It is early autumn, the days still mild, the trees just beginning to turn. But already he can detect faint signs of what is to come. Soon dead leaves will cover the sidewalks, revived for brief moments by swells of wind. At night the sky will turn blue-black as the open ocean, with that same tumbling depth and pitiless beauty. Then the cold will come, and with it the snow, and he will spend his shifts grinding through ice and slush, getting slammed by wakes of snow cast off by passing plows, maneuvering through the city in search of some sorry bastard in ruined wing tips trying to make it to Grand Central before the tracks ice over and the trains north shut down.
From the kitchen comes the click, click, click of a burner failing to ignite—his roommate Les reheating takeout on the stove. Through the thin wall that separates his bedroom from the next one, he hears Leon making his nightly call to his wife. Cecil has taken up residence in their small common area, the television blaring one of the reality shows the rest of them can’t stand but Cecil loves, or at least seems to require, for he never exactly appears to be enjoying himself as he watches; rather, the shows seem to be a way of making time pass without feeling the granularity of each moment.
He has lived here for two years, replacing a man from Trinidad who returned home to live out his retirement in the house he’d built for his family. Les and Cecil were already living here when he moved in. Leon arrived four months ago, from Carriacou by way of Canarsie. Of these men he knows only what can be gleaned through proximity: who has a family to phone and who does not, who works the day shift and who the night. Their eating habits. The sounds of their sleep.
It is his ninth apartment in nearly two decades, all of them more or less alike—nondescript buildings in Flatbush, grease-encrusted kitchenettes, radiators that clang and keen and hiss. In his early years in New York, he had bothered to befriend his roommates. When he moved in here, Les and Cecil had tried to make conversation with him. Where was he from? How long had he been in New York? Did he have a wife? Children? To these questions he gave gruff answers or dodges, and they quickly learned to leave him alone. Now he comes and goes like a ghost. His roommates step aside when he wants to use the stove, the bathroom. They are a bit afraid of him, a big man with a look of warning in his eyes. Let them be.
At work it is the same. When he first started driving, there were many others at the garage from the West Indies, but the population has turned over several times since then, and now it’s almost all Gujaratis, Sikhs from Punjab and Chandigarh, Bangladeshis, and West Africans. Their foreign tongues draw a curtain around them, leaving him to himself.
At night in bed he feels waves, mild and gentle, against his skin.
Sometimes he misses the water so much his bones ache with longing. Yet it is, ironically, all around him. In New York, he has never lived more than five miles from Manhattan Beach, hardly farther from the water than his grandmother’s house had been. During his shifts, he shuttles passengers over the East River on the coral steelwork of the Williamsburg Bridge, under the Hudson through the Lincoln Tunnel, crosses the Harlem River on any number of quaint bridges. New York is a city of islands. When he was freshly arrived, he’d purchased an old guidebook from a dollar cart outside of a used bookshop. In the back of the book, along with sections on tipping and local slang (“flying rat,” “bridge-and-tunnel,” “yooz”), there was a map. Manhattan and Long Island and the glassy-sounding Staten Island—these he knew. But there were other islands he’d never heard of: Randall’s, Roosevelt, Ellis, Wards, Hart, Governors. Over his years here he has learned many more: North and South Brother, South and East Nonations. Goose and Hog and Rat. Hunter and Shooters and Swinburne. Mill Rock and Heel Tap Rock. The Blauzes, the Chimney Sweep Islands, Canarsie Pol. Ruffle Bar and Rulers Bar Hassock and Hoffman. U Thant and Mau Mau and Isle of Meadows.
But though in New York he lives on an island surrounded by islands, sometimes—as he walks from the fleet garage to the N after his shift, or wrestles a bunch of grapes into a plastic bag at the Korean grocery on Beverley, or scrubs the toilet on a Tuesday—it will occur to him that he is, at this moment, on an island, and he will find this impossible to believe. He cannot feel the islandness of New York.
