Smoke

by Lisa Unger

  He fumbled with the keys, his jacket over his arm, took one of them off the ring and handed it to her. His face had flushed red and she could see a vein pumping in his temple.

  “Both of them,” she said forcing herself to keep her voice down. “The apartment door, too.”

  He sighed and took another one off the ring. She tested it in the door; the lock turned.

  “I’ll follow you down and check the other one, too. If you don’t mind.”

  “You don’t trust me?”

  She gave him a smile. She locked the door behind her and they rode the elevator down together in a cool silence.

  “I can’t believe I thought-” she started and then clamped her mouth shut.

  “You and I haven’t been together in a long time, Jez,” he said softly. “I have every right to be involved with someone else. I didn’t know things were going to heat up between us again.”

  She shook her head and didn’t respond further. The doors slid open and she walked quickly to the outside entrance and tried the key. When the lock turned, she stepped aside and held it for him.

  “Jez, let’s talk about this.” He spoke softly, reaching for her hand. She folded her arms across her chest.

  “Dylan, everything that needs saying between us, we said a long time ago. I was just suffering from some kind of temporary insanity. Clearly.”

  He walked onto the street and stood looking at her through the glass. He was so handsome and the girl in her loved him so much, she could imagine herself throwing the door open and running into his arms. She wanted to, even now. Instead, she turned and walked coolly for the elevator door though she wanted to run, catching it just before it closed again. She rode up, staring at her reflection in the mirrored doors, her body tense, her mouth pressed into a straight, hard line. She looked hard at the woman glaring back at her. Only her eyes betrayed the terrible sadness and disappointment she felt. She just made it into the apartment before she started to cry. She cried quietly, her head against the door, careful not to wake her son.

  Twelve

  Maybe fifty people had gathered in front of The New Day building. They stood in the cold, smoking cigarettes, drinking from paper coffee cups. A thin girl, very young with bad acne, stood with shoulders stooped, shivering against the cold. A woman wearing a three-quarter-length wool coat over a business suit clutched a soft briefcase to her side and looked around with a frown on her face, like she was somewhere she didn’t want to be. A smallish man with slicked-back hair, wearing creased jeans, a faux leather jacket and matching loafers, laughed nervously as he tried to make conversation with a pretty black woman.

  Lydia stood off to the side, leaning against a maple tree and listening to the quiet conversations that cropped up between strangers waiting for a common event. People seemed nervous, excited, tentative. She had to wonder why they’d come here. What were they seeking? Her eyes fell on the thin girl with the bad skin. The girl hunched her shoulders in, stood away from the crowd. She seemed sad and tired. It was contagious; Lydia started to feel that way, too.

  After a while, a willowy woman in the white tunic and blue jeans Lydia had seen on the website opened the large wooden doors and people filed inside. Lydia lingered outside awhile, moving behind the tree. She wanted to be among the last to enter and sit toward the back. She hoped that her baseball hat and wire-rimmed glasses would keep anyone from recognizing her, though Jeffrey had been skeptical. He’d given up the argument and they’d parted angry with each other.

  She hung back with the smokers and entered with the last of the people to walk through the door. They walked through the foyer and Lydia chose a seat as close to the door as possible, gratified that no one seemed to notice her. She had a row to herself and watched as people took tea from an urn on a table off to the side, dumping packs of sugar and creamer into their paper cups. People chattered a little at first, then grew silent. A definite tension built as people waited, started to get impatient.

  “You’re here because you want to change your life,” said Trevor Rhames loudly as he entered the room from an unseen door to the side. “But you don’t know how.

  “People always think it’s the things they don’t have that are making them unhappy. ‘If I can just get this, or buy that, or have that, then finally I’ll achieve real peace and joy.’ What they don’t realize is that it’s leaving things behind, wanting less that is the secret to true happiness.”

