by Tosca Lee
When Esad left, Lucian took a thin napkin from the dispenser and set it beside my coffee cup. The gesture struck me as aberrantly mundane.
He sighed. “I feel your trepidation, that sense that you ought to get up and leave immediately. And under normal circumstances I would say that you are right. But listen to me now when I tell you that you are safe. Be at ease. Here. I’ll lean forward like this, in your human way. When that couple over there sees my little smile, this conspiratorial look, they’ll think we’re sharing a succulent bit of gossip.”
I wasn’t at ease. Not at all. My heart had become a pounding liability in my chest.
“Why?” I managed, wishing I were even now in the emptiness of my apartment, staring at the world through the bleak window of my TV.
Lucian leaned even closer, his hand splayed across the top of the table so that I could see the blue veins along the back of it. His voice dropped below a whisper, but I had no difficulty hearing him. “Because my story is very closely connected to yours. We’re not so different after all, you and I. We both want purpose, meaning, to see the bigger picture. I can give you that.”
“You don’t even know me!”
“On the contrary”—he slid the napkin dispenser away, as though it were a barrier between us—“I know everything about you. Your childhood house on Ridgeview Drive. The tackle box you kept your football cards in. The night you tried to sneak out after homecoming to meet Carrie Kraus. You broke your wrist climbing out of the window.”
I stared.
“I know of your father’s passing—you were fifteen. About the merlot you miss since giving up drinking, the way you dip your hamburgers in blue cheese dressing—your friend Piotr taught you that in college. That you’ve been telling yourself you ought to get away somewhere—Mexico, perhaps. That you think it’s the seasonal disorder bothering you, though it’s not—”
“Stop!” I threw up my hands, wanting him to leave at once, equally afraid that he might and that I would be stuck knowing that there was this person—this thing—watching me. Knowing everything.
His voice gentled. “Let me assure you that you are not the only one. I could list myriad facts about anyone. Name someone. How about Sheila?” He smirked. “Let’s just say she didn’t return your message from home, and her husband thinks she’s working late. Esad? Living in war-torn Bosnia was no small feat. He—” He cocked his head, and there came now a faint buzzing like an invisible swarm of mosquitoes. I instinctively jerked away.
“What was that?” I demanded, unable to pinpoint where the sound had come from.
“Ah. A concentration camp!” He looked surprised. “I didn’t know that. Did you know that? And as for your ex—” He tilted his head again.
“No! Please, don’t.” I lowered my head into my hand, dug my fingers into my scalp. Five months after the divorce, the wound still split open at the mere mention of her.
“You see?” he whispered, his head ducked down so that he stared intently up into my face. “I can tell you everything.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’ve made a pastime of studying case histories, of following them through from beginning to end. You fascinate me in the same way that beetles with their uncanny instinct for dung rolling used to fascinate you. I know more about you than your family. Than your ex. Than you know about yourself, I daresay.”
Something—some by-product of fear—rose up within me as anger at last. “If you are what you say, aren’t you here to make some kind of deal for my soul? To tempt me? Why did you order me coffee, then? Why not a glass of merlot or a Crown and Coke?” My voice had risen, but I didn’t care. I felt my anger with relief.
Lucian regarded me. “Please. How trite. Besides, they don’t serve liquor here.” But then his calm fell away, and he was staring—not at me but past me, toward the clock on the wall. “But there”— he pointed, and his finger seemed exceedingly long—“see how the hour advances without us!” He leapt to his feet, and I realized he meant to leave.
“What? You can’t just go now that you’ve—”
“I’ve come to you at great risk,” he hissed, the sound sibilant, as if he had whispered in my ear though he stood three feet away. And then he strode to the glass door and pushed out into the darkness, disappearing beyond the reflected interior of the café like a shadow into a mirror. The strap of bells fell against the door with a flat metal clink, and my own stunned reflection stared back.
RAIN PELTED MY EYES, slipped in wet tracks through my hair against my scalp, ran in rivulets down my nape to mingle with the sweat against my back. It had gotten colder, almost freezing, but I was sweating inside the sodden collar of my shirt as I hurried down Norfolk, my bag slapping against my thigh, my legs cramped and wooden, nightmare slow.
The abrupt warmth inside my apartment building threatened to suffocate me as I stumbled up the stairs. My ears pin-tingled to painful life as I fumbled with my keys. Inside my apartment at last, I fell back against the door, head throbbing and lungs heaving in the still air. I stayed like that, my coat dripping onto the carpet, for several long moments. Then a mad whim struck me.
With numb fingers I retrieved the laptop from my bag and set it up on the kitchen table. With my coat still on, I dropped down onto a wooden chair, staring at the screen as it yawned to life. I logged into the company server, opened my calendar.
There—my six-thirty appointment. It was simply noted: L.
2
For the next two days, I kept to my office and home. I stared at my monitor by day and at my ceiling at night in bed, trying to dissect how someone with enough research, a talent for suggestion, and a few lucky guesses might pretend to be a demon with seeming credibility to the point where I might actually believe I was in the presence of evil. And while I decided it was possible, the one thing I could not answer was why.
