Jamie knew she wasn’t real. This wasn’t the first time she had seen her. But she looked anyway.
Then Jamie spotted the blood. It started as a crimson trickle from the young woman’s temple. Then a gush. Blood pouring down her face and across her full lips and sweet smile.
Jamie closed her eyes. When she opened them, the young woman was gone.
"What do you think, James?"
Lynette was still talking.
“Sorry, what?”
"The Irish James Dean Wonder Woman sex goddess - you gonna go out with her?
Jamie felt her heart pounding. Her head starting to get woozy.
Focus on anything else.
"Yeah," Jamie said. "Sure. Maybe."
4
Dearest Gobshite,
Mammy asked me to write ta you. Jaysis, girl, get yer arse back here to Andersonstown and quit faffin’ around in New York fucking City.
Ma says whatever ya did that ya took off from, God’ll forgive ya. Which I don’t know what she’s talkin’ about or what ya did, coz according to her, Jesus didn’t forgive ya when you pinched that extra scotch egg from the church picnic when we were kids, and according to Ma, God didn’t forgive Catherine Shanahan when she got knocked up by that boy who delivered the ice, so I’m not sure what God she’s got in mind that’s in such a forgivin’ mood.
What the Christ is this name and address by the way? And who ya livin’ with that I gotta send it care of-- “Mrs Iris Dunlop.” Who’s that old bag? I heard yer livin on the Lower East Side in New York fuckin' City. This a flophouse? Keep an eye on your stuff. Haha remember when Ivy Crane told everyone she and her brothers and her parents were movin’ outta Belfast to Armagh into this grand house and then we saw them two weeks later and they’d all moved in two blocks away with her grandparents in some shitebox just the other side of Falls Road? And then her ma pinched a chicken pot pie from Sainsbury’s? That was hilarious.
I heard Ivy’s datin’ a British soldier. Fuckin’ traitor. The Provies hear about that, she’s fuckin’ dead. All in a day here in beautiful Sunny Belfast, sis. You want me to send ya a postcard?
Billy's parents came by Ma’s the other day askin’ about ya. Ma said you was in Derry visiting family. Like any o’ us got feckin family we give a shite about. Let alone in Derry. What a shitebox.
So here’s my letter, ya idjit. I can tell ma I wrote ya. Now come home already, ya feckin’ tit.
your loving sister,
Leanne
20-year-old Bridget Dwyer was sitting on the loading dock outside Murphy’s New and Used Books on East 10th Street. Reading a letter and smoking.
“Leanne, ya fucker...” she laughed, folding the letter up into a tiny little wedge and shoving it in the back pocket of her jeans.
She jumped down from the loading dock.
An old lady walked by.
“Mornin’…” Bridget smiled..
The old lady frowned and kept walking.
Bridget glanced down at how she presented herself to the world here in New York City. Her black Clash concert t-shirt with the cut off sleeves, her tight, faded Levi’s with the ripped knee, the worn out black combat boots.
Maybe the crabby old bag was right to tut.
Bridget flipped her long hair up into a bun and twisted a tie around it.
Hot day for the beginning of June, she thought. She squinted into the sun and gazed across 10th Street, taking a long last puff of her cigarette and flicked the butt into the street.
She exhaled the smoke through her nose and mouth and stared at the view she saw every day sitting out here. The red brick apartment building with the green awning. Its brick façade filled with windows, each one having given birth to an air conditioner in the past week.
Bridget turned around and stole a glance up behind her to the second floor of the bookstore where that girl Jamie Brennan worked - a friend? Someone to give a shite about?
Dennis from the first floor told her Jamie, was a gay. He said it like it was funny - Bridget instead thought it was cool.
Dennis, who, himself, Bridget noted, was as queer as a three-pound note, and who literally wore a ladies’ fur coat last winter and literally talked about Judy Garland a lot.
Bridget felt a bead of sweat fall down her neck and the sun pelting down on her.
A guy drove by on 10th Street in a delivery truck and leaned out the door whistling at her.