  Trevor Rhames spoke quietly but his voice resonated with authority. He was short and stocky, his hair just a shadow on his shaved head, but there was a powerful bearing to him. His eyes were ice blue, pale and dramatic. They demanded. He wore black jeans and a black cotton shirt open at the chest, heavy leather boots. An unlikely getup for a preacher. He paced the front of the room slowly, picking a pair of eyes from the crowd and then focusing on that person for a while, as if he were speaking directly to him.

  “It is when we abandon materialism and vanity, worry less about what kind of car we drive and how much we weigh, that we open our minds to the Universe, to the thing religion calls God. God is everywhere, all around us; he is the ground beneath our feet, the sky above us, and the trees around us. He is us. All we have to do is recognize him.”

  He was a supernova. His energy filled the room and sucked everything else out. Even Lydia, who’d come for very different reasons than the other people gathered, felt his power. How powerful would he seem if you were lost, in pain, not sure of anything about yourself and your life? she wondered. How powerful had he seemed to Mickey? To Lily?

  He was not a handsome man. His jaw was too big, his nose crooked. The stubble on his face made him look unkempt instead of rugged. A scar ran from behind his ear down the side of his neck and disappeared into the collar of his shirt. His boots added about an inch of height and he was still short. And yet Lydia could see how women might find him attractive. There was a pull to him, like the riptide in a violent sea. She was not immune to it; she felt the tug in spite of her intellectual perspective on it.

  He went on and she settled into her seat in the back of the room. The people around her seemed rapt, hanging on his every word. She noticed something then, that many of them were holding and were sipping from or had placed beside them a paper cup. She scanned the large room, an auditorium with a brightly lit stage and rows of soft, large, comfortable seats. The construction was new, she could smell the leather of the seats around her, the paint on the walls. On a table to the side of the room was a stack of paper cups, an urn with a sign: TEA. She remembered what Dax had said about the woman he met earlier handing him a cup and his instinct not to drink from it.

  “What they don’t want you to know,” he said loudly, startling her from her thoughts, “is that the media purposely, perpetually keeps you in a state of self-hatred so that you will continue to consume.”

  He raised his hands and came to stop in front of a woman in the front row. Lydia was too far back to see her; she could only see a head of dyed blonde hair.

  “ ‘I’m too fat,’ you think to yourself,” he said, looking down at her. “ ‘Yes, you are,’ says the media. ‘Buy this and you’ll look better, feel better, be better. But then have this cheeseburger; you deserve it!’ ” He shook his head in disdain, and then gave the audience a warm, sympathetic smile. He walked up and down the aisle in front of the seats.

  “You have wrinkles or your breasts are too small or you’re losing your hair or whatever it is someone else has told you is wrong with you. But don’t worry. They have a remedy for everything-for the right price.” He paused here, looking around at the crowd. Lydia found herself shrinking down in her seat. She didn’t want Rhames to see her face.

  “What they don’t want you to know is that you are exactly the way God intended you and any value or devaluing associated with your appearance or your station in life is man-made. It’s not organic, not real. It’s an illusion created to keep you buying into a system that wants to enslave you, keep you working at a job you hate,
hating yourself, buying what they say will make it all better over and over again until you die.”

  He paused again, again looking from face to face.

  “There’s another way,” he said. He’d lowered his voice to a whisper and Lydia watched as people unconsciously leaned forward. “I am offering you a New Day.”

  He put his hand out to a woman in the audience and when she took it, he gently pulled her in front of the crowd. She was an average-looking woman, her dry, curly hair clearly color damaged. She wore the formless clothing of someone insecure about her body, a cardigan sweater, a long, full skirt. She wore a heavy mask of makeup. In the bright spotlight that shone on the front of the room it looked pink and cakey. She looked around the room, obviously wishing she could sink into the ground.

  “When I look at you,” he said, “I see what they’ve sold you. This color in your hair, these clothes to hide a body you think is substandard, this paint to hide a face you don’t want to see when you look in the mirror. But I also see you.”