One day when he had been in the city two months, he took the subway out to Coney Island. He’d never seen a roller coaster before and he watched as load after load of people careened shrieking over the wooden tracks. He strolled the boardwalk, got fried clam strips and a hot dog with onions at Nathan’s. It was September, and warm. After lunch, he walked down the boardwalk steps to the sand and slipped off his loafers. He walked to the water’s edge, cuffed his pants, and waded in a few steps. But even then, with the water lapping against his ankles and the seabirds circling overhead and the vegetal scent of shallow water in his nostrils, he did not quite believe it was the ocean he was feeling and seeing and smelling.
Back home, whether you could see the sea or not, you sensed it. He’d sensed it in the schoolyard, tasted it in the blood from his split lip after a boxing match with his friends. When he bicycled down the road to work at dawn, the ocean was a magnet, pulling his feet through their slow revolutions until he crested the rise by the radio tower and there it was, the sea, tossed before him like a net. He’d felt it in the island’s interior spaces, too, in his grandmother’s kitchen with the white curtains and the refrigerator rusted by the salted wind, at Paulette’s Place where he and his friends drained bottles of Cruzan and Bounty, and especially within the walls of the eggshell-blue prison on Commerce Street, where he sometimes put his cheek to the moist concrete floor and thought of wet sand warping silkily beneath the weight of his steps.
He found it impossible to separate his life there from the sensation of being surrounded by water, a sensation he hadn’t realized he’d felt all day, every day, until he touched down in New York and felt its absence for the first time. It wasn’t just that at home he could smell salt everywhere, or feel the humid breezes tossed off by the sea, or gauge his nearness to the water by the way the light shifted, while in New York, so remarkably, arrogantly immune to its environs, he could not. At home, the sea was consciousness itself. Always, you knew it was there, and that within it was everything else: answers and mysteries, that which could be seen and that which could not, those things that were remembered and those that had been forgotten. In New York the ocean was an irrelevancy, a vestigial thing beyond and apart from the thing itself, the city: the buildings packed in tight as tissue stanching a nosebleed, a glass-and-steel rising that pierced the sky.
* * *
THERE IS another life he lives. It flows beneath this one. He feels it like being far out in the water and sensing all that depth beneath you. In this other life, he has never driven a taxi through the snow-hushed streets of New York. He has never spent a birthday eating stale samosas in the holding lot at JFK. He has never lain awake at night listening to his roommate’s snores. He has never been to New York at all. He never took a plane away from his home, never watched the island disappear into the sea as the plane lifted into the sky. Never the eggshell-blue prison. Never the shocked faces of everyone he’d ever known. Never that night and never that girl. Never and never and never.
On the table, the iPhone in the gray case rings. The ringtone is that maddening banana song. Six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch. Go fucking figure. He picks it up and says hello.
THE LITTLE SWEET
COULD IT BE? Surely it wasn’t him, I told myself as I sat in my cubicle that afternoon. There could easily be five men named Clive Richardson—ten, two dozen—in the five boroughs, never mind that I had no reason to believe that the man who had been a suspect in my sister’s death was in New York in the first place. I stared at the manuscript for “the new Mann” on my computer, unable to think, let alone work, for the rest of the day. At five-thirty on the dot, I fled.
Back in my studio I sat on my bed beneath the harsh light of the bare bulbs. It wouldn’t be accurate to say I was thinking about what to do. I had not been thi
nking when I left my phone in the taxi and I was not thinking now. It was more like I was waiting for my body to writhe into instinctive action and carry me along with it. I ate a few bites of my salad. I sat and felt the time drip. Then I dug a handful of quarters from the change jar on my desk, ran out of my studio and up the stairs, and went out into the evening in search of a working pay phone.
