Jules finally opens her door. She has on a short black wig that makes her look like she fell out of a beatnik film. She’s wearing all black—black slacks and a black long-sleeve T-shirt. She looks so pretty. It’s something Nicolette would wear, except tighter and nicer. She looks so much like Nicolette right now.
“What time is it? You’ve got three hours and then the hospital.”
“You look pretty,” I say.
She sighs. “Where to?”
And I say, “The Bronx.”
Today everyone in the subway looks familiar. Everyone I pass is someone from my past. Two people in this car are connected to my future. But they’re all pretending not to know me.
“I don’t think it’s safe here,” Jules says, looking around us. I look around, too, try to quantify the danger level, but what she means is: we’re the only white people on the train. I don’t bother telling her she’s racist or that she ought to look a lot closer to home to know who she should really be fearful of.
There is one Hasid on the train and I don’t know who could be undercover. But they can’t stop us. We’re going to the point at which it all started. The place where Nicolette left the last clue, which is the first clue, where the tableaux will unlock the secret to time traveling. The secret to finding her.
The train breaches ground on the other side of the river. There’s the waxy-looking water, and the water-streaked storefront windows. Nicolette has been hiding the answers here all along, the code to sequencing the tableaux—a time traveler’s manual. It’s so obvious now. She hid it in plain sight, those dangerous words: the script along the trim of the landmine house.
We get off at 231st Street. There’s a church half a block south of us, looming and harboring obvious danger. And look at that sleepy-eyed man standing at the bus stop a few feet away who keeps nodding north.
“Why can’t I ever say ‘no’ to you?” Jules whispers, eyeing him suspiciously.
I have a sieve or net in my brain, weeding out the irrelevancies and keeping the bounty. But something’s not right. Do you feel that? There’s a rip in my net, letting too much through—stitch that up if you get the chance. All the streets look like the right street. I’m not seeing straight.
“I’m not seeing straight,” I say to confirm. “Straight to the words before it falls away.”
“West, please focus. Where does your friend live? Let’s do this fast. No dawdling.”
I grab Jules with one hand, the birthday-wrapped painting in the other, messenger bag strapped across my shoulder, and lead her under the overpass, cars pressing on my brain, traffic mixing with river sounds. Then, out of the corner of my eye, just behind us, a black fedora, a Hasid’s mean mug. I don’t waste time getting a good look. I pull Jules faster.
“What are we doing?” Jules shouts.
There’s an empty shopping cart blocking the sidewalk and we scuttle around it. The sidewalk trees whisper insults. Slut! Fuck-up! I don’t have time to stick up for her.
“This way, quickly.” I hold her forearm and pull her after me. They must know I have the painting with me. They must know I’ve finally found my way to Nicolette.
You’re right. To get to the landmine house we have to cross Broadway. Jules and I teeter on the curb. Four lanes of heavy traffic.
“Let’s go to the crosswalk,” she says, trying to pull her arm away.
“We’re not safe, we have to get to the other side.” And then I pull her into the street. Quickly through the first two lanes, three car horns in a row. I hold her wrist in the air so she won’t stumble. We wait between the yellow lines of the turning lane. Cars on both sides of us going sixty miles an hour. They come up fast and blue. She’s flipping her head wildly at each passing car. She tries to squirm away from me but I squeeze hard.
“West, stop! Let’s just make it to that street lamp,” she pleads, pointing back to where we came from. “See? It’s close. That’s our goal.”
I see the street lamp. It’s glinting red. Danger. “This way,” I say.
She glares at me. She’s hiding her terror inside her lips. But I know she won’t let me cross by myself. To her I’m the monster under the bed. But I can’t stop now, they’re gaining on us. She’ll thank me later.
“Motherfucker,” a man yells out his car window. From above we are wild stars, wobbling in a dead sky. Or maybe we are road kill. Failure! Fuck-up, you’re going to die. Jules already thought I was a failure. The incessant honking, like flatlining. Yet I can hear her heart beating louder even than the traffic. I hate you. It’s Jules, under her breath. I hate you. I hate you. It’s you, screaming in my ear as we dash across the last two lanes.