“Heyyyyy....Hey baby…Wooooeeee....Look at the body on you!”
She checked him out. Dark eyes, big smile, blue shorts, crisp uniform, muscles. Queens probably. Girlfriend definitely. She made blank eye contact and he drove on.
She’d learned that’s just what guys did in New York City. They hung out of delivery trucks, they whistled from windows. They made noises as they passed you on the street. But she knew to tune it out. It was part of the scenery.
Leanne’s letter... It made her heart tug. She was gonna call her mammy back in Belfast sometime, but not now - maybe in a couple of days when she’d saved up the like 50 dimes it would take for three minutes.
But she sure wasn’t going home to Belfast. She was going to make a new life in New York for herself, where she could read books and be a teacher maybe. Make a difference. Live a bigger life than back home. A safer life than curfews and checkpoints and the Provisional IRA and bombs going off everywhere.
And she could be anyone she wanted to be here.
Anyone.
Besides if she went back to Belfast, there was an IRA bullet to the head with her name on it.
Not Bridget Dwyer. Her real name.
5
“Mommy, look at that lady!”
“Oh my god,” Connie Pell thought. “Judged by a 6-year-old boy with a cowlick and an Italian ice.”
Connie looked over at the kid standing with his mother next to the entrance to Central Park.
Yes, was sitting in the back of a squad car on Fifth Avenue next to Central Park at 4 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon, wrapped in a picky beige police blanket. And yes, she’d just walked into the pond. But no need to stare.
Connie felt her sopping wet clothes clinging to her. They smelled like watery garbage.
That Grenadier Pond in Central Park was hardly a crystal spring in the Alps.
The cop in the front seat with the clipboard addressed her, not looking up.
“Name?”
"Connie Pell... Constance."
"Any middle name?"
"Muir...that's my maiden name. Middle name is Grant. It was my mother's maiden name..."
"Ma'am, I'm going to need you to stop trying to open the window. The windows don't open back there."
Connie stared out the back window towards the interlocking stone sidewalk and the green of the park.
She absently watched a society lady with a 60’s bouffant and a punch-in-the-face of rouge on each cheek walking a fluffy orange dog that looked like a feather duster.
Not even that made Connie smile.
She used to be happy. Something happened to her brain after her baby was born. Something happened to this world, she'd think. Like the moment in the Wizard of Oz where it goes from black and white to color - but instead the world had gone from color to black and white.
"What am I looking at, Officer? Can't I just be on my way?"
"We could charge you with Mischief... Trespassing..."
Connie Pell laughed. "Oh my god - I went to Vassar! I'm hardly the kind of person to be arrested for mischief in Central Park!"
She felt her one bare foot on the rubber mat in the back seat and realized she had lost one of her beige sandals from Fayva on the mud of the pond when she walked in.
“Fuck…” she whispered.
She loved those sandals. Got them on sale.
"How long is this going to take? I need to get back to work."
"Not long," the officer said to the clipboard.
She eyed the two cops in the front seat. The driver, a surly, fat 50-ish Irish one who was eating a roast
beef sandwich and clearly never made Detective. And a friendlier, younger one in the passenger seat, who looked like a youthful Sidney Poitier plus 30 pounds.
"Did you call my husband?” Connie said. "He's not going to be happy about this."
"We did, Ma'am,” the nicer cop said.
He scribbled words on his clipboard. Didn't look back at her.
"You think I’m like Anne Sexton, don’t you…I’m not," she said.
"I don't even know who that is."
"The poet. Killed herself," Connie said.
"Mm hm.."
"Like Sylvia Plath. They were friends. Isn't that interesting? Did you know that?"
"Nope."
"You probably prefer a good thriller. ‘The Taking of Pelham One Two Three’...We publish books like that too where I work. Bestsellers... Whatnot."
"Mm hm."
"Who's your favorite writer?"
"I don't really read."
“Ah - I love it,” Connie Pell laughed.
