The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen (5 page)

He looks truly pathetic. Wheedling, almost.

I hesitate.

Then I take it.

“No promises,” I say.

“Thank you,” Tyler says, relief flooding his face. “No, seriously. Thank you.”

I shake my head, loathing myself for being such a pushover. But one thought flickers at the edge of my consciousness, and mollifies me as I stuff the release form into my backpack.

Her,
whispers the thought, and a delicious tremor travels up my spine.

That girl. With the dark eyes. That untouchable girl.

Now I have a reason to find her.

I
feel pretty pleased with myself for trying the image search, I'm not going to lie. So it's a real letdown when it doesn't work.

I spent the rest of that night dubbing in The xx to
Most
. There's a wonderful yearning quality to that band, so even though it's pretty old, I wanted to use it anyway. One of the people in my documentary is an old guy, Charles, who I found playing chess in the park. His face is incredible. Deep lines, like troughs on either side of his mouth. Sunburned to the color of mahogany. He's in a knitted wool hat even though it's July. What he wants most is to fly on the Concorde, which is impossible since the Concorde doesn't exist anymore, except for the one you can visit on the pier next to
Intrepid
. But the way he talks about it, the speed, the pointed nose . . . Charles thinks about flying on the Concorde every day. He hunches over the chessboard in the park, winning twenty dollars a game, and in his ears all he hears is a sonic boom of the impossible. I edit and edit, earbuds in, and it's not until I pull the earbuds out of my ears and hear the sleepy chirping of sparrows in the ginkgo trees outside my window that I realize it's five in the morning.

“Oh my God.” I moan.

I lean back in my desk chair and rub my forehead with my fingers.

Eastlin hasn't come home. I consider texting him to make sure he's okay, but then I remind myself that Eastlin is totally ripped and is probably safer cruising guys in clubs than I would be trying to buy a pierogi at Veselka by myself. Whatever, I text him anyway, a quick
Everything cool?
And then I loll my head on the back of my desk chair, staring at the ceiling.

Divots. Acoustical tile. God, I'm so tired.

That form. Tyler.

That girl.

How in the hell am I going to find that girl?

I pull out my phone again and stare at it for a long minute, thumbing through different apps. When my thumb hovers over Twitter, I feel a lurch in my chest.

Maddie.

Maddie probably knows the hipster-curls girl. Right? Maddie said she goes to that palm reader all the time. To sleep, she said. Which is a weird thing to say, now that I think about it. Maybe she was joking.

I chew the inside of my cheek, thinking.

I haven't messaged Maddie back, and it's been a week. It's not that I didn't want to. I did want to. A lot. I just couldn't think of something funny to say. I fully intended to text her back within a couple of hours, as soon as I could think of something good. I thought of just saying
Hey
, but that didn't seem good enough. Then before I realized that was happening, three days had gone by, and then five, and then it was just way too much time and I felt like an asshole. This always happens to me. I put off something that I want to do because I want it to be really awesome, and I'm afraid of getting it wrong. I want it to be awesome so bad that I mess everything up by waiting.

I consider texting her a photo of something, and look around my dorm room. What, I'm going to text her a picture of Eastlin's skinny jeans in a heap on the floor? Yeah, no.

I can't ask Maddie.

But thinking about Maddie reminds me how Maddie found out who I was.

I see you, Wes.

I see you.

“Okay,” I say aloud to myself. “That's what I'll do.”

• • •

After three hours of fitful sleep on my face I finally drag myself out of bed and over to Tisch. I'm already waiting for the elevator when I notice that I'm still wearing the same clothes as yesterday. In fact, it occurs to me that I'm not 100 percent sure when I last changed them. Or showered. I eye the security guy who checks our IDs, and when he's distracted by his copy of the
Post
I take a surreptitious sniff of my armpit.

Oh, man. It's bad.

“Morning, Wes,” says a voice while my nose is still in my T-shirt collar.

“Oh!” Dammit. I pull down the tail of my T-shirt and cross my arms over my chest. Hopefully that will keep the worst of the funk under control. “Morning, Professor Limoncelli.”

The head of the film department flares her nostrils at me. I'm not sure if she can tell I slept in my clothes.

“You ready for documentary workshop next week?” she asks lightly.

God, it's already Wednesday. I am so screwed.

