We Are Here (51 page)

“It’s okay,” I whispered. “I’ll be fine.” I’m not sure if the words made it out of my head.

I pulled my arm around and tried to get it in front of my face before pulling in another breath. This time I got just enough air into my lungs to experience a moment of jagged clarity, and knew I had to get out of here,
right now
, or Reinhart was going to get what he wanted.

I tried to shift all my limbs at once, hoping to get at least one of them to achieve concerted movement. Nothing happened, again, and I realized that’s all I had left. It had been my last shot.

I coughed and I coughed and I coughed, each time with less and less strength.

Then someone yanked my arm, hard—so hard that I felt my chest pulled off the floor and my body dragged up into a slumped position, and beyond.

I heard a voice in my ear, speaking with extraordinary calm. Strong hands hauled me up onto my knees, and this time I knew the hands were real.

I looked up through the smoke, as the hands shoved me back along the corridor, and saw Jeffers’s face.

“Go,” he said.

The priest stepped over me to walk into the smoke and down through the slowly moving shapes and toward the turning at the end, beyond which lay the fire and whatever now waited there for him, the man or being or thing that called itself Reinhart.

As I crawled toward the stairs I heard the sound of breakage from above, as though a door had been smashed into pieces. Then a lot of shouting.

I made it halfway up.

What happened in the next hour is patchy. I remember sitting on the curb with an oxygen mask on my face and a blanket around my shoulders, Kristina perched alongside and holding me so tightly she was making it harder to breathe than all the smoke I’d inhaled. I didn’t hold that against her, not least because she’d saved my life.

I remember watching a stream of the firefighters she’d summoned going in and out of the church. At first it seemed they’d got it under control, but then something new caught fire in the basement and it started to get away from them. There was a lot of shouting and running. Eventually it died back.

I had told them about seeing the priest in the cellar. I heard one later saying to a colleague that he’d tried to make his way through the blaze down there and thought he saw two people in the distance at the far end before the heat forced him to retreat, though according to the papers the next morning the remains of only one body was eventually retrieved from the wreckage. The piece took the line that Father Robert Jeffers had died in defense of his church, trying to save something he believed in. I think that is a fair assessment.

In the meantime I saw Lydia being loaded into the back of an ambulance on a stretcher, deadly pale but alive. A portion of the floor in the church had given way while I was downstairs, and she and the cop got it almost as bad as I did. The cop ran, fleeing the scene the moment the door was opened. He was standing there waiting for his chance, and had been since the moment he realized help had arrived outside. He did nothing to aid the old woman who’d been trapped with him.

I know his name. There will come a reckoning for him. It may arrive via official channels. It may not.

As my head started to clear I became aware of other people in the street. I saw the guy David standing with a woman Kristina explained to me was his wife. Maj came walking diffidently toward David, and Dawn stepped away, coming to where we sat, to give them space.

There was a pause, long and full, as if between two people who’d known each other a long time ago meeting again, people trying to bridge a gulf a hundred years wide but only a couple of feet deep.

“It was short for ‘imaginary,’ ” David said, as if he’d been asked a question.

Maj nodded. “Okay.”

“I’m sorry. I was just a kid, but I should have come up with a better name. You deserved more than that.”

“I’m used to it,” Maj said. “And it’s better than having no name at all.”

They stood awkwardly for a moment.

“You didn’t have to do that up there,” Maj said. “Grabbing my hand.”

“I know.”

“No. I mean I wouldn’t have died if I fell.”

“That doesn’t mean you let people fall.”

Maj nodded, and they looked each other full in the face for the first time. “Goodbye, David.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Don’t know. May try being a Journeyman for a while. There’s a great big world outside the city. None of it’s perfect. But it’s there.”

“Will I see you again?”

“Do you want to?”

“Yes.”

“Then maybe.”

David watched as Maj walked away up the street. He passed the three siblings who had been in Dawn’s car. Maj paused, then suddenly lunged at them, for a moment seeming bigger or brighter. They disappeared. Then at the corner he saw Maj pause once more, to exchange words with a squat man in a striped suit.

He started off again and turned the corner, the other man walking by his side, as though they had decided to travel together for now.

Kristina glanced up at Dawn. “So David’s a writer, huh?”

“Yes,” she said proudly. “He’s got a novel coming out soon.”

“Any good?”

“He’s awesome. And he’ll get even better, too.”

“When’s the baby due?”

“Bab
ies
. Not for a while. I can’t wait. It’ll be so good for David to have a family again. He needs roots to keep him from floating away.”

“Isn’t there anyone else but you?”

She shook her head. “He’s an only child, and his parents died in an accident years ago. It was awful for him. It was their fault, too. Well, the people in the car coming up the other side said they thought they
maybe
saw someone stepping into the road before it happened. That David’s father swerved to avoid him and lost control. But they never found anyone, and David’s always been very sure it was his father’s fault.”

“Where was David at the time?”

“Here in the city.”

I saw Kris thinking about this. I knew her well enough to know she could see a door in her mind, one that would open onto things that hadn’t been known before; I knew she wanted to ask questions about how far a friend would be prepared to go for their real person if they feared they were losing them, and whether that real person might even have known what had been done on his behalf, and have been living with it ever since.

“Let’s go,” I said, pushing myself up to my feet. “Bad things happen. Leave it at that.”

Some guy from the ambulance shouted at us as we left, but they were sufficiently busy dealing with Lydia—who was trying to sit and cussing up a storm—that we were able to walk away without someone dragging me off to the hospital.

When we got to the corner I looked back at David and Dawn. They were standing with their foreheads touching, hands together. He loved her—I could see that—and she loved him. Sometimes that’s all you need to know.

