by Lisa Unger
He glances at the screen. “And she was murdered just a few months before Jack.”
I show him the photograph of the wedding that Alvaro gave me, the image I took with my phone. I don’t know what happened to the original picture. The last time I saw it was when I handed it to Layla.
“She knew us,” I say. “She was at this wedding.”
“And where does this wedding fall on the timeline?”
I think about this. “Somewhere between the matchbook and Jack’s murder. I can get the exact date, sometime in June I think.”
He holds me in that dark gaze. “This is a lead, Poppy,” he says. “I’ll follow it up. I promise.”
I want more urgency than that. Not just another I’ll follow up. “How? How are you going to follow up? When?”
“I’ve got a few things I need to discuss with you first,” he says. “Related to some of the other information you gave me. You might want to sit down.”
We walk into the living space and he sits on the couch across from me.
“So, since you called me from Avidon’s and talked to me about your friend Merlinda, I’ve been doing some digging.”
I draw in and hold a breath, bracing myself for I don’t know what.
“I’m sorry.” He holds my eyes, practiced at delivering bad news. “She’s gone. She passed away.”
The news lands hard, bringing tears to my eyes. “How?”
“After a battle with cancer, she died in hospice.”
How did I not know she was sick? It hasn’t been that long since she lived next door to me, was my friend. Another person I neglected in the myopic nature of my grief. I close my eyes and say a little prayer for her. I’m sorry, Merlinda. I hope there was light on the other side for you.
“I have to admit, I was skeptical about what you told me. You know I don’t have much faith in dreams. Real memory is tricky enough. But I promised you I’d do my best.” Grayson is quiet a moment. Then, “So as part of this investigation, I went to see the attorney handling your friend’s estate, and they have, in fact, been trying to reach you. They’ve left messages at your office, sent a letter to your old address.”
He hands me the letter. It looks vaguely familiar, a letterhead I’ve seen. In the fog of the last year, did this fall through the cracks? Did I weave the information into my dreams?
“There is a safe-deposit box containing something Merlinda left for you.”
“Did you get it?”
“I can’t do that without a warrant,” he says. “I thought I’d see if you want to go together to the lawyer’s office.”
I know I should refuse him, that I should go alone and bring whatever it is to my own attorney. Let him handle it if whatever is there needs to be turned over to the police. But I’m tired of games, tired of waiting.
By the way Grayson’s shoulders are hiked, and how he’s leaning so far forward on the couch it looks like he could topple off, I know there’s more.
“What else?”
“Do you remember that killer for hire, the one my murdered CI told me about?”
I flash back to the sketch he showed me in the park. It seems so long ago now, but I won’t forget that face, the heavy brow and deep-set eyes. I nod to indicate that I remember.
“A body matching that description washed up by Chelsea Piers,” he says. “Same tats my CI mentioned helped us identify him. A career criminal by the name of Joe Knight—foster care, in the system from age 15, armed robbery, aggravated assault, manslaughter. He fits the profile, matches the description of witnesses at the scene of Jack’s murder.”
My first thought is a selfish and cold one: great. Another dead end.
If someone hired him to kill Jack, now we’ll never know who. I’ve taken so many strange and winding roads away from Jack and back again, walked so many dark alleys deep into my own dreams, twisted memories that weren’t even real. There have been so many dead ends in this maze. I’m afraid I’ve lost him forever.
“First thing I always ask myself about a guy like that,” says Grayson. There’s a smile beneath his grim expression. He obviously loves his job, however dark. “How is he getting paid?”
I think about this a moment. “I’d guess it’s a cash business.”
“You’d think, right?” There’s a little glitter of excitement in his eyes.
He takes some folded paper out of the inside pocket of his jacket and hands it over. It’s a copy of a bank statement. I scan the charges and withdrawals. Hit men use their debit cards at Starbucks just like everyone else, apparently. They watch Netflix and shop on Amazon. Some of the charges are highlighted: an army-navy store, a pawnshop, a shooting range.
