A Flicker in the Clarity

by Amy McNamara

  “We tour the Emily Roebling House. Over in Brooklyn, by the bridge? Then we’re supposed to make use of public resources to further our research.” I use air quotes, then shrug. “Teachers probably just want a long weekend.”

  My mom stands and yawns. “Are you okay if I skip dinner? I’m ready for bed. Tomorrow’s another day.”

  Sometimes I picture my dad’s death like this train that tore into the station of our family, heavy, metallic, an unstoppable force. My mom’s still running alongside it, pounding on the windows, trying to get him back. Or ride off with him. No wonder she’s tired.

  I force another smile. “Sure, yeah. No problem. Long day.”

  She looks at me a minute longer, the skin between her brows drawn together, then kisses me on the top of my head.

  “Sleep helps a lot.” She floats down the hall toward her bedroom. “We’ll feel so much better tomorrow.”

  The Dog of Me

  BLY’S SMALL AND EVERYWHERE I GO I run into Emma. When she stepped through me again this morning on the front steps of the school, I almost tripped over Jack and Alice limb-locked in a human knot. In case that didn’t make me feel crappy enough, Mandi Iyer asked in the loudest voice possible if I was okay, the implication being, could I possibly be okay now that I’m an empty specter?

  When the lunch bell rings I’m the first one out, head down and rushing through the cool air toward Wharton Playground. We have off-campus lunch, and Wharton Playground’s the one place I’m guessing Em won’t be, because we only go there together. It’s far enough from Bly no one else makes the trek.

  While I hurry there my next map project takes shape. The city without Em. It’ll be like a new pair of glasses. The world more crisp, a summary of how it is now. If a French lady can map love, I can map absence, and then at least I’ll know where I am.

  One of the first maps I made was like that, a rough grid of our neighborhood with all the things I’m supposed to remember about my dad on it—the deli by the subway where we got mango smoothies, Bruno’s barbershop, with its stacks of hot towels and high spinning chairs. The condo where we lived as a family, right around the corner from Wharton Playground. We lost our condo when he died because money was so tight. I made the map so my mom would never know how much I’ve forgotten.

  The playground is hopping, a hive of toddlers buzzing around in daffodil-colored safety vests. I press my forehead against the heavy black gate and watch them. If I go in without Em, the park’s mine, a first landmark on my new map. The metal latch on the gate lifts up with a clank and I push in.

  Our favorite spot’s an old, gouged-up wood table near the back tucked under a mottled sycamore. I drop down at it and pull out my sketchbook. If I soften my focus I can picture Emma stretched out next to me on the tabletop like she does while I hunch and draw. I run my fingers under the edge where we scratched our initials.

  Still there. Smoother now. I made the ampersand so huge Em said our little e’s look like cross-legged kids under a Christmas tree. I open my sketchbook, but I can’t find the right place to begin. I draw the sycamore. Places in the splotchy bark look like faces, so I work on those, starting to imagine it full of people like me, so lost and lonely they ended up in the tree. This map’s already weird. A cautionary tale. Don’t end up in the tree. I’m shading a pair of haunted eyes when Emma climbs up onto the picnic table and looks down on what I’m doing.

  I keep my eyes on my work and act casual while I blacken it out. It’s private, and I have to protect my ghostly tree.

  Em nudges my journal slightly with the toe of her boot.

  This is officially worse than hearing her in the hall. Tears needle the edges of my eyes. Alice is probably behind me. Jack. With my luck, they’ve been here awhile, watching me try to draw my way out of myself. I wrap one arm around my middle while the other keeps at its task, swinging my pencil like a graphite scythe.

  Emma clears her throat.

  “Stalk much?” I lift my eyes from my journal, the sketch safely hidden under a bajillion sparkling arcs.

  She looks weird, her mouth drawn tight. There’s no sign of Alice. She came alone.

  Em paces the length of the table, then back, until she’s immense over me, gazing down, her hair loose around her face. She looks sad and I miss her so acutely it makes my throat ache.

