by Lisa Unger
The door swings open then, and an impossibly young, svelte woman in a black shift dress and thigh-high boots stands before us. She looks back and forth between us, blankly annoyed.
Grayson flashes his shield.
“We’re pursuing a suspect,” he says. His tone is comfortingly official, validating. There was someone there. There was. “Did someone come in through this entrance in the last ten minutes?”
She shakes her head and her long black hair shimmers.
“No,” she says. “I’m the manager here and this is the service entrance. There’s a bell?” She points to it meaningfully. “You ring and someone comes to open it. But there haven’t been any deliveries this afternoon.”
“I saw someone come in here,” I say, more sharply than I mean to. She blinks glittery eyelids to express her displeasure. Her eyebrows are shaped into high arches; a hoop sparkles in her nose.
“No,” she says as though she’s never been more certain of anything in her life. “Not this door.”
“Mind if we have a look around?” asks Grayson easily. She regards him uncertainly, then steps aside. We both walk into the storage area—boxes, racks crushed with clothes, standing steam irons, gift-wrapping station, no menacing strange men in hoods. Adrenaline, the power of rage, abandons me, leaving me feeling foolish, hot with shame, shaky now. Did I really see him come in here?
Grayson’s standing by the door. “Where does this go?”
“Back to the shop,” she says. “There’s a fire exit through the break room on the other side of the store, but an alarm sounds if you push through it.”
“There’s no other exit from this storeroom?”
“Well, just out back, to the alley behind the buildings, where we dump the trash.”
Grayson follows her and I trail behind. The dim alley reeks of rotting garbage; fire escapes track up the surrounding buildings giving way to a stingy square of sky up above.
“The street gate is locked,” she says. “Only the super has the key. Want me to get him?”
Detective Grayson looks at me and I shake my head.
“I’m sorry.” My voice is a rasp. “I was sure I saw him come in here.”
There’s that look again from the detective. I know it well—worried confusion. What’s wrong with Poppy?
On the street: “Are you okay?” He rests a steadying hand again on my shoulder. “You seem—”
“What?” I ask. “Crazy, unstable, a wreck?”
“Let’s go with—unsettled.”
His comforting grin settles me a bit. For a second, I flash on my father, how good he was at talking me through spirals of emotion, bouts of worry. Oh, you’re too sensitive, my mother would sniff. You better get a thicker skin. But not my dad; he always knew what to say. Okay, just breathe. Let’s break this down. What’s really going on?
“Let me give you a lift home,” says Detective Grayson when I don’t say anything else. I can’t prove what I saw, so there’s no point in trying.
We climb into the Charger, plain and white on the outside but high-tech within, a buzzing radio, mounted laptop, all manner of blinking lights on panels. The button for the siren is a tantalizing shiny red, and I fight the urge to press it.
“Maybe he ducked into a different doorway,” he offers as we snake up Fifth.
“Maybe.”
I’d have sworn it was that doorway. But obviously not, and that’s the hard part. Because what we see, what we think we see, what we remember, isn’t always reliable. In fact, it rarely is. Like for months after Jack died, he was everywhere. I’d see a tall man with a lion’s mane of hair and my heart would lurch with joy and hope, crashing into despair milliseconds later. Or I’d imagine him so vividly walking into the room that I almost saw him. Or like those lost days of my “break.” I lived those days, went places, saw people, did things, but the more I press in, trying to remember, the deeper and darker that space becomes.
The eye, the memory—they’re the trickiest liars. Only the camera lens captures the truth, and just for a moment. Because that’s what the truth is: a ghost. Here and gone. As Grayson drives, I scroll through the pictures on my phone again and find that grainy image of my shadow stalker.
Who are you?
Who was I during those lost days?
Layla spent two days looking for me, visiting all the places we frequented together with a picture of me until finally I came stumbling into her lobby, apparently wearing the red dress from my dream. Did I know that detail? Had she told me at one point what I was wearing, what I looked like, and I just filed it away? Or was my dream, as she suggested, an actual memory?