  The woman started to tear, put a hand to her mouth. “You’re beautiful,” he told her. “You don’t need to hide from me.”

  He embraced her then and she started to sob. She could hear other women in the audience start to sniffle. One man got up and left. No one tried to stop him; he was shaking his head skeptically as he stalked past Lydia. She noticed that he didn’t have a cup.

  All the people in here had come because they were in pain; there was no other reason to join a group like this, no reason to come here. Lydia would bet that on the meta-tags of the New Day website, they’d listed words like “depression,” “despair,” “loneliness,”… maybe even things like “weight loss” or “hair loss.” So that anyone searching for those words on the Internet might find a link to The New Day. She glanced at her watch and wondered whether Dax and Jeffrey were in place.

  “In this New Day,” Rhames went on, “you work for the betterment of yourself and for the world around you, not for the profit of some corporate giant. You spend your free time getting to know God by getting to know yourself, cleansing yourself of the poisons you’ve been fed since before you were old enough to even know what was happening to you. Imagine a life free from addiction, anxiety, depression, bad relationships, dead-end jobs, and financial worry.

  “Imagine,” he said, a wide smile splitting his face. “Imagine a New Day.”

  As Rhames continued his spiel, Lydia waited for him to turn his back for a second, then slipped from the darkened room into the hallway. She stood there for a moment, looked around her as if lost and trying to orient herself. She looked for cameras, waited for some tunic-clad hippie to arrive and escort her from the building. But if there were cameras in the long hallway, she couldn’t see them. And when no one came, she made her way deeper into the building, toward the kitchen. Dax had managed to obtain an old building layout from his contact, so she had an idea which way to go, though she’d never really been good with maps.

  Doors were closed; lights were dim. There was a palpable hush. The building had an air of desertion to it, like a school empty for the summer, its hallways echoing with the memory of footfalls and voices. Lydia walked quickly, trying to keep her boot heels from clicking on the tile floors.

  When she came to the place she thought the door should be, she realized that she must have turned right where she should have turned left. She doubled back, feeling a little stupid, butterflies in her stomach. She couldn’t shake the feeling that it was too easy to move around a building that had such tight security. It would have been more logical for Jeffrey to come in with the meeting group, she knew that. But she’d had a strong desire to see Trevor Rhames, to understand more about The New Day. Now she wondered, as she usually wound up doing at some point, if she should have listened to Jeffrey. Maybe they knew who she was, were watching her, giving her just enough rope to hang herself. Then again, maybe she was just being paranoid. Maybe the cameras Dax had mentioned didn’t come on until the building locked down.

  At the end of a long hallway, she came to an institutional-sized kitchen. She pushed through one of the doors marked NEW DAY STAFF ONLY. In the dark, she felt her way through a maze of large ovens and grills, metal sinks and cabinets, shelves of canned goods. It was a kitchen that served a lot of people, maybe hundreds. For some reason the place gave her the chills.

  At the back of kitchen, she found the door and took a deep breath before opening it, bracing herself for an alarm if Dax’s intel was wrong and preparing herself for a sprint. But the door pushed open quietly and standing there was her favorite sight. Jeffrey. He stepped inside and took a roll of electrical tape from his pocket and taped the latch of the door down so that it appeared closed but remained unlocked. When the place shut down, they’d still have a way out, unless the system read that a door wasn’t closed properly. She let the door shut behind him.

  “I told you it would be all right,” she said.

  “We’ll see,” he said. “Anyway, what are we looking for in here?”

  “Lily Samuels for one. Or any evidence that she might have been here,” she said, shrugging. “I don’t know exactly. I guess we’ll know it when we see it.”

  Hello?” The voice was groggy, as if its owner had been sleeping. Matt looked at the clock. It was just after ten… not that late.

  “I’m looking for Randall Holmes.”

