The Best American Mystery Stories 2011

Audacious by Brock Adams

FROM Sewanee Review

SHE WAS A PICKPOCKET.

She haunted the subway station on Thirty-fourth and Holloway, where every morning Gerald waited for his train on the same cold concrete bench. He watched her through thick glasses. She was young, frail and thin, waiflike, with short shaggy black hair, and she moved like a ghost, drifting in and out of sight as the crowd milled about.

She made him look forward to the mornings. She made him feel sparks. Watching her was the only time that Gerald had felt alive since he found Dolores, his wife of fifty-three years, face-down in her Cheerios on a Sunday morning, dead from a stroke.

Gerald's pickpocket wore black leggings covered by a short blue-jean skirt. She wore two jackets, Windbreaker over denim-lots of pockets, Gerald figured. Sometimes she wore sunglasses, even though she was underground.

She was good, crafty and swift and clever, and not greedy-you get caught when you get greedy. Gerald learned her patterns as he watched her on the way to work.

Not work really. After Dolores died, and after the funeral and the family and the random visitors bringing potluck stuff over to mold in the fridge, he found himself alone in the house. He had been retired for nine years before she died, and they had never done much of anything. They never traveled or went to parties or joined any clubs. But they were in the house together, living close but separate lives, side by side. She was there, a constant, a daily affirmation, like the soreness of his right rear molar or the ingrown toenail on his middle toe-a part of life.

Once she was gone, there was nothing there but an empty house and a lot of hours between waking up and falling asleep. Gerald cleaned and straightened until there was nothing left to clean and straighten; then he tried to get his job as a building inspector back, but the contracting business had moved on, far on, from the last time he worked. The site was now run by a kid who had been an intern when Gerald retired. He had laughed and put his hand on Gerald's shoulder when he brought up returning to work. Gerald watched the light drain from the kid's eyes, watched the uncomfortable tension slide in, when he realized Gerald was serious. The kid forced the smile back onto his face. "We'd love to have you back, Gerald," he said, "but it's just not safe to have a seventy-four-year-old on a construction site."

Gerald had smiled and nodded, shook the kid's hand. His hand seemed old and callused in the young man's grip. It felt bulky in his pocket as he walked away from the site. Gerald's hair was white by now, even though he parted it the same way he had when he was thirty. His skin was weathered and wrinkled. Everything around him was new. He didn't fit.

He took an office downtown, a small dusty room with a big window that was full of sun and blue sky in the mornings. He told people he was going to be a freelance writer. He didn't write much-a humor piece for the local tabloid, a few halfhearted attempts at a memoir; mostly he looked out the window and breathed in the musty air. He just liked the rhythm it gave to his life, this waking up and getting ready and going to work and coming home, although every morning it got harder to get off that bench and onto the train. And then he found his pickpocket.

She followed patterns that no one but Gerald knew. She entered from the south entrance, the one with the stairs, rather than the escalator. She skipped down the stairs and moved close to the tracks, leaned her back against a cement pillar. She faced straight down into the black hole of the tunnel, but her eyes darted around-light, searching. She stood at the pillar a few minutes. When the first train came rumbling up the tunnel and the crowds pressed right up to the edge of the track, she drifted in, melted right into the throng, and when the doors hissed open, she made her move. Gerald had seen her unzip purses and unhook wallets from chains while the crowd jostled and shoved. She snatched a silver fountain pen from a stockbroker's breast pocket, plucked a small jewel out of an Indian woman's scarf. Then, as the crowd disappeared behind the sliding doors and was shuttled away from her, she slipped her prizes deep in her jacket, slid out the north entrance, and was gone until tomorrow.

She was interesting, a diversion for a while, until the day she pickpocketed the cop. The cop was young and nervous-looking, and he stalked around the station every other day and ran out the bums who begged for change. He stood over a bum on a Wednesday morning.

"Got to move along, buddy," he said.

The bum looked up at him. "Come on, man," he said.

"No panhandling in here."

"Cut me a break."

"Don't make this hard," the cop said. He wore a heavy utility belt loaded down with radio and gun and baton and other cop stuff. Everything was held down by leather straps with snaps on them. He unsnapped the pepper spray. '"Just move along."