I hadn’t used a pay phone since I was a middle schooler calling my parents for a ride home in Pasadena. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d noticed a pay phone in New York, but it turned out there was one not a five-minute walk from my apartment. Apparently I had been walking past it for over a year without noticing it, and though rationally I knew it had been there all along, that in the city one’s mind renders much of the detail in the landscape invisible out of necessity, still, in that moment, I had the uncanny impression that this sorry-looking kiosk spackled with bird droppings and gum and Sharpie graffiti tags faded as the names on an ancient gravestone, had been planted here just now, for me, to make possible whatever was going to happen. I picked up the phone and heard, to my disbelief, a dial tone. I deposited my quarters and dialed my own number.
The phone rang and rang. I was about to lose my nerve and hang up when a soft voice said hello.
“Hello?” I replied.
“Yes?” the voice said.
“Yes,” I echoed. “Are you the taxi driver? I’m the one who accidentally left this phone in your cab.”
I regretted the word accidentally as soon as I said it. Nobody who had actually left something by accident would bother to say so. It was a tell, a slip. But I was being paranoid. He would take no notice of the word. Why would he?
“My shift begins at five A.M. I could meet you in midtown tomorrow morning to return it.”
“Can I come to you? I’d like to get it tonight if possible. I need it for work.”
I did not need it for work. But the lie flowed seamlessly. I had to see him tonight. I had to—what? I had no plan. I felt only a need to lock eyes with this man, to speak to him, to make something happen and see what it would be.
“That would be possible. But I live in Flatbush.”
“No way!” I said cheerily. “I’m practically your neighbor.”
“Small world,” he said with a (genuine? perturbed?) chuckle. “In that case, there’s a place called the Little Sweet on Church. I can meet you out front if that would be convenient.”
I knew the place; it was one of several popular Caribbean restaurants clustered near the Church Avenue subway stop on Nostrand. I had passed them many times with interest, but I had never gone inside, figuring the people there probably didn’t want people like me encroaching. (Or was this a justification for staying away from places that made me nervous?)
I told him I could be there in fifteen minutes. “I seriously can’t thank you enough,” I said before hanging up. “I’m wearing a blue blouse. I’m Emily.”
* * *
AS I made my way to the Little Sweet, I told myself it wasn’t him. Though I could not deny that the voice on the phone had a familiar softness, it simply could not belong to the same Clive Richardson who’d spilled my french fries in the sand all those years ago (chips, he’d called them, and how I’d loved that), the one everybody had called Gogo, the man with whom, along with Edwin Hastie, my sister was last seen alive. I would meet him on the sidewalk and see immediately that his face was all wrong, or that he was too short, or too light- or dark-skinned. I would give him twenty bucks, thank him, and be on my way, and though I might be shaken for a couple of days, my life would quickly snap back to its usual dimensions. Whether I hoped for or dreaded this outcome, I’m no longer sure.
The landscape changed as I walked north and east. Though the building I lived in was run-down and situated on an unlovely block of vacant lots and midrise apartment buildings, it was also not far from the Edison-bulb eateries along Cortelyou Road, from cafés whose menus featured an entire section of “alternative milk” options (soy, almond, cashew) and boutiques where one could purchase a vintage Berber rug or an olive-wood cheese platter for exorbitant sums. I was just a few minutes’ walk from an especially picturesque stretch of Argyle Road, where in the summertime the Victorian mansions with their wide front porches and twilight-hued hydrangeas seemed to have been lifted from some seaside idyll and set down gently on this street in central Brooklyn. Though I prided myself on living beyond such places, it was also true that I found comfort in my proximity to them. As I neared the Little Sweet, I left all of this behind. The signs on the commercial thoroughfares became more urgent: CHECKS CASHED! PLAY NOW! WIRE CASH LOW FEE!
By the time I reached my destination, the sky was dingy pink, darkness touched by neon storefronts. The Little Sweet was a take-out spot with half a dozen tables, a long steam table behind the counter, and an illuminated menu with stock photos of combination platters hanging above it. It was located between a MoneyGram and a Chinese takeout called Hunan Star, across the street from a West Indian grocery and a discount shop with a hodgepodge of merchandise on the sidewalk: coolers and pushcarts and mop heads, reflective vests and nursing scrubs. Farther down the block, a Creole and English bookstore transmitted ESL recordings into the night: I run to the house. She bakes a cake. He goes to sleep.