A big laugh that felt good. See? I'm fine. She should say it. Say, ‘Look, I can laugh. I'm fine.’
"Officer, I'm really fine now."
"Mrs. Pell, you walked into Grenadier Pond with your clothes on. You were screaming obscenities at people in rowboats.”
Connie felt the reality of reality setting in. "I don't remember that part."
She remembered how good the water felt, cool and refreshing on this hot June day. She remembered before that. walking up Sixth Avenue to the park at lunch. Buying a can of Budweiser from the deli just below Central Park South. Drinking it in a paper bag as she walked into the park. The beer making her head buzz. She remembered walking towards the pond. It was sweltering. She wanted to be refreshed. She remembered the moment before she waded in. Finishing the beer, standing next to the pond on the grass.
"Officer, I'm sorry. It was a silly thing to do but I'm fine."
Finally, he turned around.
"A well-dressed lady walking into Grenadier Pond in the middle of the day. Doesn't look good."
Connie knew the next stop would be Bellevue if she didn't change their minds fast.
"It was just a lark,” she lied.
A Checker cab screeched to a lurching halt alongside the squad car. Connie glanced over and spotted her husband Ray in the back of the cab. His wide face contorted in nervousness, he shoved a few crumpled up dollar bills through the slot to the cab driver and jumped out.
"Officer..." he was saying, “I'm Ray Pell.”
She watched Ray pulling his I.D. out of his wallet and handing it through the driver’s side window to the fat taciturn cop with the sandwich.
Ray. Her Ray. Her heart swelled as she watched him try.
He was the kindest man she had ever met. The sort of lovely guy who would never be Cary Grant, was more like a chunky Jimmy Stewart, but she loved him for that. For so many things. For everything he was and for everything she knew he wasn’t enough of. No matter how hard he tried. For her. For the world.
"This your wife?" the Irish sandwich-eater said.
Connie watched Ray peer at her in the back seat of this baby blue NYPD squad car that smelled like an old cab.
Connie waved, hoping to look cheerful.
"Yeah - is she okay?"
"I'm okay, honey..." Connie smiled, putting her mouth right next to the glass of the window. "It's all a misunderstanding." She let out a little laugh that wanted to sound lighthearted, but made her chest ache with hollowness.
She saw Ray smile. But his eyes weren't smiling. He was petrified.
"Con... I'm here, honey,” Ray said.
Connie turned away.
Tears filled her eyes as she looked over at the trees in the park. Because she suddenly realized that right before she walked into the water of Grenadier Pond, she whispered him goodbye.
Connie could see her face reflected back to her in the backseat window as she gazed at the park. Her blonde hair pasted to her head. Her freckles. That wide smile people seemed to like for some who knows what reason. “I’ll never be beautiful,” she used to think. “But I’ll be the brightest me you’ve ever seen.”
Penny said she was beautiful. Penny was gorgeous and needed her eyes checked.
Connie felt Ray's hand on her shoulder. She turned. The officer had opened the back door and Ray was leaning in next to her.
“Hey, babe…” he said sweetly.
She saw the tears in his eyes. God, he loved her so much.
It made her heart ache and stretch to feel something more. For him. For life. For anything.
“It’s okay, babe," he whispered. "I got you. It's going to be okay..."
6
“Just write something…”
Jamie Brennan let her hands settle on the hum of the typewriter keys. She looked out the window in front of her makeshift desk up at the front of her second floor exposed brick studio overlooking University Place. A dusky purple 8 p.m. summer sky was sinking into darkness over Hunan Wok University across the street. The fan in the window blowing on her bare legs in her shorts and a skimpy tank top. It was sweltering outside.
She had a sip of the Michelob she had half finished and plunked it back down on some papers, then stared at the blank page in her typewriter.
A novel to write. A meeting with her editor, Connie Pell, in two days. Connie had been patient. Supportive. Amazing.
“Just write whatever you can, Jamie… thoughts. Notes. Observations… Keep your hands moving.”
