by Natasha Bell
He sits in the restaurant for a long time. He can’t bring himself to leave. He watches people wait at the lights and cross the street, pass by his window without the faintest of glances, then carry on to wherever they’re going. He makes a game of studying people’s faces, trying to imagine what pain each of them has experienced, whether they’ve ever lost someone they loved or been deceived, if they’ve ever felt torn apart, ready to implode. He watches each one disappear on their way and resents them for not feeling what he’s feeling. He drains the last of his drink and throws the cup in the bin. Looking back out the window he sees a woman waiting for the lights. Her back is to him. She’s wearing a long cardigan and harem trousers. She has sandals on her feet. He traces his eyes up her back, over the canvas bag slung across her right shoulder, and up to her thick, curly hair. It’s too long really; I got mine cut every six weeks, always said I’d end up with a mullet if I didn’t. And this woman is heavier, isn’t she? A tad curvier. And even if she looked just like me and he was to leap out of his chair and run outside, he’d find he’s imagining things anyway, wouldn’t he? Just like in the supermarket. He’d make a fool of himself and feel even worse than he does now.
The light changes and the woman steps across the street. Barely consciously, he scrapes his chair back and throws his rucksack on his shoulder. He pushes through the glass door and sprints across the street as the lights change back and engines rev. He stops on the other side, panting. She’s four, maybe five, steps ahead of him and walking briskly toward the park. He has no desire to call my name. He prays she won’t turn around. He wants the illusion to continue. He knows it can’t be me, but he feels more alive than he has all week, all year perhaps. He clenches his fists at the thought of this woman turning to reveal a face that’s not mine, a life that’s not over.
He follows her, keeping an inconspicuous distance and deliberately looking away if he thinks she’s about to turn her head. He studies the back of her. How dare she bounce with each step, lift her hand to tuck her hair behind her ear, fill her lungs with this callous city’s air? This woman’s existence feels malicious to him, but while she keeps her back to him he also finds comfort there. He doesn’t want this to end. He doesn’t care that it isn’t real. He’s finally going crazy, but it feels good. At 4th Street, she crosses diagonally over the intersection and enters the park. The dusty greens engulf them. Alex would like this, he thinks, remembering how I used to rant about Chicago being the perfect city because it combined the bustle and artistic satisfaction of a metropolis with the tranquillity of miles of lakeside parks. “I lived two blocks from an ‘L’ stop and four from a beach!” I’d exclaim, as if unequivocally proving the city’s utopian properties.
Fake me walks quickly through the park, oblivious to Marc as her shadow. She checks her watch, but doesn’t look back. He takes in her dark curls, the shape of her shoulders, the sway of her hips. He morphs every detail with the memories of the wife he hasn’t seen in fourteen months. With every step they take, he grows more and more certain that she is me, even while another, saner part of his mind increases its conviction that he’s finally lost it. He doesn’t notice the roller skater that almost knocks him down and shouts, “Dickhead!” as he speeds away. He stops caring about their leafy surroundings and barely registers as they skirt around a fountain and emerge from the park at Washington Square Arch, the derogatory monument he’d thought might break his heart. It flecks its shadow over his shoulders as he follows the woman through crowds of camera-clutching tourists. She turns right and walks to the first intersection. Crossing diagonally again, this time on a one-way light and causing a cab to blare its horn to which she flips a ringless middle finger, she disappears into a shop. He hurries across and steps into the deli a couple of minutes behind her. Suddenly conspicuous and more than a little afraid he’ll accidentally bump into the front side of his imaginary wife, he takes a basket and selects a shelf at random. He studies an array of pay-by-the-pound cereals, then shuffles carefully to the salad bar at the back of the store.
Cautiously, he turns around and scans what he can see of the shop. There she is. At the cashier. Thankfully facing away. He gazes at the back of her head for a moment, feeling equal measures of hope and despair, then grabs an over-priced muffin and scuttles toward the cashier. By the time he’s paid for his alibi purchase, the woman has crossed back toward the park. He hurries to catch up, noticing at the last minute that she’s turned to skim the perimeter rather than head back through it. Does she have another errand to run? Is she heading home to her real husband? Marc’s headache throbs with his heartbeat. He clenches his jaw with the pain. They pass buildings waving NYU flags. How old is this woman? He wonders if she’s even in the same ballpark as me. What can you tell by the back of a head? Maybe she’s a student. Maybe she’s someone’s child, someone who gets to spend Christmases and birthdays with her family. Maybe she has her whole life ahead of her. He sniffs, realizing his eyes are filling with tears. “You’re a fucking mess,” he says aloud and a woman with a stroller turns to face him. In a split second he feels her take in his crumpled clothes and the dried blood on his knuckles. She hurries away.
