We Are Here (13 page)

I guess we’d been expecting … I’m not sure
what
we’d been expecting … that she’d be pleased or flattered or at least amused to see us. She evidently did not feel this way. She responded in a fashion that in retrospect made absolute sense. She reacted like a girl realizing she was being spied upon by a bunch of younger boys to whom she was polite in the store but whom she possibly somewhat dreaded seeing; boys who (and she was old enough to get this, even if we were not) would one day, and maybe soon, become even
more
interested in her.

Her face showed shock at first and then anger. We didn’t wait to see what happened next. We scooted down the tree and walked away talking loudly about other things. We felt dumb and embarrassed and as if we’d had something revealed to us about ourselves that we hadn’t previously understood. There’d been no harm in what we’d done. None intended, anyway. But we cut the store out of our Saturday routine for the rest of that summer.

When Catherine looked at us, I felt the same way.

Kristina didn’t seem to notice. “We’ve been worried about you,” she said. “And then it looked like Thomas wasn’t the guy after all …”

“Yes,” Catherine said. Her voice was clipped. “So?”

“Well, we thought we’d take another look today, see if we could see anyone.”

“When were you doing this?”

“After you picked up Ella and Isabella.”

“You waited outside the school? Hiding?”

“Well, not exactly hiding, but … yes.”

Catherine stared at her. “Excellent,” she said. I was baffled Kris wasn’t picking up on the atmosphere. She’s preternaturally sharp. Right now she was failing to read Catherine on even the most basic level.

“I’m sorry if that was inappropriate,” I said. “My fault. I felt bad after I spoke to you yesterday. I wanted to give it one more try. Macho pride, I guess.”

Catherine seemed to soften. “Sorry,” she said. “I’ve been tense all day and Isa did not go down easy. Do you want coffee?”

We said we did, and she got to work with an expensive-looking machine on the counter, and it seemed like all was going to be okay.

Though in fact it got worse, and pretty fast.

Kris and I didn’t speak all evening at the restaurant. I understood why I was pissed at her, though not why she was pissed at me, but I guess that’s the bottom line in most disagreements and she probably felt the exact same way. Wrong though she was.

The idea of her follower being a woman evidently hadn’t occurred to Catherine. She asked what she’d looked like. We told her. She frowned, trying to make something of this, but gave up, looking a little scared.

“Was she pretty?”

“Yes,” I said.

Catherine stood nodding, eyes turned inward. Kristina apparently didn’t have anything to say, so I asked Catherine the obvious question. “Are you going to talk to your husband about this?”

Two minutes later Kristina and I were back out on the street. Catherine had abruptly realized there were a
lot
of very important things she simply had to get on with and while she was
very
grateful for our efforts she needed us to go, right now. She’d be in touch with Kris.

Real soon.

As the door closed firmly behind us, Kristina hissed at me and stomped down the steps. I followed, not understanding what the hell her problem was. She apprised me of it soon enough. She ranted at me all the way back to the East Village, in fact.

“What kind of an
asshole
question was that?”

“About talking to her husband?”

“Yes. I mean, Jesus, John. What the
fuck
?”

“A young woman stalking an older married one—do you have a better explanation?”

“Of
course
he’s not having an affair. Christ, John, you can’t go around making assumptions like that. I know you don’t like Catherine, but I
do
and I’ve spent a
lot
more time talking to her.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So I know her marriage is solid and that Mark’s a good guy. For God’s sake—you saw that house.”

“Kris, that’s the most naive thing I’ve ever
heard
. Yes, it’s a lovely house. So what? Having expensive taste and an efficient maid doesn’t mean everything’s immaculate underneath the water line.”

“Don’t judge people by your own mistakes. Just because you fucked up a marriage doesn’t mean everyone else is busy doing the same dumb thing.”

There was enough truth in this—after Carol and I fell apart I entered a liaison with Bill Raine’s wife, which he knew about, and we’d worked through, but it remained the most damaging thing I’d ever done in my life—to make me as angry as Kristina.

This led me to snap that she was not experienced enough in long-term relationships to know what the hell she was talking about. She shouted back that she had more experience than I knew and further-more was tired of me treating her like a kid all the time, which was so out of the blue I’d had
no
idea it was coming, and I didn’t handle it well, and after that …

Well, CNN didn’t actually cover the rest of our stomp back to the restaurant, or give us our own logo, but it was
loud
.

In the end I got tired of sitting at the bar being ignored by Kristina while she was bright-eyed and charming to everyone else. I left, reasoning that she knew where we lived and also, well, fuck, whatever.

As I stomped out onto the street I saw Lydia at the end of the block. She was facing traffic and, to be honest, I tried to slip past without her seeing me.

“Don’t worry,” she said, however, without turning. “I ain’t seen him.”

“Okay,” I muttered. “That’s good.”

“See a lot of others, though,” she added thoughtfully. “
Lot
of people on the streets tonight.”

I looked around, confirming what I already knew—if anything, it looked quiet for the small hours of a Thursday night. “Okay,” I said again.

She looked at me, a wistful smile on her face. For a moment her eyes were clear and I got the sense that, were it not for the lines and layers of grime, I’d be seeing in her what a man might have forty years before.

Then they went dead. “Frankie was a dad bitch whore.”

“What?”

“What? What? What?” She took a fast step toward me, raising her bony fist to wave it in my face. “Fuckers everywhere, that’s what,” she snarled. “You ain’t going to steal from me, motherfuckers. I’ll cut you bad.”

“Whatever you say, Lyds.”

“Fuck you, asshole. I’ll fuck you up too.”

“Okay then. See you tomorrow.”

