All this time, she wanted them to think she was okay.
But she wasn’t.
He hurried to the front of the store, to the phone next to the register, and called home as he quickly explained to his manager that he just needed to check up on his sister.
He looked outside at the early evening and pressed the phone to his ear.
It rang and rang and rang.
Emilia Was Cold
Emilia was cold. She didn’t quite remember getting off the train, but at least she now recognized some stores and was relieved she’d somehow known enough to head in the right direction, toward her house.
There’s Kmart, where Ma got me those boots, she thought as she also realized she was still a far walk from home and it would be dark soon. Her feet felt numb. And she was scared.
Maybe I should call home for Ma or Tomás. Or Ian—he’ll come.
There was a pay phone up ahead. Emilia reached in her pocket for a quarter, but the money she thought she had, that she remembered bringing with her, wasn’t there.
She had bought things at the stoop sale, hadn’t she? Had she used all her money? She looked for the change purse she remembered grabbing. Maybe there was a quarter in it.
But she found no items, no money, nothing.
Emilia felt confused but kept walking.
She wondered if Carl Smith had been in his home. Was he at the hospital or was he right inside that house, dying? She should have asked the man outside. She imagined the conversation.
Do you know Carl Smith?
Yes, he’s my brother.
I heard that he’s not well.
No, he’s not.
Is he inside? Can I see him?
What would the man have said? Emilia imagined the look he might give her, the same confused look he gave her when she didn’t understand what he was saying to her.
Can I?
I suppose.
Emilia pictured the scene in her head.
Then what? Would I walk up those steps? Would I go into that house, that house that must smell like him? Where he lived, and breathed, and sat, doing what? Thinking of that day? Remembering?
She imagined herself going up the steps. Pushing open the front door. A television set would be on. The kitchen light, too. And stairs, leading to a bedroom she knew held Carl Smith. Dying.
Fear and anxiety fluttered wildly in Emilia’s chest and she took a deep, heaving breath. Let it out slowly.
She kept walking and felt the world slipping away as she continued, as she became numb with cold.
In her mind she saw his bedroom door, open just a little bit. From it came those smells she remembered from the hospital. And she stood just outside. All she had to do was peek in, and look at his face.
The man who attacked you, Carl Smith, not Jeremy Lance, is just beyond that door.
She could smell his diseased body. It turned her stomach. She felt the cold wrap itself around her ankles, tightening, and then Emilia felt like she was falling.
Emilia felt herself being dragged away from the door—Look at his face first!—and the image became darker and farther away as she felt herself floundering, wanting to fly.
Emilia lunged forward, trying to reach the disappearing door. And suddenly the world whirled back into view.
A car horn blared and Emilia jumped back. The driver yelled at her as he drove by and pointed at the lit-up DON’T WALK sign. Emilia looked at it, and then at her surroundings, realizing she’d walked well past the turn to get to her house. Now she was just two blocks from the school.
She looked in its direction and thought of her glittering birds. Of that room. The sign ahead changed and flashed.
WALK.
FLY.
WALK.
FLY.
Emilia ran across the street and headed toward the school.
Sam DeJesus Sat in the Hotel Lobby
Sam DeJesus sat in the hotel lobby with an almost-empty cup of coffee on the table in front of him. He watched the coming and going of people outside, the lights of taxis flashing in the early night as they pulled up and away from the curb.
In another time, in another place, he would have been inspired by the strange elation and sadness of departures and arrivals. He would have gotten out his notebook and tried to capture the words that would precisely describe this feeling, the look in people’s faces, the busyness and monotony of a moment, a day, a life.
But he didn’t carry pens or small notebooks anymore.
Sam lit a cigarette and remembered the day the shuttle blew up. That was the day he’d stopped trying to capture all of this. He’d sat, trying to process his own feelings, through poetry. Fucking poetry.
Shame filled him as he remembered. What he should have been doing was trying to help his family. His daughter, his wife, his son. What he wanted was to take their pain away. But all he could think about was himself. How he felt. What a useless piece of shit he was.
He remembered distinctly sitting outside on the patio with his notebook in his lap. He knew he should go inside and help Nina. She was in bed with Emilia. He’d already started sensing Nina had finally discovered he was a coward. He could see how she was looking at him. How her eyes followed him when he would go outside or to the basement with his stupid journal at his side, unable to write a fucking word and unable to be around them, either.
He’d been sitting on the patio, near the bathroom window, when he heard Nina’s weeping from inside.
Go inside, he told himself. Go inside.
He looked at his blank page and listened to his wife. He felt as if he’d split in two. Part of his mind and most of his heart disengaged themselves from his body. He closed his journal and vowed never to write again. He took another drag of his cigarette and looked at the sky, telling himself to go inside, but he couldn’t.
* * *
*
Sam stared out at the hotel lobby and pulled another cigarette from his shirt pocket. He was just lighting it when he suddenly saw Nina rushing through the doors, frantic, running to the desk.
