster Square were folding like poker hands. Without work, people were running out of money. The row houses along the street, once grand and stately, showed a hundred signs of neglect: chipped paint, sagging porches, missing shutters, sunken roofs. Fifty years ago they’d been opulent single-family homes for the rich; now they were overcrowded rooming houses for the broke.

Still, the young man saw signs of resilience and self-sufficiency too. He passed household vegetable gardens and chicken coops. He passed bakeries, meat markets, and pastry shops still holding on. The unemployed were turning their houses into makeshift shops, leaving their windows open so that the delicious smells of their cooking would lure passersby. More than once, the man had stopped impulsively to buy tomato pies or rich, sweet pastiera. If his mother were still alive, she would be shocked. Her Irish son eating Italian food.

A few minutes later he reached his workplace, a hulking brick building called Strouse Adler — one of the few factories in Wooster Square that was still turning a profit. He went in the front entrance, noting a drunk loitering near the door. No doubt he was there to leer at the female workers who flooded the main entrance at 8:15 every morning. Mr. Russo, the boss, was strict about punctuality. He threw on the power switch at exactly 8:30, and God help anyone who was late.

The man maneuvered through the corridors, nodding curtly at passing seamstresses and bundle girls. His room was on the second floor. A year ago he’d been hired by Mr. Russo to be the company’s chief advertising artist. He drew portraits of girls modeling Strouse Adler’s products: corsets, mostly. His drawings were published in newspaper advertisements throughout the country, although he was never credited. Mr. Russo was a stickler for discretion too.

The man put a sketchbook on his easel and sharpened the dull ends of his lead pencils. Today he would be drawing a model wearing a “Smoothie,” one of Strouse Adler’s most popular corsets. It was constructed with a newfangled material, latex, which was nothing like the thick, coarse cloth of the past. Modern women seemed to love the flaw-disguising stretchiness of latex. Mr. Russo loved it too, because of the savings. Only a little material was needed for each corset, compared to the eight yards of yesteryear.

After the metal sewing machines whirred to life on the floor below, his first model sashayed in. Antonia Colavolpe. She and her younger sister Cecilia were frequent subjects in Strouse Adler’s advertising. Although both girls were beautiful, they were not the kind of models Mr. Russo typically employed. As a rule, he didn’t hire local girls.

“Italian fathers can be a nightmare,” he’d once confided. “And none of them want their daughters posing in underwear.”

Even so, the Colavolpe sisters, with their natural eighteen-inch waists, had been too good to pass up.

Antonia shut the door behind her. “Good morning,” she said cheerfully, tossing back dark, pin-curled hair. Behind a partition in the corner of the room, she took off her clothes and put on the corset that awaited her. “Will you be finished by noon, Lewis? I have to be somewhere.” She poked out her head and winked at him. “Secret rendezvous.”

Lewis knew most fellas would find her irresistible: her boldness and bright red lipstick. But he bristled when she used his first name. It breached a professional distance he tried to maintain. “We should be done by then,” he replied.

“Thanks. Oh gracious — this one’s divine.”

She stepped out from behind the screen and ran her fingers along silky paneling and lacy, beribboned trim. The corset fit her like a second skin.

“Hands at your sides, please,” he instructed. “Tilt your head a little and cock your right hip. Just a couple inches.”

He sketched her for about twenty minutes as she chatted merrily about the possibility of seeing a double feature on Friday night. Or maybe finding a new beau. She was too blithe and animated for his taste, but at least she kept her body still. That was all Lewis really cared about.

“Any plans for this weekend?” she asked.

He didn’t answer her right away. “Nothing very interesting, I’m afraid.”

“Really, you can be such a wet blanket, Lewis.”

He ignored that and began to draw the contours of a face. Not Antonia’s face, though. He never drew the real faces of his models. Because Mr. Russo demanded absolute discretion, yes, but also because Lewis preferred his drawings to be anonymous. He liked to imagine the heads separate from the bodies. That way, when he sketched a sweet, wholesome face, he didn’t have to worry about it contradicting the bombshell body to which it was attached.

“I’d let you take me out,” she said coyly. “So that when someone asks you what you did on Saturday night, you’d have something to say. Would you like that, Lewis?”

He stared at the paper and licked the tip of his pencil. “Miss Colavolpe, I’d like it if you stopped talking.”

After Antonia had gone, he headed for the kitchenette, a room of sea-green walls and checkerboard floor tiles that was reserved for management. But being a favorite of Mrs. Russo, he was allowed access.

Lewis couldn’t quite remember when or how their routine had started. At some point, Mrs. Russo had decided to pack him a lunch. Now she did it every day. The two always met at noon — sharp — and ate together.

Today the plate that awaited him was spaghetti with anchovies and fennel. Mrs. Russo always cooked Italian food, although she — like Lewis — was not Italian. She’d learned the recipes, she said, to satisfy her husband.

She smiled warmly when Lewis joined her at the table.

“Thank you, Mrs. Russo,” he said. “This looks divine.”

“I’ve told you a thousand times to call me Doris.”

“Thank you, Doris.”

Mrs. Russo’s own meal remained untouched. She was too busy sewing to eat. In her fingers were pattern pieces for a new corset. She liked to make original designs with unusual fabrics and hardware. Sometimes her work even made it into production. Out of everyone at Strouse Adler, Mrs. Russo probably knew the most about corsets, which was ironic since Lewis had never seen her wear one. She was a big-boned woman, thick in the rear and middle in particular. Yet she moved about self-confidently, unbothered by the fleshy rolls that Strouse Adler deemed the enemy.

“What’s this one going to be like?” he asked her.

“Different. Modern,” she replied. When he raised an eyebrow, she laughed. “Don’t look so alarmed. It’s not the second coming of the electric corset.”

He laughed too. It was a running joke between them: how Strouse Adler had once deigned to manufacture Dr. Scott’s electric corset, which had promised to cure everything from paralysis to impaired circulation. An electric corset: quackery at its finest.

“Who was the model this morning?” she asked as she stitched.

“Miss Colavolpe. The older one.”

“You mean the greedy one. Do you know she had the nerve to ask me for more money? She makes four times what our seamstresses make — and I have to hold back their raises. Again.”

“You and Mr. Russo are very generous to the models.”

“Too generous. I told that Antonia, No sirree, and that if she doesn’t stop sweeping through the front entrance like Hedy Lamarr, she won’t have a job at all. She’s attracting too much attention. But I think she likes that.”

He nodded, and she sniffed in satisfaction. Lewis felt an ease with Mrs. Russo that he didn’t feel with anyone else at work. Or anyone else in his life, really. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that he was not only the Russos’ employee, but also their tenant. A few blocks away, he rented the basement apartment of their brownstone. He had a separate entrance, and thus, privacy and independence. Even so, his life felt tethered to theirs.

As Lewis dug into his meal, Mr. Russo popped his head in. “You forgot the anchovy sauce,” he said testily, staring at his wife. He was holding his plate in his hands — the same lunch Lewis was enjoying. Seeing him, Mr. Russo softened. “No matter — just remember it next time,” he muttered.

“I’ll be done with the New York Times ad by tomorrow morning,” Lewis told him.

“Good man.”

Mr. Russo ran his hands down the front of his slacks, which were always perfectly pressed. He was a dapper man, by any standard. Tall and elegant, he carried himself well. Lewis had observed the models try to flirt with him many times, but he was always dismissive. Lewis admired that.

“I have to eat this in accounting. Harold bungled the Chicago shipment again,” Mr. Russo complained.

“Good luck, dear,” his wife said, although it was Lewis he glanced at on his way out. She put the corset pieces on the table and smoothed them with her fingers.

“He acts like a baby,” she said, shrugging, apologetic. “Maybe because we have no babies of our own. When I first got married, I thought we’d have half a dozen by now.” She looked like she wanted to say more, but didn’t. Instead, she fiddled with a thimble that was too small for her meaty thumb. “What about you? Do you plan on settling down and becoming a father?”