“Um,” I stammer. She intimidates the hell out of me. “Yeah, I think so. Just about.”

“What's yours called again?” She gazes up at the elevator the
way people do when they think they can hurry it along by mental telepathy.

“
Most,
” I tell her. “It's kind of a documentary meditation on desire? Where I, you know. Talk to people? And they tell me what they want the most.”

I think she's suppressing a smile, but I can't tell if that's really happening or if I'm just being paranoid.

Could the elevator be taking any longer? I thought getting here by eight I'd avoid everyone. But the elevators here are famous for being slow. Already some grad students have come shuffling in with their huge Starbucks cups and a few other professors are milling around looking at their watches and Professor Limoncelli is smiling at me like she can tell I was up editing all night.

“Sounds interesting,” she says, turning back to gaze up at the elevator numbers as they fall one at a time. All at once I realize that I'll have to stand next to her all the way up to our floor if I get on the elevator. That is completely impossible. That will make me completely freak out.

“Thanks!” I chirp. “Me, too. I, um. Actually, I realize I forgot something, so . . . yeah.”

I start edging away. The elevator arrives with a ping and everyone starts loading on.

“Okay.” She smiles. “See you Friday.”

“Yeah! Yeah. See you.”

The second the doors ding closed I turn on my heel and run for the stairs. I catch the security guard laughing behind his newspaper.

I'm winded when I get to the hall outside the editing room, where the student lockers are, and it takes me a second to remember the combination to Tyler's locker. After some yanking and fumbling I get the lock open and then his 16 millimeter film is in my hands.

I don't have a lot of experience with actual film. I shoot all my
stuff digitally, since it's so much cheaper. But Tyler thinks it's a “more authentic encounter with memory and consciousness,” or so he said on our first day in class. Pretentious ass. He probably got that out of a back issue of
Film Comment.
But God, Gavin Brown. Damn. A part of me feels envious. A large part, if I'm honest. I mean, it's not like I came to New York thinking I'd bust my way into the art scene. Then again. Can it hurt, if you're a documentary filmmaker, to have a friend big in the New York art scene?

Assuming Tyler is my friend.

I load the film into the Steenbeck and spool it forward, slowly, rewatching all the footage that Tyler showed me last night.

Just before the end, I freeze frame the film and sit back in my chair, staring.

There she is. I can just see her in the background, drawing the curtain away from her face. Looking off to the side, like she's trying to get someone's attention.

I wonder what she's looking at.

I nudge the film forward another frame or two, trying to get the angle of her face just right. It takes a minute of tinkering back and forth.

There. After the séance is over and someone turns the lights on in the parlor, I can see her best. That pale skin. The little mole on her upper lip. The curls over her ears are glossy and thick. Her face is turned partway toward the camera, and her mouth is open like she's calling out to someone.

I pull my phone out of my shorts pocket, hold it as steady as I can, and snap a picture. A film still.

“Okay, hipster girl.” I say to myself in a fake Bond-villain accent. “Let's see who you really are.”

I share the picture to Google on my phone and hit search.

The waiting circle spins for what seems like forever while the
results load. While I wait, I start rewinding Tyler's film with a punch of buttons and a whir of tape. The girl with the hipster curls blurs out of existence.

I've tucked the film reel back into its canister and am about ready to leave when I check my phone for the search results.

And the results are—nothing.

Well, not nothing, obviously. The results are hundreds upon hundreds of pictures of random girls, none of whom even remotely look like the girl with the hipster-curls hair. I frown, scrolling through all the glurge spat out from the farthest reaches of the internet. How can there not even be one? No Facebook? No Instagram? No drunk selfie with a bunch of other girls dressed like slutty witches on Halloween? Nothing from high school, even? My Facebook is like a permanent repository of all my worst high school moments—bad hair. Zits. My ex-girlfriend, who tags everything to make sure I see it. That's one reason I never check it anymore.

“Huh,” I say aloud.

I sift through pages of anonymous girls grinning into cameras, arms around each other's necks, fingers flashing peace signs. So many girls, and none of them are the girl with the hipster-curls hair.