He felt his lungs collapse.
“She’s gone,” Nina said as soon as Sam went up to her.
“What happened? What happened?”
But she was already speaking over him.
“She hasn’t come home, Sam. I don’t know where she is. I don’t know where she could have gone. She was supposed to be home. And I just . . . I just have this feeling. Something is wrong, terribly wrong. I don’t know where she is.” She was on the verge of hysteria.
Sam felt all of his insides loosen.
Stay strong, he told himself. For once, don’t be a coward.
“Okay, okay,” he said, trying to wrap his mind around what Nina was saying, what he should say, what he should do. “Okay, come sit down. We’ll call the police. We’ll . . . She’s okay, Nina. I know she’s fine. We’ll find her . . . ,” he said. He said it with so much conviction that he almost believed it himself.
She must have gone somewhere with her boyfriend and lost track of time.
Or she’s probably already home and we just don’t know it yet.
Or she’s sitting on the couch, worried, because she knows Nina must be worried.
Sam guided Nina to the couch he’d just been sitting on. He reached for the phone on the table next to it. “Call home and check. Maybe she just got there.”
Nina nodded, reached for the phone as Sam dialed their home number. She waited, and slowly, as nobody answered, he saw her hand start shaking. She pressed the handset harder against her ear, closing her eyes and whispering, Please, please.
Sam saw tears slide out the corners of her eyes. He watched the way the sobs took over and came out in great gulps as he reached for the phone, which she was holding tighter and tighter with each unanswered ring, or maybe because she was afraid she might
miss Emilia’s voice on the other end.
He gently loosened the phone from Nina’s hand as he fought back his own sobs.
“We’ll call the detective,” he whispered, bringing the phone up to his own ear, listening to the terrible endless ringing before hanging up with his finger.
Nina searched in her purse and pulled out an old business card frayed at the edges, the same one from so long ago, and handed it over to Sam.
He held her hand for a moment, just to stop the shaking, before he dialed Detective Manzetti.
The House Was Cold
The house was cold and dark and empty. It was nighttime by the time Tomás stood in the living room, listening to the silence, the echo of the phone still ringing in his ear. He hadn’t unlocked the door in time.
Was it you, Emilia?
He had no way of knowing if it really was Emilia, but something told him it must have been her. Was she calling for help? Had he missed it again, like that day when he’d been so confused by that person he saw in the mirror he only thought there was a ringing phone? Only later, years later, did he learn Emilia had tried to call home that day.
Why, in all this time, had they never gotten an answering machine?
Tomás took in the empty living room. Where was his mother? Why did the house feel like a shell, so empty? Why did it feel like someone had just died?
Relax, he told himself. Think.
Still in his coat, Tomás ran over to Ian’s house.
“Is Emilia with you?” he asked as soon as Ian answered the door.
The look on Ian’s face let him know immediately that she was not.
“Do you know where she is?”
Ian looked at Tomás, silent.
“Ian, do you know where she is?” he asked, louder this time. “She’s not home, and I need to know where she is.”
“I . . . I don’t know. But, Jesus Christ, are you sure she’s not home? Or with your mom? Or something?”
Tomás caught the edge in Ian’s voice.
“What’s going on? Do you know something?”
“I . . . She asked me to take her to the train station this morning . . . She skipped school and she wouldn’t tell me where she was going.”
“What?”
“I tried, but she wouldn’t. But I took her, because she wanted me to and—”
“Where did she go?” Tomás said.
“I’m telling you, I don’t know! She wouldn’t tell me.”
“Think, Ian, where do you think she might have gone?”
“I don’t know. She was acting funny and . . . I’m sorry. I really don’t know.”
“Fuck!” Tomás yelled, and he saw Ian sit down under the weight of what Tomás was and wasn’t saying. His hands were on his knees and he was shaking his head.
“She wouldn’t tell me . . . ,” he repeated.
“Get your keys,” Tomás said. “Let’s go.”
Ian jumped up, grabbed the keys from the counter. He yelled something upstairs to his parents, and just as they were pulling away, Tomás saw the door open as Ian’s mother looked outside, confused.
“Where first?” Ian asked.
“I don’t know, just . . . drive,” Tomás said, his eyes already searching, already looking for Emilia’s silhouette to emerge somehow, from somewhere.
Be okay, he told her, hoping his voice would reach her wherever she was right now.
Please just be okay.
The sound of Ian’s car sliced through the silence of the night and echoed in the darkness.
The Crows Watched Emilia
The crows watched Emilia through the classroom window. She had lit candles and placed them all around the room so it glowed.
They’d watched her create this place, and for as much as they’d followed Emilia all these years, for as much as they saw, they cocked their heads to the side, as if perplexed. Something was happening, but they didn’t know what it was. So they sat, vigilant, on the branches of the tree and watched as she put finishing touches on a mural she’d painted on the wall—a large black crow.