The train rumbled in and the doors opened and the crowd sardined its way into the waiting cars, and as Gerald watched, his pickpocket wove her way in between the people and up behind the cop, nicked the pepper spray right out of his belt, and scuttled on out the north entrance. The cop reached for his belt, fumbled thin air, looked down with confusion.

"Watch out for those damn ghosts," the bum said, laughing, grinning a dirty-toothed grin.

Gerald fell in love with her that morning.

Gerald stood at the edge of the crowd with his hand against a pillar. He ran his finger over the cold, gravelly cement. The subway station always smelled of metal and soap, of machines and people just out of the shower. A thin man in a suit stood beside Gerald, one of those phone earpiece things attached to him, making him look like a robot. He yelled at whoever was on the other end of the phone, like he was yelling into thin air. Two kids with lunchboxes sat side by side on a bench. One punched the other on the arm, and they both laughed.

All around Gerald the crowd hummed, feet clicking and sticking on the cold ground.

She came in through the south entrance, her sunglasses on, her jackets zipped up against the November cold. She leaned against her pillar. Gerald watched her out of the corner of his eye. He could feel her looking around, looking at him. He slid his hand further up the pillar, his jacket falling further open, his wallet inching out of the inside breast pocket. An inch and a half of leather showing now. She had to see it.

The train snaked into the station. The doors opened. The crowd surged and shoved around him; he looked at her pillar, and she was gone. A woman with a bagel smushed into him, got cream cheese on his coat.

"Sorry," she mumbled without looking at him.

The crowd pressed him into the car and the doors shut behind him. Warmth was everywhere, coming from the car's heater, coming from the bodies pressed against each other. The odor of coffee on the air. Gerald felt his pocket. The wallet was gone.

The train began to move and the station slid away outside the window. Gerald watched his pickpocket as she edged through the crowd toward the north entrance.

He held on to the metal rail above his head and smiled as the train plowed into the darkness. Graffiti raced by on the tunnel walls. He closed his eyes and pictured his girl, climbing up the stairs and into the cold hard air of the city, scooting along the sidewalk, head down, hands in her pockets while the wind whips her hair around. She turns down an alley and tucks herself into a corner behind a dumpster. She unzips her coat, pulls the wallet out, and opens it, rifles through it, stares. No money, no credit cards, no ID. Just a piece of paper. She holds it in her little pink fingers. One side says BUSTED. She flips it over. So audacious. Find me tomorrow. She huffs, pouts, crumples the paper, sticks it back in her pocket. She fumes. A tiny ball of fire.

Gerald smiled and felt his feet rocking with the train.

She was there the next morning. She leaned against her pillar, her arms crossed, her top teeth biting into her bottom lip. She stared at Gerald. He sat on the bench and stared back while people cut back and forth between them. The subway came and went. She let the crowd and all their wallets and purses and jewelry walk right by in front of her. Then the station was nearly empty: the cashiers were changing shifts, the cop was heading out the north entrance, and the pickpocket padded across the concrete, the soft pat of her shoes echoing around the station. She stopped in front of him and crossed her arms again.

"What was that all about?" she said.

Gerald smiled at her. He put his palms on the bench and leaned back, crossed one leg over the other. "Surprised?" he said.

"Are you going to turn me in?"

"I wasn't planning on it."

"Then what do you want?"

He looked at her feet. She wore black ballet slippers. "I see you every morning," he said. "Just wanted some company, I suppose."

"Are you trying to hit on me?"

"No."

"How old are you?"

"I'm not trying to hit on you."

"Okay." She looked around the room. A janitor was wandering around with one of those grabber-claw things, picking up coffee cups and fruit-bar wrappers. She sat down beside Gerald and pulled the crumpled piece of paper out of her pocket. She looked at it, flipped it over, turned it between her fingers. "What does audacious mean?"

"You've never heard it before?"

"No."

He took the paper from her. "It means daring, bold."

"So audacious."

"Yup." He handed the paper back to her. She folded it up and slipped it neatly into a pocket. She looked at her feet. Pushed her hair back behind her ears.

"I'm Gerald. What's your name?"

She licked her lips. "You think I'm audacious?"