He didn’t want to admit that the question had never occurred to him. He still felt worlds away from marrying, never mind having a child. Not that he wasn’t old enough. There were plenty of fellas his age who already had children — he saw them every time he walked though Wooster Square. Fathers trying to untangle themselves from gaggles of small, cherub-cheeked children. It was a sight Lewis couldn’t relate to. He’d been an only child, and he couldn’t remember ever clinging to his father. Quite the opposite; he’d only ever wanted to be with his mother. Fed you from the tit until you were five! his father had said once. It was unnatural! Lewis shuddered, trying to push the memory back into whatever dark recess it had crawled out of.

“Are you feeling well, Lewis? You’ve gone pale. I hope I didn’t upset you.”

“Everything’s fine,” he assured her. Briefly, he patted her plump fingers, savoring their warmth.

She sighed and held up the corset, which was now loosely fitted together, and shook her head. “It always shocks me how busy these things are. When they’re finished, you’d never know how much is inside of them: the busk, bones, grommets, channels, casings, and lining. When all’s said and done, you don’t see any of that — only the silhouette.”

“It’s the art of disguise,” he said.

She nodded. “That’s right. In more ways than one.”

A week later, Cecilia walked into his workroom. In contrast to the brazen entrances Antonia made, Cecilia’s meekness was refreshing. She tapped on the door first, opened it an inch, and whispered, “May I come in?”

Mr. Russo was on his way out. He’d come to request a couple changes to the New York Times ad. “I want a blonde, not a brunette,” he’d said. “And can you make her face younger? For Pete’s sake, that old mug reminds me of my grandmother.” He took his hand off Lewis’s shoulder, where it had been resting for quite some time, and waved off the girl as she attempted to greet him. “Get it to me by quitting time,” he said to Lewis, shutting the door behind him. Lewis could hear the beat of his glossy black shoes as he walked down the corridor.

Head bent, Cecilia moved behind the partition. Lewis put down his pencil and stretched. He was stiff from sitting so long. Nervous too. Strangely, Cecilia made him even more uncomfortable than her sister did. She was always punctual and polite, and didn’t prattle on about her personal life. She struck him as a decent girl. A good girl.

When she reemerged, she avoided his eyes. The corset was cut modestly, generous and straight at the top, covering most of her bosom. It wasn’t very fancy, with minimal flourishes and decoration. Lewis was grateful. He didn’t want her to feel any more self-conscious than she already was.

“Hold your hands behind your back loosely, please, and stare off into the distance — as if you’re admiring a sunset,” he told her.

She did as instructed.

“Raise your chin a little and tilt your head to the side. That’s it.”

She stood motionless for a few minutes as Lewis sketched her in broad strokes.

“I’ve been reading that we might get involved in the war,” she said, still staring toward an imaginary sun. “Do you think so, Mr. O’Connor?”

He flicked his pencil back and forth, then began to narrow one of her thighs. “I don’t know. What do you think?”

“I think we will. I think we have to. It’s terrible that we’ve abandoned Great Britain like this. And now the Soviets are joining the fight too.” When he didn’t reply, she went on: “I know others would disagree. They say we have to focus on ourselves — and fix the problems here in America. But I say, you should never abandon a friend in need.”

Lewis decided he would use Cecilia’s eyes in the drawing. He liked how wide and frank they looked. As long as he distorted the other features, he could keep them. “Sometimes it’s better not to have friends,” he said.

“What a strange thing to say.”

He shrugged. “It’s hard to know who to trust.”

“Well, I know we can’t trust those Nazis. And besides, isolation hasn’t worked so far. The economy is still terrible. In my family, my sister and I are the only ones who have jobs. And I’m counting aunts, uncles, and cousins. The whole kit and caboodle.”

“I prefer to be an outsider,” he maintained. “You can see everything better from a distance. It’s when you get too close that things go wrong.”

“I never looked at it that way.”

A silence ensued, but not an uncomfortable one. Both Lewis and Cecilia were lost in their own thoughts. He continued to sketch, shading and filling in detail.

“I like talking with you,” she said suddenly. “You don’t waste words. Have you noticed that most people do? Waste words, I mean.”

Again, he didn’t answer. She began to blush.

This is why Mr. Russo hired me, Lewis thought. He knows I’ll never take advantage of my position. He knows there’s something in me — something strange — that doesn’t want to.

“I was w-wondering,” she stammered, “if you’d like to take a walk with me after work sometime?”

He had to admit that she looked pretty, her pink cheeks a lovely contrast to her pale skin. He wondered if, just once, he ought to take a chance. Do something a normal man would do in a heartbeat. He wondered if maybe he ought to give Mrs. Russo’s question more thought. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t lonely — that he didn’t want companionship. It was hard — and exhausting — to be so different, to want things he couldn’t even mention.

“It’s okay if you don’t,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean to be presumptuous. Maybe you have someone... or maybe you’re not interested. Oh God. I’ve never done this before. My mother would be horrified.”

“I’d like to take a walk with you,” he said finally. “How about today?”

“Today?”

“Yes. After work. Let’s walk to the green.”

“But all the grass is dead there — it’s been so hot.”

“We don’t have to look at the grass.”

She smiled bashfully. “Okay, Mr. O’Connor.”

“You can call me Lewis.”

“Okay, Lewis.”

They didn’t talk much at first. He was preoccupied with his limp. He hoped she wouldn’t notice it, or if she did, that she wouldn’t mention it. It seemed to him that she was as nervous as he was. She kept playing with her hair and smoothing the skirt of her polka-dot dress, which rustled in the warm breeze.

“At least it’s not as humid as yesterday,” she said.

He nodded. They were walking close, but not too close. A lot of people worked at Strouse Adler — he didn’t want to give them something to gossip about.

“Lewis, have you noticed that this summer feels different?”

“What do you mean?”

“Summer is usually such a happy time. All the children are running outside. The men are playing bocce. There are parties and dancing and gelato...”

“I see all of that.”

“Yes, but this summer there’s something else. A kind of shadow. I can’t explain it.”

“Do you mean a dread?”

She looked at him sharply. “Yes — that’s exactly what I mean! What do you think is causing it?”

“Maybe it has to do with the quilt fire.”

“I think you’re right, Mr. O’Connor. I mean, Lewis. It must be the quilt fire. It was terrible, wasn’t it?”

The fire at the New Haven Quilt and Pad Company had indeed been terrible. Though the incident on nearby Franklin Street had happened months ago, Lewis knew it still haunted Wooster Square. Ten people had been trapped in a fire on the third floor. Rumor had it the automatic sprinkler system had been turned off and the fire doors ordered shut. These measures wouldn’t have surprised Lewis. Every factory in this part of town cut corners. Savings always trumped safety.

“I lost my favorite cousin in that fire,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Did you know anyone that worked there?”

“No.”

“Really? You’re the first person I’ve talked to in Wooster Square who’s said that.”

“I don’t know many people. I try to keep to myself.”

“Why?”

“It’s part of my policy of isolation,” he said, smiling at her wryly.

They had reached the green. She was right about the grass. And the elms weren’t faring much better. Those few that had survived the big hurricane in ’38 were beginning to look sick. He wondered if another wave of the tree disease was underway.

“I’d love to sit in the shade, but I don’t think there is any,” she observed.

They found a seat on a sun-soaked bench and looked around. A few young men sauntered by and one of them stole an appreciative glance at Cecilia’s shapely calves. Lewis knew he ought to feel protective, even territorial, but he didn’t.

“I love to watch people,” she said, oblivious to the attention. My sister and I try to figure out what they’re thinking. Where they’re going. What their lives are like.” She paused and turned to him searchingly. “Why do you prefer to be alone, Lewis? Is it because you’re shy?”