“I’m going to hang around awhile,” Detective Grayson says as he pulls in front of my building. “Out here, in my car. I have some calls to make, emails to answer. I can do it here for a while, just, you know—in case. Why don’t you get some rest?”
Part of me wants to tell him that I’m grateful. Thankful that he hasn’t given up, doesn’t urge me to let it go and move on, that he still cares about what happened to Jack, what happens to me. But a bigger part of me is not grateful. How urgently I wish we’d never met, that I had no reason to know Detective Grayson. I leave the car without a word.
* * *
I tap over the limestone floors of my lobby, breezing past the day doorman, who is on the phone but offers a friendly wave. In the elevator I text Ben and tell him to cancel my appointments and calls for the afternoon, that I’ve come down with a stomach thing. It’s not ideal, but I’m addled and shaky, in no condition to talk to clients or anyone else. Inside the apartment, I close and lock the door.
Leaning against it, I slide down and sit on the floor, the long hallway that leads to the rest of the apartment dark, lined with photographs—his, mine, us together. The only thing I’ve managed to do since moving here is hang those photographs. Sitting on the hardwood, I think tears will come, but they don’t.
Instead I notice that one of the photographs lies on the floor, surrounded by broken glass.
I haul myself up and walk over to it, the apartment unnaturally quiet. The thick-paned windows on the twentieth floor keep most city noise at bay. The glass crackles beneath my feet as I retrieve the picture. Me and Jack, on our honeymoon in Paris. What a cliché! he’d complained. He’d wanted to go Thailand, lie around on some isolated beach, sleep in a thatch hut. But a Paris honeymoon was my only girlhood fantasy and he complied, because he always did. He always wanted me to have the things that I wanted. I can’t even tell where we were, a selfie so close that everything behind disappeared, our faces so goofy with love that it’s almost embarrassing to see.
I hold the shattered frame. The picture hanger is still on the wall. And the photo seems too far from its original space to just have fallen somehow.
My breath comes heavy. I should move back slowly toward the door and run downstairs to Detective Grayson. Instead, I turn and walk toward the living room.
It takes me a moment to notice it, but when I do my stomach bottoms out. Sitting on the low coffee table between the couches is an orchid in a pot. A fat, snow-white bloom drips heavily from a bowed stalk. There’s a single white card tucked into the thick green leaves at its base, a note in black scrawl.
I remember you.
Don’t you remember me?
7
“Let’s go over this again,” says Grayson.
He sits on the couch across from me, leaning forward, his dark gaze pinning me to my seat. I know that look; he’s been watching me like that for a year. As though he might still suspect something dark just beneath the surface of what he sees.
Layla’s already here, ministering. She’s gotten me a blanket, which I’m not using, brewed coffee that I’m not drinking. Now she’s hovering, sitting on the couch beside me, leaning in so close that her thigh is fused with mine. Her foot is tapping in that way it does when she’s n
ervous or annoyed. She’s staring at that white blossom as it quivers in front of us, at Grayson, around the apartment, with a kind of narrow-eyed suspicion.
“You entered your apartment—” he leads.
This is another thing he does, asks me to repeat what I told him, once, twice, three times. Looking for the inconsistencies of lies, I suppose.
“And I saw the picture fallen on the floor at the end of the hallway.”
“Why didn’t you leave the apartment right away?”
“I didn’t think,” I say. “I walked down the hallway and picked it up. Then I saw the orchid and called you.”
“Weren’t you afraid that there might have been someone in your place?”
“No,” I say. “I mean—it didn’t occur.”
He’s frowning at me, like this doesn’t make sense. “But you suspect someone’s following you.”
“That’s right,” I say, feeling foolish. “I don’t know. I just didn’t think there was anyone here.”
I’m so tired. Whatever I took on the street, I can feel it warm and tingling in my bloodstream. I wish I hadn’t taken it. I want to be more alert for this, more plugged in. But my awareness is swimmy and strange.
