Night Film

112

What can I say about the ensuing weeks?

Marlowe Hughes said it best: “When you finally returned to your real life after working with Cordova, it was as if all of the colors had been turned way up in your eyes. The reds were redder. Blacks blacker. You felt things profoundly, as if your very heart had grown giant and tender and swollen. You dreamed. And what dreams.”

I drove home from Enderlin Estates, pulled the curtains, and slept for twenty hours, a sleep as blacked-out and resolute as death. I woke up around nightfall the following day, shadows streaked across the ceiling, the dying light outside making the street blush with the elegance of a memory.

My old life took me back, the old faithful mutt that it was.

I was somewhat shocked to learn it was December. I spent a few evenings at dinners with friends, most of whom assumed I’d been away, traveling. I let them believe it. In a way it was true.

“You look good,” quite a few of them remarked, though certain lingering stares seemed to suggest this wasn’t exactly true, that there was something else altered about me, something they sensed best left alone. I wondered, half seriously, if it was residue from the devil’s curse — if, even though it had turned out not to be true, perhaps one never recovered from having once believed. Maybe certain far-flung attic rooms in the brain had been violently broken into — doors bashed in, lamps broken, desks flipped upside down, curtains left dancing strangely by open windows — rooms that would never be reached again or ever reordered.

But I was thankful for the company, for friends, for light conversation forgotten as soon as it began. I joined in wholeheartedly, I laughed, I ordered wine and duck and dessert, and people slapped me on the back and said they were happy to see me, that I’d been away too long. But occasionally I slipped, unseen, outside all the talk and stared in at it, wondering if I’d stumbled back to the wrong table, the wrong life. I felt at once rested and relieved the investigation was over, but also vague regret, even a dulled longing to go back, to return to something I couldn’t pinpoint — a woman I hadn’t realized had bewitched me until she was gone.

Lines of laughter on a face, rude waitresses with bony arms, dark figures hurrying along sidewalks eager to get somewhere, nearby voices filled with dusk, cabs and panhandlers and one drunken girl screeching like a wounded bird — all of it flushed with a warmth and sad beauty I’d never noticed before.

Maybe it was a consequence of reaching the end of the end, finding out the dark, mad, gleaming tale had concluded the only way it could in the real world — with mortal people doing mortal things, a father and daughter, facing their deaths.

Because there could be no doubt about what Gallo told me: I’d phoned Sloan-Kettering Hospital, posing as a health insurance agent from a disorganized HR department. After telling a few half-truths to three different assistant department heads, and giving Ashley’s Social Security number taken from the missing-person’s report — one of the few documents left behind — three different people confirmed it on two different days. Ashley Goncourt had been treated in the pediatric oncology department in 1992 and 1993, 2001 and 2002, and finally in 2004 in conjunction with the University of Texas at Houston, exactly as Gallo had said.

At night I strolled home on the crooked sidewalks, past silent brownstones with lit-up windows filled with lives. Glasses clinking, the street gasping with laughter as the door of a bar was shoved open — these sounds seemed to follow me longer than they ever had before.

I hadn’t returned to the Reservoir after seeing Ashley there, but in the aftermath of learning about her sickness, I went back.

There was no hint of her — not in the water or the green lamplight or the biting wind, the shadows that threw themselves at my feet. I ran, lap after lap, and could think only of how she’d gone to the warehouse and what a lonely walk it must have been, up the steps to the edge of the elevator, which was the edge of her life, staring it down.

She’d been dying when she’d appeared here. It made sense, given the way she’d walked. She’d been weak, in an especially precarious mental state, according to Inez Gallo.

Even accepting this, still, something gnawed at me. I’d come to believe Ashley had sought me out because she wanted to tell me something — something crucial and real — her circumstances preventing a direct approach. Now even this had an explanation: Gallo had mentioned Ashley’s fear, that she might cause physical harm to anyone she came in close proximity to — a fear that could very well have begun when she learned what had happened to Olivia Endicott or the tattoo artist, Larry, when they’d been in her presence.

It had to have been why she stayed away from me.

In all the stories I’d heard, Ashley stood for the truth. She was the antithesis of weak. Even hunting the Spider, she’d sought him only to forgive. To accept now that it’d been delusions that brought Ashley out here, spinning her straw into gold, a master of manipulation, as Gallo put it, felt off.

What had Ashley wanted me to know?

I took so many laps around the track I lost count, and then, lungs burning, exhausted, I left, jogging down East Eighty-sixth to the subway, and boarded the train, exactly as I had the night I’d seen her.

Staring across the platform, the neon light flat and bright, I wondered if I could manifest through sheer will her boots, her red-and-black coat — if she might come one last time, so I could get a clear glimpse of her face — decode, once and for all, the truth behind her.

But there was no one.

Even the sci-fi movie poster that had been there before — the sprinting man with his eyes scribbled out — even he was gone now, replaced with an ad for a romantic comedy starring Cameron Diaz.

She just doesn’t get it, read the tagline.

Maybe I should take the hint.