“I just don’t relate to most people.”

“Do you think you could relate to me?”

He studied her face. She wasn’t wearing any lipstick or rouge, not like her sister, who seemed to use a trowel to apply her cosmetics. Cecilia was a fresh-faced, lovely young woman. And that was the problem.

Suddenly she leaned in and tilted her head, just the way he’d asked her to do hours ago. She closed her eyes. Her lashes, thick and long, nearly rested on the ripe apples of her cheeks. He knew what she was waiting for.

“No,” he said.

“What?” Discombobulated, she opened her eyes.

“I don’t relate to you at all.”

He offered to walk her home, but she refused. She was too embarrassed. Mortified was the word she’d used. Lewis felt bad. He knew he’d handled things poorly. He should have been more kind. He should have made a gentlemanly excuse. It wasn’t the girl’s fault, after all. Their outing had been an experiment. A failed experiment.

When he got home he soaked his feet in a bath. He looked at them side by side. The right foot was normal. The left was a disfigured, swollen, scarred clod of meat. It didn’t even have toes, just oddly shaped nubs. And the skin — it didn’t resemble regular skin. It was tough and rubbery and crosshatched with gleaming-pale connective tissue.

Even under the warm water, his bad foot throbbed. Sometimes it did this, especially when the weather was very hot or cold. He sighed, undressed, and slid his whole body into the water. Through the narrow basement windows, the aroma of a hundred dinners wafted in. It was getting late, he should have been hungry by now. But the walk had left a bad taste in his mouth.

He went to bed soon after, lying awake and listening to Victrolas, men singing opera, squealing children. The pain kept him up, as did the persistent feeling that he was a reject, abnormal, maybe even a monster.

It must have been two o’clock by the time he finally drifted to sleep. He awoke to a sharp rap on the front door. He sat up abruptly, thinking it was daybreak. He must be late for work. But when he opened his eyes, darkness still streamed through his windows.

More knocking.

His instincts told him that it was Cecilia. What did she want? An apology? A second chance?

“It’s me,” a voice called out.

“Mr. Russo?”

“Open up, Lewis.”

Hurriedly, he slipped on pants and opened the door. He was sure it was an emergency; Mrs. Russo must be ill. Maybe she needed to go to the hospital.

“What is it?” he asked worriedly.

But Mr. Russo didn’t appear distressed. He leaned his head against the doorframe, and then the whole of his weight. He smelled like a distillery.

“Someone said they saw you,” he mumbled in a gravelly voice. “You were with one of the Colavolpe girls.” He sounded irritated, but not angry. Lewis was worried that he would slump over and fall to the ground.

“We went for a walk,” he replied.

“Consorting with a model is not acceptable.”

Lewis rubbed his large, pale eyes. “I’m sorry — I lost my head. It won’t happen again.”

Mr. Russo rubbed his eyes too; they looked bleary and bloodshot. “I didn’t peg you for that type, Lewis.”

“What type do you mean, sir?”

“The type that would exploit an opportunity.”

“I didn’t do any such thing. We just went for a walk.”

“It has been my experience, Lewis, that men like yourself aren’t always forthcoming about the truth.”

Lewis was fully awake now, and cross. He resented Mr. Russo for showing up on his doorstep at this time of night, for causing him concern, for accusing him of something he hadn’t done. Lewis had thought that Mr. Russo had a better opinion of him. He’d always believed there was a trust between them, unspoken but implicit.

“I am being truthful,” he said.

Mr. Russo stared at Lewis, and as he stared, his expression softened. Tenderness, or something like it, replaced consternation. He reached out and brushed Lewis’s cheek with his fingertips.

“Men like us aren’t always forthcoming,” he whispered.

Lewis has no idea what to say. Mr. Russo had taken a step closer. His foot was practically across the threshold. Lewis saw that his tie was loose, the top buttons of his shirt undone. A tuft of curly black hair peeked out from the starchy opening. He looked like a different man.

Lewis breathed deeply. He hated the whiskey smell of Mr. Russo’s breath. He knew that odor all too well. It was his first olfactory memory — forever branded on his brain. He remembered his father bending over him, hands clenching his spindly arms like vises, the whites of his eyes pink like Mr. Russo’s. His father promised another thrashing with the belt. The thick brown one with the heavy metal buckle. The one Lewis feared more than anything in this world.

That memory of his father contrasted deeply with his early memories of his mother, which were visual and tactile. He recalled the scratchy straw-stuffed mattress they used to lie on. The way he would snuggle against her corpulent body, nestling deep into the warm, protective rolls of her flesh. He’d felt so safe there, as she read to him from their favorite book. She must have read it thirty times, but he never tired of listening to it.

And then one day everything ended. His father came home more drunk than usual, stumbling through the door, angry and jealous about something Lewis didn’t understand. He ranted, grabbed the book, and threw it into the fire. Lewis remembered being picked up roughly, and then dangled over a large pot of boiling water, his mother screaming “Stop!” and “No!” — but it was too late. His father dipped his foot into the pot. Lewis recoiled like a wild animal fending for its life — thrashing, biting, clawing. He remembered being dropped to the floor, his mother futilely beating his father with her fists. From the ground, his view somehow magnified, Lewis watched his father strike his mother’s face with the back of his hand. She toppled over, hitting her head on the sharp corner of the counter.

Lewis remembered his father’s expression, anger and anguish in equal measures, as he gazed down at his wife and son, realizing the permanence of what he’d done. And then Lewis’s pain became intolerable, growing with the pool of sticky, scarlet blood on the floor under his mother’s head. His own wailing reached a piercing crescendo. His father fled and a neighbor entered, followed by a policeman. This was as much of the story as Lewis could dredge up, for he must have passed out.

After that, everything in his life changed. He lived somewhere else, bunking in a room with many children. He barely spoke, but drew incessantly on the paper the nuns gave him: old newspapers, magazines, wrapping paper, cut-up cardboard boxes. He grew older in a place where parents no longer existed, until he was old enough to leave.

“I understand your message,” Lewis now said, meeting Mr. Russo’s eyes meaningfully. “You don’t need to come around again.”

For a second Mr. Russo glanced down, then looked up again bitterly. Lewis quickly shut the door. After a pause, he locked it too.

The next morning, Lewis awoke with a headache. It was as if he’d been the one drinking whiskey all night. He cringed when he remembered whom he was scheduled to draw that morning: Antonia. Lewis knew there would be trouble. Women always talked to each other. And sisters — they must tell each other everything. He’d been foolish to ignore that fact.

She strutted into his workroom without a word, shoulders squared, back straight as a lightning rod. Behind the partition she noisily changed her clothes. She emerged in the day’s garments: a conical brassiere, garters, stockings, high heels, and a waist-high, lace-up corset. Lewis took a deep breath. Behind his sketch pad, he felt unnerved. By contrast, Antonia appeared supremely confident.

“We’ll be drawing you from the front today. Straight on. One hand on your hip, the other dangling, fingers relaxed,” he said. “Look at me directly, please.”

She glared at him as she assumed the position he’d requested. Under his arms, sweat stains bloomed.

“I hear you went out with my sister,” she said. Lewis knew more was coming. Her voice was smug, indignant, and jealous all at once. “She said you were quite peculiar, but I could have told her that.”

“Relax your hands, please. They’re clenched.”

“She said you didn’t like her.”

Lewis didn’t reply.

“She said she’s not your type. But I guess I’m not your type either, am I, Lewis?”

He wiped his brow. Now his whole body was perspiring, though this was one of the few rooms at Strouse Adler that was air-conditioned.

“What I want to know is — what is your type?”

“I don’t think that’s an appropriate question, Miss Colavolpe.”

“But it was appropriate to take out my sister?”

“No, that wasn’t appropriate either,” he conceded.