“Ms. Van Santen here has a key to the apartment. And there’s another key with the building staff. They have permission to enter your apartment to make deliveries.”
I nod, a faint ringing in my ears, a wobbly quality to the space around me.
I see Jack walking around the unfurnished space, standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto the expansive view. It was late afternoon when we first came to see it, the sun low in the sky.
If you like it, I like it.
I want you to like it, too.
He walked over to the open-plan kitchen, touched the marble countertop.
What’s not to like?
But?
He stared at the refrigerator, ran a finger down its gleaming metal surface.
It just feels a little—too cool. Like a museum.
We’ll make it ours.
I wrapped him up, my arms tight around his waist. He looked down at me with that smile, indulgent and half-amused. At any contact, there was heat. His lips on mine, then his arm around the small of my back.
What do you think? The Realtor had returned, catching us making out like teenagers. Oh, I’m sorry!
Jack looked up at her, unflappable. We’ll take it.
“Poppy.” Grayson’s voice brings me back. His frown has deepened.
“I’m sorry. What?”
Two uniformed officers dust for prints; they are comically mismatched. He is a towering thick-shouldered black man; she’s a petite strawberry blonde, a full head shorter. They move quietly, with purpose, from the doorknob, to the plant, the note, the photograph frame, leaving bursts of black residue behind on the too-white walls. Does that come out? The apartment, which I’ve just barely settled into, feels tainted.
“So, anyone who works in the building has access to your apartment? The doorman, the maintenance staff—” He lets the sentence trail.
The staff, with permission, delivers packages, dry cleaning, laundry directly to the apartment; the cleaning service comes in on Wednesdays. I never thought of it as strangers coming into my apartment, though of course that’s precisely what it is. Under Detective Grayson’s disapproving frown, it seems like a terrible failure to safeguard myself, the apartment.
“Yes. I guess that’s right.”
“There’s no sign of forced entry at the door. Of course, no chance that anyone comes in through the windows.” He walks over to the window—which only opens a sliver to let air in. He pushes back the gauzy drapes and peers out at the view. “So how many people would you say are on staff here?”
I try to picture the various doormen, the cleaning staff, the superintendent, the maintenance guys. Had any of them seemed odd, menacing? Had I seen anyone lurking where he didn’t belong, feel eyes lingering too long? No.
But the fact is that I’m a specter in my life now—floating, going through the motions, white-knuckling my way through days that seem to have no meaning. There it is. The thing I haven’t even said to Dr. Nash—I’m not sure what the point is without Jack. I’m not sure I even want to be here.
“Maybe twenty?” It’s just a guess, though. I have no idea how many people work here.
“Does this mean anything to you?” Detective Grayson points at the flower, the note.
Dangling and snow-white, it hangs between us, the heavy blossom bending the stem.
“It reminds me of your favorite flower. The ghost orchid,” says Layla.
“But that’s not a ghost orchid. It’s a phalaenopsis, a moth orchid, found in any corner deli or supermarket. It’s as common as a carnation.”
“Close enough,” says Layla with a shrug. “Whoever left this knows that about you.”
“Maybe,” I say.
The ghost orchid blooms only once a year, between June and August, and is found in the swampy forests of southwestern Florida, Cuba and the Bahamas. Rare and elusive, it perches on scarious bracts, appearing to float in midair, hence its name. It can only be pollinated by the giant sphinx moth, the single insect with a long enough proboscis to access the flower’s extremely long nectar spur. Jack and I spent two months in Florida, wading through the Fakahatchee Strand with a Seminole guide to get pictures for a Smithsonian Magazine feature.
