We Are Here (46 page)

I ran to the wooden fence. “Hey,” I said.

They ignored me. The man in jeans was losing it now, shouting louder and louder, arms flailing by his sides. I was close enough that what he was saying should have been audible, but all I got was misery and fury.

I let myself in the gate, aware I could be approaching a drug deal going wrong and setting myself up for another trip to the hospital. I didn’t care.

“Turn the fuck around,” I shouted, my voice spiraling out of my control.

The man turned. It was Maj, of course. His face was pure white. His eyes were black. He seemed condensed and powerful and yet on the verge of blowing apart, a dark kernel of terrible anger and violence.

“Have you seen Kristina?”

The other man glanced at me but was far more concerned with trying to talk Maj down.

“Do you
know where she is
?”

“Look, I don’t know, mate,” said the man in the suit. “Never met her. And we’ve got bigger—”

Maj ran off. The other guy went after him. By the time I got outside the enclosure, they’d become lost in shadows.

“
Assholes
,” I shouted. “She tried to
help
. She tried to stop it happening. Lizzie was her
friend
.”

All I heard in reply were the sounds of leaves in the trees around the park and traffic out on the streets.

As I stormed back toward the road I saw someone standing in the bushes by the side of the playground, however. She might even have been there all along—from the angle I’d approached, I wouldn’t have seen her.

She was dressed in black but with a vibrant green skirt. She was plump with pure white hair. She was watching me.

But then she wasn’t there.

Two minutes later my phone rang. I yanked it out of my pocket so fast that it spun out of my fingers. I snatched it off the floor and got it to my ear.

“Kris? Where are you?”

“Not her,” a voice said—an older, croaky voice. “It’s Lydia. You got to come, John.”

“Where? Are you with Kris?”

“No, I don’t know where your girl is. But you got to come to the church. Right now.”

“What? Why?”

“There’s a bad man here.”

Streets slick with rain and reflecting lights and blackness a purple-blue oil in puddles. Cars flashing by on their way from nowhere to nowhere else, spraying cold, dirty water. Windows and houses and stores and bars. Distant shouts, honks, half a laugh at some circumstance out of sight. People, real and imagined, standing, walking, turning—still or in movement.

So many strangers, so few friends; among the millions of people in the world, barely a handful you’d rather be with than be alone. You could pass through all this like a shadow and never be a part of it.

You can pass like that, and Kristina did. She walked. Her head was empty but for one thought.

Eventually she ended up somewhere. She had been standing in it for five minutes before she realized where she even was. She became aware of trees and bushes and a dark open space. Bryant Park.

Of course. Her feet had brought her here—her feet and the part of the mind that keeps moving even when the thinking portions have absolved responsibility and dived into a black hole. Her feet had brought her to the first place where she and Lizzie had spoken.

Why would they do that? How could it help?

Kristina had thought she had no more tears. She was wrong. She’d kept finding she was wrong about this, discovering herself doubled up, stomach clenched in the kind of spasm the body resorts to when poisoned. Events can poison, too. If you cry on the streets people will avoid you. They will step past and look the other way. They know the kind of things that cause people to break down in public and are scared it might be contagious. The only times Kris could remember something this huge was the death of her father. A bulletproof world of beings and love had split along a seam, leaving a gap for some force outside to suck someone out of the circle and into permanent darkness beyond.

She was aware her response was out of proportion. As John had pointed out with characteristic bluntness, she hadn’t known Lizzie long or well. It was like being knocked sideways by the death of a celebrity. Ridiculous. Self-indulgent. And yet real. People can define your world and emotional space without having sat at the same table. You build your own universe, and if you choose to cover some of its walls with pictures of someone you’ve never met—patching over your need for love and attention and meaning when there’s no real person to fit the bill—then the tearing of their image from reality will uncover cracks just as real as the death of someone you’ve known all your life.

Somehow, Lizzie’s death did exactly that. Not to mention … it was Kris’s fault.

