“I’m the someone. Interested?”
“Well, yeah. Could I see it now?” I scratched a bump from a bug bite on the right side of my neck. People think if you live in the city that the bugs can’t find you.
“Sure. Let me get Sasha from the back to cover for me. Can I get you something?” The bartender had an easy way of moving from the bar to behind him, where wineglasses lined up on a mirrored shelf. I guessed he was a struggling actor in his early forties, with a string of episodic roles dating back to the first CSI series. His brown hair was curly, shoved behind his ears so the ends flipped.
“A glass of sauvignon blanc, I guess.”
“You guess?” The bartender laughed. Some kind of chanting —Gregorian, I thought—an odd musical choice for a wine bar, filled the space. The lights were low enough to make you believe you might find love with a guy who ordered a Johnnie Walker Black Label.
I followed him upstairs.
The room had a small bathroom with a shower built into a sloping wall, suitable for a person no more than five feet tall. At five foot three, I imagined myself in a soft plié as I shampooed. The white walls were bare except for one left-behind painting of a woman with two arms ballooned like stuffed sausages. It took up most of the inside wall. I walked over to the one window that faced the front of Mueller’s Bakery. A perfect view.
What am I doing here?
“There’s a small fridge, but no cooking is allowed,” the bartender said. “We rent month-to-month for $850, with a two-month security deposit.”
“Can I stay here a minute and get the feel of the place? Alone?” I added.
“Sure. Just lock the door behind you and drop off the key at the bar. Uh . . .” He turned to leave but then stopped and said, “What do you think?” He kept both hands in his pockets, making noise with what I guessed were dimes and pennies hammering against quarters and nickels. In the back of my mind, I imagined the guy needed a large ceramic dish near the front door to his apartment where he could drop paper clips and receipts from the corner grocery store.
My voice, as true as a Tibetan singing bowl, said, “It’s just what I’m looking for.”
As I was about to move away from the window, I noticed the man wearing a Harley T-shirt and a straw fedora standing in the middle of the block. As I watched, he dropped his cigarette and stamped it out. He looked up and down the street before he walked away.
I stepped behind the curtain and waited. For what? After a few minutes—maybe three—I left the room and returned the key to the bartender. “When can I rent it?”
“Two months’ security plus this month’s rent prorated, and it’s yours right away.” The bartender reached across the bar to shake my hand. “I’m Ed. Welcome to Brooklyn.”
I left the wineglass half-full at the bar.
As I rode the subway home to Twenty-Third Street, I debated whether I should tell anyone about my room. For a moment, I thought of sharing this with Kay, but she was too quick to respond. I didn’t want her to shoot this down. Not now, when I had finally taken an action. Done something without asking anyone’s permission.
Of course, I had doubts. I know how doubt tastes and moves. How it squats and burrows like a tapeworm, until it’s so far inside, there’s no getting rid of it.
If you must know, I had plenty of doubt, but I leaped over it as if I were stepping over mud.
All I knew was that I wanted to watch the front door of Mueller’s Bakery. The next time I returned to the room, I had a gray camera bag slung over my shoulder with a brand-new lens tucked next to the black Rebel. Working as a fashion editor had inspired me to see things. I noticed details. I didn’t miss what was in the corner of a picture. Others might. If a hair hung wrong over the model’s cheekbone or the collar of a leather jacket didn’t lie right around the neck, I vetoed the shot. My photographers were the best. I learned what to look for from them. When I watched from my window, I saw things—corner to corner, through the lens. Each time I traveled to my room in Brooklyn, I strolled the neighborhood. I photographed what was up and down the street, not knowing what I would stumble onto in the middle of one frightening night.
As the train rumbled underground, I called Kay at her office.
“I just left Mueller’s Bakery. Hannah sat with me. I think I’m getting to her.”
“What did she say?”
“It wasn’t what she said.”
I could hear Kay shuffling papers on her desk or shoving them into her designer tote.
“Body language doesn’t carry weight in my business,” she said.