There are regular cash deposits, some small, some large. There’s a larger, recurring deposit that seems to come consistently every two weeks like a paycheck. At first I don’t recognize the company name. It knocks around for a moment. When it clicks, I take in a sharp breath, can’t get any air. The room starts to spin and the bottom falls out of my world. Again.
But this time, I’m still here.
30
The small bank is quiet as we enter, an older branch with worn carpets and uninspired Formica surfaces, unflattering fluorescent lighting. The place has an air of desertion. A woman in a dark coat argues quietly with a young male teller, but otherwise it’s empty. Do people even go to banks anymore in this online world? Money has become just numbers on a screen, debits and credits, red and green. Even our cash comes from machines.
“I’ll wait for you here,” says Grayson, taking a stance by the door like a security guard. “Give you some space with it.”
Part of me wants him to come with me, to be there when I see what’s waiting. He’s right that I’m stronger. The world seems solid, the ground beneath my feet firmer now. But what kind of wormhole will open in my world when that safe-deposit box lid comes off. What’s in there? Hesitating a moment, I finally leave him to approach the teller. She’s a young woman who looks old, wearing a retro lime green shift, her red hair pulled into a tight twist, a quizzical frown on her face.
“I have a key for a safe-deposit box that was left to me by a friend who’s passed,” I tell her. She squints at the paperwork through bug-eyed specs, enters a few strokes on the keypad in front of her, then without a word retrieves a ring of keys.
“This way, please.”
What did Merlinda leave for me? I think I know. But my only memory is a dream, something I’m not sure ever happened.
My throat is dry with fear as I follow the tiny woman, her kitten heels clicking purposefully on tile floors. We travel down a long hallway and finally at the end she pushes us through a heavy door, into a bright room that’s as cold as the interior of a refrigerator.
I imagined something different, a wood-paneled space, maybe with an oak table and rows of copper doors. Instead, it’s more like a gym locker room, the same lavender and gray of the branch lobby.
She puts a key in number 329, and leaves me alone, closing the door with a click that seems final. I breathe against my hammering heart.
Whatever it is, it’s been sitting for a long time. How can it hurt me now? How much more pain is there left in my universe?
“What is it?” I ask Jack, who is sitting on one of the molded plastic chairs that tuck inside the cubby where you’re meant to bring your box.
But he doesn’t talk much these days. When I do see him, he’s usually walking ahead of me on one of the trails I wander. Sometimes he lounges by the fire. These are all the things he would have loved about a house in the woods.
I still dream of him, too. The other night I dreamed we had a child together, a little boy who looked just like him with sandy hair and wide, soulful eyes. They walked ahead of me on a wooded path, hand in hand. I followed but they drew farther and farther away. The faster I chased, the more distant they became until they turned
a corner and were gone.
He was ambivalent about fatherhood, but he would have been a good dad—a great one. Loving, patient, fun—exactly the kind of husband he was. I never knew his father, beyond what he and Sarah told me. A hard worker, honest, maybe too strict, a stick figure in Jack’s life, someone consumed by his job, plugging in now and again for awkward games of catch, or fishing trips steeped in silence. Maybe that’s what Jack remembered about fatherhood. Maybe that’s all we know, what our parents model for us, until we try to do better.
“It wasn’t just that,” ghost Jack says. “The world. I always thought it was a beautiful place—magical and full of awe-inspiring surprises. But it’s dark, Poppy. You see that now, too, don’t you? Whatever light there is gets swallowed.”
“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “But you’re wrong. It’s both. Shadow and light.”
I turn the key in the lock. Then I pull the drawer from its sleeve and open it slowly.