We spent our days in waders, sweltering in the thick humidity, savaged by mosquitoes and no-see-ums, on the perpetual lookout for water moccasins and alligators. And then, at the beginning of our final week, we finally found the blossom. It hung in the murky light, roots clinging to the cypress tree, a shimmering apparition, bright white, with delicate, dancing tendrils, curling, disappearing into the shadows all around. The pulsing throb of cicada song, the squawking call of a great blue heron, the rippling of water, the perpetual scent of damp rot that’s somehow the cleanest thing you’ve ever smelled, and among all the wild, this perfect creation of nature. We were hours, taking shots, waiting for changes in light, switching lenses, filters. It passed in a heartbeat and then the light disappeared and we had to leave.
After that, all other flowers wilted in comparison to its delicate, spectral beauty, its rarity. Who knew that? Jack, of course. Layla. Maybe a few of our friends, a client or two. The ghost orchid cannot be had, though. You won’t find it at any florist. It’s a protected flower. It can only be observed in its natural environment.
“Poppy?”
Layla has her hand on my shoulder, is staring at me, brow wrinkled with worry.
“What?”
“Where did you go?”
To Florida, with Jack, a hundred years ago. I would give anything to go back.
“Sorry.” My tone is as flat and numb as I feel. Layla’s scowl deepens.
She rises and I catch Grayson staring at her, though he looks away quickly.
Wow, he is human. For some reason, I don’t think of him as a person, exactly. He’s a reaction formation, someone who appeared in my life on the very worst day. If Jack hadn’t died, he wouldn’t even exist. Observing him watch Layla elevates him somehow. He’s a man, probably younger than he looks. That gray in his dark hair premature, I think. Beneath the rumples of his ill-fitting blue suit, there’s a man with a life. Divorced. He may have mentioned a son, a teenager.
“You’re not staying here,” Layla announces. She casts a quick dismissive look at Grayson. “Pack a bag.”
“Poppy,” she says when I don’t answer. It’s precisely the tone she uses when one of the kids isn’t moving fast enough for her.
“Okay.” And I sound a little too much like a sullen teenager.
“I have to agree,” Grayson says, watching me again. “You shouldn’t stay here until you’ve had the locks changed. Even then maybe—
until we have a handle on what’s happening here.”
When I still don’t move, Layla heads to the bedroom, issuing a sigh. I hear her taking my overnight bag down from the closet, opening drawers. My limbs are filled with sand.
“You’re telling me everything, right?” Grayson asks. He sits in the chair across from me and leans forward on his thighs.
“Of course,” I snap, annoyed. “I’m being followed. Someone broke into this apartment. My husband is dead. What more do you think I have to tell?”
He leans back, lifts his palms in surrender. “I’m on your side, remember.”
That orchid dangles between us. “Sorry.”
“I get it.”
I can’t bring myself to look at him again, just stare out the window at the Freedom Tower glinting in the distance, the sun drifting down toward the Henry Hudson. September 11. I thought the world had ended that day. Who could have known that it would begin and end again?
“You just seem off,” he says, still frowning. “Out of it.”
“I haven’t been sleeping.” And I’m popping pills left and right, Detective. Not even sure what they are, actually. Also, I often take them with alcohol. Do you think that’s a problem?
“I’m going to check with the super, see who was on duty today,” Grayson says when I don’t say anything else. “I strongly suggest that you rescind your permission to let building staff enter this apartment.”
“Okay,” I concede.
Then he gets up and leaves the room, striding down the hall, door shutting behind him. The uniformed officers are gone, as well. When did they leave? It’s just me and Layla.
“When were you going to tell me about all of this?” She stands in the doorway.
“Maybe never,” I admit. “I was kind of hoping I was just imagining the whole thing.”
“Hoping for that?” She cocks her head, squinting at me.
“I don’t know.” We both wait for me to make any sense at all. “I don’t know what’s worse.”
Layla has my overnight bag over her shoulder, her hand on her hip. The blond highlights in her hair pick up the afternoon light. She’s dressed in her workout gear—yoga, kickboxing, Pilates; she’s in killer shape. She’s shaking her head slightly, her lips just parted. She’s considering.