"I do."

"So just call me Audacious."

"You don't have a name?"

"Not that I'm going to tell you."

"Well, Audacious is a little long for a name."

"So shorten it then, whatever. I'm not telling you my real name." She stood up.

"Shorten it? Like Audi?"

She stood in front of him, zipped her jackets up, first the denim one, then the Windbreaker. "Like the car?"

"As in short for Audacious."

"Fine then. Audi." She turned around, headed for the north entrance.

"See you tomorrow?" Gerald said. His voice bounced off the walls of the station.

She tucked her hands into her jacket and walked out of sight.

He brought her coffee the next morning. Audi stood across the station and stared at him until the train left, then came and sat down beside him. Didn't say a word.

"I thought you'd like it sweet. I put lots of sugar in it. Lots of cream," Gerald said.

She took it from him. "Thanks," she said. She took a sip, licked her lips. "You know, this is two days in a row I've missed a score because of you."

"Whoops."

"You're going to have to help me out if you keep this up," she said. She smiled at him. The gums above her top teeth showed pink and tender. Her dark eyes sparkled. Gerald felt himself filling up inside.

"I brought you coffee," he said. "What else do you want?"

"I'll think of something."

For two weeks she was there every morning. Gerald missed his train to talk to her. He showed up late to the office every day. Not that there was anyone who would notice.

Audi told him about herself. She was twenty-two years old, had been fending for herself for the last six years. She ended up on the street when her boyfriend left her. He owned a house, begged her to move in. She did, and a month later he'd had enough of her.

"Get your shit and move out-that's all he said to me," Audi said, turning her coffee cup around in her palms. "I knew my parents wouldn't let me back in; they were all pissed off that I left in the first place. So I went downtown to stay with one of my girlfriends. She said there wasn't room, and that was that. I started sleeping in here." She waved her arm, gestured to the cavernous space.

"In the station?" Gerald said.

"Over behind those vending machines. It's warm back there, the machines make it warm, and there's space. And the cops don't look back there."

"Not the most comfortable place in the world, though."

"No." She drank her coffee and looked at the vending machines. "But I hung around here enough that I figured people out. And started stealing their stuff. It's easy. And I got enough to pay a sixth of the rent at this place." She told him about the apartment, a place downtown where she stayed with a half-dozen other people her age, the population of the apartment constantly in flux as people disappeared and new ones showed up. She slept on the kitchen floor. Rent was cheap.

"And you're happy there?" Gerald said.

"No."

She leaned forward, her paper cup dangling from her fingertips. She scrunched her face and looked at the ground. Her jackets bunched up around her shoulders, her back. Gerald held his hand behind her, an inch from her back, thought about it, watched her, and finally rested his palm flat and gentle against her jacket.

"You know, I've got extra space, if you ever need somewhere to stay," he said.

"I'm not going to have sex with you."

"I'm not asking you to."

"You're old enough to be my granddad."

"Probably so."

He left his hand on her back while another train came and went. Audi was gone the next day. He sat on the bench with a cup of coffee in each hand and watched four crowds get into four trains. Then he went home.

The city turned dark, gray, and frigid as the month wore on. The streets were slick and the tall buildings looked like they were cut from wet cardboard and stuck against the sky.

Each morning Gerald sat at the station, scanning the platform for her, searching the overcoat-wearing, briefcase-toting crowd. He noticed women with their purses hanging loose and open from their shoulders. Men shouting into cell phones while their briefcases sat unwatched beside them. A treasure trove of targets. But no Audi.

Gerald watched through the window of his office as the winter came in fast and cold. The snow blew in sideways and piled in dirty drifts along the edges of the rooftops. The pigeons at first huddled together in the rafters and eventually disappeared altogether. Gerald tried to fill the hours in the day. He balanced his checkbook. He did crossword puzzles. He wrote, toying around with different stories, far-fetched tales with beautiful female pickpockets as the leading characters. Mostly he just looked out the window. He wondered if Audi's apartment had a heater. He wondered if she'd really had an apartment to begin with.

