by Karen Ellis
Saki says, “For the record, each person will need to identify him- or herself. I’ll begin. My name is Detective Saki Finley, Eighty-Fourth Precinct, Brooklyn, New York.”
Crisp glances up and around and locates the cameras installed in two corners of the room, filming them from opposite angles.
His brain lights up. Panic rises.
Don’t.
He reminds himself of his intention to simply tell the truth, regardless of what Glynnie says or how her fancy lawyer might try to spin things in her favor. His own representation of what happened will stand as his own truth, the only truth he can carry all the way.
As the introductions continue, Crisp looks at Harry and it hits him that the blind lawyer doesn’t see any of the surface details, not skin or clothes or whether someone chews her nails (the red-haired detective) or has an obvious eating disorder (Glynnie’s mother) or the veiny nose of an alcoholic (her father) or that Crisp, though biracial, reads as black to the world. Crisp wonders if Harry was born without sight. He finds himself thinking about how that could be an asset, never being able to see yourself in a mirror or catch yourself reflected in someone else’s eyes.
33
Walking along Newport Avenue through the quiet streets of Belle Harbor, toward home, Lex smells and hears and senses the restless lash of ocean two blocks in either direction—the long slip of the Rockaways traced by water from its beginning to its end. If he keeps moving in a straight line he’ll simply plunge into the bay; then, if he lets himself drift, the ocean will have him. The thought of something so easy, so free of resistance, entices him for one flash of a moment. At first, what he loved about living here was this very sense of limitlessness. But now, tonight, perched on an edge all his own, the proximity to so much water and so much sky feels laced with threat.
He imagines various scenarios for what he might find at home, ranging from nothing (Adam gone, really gone) to everything (Adam waiting with one of the meals he sometimes makes with his signature flourishes of special oils and fresh herbs). In between, the possibilities are endless, and Lex settles on a compromise of Adam on the couch with a beer, absently watching the news while pretending not to wait for him to turn up. Exhausted, sad hellos. A takeout order placed. A glass of wine, two, and enough normalcy to allow them to slide into bed without stepping on each other’s egos. In the morning, a civilized talk about how to repair things between them.
The white Victorian where they rent the second floor sits like a tatty but proud dowager that keeps the past alive in an otherwise changing world. So few of these old houses are left now amid the proliferation of brick apartment buildings and charmless single-family homes constructed more recently. The first-floor tenants appear to be home, the place lit up golden in the dark. No lights are on in the upstairs apartment.
Lex begins to cross the street when Adam appears on the path alongside the house, behind which their private entrance is accessed by an external rear stair.
So he didn’t move out—unless that’s what he’s doing right now.
Dressed all in black, Adam is nearly swallowed by the darkness, but Lex knows that loping walk like he knows the rhythms of his own body. Feeling the tug of a cord of joy snarled by a filament of sadness, he backs into a shadow so he won’t be seen.
Adam pauses to open his backpack. He takes out a knit cap and pulls it on. Swallowed up by some role he’s playing, some secret he’s convinced he can’t divulge.
If you were working a case you’d follow him without question. As soon as Lex thinks this, he stops agonizing long enough to decide.
He silences his phone, slides it into his back pocket, waits until Adam is a good way down the block. Stealthily, he trails him to a deli, where he emerges with a bag bulging with a purchase, then to the subway.
They arrive at the Prospect Park station at the edge of Prospect-Lefferts Gardens. Lincoln Road is populated with a mix of everyone at this hour—that last-chance margin of time between dinner and bed, a free-floating dance of coming home and going out. Lex yearns for that kind of normalcy, to reclaim the prosaic rhythms of an average day.
He wants to tell Adam to be more careful, to look over his shoulder from time to time, to notice when the atmosphere shifts from bustling to remote, as it does now, entering the park. To notice, damn it, that he’s being followed! Lex knows he’s good at this, he’s surveilled enough people to know how to simultaneously hold a lead and fall away. But Adam should be more alert if he’s going to lurk around alone at night dressed like a burglar.