“All I want you to do is answer the question. What kind of girl do you want? My sister thinks the problem is that you don’t know what to do. I think you know what to do — but can’t do it.”

Quietly, Lewis chose another pencil, licked the tip, and kept drawing. He wasn’t sketching Antonia, however. The body he created was naked, lush, and fat — thick in the middle. A baby suckled on a swollen, unconstrained breast. Antonia continued to antagonize him. All the while, he wanted to argue, but he’d promised himself he wouldn’t insult her.

The rest of the day passed in a blur. He picked at the meal Mrs. Russo had packed him. He still had no appetite. She fretted, asking him if he was feeling well.

“I’m fine,” he replied, avoiding eye contact.

After lunch he crumpled up the picture he’d drawn. From memory, he tried to sketch how Antonia had appeared that morning, like an angry empress, but his mind was muddled. His hands kept trembling and he couldn’t concentrate. Eventually, he threw his pencil on the floor and left the room to wander the halls of the factory. On the first floor he loitered outside one of the huge workrooms. Like the others, this one had a wood floor and slow-moving fans. Corsets and brassieres and other silky things spilled out of bins. Many lay scattered about on the ground. The air was thick with lint particles.

The ear-piercing cacophony of sewing machines filled his head, giving him a respite from his thoughts. From outside the room he watched row after row of tired women hunched over their machines, working in tandem. Occasionally they paused, or tried to take a smoke break. But those were discouraged, as was talking. Mainly, the women hummed or sang as their fingers busily guided fabric under sharp needles.

Young bundle girls moved the garments from station to station, for there were many stages before a product was complete: cutting, sewing, embroidering, eyeletting, boning, binding, trimming, starching, ironing, lacing, and packing. By comparison, Lewis’s job was a breeze.

The noise distracted him for a time, but it also made his headache worse. He decided to leave work early — something he rarely did. With nothing to do, he walked New Haven for hours, until his legs tired. Until his left foot felt like it was on fire.

On his way home he decided to walk down Court Street, to the store that carried books. Over a week had passed; he’d counted the days. He opened the door and greeted the shopkeeper, who had a twinkle in his eye.

“I have it,” the man said proudly.

Lewis was skeptical. In his heart he didn’t believe he would ever find that childhood treasure again. Sometimes he wondered if he had imagined it in the first place.

The storekeeper disappeared into the back, returning a few moments later with a book in his hands. The book. The same version of The Time Machine that Lewis’s mother had read to him when he was a young boy.

“It’s a sfinge?” the shopkeeper asked, pointing to the cover. “I find it — for you.”

“Yes, the sphinx,” Lewis said, wide-eyed. There it was, front and center, the same mythical, lion-haunched creature he remembered.

“Hard to find. Very hard to find,” the shopkeeper said, holding fast to the book. Still smiling, he sized Lewis up. “Perfect condition. I take only ten.”

“Ten dollars?”

When the man nodded, Lewis nearly lost his breath. It was an unreasonable sum, especially now. Especially here. Nobody had that kind of money. But Lewis could not possibly leave without the book. He opened his wallet and gave the man what he’d asked for.

The man examined the bill carefully, then nodded again. Humming, he wrapped the book in brown paper, tied it with twine, and handed it to Lewis. “Glad you happy,” he said.

Lewis tipped his hat on his way out. He thought that happy wasn’t quite the right word. What Lewis felt was transported.

It was dusk by the time he finally returned to his apartment.

He fell asleep in a chair while reading the book, having lost himself in familiar characters from another time. Hours later, a knock on the door awakened him. He was annoyed, although it was still a reasonable hour — not the middle of the night. Readying himself for a conflict, he was shocked to see Mrs. Russo — instead of her husband. She smiled and held out a steaming plate of food.

“I brought you dinner. I was worried about you at lunchtime today. Still am. You look sick, if you don’t mind my saying.”

“I’m fine,” he said brusquely. Now that he had the book, it was going to be harder to keep the bad thoughts at bay. “But I appreciate your kindness,” he added, trying not to look at her.

“My husband’s out with the boys tonight. They play cards once a week. Pinochle. Those games must be something.”

“Why do you say that?”

“When my husband comes home, he always looks like a freight train hit him.”

“Boys will be boys,” he muttered.

“Indeed.”

Lewis noted a quaver in her voice. Perhaps she understood more than she was letting on. Perhaps she needed a confidant, someone to pour her heart out to. He knew he shouldn’t let her in, for her own sake, but he didn’t want to disappoint her either.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” he asked after a beat. It felt funny to ask — it was her house, after all.

“If you don’t mind — that would be nice.”

He’d been right: she wanted an intimate. She needed him — although not as much as he needed her. He guided her inside and motioned for her to sit in one of the wooden chairs that flanked the kitchen table. Primly, she adjusted her voluminous floral dress, her ample figure overflowing the seat. Lewis watched her intently. He had a sudden urge to sit in her lap, to feel himself engulfed in the soft, snug folds of her flesh.

When she caught him staring, Lewis turned away in embarrassment and started the coffee. He found the bottle of milk and the sugar jar, napkins, and spoons. He glanced at the stove, ashamed at how dirty it was, and at the greasy cast-iron frying pan he kept on one of the burner grates.

“The coffee will be ready in no time,” he said.

“Thank you, Lewis. You’re always very good to me.”

“I was about to say the same thing about you, Mrs. Russo... Doris.”

“We’re like family, you and I, aren’t we?”

Lewis realized that his hands were shaking again. In his fingers, the sugar jar trembled, its lid tinkling. He wished she hadn’t said that. It was hard enough to distance himself without hearing that kind of talk. Now that she was here, alone with him, he couldn’t stop thinking that the book might be a sign — a sign that the time had come.

“You said you thought you’d have half a dozen,” he blurted, a new coat of sweat covering his body. “What if you could still have one?”

“Pardon?”

“I could give you what you want.”

“What are you saying, Lewis?”

“Someone to hold,” he said. “I could give that to you.”

She scrutinized him, her warm eyes cooling. “You should eat your dinner, Lewis.”

“Don’t you see?” he said, gaining momentum, unable to stop. “Everything is coming together.”

“I think I need to wish you a good night, Lewis.”

She stood up quickly and clumsily, the thin fabric of her dress clinging to the thick, undulating ripples of her body. Staring at her unabashedly, he realized how close he was. Terribly close.

“Please,” he begged, “don’t leave.”

But she turned her back and snatched her purse, like she had finally caught a whiff of his freakishness. He set down the rattling sugar jar and stared at the stove. He hadn’t wanted it to come to this. But when he reached for the handle of the pan, he knew what he had to do.

Later, when the pan soaked in a sink full of sudsy red water, he realized that his foot had stopped hurting. It must be a miracle. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt such relief.

The heat wave was still in full force, and his apartment was sweltering. Even so, when Lewis crawled into bed, he slipped under the covers. With a satisfied sigh, he nestled against the pliant, ponderous body beside him. Still warm, it yielded as he maneuvered under the shelflike bosom. That spot had always been his favorite, the place he had preferred when his mother had read to him all those years ago. She couldn’t read anymore, of course, but he could tell her the story. The same book, the same pages, as close as he was ever going to get.

The Man in Room Eleven by Michael Cunningham

Chapel Street

The tenant in room eleven of the Hotel Duncan on Chapel Street has a lifetime lease, paid monthly, agreed to by the hotel’s long-deceased original owner.

No one who is currently employed by the Duncan (a rigorously plain building of dun-colored brick) has seen the man in room eleven in at least twenty years, which is the tenure of the longest-employed of the maids. That sole remaining maid does, however, remember stories told by another of the maids, long gone, who claimed to have seen the man. She described him as courteous, reserved, and perfectly manicured, though he kept his fingernails longer than was the general custom among men. He sported a mustache so thin and precise it might have been drawn on over his upper lip with a pencil, and always wore a hat, even in the upstairs halls.