I let out a long breath when I see my pink backpack stuffed inside. I lay my hand on it, feel the shapes of things beneath the thin fabric. I wore this pack when I trekked the Fakahatchee Strand with Jack, searching for the ghost orchid. It was on my back as I rode a boat down the Amazon River, hiked a lush and twisting trail to a stunning waterfall on Kauai. Once, it caused me to get stuck in a tight spot spelunking a lava tube in Iceland. Jack had to shimmy it off my back so that I could get free. It has an energy I can feel in my palm.
I heft it out and lay it on the table, pull the zipper slowly and start to remove the contents. There’s a slim black notebook, filled with Jack’s scrawling handwriting. A burner cell phone, its battery long dead. And there’s a large envelope, which I open to retrieve a manila file. Inside there’s a stack of photos.
Then, I’m time traveling again.
* * *
Everyone was gone. Jack’s funeral was over. Layla had sent my mother packing under some weak protesting. But I think Mom was relieved to leave my grief behind her. Real emotion made my mother uncomfortable.
I could cry to my father, throw myself at him in adoration, follow him around with my camera. But Mother bristled at too much of me. That’s enough, Poppy. A quick pat, a kiss on the head, and then a little push away. I was glad to see her go, too. On the other hand, I didn’t want her to go, either, and part of me resented her for leaving. The complicated twists of the mother-daughter dance.
“Just try to keep moving, sweetie,” she said as she left. “Try to not wallow.”
We left the dishes in the sink.
“Someone will come in to clean tomorrow,” Layla said. Her face was as drawn and exhausted as mine. Mac stood by the window looking out. His phone convulsed on the countertop; for once, he ignored it.
“I’ll do it,” I said listlessly, lying prone on the couch. The pills Layla gave me, who even knew what, had me numb to my core, empty of feeling.
“You will not,” she said. I think she’d taken something, too—and she’d been drinking. As had I. I relished the nothingness, the distance of my pain. “You’ll rest. Or do whatever you need to do. No one ever needed to do dishes to feel better.”
“No,” I agreed. “No one ever did.”
Mac seemed cored out, his shoulders sagging, eyes dark with fatigue. “We’re going to do whatever it takes to get you through this,” he said, taking me into his arms. “I promise that.”
Thank God for them, I thought distantly. Where would I be without them? Friends are the family you choose.
“Come with us,” Layla begged.
“It’s okay,” I lied. “I’ll come over first thing in the morning.”
All I wanted was dark and quiet, my nerve endings raw, my body aching. Just quiet.
“Then I’ll sleep on your couch,” she said. “You won’t even know I’m here.”
Mac drew her gently away. “Stop smothering her, Layla,” he said. “She needs some space.”
“I’m not smothering her,” she said, high-pitched and defensive. “Am I, Poppy? Okay. Okay. I am. I’m sorry.”
And then they were gone. The silence expanded. The apartment rambled. I floated on a medicated cloud, lying awake in a haze, blissfully blank. There’s no tomorrow, I thought, no yesterday. Just this empty, disembodied moment. On the bedside table, there was a bottle of pills that Layla had left. Ativan, did she say? Or Bennies. What was that even? It sat like a sentry, ready to rush in and save me from the waves of pain, grief, rage that were beating distantly at the inside of my brain.
What if I took them all? Jack disappeared through a dark doorway in the world. Couldn’t I just follow him? The bottle rattled in my hand, the water glass right there. How long would it take? How quickly would the darkness swallow me?
That’s when I heard the beeping, somewhere muffled, so faint. Then it stopped. Long enough that I could think maybe I hadn’t heard it at all, or that it was in another apartment, or something outside, down the hall.
Then it started again. It went on and on, until finally it drew me to my feet. I walked from room to room, finally coming to stand inside our closet. The beeping stopped but I stayed, waiting. The shelves lined up to the ceiling, the tallest of them only Jack could reach without a step stool. And that’s where he kept all his old junk. When the beeping started again, that’s where it was coming from.
