Signs and Wonders

Vigo Park

There’s a gun at the beginning of this story, placed here so that you know it’s going to go off by the end. That’s just the way it is; you’ve been warned. Call it fate, call it destiny, call it the inevitable consequence of certain destructive but all-too-common human behaviors. There’s no changing the ending, however dramatic and/or ugly and/or contrived and/or sad it might seem to you. Better accept it now.

The gun (an ancient Walther looted from some German soldier in World War II, not that this ultimately matters) is in the coat pocket of a man on the 24 bus, which is heading to Vigo Park. It’s winter, and he’s hunched over, with his hands meeting across his lap, like someone protecting himself from the cold. Underneath his coat, though, he has taken off both his gloves and is touching the gun — which his father, a responsible man, kept unloaded and locked in a cabinet in his house until he died — with his bare fingers. The ring on his left hand makes a clinking sound against the barrel, but nobody on the bus hears it. Despite all that’s happened he hasn’t been able to bring himself to take it off. Whenever he starts to slide the ring off he sees his wife in his mind’s eye, crying on their wedding day when she put it on his finger, tears of pure, liquid happiness. To take it off would be to acknowledge all the ways he has hurt her, and that is more than he can stand to do.

A fat man in a sheepskin jacket sits down next to him at this point, and so he stops touching the gun, which has made him feel kind of masturbatory anyway, sliding his hands up and down the length of it beneath his coat. The bus begins the uphill chug toward the park. People get on; others get off. The day is gray. Earlier there was sleet and later there will be snow; but right now the sky holds itself in dark abeyance above the salt-streaked roads and cars of the city. Even the clothing seems to have darkened in the wintry light: brown and black and navy-blue wool coats trudge up and down the streets, relieved only occasionally by a patterned hat or scarf. Why, he wonders, does winter have to take all the color from the world? The bus turns a corner, and through the dirty window he can just make out his destination.

In the park a woman in a red coat sits watching a child play. It’s not her child. She has no child. This, to her, is a source of enormous grief. She had a chance, several years ago, but was talked out of keeping it. Sometimes, when she sees a child the age her own would be, she thinks about kidnapping it, or doing other, even crazier things.

“Life is what you make it,” her sister often tells her, and this is just one reason among many they seldom speak. Her sister, who is happy, believes this is of her own devising. She doesn’t believe in luck. She tells Rebecca to change the things in her life that make her unhappy, and then she’ll be happy. “It’s like making coffee,” she explains. “Is it too strong? Add more water next time. Learn from the mistakes of the past.” These words fall on Rebecca like wet snow: white and substantial one moment, dissolved by the next. “I drink tea,” she tells her sister, who sighs heavily and informs her that she’s missing the point.

This is where things might get a little hard to believe for some people. Basically the situation is that on the other side of the playground is another woman in a red coat. Like Rebecca, she has long blond hair in a ponytail, and like Rebecca, she is alone. In fact, it’s the same make and model of coat, bought from the same department store during the same January sale. It was even bought for the same reason, because most winter coats are dark blue or black or brown and both women thought they might cheer themselves up by relieving the gray color scheme of winter with a flash of red. This not-especially-brilliant bit of fashion psychology has infected hundreds, maybe thousands, of women, and the red coats are flying off the racks; it’s the one must-have item of the season — you know how women are, they get these ideas into their heads, these cravings that must be satisfied — and Tori has come to regret her purchase, since seeing it on so many other women has made her feel generic in her thoughts and emotions, frankly, the last thing she needs right about now. Looking across the park she thinks, Oh, great, another one. Why do I even bother? Which is a question she’s asking herself more and more often these days. This other woman seems to be waiting for someone, as she herself is. Automatically she compares the other woman’s looks to her own — maybe ten years older, and thinner, too thin, really, a stick — and decides, after some thought, that the coat looks better on her, Tori. Knowing this victory is shallow doesn’t mean she isn’t still satisfied. Frank always tells her, after sex, that she’s beautiful, in a tone of wonderment and joy she has to believe is genuine. In life you have to believe some things are real or you just die. You die, even if you stay alive.