That older maid (who died of a heart attack while cleaning on one of the upper floors) had said as well that he was a perfect gentleman, and a generous tipper. She was puzzled by, but grateful for, his request that his room never be cleaned. It was that much less work for her, after all, and the guests of the Duncan occasionally left their rooms in states of rather extreme, if conventional, disorder: the dark stains on the sheets, the moldy pizza slice that somehow fell behind the bureau and went undetected for weeks.

The older maid (not long before she died) did claim to have been cleaning one of the rooms after its occupant had checked out, and to have found something too awful to describe. When pressed for details, she’d simply shaken her head, crossed herself, and said that it was gone, that she had gotten rid of it and that was the end of the story.

The Hotel Duncan is hardly luxurious. It is, however, respectable, and relatively clean. It still books rooms overnight, like any hotel, but has become more prone, over the years, to guests who stay for longer periods: weeks, months, or, occasionally, years.

They are mostly, but not exclusively, men. They often spend hours in the hotel’s lobby, which, though in need of renovation, is possessed of that timeless, neither-here-nor-there quality common to certain older, less prosperous hotels: the crepuscular eternity of deep armchairs among potted palms, Persian rugs that appear to be indigo and black in the dim light, the sporadic chiming of the bell as the elevator makes its extremely slow progress from floor to floor.

The guests who frequent the lobby are various, of course, and each has a different story to tell, but if you speak to enough of them, a certain overall theme does seem to emerge. They are, almost all, currently waiting out the period that extends from one life to another. They have, most of them, left (or been expelled from) marriages, jobs, homes, institutions, or, occasionally (as one dapper, if tipsy, gentleman put it) have simply run out of the patience required of them to live as they’d been living.

They are, almost all of them, waiting for a next era to begin. Hopelessness is rare among them, though few seem to have specific dates in mind, or to be possessed of a plan that extends beyond the vision of vaguely improved circumstances. They are waiting for a check to arrive or a divorce to be finalized; they are waiting for a niece or nephew to come for them; they are expecting a huge cash settlement from the company that rendered them unable to work.

They languish there, in the lobby of the Hotel Duncan, as one of the several desk clerks (they are alike-looking as brothers — mild-faced, bespectacled men who might be forty or might be seventy) tends to hotel business, seated in the lobby’s singular pool of bright light (from its lone overhead fixture), behind the imposing old mahogany front desk.

The man in room eleven never comes to the lobby. He never leaves his room, which is on the top floor, facing the street. Reclusiveness, however, is not a crime. The only disturbance he’s ever caused has involved a handful of New Haven citizens who, over the years, have complained about a man staring down at them from the window of room eleven, his face obscured by wispy curtains. Unless the laws of New Haven change, however, staring from windows at people passing by on the street below is not cause for intervention by the police.

Still, several people have been sufficiently disconcerted by the man’s gaze that they have, in fact, called the police. Their complaints, though, not only fail to involve any actual assault, but those who call the police always find themselves unable to be specific about what, exactly, they believe the man to have done to them. They’re simply convinced that he shouldn’t be there; that he’s (as one Yale football player put it) “up to no good,” or (as reported by a woman who works as a cashier at the Rite-Aid) “he’s just sort of... creepy... I just feel like he’s doing something wrong in there.”

The police consistently inform these people that citizens are entitled to look as if they’re up to no good (as long as they merely look that way), and that if there were laws against creepiness, a considerable portion of the New Haven population would be in jail already.

The man in room eleven is respected by the management and staff, in large part because he pays faithfully, in cash, the money neatly inserted into an envelope he slips under his door at the beginning of every month, and because he requires virtually nothing of the hotel’s employees.

He plays the cello, quite well, but never after ten p.m. He apparently keeps a snake, which creates no disturbance of any kind. The snake’s existence is apparent only because the boy who delivers the man’s daily meals (there have been different boys over the years but all are respectable looking, well dressed, if unknown to any staff member who lives in or near New Haven) leaves, along with the man’s food on a tray (ordinary food, chops and roast chickens and the like), a live rodent — a white rat, a hamster, a guinea pig — in a little cage, placed carefully beside the tray.

The following mornings, the tray and the cage, both empty, always appear in the hallway just outside room eleven.

The Duncan has its history of incidents, like any hotel. Even the Connaught in London, even the Ritz in Paris, has seen mortality do its work — how could it be otherwise, when so many come and go?

At the Duncan, there was the sudden disappearance of the room service boy (many years ago, when the Duncan offered room service at all), with no notice; without so much as leaving his uniform behind.

There was the porter (back when the Duncan employed porters) who came down in the elevator (no one was ever sure from which upper floor), walked purposefully through the lobby to the front door, and did not appear for duty the next day, or ever again.

There was the expression on the face of the man found dead in his room of a coronary occlusion. There was the single woman who’d said a cheerful good night to her two women friends, gone up to her room, and been found hung from the shower rod, by a silk stocking, the next day. There was the young man, stopping over on his way to Albany, who seemed to have been bitten, over and over, by... some small animal, probably a dog, though dogs have never been allowed at the Duncan.

Such events are not unusual, not in any hotel.

The only genuinely strange occurrence is a recent one, and it took place not inside the Duncan but on Chapel Street, in front of the hotel.

A young woman, a junior at Yale, had been walking back to the campus rather late at night, having been at a party on Dwight Street. According to her friends, she’d been entirely herself when she left the party: cheerful, bantering, and only as intoxicated as it’s possible to become after imbibing two Miller Lites. It being Chapel Street, a mere few blocks from the campus, no one thought anything of her walking home alone.

She was found less than an hour later, standing on the sidewalk in front of the Duncan, staring up at the building, frozen in place. She was alive, and unharmed, but remains catatonic three weeks after the incident.

No one is able to speculate about why she’d stopped before the Duncan like that — it’s hardly a New Haven landmark — though a faculty couple who had just walked past the young woman on Chapel Street do claim to recall the sound of someone knocking on glass, from above. They did not look up at the source of the tapping sound (it seemed so clearly meant for the young woman), and in fact thought nothing of it at all until they read about the young woman’s hospitalization in a police bulletin on Yale’s website.

The girl did briefly regain consciousness, in her bed at Yale — New Haven Hospital, the day after she was found on Chapel. She opened her eyes, but did not seem to be aware of her surroundings. She merely stared up at the ceiling of her room and said, “All those little teeth,” after which she emitted a hissing sound that, according to the attending nurse, did not sound quite like a noise of which the human voice is capable.

She spoke so softly that the nurse, who was the only one present at the time, is not entirely certain that the girl said, “All those little teeth.” The nurse believes it might have been, “All those little teas,” which would probably have referred to the Master’s Teas held in Morse College.

The latter version, of course, makes more sense. The nurse, however, is certain about the inhuman sound that followed the phrase; she says it resembled the hiss of a snake but was deeper and more penetrating, more like (according to the nurse) the sound of gas escaping from a valve.

At any rate, by the time the girl’s parents arrived from Grand Rapids, the girl had lost consciousness again, and has not regained consciousness a second time.

The girl’s parents have had her moved from New Haven to Grand Rapids. The doctors there are, as they say, guardedly optimistic. CAT scans have revealed nothing amiss in the young woman’s brain. There are, have always been, unsolved medical mysteries, and people who, like the Yale undergraduate, fall abruptly into catatonic states and sometimes return from them, just as abruptly, wondering where they are, assuming themselves to be still on the bus or in the room or wherever they were when they passed out of consciousness, days or weeks or months earlier.

Still, if you find yourself walking past the Duncan on Chapel Street, it’s probably just as well to focus your gaze straight ahead, either toward the lights and joviality of the Study Hotel or the brutalist bulk of the architecture school, depending on which way you’re headed. There’s plenty to see on Chapel Street, at eye level.