A nineteenth-century lamppost sluices light across a stretch of path. Adam wades into it with the confidence of someone who knows where he’s going. Lex trails him along the edge of East Drive, the road open to car traffic for only two hours on weekday mornings. Cyclists and runners own it now, and they whiz through the dark, lit mostly by a strong moon and the occasional lamppost. Adam and Lex pass signs for the Boathouse. Then Adam veers onto a footpath that cuts through a wooded area.
The lush silence is full of warning to Lex’s vigilant ears. Each crack of twig, swish of pine needles, rustle of breeze carries some unnamed potential. He steps only when Adam steps, pauses when he pauses. At one point he thinks Adam is going to turn around—he almost wants him to turn around, to pay attention. Oblivious, Adam continues on the path until he reaches a clearing beneath an old stone bridge. A parks department sign on a defunct lamppost identifies Eastwood Arch.
Lex hangs back and watches. A twinge in his right calf reminds him of yesterday’s cramp, how he hasn’t felt it all day until now. He flexes his foot and realizes that, at last, it’s gone. But still, a pulse of craving echoes in his brain like a beacon searching, searching for a willing receptor. Fool me once. He shakes his head, shuts it down.
An upturned floodlight illuminates the curved underside of the bridge under which some kind of quiet but determined activity is taking place. Half a dozen men and women dressed in dark clothes, some on ladders propped against the curved inner walls, some crouched at the lower edges. One man, perched high on a ladder, clenches something slender, a paintbrush, between his teeth. They’re painting…lace, Lex sees, as his eyes adjust. A giant’s orange body parts emerge from behind the lace with quiet violence, protuberances of elbow, knee, nose, toe tearing through the filigree. The only other color is a splash of yellow—a monstrous head of cartoon hair.
Is Adam part of this art project? The idea strikes Lex first as ludicrous, then perfect. Adam’s said occasionally that he’d like a creative outlet, something to distract him from the complexities of studying the human mind. But this? And why would it need to be a secret?
Adam stands at the lip of the arch, and one of the artists turns and sees him there. She begins to smile, as if he’s expected, but her reaction hardens as her eyes move from Adam to Lex, thirty feet behind him.
Adam turns around to see what the woman is looking at.
Lex ducks into a shadow and hangs back until he’s confident he wasn’t noticed, feeling like a dirty old man caught observing something not meant for him. His mind churns, trying to understand this…this…what?
Then he remembers one of the headlines that zippered across the taxi’s screen: Banksy strikes again. He always assumed the guerrilla artist was just one person, but maybe he has a crew, and maybe Adam, Adam, is on it. The way Banksy’s trademark quick flashes of work appear out of nowhere—it makes sense.
“Sorry,” Adam says. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“Yeah.” A woman’s voice, the woman who almost spotted Lex just now. “Could you maybe not say anything about this, at least until we’re done?”
“I won’t. Okay if I pass through?”
“No problem.”
Lex’s heart races—Wrong again. He edges out of the shadows to see Adam walking under the arch as the artists get back to work. He waits until Adam is all the way through and then follows, extending his own apologies and promises to the artists.
He follows along an asphalt path
and then over root-humped grass and into a dark thicket. He hears a rhythmic slurp of water—they must be near the ravine. As they approach a low stone wall, Adam slows nearly to a halt and looks around.
Lex hangs back behind a stand of trees whose trunks are webbed with enough overgrown vines to provide decent cover. He watches Adam place the deli bag atop the wall, climb over, take the bag…and then disappear from view.
Adam says something inaudible. Another voice answers—a man’s. The second voice is vaguely familiar and then it lands hard. It’s William’s voice, William, who Lex hasn’t seen or heard since the night of Diana’s party, the night he met Adam.
With a surge of adrenaline, Lex abandons pretense and comes out from behind the trees. He climbs over the wall and there, there is Adam, sitting on the ground, sharing a blanket with William.