In the playground children are chasing one another, swaddled in snowsuits that make their legs and arms look like sausages. Sometimes she used to daydream about the children she would have with Frank, give them names and choose outfits for them, but these were daydreams, nothing more. Tommy had wanted to have kids immediately, though he never considered the consequences, never thought about supporting them or not being able to stay out drinking until five in the morning whenever he felt like it. On the day they got married, in his parents’ backyard, he held the ring so solemnly before slipping it on her finger that she thought — with a sad, small shock of recognition — he looked less like a new husband than a child with a new toy in his hands. He was a child who wanted a child, and she had to be the adult for both of them, always arguing that it was too soon, that they should wait a little longer, that they had plenty of time, and it was too much for her, she was tired all the time, until she met Frank and saw a different vision of what life could be. There was the death of hope and then the beginning of it, and sometimes in her memory she could no longer separate the two.

She says his name out loud, just to say it. “Frank.” She misses him.

At the sound of her voice — and she thought she’d said it quietly — the other woman in the red coat turns around. There’s a nod, a chagrined, hey-you’ve-the-same-coat smile. They don’t see themselves as doppelgangers or anything like that. They’re just two women with the same coat, okay? It happens.

Tori wonders what Tommy is doing right now. It’s his second week of four in rehab, a period of maximum potential hostility, the therapist has said. He had vowed to put everything straight, and so had she, after she told him about Frank. It was a contest there for a while, who blamed who more. “That’s what marriage is,” Tori’s mom explained to her, “a blame game. You blame yourself, and then you blame the other person, and then you blame yourself for choosing the other person. That’s the cycle.” This is why she doesn’t usually confide in her mother, because she makes these depressing pronouncements about life that all too often turn out to be true.

A child runs past Rebecca chasing another — it’s hard to guess genders with all the coats and hats and scarves — who trips, and the first child falls on top, both of them laughing and then crying. Where are these children’s parents? No one runs to pick them up and reassure them and dry their tears. (In fact they are nominally under the charge of a day-care attendant, who is on her cell phone to her boyfriend in the warm confines of the rec center at the other end of the park. Later, weeks from now, she will be fired for having sex with this same boyfriend in the back of the day care while the children are napping, and she will have to move back home with her parents and endure hours and hours of lectures, none of which will influence her behavior in the slightest.) Without parents to help them, the children help themselves. They stare at each other, wide-eyed and crying, for a minute or so, then are distracted by something else going on a few feet away, and just like that, the crisis is over. Once they run away, though, Rebecca sees that one of them has dropped a mitten, striped, blue-red-yellow. The only other adult in sight is the woman in the matching coat, so Rebecca picks it up and brings it over to her.

“Excuse me,” she said, “one of the children lost her mitten.”

“Like a kitten,” Tori says.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Tori tells her, shaking her head. This is her life. Nothing she says sounds as right as it did inside her head.

“Are you, uh, a mother?”

“Oh, no,” Tori says. “I’m just sitting here. Come to think of it, I don’t know where their mothers are.”

Rebecca stands in front of her, holding the mitten by its cuff like it’s something dirty. She doesn’t know why, but she feels it’s important that she not lay claim to it, or try to resolve the problem herself. Okay, she does know why. It’s because she thinks the reason she has no kids is that she doesn’t deserve them, she’d better stay away from them, because she might do it wrong. By some higher and mysterious authority this much has been decreed. When Gabriel told her she shouldn’t keep the baby, that they weren’t going to be a family (because of his wife, that long-suffering woman), he said, “There will be other chances.” She agreed with him and his wisdom. But in the doctor’s office, she felt, no, she knew, there would be no other chances. She could have gone off and had the baby on her own, right? After all, other women — stronger ones — did. Just not her.