Because she was one of them. She’d been one of them for years.
But the rest of it, everything she’d dragged there, all these items. What did it mean? What did it mean that she’d spent so much time here by herself? Creating, memorializing?
Perhaps this was what made Emilia more human than not.
One of the crows cawed loudly, and she turned to look at them. Then looked around the room, as if taking everything in. She walked over to the different items, picked them up, touched them gently.
Emilia looked at the mural. And then at the art book she’d left open. And finally, she turned and looked out the window.
The crows flitted and stretched their wings and stood at alert as she came toward them. She unlocked one side of the window, then the other, struggling as she tried to pry it open. Finally, a loud screech broke the silent night as she dislodged the window and slid it up roughly. The cold swept in; it made Emilia catch her breath and tremble and turn away.
It’s cold, Emilia.
What are you doing, Emilia?
Close the window, Emilia.
Emilia turned back toward the night, shivering like she was about to break but once again facing that biting cold. The crows waited for a look, or a word, or a few nuts. But she looked out past all of them, toward the playground, as if hypnotized, and stared for a long time.
The crows cawed louder but she didn’t hear them; her eyes were faraway and set only on the playground.
Go home, they told her. Go home.
But Emilia closed her dark, dark eyes. “I’m coming,” they heard her say. “I’m coming for you.” The crows saw her lips turning blue from the cold. They watched as she lifted her arms, just as she did when she was a small girl, right before she would take flight.
* * *
*
The cold against Emilia’s chest was like a thin sheet of ice as she swooped up, up, up toward the sky. She took flight and looked back at the school. All those windows, dark and smudged, except for the glowing candles in the classroom.
She and the other children had once looked out those windows when they were bored, when their minds had wandered from the story they were reading or the math problems that never ended. They stared out those windows, into the unremarkable world outside, and they waited. They waited for something remarkable to happen. She remembered being one of those kids—yes, I was just like them once—as she sat at her desk, staring out the window and across the playground. She would imagine herself over there, playing, running into the woods.
Emilia flapped her wings harder and looked over at the playground.
Where are you? Emilia whispered now as the wind blew and the night got darker. I know you’re there. I’m coming.
The wind was cold, freezing even, but Emilia paid no mind to it. She sliced through the air, sailed through the dark sky, the endless dark sky, riding and dipping and catching the currents to get to the playground. The cold fluttered through her body. It swished under her giant wings.
And then Emilia thought she saw her. A little child emerging from somewhere on the other side of the playground, a smaller, younger version of herself, the one her brother used to call Mia. The sky around her lightened to gray, the same shade it’d been the day of her attack, and Emilia could suddenly see clearly.
Emilia focused on the girl. It was her. That was Mia.
Mia ran across the field, past the metal spiderweb and monkey bars, and then suddenly stopped right at the perimeter of the woods.
Emilia knew she was going in.
No, don’t! Wait! Wait!
Mia faced the woods, looking at the ground.
Wait, Emilia called. Wait for me. I’m coming for you.
Emilia flew to the tree, perched in the branches, from where she c
ould see any danger coming.
She saw the young girl look up at her for a moment.
Don’t be afraid, she told that smaller version of herself. I’m with you. We’ll be okay. It made Emilia want to cry, but she took a deep breath and watched Mia go into the woods, looking now at the sticks on the ground, following them.
Interpreting the messages from aliens, Emilia remembered. She looked away from the young girl and studied the woods.
Where did he come from? Where was he hiding? Where exactly was I when it happened?
Mia strayed farther and farther into the woods. Emilia tried to fly down to her, but she couldn’t move.
Mia was almost to the fence that separated the school from the next property. And Emilia remembered, Here, oh god, here. This is where I was.
Emilia cawed, shrieked, but already felt a pain shooting through her head and jaw.
God, she remembered every blow, the fireworks she saw behind her eyelids, the confusion. She couldn’t see anything. Nothing. Just flashes of light, flashes of the sky, crisscrossed branches, and dark dots.
Emilia spread her wings, tried to fly down, but she felt disoriented. She was in two places at once. You’ll be okay, she tried to yell, but only more shrieking caws came out as she felt part of herself being dragged over cold ground and jagged rocks, farther from the school, farther from her home, farther from her family.
She could hear the gurgle of her younger self; she could taste the blood in her bird mouth; she knew her tongue was split and the blood was filling it up. She knew Mia was floating in and out of consciousness.
I’m here with you, she cawed to her younger self. You’re not alone. You live through this! You’re not going to die! You’ll be far from here soon. I promise.
Her shoes were gone. Her pants were off. Emilia wrapped her wings tighter around herself. She watched the horrible scene from above. Then from the ground. Her mind flickered back and forth between the two views, back and forth.
The Fall of Innocence Page 27