The Shadow Men (8 page)

She looked into the apartment. “That’s not my home,” she said. The décor was different, the furniture, and as she watched, a strikingly tall black woman walked naked from the bathroom, across the hallway, and into the living room.

Trix caught her breath.
Perhaps we’re lovers
, she thought, but then a man emerged from the bathroom, naked and sheened with sweat, smiling and still semi-erect.

“Ice?” she heard the woman call, and Trix let the letter flap close softly as she rested back on her heels. Instead of being shocked or upset or disturbed, all she could wonder was how they could still make love with the city falling apart around them.

“Trix?” Jim asked.

“We can go now,” she said, standing and walking toward the stairs.

“You’re sure?”

She turned to him and was sad to see the hope fading from his eyes. “We’ll look somewhere else,” she said. “We need to go to someone who will listen.”

“Who?”

Trix glanced back at the familiar building one more time, glad that the rain would camouflage her tears.

“In the car,” she said. “We need to leave here. I’ll explain then.”

Rare Ould Times

A
S
J
IM
drove through the city, windshield wipers battling the rain, he glanced at familiar stores and landmarks. His sense of dislocation had increased, despite the absence of any obvious changes. Every detail of Boston remained the same, at least based on a cursory inventory, and yet somehow it seemed as alien to him as if a tornado had dropped him into Oz. “Seriously, Trix, where are we going?” he asked.

“I told you. State Street. Try to get a parking space near the Old State House.”

“Easier said than done,” he said.

Trix nodded, peering out the rain-slicked passenger window. “I know. But we only need a few minutes. Double-park if you have to.”

Jim jerked the steering wheel to swerve around a taxi that stopped abruptly in front of them. One wheel splashed through a pothole, and he swore. Trix reacted not at all, and he glanced at her, trying to figure her out. Her appearance had changed dramatically, even her body, but she was still Trix.

It should have given him comfort, having a close friend beside him, going through all of this with him. Instead, it scared the shit out of him. It had been terrifying enough to think—as he had at first—that Jenny had taken Holly and vanished from his life intentionally, and then to suspect a meticulous and cruel conspiracy of abduction. And when he had begun to believe that he might be insane, his fear had bloomed into something near enough to lunacy that he might as well have been crazy. But this … somehow, this was worse. Trix remembered the world the way Jim did—remembered Jenny and Holly—and that meant that neither of them was crazy. Instead, it meant that the world had suddenly become hideously malleable. Reality had turned fluid.

“You’re really not going to tell me what we’re doing here?” he asked.

She squeezed her eyes shut a moment, then opened them and turned to look at him. Her new look—the pink hair, different makeup—made her seem more intense, but her eyes were the same as ever, and glinting with unshed tears. “You know how much Jenny means to me, right?” she asked. “Jenny and Holly, I mean?”

Trix loved Jenny almost as much as he did. In truth, he had always suspected Trix was deeply
in
love with his wife, though Jenny had always insisted that whatever feelings Trix might have for her were in the past. Every time Trix ended a relationship with a girlfriend and the three of them would get together and drink too much wine, he would see that old wistful sadness in Trix’s eyes, but eventually he had learned not to mention it. Things were what they were. Jenny and Trix had a powerful bond, but Jim had never felt threatened by it.

Trix might be Jenny’s best friend, but she had become one of his closest friends as well.

“Yeah. I know,” Jim said.

“Then I’m going to need you to trust me for a little while. There’s someone we need to talk to—a woman named Veronica Braden—and if I find her and she can’t help us, then we’ll think of something else. We will, Jim. We’re going to figure out how this is possible, and we’ll find them.”

He laughed darkly. “You sound so sure.”

Trix turned to look back out at the rain. “I have to be. And you’ll have to be, too.” She lowered her voice. “Whatever this is, it can’t be the first time it’s happened to anyone. I’ve read Stephen Hawking, y’know? Parallel dimensions and black holes and all that shit. We’re going to figure this out, and we’re going to get … get your girls back.”