Tori sees that Rebecca is weirdly paralyzed, helpless. The woman is small and pinched looking, tired in that permanent way that afflicts women on the other side of thirty. Tori used to think this was caused by being a parent. Now she thinks it’s just life.

She stands up. “I’m sure we can figure out whose mitten it is,” she offers. “Let’s just look for a kid with frostbite on one hand.”

Rebecca smiles at her gratefully. She’s younger, this other woman, around her sister’s age, and very pretty — short and voluptuous, with olive skin and green eyes, a complexion better suited to the red coat than Rebecca’s pale one. She’s wearing lipstick and has a come-hither look. Rebecca bets she’s popular with men. Some women just have it, this thing, a magnetism that doesn’t only have to do with beauty or even sex. It’s desirability. Women like that never go two years without a date. They never wind up agreeing to have a drink after work with their older, sweet-tempered, sad-eyed boss, even though they’re sensible and morally upright and know much better than to get involved with a married man. Women like that never know the pulsing, toothachey loneliness of an ordinary life.

As she’s thinking this, Tori shakes her head as if she wants to deny the claim, and Rebecca notices a little wetness around her eyes, like she’s been crying. Although it could be the cold. “Are you okay?” she asks suddenly.

Tori blinks, then smiles. “Sure,” she says. “Let’s find that kid.”

Together they walk through the playground like some kind of police duo, fashionable Mounties in their red coats, looking at the kids and trying to figure out, in the blur of skipping and falling down and crying again, which one they’re looking for.

“Hey, hey, kids,” Tori calls out. “Which of you kittens has lost a mitten?”

The kittens ignore her. “It’s like I don’t exist,” she says to Rebecca. “Kids don’t recognize that I’m alive. Good thing I don’t have one, I’d never get it to do a thing I say.”

“It’s probably different once you actually have one,” Rebecca says. “A mothering instinct kicks in, and then you’re good at scolding and nagging.”

“And giving advice and instilling guilt.”

“Exactly,” Rebecca says. “It all happens automatically. At least I think so, anyway. I wouldn’t know for sure.”

Tori doesn’t answer. The two women stand for a moment encircled by their thoughts, each examining her own future and its branching flowchart of possibilities. Tori thinks about a life with Tommy and/or kids, and how they might be able to make it, to be happy, but then again might not; also about life with Frank, and/or kids, and how this life once seemed not only necessary but inevitable, until it dissolved. And it’s so strange that this can happen, and something so counted-on can just wither once exposed to the air; but it never withered for Frank, who insisted on meeting her here today, for one last time. She loves Frank. She misses him constantly. But Tommy — they’ve been together since they were nineteen and he’s going through rehab, changing everything for their life together. “It’s not something you walk away from,” she told Frank, and she could almost hear him thinking, Neither am I.

Rebecca is thinking about how something drained out of her in the doctor’s office, some part of herself that believed in change and possibility, in all the and/or flowchart branches of a long and storied life. She thinks about how she hated Gabriel then, and blamed him, and wrote that letter to his long-suffering wife. But the truth was that in spite of it all she did love him; she didn’t idealize him or anything, she simply loved him, and that love was pure and true and strong even though its circumstances were sordid and trivial and absurd.

· · ·

The bus stops at the other end of the park. Coming out of the rec center, snapping her gum (which seems to lose its tensile strength in the cold, and she wonders, briefly, why), the day-care attendant notices a man in a gray wool coat get off and start across the park in the direction of her charges. The only reason she notices him is to think that her boyfriend is better-looking and taller and more muscular, and she can’t wait until she sees him tonight. She’s got a one-track mind, that attendant.

A child runs up to Rebecca and doesn’t say anything, just stands in front of her, a strand of blond hair leaking out from underneath a fleece cap. Crouching down, Rebecca can see it’s a girl, who removes her hand from the pocket of her snowsuit and shows it to her, shyly, like an injury of which she is ashamed. Their eyes meet.

“It’s okay,” Rebecca says mechanically, and the child nods. “Come here.”