I walked away, simply not in the mood for New York tonight.

Kristina got home at two thirty. We talked. We did not kiss and make up—neither of us regard sexual intercourse as an effective means of arbitration in matters of serious dispute—but we did start to laugh at ourselves, and she eventually fell asleep in my arms. I lay waiting to follow her. The city below seemed quiet, far away, as though we were in a tiny room at the top of a stone tower in some other world. The wind was strong. We’re always aware of it here up in the garret, but this was rowdier than usual. It sounded as though someone was bouncing little objects across the roof.

I don’t like arguments. They always feel like a failure, which I presume must be mine. Pretty soon my head began to feel crowded, and it felt like a fight not to open my eyes.

Then I heard a real noise, from out in the main room. I carefully lifted Kris’s arm off my chest and slipped out of bed.

The source of the sound was obvious and mundane. Kristina’s cell phone lay on the counter, as usual, and the screen was glowing. A little red number on an icon in the dock said she had e-mail. At this time of night it would only be spam and so I put her phone facedown on the cushion on the sofa instead, where further vibrations wouldn’t make the thing rattle so audibly.

I stood aimlessly for a moment before deciding to enact the only ritual that’s ever helped me to sleep—a weak coffee and a cigarette. I know two stimulants taken together should do the opposite, but … they don’t.

I made the drink on autopilot, trying not to worry about the problem of Catherine’s follower. There was now only one credible explanation and it was down to Catherine to chase it down. I still found it hard not to keep thinking about, though. It was this that had been keeping me awake, along with dregs of the adrenaline occasioned by arguing violently with a woman whom I knew, increasingly, that I loved pretty hard.

The image that kept coming into my mind was the face of the girl in the coat when we’d cornered her. So much of our experience is mediated and cushioned. Car crash–style interactions are unnerving, cracking the paper-thin shell around our lives. Who
was
this woman? What did she want? Was she basically a good person, or a certifiable whack-job? What did she think would come from stalking Catherine, even if there
was
something going on between her and Mark? Was being confronted on the street going to make her back off, cause her to be more stealthy, or possibly escalate her behavior? Where was she now?

Abruptly I shook my head.

Whatever
. I was done. For real this time.

I took the tea and a cigarette over to the window. It was the middle of the night and so I wasn’t going to actually climb out onto the goddamned roof, but I’d at least open the windowpane and blow the smoke out.

As I started to pull up the sill, something happened outside. I don’t know what it was, but it was fast and large and dark. It was as if a huge crow had been roosting on the roof area and took sudden, chaotic flight. In the fraction of a second in which I saw it, it seemed to split into two, maybe even three shapes—twisting shadows that disappeared or dispersed like a storm cloud ripped apart by the wind.

I heard noises, too—more of the pattering sounds I’d heard while in bed, the sounds I’d put down to the wind clattering objects over the roof.

My chest beating hard, I pushed the window up the rest of the way. I stuck my head cautiously out and saw the scrap of flat roof. The wooden chair. My heavy glass ashtray. The chair had been knocked over. It was windy, but nowhere near enough to have done that, nor for the ashtray to have somehow been upturned or broken in half.

“What’s happening?”

Kristina’s voice nearly gave me a heart attack. I whirled around to see her yawning in the doorway to the bedroom. “What are you doing up?”

“Heard a noise,” she mumbled, turning on a table lamp. “You opening the window for a crafty smoke, it seems. Couldn’t have done it a
little
more quietly?”

“Sorry,” I said, pulling the window back down again. “But … something weird just happened.”

I was about to say more but realized she was no longer looking at me, but at the window.

“What the hell is that?”

I looked where she was pointing and saw there were marks on the glass, revealed by the light now on in the room. I leaned closer and ran my fingers over the pane. The marks were on the other side of the glass, spidery tracks through layers of dust and airborne dirt that neither we nor the last ten sets of tenants had made any effort to clean.

Kristina was standing beside me now. I think we realized at the same time that the marks on the window, though faint and jagged, were letters, and that they spelled out three words.

They said:

David never saw how they began. He watched for the beginnings like some Midwest stormchaser, but they were invisible to him. He was learning with most things that you could observe cause before effect. Careless elbows knocked cups off tables. Mouthing off to teachers got you exiled to stand in the corner, head lowered, the shame of punishment evenly balanced by the welcome change it made from sitting at your boring desk. Shouting at Mom got you smacked—and in this case effect came lightning fast on the heels of cause, and hurt a
lot
. Cause and effect often came so close together there, in fact, that from time to time the order seemed reversed.

The fights between his parents stood outside this process, however. They just happened. There was no beginning and so, presumably, no end.

He tried to see it this way, at least, but couldn’t ignore the fact that most of the time his mom and dad seemed happy together. So happy that they didn’t need him, in fact. They would laugh and drink their special drinks from the cabinet, their conversations conducted in looks and implications that excluded him. If he was naughty or lazy, they’d gang up on him, two against one, and after he’d retreated—or been sent—to bed, he’d hear them on the deck, their voices calm and relaxed once again, now that he wasn’t around to cause trouble.

Then some afternoon—for no apparent reason—he would hear the distant sound of the whistle coming out of the woods on the other side of town, and he’d know the train was on its way. He understood it wasn’t a
real
train. He knew what he was hearing wasn’t even a real
sound
, but an itch inside his head. A sign that, sometime soon, there was going to be a fight.

But why? There was no track leading to their house. So how did the train always know how to find the way? The child had come to believe that the reason he could not see the cause was that he
was
the cause. He was the nail on which they snagged themselves. He was the station the dark train was trying to find.