Deep into page six of the search results, I almost recognize someone. I squint at the phone, trying to figure out where I know her from. This girl is blond, and grinning into the camera like all the others. She's pink-cheeked and fleshy in an appealing, healthy way. She looks really young, like fifteen. It's from a defunct-looking Facebook page that is all set to private except for the profile picture. The girl's name is Malou, which seems like a name I'd remember if I'd ever heard it, which I haven't. I know that I recognize her, though. Not from Madison. I just can't put my finger on where I've seen her before.

I save Malou's picture to my gallery and flip back to the film still.
When I look at it, there's a strange heaviness that comes into my chest, and for a minute I'm worried I'm going to cry, which is stupid because there's nothing wrong. The girl hovers there, an image of an image, looking off to the side like she desperately wants to catch someone's attention.

Someone who's just out of shot, to the right of the frame, trying to stay out of the camera's way.

Someone who, I realize in a dizzying rush of certainty, is probably me.

T
he Bowery looks different during the day. Maybe it's because I was up all night, and it's still pretty early, but I have the hallucinatory feeling that I'm floating above the sidewalk as I walk. The thin light of summer morning brings things into sharp relief that I never noticed before. A restaurant with overturned chairs on the tables. A taxi, light on, idling by the curb. A lumpy sleeping bag rolled up against a doorway, with two dirt-crusted feet sticking out the end.

My dad told me that I shouldn't go to the Bowery. He said that's where all the flophouses are, the ones where homeless men pay five bucks to sleep in chain-link enclosures, caged like animals. He told me about his one night of glory playing CBGB, sitting in with some guys he met through the girl he was crashing with. He saw Television and Blondie play in person.

I guess Dad really hasn't been back to the city in a while, because other than the line of homeless guys snaking out of the mission waiting for breakfast, the Bowery looks pretty plush to me. Fancy bars I can't afford. High-end furniture shops. There's even a Whole Foods.

I reach the corner of Bowery and Bleecker, and hesitate. Nothing looks familiar. The night I went along with Tyler I just got in the cab
with him and our film equipment. I was so worried about forgetting something that I didn't pay any attention to where we were going.

A leggy girl prances by, still dressed up from the night before, probably on a walk of shame, not that she looks ashamed. Her makeup is all sex-smudged. She eyes me but doesn't say anything as she passes.

“Hey, excuse me?” I call out to her.

She pauses, far enough away that I have to raise my voice. City girls are wary. I guess I don't blame them. She doesn't know I'm not a skeeze.

“Um. Do you know where there's a pizzeria around here?” I shout.

“Are you serious?” she says. Probably because there's a pizzeria across the street from us. Just not the right one.

“Yeah, sorry. Not that one. The one I'm looking for has a palm reader upstairs from it?”

She doesn't even dignify that one with an answer, just shakes her head in disgust and walks away.

“'Kay. Thanks,” I call to her retreating back.

I wander south, watching as the city around me begins to shake off sleep. A guy comes out of a bodega on the corner and starts hosing down the sidewalk. From the steam rising up where the water runs into the gutter I can tell it's going to be hot today. Sticky hot.

When I get to First Street, I pause.

There it is. It's not actually on Bowery, turns out, it's just off it, around the corner. I don't know why I didn't remember that.

The no-name pizzeria is still shuttered for the night, metal security gate down and padlocked, zigzagged with faded graffiti tags that read
LUDDITZ
4
EVA
. The
z
looks like a lightning bolt. Upstairs in the picture window the neon sign that says
PA
LMISTRY CLAIRVOYANT
PSYCHIC TAROT
$15
is lit, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything.
I guess I should have called or something to see if they were open. That didn't even occur to me.

I'm so busy worrying about whether or not the place is open that I'm basically standing right in front of it before I notice that there's someone sitting on the stoop.

It's a small person, a girl, curled in a ball, arms and face tucked behind updrawn knees. All I can see is the stark-white part of her hair, her knees draped in what looks like a nightgown, two slippered feet sticking out from under a frayed hem, and her rounded back. The figure is rocking back and forth softly, sleepily, and she doesn't seem to notice that I'm there.

“Hey,” I say as I approach.

I'm on the point of asking what time the place upstairs opens when the figure raises her face and stares at me.

The eyes are formless puddles of black.

It's her.

“Oh!” I exclaim. I take a step backward in shock, my scalp tightening, and the hair on my arms stirs with electricity.