Jamie felt the fan in the window blowing directly on her - trying and yet failing to cool her down. And she could hear shouts and laughter from the pizzeria downstairs.
She had gotten home from work two hours ago and changed into gym shorts and a thin green tank top. Barely dressed. But still, sweat trickled down the back of her neck.
She let her hands settle on the keys. Staring out the window in front of her desk onto University Place. Feeling the warm electric whir of her lemon yellow Olivetti press against her fingertips.
Art
She typed.
Chapter One
She typed.
She could write other things, silly things, but this book wasn’t happening.
She looked around for something else to do but write, glancing at the note on her desk to call her sister back.
Christy wanted Jamie to go see a Broadway show with her soon. Their recent experience at Annie notwithstanding.
8:20. Too late to call. Christy would be putting the kids to bed. And besides, their phone conversations were often so point-form that Jamie usually felt lonelier after. Her older sister was sometimes like morse code with a voice attached.
Jamie started typing.
“The light in Florence is both the reason I want to stay and the thing that makes me most miss New York.”
Jamie leaned back and stared at the words on the page.
Her phone rang.
“Oh, thank god...”
She pushed back from her desk and walked to the back of her apartment. Grabbing the avacado green rotary phone on the third ring.
“Hello?”
“Good evening, we are conducting a consumer survey on grocery buying habits in the greater New York area. Would you have fifteen minutes to give us so we can ask you some questions?”
Well, this would be wrong. And procrastinating, she thought.
“Definitely.”
Jamie glanced up to the front of her apartment, looking at her typewriter. Which more and more had started to feel like an inquisitor.
The woman on the phone was finishing her introduction.
“I’m going to read out a number of products, please stop me when you get to the one you buy most often… Paper towels, fruit and vegetables, macaroni and cheese…”
Jamie listened to the words and glanced down to her telephone table. A phone number written on a yellow sticky note.
Dr. Donna Hornstein – 212 PL5...etc. Another shrink. Lynette gave her this one. “James, just call her. She could help.�
��
“I’m fine...” Jamie had lied.
The last one didn’t go well.
“Trauma...” the psychologist lady with the weird earrings and the homophobia had said a few months ago, “Has many unseen scars....”
The shrink lady had been saying this as Jamie absently glanced over to the potted plants on the woman’s office windowsill. The plants had names written on masking tape. “Spike...” “Lola...”
“You name your plants?” Jamie thought. “And I’m the crazy one?”
Then she heard Dr. Shrink Lady say, “Do you think your homosexuality had anything to do with--”
And with that, Jamie stood up and left.
“I’m fine,” she told Lynette when she suggested a new shrink.
She wasn’t fine. She knew it. She couldn’t love anyone anymore. She couldn’t sleep without sleeping pills. She drank beer to feel safe at night.
And now she couldn’t get this novel written, let alone started.
Jamie picked up the Dr. Hornstein piece of paper and crumpled it up. She tossed it into the wastepaper basket by the phone table.
“Do I buy items on sale? Sometimes. Paper towels.”
God, this conversation was boring. But it was exactly what she needed. A reason not to work and a reason not to feel.
7
The sun was setting on the Manhattan skyline in the distance as Bridget Dwyer made her way along the footbridge from the Queens subway station. She could hear her combat boots clonging on the metal grid.
A drunk guy in a ripped army jacket slouched on the side of the walkway whistled as she passed.
“Yo, girl, where’d you get dat ass?”
Bridget knew not to answer back but sometimes she had to. It was fuckin’ annoying.
“Fuckin’ Woolworths. They’re havin’ a sale, guy.”
“Yo, you got any money?"
He outstretched a grimy hand as she went by and grinned, revealing a gold tooth.
“Woah,” Bridget said, “Guy, whyn’t ya sell yer fuckin’ tooth? That’s gotta be worth a few.”
Now he open mouth laughed. “Yer fuckin’ funny - wait, come back ya sexy fuckin’ thing… Whatta you Scottish?”
This Will Be Page 2