I grabbed a chair from the dining room, hauled it awkwardly down the hall, banging into walls. After digging through piles of sweaters, shoving aside boxes that had sat unopened since college, stacks and stacks of photographs and term papers, I found it, far back in the deepest corner. My pink pack, a single red flashing light shining through the thin fabric. It was heavier than I expected as I took it down to the floor and tore it open.
A phone, beeping with the alert that it was about to die. The matchbook with Elena’s scrawled name. Photographs. A slew of articles. Oh, god. Oh, no.
* * *
Back in the ugly white light of the bank vault, I let all the feelings from that night wash over me. The wrenching betrayal, the terror, doubles me over once more, and tears come with a strangled sob. That drawing in my journal, where the tiny figure falls and falls into the widening spiral. That’s me.
I remember thinking that I had to get as far away from everything, everyone, as I could. I dressed and took that pack, brought it to Merlinda. Why did I bring it to her? I’m not sure what my logic was. Maybe it was because she was a friend who wasn’t connected to the mess of my life. Because I trusted her, her goodness, her wisdom. Maybe because she was right down the hall, and someone no one would—if anyone was looking—suspect as my confidant. Scenes come back in a slide show of foggy memories: Merlinda answering the door in a robe, worried and kind.
Please, Poppy, stay with me. Let’s call your friends.
No one can know about this.
The hallway, the elevator, Richie the doorman calling after me. Then I ran, as far away from my life, from myself as I could.
Everything, I remember thinking. Now I’ve lost everything.
* * *
What’s real and what isn’t real? It’s a question I never thought I’d ask myself. We’re asleep for half our lives, our bodies at rest and our minds journeying to another space and time, a twisted world woven from our experiences, our imaginations, our desires and fears. And something more maybe.
Jung thought that dreams were a doorway into the collective unconscious, into the mystical. Freud thought they were a canvas for the id. Before Jack died, before the pills altered my brain chemistry, I didn’t have an especially active dream life. The idea that there might be any confusion between those two worlds never occurred.
The camera lens is the unwavering, seeing eye. And photographs are moments irrevocably captured. That trick of light and shadow, of here and gone, that is the passage of time foiled by the captured image. That moment, whatever it was, however brief, was real, the photograph say
s. It is the prisoner of this frame and it cannot deny itself. The eye is unreliable, memory even less so. The photograph in its pure form is the unimpeachable witness to what was.
“Don’t do anything stupid, Poppy.”
This was Detective Grayson’s warning as we parted ways in front of the bank. My head is spinning with what I learned from him, from the contents of that pack. Finally, everything makes sense, and I desperately wish it didn’t. I remember the advice from ghost Jack: Stop asking questions, Poppy. You’re not going to like the answers.
“Get yourself someplace safe,” Detective Grayson went on. “And stay there for a while. This is up to me now. Wait for my call.”
“Be low risk for a while?” I say.
“Can you handle that?” he asks, skeptical.
I don’t go back to Noah’s, or to Layla’s, or to my Chelsea high-rise. Instead, I wander around the old neighborhood—past the café where Jack and I used to sit and have coffee and read the paper. Past the corner deli where he used to stop for flowers—not orchids. Past the entrance to the park where we most often entered on our morning run, and where he entered alone on the last morning of his life. I sit on the bench there and listen—to the traffic, to the birdsong, to the kids shouting and laughing on the playground.
Jack’s ghost is everywhere, and so is mine. The girl I was then, Jack’s wife, Poppy Lang. But Jack is gone. Mac, Layla and I released his ashes off the Brooklyn Bridge, as was his wish. And I am gone, too. The woman who walks these streets today is not the same. I died that morning in the park with him, have died a hundred times since then, in dreams, in my imagination. I am someone new.
I need to call Layla, can’t keep this from her—even though it’s the end of everything, for both of us.
She answers on the first ring.
“Where are you?” she asks, her voice wavering. I can tell she’s been crying. Does she know everything already? Have the police already called her?