William.
William on his back, bearded now, in filthy clothes, stinking of piss and booze. When Lex imagined Adam having a romantic rendezvous, it wasn’t with William and it wasn’t like this. An empty jug of water is overturned beside the wall. Two cardboard cups lie scattered. A small plastic hairbrush, the kind a child might use, lies half inside one of the cups.
William rises onto his elbows at the sound of Lex’s approach, then drops back onto the blanket, shaking his head.
Adam turns, freezes, stammers, “You—you followed me.”
“What is this?” Lex stands at the edge of their blanket, feeling helpless as an eight-year-old.
“I’ve been trying to find the right time, the right way, to tell you,” Adam struggles to explain. “But I couldn’t, and the longer I waited, the harder it got, and I knew you’d be angry.”
“I’m not angry,” Lex says. “I’m…I’m…” Enraged. Broken. A fat ant crawls along William’s stomach and Lex can’t find the right words for what he is.
“When I had lunch with Diana a couple weeks ago,” Adam says, “she told me William was—”
But Lex doesn’t want to hear it. He’s seen enough. He suspected someone, anyone, but not William. William the thorn, the hopeless drunk, the giver of pain too tempting for Adam to resist. Adam the enabler, the fixer. Is that it? Has the power of their old dysfunction clawed them back together?
Appalled, Lex climbs back over the fence.
No. He won’t let other people’s failings weaken him.
He will not.
He digs into his pocket for the little packet of heaven and hell and tosses it into the darkness. Never again.
Adam jumps up to follow and keeps pace as Lex breaks into a jog. “I just wanted to help him,” Adam says. “He’s in trouble and—”
Lex’s patience hardens, cracks. He stops. “When was he ever not in trouble?”
“This time’s worse.”
“Right.” Lex tries to hold back but emotion rises too quickly. “So now you’re running back to him. No. Not running. Slow walking. Dragging it out to torture me. I’m going home. Don’t come back. I never want to see you again.”
“You’ve got this wrong.”
“Go to hell, Adam—I’m not stupid and I’m not blind.” Lex walks quickly in the direction of Eastwood Arch and the road out. Finally Adam’s footsteps fall away and Lex is alone.
34
Lex lies on the couch at home, mired in a familiar heartbreak, exhausted beyond reason, mindlessly following a beam of light as it creeps across the ceiling.
He stiffens at the sound of footsteps coming up the outside stairs.
The apartment door rattles open and the quiet of Adam seeing him penetrates the living room. Adam asks, “Can I come in?”
“You here to get your things?”
“That’s up to you.” Adam turns on the overhead and the room pops into focus. He looks at Lex and says, “Please just hear me out.”
Lex swings his legs to sitting. He can’t feel anything, not even anger. He’s too tired, too empty, too sad. Listening is something, maybe the only thing, he can manage right now.
“You followed me,” Adam says.
“I shouldn’t have. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t resist.”
“Then you did want to.” Adam sits across from Lex. Closer now, in full light, the dark rings beneath his eyes contrast vividly with his paler than usual skin. “Lex, what do you think you saw tonight?”
“To state the obvious, I saw you with William.”
“What did you see that maybe wasn’t so obvious?”
“Oh, please.”
“Can I tell you?”
“I guess you’re going to.”
“You were right before—William’s never not been in trouble. But now he’s homeless, Lex—homeless. I’ve been trying to help get him off the street, that’s all. Every night I call all the shelters and every night there’s never a bed available. It’s the least I can do—”
“Why do you have to do anything for that—” Lex holds his tongue. That what? Loser? Drunk? Shallow insults, like pebbles thrown at a storm, will only make him foolish. Now, in the calmer aftermath, Lex can recall that Adam and William had genuinely loved each other, they lived together a long time; what they had was real even if it rotted at the core.
“I don’t have to do anything.” Adam tones back his rising defensiveness. “I choose to. It’s my…right.”