  She kicks the edge of my journal again, lightly, but still. Anger shoots through me. Maybe this is how a fight starts. People poking each other’s softest spots until blows are thrown, hair torn out. I straighten up and let my pencil drop. For a second I think I’ll get up and leave. Walk away from her. Out of the park. But that’s more her style. I’m not that brave or that dramatic. I look down at my dark page instead. My anger melts to tears.

  “This is the longest fight we’ve ever had,” I say, trying to keep my voice from wavering. “And I don’t even really understand it.” I mean my role in it, why I did it, but I can’t bring myself to say that.

  She makes this little noise like a hiss-filled laugh.

  We stare at each other.

  “I don’t know what to say, Evie,” she says finally. “You got me in so much trouble.”

  There’s something in her voice, the sound of it, the way her eyes look empty toward me. I hear her words like, we’re not friends anymore.

  “I’m sorry,” I plead. “I screwed up, this once, but you’re acting like you hate me or something, like you’ve been dying to get out of our friendship and you finally found your chance to slip loose.”

  She looks around wildly a second. Shakes her head. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me!”

  “All you had to do was cover for me!” she yells, her voice raspy. She pops her hip out and mimics me texting her dad. “Yeah, hey Mr. Sullivan! Em’s here with me but she’s in the bathroom. I’ll have her call you in a bit.” Her voice is sharp, bitchy, doesn’t sound like her.

  A toddler boy chasing a red ball stops in his tracks near the table and stares at us a minute before running off.

  “I couldn’t reach you. Your phone was off.”

  I want to say I was out of minutes, but my heart’s beating so hard I feel like it’s going to knock me backward off the bench. I hate fighting.

  “So what. You lie. I had it in airplane mode. I didn’t want my dad tracking me. I was out in Bushwick with Ryan and those guys.”

  Ryan. All I’ve gotten out of her is that he works in a bar in the East Village and is supposedly a student. She’s vague on the details.

  “And those guys,” I say, flat, a challenge.

  Emma stares right back at me. Says nothing.

  “Seriously, Em, what do you know about them?” The knuckly gray branches above her look like dark cracks in a painted blue sky. “I waited for you outside Dos Toros for over an hour. In the cold. I didn’t know where you were. When you’d show up.”

  “I was coming,” she snaps. “I was just late!”

  “The Hanovers—I had to babysit . . .” It’s a hollow defense. Emma’s always been better than I am at making her position sound legitimate. I’m always apologizing for mine. But I did need the money. I always need the money.

  She crosses her ankles and sits next to my sketchbook with a sigh.

  “Do you have any idea what it’s been like in my house since that night? The minute I walked in the door, my dad started yelling.”

  Emma stands up again and hops off the picnic table, pacing near the end of it. A little girl rolling around on a scooter sees the look on her face and clears out.

  “I’m sorry you got in trouble,” I try. I don’t know how many times she wants me to say it, but I want this to end.

  “Trouble?” She’s incredulous. “I’m not in trouble. It’s so far beyond that.” She laughs, a cynical sound. Then she looks at me wearily. “You’re such a—” She thinks a second, then shakes her head. “God! I was having fun! You should have covered for me whether I was late to meet you or not. That’s how it works. I don’t know, Evie. It feel
s like you wanted me to get caught.”

  She might be right. In the tiniest way.

  “I’m such a what?” I ask.

  “Chicken.”

  I put my head down on the table. It’s true. I get scared easily, overwhelmed, but I fight it with all my might, and she knows it. She knows it’s the part of myself I can’t stand because it makes me feel like I’m like my mom, and my life is going to be small and lonely too.

  I take a deep breath and look at her again.

  “What is wrong with you?” I demand, surprising myself.

  She’s so mad right now, it can’t all be because of me. Emma doesn’t get like this often, crackling, explosive, but when she does you either duck and wait it out or go down like a bystander in a drive-by. Not this time. Not after this whole dead-to-me thing. I slip my sketchbook back in my bag with shaking hands.

  “Me?”

  My stomach lurches. I’m out of here.

  “Em,” I say, struggling with the zipper on my bag. “You got high with those guys? I mean, who are they? Do you know anything about them?”