We spent the night at a hotel. I let Kristina do the talking at reception and stood well out of the way and tried not to smell of wood smoke. I had a long shower and we sat in bathrobes on a balcony fifteen floors up and watched the lights and listened to the cars below. You could see people down on the sidewalks, too, walking up and down, back and forth, standing, waiting, living. I’ve no doubt that some of them were real. I’m unsure now how to tell which, or of how much difference it makes.

Reinhart was still in the city somewhere, alive. I could feel it. I don’t know whether I truly believe he killed his friend and became something new, or that he is like the rest of them, or ever was. It could be that Jeffers was right. Reinhart might simply be the unholy ghost, the shadow in our minds, that thing that has always existed wherever humans congregate, something born out of our behaviors and desires and yet which takes on a life of its own. We try to find words to cage this thing, to help us understand, but it is beyond comprehension. All you can do is fight, wherever you find it, and hope that someday your kind will win—the kind that does the best it can, rather than the worst it is capable of.

The next morning we didn’t have to discuss what to do. We left the hotel and walked down to Penn Station and bought two tickets for the first long-distance service due to leave. We sat together as the train started to whirr and chug, ready to start out toward the countryside, where there are fewer people, wider spaces, and it’s easier to work out who you are. In the fullness of time we may get all the way to the other side of the country, and when that happens I will try to see my ex-wife and my boy. He may never view me as his father. I may always be just some guy. But he needs to know that I did not forget him and never will.

Out of the corner of my eye, as we pulled up out of the tunnels and light flooded into the carriage through the windows, I saw a girl slip into an empty seat six rows behind us. White hair, tough-looking.

Kristina told me her name is Flaxon. I didn’t turn and stare. If need be, we’ll work out what to do about it somewhere down the line. And she’s welcome, anyhow.

We have no idea where we’re going. I’ve got no problem with a friend coming along for the ride.

The church was not the only thing that burned that night. It appears from news reports that there were twelve arson attacks at other locations in the city. Twenty-seven people died, including one in a house on the Upper West Side, where a girl called Jessica Markham suffocated in her bed. Her parents survived. The fire was apparently started by a lit matchbook pushed through the letterbox.

A witness claimed to have seen a teenage girl wearing a gray hoodie standing in the street and watching the flames, before running away into the city.

She was laughing.

She looked very alive.

Ten days later a woman found herself wandering the city in the early afternoon, walking streets she knew and streets she did not, walking because it felt like the only thing to do. Eventually she came to rest in a grassed area at the end of the Riverwalk, overlooking the Hudson. Despite living only ten or fifteen minutes from this little park, she’d never stood on this spot and didn’t know what might have drawn her to it now.

Catherine Warren had found herself feeling unaccountably lonely over the last few days. She’d discovered that meeting with friends in the Village, keeping up her end at dinner parties, or chatting with other mothers outside the school gate had started to feel flat. Nothing had changed about these people or about the structures of her existence … and yet something had. There was a lack. A hole, even if she’d long ago stopped being aware of what had filled it.

It felt specific.

It was like someone was missing in her life.

But she supposed everybody feels that way sometimes. You enter adulthood on the promise of becoming full, of achieving one hundred percent and three-sixty degrees and 24-7/365—but slowly come to accept there’ll always be a gap somewhere. She knew this intellectually but still couldn’t shake the feeling of melancholy. She was old enough to know it would pass, however. The world keeps serving up stuff and you deal with it and sooner or later it’s either okay or overlaid with something else—like adding layer after layer of paint onto a canvas until one day you have the finished picture. It may not be what you had in mind when you started. But it is what it is.

She couldn’t seem to leave the spot, this park, though she knew she needed to get back to Chelsea and her life. She had to be in good form tonight, too. Mark would be tired. He was busy at work. He was always busy. Work stood behind him, hands on his shoulders, holding him down. He would need nurturing and looking after, and probably—if he had a glass of wine too many again—a great deal of reassurance that everything was okay.

Catherine actually had no idea if everything was okay. She didn’t recall being promised it would be, either. She remembered coming to the city convinced she was going to be a journalist, that one day people would pick up the
New York Times
and her byline would be there, fighting the good fight and pulling aside the veil. It didn’t happen. She worked hard at it for a while, but the world fought back, with its good-natured persistence and slow but constant cavalcade of events and demands: in the battle between you and reality—as she’d once read somewhere—you should always offer to hold reality’s coat.

One day she woke up to realize that she was a mother, not a Pulitzer hopeful, and so she’d decided that she would be the best damned mother she could instead.

These days she barely remembered the other things she’d wanted, and she didn’t care. What would be the point? Dreams are supposed to support and succor us, not to make us feel bad. Catherine had always been good at pushing aside things that no longer worked. It was the best way, the adult way, the sensible way—and she had wanted to be adult and sensible since she was a little girl.

She remembered that, at least. She would never remember, because it was buried too deeply, the evenings back then during which someone who should have loved her in better ways had done inappropriate things. She would never recall—except in the shape of the formless but very strong distaste she now held for the work of certain artists from the turn of the previous century—the way in which during these events she had fastened her attention on a reproduction picture on the wall in this man’s house, a pre-Raphaelite painting of a young woman standing alone and drinking out of a glass bowl the color of irises, in front of a window showing sailing ships in the distance; a tall, slim girl with thick dark hair and pale skin, wearing a red velvet dress. The girl had looked thoughtful, and kind, the sort of friend that would not allow what was happening to be happening.

But happen it did.

And so what? What matters in life is what
you
do, not what’s done to you by someone else.

Catherine frowned, finding herself remembering Thomas Clark, the guy she’d dated before Mark. Though he would never be anything more than part of a superseded past, she found herself wondering how he was and how he dealt with the dreams that had faded around them. He’d had big plans once, too. Maybe she should try to get in touch, say sorry, or hi, or something like that.