She knew she needed to talk to John, that he was the only person who might be able to make her feel better, but every time her phone buzzed she let it go. She didn’t deserve help. Her dumb speech to Lizzie about how it was time for a reunion—what the hell had she thought she was doing? What had made her think she had the perspective to talk that way?

She slumped onto a bench, mercifully obscured from the rest of the world by an overhanging tree. Her head was splitting, nose dripping, her face a puddle of hot tears and cold drizzle, and still it kept coming, pumped out by the fiercest and most terrible motor of grief—the idea that something could have been done differently and none of this would have happened; that you have been the engine of your own destruction. It’s the moment that the smoker with lung cancer realizes they could have gone through with giving up twenty years ago; the moment the sole survivor of a car crash realizes he could have double-checked in the mirror before changing lanes on the interstate; the agonizing moment someone on a rusty fire escape has to think yeah, maybe they could have checked how stable the thing felt before climbing out … and meanwhile the old bolt pulls free of crumbling brick and the entire contraption of life tilts away from the wall of reality on a one-way trip into blackness.

Regret is the poison that kills for all eternity, because no matter how violently the mind and body spasms, it cannot be expelled. Lizzie was dead because of something Kristina had said.

That was a deed that would never be repaired.

“It’s not your fault.”

Kristina jerked her head up. She had no idea how long she’d been on the bench, lost in silent screams of self-recrimination. For a moment she couldn’t see who had spoken. Then she realized the Angel girl, Flaxon, was standing in front of her, body as straight as the rain. It was coming down harder now and the girl looked soaked. This fact cut through Kristina’s confusion.

“How … are you wet?”

“The more you feel, the harder you are. A person could break bricks on you right now. I heard you half the way from Union Square.”

She came and sat next to Kristina. Kristina sniffed, wiped her nose on her sleeve, unsure how seriously to take what the girl had said.

“For real,” Flaxon said, as if in answer. Her face was pinched-looking. She seemed thinner than the night before, and smaller and younger—though also stronger. She held up her hand, and Kristina saw that a few of the raindrops seemed to bounce, rather than passing through. “I can hear what you’re thinking, too, a bit. Only because you’re loud. And because you think like my friend did. She was a dismal bitch too.”

Kristina was surprised into something like a laugh. “What … happened to her?”

“No idea. She dropped me. End of story.”

Kristina remembered Lizzie saying how hard it had been for this girl to accept her place in the world, and suspected that
wasn’t
the end of the story, but she was done trying to wheedle information out of people.

“I’m sorry.”

“I need to talk to you,” Flaxon said.

Kristina felt another surge of guilt, certain she was about to be brought to account and that she deserved it. “I’m sorry,” she said again.

The girl shook her head curtly. “Get over yourself. Just because you’re real doesn’t mean everything starts and ends with you. Lizzie was a strong person. She acted.
She
did the thing. Don’t try to take that away from her.”

“Then … what?”

“I was down in Union Square and I overheard something and I see a dark cloud over it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maj was there with that Cornerman buddy of his, Fictitious Bob, and he was losing it. Badly. Not sure if you’re aware, but Maj knows where his real friend lives.”

“I heard.”

“Okay. Well, if you’re looking for what pushed Lizzie over the edge this afternoon, that’s more likely it than anything you said or did.”

“No. She said she was happy for Maj.”

“I’m sure she was. She had a lot of good and happy thoughts and she spread them around. That’s how she rolled. But it was also like a knife to her.”

“Why?”

“Everybody wants to feel they’re the center of creation, not just someone’s friend. But you get used to it. Kinda. Not everybody gets to be a rock star, right? It’s hard for us to love, though. One another, anyway.”

“Because of what you feel for your real friend?”

“It’s like a first love, I think. From what I’ve heard. That sound right?”

Kristina thought about it. That first love, the one that changes you, striking like an arrow or axe into your adolescent heart, the one that will (despite decades of dating and far deeper and more meaningful affairs) define your emotional landscape forever. You won’t spend the rest of your life trying to replicate it—you may do just the opposite—but it’s there nonetheless, a ghost in your heart. She nodded.