There are, after all, people who, for unknowable reasons, want to see things they’d be better off not having seen at all. These people seem simply to want to know that mysterious forces are alive and well.

There are zealots of another sort too. You could probably think of them as religious, in their way, though the message they want to impart is different from that of street-corner Christians. This other body of evangelists wants us to know that hell and damnation are inevitable, that we do not go unwitnessed by the evil eye, that it’s only a matter of time until our final destination is revealed to us.

So why take chances? There are, after all, unsavory presences at large in the world, and they sometimes manifest themselves in the unlikeliest of places. So, really, there’s no particular reason to glance up as you pass the Hotel Duncan. The man in room eleven has only proven dangerous to those who hear him tap on the glass, look up, and see... whatever it is that they see. It’s best to stare straight ahead, and go on about your business, especially if someone overhead, in the Duncan, seems to want to attract your attention.

The Queen of Secrets by Lisa D. Gray

Bradley Street

On Saturday when my mom and Aunt V picked me up from ballet class, the last dregs of their argument stunk up the car like chitlins at Thanksgiving, thick and spicy. We were headed down Whalley toward Aunt V’s apartment, and while we waited for the light to change, my mom asked her, “Vanya, you did make the appointment for Thursday?” My aunt didn’t answer and her eyes slid across my mother’s face like a slap.

I waited a few minutes before leaning over the seat and snapping on the radio. My aunt’s hand gripped the door handle, her knuckles bulging like little hazelnuts as we passed the empty playground. A drizzle sprinkled the window, making the swings, slide, and jungle gym’s bright colors all runny like in those French paintings at the museum. I love that place. All those paintings and beauty under one roof.

“Sit down, Janelle,” my mother said as we pulled up in front of my aunt’s brick apartment building on Kensington.

Before Aunt V lifted the handle to get out, she turned to my mom and said, “Yes, Olivia, Thursday. Night, Janelle.” She smiled at me and then she was gone.

A huddle of boys shot craps against Aunt V’s stoop as they waited for their customers to creep out of the shadows. She stopped for a second and spoke to them before they moved to let her pass.

“What’s Thursday?” I asked my mom.

“I don’t recall anyone inviting you into the conversation,” my mom said, like she did anytime she thought I was minding grown folks’ business. I wondered what they’d argued about, but not for long, because my mom and aunt bickered one minute and laughed the next. “That’s how sisters are,” my mom would tell me after one of their melt-into-nothing arguments.

Tuesday, I was wiping the table and counter after dinner when the phone buzzed. I answered it on the fourth ring.

“Hello. Hey Auntie, yeah, she’s here.” Aunt V’s voice sounded wavy. “Mom, pick up the phone!” I hollered into the family room, but I didn’t hang up.

“Does she know?” my aunt asked my mother.

“Of course not,” my mom told her in her I-don’t-want-to-say-I-don’t-have-time-for-this-but-I-don’t-have-time-for-this voice.

“I want to tell her, O.”

I wanted to keep listening but they might hear the TV. I was watching the news for my homework and it was kind of loud, so I hung up the phone then tiptoed to the door and cracked it a smidge. Mom was still folding clothes. Hills of socks, T-shirts, and jeans covered the coffee table in front of her. She had tucked the phone between her ear and shoulder as she talked and folded. “V, you were doing so well. What happened?” That was all I could hear because Mom’s voice got softer.

I swept the floor, fed the dog, grabbed a Coke from the fridge, then headed into the family room hoping to catch more of their conversation. My mom was still on the phone and she lowered her voice, her eyes tracking me as I crossed the room to the sofa. I picked up the remote and sank into its fat brown cushions. The couch was my command station, like Captain Kirk’s on Star Trek. The TV popped to life and my mom whispered into the phone, “Let me call you right back.” Mom didn’t say anything to me; she just hung up and climbed the stairs.

On Thursday, I got home from swimming practice just before four. I was late and hungry. Swimming always made me want to eat. A note sat on the counter next to a covered plate: Out for a bit. Home soon. Mom.

I remembered Mom and Aunt V’s chitlin-funky conversation in the car and figured she must be with her or out with her friends. She did that sometimes, had a girl’s night. But six hours later she still wasn’t back and I was getting worried. I’d finished my homework and was balled up on the couch, TV on, a bag of chips on the floor. I flipped through Essence and half paid attention as Janet Peckinpaugh said, “The body of a man found at the Pond Lily Hotel several months ago has been identified and an explosion yesterday evening rocked a local women’s clinic. Details at eleven.” I changed the channel.

Vanya and Olivia were sun and moon, oil and water, opposites with nothing in common, but they’d been best friends since they were pinkie-hooking secret sharers. At fifteen, Vanya was what her sister and friends called a “goodie-goodie.” She’d won spelling bees and science fairs; she volunteered at the Hospital of Saint Raphael and earned straight As on most of her report cards. Sixteen-year-old Olivia, on the other hand, had managed to earn little more than a reputation. She skipped school, smoked cigarettes, and snuck into bars like Ernie B’s and the Oasis over in Newhallville. Olivia and Vanya were still as close as they’d been as girls and had had to depend on each other after their mother died in a car crash. Their worlds circled each other’s, in distant orbits held together by an invisible pin.

It started the year their mother died. She’d picked them up from school, and as they drove down Dixwell Avenue the car skidded on some ice and spun around and around. The girls screamed and held hands in the backseat even after the car barreled into a tree. Everything turned silent and snow sprinkled the windshield where a spiderwebby crack now crawled. Their mother didn’t move. The girls tried to scramble over the seat to get to her, but they couldn’t undo their seat belts. Faces peered in the windows, voices called out to them, and then they heard the sirens.

After the funeral, their father was as much of a ghost as they imagined their mother to be. He plunged himself into work at their school where he was a principal, and spared little time for them, his grieving girls. He never dated and spent his nights staring at the television. The girls didn’t know what to do with their grief or their father’s indifference and tried to win his attention in their own ways. The thing the girls held onto was each other, even as they started moving in different directions. At night after dinner they sat on their beds and gabbed about their day. On Saturday afternoons, they washed and pressed each other’s hair, and on Sundays they cooked dinner while talking about books and boys. They reminisced about their mother as they prepared the recipes in the cookbooks she kept above the stove.

At seventeen, Vanya was a tall girl with high cheekbones, a broad nose, and almond-shaped eyes. She possessed a quiet, easygoing nature and was well liked, but had become a loner like their father. Girls in her class called her stuck up and snooty. Olivia was petite with a nose that turned up at the end and ears that stuck out a little like their mother’s. Her smile drew people to her and she reminded almost everyone of their mother, who had sparkled at the center of any group.

I woke up on the couch Friday morning, and potato chips and empty Coke cans littered the coffee table. The house was quiet. My mom would kill me if she knew I’d guzzled three cans while doing the rest of my homework. The TV was still on and a reporter stood in front of a charred building on what looked like Bradley Street near my school, Saint Mary’s. People swarmed behind the reporter, a few of them waving while others seemed to just want to hear what she was saying. I spied my mom in the back of the crowd, wearing her faded jean jacket. Her eyes were puffy, her hair uncombed, and my mom did not do uncombed hair, ever.

The reporter introduced a tall man named Captain Johnson who stepped up to the mic. Sweat trickled down his pale, heat-reddened face as the camera zoomed in on him. Looking directly in the camera, he began, and I listened.

“Yesterday, at approximately seven p.m., a Caucasian male entered the Planned Parenthood clinic and detonated an explosive device. It seems there may have been as many as twenty women in the building at the time. We will release names to the media after we’ve identified the victims and notified their families.” He abruptly turned away from the camera and the reporter took over. I didn’t hear a word she said.