Silence filled the space between them then, save for the
shush
of the wipers and the rumble of the road beneath his tires. He drove down Congress Street searching without luck for a parking spot. Roadwork took up two long blocks on the right, and the left had parked cars bumper to bumper. As he approached State, he took a chance and turned left onto narrow Quaker Lane, saw a spot, and pulled in.

“There’s a sign,” Trix said.

Jim didn’t respond. He killed the engine and climbed out, cold rain spattering him and drops running down the back of his collar. Trix stepped out of the car, and they both looked at the sign she had pointed out, a list of parking restrictions. She had said they wouldn’t be long, but he found he could not care about tickets or tow trucks.

“If you want an umbrella, I saw one on the backseat,” he said, slamming the door.

Trix turned her face up to the sky, seeming to relish the cold rain. “Fuck it.”

They walked up Quaker Lane all the way to Devonshire and turned right. The rain was little more than a drizzle, but Jim kept wiping it from his eyes. Trix pushed wet hair out of her face, the rain having taken all the punky spikiness out of the pink dye job. When they came to the end of Devonshire, where the Old State House stood on the corner, Trix frowned and glanced around. Then she set off along State Street.

“What are you looking for?” Jim asked, avoiding puddles that had started to form in the warped, uneven sidewalk.

She ignored him, picking up her pace, weaving around people who had just come out of the State Street T station, which was located beneath the Old State House. At the corner, she glanced up at the building’s front balcony, then across the street. They’d walked three quarters of the way around the old brick structure now. “There,” Trix said, setting off again.

But this time she did not go far, only to a traffic island that jutted into the street. In the island was a wide circle made of cobblestones set in concentric patterns. Trix hesitated as though about to walk across hot coals. Jim could only stare, wondering what she was up to, but then she turned and held out her hand. “Come on.”

“Where?” he asked.

“Right here,” she insisted. “You said you trusted me.”

He stared at her, pink hair plastered to her scalp and face now, rain running in rivulets down her cheeks, and he wondered if he had made a terrible mistake, if whatever sinister manipulations were at work here, Trix was a part of them. But then she pushed the hair from her eyes and he saw the pain in her imploring gaze, and chided himself for hesitating.

Jim took her hand, and together they stepped into the cobblestone circle.

Revelers going into the city for the night maneuvered around them, umbrellas sluicing rain. Hardy tourists gave them a wide berth, though hardly anyone really looked at them, the two nut jobs standing in the rain for no apparent reason.

Trix held his hand tightly, closed her eyes, and began to whisper. Jim leaned in to listen, feeling her breath warm and intimate on his face.

“… Jennifer Anne Garland Banks and Holly Marie Banks,” Trix whispered. “They’ve vanished and we have to find them. We love them, and our lives—our world—are falling apart. We need your help.”

Jim pulled back, staring at her. Sensing his withdrawal, Trix opened her eyes in alarm. “No,” she said, tugging him back toward her. “You said you trusted me.”

“I do, but …”
This is crazy
, he wanted to say. “You dragged me halfway across the city to fucking
pray
?”

Trix gripped his hand harder. “I’m not praying. But right now, on this spot, you’ve got to ask for help.”

“Who am I asking?” he said, eyes narrowed, as he looked around at the rain-swept street and the umbrella people passing by. He pointed at the sky. “Someone up there?”

Trix laughed uneasily. “The way I understand it, you’re asking Boston.”

“Boston?”

She nodded. “The city. Yeah.”

Jim let his shoulders sag. “Oh, Jesus, Trix, you can’t believe that. You wasted all this time—”

“When we could have been doing what?” she snapped, her gaze intense. “Look at me, Jim. There’s nothing normal about this. We can’t hire a private detective or something. Another search of your apartment isn’t going to turn up shit. So please, just … let me try.”

“Who even told you about this?”

Trix took a deep breath. “My grandmother. I’ll explain later. But for now … I need your help.”

He let out a breath and nodded, trying to think of a next step, something he should be doing to try to find his wife and daughter in a world where they had apparently never existed. “All right,” he said, a great void opening up within him. Whatever hope he still had had begun to fade.

“You have to ask for help.”

