We Are Here (40 page)

What if it hadn’t been Maj, but
someone like him
?

It had been clear from the night in the city that Maj had friends, people who lived the same kind of life. Might he have sent some of them to try to lean on David? Or …

Maj also had enemies.

David remembered the people in Bid’s. The unfriendly looking guy in the old-fashioned suit and the fucked-up thin people who’d been with him in the bar. He recalled that, as he’d hurried away from the church later, he’d thought he’d been followed for at least some of the way to the train station. By whom, he wasn’t sure. He thought he’d lost them.

But what if he’d been followed all the way home?

When he got to the house he knew at once that someone had been inside again. The paper he’d stowed on the hall table had been thrown all over the hallway. He hurried around, picking them up. He knew where the paper had come from. He’d known last night. It was old stock from one of the boxes he’d unpacked in the study, one of the things he’d kept from the upstairs room in his parents’ house, his father’s much-discussed “study.” Paper his father had never typed anything on. A secondhand blank slate.

He had to get rid of it. He gathered the sheets and went back out the door to the side of the house where the recycling was kept. The paper felt like it was symbolic of everything that needed purging from his life, and he lifted the lid of the container and raised his arm high, ready to hurl the paper into it.

There was something in there.

Something other than tin cans and cardboard and glass bottles that had held organic ice tea. He pulled it out, feeling the skin all over his scalp crawling. It was obvious what it was. He just didn’t understand it.

It was a laptop. He turned it over in his hands. It was battered, cheap-looking. He’d never seen it before. So what the hell was it doing in his recycling?

He hurried back indoors. Once inside, he popped the catch on the laptop and opened it. After a pause the screen blinked into life. There was so much unfamiliarity there—smaller screen, Windows instead of Mac, someone else’s lunatic idea of how to organize a desktop—that it took him a few moments to spot something he recognized. In the middle of the desktop (a fuzzy picture of a lot of cats) was a file called ALEGORIA II.

No no no …

Within a minute he’d confirmed it beyond doubt. This was Talia’s laptop. He closed the machine and put it on the floor, so hard he probably came close to damaging it, but he had to get it out of his hands.

He felt like vomiting.

He had a dead woman’s computer in his house. If he was right and someone
had
followed him home from the city, there could be no doubt that they were now systematically persecuting him.

Coming into the house.

Attacking his friends.

Even trying to implicate him in Talia’s death. What else would be the point of putting the computer here?

It had to stop.

He had to deal with it.

He stared at the machine as if it could leap up and bite him—knowing that, for now, job number one was finding somewhere in the house to hide it—and it randomly struck him that he didn’t have to finish reading Talia’s book now. The idea felt bad. He felt he owed it to her to get to the end, out of respect. Nobody else ever would. He also wanted to know what happened. On that most basic of levels the book worked, and worked well.

As he carried the laptop upstairs another thought dropped into his mind.

Had anybody else seen Talia’s book?

Anybody apart from him?

It was only when he straightened from stowing the laptop in his closet that he realized if he
was
right, and someone
was
attacking him through those closest to him, there was one obvious person they would target next.

Lizzie went downtown first and left a message. After that she kept in movement, spiraling around the deed and building her concentration. If she was going to break her own rules it had to be worth it. She had to get it right.

With the girls it was hard to be specific and bringing something for the sake of it wouldn’t work—so she dropped the idea. Catherine was hard too, but in different ways. She had so much already. It seemed hard to believe she could want for more. We do, though. Lizzie understood that. There’s always something new to add to the pile. We want more stuff and the comfort that comes with it. We want to surround ourselves with a nest, a cocoon. It’s one of the reasons we have friends, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with the arrangement … assuming you can
get
the stuff. If you can’t then all you have is no stuff, and after a while the lack of things starts to suffocate you.

She avoided the parks. She might chance upon Maj in one and, though she really wanted to see him, she knew he’d realize something was up. It was too late for her to be dissuaded and she did not want to argue with him.