She looks exactly as I remember her, the curls over her ears, the pale cream skin. The mole, God, that mole! But in the morning light she looks even more . . . It's like she captures the light. Like it moves through her, and gathers within her, and makes her exude a fragile glow. I swallow and realize that I'm staring, and I haven't said anything, and that's totally weird, and I'm probably freaking her out. When I open my mouth to speak I discover I've been holding my breath.

She looks at me. Confused, like she's been asleep. Or maybe she came out to get the paper, and forgot her keys, and she's locked out. She obviously wasn't planning on talking to some guy on the stoop before she's even had any coffee. She blinks, and the tiny movement
over her eyes shakes me loose from myself and I get it together to actually say something.

“Hey! Hi!” I say. Smooth, Wes. You are so, so smooth. You are so smooth, you could give glass lessons.

What? What does that even mean?
I think in a panic.

At first she looks taken aback. Like I surprised her. When I speak, though, her face brightens. She even smiles. When she smiles, it unlocks a beam of light in my chest, like I've leveled up in a video game I didn't know I was playing.

Her lips are the color of dried rose petals, and the minute the thought crosses my mind I marvel crazily that I would even come up with a metaphor like that.

“Herschel?” she says.

“Huh?” I ask.

I look around behind me, thinking maybe she's talking to someone else. But the street is empty, save for the guy hosing down the bodega corner and an elderly woman in orthopedic shoes pushing her grocery cart down the sidewalk across the street.

“Oh!” Her eyes grow confused. She shrinks behind her knees.

“Hey, no. I'm sorry. I'm Wes. From the other night. Remember?”

“Wes,” she says slowly. She gives me a long, steady look. Studying me. Those dark eyebrows knit over her eyes. A little wrinkle forms between them, and it might be the most enticing wrinkle I have ever seen. My mouth goes dry.

“Yeah. Um. I was here with that other guy? Filming the séance. Last week?” My eyes search into hers. She has to remember.

“The séance,” she repeats, thinking. It's like she doesn't know what to do with the word I've given her. Then her black eyes glimmer with recognition, and I feel my pulse thud in my throat. “Oh yes! I remember. Of course.”

She sounds uncertain, though. There's definitely something off
about her. Like she's saying the right things because she's practiced, not because it's what she really means. It crosses my mind that maybe this girl is hiding something. Maybe she's like Maddie. Maybe she goes there to sleep, too.

Or maybe she's, like,
on
something.

I peer at her more closely, and she smiles prettily up at me. The eyes are definitely bottomless, but not in a druggy way. When she smiles, her mouth looks like a bow on top of an expensive present.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“Okay. I was just waiting,” she says, tipping her head to the side as she looks up at me.

“I was actually hoping I'd see you again,” I say without thinking it through first.

“You were?” Her smile widens. She's blushing, and it makes me dizzy, that I've made her blush.

“Definitely,” I say. “In fact, it was absolutely imperative that I find you. Did you know that?” I wonder who this guy is, who's flirting so effortlessly with a hipster New York City girl. Because it's definitely not Wesley Auckerman from Madison, Wisconsin.

“Aw,” she says, eyelashes lowering over those black eyes. “You're teasing me. You're not really here.”

“Sure I am,” I insist. I plop myself down onto the stoop next to her, my knees drawn up, too, my sneakers alongside her slippers. I nudge her with my elbow. She feels firm, fleshy. In that fleeting pressure my elbow finds room between her ribs, and I dig it in gently, to tickle her. She giggles.

“See?” I whisper.

Her tentative smile breaks into a huge grin. She laughs and nudges me back. Her elbow is sharp in my side, but I like it.

“So how did you find me?” she asks. “Wes.” She rolls my name around in her mouth, like an unfamiliar flavor.

“It wasn't easy,” I confess. “Given that I don't know your name.”

She doesn't pick up my gambit. One of her eyebrows draws up into an inquisitive arc.

“Wes,” she says again. “Is that a nickname?”

“Maybe,” I say, arching my eyebrow back at her.

She bites the inside of her cheek, waiting, but two can play at this game, and I don't pick up her gambit, either. We wait a long beat, daring each other with our eyes. She nudges me in the ribs again, and then we both laugh. When she laughs, her whole face squinches up until the bridge of her nose wrinkles, and I can feel her shoulders shaking where she's pressed against my side. The curls over her ears vibrate from the energy of her laughing, and it's all I can do not to put my arm around her shoulders and pull her to my chest and bury my nose in those curls. But that would be completely crazy, and so I don't.