She fits the mitten over her small, white hand and tugs it up over her wrist, the girl so close that Rebecca can smell the sour yet wholesome scent of her skin. The two of them look at each other, the child still holding up her mittened hand as if Rebecca isn’t finished yet. What’s left to do? A kiss on the forehead, a “You’re dismissed”? What’s the protocol? Then she realizes she put the mitten on wrong, that the girl’s thumb isn’t fitting into its slot. So she has to pull the mitten off and start over again, the child staring all the while. Rebecca’s starting to wonder if something’s wrong with the kid, with the whole lot of them, and that’s why they’ve been abandoned in the park to play by themselves.

Tori, meanwhile, is standing next to her, standing there in her red coat, her long blond hair snaking down her back. From the back, of course, she looks just like Rebecca. Only one thought exists in her mind: Frank.

The man coming toward them, the gun warm in his hand, could be Gabriel or Frank or even Tommy, escaped from rehab. But not all of them; only one. As it turns out, it’s Gabriel. It’s the sad-eyed ones you have to watch out for — another piece of advice that could usefully have been given to Rebecca, but which she would probably have ignored.

You can see where this is going, right? With the red coats and the blond hair? There are no surprises for you here.

From a distance of ten yards Gabriel sees only Tori’s back, and he is so blinded by his belief that it’s Rebecca — the woman who wrote a letter to his long-suffering wife — that he doesn’t notice the other form crouched down next to her. If he did, he might think it is a bundled coat or a child on a sled; his focus is that intense, the world outside it merely peripheral.

The day-care attendant puts away her cell phone, wonders who all these adults are, then sees him pull out a gun and fire. A woman in a red coat falls to the ground, lightly, almost casually, as if in jest.

The attendant starts to run. Children are screaming, some of them running away. Rebecca drops the mitten and stands up and turns around. She thinks of cars: backfires, accidents. She doesn’t take a gunshot into account. Then, seeing Gabriel, she thinks he has come for her, to make a life with her, that he has finally left his wife. All this crosses her mind with certainty in the second before she notices the gun. Once she does, she sees the woman on the ground beside her, crouches again, and turns her over, feeling for a pulse. There is none. The woman still looks alive — that is, exactly like she did only moments earlier — but she is dead.

“Oh,” Rebecca says. “Oh. Oh.” The little girl runs away.

You knew that the gun was going to go off, and that it was going to kill a woman in a red coat. It was only a question of which woman, and when. And of course why. This isn’t some kind of mystery. It’s not even a story about the murder, really, or police and jail and a trial. It’s about the moment after the murder, when Rebecca looks Gabriel in the eye and he looks back. The bitter, burnt smell of gun smoke is in the air between them. Here’s the thing: in that instant, Gabriel knows that he’s killed the wrong woman, that his Rebecca — the love of his life, notwithstanding the long-suffering wife, whom he couldn’t bear to have hurt — is still alive, and he’s so grateful and happy that he smiles. And Rebecca, who with one part of her brain knows he must have come to kill her, with another part of it registers this happiness and smiles back, out of instinct, acknowledgment, and love.

And meanwhile Tori is gone and, somewhere in the world, Tommy and Frank do not know it yet.

Soon, of course, there will be police, jail, a trial. There will be repercussions, grief, and pain of enormous proportions, with consequences radiating out from each of the three people in this park, toward friends and families and coworkers and neighbors and childhood acquaintances they haven’t spoken to in years but in whose minds they nonetheless appear and flit around, moth-like, unexplained, from time to time.

You think this is a story about coincidence and/or injustice and/or fate, about the extraordinarily wrong actions of ordinary people. But you’re wrong. This is about the moment when one of them realizes he has killed the wrong person, and the two of them, these lovers, very nearly run to each other and embrace. They almost kiss over the dead body of the woman who is not her. It’s about the moment in which hope leaps in his heart. The moment in which she vows never to let him go again.