So she remained in perpetual movement, as throughout her life. Walking, walking, with nowhere to sit down at the end of it. She realized how tired her feet were. Not physically, but emotionally. Her legs were the idea of tired. That’s all they really were if you got down to it, ideas and dreams, and while people poured so much time and energy into both they were also liable to drop them at a moment’s notice. Most of the time it doesn’t matter whether dreams come to fruition. It only matters whether they cheer you up. Except, perhaps, to the dreams themselves, who might yearn to come true, to become more than a comforting pattern of thought that eventually lapses into an emotional line of least resistance.

That’s why change sometimes had to come to those who weren’t looking for it—who’d done everything they could to
avoid
it. They could squat there in their great big warm houses with their big warm lives, ignoring everything outside their window. You could do that if you had enough stuff inside with you, if you
had
an inside to start off with. That didn’t mean the situation couldn’t change. Lizzie had tried hard not to need, very hard, but after so many years it still hadn’t worked. If Kristina could take Lizzie seriously and seem to want to be her friend, what was to say others could not?

Was there any law that said dreams could not dream too?

Lizzie felt dumb and childish for having followed and watched and been a good girl. For accepting her lot. The time for being dumb and childish was over.

It ended this afternoon.

It ended now.

She was close to settling on Bloomingdale’s when she had a better idea. She hurried back down Fifth Avenue. Going to Bloomingdale’s would have felt too much like the bad old days. Instead she’d try the street where she’d followed Kristina the first time they’d spoken to each other. That felt appropriate. It was following the signs, and Lizzie was a believer in story-maker events. Why else would she have met Kristina—and come to believe in the possibility of a real friendship there—if not for the idea of today to come into her mind? You put thoughts out into the universe and God gives them form and sets them down. So Father Jeffers said, and on that he might even be right.

She walked along 47th, peering in windows. Within a few minutes she’d found a store that looked like a possibility. It had interesting things in the window and was a little larger than most of the others, which would make it easier too. She picked her moment, moving in a meandering figure eight over a forty-yard radius, waiting until she’d seen a few people enter the store—a couple of men who looked like dealers, a handful of civilians too.

Then she slipped inside.

The interior was lined on three sides by display units filled with tray cases, turned into a U shape by a central island, within which a fat-faced man in an expensive suit prowled. The walls were mirrored to help ricochet light around the space and make the diamonds and other precious stones sparkle, but that was all to the good. Lots of reflections made it harder for people to see, confusing their sense of space.

At the back of the store the two men in homburgs were involved in a voluble price negotiation with another employee, who was listening with the stoic expression of someone who’d been down this road many times and generally ended up receiving a price very close to what he’d originally had in mind. Lizzie drifted past and saw the two men were buying rings in quantity—plain, functional things that would not suit her purpose.

She paused by a pair of German tourists (gawking at thick gold bracelets, also wholly inappropriate), before glancing over the shoulders of a group at the central island: three whip-thin English women giving serious consideration to a tray that Lizzie could immediately tell was far more interesting. It held five pieces of silver jewelry in arts-and-crafts style, each given plenty of space on a cushion to showcase their individuality—and to broadcast the message that they weren’t going to be cheap. They looked good. They looked right.

One of them in particular, the brooch in the middle, would be
perfect
.

The fat-faced man was being attentive, having judged the ladies weren’t just killing time but could have their interest parleyed up into acquisition. He unlocked the unit and brought the tray up onto the counter.

The women bent at the waist to inspect the treasures a little closer. Lizzie felt her insides start to churn.

It felt like being a teenager again, and not in a good way. It felt dirty. She kept moving around the U shape. She knew that when she got to the other side she should keep walking, go back out into the world and forget the idea. But she knew also that you go to your god or goddess with offerings, and that she’d been locked on this course from the moment she’d seen Billy’s Bloom, and probably before. He wasn’t the first she’d seen burn out, but for some reason it had hit her much, much harder.

If she walked out now, what came next? Would her heart heal for the hundredth time, or would it be forever suspended in a moment of blackness?