He went by the market near his house every day on his way home. He liked putting his hands on the fresh vegetables, weighing the ripe fruit. He walked slowly, taking his time, planning his meals as he wandered the aisles. This took time. Bringing it all home and cooking something also ate up the evening. By the time everything was eaten and cleaned up, it was almost time to go to bed, and another day was over.

A week before Christmas, he was sauteing onions when he heard the knock. He left the onions sizzling in the skillet and went to the door. Audi was there, the wind blowing cold and wintry around her, her hands deep in her pockets, her ballet shoes wet with dirty snow.

She looked at the ground, made patterns in the sludge with her toe. "Hi," she said.

"Hi," Gerald said. He stepped aside and she came in.

He put on a pot of coffee; then he made a huge omelet with eight eggs, green peppers, onions, chopped-up smoked sausage. Audi sat at the kitchen table with her hands folded in front of her and didn't speak. She watched him cook. He cut the omelet in half with the spatula and put half on a plate and set it in front of her. He sat down with the rest of it and began to eat it right out of the skillet. Audi stared at her plate.

"You don't like eggs?" Gerald said.

"They're fine," she said. "It just looks pretty. I don't want to mess it up."

"It's just an omelet."

"It's been a long time since I've had an omelet."

She ate, and she told him the story, how she'd come home to her apartment and found the door boarded up, how she didn't even know who the landlord was, how she had no idea what happened. She found one of her roommates on a bench at the park. He told her the rest.

"Drugs or something," Audi said. "The guy said that the cops came and busted them, and after that the landlord kicked everybody out. Boarded the place up. Said she'd had enough of renting to worthless kids."

"Shame," Gerald said. "Not really your fault."

"Hmm."

She finished her plate, and he took it from her and put it in the sink. He poured her a cup of coffee and sat back down at the table. She held it tight between her hands.

"How did you find my house?" Gerald said.

"Followed you one day, a few weeks ago." She pushed her hair back. Looked from the cup to Gerald and back again. "You said I could come if I needed to."

"I know I did. And you're welcome to. I just wondered how."

"I don't want to impose."

"You're not."

She drank the coffee. "The food was good," she said.

They sat at the table in silence and drank their coffee. The snow started to come down again, edging against the windowsill like silent white feathers. Frost coated the glass. The heater kicked on with a groan, and the warm air blew through the kitchen. Audi squished her shoes against the tile.

"You want some dry clothes?" Gerald said.

She nodded. Gerald left her at the table and went upstairs. He had a walk-in closet in his bedroom; the right side was full of his stuff, on the left still hung all of Dolores's clothes. He hadn't known what to do with them. Her shoes were lined up neatly against the wall, except for a pair of heavy brown boots-the last shoes she'd worn-thrown haphazardly in the corner, exactly where she'd left them. He took a selection of shirts and pants and carried them back downstairs.

Audi was sitting on the couch in the living room when he got back. Gerald laid the clothes out on the coffee table in front of her.

"So retro!" she said, fingering the frilled sleeves of a scarlet blouse. "Where'd you get all this stuff?"

"It was my wife's," Gerald said.

Audi nodded and looked at the clothes.

"She died a few years ago," he went on.

"Of what?"

"Stroke."

Audi picked up a pair of brown slacks and stood up. She held the slacks in front of her and looked down, lifted her leg, twisted her toes. "Do you miss her?"

He nodded. "Often."

"I'm going to put these on," she said. She took the scarlet blouse and the brown slacks and went into the bathroom. She was in there a long time. Gerald turned on the TV. A rerun of The A-Team was on. Mr. T beat someone up. Gerald turned down the volume.

"What was her name?" Audi said. She was standing in the doorway, looking slim and clean and young in his wife's clothes.

"Who?"

"Your wife."

"Oh. Dolores. Her name was Dolores."

Audi looked at her reflection in the dark window. "Very pretty," she said, flexing her arm, turning around and standing on her tiptoes. The snow fell quiet and heavy.

She stayed in the guest bedroom that night. He took the sheets down from the top of the closet and made the bed while she stood in the doorway and watched him. She grinned at him.

"For a guy you're pretty good at that."

"I had to learn," Gerald said. He tucked the sheets under the corners of the bed.

"My ex-boyfriend was terrible at it. He always made me help him." She sat down on the end of the bed. "It was a huge pain in the ass."