“Let go of me,” Jules says quietly, panting at my side.
I swing her arm and the painting tube in either hand, propelling us down the sidewalk, my messenger bag swinging too. Tibbet Road, we’ve made it. I smile at Jules to let her know it’s all right, I’m going to keep us safe. She tries to yank her arm away, but I keep hold.
“Just wait,” I snap at her. I don’t mean to snap.
Finally, the landmine house. It’s quiet. The eye of the storm. I have all my tableaux on file: the bluff, the tunnel, cigarette burns, the café and marionberry pie, my childhood bedroom. On tiptoe we approach until we’re standing hand in hand on the sidewalk in front of the lawn. And then I want to rip my eyes out.
The green trim around the house has been painted over.
Where are the words? No, I’m ready. I’m finally ready to read them and they’re gone!
Could I have been wrong? No, I could not have been wrong. The deductive logic must stand. Did they change the language on me because I got too close? Maybe the words have moved inside. There’s no more landmine sign or barbed wire, but there’s still a divot in the grass from an explosion. The shadows and the houses are spaced too evenly, fake. A little boy placed these houses here in a miniature train scene and we’re just little plastic people, stalled in time.
In the window, a movement.
Nicolette.
Of course. She’s inside. She’s been inside the entire time, waiting to explain those words. That first day, she was there, too, watching me through the window.
I squeeze Jules’s hand—then pull her forward into the minefield and wait to explode.
“I’m calling Dan,” Jules says, using a mean woman’s voice. “He’ll pick us up. After he says ‘I told you so.’”
But Nicolette couldn’t come out of the house that first day because the Hasidim arrived.
Two more giant steps.
“Stop,” Jules says. “I said stop.”
I stop and open my eyes. We’ve reached the front door. I grab the knob. It’s locked.
Three kicks to the door. The stone flowerpot beside it hadn’t been there last time. I lean the tube and my bag against the siding and grab the pot. It’s heavier than I thought, the perfect heaviness. A bud is starting to sprout.
Quickly along the perimeter where house meets lawn, to the first window. But she’s no longer in sight. All I can see in the dusty glass is myself. A little-boy version of me.
A running start and I smash the bottom of the pot into the window. The glass doesn’t break and there’s soil all over my chest. I do it again and the window cracks and splinters, and the third time I have to shake Jules off me and the glass sprays everywhere and almost gets her. I knock the rest of the broken window away with my hand. Jules screams at the same time as my fingers start to bleed and her screams are coming out of my wounds. I turn back to Jules to help her up on the sill. She’s crying up a storm. There’s a storm brewing, big clouds on their way, flying over the roof of the house, coming out of the chimney, they’re coming to drown this whole place, to make an ocean, and the Hasidim are on their way to get me. I have to get in, I have to get in the house, and Jules doesn’t understand. They will take her away from me again if I can’t find the words to go back in time before the first time.
A man is standing in front of me on the other
side of the broken window. He’s covered in shadow.
“Let me inside,” I demand of him. “Where is she? Werewolf. Give me the words. Words are for babies.”
“They’re on their way, asshole,” he says.
I turn to Jules for help. Her face is wet with sweat and tears and soot and she is made of plastic. She’s going to run away from me now, and that will be the last I see of her.
But there are her hands on my shoulders and she’s shaking me and yelling and she pulls my head onto her shoulder and I’m crying, too, which I didn’t mean to do.
When I pull away, her snot sticks to my shirt and her tears are everywhere.
“The police are on their way,” she says. “They’ll take you to the hospital.”
But the cops are working for the Hasidim. She must know this.
I don’t believe her. She wouldn’t turn me in. “You don’t understand, understand this,” I say. She wouldn’t have done that to me. I don’t believe her.
“What am I supposed to do?” she says.
“Why don’t you let me help you? Help is on its way and the way is flat from here. Now Dan and his people will hurt you. You might die and I can’t stop it and it’s all your fault.”