She ground to a halt, feeling out of practice and drained of hope, fully lost.

One of the men in homburgs turned around.

His colleague was still haggling vigorously, but this man had become distracted, as if he’d smelled something unexpected. He peered peevishly around the store, face creasing into a frown.

Lizzie realized she had to be quick. Sometimes people felt something. You could never predict who, and once they’d done so the atmosphere would change and it would be harder.

The need for speed made the decision for her. She waited until the man had turned back to reengage with the negotiations, and then she coughed.

Two of the English women glanced up—distractedly, minds still on the goodies on the counter. Their eyes skated across the apparently empty space behind them, unable to see Lizzie, and then returned to the matter at hand—the display cushion.

Lizzie moved decisively toward the window. This was constructed of a pair of sliding panels of glass on runners, locked in the middle, protecting the goods in the window from people inside the store.

She placed her hands on the left pane of glass, widely spread apart. The head is the hardest part of your body. It’s where all the thinking is. That makes it tough. Fragile, too, of course, the place where all the real and lasting pain is born, and stays—but hard enough for her purposes in the physical world.

Lizzie summoned all her concentration, and smashed her forehead into the glass.

It wasn’t anything like the impact Maj or another Fingerman could have achieved, but it was enough. The glass cracked loudly, splintering diagonally across the large pane.

Everyone in the store heard it. The Germans took a defensive step backward. Two of the English ladies did the same, pulling the third—who was still obliviously inspecting jewelry—with them.

The store owner started bellowing in a foreign language, gesturing at the underling in back to come and do something about the situation. He came hurrying, leaving the men in homburgs wide-eyed.

The top half of the window slowly tilted forward, then fell to the ground with a tremendous splintering crash. There was screaming and running.

Lizzie swept past the velvet cushion with her hand out, weaved through the chaos, and ran from the store.

When she got back onto Fifth Avenue she slowed, however, knowing she had to go back. This was a betrayal of everything she’d come to believe, turning the clock back too far and too hard and in a way that could only lead to bad things.

But without it …

As she hesitated, she saw a couple coming up the street. Mid-twenties, hand in hand, the man wearing a baby papoose. The child inside it could only be weeks old. The couple looked exhausted but so happy, adrift on the bleary seas of early parenthood, adapting to the changes inaugurated by this new phase in their lives.

Lizzie felt her heart stiffen. She’d been born—as they all had—before their friends had any conception of the process of conception. They were a sterile race. Just one more thing that none of them would ever have.

Unaware that she’d come to a standstill—and that a man in his early thirties and a girl of six had caught split-second glimpses of her, this tall woman wearing a red velvet dress under a black coat, and that trying to discuss the Ghost Lady of Fifth Avenue would earn the child a telling off for making up stories and bring the man a step closer to finally being diagnosed schizophrenic—Lizzie decided the time for sinning had come. It’s how we broke out of the cozy prison of the Garden of Eden, after all. Father Jeffers wouldn’t approve, but then he didn’t really understand anything except dead composers, and death is too safe a haven for those who want to live.

Lizzie clasped the brooch tightly in her hand, where passersby would hopefully not see it, and started to walk quickly down the street. She felt bad. She felt scared. She felt excited.

It was time to go home.

When Kristina finally answered her phone I told her to meet me at the apartment but didn’t go into detail. It took her a long time to get home and I decided in the meantime to get out of the place and wait on the street. With Reinhart at large, I realized it wouldn’t be smart to hang around right outside and so I went forty yards up the sidewalk and sat in a shadowed doorway for nearly three hours and smoked and drank a series of coffees from the deli and watched leaves wandering along the street and didn’t try too hard to get everything to line up in my mind. My body and head still hurt, but it was settling into a set of sturdy aches now, rather than urgent yelps. My brain felt clear. I wanted it to stay that way because it was evident my life was changing for good today. You seldom get warnings so obvious, and I figured I’d better be ready for what came next with an open mind.