Gerald propped the pillows against the headboard. "There's a TV," he said, "if you want to watch TV, but I don't have HBO or anything, and I don't know where the remote is."

She crawled up to the top of the bed and settled back into the pillows. "I'll be fine," she said. "I think I'm just going to go on to sleep. I'm tired." She smiled at him. Her skin was fair and her cheeks were flushed and pink. Her hair fell over her eyebrows and spread out behind her on the pillow.

Gerald backed out the door. "Okay, then," he said. "Good night, then." He pulled the door to behind him.

The next day he woke at seven and got dressed. He cracked the door into Audi's room and peeked inside. She lay asleep, under the covers, except for one leg, a long fleshy leg that hung out and down to the floor, bare and pink. Dolores's pants were on the floor beside the bed. Gerald looked at Audi's skin as she shifted in her sleep. He shook his head and shut the door.

At the office, for the first time in weeks, he found himself compelled to write. He took his latest attempt at a memoir out of the drawer and read the first page. The writing was pedestrian, dull. The scene was a boring one, a school play, from ages ago, from third grade. He folded the pages in half and threw them in the garbage and slid a fresh sheet into the typewriter. He began to write, this time starting the story with Dolores's death. He wrote with fire, the words crackling like lightning across the page. He saw himself rolling over to the empty part of the bed, relishing the space, nuzzling into the pillow as the sun made its way through the windows. Then rising late, stumbling downstairs, where Dolores's hair was splayed across the table, her hands dangling limp and straight down at her sides, milk dripping slowly onto the tile.

And then came Audi, a ball of fire in the empty house. He put the paper away and headed home.

She was there when he got back. She was on the couch in another outfit of his wife's, an old sweatsuit. She had cooked popcorn and was cuddled up under the blankets, watching TV.

"Enjoying yourself?" Gerald said.

"You know it."

He sat down beside her. She scooted closer. She took a pillow from the end of the couch and set it in his lap, laid her head on top of it, and turned on her side to keep her eyes on the TV. She was watching a music video.

"What did you do today?" Gerald asked her.

"This," she said. "All day. Bummed around. It was great." She laughed. It was the first time he'd heard her laugh, a tinkling wind-chime sort of sound that started in her chest and bounced its way across her tongue. It put tingles in Gerald's spine. "How about you?" she said.

"I did some writing."

"What about?"

"About you."

She turned over on her back and looked up at him. "You're writing about me?"

"Yup." He watched the TV. The band was playing in a warehouse. He could feel her eyes on him, cold and intense.

"You better write me exciting. I don't want to be a boring character."

"You're not."

"And I better be pretty," she said. Then she turned back to the TV.

She stayed with him. He went to his office and wrote, and came home and talked to her about his day. He spent all day looking forward to his time on the couch with her, to the feeling of the weight of her head on his lap, the feeling of her breath so near his face.

He stayed home on Christmas Day. He was cooking biscuits when she came downstairs, slow and sleepy-eyed.

"Merry Christmas," Gerald said.

She sat down at the table and yawned. "Don't say Merry Christmas," she said. "It sounds so commercial."

"What do you want me to say?"

"How about Happy Christmas, like you say for every other holiday?"

"Fine, Happy Christmas. Honey or jelly? On your biscuits."

"Honey."

"Good choice." He put the biscuits in the oven and took the honey from the cabinet and set it on the table in front of her. "They'll take a few minutes to cook."

"I got you a Christmas present," she said. She looked at the table and wrung her hands. "I'm not sure if you'll like it."

"What is it?"

"You promise you'll like it? Or at least say you'll like it?"

"I promise I'll at least say I like it."

"Smart-ass," she said. She ran upstairs and came back down with a brown paper bag and handed it to Gerald. She sat back at the table and waited.

Gerald opened the bag. There was a picture frame inside. He pulled it out. Inside the frame was the piece of paper that he'd left for her in his wallet, the side with the audacious bit on it. She'd taken colored pencils and traced over all the creases from where she'd crumpled the paper up; then she'd colored the sections all different colors. It looked like the dry, cracked ground in the desert would look if someone attacked it with a paintbrush. The word audacious was traced in brilliant red. The colors were amplified behind the glass of the frame. Gerald turned it between his fingers.