Jim tried not to pay attention to the people passing around them, to faces halfway hidden beneath umbrellas, to conversations and cell phones and a burst of laughter from half a block away.

He closed his eyes. “Please,” he whispered, his heart breaking all over again as he surrendered to the truth, that he had no chance of finding them himself. “I’ve got to find them. I can’t live without them.” The moment the words were out of his mouth, he knew they were true. He would never be able to survive in a world where his two reasons for living had simply vanished, where all that he loved had been taken away. Deleted.

“Okay,” Trix said, squeezing his hand. “Let’s go.”

Jim let her lead him. “Where?”

She looked up at the street signs on the corner. “To dinner.”

“Are you serious?” he asked. “I couldn’t eat anything right now.”

Trix let go of his hand and he saw his own heartbreak reflected in her eyes. “What about a drink? I’m not screwing around, Jim. There’s a place we need to go.”

Jim exhaled. They should be out searching, but where would they even begin to look? “And over a drink, you’ll tell me what this is all about?” he asked.

“I swear,” Trix said.

“Then lead the way. Maybe a whiskey will steady my nerves.”

* * *

As it turned out, the whiskey didn’t help.

Other than telling him where they were going, Trix had been resolutely silent on their short drive to the North End. Jim had found a parking spot across the street from Mike’s Pastry, and they’d walked past the strange spectacle of a trio of fiftyish Italian men sitting in lawn chairs in front of a small shop as though nothing had changed in the century since the North End had been the heart of Boston’s Italian-immigrant community.

These days, the people descended from those immigrants couldn’t afford to live in the trendy neighborhood, but nearly every storefront was an Italian restaurant. The North End was a dining mecca for tourists and locals alike, and the sidewalks were always thronged with people, the streets jammed with traffic. And yet those men in their lawn chairs seemed unmoved by the changes in the neighborhood. They were either Mafia or Mafia-connected, but even the Mob had been watered down tremendously over the years, and they were the only ones who didn’t seem to realize it.

They had passed by a dozen more modern restaurants, walking along Hanover Street away from the worst of the crowd. On a block of three-story apartment houses, tucked between a small Laundromat and an even smaller Italian grocery, was a restaurant called Abruzzi’s that seemed to make no effort to draw the attention of passersby. There was no sandwich board advertising specials on the sidewalk, no awning, no valet parking—just a menu taped to the inside of the tinted front window.

Inside, Abruzzi’s seemed stuck in the 1970s, with red vinyl booths and Sinatra playing on the sound system, photographs of Italian landscapes and cityscapes on the wall, and paper placemats upon which a map of “the boot” had been printed. But the moment they walked in, Jim’s stomach growled, betraying him. He hadn’t eaten anything since that morning, and hunger had been gnawing quietly at him, subordinate to hysteria and grief but now making itself known.

Reluctantly, he agreed to eat. Trix ordered pizza.

Now they waited, and Jim watched her as he sipped his whiskey. Glasses clinked. An old man celebrated his ninety-first birthday with what appeared to be three younger generations around a long table. When they sang to him, the whole restaurant joined in except for Jim and Trix, who feigned smiles and applauded politely. And then at last everyone turned their attention back to their own dining companions, and Jim took another sip, relished the burn of the whiskey in his throat, and looked at Trix.

In the car she had fixed her hair as best she could, pushing her fingers through it, but still he knew they both looked like something the cat had dragged in. He had to wonder what the other diners must have thought when they first came in. But then he realized he didn’t care. None of these people meant anything to him. They weren’t even really of his world. In some unsettling way, because they were only aware of a world where Jenny and Holly had never existed, they felt like the enemy to him. In fact, it felt like he and Trix had snuck behind enemy lines and at any moment might be discovered as outsiders.

We don’t belong here
, he thought, taking another sip. And maybe that was true. It made him wonder if other people had vanished, too. If there were other people out there who were aware that the world had been subtly altered. He and Trix might as well be invaders from Mars.

She stared at the bottle of Heineken on the table in front of her, passing her thumb over the green glass like she was trying to see something floating in the beer inside. Every ten or fifteen seconds she glanced toward the door.

“Trix,” he said.