Doesn’t she see that I can take her back in time so she won’t have a miscarriage?
She digs her face into my hands and cries harder. “Listen to what you’re saying, West. You know it’s not true.”
And there she is—lost to me.
I’ve never blamed her before, but she’s never betrayed me before. You don’t know betrayal like this. Who’s ever left you? Your own sister fouling up your plans to save her, right before you solve everything. Which you should have seen coming. It’s you. It’s your fault.
Or maybe it’s my fault. Or maybe Jules is right. Maybe I want her to be right. That would mean I’m just sick. That would mean she’s not in danger. It would be so much easier if I didn’t have to protect her.
But I know I’m not wrong. I can’t be. Unless I messed up somewhere at the very beginning of the logical argument.
I grab my painting and bag. I can’t force her to let me take care of her forever. She will have to fend for herself. I pat Jules’s dark wig. She doesn’t feel it. “Do you miss your hair, Jules?”
She doesn’t look at me. “No, I don’t miss my hair.”
What do I say after that? Nothing. I will run.
But first I leap at her to scare her away for good.
She really shouldn’t love me.
I am completely alone in the world. Completely and utterly and finally alone except for one man:
Jill is waiting for me on the corner of West 101st Street and Fifth Avenue, like his voicemail said. I’m twenty minutes late but still he waited. He is a giant in his leather jacket.
From the corner, I think he might be make-believe. The words and the landmine house have disappeared, and with it Nicolette’s code-key, and I’m afraid everything else will start disappearing, too, Jill included. Vanished through the ripped seam in the universe.
“You’re late.” He’s real, all right. “Didn’t I tell you I’d find you? And her?” He grins at me. He’s real and safe. Thank goodness for green-level safe. He doesn’t know that after Jules, he and Claire are all I have left.
We walk half a block east. He looks at my wounded hand, which I wrapped in one of the extra T-shirts Dan put in my bag, but he doesn’t ask about it. At a don’t-walk sign, Jill digs into his pocket. “Here, I got something that belongs to you.”
He slips me a half-sized crumpled manila envelope. I let him hold the painting while I open it. Inside are rectangular clippings of naked girls. Not the kind you’re thinking—this man is an art thief, not a pervert. It’s an envelope stuffed with dozens of Renaissance nudey cut-outs.
He leans toward me. “Look closer.”
I look closer. Between the clippings are many twenty-dollar bills.
“Can’t be too careful,” Jill says.
“What’s this for?”
“What do you think? I’m paying you back. I shouldn’t have taken it in the first place.”
I unwrap my hand and drape the bloody T-shirt over my shoulder so I can count it, keeping it in the envelope. “It’s missing three hundred!”
“Four hundred.”
Something else is jiggling around in the bottom of the envelope. “What else is in here?” Peering through, it looks like pills.
“Don’t lose those. She’ll want them. I know she will. Did you bring your meds? You got Xanax?” I nod and pat my messenger bag. Jill leads us to a private-enough alcove by the entrance of a massive stone building I don’t recognize.
“Where are we?” I ask. Gargoyles leer down at us, but the bird poop on their faces make them less threatening. I could kiss them.
“The hospital.”
Has he been talking to Jules? He couldn’t have been. I’ll have to make a run for it again, that’s all there is to it. Goodbye to Jill, goodbye to everything.
“Guess who’s right inside these walls,” Jill says.
“Who?”
“Claire, for Christ’s sake,” he says as if I should have known. “Claire Bishop.”
So I’m going to the hospital after all, just like my Jules wanted. But for another reason.
“What’s wrong with her?”
He lowers his eyes and tosses the painting tube lightly up and down. The birthday paper is torn in places. “We have to act fast. There’s not much time.”
“Why? Did we get caught?”
“No. No one’s getting caught at anything. I know the guards here, if you know what I mean.”
I slip the envelope in my bag and take the painting back from him.