"You like it?" Audi said.

"I love it," Gerald said. He propped it up on the table in front of him.

"You promise?"

"I love it." He looked at her. She was blushing, her face turned away from him. "I didn't get you anything," he said. "I can get you something."

"You don't have to," she said. "You've done plenty."

They spent the entire day on the couch, watching the Christmas shows-Rudolph, Frosty, Island of Misfit Toys-until it got dark outside and the snow started to fall. Gerald went upstairs and got into bed. He closed his eyes.

He didn't know how long he had been asleep when Audi came in. He felt her as soon as she came into the room. Gerald watched her. She was wearing a T-shirt and panties. She tiptoed across the carpet to the side of the bed, then she pulled the covers back a bit and slid under them. She cuddled up close beside him, put one of her bare legs across his. Her legs felt smooth and soft. She pulled Gerald's arm up above his head and put her head on his chest, wrapped her arm across his stomach. Gerald felt her hair on his chin. He felt her eyelashes on his chest. His muscles tensed.

"You've been really sweet to me, Gerald," she said.

He let his arm drop slowly. He brought it around her and pulled her close to him. She wrapped her leg around him and squeezed back.

"I could fall in love with you," she said.

"No, you can't," he whispered. He breathed in her hair; she smelled of honey and apples and skin. Then he kissed her on the top of her head. She looked up at him, her eyes dark points in the dark room. She inched forward and kissed him on the mouth, twice, feather soft. Then she laid her head back on his chest and fell asleep. Gerald stared at the ceiling and listened to her breathing.

He woke up and the sun was bright on her face. He shook her. She stirred and batted her eyes and looked at him.

"Hey," she said.

"Get up," he said. "I want to take you somewhere. Late Christmas present."

She rolled off him onto her back, bunched the covers up over her face. "I'm still sleepy," she said, her eyes peeking out above the bedspread.

"You want me to make you some breakfast?"

"Make me some more biscuits," she said. "Just do it quietly." She grinned at him, then she flopped over in the bed and covered her head with the pillow.

Gerald walked downstairs and looked in the refrigerator. He was out of milk. He put on his boots and his coat and his hat and walked outside. The air was crisp and stung his nostrils. The sun glinted off the icicles that hung from the eaves of his house.

He put his hands in his pockets and walked up the street to the market. The electric doors slid open and bathed him in warmth and fluorescence. He smiled at the cashier and walked to the back and took a carton of milk from the shelf. He turned it over in his hand, checked the expiration date. He looked at the back of the carton, where they put the announcements about missing children. Audi's picture was printed in smudged ink beneath the nutrition information.

Gerald stared at it. Her eyes looked back at him from the cold cardboard. Nikki Tyler, age sixteen, runaway, missing for a year. Height. Weight. Parents' number and address. Her parents live just forty-five minutes outside the city, less than an hour from Gerald's house.

He put the carton on the shelf and chose a different one, one with a picture of a little black boy on the back, and bought it and took it home.

Audi was on the couch watching The Price Is Right."Took you long enough," she said. She had the blankets tented around her, just her head sticking out, her eyes intent on the TV. Her nose was small in profile, her lips thin and pink. She turned to him, smiled. "You miss me?"

Gerald shifted the milk from one hand to the other. "Terribly," he said.

He cooked the biscuits, and they ate some in front of the TV; then they packed a lunch and got in the car and headed north on the interstate. The roads were empty. The new snow was flat all around them, mostly smooth, but whipped by the wind in some places until it looked like peaked meringue. The sky was deep blue and far away. Audi pressed her nose against the window as they drove.

"Where are we going?" she said.

"Ultima Thule," Gerald said.

"What?"

"End of the earth."

They pulled into a parking lot beside a huge frozen lake. Gerald got out of the car and opened the trunk and took out a blanket and their food. They set off toward the lake. Gerald stepped gently off the sand and onto the ice; it held firm.

"Careful," he said. He took Audi's hand in his. They walked across the ice, their footprints sitting deep in the powdery snow.