“So, listen,” I say after our laughter subsides to eruptive snorts. “This may sound really weird, but I did have to find you.”

“Weird?” she echoes.

“I mean. It's not a big deal or anything,” I rush to reassure her.

I go to pull out Tyler's release form from my bag. She watches me rummage in my backpack with interest. I finally find it, smooth it out on my leg because of course it got all crumpled up while I was carrying it around, and then pass it to her.

“I just need you to sign this. I'm sorry. I should have done it when I was here before.” I'm feeling foolish now. Like she'll think that I'm just flirting because I want something from her. When actually, I want . . . I want . . .

She looks the release form over, a baffled expression on her face. Then she glances up at me, questions in her eyes.

“I mean . . . ,” I fumble. “I'm just as glad I didn't. Remember to get you to sign it, I mean. Before. Because then I had to . . .”

I trail off, staring at her. A long moment falls between us. She's
watching me. I can't tell what she's waiting for.

“Anyway,” I say, looking back into my backpack as a flush reddens my face. “Here.” I hand her a pen.

She takes it gingerly, weighing it in her hand.

“Sign?” she says at length. “But what is it?”

I don't know why she looks so worried and confused. In a flash I wonder if maybe she's famous. What if she's some cable-show teen sensation and I don't know? What if I've been so into my video games and documentaries that she's someone everybody's heard of except me, and people bother her to sign stuff all the time, and I'm being a complete jerk? It would explain the funky hair. And the expensive, high-concept dress. But as soon as the thought blooms into being, I discard it. She would have shown up on my image search, if that were true. Even if the funky hair is new, Google would have found that face. That perfect mole.

God, that mole.

Then I wonder if maybe she's in trouble. Maybe she's run away from home and doesn't want to let on where she is. She certainly wouldn't want to be in some art film on the internet, in that case. That must be it. Maybe I should offer to help her? I could protect her. She's younger than me. Someone as young as her shouldn't be on her own. I bet she has nowhere else to go. That's probably it. She's in trouble. She needs help.

“Seriously. Is everything okay?” I ask gently.

Those black eyes turn to me again. “Is . . . everything . . . okay,” she repeats, in the same way that she repeated my name. Like she's trying it out, in her mouth. “Oh. Kay.”

“Is it?” I press. I drop my voice to a whisper and say, “You can trust me. It's okay.”

She blinks once, twice, and then smiles again. The smile fills her face with light, and I see that I've guessed wrong.

“It caps the climax,” she says with a grin. “Got any ink?”

“Um. What?” I'm confused. I don't even understand what she just said.

“Ink?” She peers at the pen, dandling it in her fingers. “You want me to sign it, don't you?”

“Well, yeah, but . . .” I'm not sure what I'm supposed to say at this point and am about to ask her what she means, when she freezes, ears pricking up, listening.

“Are you—” I start to ask her, but she shushes me, pressing her fingers to my lips. My skin tingles where she touches my mouth, and I feel myself growing light-headed. Her fingertips are warm and soft.

“Shhh,” she whispers.

She listens intently, her gaze moving to the façade of the building where we're sitting. All I can hear is the faint buzzing of the neon clairvoyant sign, and the abrupt shutoff of the bodega guy's hose at the end of the block. There's a long minute of listening silence, and then her face twitches with recognition, as if she'd just heard someone call her name. But there's nothing. Only the hot summer wind ruffling the pear tree leaves.

I'm about to ask her what's going on when her fingertips disappear from my lips and she leaps to her feet, her dress bunching in her hands. Her ankles look skinny and pale above the slippers on her feet.

“I'm sorry,” she says in a rush, dumping the release form and pen in my lap. “I'm sorry, Wes, I've got to go. That's my mother.”

“Your—what?”

She's already dashed up the town house stoop and opened the door and started up the stairs that lead to the palm reader, and then I guess to the couple of apartments up above. But I haven't heard anyone. The building is silent, still lost in morning sleep.

“My mother. I'm sorry, I have to go,” she calls from inside the vestibule.