The woman he’s following crosses the next road and heads into a towering, windowless building. Bobst Library, he reads on the sign. He hovers in the shadow of a tree on the corner, afraid following her into a library he doesn’t know might give his game away. While he waits, he tries to talk sense into himself. I can take the subway back to the hotel, make sure my things are packed, go out to dinner, even see a show if I like. The trip doesn’t have to be a waste. I can salvage my last night in New York at least. I can leave this corner right now if I want to. I don’t have to act like this. I don’t have to be this man.
It almost works. He steps up to the crosswalk a couple of times, but scurries back to his shadow before the glowing sign says Walk. I’ll follow her to her next stop, he tells himself. It’ll probably be closer to a subway station anyway. I’ll just pretend a little longer.
He stands in the shadows for nineteen minutes. He knows because he keeps checking his watch. Eventually she emerges. She looks both ways along the street, but he manages to press himself into the tree in time to avoid either of them seeing the other. He knows in his heart he’s probably going to follow her until it becomes abundantly obvious she isn’t me, but he’s not ready for that to be now. Not ready to find out what that realization will make him do.
She turns left, three books hooked under one arm and her deli bag in the other hand. She turns left again on to Sullivan Street. The pavement is almost empty, so he drops back, allowing almost a block to stretch between them. She takes the first right and is almost out of sight by the time he makes the turn. She’s heading left a block ahead of him. He quickens his pace, trying to catch up. He reaches the corner, double takes as he recognizes the sign for Ben’s Pizzeria, then turns back on to MacDougal Street.
There, up ahead of him, ducking toward the glass door between Silver World and Ali Baba, is the woman with my thick, curly bob. He watches as she transfers her deli bag to the arm with the books and fishes in her canvas bag for keys. He’s only a few paces away now. She’s about to disappear into the building. This is going to be the end of his fantasy, whatever the outcome.
He opens his mouth to speak. A large, empty breath comes out but no sound. He tries again. What is he trying to say? He’s forgotten. Whose name is he calling? A third time and a fourth, and he manages nothing. They’re two meters apart now, his legs still working even while his tongue refuses.
Finally, he locates his voice. He parts his lips once more and rolls his breath over his tongue, past his cheeks in order to sound the first “A” of “Amelia.” But, before the rest of the name can tumble from his mouth, the woman turns. She whips that iconic bob to the other side of her neck, twisting her shoulders and waist, almost dropping her books and shopping in the process. She swivels to face him, speaking before she’s turned,
calling out, “Look, you cocksucking asshole, stop follow—”
But her words seem to choke her. She does drop her books now. And her shopping. Something cracks. Maybe eggs. The breath falls away from her insult, just as it does from the wrong name he’s trying to call. Her blue eyes meet his. The air leaves his lungs. His knees feel weak. I’m not crazy, is what he thinks as his body hits the pavement. And then I’m rushing over to him, calling his name. “Marc, Marc! Are you okay?”
He looks up at me, the brownstone with the arched windows towering above my head. “I found you,” he says, then slips into unconsciousness.
* * *
MAY 20, 2015
“Have you considered maybe you wanted to be caught?”
I shake my head. He’s so fucking smug. He thinks he can see into my psyche. Even now, he still wants to believe he’s found a nugget of remorse, prove I never really intended to get away.
“Well,” he says, “what other explanation do you have for leaving your passport and the letters to be found?”
“I didn’t leave them to be found,” I say. This is how he works: he talks his bullshit until I’m so pissed off I can’t help but correct him. “I couldn’t take anything with me, but I couldn’t bring myself to destroy them either. All I could do was hide them and hope they’d sit collecting dust in the attic until maybe one day I could retrieve them. I thought the police would believe I’d drowned and Marc would move on and that would be that. I didn’t think he’d have a reason to go rooting through everything.”
“But you kept your mother’s house. You left Amelia’s work in a gallery.”
“I tried to sell a photograph years ago, that’s all.” I’m almost shouting now. I can feel my face growing red. I hate this man. “I’d forgotten all about it, okay? And I never thought Marc would go there.”
He folds his arms, shaking his head. “I think you left a trail.”
I don’t know why he is here. It’s not a proper session. His statement has been heard; his work is done. In an hour or two, maybe more, maybe less, my fate will be decided and our relationship will be over. He’ll go back to his life and his other patients, and I’ll head off in search of my next identity. Criminal or insane, what a choice.
I look at him and sigh. It will be strange not seeing him after all this time. “I was trying to give myself options,” I say. “I thought I might want to return to Lyme one day, after it had all blown over. I miscalculated, that’s all.”
“How does that make you feel? After all your work, you made a mistake.”
I shrug. “It was minor. It should have been fine. The police didn’t find anything.”
He nods. “It was only Marc who put everything together, only he cared enough to solve your mysteries.”
We sit in silence for a moment. I have an urge to ask him questions, to find out who he is, why he does this. I wonder if today he might tell me.
He crosses his ankle over his knee and leans forward. “You like to be in control, Alex, but the most important characteristic of the subconscious is its inability to be controlled. It’s scary for someone like you to acknowledge that there’s a part of you that’s ever-present but ultimately unknowable. You’ve tried to be the puppetmaster your whole life, but today you’re finally having to accept that, like everyone else, you’re also a puppet.”