Of course my mind went first to Aubrey. But to think that she would direct so much energy my way—even out of cruelty—seemed pure vanity on my part. I had given her no cause for vendetta toward me, having stepped aside with near silence once her resolve to leave was clear.
I briefly considered Sheila, who was not only our office manager but the wife of my college roommate. I owed her much, I supposed; it was through her that I first met Aubrey. She had also been the one to alert me to the position at Brooks and Hanover when my predecessor left to join Random House. And she was the only one in the office with ready access to my calendar. But while our conversation had been stilted, if polite, since the divorce, such a scheme was so far beyond and beneath her that I rejected the idea immediately.
That left three options. The first was Richard, but I could think of no reason for him to take the trouble. He already had what he wanted. Still, he had the resources and access to a storehouse of information about my history via Aubrey.
The second was, again, that Lucian was a writer. And while I had heard stories of writers tracking editors like crazed fans stalking movie stars, I had to wonder why anyone would direct so much interest my way when editors for the Six Titans, as I called them, were a train ride away in New York City.
The third was that Lucian had targeted me for more mysterious reasons of his own. This was the most disturbing possibility of all.
On Thursday afternoon I put in a call to Esad to ask if he remembered the man I had been sitting with two nights past. “Yes!” He raised his voice over the sear of the grill in the background. I could practically smell cooking onions. “Very nice!”
“Do you know him?” I asked, feeling foolish.
“No, no, it’s the first time to meet him. Bring him back! I’ll make something special.”
I had no intention of doing that. Further, I determined that if this Lucian pursued me again, I would go to the police.
NEW YORK LITERARY AGENT agent Katrina Dunn Lampe was a polished, vivacious woman who sapped my energy. But because she represented talented clients, I tried to meet her for lunch whenever she came to town. And so I was shif
ting time blocks in my schedule like square pieces in a puzzle box, trying to find that doable—preferably short— lunch slot during the two days she would be in town, when the appointment materialized in the corner of my screen.
6:00 p.m.: L.
Tonight.
I got up, hardly able to take my eyes off it, not trusting that it wouldn’t disappear the minute I blinked. Forcing myself away, I strode out of my office and down the hallway. Sheila was missing from her desk. I sat down in her chair and tapped her keypad, bringing her screen to life. I closed an open e-mail, but not before catching the subject line: “have to see you.” I noted it wasn’t from her husband, Dan. Opening the group schedules, I found my own, scrolled through it.
It wasn’t there.
I went back to my office and stared at my monitor.
L.
What did it mean? Did he just expect me to show up at Esad’s again? Or did he plan to follow me when I left work? Was he waiting, watching for me even now?
I sat like a ghost through a last-minute titling meeting. Stared at the sandwich I had brought from home without eating it. Shifted manuscript pages on my desk without reading them. Watched the clock.
I distracted myself by thinking of Sheila’s mysterious e-mail. A part of me wished I had noted the sender, a part of me wished I hadn’t seen it at all. I couldn’t help but remember Lucian’s insinuation. I hoped for Dan’s sake it wasn’t true.
By five o’clock I was useless. I shut down my laptop, shoved it along with a stack of proposals into my bag, grabbed my coat, and left.
Outside on the street, I realized I had no idea where I was going. But one thing I did know: I was not going to Esad’s. Neither did I want to risk anyone following me home. For a moment I actually considered going to Carmichael’s, a small restaurant with a decent wine list, once my favorite watering hole. I quickly discarded the idea—not for my three months on the wagon so much as the thought that my supposedly preternatural acquaintance might find it pathetic.
Which just made me mad.
If he was what he claimed to be, the last thing he should want was for me to stay sober. And the last thing I should want was to care what he thought. But here I was, a flustered wreck, having doubted my experience and second-guessed myself a thousand times since Tuesday.
I descended into Kendall Station. I normally hated the claustrophobic press of rush hour, but today there was something comforting about the electric lights, the subterranean warmth, the flow of bodies to and from the T.
On the train I did something I rarely do: I studied the faces around me. I took note of clothing, skin color, and watches but saw no one resembling the Mediterranean stranger. Packed in the Red Line car, I considered the distant dullness of the commuters’ eyes, even of those playing games on their phones or jacked into iPods, of the book readers who had all but escaped their bodies for the ride.
How long had I been one of them?
I filed out and up onto Park Street, one in a milling flotsam of bodies. I often felt lost in this current, everyone around me having places to be and going there with a purposeful intent I envied.
But not tonight.
Tonight I meant to end these three days of anxiety—days during which I had somehow forgotten that I was a rational and intelligent person. I meant to remember that, despite how I had felt in the past, I was not at the complete whim of circumstance—or of any other phenomena either.
I walked down School Street in the brisk cold of pre-twilight and entered the bookstore.
There was a time when this sheer volume of books—shiny in their crisp dust jackets, stacked along the new arrivals section or, better yet, orphaned on the bargain table—was as intoxicating to me as any wine. That was before I entered the business. Now I couldn’t remember the last time I had been here—only that it had been with Aubrey.