  Emma’s like that—if it exists, she tries it. We vowed not to drink after the night Patrick died. If we hadn’t been drunk ourselves, maybe we could have stopped him from racing out of there. But I’m the only one who kept the promise. I stick close to Em when she does stuff at parties.

  “I would have covered for you,” she says, her eyes narrow lasers. “I would have had like a thousand lies at the ready. I would cover for you no matter what, because I trust you to do what you want in your life, a feeling which obviously is not mutual.” Her voice is small and quiet. She lets out an exasperated blast. “It’s bigger than this.” She shakes her head, as if she’s about to tell me something but decides against it. “You have no idea what’s going on right now.”

  “What?” I ask, my heart in my throat. “Please, tell me.”

  “Forget it.” She closes her eyes. “You know my parents, Evie.”

  The thing is, she’s right. I didn’t trust her. And I do know her parents, how they are, especially since Patrick. But I can’t bring myself to tell her she’s acting wilder and it scares me. Or that I’m afraid I’m so boringly boyfriend-less she needs to find a new best friend.

  Before I can say anything at all, Emma turns and walks out of the park.

  I watch her go.

  I try not to cry in public. This city is big and packed with people and for the most part we mind our own business, a survival thing, a way to share the tiny miles that hold us. And at first people try not to look at me, extend me a little privacy, but pretty soon they stop pretending. When you walk down the street crying like someone just ran over your dog right in front of your eyes, people can’t help themselves, they stare. And Emma totally ran over the dog of me.

  Missing

  THE NEXT MORNING EMMA, Jack, and Alice are in a happy knot at the end of my subway car. The train’s packed with Bly people making the trek from Manhattan to Brooklyn—Ben, Jay, Stella, Mandi, and Vanessa; even Roman and his crew, but neither he nor Em seem to register the other’s presence.

  I shrink into the opposite end of the car, where I’ll be invisible and a barrel-chested man crowds me in even tighter. It’s so awkward there’s no chance I’ll fall asleep standing up. I was awake most of the night trying to figure out what it is Emma can’t tell me and why.

  In the scratched and filthy window my reflection and I whip through the dark tunnel. I look like the kind of girl who would fall for her first-grade earthworm compost partner. Jack and I took turns stirring the red wigglers and spreading their earthy castings in the Bly Lower School Sunshine Garden. It was so easy back then. The three of us had Friday night sleepovers until Jack’s voice changed. Em’s mom pulled the plug on those. She was smart to end them too, because that’s when Jack turned magic. He slouched in late to assembly on the first day of ninth grade all lean and cute, like he’d spent time at science camp whipping up a hormonal transformation. Bye-bye, baby fat. Hello, strange new grace. His voice was deeper, his shoulders wide, and new angles of muscle stretched across his chest.

  And the first thing he did was fall for Ming Li.

  Emma said, Don’t sweat it. Ming will break him in. Like he was a puppy, which he kind of is. Only it lasted forever. I liked Ming, but it got harder and harder to hide how I felt about Jack. Then Ming’s mom got a job in San Francisco and they moved away.

  Jack was free and he noticed me.

  The train lurches and Mr. Barrel Chest steps on my foot. He apologizes, then raises an arm above my head to brace himself on the train car ceiling.

  From beneath his man-scented armpit I see Alice’s hand in Jack’s hair, twisting two tufts into devil horns. Jack swats her away and smooths it down again with a bright grin. Emma’s laugh travels the length of the car, cutting through the track noise and the morning murmur.

  Emma hates me and I blew it with Jack. I chew a hangnail until it bleeds.

  When Jack put his hand up on the cupboard in his kitchen—it wasn’t like it was my first kiss. That one happened the night Emma’s brother died. We were at a party on the beach and I barely knew the guy. Emma set it up. It’s no big deal, she said. It’s just lips on lips. Jump in, let your body be your guide.

  The guy was the friend of some guy Emma liked and they brought us to this senior party out on Montauk. We drank foamy beer in the dunes, and even though he was kind of cute, when he leaned in his lips were like pushy worms, beer-cold and slick. I kept waiting for the sexy rush Em said I’d have, but his breath made me sick. No sexy rush. I need to like the guy first. When I tried to pull away, he gripped me tighter, pushing a hand up my shirt and his tongue down my throat.