  There was a pause on the line, a drawing in of breath, a rustling of sheets.

  “Who’s calling?” It was hard to tell if he was talking to a man or a woman, the voice was hoarse, sounded old.

  “This is Detective Stenopolis from the NYPD. Mr. Holmes made a call to a tip line. I’m following up, sir. Sorry for the late hour.”

  The voice heaved a sigh. “Son, that was two weeks ago.”

  “You’re Randall Holmes?”

  “Well, who the hell else would I be? You called me.”

  Matt smiled. “You’re right, sir. I’m sorry.”

  The man grunted on the other end of the line.

  “You told the tip line operator that you saw Lily Samuels in church. Is that right, sir?”

  “No, that’s not what I said,” he said. “That place is no church, I’ll tell you that. Bunch of Moonies, if you ask me.”

  “Which place?”

  He heard the man breathing heavily on the other line. “How do I know you’re not one of them?”

  Matt put his head into his hand. After going through Lily’s file and finding nothing, he’d started sifting through some copies of the tip line transcripts he’d brought home with him. About halfway through the stack, he’d come across Randall Holmes, who’d claimed that he’d seen Lily at church. The notation from whoever took the call was that Holmes was “unstable, ranting.” A note indicated that Jesamyn had made a follow-up call the next day and came to the same conclusion, that the guy was nuts. But now, knowing about The New Day, this call about a church from a man who lived in Riverdale held more potential. At least that’s what Matt had hoped.

  “Sir, I’m a Missing Persons detective with the NYPD. I’m one of the good guys. I promise.”

  The old man snorted. “I’ve heard that one before.”

  Matt sighed, feeling disappointment and frustration squeeze at the back of his neck, tense the muscles on his shoulders. Another dead end.

  “Okay, Mr. Holmes, thanks for your time,” he said, getting ready to hang up and go to sleep.

  “Anyway, you’re too late,” he whispered.

  “Too late for what?”

  “Too late to help that girl.”

  Matt felt his stomach do a little flip. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I watch them go in. Some of them come out. Some of them don’t. I sit on the porch after most of the others have gone to sleep. I like to go outside still, like to breathe the clean air. The rest of the people in this place are already dead, they’re just waiting to stop breathing. Not me. I want to suck every last breath of air out of this world.”

  “W
here are you, sir?”

  There was a pause. “At the home here, the Sunnyvale Home for the Elderly. Boy, you don’t know much of anything, do you?”

  He was calling from almost directly across the street from The New Day.

  “No, sir, not really. Maybe you could help me out.”

  “I sit in the dark corner of the porch so I can see without being seen, you know. It’s always so much better not to be seen.”

  “I agree,” said Matt solemnly. “What can you see from your porch?”

  “I can see the brown building with the stained glass window. They try to make it look like a church. But there’s no God in there. I know that for a fact.”

  “You said you watch people go in?”

  “Some nights they gather outside, groups of people. They look nervous and hungry like they’re waiting for a meal or a handout. A thin girl with bony shoulders and no tits opens the door for them after a while. They go inside; a few usually come out in the first half hour or so. Some come out a couple hours later. Others don’t come out at all.”

  “You saw Lily Samuels there one night?”

  “The girl on the news. I saw her. I told the nurse. She said it was dark and my eyes aren’t what they used to be. So I called the number they gave on the television. I have a phone in my room, my son makes sure I have a good television and my own phone number here.”

  “He must be a very good son,” said Matt.

  He made some kind of grunting noise that might have been assent or disdain. Hard to tell.

  “So you saw her standing and waiting with the others?”

  “That’s right. She looked lost,” he said. “Very sad. Sadder than the others, somehow.”

  “Did you see her come out?”

  “No. She didn’t come out that night.”

  “That night? You saw her come out another night?”

  The old man laughed. “No, son, haven’t you been listening? What I’m trying to tell you is that if they don’t come out the same night they go in, they don’t come out at all.”