My dad was out of town at a conference, so I couldn’t ask him any of the questions swirling through my head. Not that he’d have answers; he and Aunt V had kept their distance since that first summer when she came home.

I ran to my room, stuffed my legs into a pair of jeans, and threw on a T-shirt over my nightgown. It was still early and as the sun rose over the tops of the trees, streaking the sky a golden orange, I pedaled hard, my heart pounding in my ears as random thoughts about Aunt V floated in my brain. Shoes. She loved shoes and had over a hundred pairs. I knew because the week before she’d paid me fifty cents a pair to organize them for her, and I’d earned sixty-seven dollars. The shoes sat on the large closet shelf, each in a cloudy-white plastic box. I’d taped Polaroid pictures to each — red pumps, purple sandals, orange suede boots, pink high-top sneakers, burgundy penny loafers...

I got to Bradley Street and there were people everywhere — police, firemen, neighbors, kids. I scanned the crowd for my mother, hoped to see my aunt. Glass, paper, and broken furniture littered the sidewalk and street. Men in uniforms carried black bags like the ones you see on crime shows from the building and lined them up on the grass outside the front door. The smell of smoke filled my nose and throat, and the faint smell of burning hay wafted through the crowd.

Olivia and Vanya had always shared secrets, and in high school Vanya dubbed Olivia their queen. They’d reveal their confidences before hooking their pinkies, gazing into each other’s eyes, and repeating a solemn phrase they’d learned from their mother: Forever and Always. Olivia told tales of the things she and Seth got up to when she snuck out to meet him at night. V didn’t really like Seth. He was a know-it-all whose mother talked about Olivia, called her wild and worse. Olivia’s biggest secret spilled out the night of her graduation, the night she left town with Seth.

Olivia threw clothes in a suitcase as V tossed her sister’s blouses, skirts, and shoes out of the blue bag until she caught that gleam in Olivia’s eye. She knew Olivia would not be stopped.

“Where you going?” Vanya asked.

“New York or Washington. Seth got into Howard and NYU.” She stopped packing and added, “I’m pregnant. I thought about, you know,” she touched her still slim stomach, “but I can’t do it.”

Olivia closed her eyes for a moment, then tossed a pair of faded jeans into the almost full bag.

“You gonna marry him?”

“Yes,” Olivia answered.

“You know Dad’s gonna try to stop you.”

“When has he ever tried to stop me from doing anything?” O said. “When has he ever cared? Besides, it’s gonna be our secret.” She held out her pinkie, but V didn’t take it. O closed her suitcase as a tear rolled down her nose. She walked to the door.

“Wait!” Vanya called. She hopped off the bed and went to her dresser where she kept her box of memories. It’d been the last Christmas gift she got from their mother. She pulled out a bunch of crumpled bills and stuffed them into her sister’s hand. “Take this,” she said, then extended her pinky.

Seth started at Howard soon after he and Olivia arrived in DC. They lived in a tiny apartment with furniture they found or picked up from tag sales, and Olivia hated it. After a while she started to hate Seth too, but she stayed. She lost the baby a few months after they left home; she tried to forget and found a job on campus answering phones for the English department. When Seth graduated, they moved back to New Haven, where Olivia worked at Malley’s in the children’s department while Seth went to law school and they tried to have another baby. She missed her sister.

Vanya graduated the May after Olivia left and went off to Spelman College. She made friends. She danced at parties and sipped fruity cocktails on dates. She studied for classes and talked to Olivia at least once a week. They still shared secrets but now Vanya’s were juicier than O’s. O had settled into a life with Seth while V had started kissing boys and skipping classes. By the time Vanya graduated, Olivia’s little indiscretions tasted like dry white toast in comparison to her butter-and-jam-slathered tales. Vanya went home to New Haven for a week before moving to Montreal to study nursing and didn’t return home for ten years.

You got off the plane wishing you didn’t look as raggedy as you knew you did. You were ready to start again and go back to before everything had spiraled out of control. Olivia had called almost every day that first year you lived in Montreal, and you’d gab for hours about your new grown-up lives — your classes in nursing school, her relationship with Seth, the baby they never had. A year went by, then two. You finished nursing school and found a job as an ER nurse. Olivia chaired committees, and hosted dinner parties, and you spoke to her less and less. You were lonely, and tired all the time, and you wanted to talk to your sister. Most days you struggled to keep your eyes open, especially on night shifts — you started doing it as a way to stay awake, a way to feel something on the days when life was a gray cloud you trudged through. You told yourself it was no big deal. Lots of the nurses did it. A hit here, a toke there, and before you knew it, you craved its caresses like a lover’s. Some days you didn’t even go to work, and when days turned to weeks, they fired you. You’d stare at your cracked reflection in another broken mirror, in another bathroom, in another bar, and as you painted your lips, you’d wonder who that hollow-cheeked woman was. When it got bad and you couldn’t pay your rent, you’d call your father for money but never told him you’d lost your job, or that your belly was growing, or that your home was a run-down hotel, or that you turned tricks for hits. You loved the act of preparing it, measuring it, grinding it, cooking it, but especially smoking it. The bittersweet acridness of the blue smoke, the crackle of tiny, quartzy rocks as you kissed them with flame. You’d close your eyes and inhale, hold the smoke in your lungs, and then blow it all out as the smooth, tingly sensation creeped from brain to toes. You loved that most of all until the baby kicked and you knew you had to quit. You called Olivia. She came and stayed five months, and you stopped, and when she left, you hooked your pinkies and whispered, “Forever and Always,” before Olivia closed the cab door and flew home with the baby. It didn’t take long for you to start again. You missed O, couldn’t find a job, and the hole in your chest throbbed as you thought of your baby, her baby, and you smoked. The first time you landed in jail you told yourself it’s no big deal. Ten arrests for solicitation later and you spent eighteen months in prison and they shipped you back to Connecticut. You’d missed your father’s funeral. A heart attack took him and you hadn’t found out until three months after it happened because Olivia didn’t always accept your calls. She never came to visit, never sent pictures of your baby, her baby. No one picked you up from Union Station and you loaded your bags into a cab, reciting Forever and Always in your head because you wanted to tell her you were home and she was yours — but not yet.

I was eight the summer I met Aunt V. The sun slipped in and out of clouds as I played jacks on the porch. My mom talked about her, but she’d never come to visit. “Work,” my mom told me. She sent me cards for my birthday and every Christmas. I sat on the porch, tossing up my jacks ball, waiting for her to come, and when a yellow cab pulled up to our curb, I skipped down the front walk to meet her.

“Nelly, it is a pleasure.” She squeezed my hand then hugged me until I almost couldn’t breathe. Her almond-shaped eyes and broad nose were like mine. In our baby pictures our cheeks and smiles are so similar, like twins people said as they flipped through the family album Mom kept on the coffee table. Her curly Afro bounced as her yellow heels clicked up the front steps. Aunt V didn’t look as pretty as the girl in the photos, though. She was pencil-thin with a trace of ash around her lips. I was dragging her bag up the stairs to my room when she asked me, “Where’s your mom?”

“In the kitchen.” I nodded my head toward the open door, and after I put her bag on the second twin bed in my room, I ran downstairs. Mom and Aunt V sat on the couch in the living room and I settled on the bottom step to listen.

“Thanks for letting me stay. I start work at the end of July so I should be able to get my own place by September.”

“I hope so, because Seth is not going to be happy if it’s longer than that, and you have to go to the meetings, Vanya. And no more secrets. Clear?”

“Crystal.” Aunt V’s voice was crisp and gravelly.

I thought they’d be happier to see each other, but they circled each other like kids on the playground before doing battle, only breaking the silence when Aunt V gave a tight little laugh. “Guess I’m the Queen of Secrets now, huh?” The Queen of Secrets — I liked the way it sounded: mysterious, dark.