"It's like walking on the moon," she said, her hand tight in his, warm, her eyes scanning the blue horizon. Her feet were soft on the ice.

A hundred yards offshore, Gerald spread out the blanket and sat down. He handed Audi a sandwich. They ate and looked out over the lake. The ice was cracked and shattered not far from where they sat, and beyond that there were huge gaps with water in between them. Silvery blue and white floes were broken off and drifting beyond, spaced farther and farther out toward the blue horizon.

"I used to take my wife here," Gerald said. "She liked it. She said it was like the world was trying to stay together, but it was too much. The pull of whatever's outside the world was too much, and it made the earth just break apart and float away."

"That's very pretty," Audi said.

"She said when we were here, she felt like we were sitting on the very edge."

Audi nodded and chewed her sandwich. She took Gerald's hand in hers and held it in her lap and squeezed it tight. The air was still and cold. Water birds cackled at the edge of the lake. The ice cracked and groaned.

"Audi," Gerald said, "what are you going to do?" He watched the birds as they pecked around in the snow. He felt Audi looking at him.

"What do you mean?" she said.

"I mean, with yourself?" He felt her put her other hand on his, closing his rough hand in her fists. "Don't you miss your parents?"

"They were mean to me, Gerald."

"Were they really? Is that why you left?"

She squeezed his hands. "I'm not going to lie to you," she said. They watched the ice float out over the deep water.

They headed home as the sun started to go down. The sky was cloudless and clean; the sun turned the horizon a bright yellow-orange as the light reflected off the snow and the ice. Audi leaned back in the passenger seat and shut her eyes.

"I'm stopping up here at this rest area," Gerald said.

Audi mumbled something, her voice heavy with sleep.

"You got to pee?"

She shook her head. Gerald pulled off the interstate and into a parking place at the rest area. He left the engine on, with the heater running. He used the restroom and came outside and stood in the cold, watching his breath form clouds in front of his face. In the parking lot a family rearranged the contents of their van.

Gerald shook his right leg, then his left. They felt stiff from the drive. He took some long steps around the rest area. He wandered over to the drink machines and bought a Coke. He opened it and took a sip and walked back to the kiosk with the map and the advertisements. He looked over the ads for car insurance and get-rich-quick jobs. In the top right corner were six pieces of paper with pictures of people on them, fliers advertising missing children, the rest-area equivalent of the back of a milk carton. Audi's was in the middle. He read her parents' address again, looked back at the car in the parking lot. The headlights were on and steam was easing out from under the hood. In the woods behind, the snow lay heavy on the limbs of the trees. The branches crackled with ice.

Audi slept in the passenger seat. Her mouth was open slightly and her right temple leaned against the window. She had her legs tucked into her chest and her arms pulled inside the sleeves of her shirt. Gerald turned the heater up and looked out the window. The dark in front of him grew brighter as the inky night slid past, and then the city rose up glowing and hard in front of them. He left the interstate and headed into the neighborhood.

Gerald drove slowly, scanning the dark houses for the address. The houses were small and weathered; the streets were lined with ghostly bare trees. The wind picked up outside and tossed snowflakes off the ground and into the air. It ripped and whistled around the car. Audi woke up. She yawned and scratched her nose, looking around. She stared out the window.

"What are we doing here?" she said.

Gerald didn't say anything. He turned the brights on to see through the swirling snow.

"Gerald. Where are we going?" Audi was glaring at him, her eyes piercing neat holes in the side of his head.

"I'm taking you home," Gerald said.

"I don't live around here."

"I'm taking you back to your parents, Nikki."

Audi sat up straight in the chair. "You son of a bitch," she said. "You knew? How long have you known?"

"Only a little while-"

"Have you been planning this? Is this your trick? Your trick to get me back to my parents?" She climbed onto her knees in the seat, one hand on the dashboard, the other on the headrest, and put her face close to Gerald's, yelling at him. "They rewarding you or something? Are you some sort of bounty hunter?"

"I only found out today," Gerald said. He stopped at a stop sign and looked at her. "I just found out."

"I don't want to go back. I told you they were mean to me."

"I know."

"They were awful! They never let me do anything. They wouldn't let me see my boyfriend. They locked me in my room. They locked me up, Gerald!" She was raving, her breath hot on Gerald's ear. "They were so mean. I told you they were mean."