“Are you going back to him?”
“He’s a wreck.”
“So you’re not—”
“No fucking way.”
“Adam.” Lex inches forward on the couch. So the agony, this agony, won’t come in the shape he expected days or even hours ago. It won’t come shaped as abandonment, or reprieve. It will come as surrender. “Adam.”
How long has Adam felt this troubled by guilt for leaving William last year? He’s never talked about it. Another secret held tight to avoid upsetting Lex. And he realizes: that long.
Lex makes a call to HOME-STAT, the police department’s partnership with Social Services, pulls a string or two, and by morning William’s been picked up and installed in a bed at a shelter in the Bronx. As simple as that. Lex doesn’t say it, but all Adam had to do was ask.
But it was never that simple, and it still won’t be. In the morning, as they wake up in their bed and reach to hold hands, Lex grudgingly reminds himself that there’s no such thing as simple when two adults with histories love each other. Adam may need to visit William (a self-destructive need, but a need still). Lex may need to let him (a need that will cross every boundary of his always-waiting-to-be-broken heart). Adam may need help coping with his codependency, which appears to be a more intractable problem than Lex realized. And Lex—Lex may need help staying strong. And if they make it, if they can stay together, this knowing of each other will only get deeper and harder and more surprising. And if they don’t make it, it won’t be for the reasons he guessed.
* * *
Early that evening, Lex feels something jabbing at him on the hammock’s underside; someone is kicking him, not hard, but kicking him. He must have passed out, depleted after being on the water that afternoon, trying and failing to latch onto a decent wave.
He opens his eyes, raises his head from within the cocoon netting, and sees who it is. His brother, David, standing there with a raised foot.
“Wake up, loser.”
“Who invited you?” Lex asks, as if he doesn’t instinctively know the answer. He propels his legs around, pauses to still the chaotic rocking and to rub his deaf ear, then gets out of the hammock.
There, at one of the surf club’s courtyard tables, Elsa sits with Adam under an open umbrella throwing its shade far afield. Adam in cutoffs, a Yellow Submarine T-shirt, and sunglasses. Elsa in her summertime white linen—long sleeves and long pants. Her hair falling around her shoulders in a pretty mess. Three open beers on the table.
Lex asks David, “How long have you been here?”
“You said five o’clock, so we were here at five.”
“I told Elsa five o’clock.” Lex grins, leans closer to his brother. �
��But I’m glad she brought you. I had a feeling she might. So where’s the kid?”
“It’s Saturday.”
Right. Weekends, Ethan is with his mother.
Adam turns. “If it isn’t Rip van Winkle.”
“Sorry about that.” He bends to kiss Adam’s cheek.
“You needed it,” Adam says. “How was the surf?”
“Ankle busters.” Lex yawns. Stretches. “Hoping it’ll pick up.” He takes a seat at the table.
Adam asks, “Get you a beer?”
“Sure—unless Elsa really wants to see me on the board.”
“You promised,” she says.
“Seltzer,” he tells Adam.
As soon as Adam disappears inside the club, leaving the beaded curtain shaking in his wake, Elsa leans forward and says, “Seems like things’ve settled down between you two.”
“Last night,” Lex says, “certain things came clear. I think we’ll get it worked out.”
“Hope so.” She turns to smile at Adam as he appears through the shivering curtain with a cold bottle of seltzer.
Lex gulps down the water, bubbles sharp enough to sting going down. He tosses the empty bottle into the nearest recycling can. Smiles when it jumps off the rim of the can and lands inside. “Ready to hit the water?”
Elsa says, “Let’s go.”
Lex collects his board from his locker and they all walk the two blocks to the beach. The crowd has dispersed, leaving behind a handful of sunbathers and a stalwart few surfers.
Adam and David sit on the sand, facing the ocean. Elsa stands, her white linen snapping in the wind. Lex feels the plank of her gaze on his back, watching for clues that he’ll be okay, that he knows what he’s doing.
