by Lisa Unger
“And him?” I ask, still staring.
She lifts her shoulders, turns back toward her waiting customers. “Some girls I remember. Guys, not so much. I’ll send this to you, if you want.”
The music gets louder, the vibration of it moving through me, making my head ache again.
“You haven’t seen him since that night?”
“No.”
“Would you recognize him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
He’s a wraith, the man in the image, wrapped in darkness, a shadow. I can’t see his face. He’s swallowing me, a ghoul enveloping me, black devouring red. I think of the masked man in the shadows of my life. A shudder of fear moves through me. Is it the same man? Did I meet him that night and has he been following me all this time?
“I remember now, I think. You danced with him—but you seemed so out of it. Then you disappeared into the bathroom. You were in there for a while. I figured you were trying to blow him off, but he waited. Finally—I think you left with him.
“It’s weird, I know,” she continues. “But I took your picture. In case.”
“In case?”
“I don’t know,” she says, looking sheepish. “It didn’t seem right. You were a wreck. He was watchful in this weird way, not like just some normal guy looking to get laid.”
Unsettling to hear a story about yourself, one you can’t recall. You were a wreck.
“So you took my picture in case—something happened to me?”
“Yeah.” She shrugged. “And you guys were making out, there was something kind of beautiful about it—the colors, the shape of your bodies, the blue light.”
I give the bartender my number and she texts the photo.
“If you remember anything else, or if you see him again, will you call me? I’m Poppy.”
“Sure, Poppy,” she says. She has a sweet smile, somehow confident and shy at the same time. She winks at me, then she hurries down the bar again.
I drift toward the bathroom, take a deep breath before pushing inside. Red stalls, black-and-white-tile floors, walls covered in graffiti, scrawled notes, phone numbers, bumper stickers. Over the sinks, smoky mirrors reach the ceilings. When a girl stumbles out of the first stall, I move inside, door banging metal on metal. It’s filthy like I remember it—or dreamed it, the odor strong. The wall is a mess of scrawl, a bulletin board broadcasting phone numbers and email addresses, dirty comments, cryptic messages:
You were the girl with the purple butterfly tattoo. We met on the dance floor and you said I was hot. Call me. The number was long since rubbed away, just a smudge now.
Maria is a slut.
Bobbi and June TLA.
I hate you. I hate myself more.
This place sucks.
I sit on the toilet and keep reading all the messages of the party crowd, the music getting louder, then quieter again, as the door opens and closes, opens and closes. I use my phone to snap pictures; I don’t even know why except that it occurs to me suddenly that this is the way to hold on to reality.
If I can capture the image, save it on my phone, then it’s real.
I press the reverse button and my own face appears on the screen. I stare at myself a moment, a tired-looking woman with big blue eyes, and blush-pink lips, someone who looks both older and younger than she is. Who is she? Who am I? Before I sink into a full-blown existential crisis, I take the picture. Then I quickly leave the bathroom to find Noah waiting by the bar looking content, patient. He sips at his drink, watching the dance floor. When I join him, he hands me my club soda.
“I thought you ditched me,” he yells over the music. His smile is warm, pleasantly devilish. I take a sip, then more. I’m hot suddenly and the icy liquid fizzes pleasantly in my mouth.
“I wouldn’t do that,” I say.
“Happens all the time.”
“I kind of doubt that. You don’t look like the kind of guy girls ditch.”
He lifts his glass, then drinks it down.
“Anything? Dreams, memories, something you recognize?”
I want to tell him about the bartender, but it seems too hard with the music so loud. I look over in her direction, but she’s not there. A young man has taken her place, tall with a mop of inky hair, dark eyeliner.
I start to panic—another microsleep? Another hypnagogic dream? But then I scroll through my texts, see the strange picture she sent, her number. Okay. It works. Reality captured and cataloged. I lift the phone, and Noah appears on the screen.
“Smile,” I tell him.