“Sorry. I forgot that your business is different than my business,” I said, with a coolness that made me cringe.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Kay’s lawyer voice grated on my nerves. I took a deep breath.
“Nothing. Let it go.” Tension stitched up my throat. Kay didn’t respond.
“Forget it,” I said, and hung up. I was right. I couldn’t share my room for rent with Kay.
The train pulled in to Twenty-Eighth Street, and I walked up the steps and out of the subway station. The bright sunshine reminded me summer was near. My original plan was to return to the house in Spring Haven for the month of August. I knew I didn’t need the summer months to bring me back. I had been driving by Hilda and Rudy’s house for over two years. But now I had a room in Brooklyn without an oven and a stall shower built for a woman with short legs.
What had I done?
I PULLED OFF the white hat I had bought in the bargain bin at Barbara Fineman’s millinery in the East Village and hid in the open at the Rose Reading Room at the library on Forty-Second and Fifth. Row upon row of faces—long, bright, dark, and round—sat fixed to a book, paper, or computer screen. Men with beards and without, women in scarves and skirts, every one mixed in color, worked in silence.
I took a small sketchpad and soft pencil and drew the faces of those sitting around me. The man on the end had a brown suede coat draped over his shoulders. I wondered if he had a tattoo on his bicep—something spiritual, like “Hosanna in the Highest” or “Satan Loves Me.” Three chairs down was a woman—young, her skin the color of mocha. She was probably not yet twenty-five. On her head, she wore a gray knit bandanna tied behind her ears. Her features were soft. My eyes looked up and down from my book in swift, dart-like motions. Back and forth, my pencil flew across the page, shadowing the unsuspecting woman’s face, working on her mouth, catching the end of the bandanna poking from behind the left side of her neck. Without warning, the young woman stood up and left. I followed her with my eyes until she was out of sight. When I returned to the pad, I worked from memory, going as fast as I could, feeling the burn of getting something down before I lost it in my mind’s eye.
After what had to have been longer than I realized, I looked up and, to my surprise, I thought I saw Evelyn, but no—an older woman wearing a purple shawl pulled up and around her shoulders stooped over a stack of thick books. Evelyn’s shoulders wouldn’t slope that way. She held herself proud, like a warrior who had battled enough in the past.
Once, when we had only just met and Vinni and I were visiting her in her studio, she said, “I’ve always believed people show up in our lives for a reason. Your moving upstairs with Vinni. Coincidence or fate?”
I flinched now as I thought about Hilda and Rudy watching Vinni and me on the beach three years ago. Why had they shown up in our lives? Was I supposed to believe that inviting us for dinner and distracting us with comfort food and gentle storytelling was part of some divine plan? Was my mother’s suicide supposed to have helped prepare me for pain?
I ran my fingers over the spine of a book closed in front of me. I had grown into the skin of a worrier. The image of the man in the Harley T-shirt and the straw fedora standing around Mueller’s sprinted across my mind. Something more to worry about, I thought. In and out. In and out. Just a neighborhood guy hanging out, right? Yeah, a neighbor man. I let it go the way I let go of wondering about the scar on John D’Orfi
ni’s buttocks. I packed up my purse, letting my pencil and sketchbook slide in without a sound.
It never lasted long, but going to the library made me feel less invisible. Rather than a woman with a missing daughter, I was a woman who sketched on a pad. Who popped Tic Tacs to squelch a stale mouth. Who bought a cup of tea topped with cream on the way home. The ordinariness of it had monstrous appeal.
TWO TO THREE times a week, I returned to my room across from Mueller’s Bakery. I looked out the window, into the middle of the night, until I fell asleep with my head resting on my arm. Its weight made my hand go numb. Nothing happened. Of course, I don’t know what I expected, other than a vision of Vinni running toward me. This went on until the end of May, when the nights got warmer. Right before Memorial Day, I headed out to Brooklyn with a backpack holding two pairs of underpants, two tees, and an extra bra. Toothpaste, face cleanser, and a bottle of Eucerin face-and-body lotion—the one with the pink cap—sat in the medicine cabinet above the sink in the bathroom. As I rode the subway, I thought about scrapping the whole idea of the room. I had made a mistake. I beat myself up for wasting money. The only saving thing about it was that I hadn’t told anyone.