“You don’t know what I mean.” He tells me that the missing four hundred went to the guard he’d paid off, who he told I was Claire’s son, but that I was a bastard kid, and you know how family is, her other kids were always visiting and didn’t want me near, and that’s why we had no choice but to visit at night when everyone else was gone. “I don’t know how long she’s got. Up here,” Jill says tapping his head. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. How long she’s going to be herself. She’s not totally gone yet. But they said she stopped eating. Why would she do that?”
“You don’t have to worry. She can’t die,” I say with as much certainty as I can muster. “The painting won’t let her.”
In the hospital lobby, the fluorescent lights spill on us, chlorinated pool water. I hold my breath. Jill is beside me, eyeing everyone suspiciously. There’s a doctor talking with a security guard at the reception desk, the words SORRY and CRAZY scrolling on the LCD screen above. It’s evening now. Visiting hours are over. But we stay on a bench in the corner like we know what we’re doing.
“The cops are after me,” I say to Jill, keeping my eyes on the guard and doc.
“What happened now?”
“I smashed a guy’s window.”
He just looks up at the vast skylight.
“And I hurt my sister. She’s never going to speak to me again.”
“Sisters are good at forgiving,” Jill says.
“Do you have a sister?”
“Not exactly. But I know.”
While we’re waiting, I get out my notebook, though I have little to work with now. This is why I stay away from hospitals. They’re outside any Homeland Security threat-advisory system with different rules. I don’t know what’s dangerous and what’s not anymore, what kind of connection to the Hasidim. The clues are a fuzzed-up carpet too tread upon.
And you, Lousy Voices—why are you in such a nasty mood? Telling me I’m wrong all the time, that I should give it up, that my time travel theories come from the movies. I know I’m a failure; tell me something new. Stop with the shadow-chorus of whispers! And turn off those red eyes. I’ve had enough of eyes. You may only remain if you have nice things to say.
But no matter how mean you are to me, I will not stop telling you the truth.
After everything else is gone, there’s still Nicolette’s painting in the tube on my lap. And couldn’t this all be orchestrated by her? This whole thing, the whole mystery, could be one of her installations. And where is she? Laughing in the wings, watching me flit about, ready to jump on stage when I’ve solved the thing?
But there’s only one way to know for sure. I flip to the front of my notebook. It all hinges on Premise 1:
NICOLETTE, THOUGH 26 YEARS OLD IN 2004, PAINTED “THE SUICIDE” IN THE LATE FIFTIES.
Everything follows from there. I add one last link to end the proof:
P8: ONLY TWO PEOPLE CAN VERIFY WHETHER P1 IS TRUE: NICOLETTE AND CLAIRE.
But Nicolette is gone.
Could she have wanted me to give the painting to Claire all along?
Now that the doctor has left, Jill walks up all smooth to have a word with the security guard. Some of the overhead lights have been turned off, and the nurses are switching shifts. The guard points to the elevator bank at the back of the lobby.
Jill waves me over and I follow him there. He and the guard whisper and the guard hands him a plastic badge with a string looped through and Jill hands it to me—a visitor’s pass, photocopied and forged.
“End of the line for me, kiddo,” Jill says, and swoops his hand through his silver hair. It doesn’t light up. It doesn’t do anything. The guard pushes the elevator UP button.
“What do you mean? We’re right here,” I say.
“Nope. Can’t go in. The boss here says only one of us. And you’re it.”
I look at the guard who’s picking his nose nearby, pretending not to pay attention. “I’m sure he’d be happy to take more money for you to come, too,” I offer. “I have the envelope.”
Jill rubs his face with his big hands and I think for a second he’s moved his features around, nose replacing forehead, but I’m mistaken. He just looks tired. The near-ultimate kind.
“I’m asking you for a favor, kid. I need you to make sure she gets it. And that she knows what it is and who it’s from. Got it?”
The elevator door opens, and we look at it, but we don’t move. It closes again.
“You’ll do great. You’re a smart guy. One of the smartest, seriously.” Nothing about his face spins dangerously. He’s telling the truth. Or at least what he thinks is the truth.
The Suicide of Claire Bishop Page 33