  Then Patrick and Mamie got into their huge fight, crashed their car, and nothing else really mattered. The relative importance of a miserable first kiss kind of shrinks when your friend’s just lost her brother.

  So when Jack leaned over me in his kitchen with that look in his eyes I laughed in his face—nerves, I guess. And now he’s with Alice.

  Barrel Man shifts again, leaving me exposed, but it doesn’t matter. Emma’s laughing about something and the rest of those guys are all talking to one another, not looking down here, anyway. To them no one’s missing.

  Voorse Means Vhat?

  I HANG BACK AT THE SUBWAY so I don’t have to walk down the hill behind them all. It’s strange to be down here. The last time we came to this part of Brooklyn we were with Patrick and Mamie because Mamie wanted pizza from Grimaldi’s. We hit the Ice Cream Factory before walking back across the Brooklyn Bridge. Mamie took a lot of photos that day. I don’t think I ever saw her without a camera. I’d love to see those pictures now, the ones of Em and me, of Patrick with the river behind him. Forever ago.

  By the time I make it to the Roebling House gift shop the Bly School group is out the door. I rush to the ticket counter to try for a spot in the next tour.

  The guy at the register signs me up, prints my pass, and points to another tour guide standing by the door in a pool of morning sun.

  He has a black eye and a split lip and he’s sort of cute.

  No. Scratch that.

  He’s totally cute.

  He looks like he might be about my age, but he’s dressed like a visitor from the 1880s, so it’s kind of hard to tell. He’s wearing high-waisted dark pants with suspenders, a rough collarless shirt, and a wool cap pulled down over what appears to be a nice mess of straw-colored hair.

  He scans through a list on an iPad, then checks a watch he pulls out of his pocket. Awesome anachronistic clash. He hasn’t looked up at me but I get the feeling he’s about to. I turn and wander the creaky floors of the gift shop, pretending to be interested in a bird’s-eye map book. I could do one for that TeenART thing. Call it Bird’s-eye View of Confusing Conflict and then sketch an aerial view of New York with tiny trash-can fires on random corners.

  The bell on the door jingles and a big group of tourists fills the place with their language. G
erman, maybe. I glance over at them, with their backpacks and travel books, and when I do, the guide rocks onto his toes and catches my eye. I look away, but not before a smile sneaks its way across my face. He announces the tour. I blush and walk over to hand him my ticket. He gives me a bright half smile. I’m about to turn away when he looks at me again, in that way people do when they’re not trying to hide that they’re checking you out. I’ve seen Emma get this look a thousand times. A thrill ripples through me until I realize this is probably just part of his routine. He holds the shop door open and we all file out into the cobbled street.

  “Welcome to 1883. My name is Theo Gray,” he says in a loud, clear, theatrical voice, “illegal pugilist and oldest son of Francis Gray and Hannah Nolan. I’m a typical Irish immigrant for my time. Since the death of my father on our crossing to America, I’ve worked on the bridge you see behind you and am the sole breadwinner for my family.”

  Emma would make fun of this, say, Okaaay . . . the tour’s conducted in character. Or maybe not. With his looks, she’d be up by his elbow, blinking at him brightly, finding a way to meet up with him later.

  His brogue is so convincing I decide that barring actual time travel, he’s at least a recent Irish transplant. The Germans are studiously attentive. I wonder if they can understand his accent. We follow Theo Gray down to the Fulton Ferry Landing. He asks us to imagine it before the bridge was built.

  “Brooklyn is hills and farms. Robert Fulton’s steam ferry transports thousands to Manhattan, weather permitting. But I’m here to build the future.”

  We follow him to a small wooden lean-to near the base of the bridge. He holds the door open while we take turns peering inside.

  Work pants and shirts similar to his dangle like tired ghosts from hooks lining the walls. Long wooden benches run either side of the room, rows of rough-hewn leather work boots beneath them.

  “The bridge changes everything. Dubbed the ‘eighth wonder of the world’ when it goes up, it’s the tallest structure in the Western Hemisphere. It marks the beginning of what becomes the multiborough city of New York.”