I screw up my face. I want to scream.
“Does it please you that it was Marc?” he says. “Does it make you feel loved that he went to all that effort? That he tried harder than the authorities to find you?”
The backs of my eyes begin to prickle. I want to tell him to shut up, to leave me the fuck alone. I hate that I made mistakes. I hate that I am here, that this is how it ends. I didn’t mean for this to happen. I thought I’d figured it all out. I went over and over everything. After all that planning, I honestly don’t know how I missed things.
“I return to my original theory,” he says. “Deep down, I think you wanted to be found. And, more specifically, you wanted Marc to find you.”
2014
FRIDAY, APRIL 4
THE END
Marc woke on my couch. I’d had to ask a neighbor to help me carry him in. I told them he was a relative from out of town, that the medication he was on made him prone to fainting, that he just needed rest. I don’t know if they bought it, but what I like about Manhattan is that nobody pries.
I didn’t know what to say now, how to start. Marc had been out for a while, but I hadn’t known whether to call an ambulance.
“I wasn’t sure if you had medical insurance,” I said. “It’s sorta complicated here. You didn’t hit your head, so I thought you’d be okay.”
I winced at my own American twang. Marc looked at me.
“Can I get you a cup of tea?” I asked in a clipped British accent.
He pulled himself into a sitting position. I’d bandaged his hand while he was out. I’d also changed into a long black dress. I’m not sure why now. What had gone through my head as he lay passed out on my sofa? Must look nice for the husband I abandoned?
“Is it—” Marc said, his voice betraying a condemned man’s hope. “Is it you?”
I turned away, nodded.
“I—”
Nothing came after that word. I’m not even sure which one of us said it.
I snuck a peek at him. He looked good. I know I had no right to, but I’d missed him. He was rolling his eyes around the apartment. We were in a light, open-plan living room-cum-kitchen. The floors were polished wood, the only frills the lilies on the coffee table and the fake coals in the fireplace. I knew what Marc was thinking: it felt like a show-home.
“It’s not much,” I said. “But it’s comfortable.”
“Amelia,” he said, but nothing else.
We were quiet once more. I heard a siren trickle through a crack in the window frame, a far-off whine that increased in urgency as it came closer and closer, eventually howling for attention right beneath us, then fading slowly back into nothing as it headed uptown. The silence in its wake filled the air with treacle.
“You and Amelia.” Marc spoke as if in shock. It wasn’t a question. He didn’t look at me, he wasn’t asking for an answer.
“Marc,” I whispered.
He snapped his head now and I felt his eyes burn into me. He was scrutinizing every inch of me, the strange, mortal body he’d spent months searching for, the simple woman for whom he’d traveled.
“Are you—are you living here?” he asked, this time definitely a question.
“It’s not what you think.” My voice came out louder now, breaking through its whisper.
He stood up, knocking the coffee table with his shin. The vase wobbled. “I need to get out of here,” he said.
“Please,” I said, stepping forward.
“Get away from me,” he growled, finally making eye contact. I recognized so little in those eyes.
I looked away, backed up to a stool beside the breakfast bar, securing four or five feet of no-man’s-land between us. “I wanted to do it differently.”
“Fucking hell, Alex,” he shouted, kicking the coffee table now. It scraped across the floor toward the window. I watched the vase topple, then roll, spilling water and scattering petals. It reached the edge and seemed to hover in the air. My body jolted with the smash.
Marc sat down, hid his face in his hands.
My voice was a whisper. “I thought and tried and ached not to break your heart, but we were happy.”
He let his hands drop, turned to face me.
“I couldn’t tell you I needed to leave, you wouldn’t have understood.”
His nostrils flared.
“If I’d told you about this,” I said, gesturing around the room, “it would have ruined everything we had, you’d have thought I’d lied, that our vows, our life was untrue.” My last
word hung in the air for a moment.
“Was it?” he said finally.
“No.”
“I thought you were dead.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought it’d be better that way. I left my things by the river.”
“There was blood!” he said, shifting his weight as if he was about to stand up again. I imagined his hands around my throat. I almost wanted him to hit me.
“I needed it to look like—” I swallowed, touched my stomach. “I cut myself.”
Marc shook his head. “No, the police said there was a lot, two or three liters. That’s too much. Nobody does that to themselves.”
“I was aiming for two,” I said. “I’d read that would be possible. It was meant to be the final test of my commitment. I was timing myself, but I lost consciousness, came to and I was still bleeding. I thought I’d messed everything up.”
Marc was still.
“I patched myself up,” I said, “and walked along the bike paths to Selby. It took forever, I was so weak, but the next morning I slipped away on a bus in different clothes. I knew it would hurt, but I thought you and the girls could move on, remember me fondly. I didn’t mean for it to become this big thing.”