At least I wouldn’t look like a fool.
Nobody knew where I was that last night before the long holiday weekend. Unless, of course, you counted Ed, the bartender. I had gotten used to floating through the bar to make my way upstairs with just a wave of my hand.
The northeast was experiencing an early heat wave. I opened all four windows. Only two had screens, but I needed the air. In the middle of the night, I got up, peed, and went and sat by the window. I should have gone straight to bed. If I had, I might have avoided stumbling into something that I knew nothing about. I must have fallen asleep with my head on my arm. At first, I thought it was the numbness from my lower arm that woke me, but when I opened my eyes, I saw a black limousine parked two buildings down from Mueller’s. Had the car awakened me?
I moved behind the curtain of the window closer to the kitchen to get a better look. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. A tingling sensation traveled through me as I watched two girls get out of the vehicle. Their skinny legs told me that these were young bodies. At first, I held my breath as I stared across the street. The girls stood still on the concrete sidewalk, their faces covered by hanging locks of hair. A slim man dressed in suit and tie exited the limousine. They followed him to an alleyway where the limousine had stopped, and then all three disappeared from my sightline. I stayed at the window for what seemed like hours but in truth was only fifteen minutes, until I saw the slim man return alone to the limo and speed away. Somewhere down the alleyway, the two girls had disappeared.
This has nothing to do with my daughter, I thought, as the words danced round and round in my head.
Nothing.
You must go to bed and close your eyes. You must forget what you’ve seen.
But how could I?
I slipped on my sandals and quietly opened the door. I made my way downstairs, careful to avoid stepping in the middle of the last two steps at the end of the staircase, where I knew they creaked. I moved fast to the front door, and just as I was about to turn the doorknob, I heard Ed the bartender. “Hey,” he said. “It’s three in the morning.” He set down a case of empty wine bottles and looked at me, dressed in a girlie nightie tucked inside a pair of jean shorts. Vinni had given me the nightie on the last Mother’s Day we were together. Kay had taken her shopping.
“You okay?” Ed asked. He stood about twelve feet down the hall.
My hand gripped the doorknob more tightly. All I had to do was turn it and run outside and across the street to the alleyway to get a closer look at what I suspected was a bad thing.
“Uh, yeah,” I said. I hesitated. Then I released my curled hand on the doorknob. “I couldn’t sleep. Too hot, I guess. I was thinking of going for a walk.”
“Cool walking clothes,” he said, and laughed. “How about you have a shot of whiskey, instead of walking around in the middle of the night?”
“Yeah, you’re right,” I said too quickly.
I ran back upstairs and closed the door behind me. I don’t know what would have happened if Ed hadn’t stopped me. Maybe I would have avoided all those nights ahead, watching from the window to see if I’d catch a glimpse of more girls disappearing down the alley. Maybe I would have slept and not wondered if Hannah and George knew what was happening two buildings down from their bakery.
Vinni was going on eleven years old now. She would be taller and look older than her age. Would she be wearing her hair long and hanging over one eye?
All I knew was that I had plenty of doubts I couldn’t share. Not with Evelyn or Kay or even John D’Orfini. The man was a walking doubt factor forced upon him by facts. He could make you stop believing in vanilla ice cream if you gave him enough time. And Kay? We had gotten closer, almost to where we were years ago, before she made a mistake and slept with Steve. But she was a loyal assistant US attorney and I couldn’t forget that. She had taken an oath. Sworn on a bible to uphold the law. I hadn’t sworn to anything, so if I chose not to share information with the law—things I had seen from my window in Brooklyn—I told myself it was okay. And Evelyn? She played a key role in keeping me alive. At least this was one thing I had no doubt about. This is exactly why I chose not to involve her. Evelyn knew about art and painting. She stood in a separate place, far to the side of John D’Orfini and Kay.
I made a choice.
I kept quiet.