“You don’t have to be,” my mom answered her. “Just know I love you, V, and that we want to help, really.”

“We? Seth too? That boy finally off his high horse?”

“Vanya, that’s not fair.”

“Well, he wasn’t fair, and he’s the guy who got his underage girlfriend drunk and knocked her up. Clear?”

“Crystal,” my mom said, and they burst out laughing. They talked for hours that night. I could hear their voices buzzing as I waited for Aunt V to come to bed.

Aunt V became my best friend that summer. We spent whole days doing everything and nothing. In July, we went to the beach and she taught me how to swim. She moved into her own place over on Kensington Street near the hospital in September, and that fall, we gobbled bunless hot dogs out of a thermos as we sat on the hood of Mom’s car, feeling the airplanes roaring above us as they soared to foreign places like Australia and Turkey.

She smoked long white cigarettes, and at Thanksgiving she and Mom giggled as I imitated her by puffing on a straw and teetering across the front room’s green carpet in her red pumps with heels as long as my pencils. Her chocolatey perfume tickled my nose when she whispered in my ear. Sometimes I’d catch her studying me as I watched TV or did homework, and it made my stomach wiggle.

She gave me a Polaroid camera that Christmas and the first picture I snapped was of her. I pinned it to the bulletin board in my room. She is sitting on the floor in the kitchen. Her feet are bare, and her legs, which are spread wide in front of her, are swallowed by the red-and-green puddle of her full skirt. A little red ball hangs in the air in front of her face, and her hand is poised to sweep up a gleaming row of jacks on the floor. A half-full martini glass sits next to her and an imprint of her red lips decorates its rim. She is laughing.

You tried to stay clean. You snuck a few drinks at first, craved a hit, but then you started the job, and NA, and you stopped. Three months later you moved into your own place, reconnected with old friends, went back to church, and stayed clean until He came. He found you at the hospital where you worked and where you and Olivia had once sat in hard orange chairs waiting for your mommy to walk from behind the washed-out green curtain. You’d waited and waited, but she never came. You became a nurse because of that night, and you loved your job, but after a while the long hours and the dying exacted their toll, and you couldn’t breathe, felt like you were sinking, just like you had in those orange chairs the night your mom died. Some days you drank, and you craved a hit, just one hit. He followed you home from one of the NA meetings at the church where Olivia volunteered. You’d started going when It had called to you, when Its memory tickled your brain, and you tried to ignore It. He never said a word to you until the day he approached you at the bus stop.

“Hello,” he said. “We need to talk.”

You didn’t remember telling him anything about home. You’d stopped seeing him when you’d told him about the baby. He’d wanted you to get rid of it and keep tricking, and you thought about it, but much like Olivia all those years ago, you couldn’t do it.

“No,” you’d said, and he left you alone. That’s when you called O.

The bus eased to a stop, and you got on, leaving him standing there. Three days later, you spotted him outside the hospital, and a week after that he showed up as you got off the bus at O’s house, and your body went cold.

“What do you want?” you asked him.

“To talk about... about... you know.” His blue green eyes slipped to O’s house and you knew he knew, so you agreed to meet him at his hotel.

You met him the next night at the Pond Lily, because no one would know you there. You guzzled three martinis in the bar before heading to his room. He offered you a drink and you nodded. You sat at the scratched brown desk.

“How are you?” he asked.

“Better than some, not as well as others,” you responded, then sipped the glass of warm bourbon. “And you?”

He shrugged his thick shoulders, his hands hanging at his sides. He needed a shave and his breath stank.

“Where is she?” he asked.

“Who?” you said, raising an eyebrow, gripping the glass.

“I know,” he said.

“Know what?” You thought of Nelly and your sister, even of Seth, despite him still acting funky whenever you visited.

You went to him and whispered in his ear, “She died.” You kissed him and he kissed back, and then you felt his warm fingers at your throat, squeezing.

“Liar.” He let go and you gasped for air, then sucked down the rest of the bourbon. You slipped your hand in your purse and felt it there, and you knew you would do it. You apologized to him in your head and kissed him before pulling him to the bed. You would do it.

When you woke up, he was still sleeping. You slipped on your clothes and wiped the glass, the desk, the bed frame. You pulled a syringe from your purse and filled it with the insulin you’d taken from the hospital. Forever and Always, you thought as you eased the liquid into him. You left and started again. One time, one hit, you told yourself as you left the Pond Lily. When you got home you bought a package from the boy on your front stoop.

That day melted into months, and now you were strung out again, about to lose your job again, the Queen of Secrets again. You sat on the toilet, your mouth dry, your palms sweaty, your head pounding as the blue line on the end of a white plastic stick stared at you, and you wondered if you could do this again. It was the same as before — the same guy, the same blurry emptiness like those impressionist paintings Nelly loved. You wanted to tell Olivia but couldn’t take Seth’s condemnation, not again, so you told your diary. You chronicled everything between its pages: every booze-soaked night, every baby that died in your arms, that night with him, your daughter and how you dreamed of her and you together knowing it could never be.

My mother talked to a policeman. Emergency workers scurried around, people chattered, reporters interviewed witnesses in the crowd. I dropped my bike and ran to Mom.

“What are you doing here?” I asked her, knowing the answer, wanting to be wrong.

“Janelle.” Her glassy red eyes held mine.

“I saw you on the news. Where’s Aunt V?”

“You shouldn’t be here, baby.”

“Where is Aunt Vanya?” I pulled her arm, my voice rising.

Olivia dropped you off at six forty-five. On the ride over, you’d wanted to tell her everything. You’d tried the night before. You’d spent the night so you could get to the clinic early and maybe avoid the people with the posters chanting, “Baby Killer!” as you walked into the clinic. You’d wanted to tell her before you went to bed in Nelly’s room, but you could not find the words. As you got out of the car, she matter-of-factly uttered, “Call when you’re ready.” No smile of assurance, no hug for strength. Five or six protesters lined the sidewalk and you tried to ignore them, tried not to see the tiny baby parts splattered across their signs.

Inside, your eyes wandered the room and you noticed you were the only one not dressed for a workout or an afternoon at the mall. A tall man wearing jeans and a T-shirt walked in, and you wondered if he was picking up his wife or daughter. He sat down. You felt out of place in your bright dress, but this time you’d at least kept up your appearance and you wouldn’t let it go now. You dressed how you wanted to feel. The girls waiting with you appeared no older than Nelly. You could have been their mother. One side-eyed you, her eyelids squinched, her lips pursed, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. You sat up straight, hands folded in your lap, legs crossed at the ankles. The chair was cold and hard underneath you, and you thought back to the hospital the night your mom died. You hoped no one there would recognize you, which is oddly enough something you never thought about as you gulped martinis in dark bars, sniffed coke in bathrooms, and checked into seedy motels off 91 with men like Nelly’s father, this baby’s father. The man shifted in his seat and tapped his foot against the linoleum floor. They called your name and, in a tight, dimly lit room, a nurse walked you through your options, and you gazed out the window and thought about tomorrow and starting over again. You took a breath and began answering her questions. Heat seared your skin and you were melting. You tried to run but had no legs, and rubble rained down on you, and you thought of Nelly, your baby, her baby, and you saw him lying in the bed next to you, his face, her face.

A snatch of color caught my eye. I squinted and focused on it — a shoe. A scorched, light-green slingback. A pale pink rose bloomed from its toe. I knew the shoe because I had photographed it only a few weeks earlier. My mother walked in a tight circle, hugging herself. A breeze blew and carried the reporter’s voice to me as I stared at the shoe: “Now, back to the studio...”

I’d had to ride my bike home as my mom finished talking to the police. When I got there I lay down on the other bed in my room where Aunt V had slept the night before and felt something hard under her thin pillow. A diary with The Queen of Secrets scrawled across its worn cover in Aunt V’s spidery cursive. I opened it and started reading.