He does, a little self-consciously. He runs a hand over the crown of his head, and I take his picture. There. Now he’s real, too.
“Any chance we can get out of here?” asks Noah.
I think I said yes. I’m sure I did.
18
The lights are out, but I hear him moving around in the bathroom. A cough. The water running. Though my head feels like it’s full of gauze, and my throat is raw, I force myself out of bed, stand and stretch. The room is cold and full of shadows, amber light leaking between the blinds from outside.
“You coming?” Jack stands in the doorway, a shadow in a dim rectangle of blue light.
“Yeah,” I answer. “It’ll be good for me.”
He moves over close, lays a hand on my forehead. “You sure? You were coughing a lot.”
“I have to shake this thing.”
“I’m sorry.” He runs a hand through my hair, holds my gaze. “About last night.”
I rest my head on his shoulder, take in the scent of him. We went to bed angry; he feels a million miles away. Or maybe I’m a million miles away.
“It’s okay,” I say. I mean it. “You were right.”
He was right; that’s why it hurt so much.
“I want the things you want, Poppy.” It’s just a whisper, hot in my ear. “I swear I do.”
I believe he wants this to be true, though I’m not sure it is. It’s okay, though. We don’t have to want the same things, do we? To love each other?
I lean up to kiss him, and he bends to meet me. Desire comes up hot and fast. His arms tighten around my back, his mouth finds my neck, my lips. I’m ravenous for him in a way I haven’t been for a while. The heat—it’s just for him. Outside the wind howls, a cold morning, still dark. In the glow of the streetlight, raindrops glitter like glass.
Then we’re tumbling back into bed. I strip him out of his running clothes, his sneakers bouncing softly to the wood floor as he kicks them off. His skin is so hot, so soft. He tears off and tosses my thin sleep shirt; it flutters away like a ghost.
I feel his need for me, but I make him wait, kissing him—his eyes, his neck, his chest, the silky insides of his arms. I take him in my mouth until he’s groaning, helpless, and then I climb on top of him. Slow, wide waves of pleasure, milky light making dancing shadows on the wall. A dog barks outside, faint, far away.
With an easy flip, he has me beneath him, staring up into the pools of his eyes, arms tight around him. It’s desperate—as though we haven’t been together in months and maybe we haven’t, not like this, not just because we want each other, because we love each other.
Later, we lie wrapped up in each other as the dark morning grows light, and outside the world starts to turn. I hear the coffeepot come on; it’s set for six.
“That’s better than a run,” he says with a grin.
“There’s always tomorrow.”
Maybe, I think before I drift off again, we are enough, just us, if it comes to that.
* * *
I’m wearing the clothes I wore to Morpheus with Noah, but now I’m lying on my bed, covered by a blanket that was on the couch. It’s 3:00 a.m. Another wake-up from a revisionist dream where I live another reality with Jack—then lose him again. So vivid this time, it didn’t seem like a dream at all. No wonder I
had a nervous breakdown. How many times can you lose someone? There are an infinite number of scenarios I could concoct where he doesn’t leave me that morning. Will I live them all? I think of those pills in the toilet, wish I hadn’t flushed them. Right now, I’d take just about anything to dull the pain in the middle of my chest where my grief has lived. God, he’s still here. He’s still with me.
I push myself up and walk down the hall to the living room, where I find Noah asleep on the couch. He’s sprawled on his back, one leg on the floor, one arm over his head. He stirs as I walk into the room.
“What happened?” I ask.
He pushes up, rubs his eyes. “You fell asleep in the cab. I walked you in but you were dead on your feet. It didn’t seem right to leave—or to stay. So.”
He looks at the couch, where he’s piled up some pillows. “I thought I’d just crash on the couch awhile. In case you woke up, needed something.”
I wrap myself up, arms tight around my middle, and stay by the door. It feels like a betrayal to have him here; Jack is everywhere. His essence, our love, it’s still on my skin, under my skin. I still belong to him, maybe I always will.