I mixed up colors on the canvas. I painted more to whittle my way out from the wound. Three years is a long time to believe in what others don’t. Not that anyone said they believed Vinni had disappeared forever. They didn’t have to.
Evelyn used to say, “‘Art begins in the wound.’ I read this somewhere once. It’s true, you know. If you paint from the wound, you’ll forget what day it is and the only thing that will stay with you is the shade of your last stroke. Not its name.”
TWENTY-ONE
EVELYN KEPT THE WINDOWS TO HER STUDIO WIDE OPEN. The early-morning June light provided natural warmth. When I arrived one Saturday, she was already working at the easel. Without looking up, she said, “I want you to do something for me.”
My first thought was how I might have to cancel my plan to go to my room in Brooklyn. Two weeks had passed, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the girls disappearing down the alleyway by Mueller’s Bakery.
“Of course. What is it?” Evelyn’s requests usually revolved around escorting her to the Metropolitan Museum or the Opera House at Lincoln Center. She was a frequent matineegoer and for years, before her hips stiffened, had attended productions alone.
“What are we seeing?”
Evelyn’s white cotton skirt, threaded with silver, shimmered in the sunlight. Although it was warm outside, she wore an oversize white shirt that hung near to her knees. Each sleeve was rolled up neatly below the elbow.
“Go change into something white. Top and bottom. Meet me down in the lobby in an hour.”
My own wardrobe had begun to resemble Evelyn’s. Long skirts—the kind I used to wear when I was an art student at NYU—had replaced half my selection of tailored trousers. I grabbed a multitiered lace skirt and snug white tee bought at a boutique on Amsterdam Avenue owned by a woman who imported clothes from Asia. The skirt was from Thailand. I walked into Vinni’s room and twirled around with my hands on either side of the skirt. On the dresser was a hair comb decorated with white baby roses. I picked it up and tried to fasten it into my hair. It was too thin and too short to grab hold of the comb. I returned to my bedroom and chose a long silk scarf and wrapped it around my head, African princess—style. The scarf was white with cream-colored roses wound and rewound among green vines. As I played with the ends of the scarf, I ended up with knotted blooms on the left side of my head.
Three years is a long time to be blue. I looked pretty in white.
WHEN I ARRIVED in the lobby, Evelyn stoo
d with her back to the stairs as she spoke to Stanley. Perhaps, I thought, he had come for a surprise visit. But no, he was dressed in white pants and a long-sleeved white collared shirt. On his head sat one of those natural white straw fedoras with a black grosgrain ribbon fastened around the inner edge of the brim. The three of us looked like we were on our way to an afternoon tea fest on the island of Barbados.
“There you are, dear. Stanley’s going with us.” Evelyn had changed her top to one with billowy sleeves bordered with off-white French latticed lace. Narrow strands of matching colored ribbon pulled the sleeves into a ruching effect above the wrists.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Maddy, good to see you,” Stanley said. “It’s beautiful outside. I took the liberty of having a car drive us.” He waited for both Evelyn and me to settle on opposite sides of the long seats facing each other. Stanley sat alongside Evelyn. She looked excited. Flushed, almost.
From Chelsea, the driver took us to Twenty-Ninth Street, over to Ninth Avenue, and up to the entrance to New Jersey via the Lincoln Tunnel.
“Where are we going? What’s the secret?” I asked, as I adjusted the silk bloom over my ear.
“It’s not a secret,” Evelyn said. “It had to be the right time to take you here.” Then she looked out the window and said, “I wanted you to be ready, and now you are.”
She hesitated, as if thinking about something, before she added, “Love your turban, dear.”
Stanley smiled and nodded. He raised his eyebrows as if he were anticipating a ride in an amusement park. His eyes twinkled. This was a man who after all these years was still in love with his former wife. Anyone could see it. The way he looked at her with a distant gaze, aware that if he got too close, even this might disappear.
As we traveled south on the Garden State Parkway, I feared Evelyn was taking me to Spring Haven without warning. But two hours later, we exited the highway to a sign that read WELCOME TO DAMSON.
A Matter of Chance Page 13