Gerald sighed. "I know, Audi, but you've told me a lot of stuff."

"You son of a bitch."

"I just want to do what's best for you," he said. He started to pull forward.

"Stop the car," Audi said.

"What-"

"Stop the car!" She yelled it right in his ear. Gerald stopped and Audi sat back down in the seat. She looked out the windshield. The wind rocked the car and the snow made wispy patterns in the dark air. "Who the hell are you to say what's best for me?" she said.

Gerald sat quietly for a moment. The engine vibrated; snow melted on the hood. The air from the heater felt fusty and warm on his face. "I don't know. I don't know."

She didn't look at him. She stared down at her shoes. After a while she said, "You don't want to keep me?"

She was so small in the chair. She had her knees pulled into her shirt again.

"You know I can't, Nikki," Gerald said.

She turned to him. Her eyes were wet pieces of coal. "Stop calling me that," she said. She opened the door and the cold swirled through the car. She got out and zipped her jacket tight around her and slammed the door behind her. She walked up the street.

Gerald reached across the center console and struggled to roll the window down. "Nikki," he yelled after her. "Nikki, hang on. Audi! Audi." He checked the intersection and put the car in gear and swung around the corner after her. She was hurrying along the edge of the street, her feet tromping through the matted snow along the gutter. Her head tucked tight between her shoulders, hands deep in her pockets.

Gerald slowed beside her. "Audi, come on," he said.

She walked faster. The wind was high and the snow blew like a white sandstorm through the darkness. Street lamps lined the road, casting cold yellow pools of light on the asphalt. Audi walked through one; Gerald saw the snow stuck in her dark hair. She looked up at him, her eyes black, so black and cold. She began to run, cutting across a lawn, ducking between two houses.

Gerald got out of the car. The wind hit him and blew his coat open, blasting his chest, the cold stealing his breath. He ran a few steps. His legs were stiff from the drive, stiff from the cold, stiff from seventy-four years of life. Audi was just visible at the dark edge of an anonymous backyard. Gerald called out to her again. He stepped out of the light of the street lamp and into the hard winter dirt in front of the house. He stumbled, put his hand out to catch himself. His old heart pounded in the cage in his chest. When he looked up again, Audi was gone, disappeared into the dark, into the wind and the cold.

When Gerald got home, the house was empty and quiet. Upstairs Dolores's clothes, the ones that Audi had worn, were scattered across the floor. The bed was unmade. He left it all there. In the kitchen the remains of the biscuits sat in the sink. His Christmas present, Audi's artwork, audacious, lay on the kitchen table. He picked it up and carried it into the living room and propped it on the TV.

He looked at his gift. The colors were still vibrant and glowing beneath the glass. The lines were fine but dark where Audi had traced. He pictured her small fingers, spending hours meticulously following the paths already set into the paper. Her lines followed those paths, the ones that split out in a thousand directions, one way leading to three more, each of those three leading to three new ones, on and on, the paths circling each other and spreading out and falling together again, a patchwork of possibilities spread across the once-blank field of the paper.

He had thought of the other possibilities, of course, all the other paths. The other lives that he might have lived had always hidden somewhere in his subconscious, specters of other Geralds in other worlds where things were not the same. Worlds where he did other jobs, lived in other cities, married other women. Worlds where Dolores wasn't dead, worlds where he'd never even met her. All the different paths, and now these new ones: he catches Audi out there in the snowy night, before she disappears into shadow, and she sobs into his chest, and they get back into the car. They go on living together, but for how long and for what purpose and under what pretense, he doesn't know. Or maybe he adopts her, but that one could never be. Her parents would keep looking for her. They'd never allow it.

And the last one, the one he felt in his stomach and pushed aside with his brain. Her leg wrapped so tightly around his. Her lashes on his chest. No, he thought, shaking his head. No.

All those different paths, traced so carefully with delicate fingers.

The wind had died down, and the snow was falling again. He wrapped himself up in a blanket and sat down on the couch and closed his eyes. The heater clicked on. Gerald listened to its ticks and pings and rumbles as the heat moved through the empty rooms.