I stood in front of the narrow storefront and tried to appear occupied. I put a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket to give to the man as a reward. I cleaned out my handbag, disposing of fistfuls of receipts and a cough drop that had been floating loose in my bag, stuck with grit and lint. It had not been necessary to specify what I was wearing. I was the only white person here, with the exception of a man about my age, bearded and man-bunned, who sat at a table in the center of the Little Sweet and alternated between eating and drawing in a sketch pad.
When I saw Clive Richardson coming up the sidewalk I knew at once it was him. It was his walk. The hunched shoulders, the bowed head. He moved like he thought he took up too much space and was sorry. I clenched my jaw to quell the chattering of my teeth and willed myself to be still.
In a flash I saw my parents. They would be sitting down now to one of their abstemious locavore dinners in their kitchen in Pasadena. I imagined them seeing me seeing Clive Richardson on this sidewalk in Brooklyn. I felt them reaching out, pulling me back into the safe, blind world our family had inhabited all these years, our aftermath of SoCal sunshine and ceramics and racket sports. Forget my phone. Turn around. Run straight home and don’t look back. That’s what they would want me to do.
“Emily?”
I nodded. I couldn’t raise my eyes to look at him.
“I hope you didn’t wait long.”
“Not long at all.”
He pulled my phone from his pocket.
“Thank you so, so much. You just have no idea how much I appreciate this.” I held out the twenty-dollar bill to him.
“I can’t accept this.” He spoke softly, as if worried his refusal would offend me.
“Please take it,” I implored.
“I would prefer not to.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, miss.”
Miss.
I looked up and for the first time our eyes met. Clive Richardson must have been at least forty now, and he looked it—his hair had already started to go white and his forehead was deeply lined. My body trembled. My jaw was clenched so tightly it would ache later. At the same time, my mind spasmed as it tried uselessly to understand that this ordinary man standing before me in a windbreaker and black loafers was him.
I tucked the money back in my pocket. “Well.”
We stared at one another awkwardly. The moment was lifting away from me. Could it be that I would do nothing? That I would simply let him leave? But what else could I do? Even as I wondered this I was saying, “Thanks again. I really appreciate it,” and Clive Richardson was telling me it was nothing, and I was wishing him a good night. The bells on the door of the Little Sweet jingled as he opened it and stepped inside. I turned
and hurried down the sidewalk. My eyes filled with hot, stinging tears. It had happened too fast. I hadn’t been ready, had missed my chance. My chance for what, exactly, I wasn’t sure, but I was filled with the sense that I’d failed to capitalize on this extraordinary convergence and, more than this, with a sense that this failure was at the center of who I was—a person who let things slip through her hands.
* * *
THAT NIGHT I dreamed I walked out of my apartment to find that a stone staircase had opened up in the middle of the sidewalk, leading down. Only the first few steps were visible. After that, the staircase disappeared into the darkness below the city. The stairs went on and on, and I walked for what felt like an eternity in the pitch-black, step, step, step, down and down and down, until I found myself standing on a beach. White sand, curving palms, mint waters. It had been here all along—this place, this past, waiting only for me to return. (In the dream I knew without having to know that I was Clairey again, a child.) Some distance from me, standing at the water’s edge, her ankles lapped by the gentle waves, was Alison. She was turned away from me, staring out. When I reached her, she looked down at me and smiled, and I smiled back. She raised a finger to her lips. Shh. Don’t tell. She tossed back her head and laughed.
I awoke drenched in sweat and full of self-recrimination—I hardly ever dreamed of Alison and I’d ruined it, expulsed myself from the dream prematurely. For the first time in months, I took out the photographs from the shoe box under my bed. I needed to tell her what had happened to me and how helpless I’d felt as I thanked Clive Richardson and walked away. All this time, he had been right here. How was it possible that I hadn’t known it, sensed it?
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