I took the stairs up a half level toward the back of the store. I wasn’t sure where I was going; I just wanted to get out of the entry. Passing between shelves like labyrinth corridors, I veered off between Women’s Studies and Sexuality and found myself, ironically, in Spirituality. There I sequestered myself at the end of a row housing books on guides, angels, and psychics.
Demons, too.
5:40. I felt a spike of anxiety but reminded myself that tucked away here, I was the colloquial needle in the haystack. Six o’clock would come and go, and here I’d be, my nose in a book on psychic healers. By seven o’clock I’d be taking dinner at a restaurant in Chinatown, perhaps contemplating writing an essay about the lengths desperate writers will go to get published, or at least requesting that our technical team put up a better firewall.
I had a second reason for coming here—one that had more to do with the exorcism of Aubrey than disproving the authenticity of demons. Sometime last summer I realized that in moving to Cambridge, I had penned myself in to a little safe-cage and that the city I first loved for its culture, for its civic and intellectual history, had become a connect-the-dots of locations infused with painful memories. So I had started the slow, deliberate process of reclaiming those places I had frequented with Aubrey and of putting new pins in my map that were solely my own.
It was difficult. Even today, walking in through the oversized double doors and passing the coffee bar, I remembered the soy lattes that Aubrey used to drink, the way she drifted up that stair to wander the travel section, there to pick up books on Africa, Italy, and Mongolia, to point out the exotic locations where one could hike to the summit of Kilimanjaro, walk through ruined Pompeii, or overnight in felt yurts—all trips I agreed should go on our list of future places to see. All places I knew I could not afford to take her.
Walking up that half flight of steps tonight, I recalled the collection of Eyewitness Guides she had kept on our bookshelf—a constant reminder of unfulfilled hopes and my own shortfalls as a provider. A detail I had forgotten until now. But it came upon me, reflexively and fully formed, the way the smell of a hospital room could conjure my dying father.
It was always like that. I might open a box—there were several in my apartment I had not unpacked yet—and find one of her long, dark hairs still clinging to a spare set of towels or even one of my sweaters. They used to stick to our pillows and sheets, adhering in tangled twists to the lint collector in the dryer. I still expected to see them there sometimes, still smoothed their phantom presence off the pillow before I lay down, just as I still got out of bed in the morning without pulling back the covers.
I slid three books from the shelf and then—on a whim—set up camp in the middle of the aisle as I had done as a college student in the Amherst library. As I folded my legs, I noticed that the hem of my pants was fraying. That surprised me as I considered these pants relatively new, but then I realized that they were simply among the last pieces of clothing Aubrey had chosen for me.
The thought summoned a small surge of panic. As much as I was on a mission to mark the corners of all our old haunts, I did not like the idea of her presence disappearing from my life altogether. The long hairs clinging to the sheets were gone. Soon the clothes she had chosen for me would be pawned off to a charity and worn by another man.
I forced my attention to the book in my hands.
I was camped there, well into the first chapter of Unseen Hands: Discovering Your Guardian Angels, when a woman tried to sidle past my makeshift roadblock.
I apologized, tried to scoot to the side, and then gave up and got to my feet.
“Sorry.” I nudged my bag out of the way. But instead of passing, she bent down and retrieved two of the books I had left on the floor. Long curly hair the color of new pennies fell over her shoulder. When she straightened, I saw that she was pert-featured and curve-lipped, her skin devoid of the freckles I expected. A tiny diamond winked from the side of her nose as she tilted her head one way and then the other to read the titles in her hands. No wedding ring.
“What do we have here? Unleashing the God Within and Angelic Voices. Well, it’s official”—
she returned them to me—“you’re a seeker.” She smiled, the bow of her lips stretching in a generous curve. She was wearing a burgundy coat—velvet—and a low-cut top beneath it. A silver ankh hung in the open neckline against a smooth expanse of skin. She would have stood out anywhere, but she did so especially here, where the local dress code seemed to be anything black.
She was possibly the most beautiful woman I had seen in years.
“Actually, I’m a Republican,” I said stupidly.
“In this town?” She arched a sleek brow at me. “Then you’ll need all the guardian angels you can get.”
Was she flirting? “Are you volunteering? Because I make a good charity case. Obviously.”
Was I flirting?
She fingered the thin chain at her neck, the ankh dancing like a body on a hangman’s noose. Her hands were slender, almost girlish, and I found myself wondering if she were a pianist. “Well, as fate would have it, I just happen to be between appointments.”
I looked around. Not a well-groomed Mediterranean in sight. I glanced at my watch—it was just past six o’clock. “Would you be willing to discuss terms over coffee?”
“It’s a deal,” she said, laughing. The sound was warm, like sun against my chest.
Downstairs, I ordered coffee and scones—just a snack to tide me until dinner. Who knew, maybe I wouldn’t be dining alone.
Now that was an odd thought. It occurred to me that such an event would constitute my first real date since my divorce, frayed pant hems and all.
At the table I watched with some curiosity as she emptied no fewer than three sugars into her mug, the ankh drawing my attention back to the skin beneath it every time it swayed on its silvery chain.
“So, how is the guardian angel business these days?”
She traced the handle of her mug with a fingertip. “Well, for one, the pay is horrible.”