“By the way,” he goes on. “This is literally the most uncomfortable couch in the world. It actually seems to be pushing me away.”
He has a nice smile, kind and warm, in on the joke of it all.
“Thank you,” I say. I sit across from him, still wrapped up.
“For what?”
“For coming with me tonight, for seeing me home. For not...” The sentence trails.
Noah hangs his head, seems to sense the distance that’s opened between us. After a moment, he rises.
“I should go, I think. Right?”
I want him to stay. I want to lose myself in him, if even for a while. I want him to leave; I need to be alone. Alone with my memories of Jack, my unwanted dreams. That’s the tug-of-war inside me. Move on? Stay rooted? What hurts less? Either way, it’s not fair to Noah. A friend, maybe in another version of my life, something much more.
“Maybe,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
Noah is a shadow among shadows—of boxes, the hard couch, his silhouette cast against the ambient light from outside, the city a field of stars behind him. Another pang. I should have stayed in our old place with the mice and the outdated kitchen, the place where our love lived. Nothing lives here. Nothing can; it’s too cold, barren. Like a museum, Jack said.
“A couple of years after Bella died, I went to see a psychic,” he says into the quiet. “One of those people who talks to the dead?”
I find this surprising, that he was the type of person to see a psychic. I don’t know him well. But it’s hard to reconcile this information with the man who stands before me, the one who hammers metal, bends and twists it into enormous, menacing shapes. He seems so grounded, so solid in the world. It’s hard to imagine him reaching beyond what he can see, what he can touch.
“That doesn’t seem like something you’d do.”
He draws in a breath, offers a shrug.
“Desperation can separate us from ourselves. I couldn’t stand how random it seemed. How there was no justice or logic to her death, no meaning that I could see or intuit. It defied what I thought I knew about the world. Of course, then, maybe even now, I knew nothing about the world. Who does know anything?”
“So, what happened?”
He sinks back down onto the couch. The light from the hall shines on his face and I can see the fatigue under his eyes, his sleep-tousled hair. He rubs at his temples.
“I was on this waiting list for months. Finally, I get a call, drive out to a town called The Hollows and I meet with a woman named Agatha Cross. She has this big white house in the middle of nowhere.”
The name of the town rings a bell, a place that Merlinda has mentioned. A vortex, she called it. A girl went missing there a couple of years ago and it was in the news. There’s some kind of dark history, haunted tours, woods, abandoned iron mines.
“She had this remarkably soothing energy. Just sitting with her, I felt some of my anger, some of my grief drain away. There must have been a hundred chimes on her porch, and the wind blew in this weird way, like it was whispering. We talked for a long time—about Bella. About how I wanted her to know that I was sorry we fought, sorry about everything.”
He is quiet in that abrupt way men have when emotion overtakes them. I sit quiet, waiting.
“She knew things she couldn’t have known,” he continues. “That Bella got pregnant, an accident. That I asked her to marry me, then she miscarried. That we’d fought, were angry at each other when she went to see her parents.”
“I’m sorry.”
“At the end of our session, she told me something that stayed with me.”
He’s staring at me, his eyes dark pools. There’s a draw, a pull. Something that doesn’t have anything to do with Jack, something that’s just me and him.
“She said that everyone thinks the dead haunt the living and sometimes they do. But the living can also haunt the dead. Bella needed me to let her go, so that we both could move on. She told me: you had your time together in life. And it’s over now. That’s it.”
He stands up again, picks up his jacket that’s draped over the chair. He moves over toward me, leans down and kisses me gently on the forehead.
“Good night, Poppy.”
I let him leave, just sit there in the dark listening to his footfalls down the hall.
When I hear the door close, I get up and rummage through my bag for the one prescribed bottle of sleeping pills I kept. I hold the rattling bottle in my hand. Sleep in an amber vial. Rest. Darkness. I hesitate, then stuff them back in my bag.