“Maj and Lizzie got close, though,” Flaxon said. “He is
very
broken up by what happened and
almighty
pissed at the world of real people right now.”

Aware that she was deflecting some of her anger at her own actions, Kristina said: “So maybe him talking to his friend is exactly what needs to happen.”

“No,” Flaxon said patiently. “No good comes of it. Ever. I don’t think it would be his friend he’d be looking for anyway. He was ranting about the priest.”

“Jeffers? Why? He’s been trying to
help
.”

“Maybe. But Maj thinks he screwed with Lizzie’s thinking and maybe it was part of what made her … do what she did today. It’s a really bad idea for them to talk right now.”

“Are you sure? Real people have to
learn
. They have to take responsibility for what they say and do.”

“You don’t get it. Maj is different.”

“I know. He’s a Fingerman. A good one.”

“Oh, he’s that. The best that ever was, people say. But that’s not what I’m talking about.” Her voice dropped to a whisper, a tangled mixture of distaste, respect, and dark excitement. “He killed someone once. A real person.”

Kristina stared. “How would that even be
possible
?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know who it was or when or how. But they say it’s true. It’s why Reinhart wanted him to work for him so bad—he’d already crossed that line. My point is, if Maj gets the brush-off from Jeffers then people could get hurt. You think Lizzie would have wanted that? For Maj to do something black because of her?”

“But what can I do?”

“At least talk to Maj. He knows Lizzie dug you. It might make a difference.”

“I don’t know where he is.”

“First place to try would be the church, duh?”

Kristina didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know whether going after someone she’d barely met would make a difference, or if she even had the courage to try after what had happened.

“Still hearing you, babe,” Flaxon said. She shook her head like a dog, spreading rain flying in all directions. “There’s something else Lizzie used to say, and it’s what stopped me running with the bad guys and made me want to be an Angel instead. She said regret is the only thing that kills forever and also the only poison that you feed yourself.”

Kristina blinked at her. This was exactly what she’d thought earlier, almost word for word. It couldn’t be coincidence, and she knew Lizzie hadn’t said it to her.

Was part of Lizzie here now, in this park?

Was part of her
inside
Kristina now?

“Let’s get on this,” Flaxon said, standing. “And page your boy-friend, too.”

“I don’t even know whether he’ll come.”

“Make him. He seems like a guy who’d be useful in this type of situation.” She winked. “Also, he’s kind of hot, for a real person.”

Flaxon started running. Aware she was stopping the other girl from moving much faster, Kristina did her best to keep up, and ran after Flaxon as fast as she could.

David kept talking as Dawn drove in through the outskirts of the city. He talked longer than ever before in his life, dredging up out of memory and hidden spaces. He told her everything he could remember from the time he crawled under a kitchen table in the midst of a fight that was breaking his heart, to find a boy there with him. He told her about the hours and days spent in the woods by himself—except for the friend he’d conjured up; the times in his bedroom with him playing the endless made-up games that neither parent could seem to stomach or understand; the long talks they would take together as David—a solitary boy, the total loner geek—explored the small town where he grew up. Told her, too, how Maj was there into his early teens and beyond, long after he’d heard about the idea of imaginary friends and realized most people had forgotten about them by then. How when he was at some other kid’s birthday party at a roller-skating rink or bigger house, Maj would be there in the background, giving him a wink every now and then to reassure him he wasn’t alone. How the boy kept pace with him in age while always looking and dressing differently, always that bit more daring than David and naughtier
(what nobody sees, nobody knows)
—sometimes lifting a dollar bill from dresser tables or small change from the tips people left in restaurants and putting them where David would find them, dropping them out of the air to be discovered on the floor or on the path outside his parents’ house. Money that David saved and eventually used to buy the basic word processor on which he tentatively started to write, in secret, keeping silent about this lest his mother find out and hate the endeavor in him as much as she evidently hated it in his father; also in case his father poured scorn upon it as he did with most everything else his son did, scorn mixed with the pungent jealousy that’s born of the realization that too many years have passed without achievement and there’s a new generation coming to elbow you aside and take the things you assumed one day would be yours.