In bed, I sit and write everything that happened that night, my dream, the things that Noah said. The photos, these journal entries, that’s how I’ll know tomorrow what’s real. Ink on paper, moments captured in digital memory. Everything else fades. Those things remain.
19
“Did you sleep with him?” Layla asks immediately when I call her in the morning. I’m already in a cab heading uptown.
“No,” I say, trying and failing not to sound defensive.
The conversation Noah and I had still rattles around my head, but I don’t tell her any of that. I tell Layla about the club, what the bartender said, the picture she showed me. I can feel her vibrating on the line. I get it. If situations were reversed, I’d be after her, too, for her recklessness, for shutting me out. I’ve dragged her out of bars when she wanted to go home with the wrong guy, taken cabs in the middle of the night to outer boroughs to rescue her when she did. She threw a drink at a guy who groped me in a club, stayed with me for a week when my father died. I’ve sat up all night with her when Slade was colicky and Mac needed to sleep for work, taken Izzy to school in the morning. We’ve been there. As long as I can remember, no matter what. I’d be railing, chasing, bitching a blue streak if she were doing the things I was doing.
There’s an annoyed pause when I’ve finished recounting the evening: “So what’s your endgame here, Poppy? What are you looking for?”
“I need that missing piece of myself back.”
And if I find it, I might be closer to understanding what happened to Jack. I don’t say that, though, because it sounds a little wobbly, doesn’t it? Like I’m on a mission to find out who killed my husband. This isn’t something stable people do, is it? And it’s not the whole truth.
“Okay, I get it,” she says, even though I know she doesn’t. “If you don’t think the police are doing their job, we have people who can help. People who can look out for you, and find the answers you want. Tom at Black Dog, he already has a plan. Let him handle it and you come back here. That way you stay safe.”
“No one’s safe.”
“Safer than you are now. Look—it’s selfish. I’ll admit it. I need you. The kids ne
ed you.”
The guilt card; it’s a powerful one. I feel myself weakening.
“You’re not safe right now, how you’re acting,” she goes on. “It’s like—you’re purposely putting yourself at risk. I mean—is that what you’re doing, Poppy?”
Grayson’s warning comes back to me. Sometimes we invite darkness. Is that what I’m doing?
Anger bubbles up from nowhere. Why does everyone think they know how to live my life better than I do?
“Layla, I have to go.”
I hear her saying my name as I end the call.
* * *
Returning to my old neighborhood is a journey through space and time. Versions of Jack, of myself, vivid close memories dwell on every corner—in line at the coffee shop, reading the paper at our diner, jogging down the street toward the park. Even the fall of autumn leaves littering the ground, their earthy smell, reminds me of him, of us.
There is a tightness in my chest as I climb the stoop to our old building and push through the door.
I expect to see Richie, stooped and smiling. But the uniformed young man at the desk is a stranger. The smell—wood, floor polish, decades—is so familiar, so evocative of our life together, that it nearly buckles me over.
“Can I help you?” he asks.
He has a crooked nose, as if it was broken once and never healed quite right. But there’s a sweetness, an innocence to the sea-glass green of his eyes.
“Where’s Richie?” I ask. I look to the doorway behind the reception desk.
“Oh,” he says, turning to follow my gaze. “He retired, moved to Florida with his wife. He’s been gone a few months now.”
He always said he would; we never believed him. He was a fixture, an old New Yorker in an old New York–style job. I’m happy for him, but it’s just another reminder of how you can’t stop things from changing. Why does it never stop being a surprise?
“I’m here to see Merlinda, 7B.” I want to tell him I used to live here. But I don’t.
Instead I take it in, the towering ceilings, the marble floor, the dark wood wainscoting. New York, prewar, with the kind of character Jack loved, things that stood the test of time, that weathered and grew more beautiful. What I saw then was the water stains on the ceiling, the creaking old elevator that didn’t work as often as it did, the rust on the mailboxes, the cracks in the floor. I wanted crisp and new, clean, modern.
