Neon in Daylight

by Hermione Hoby

“What the fuck!” she screamed, shoving the shoes against Kate’s chest and dropping them there. Kate didn’t stoop to catch them. Inez pushed her again in the solar plexus. “You were using me? To get to my fucking dad? To fuck my fucking dad?”

  Kate stood her ground, planted in her bare feet. The calm she felt was extraordinary. Now she knew.

  “I wasn’t using you,” she said, knowing Inez wasn’t listening.

  “All this time?” Inez said, raking her hands through her hair. “All this fucking time? This is beyond fucked up!”

  Was he really dead? Had it been a joke? Kate couldn’t see his body now, the crowd still swarming and yelling. She watched Inez blinking furiously against tears—of fright, she thought, as well as rage.

  “What the fuck just happened?” Inez asked. “What the actual fuck? Is he dead? Did he just fucking die right in front of us?”

  Gently, Kate reached for the shoes. She could hear, streets away, the wail and honk of an ambulance, or fire truck.

  

  He’d wanted one last orchestrated drama, Bill thought later. The modest stage of his glass table, his own party, his very blood sprayed magnificently on his friends. Those arthritic fingers fumbled, he missed, the cleanness of the moment botched, and the bullet slid past his heart. They wouldn’t let Bill in the ambulance; its doors slammed in his face on the street the second after the stretcher bearing his friend’s body had been bounced up and in. Family only. No family.

  He’d spun backward, flinging an arm into the oncoming traffic to claim a taxi to chase the ambulance to Beth Israel. Oblivious, as he slammed its door, sweating, to the crowd, to everything, to Inez yelling Dad from the fire escape of Casey’s apartment, where Kate—Kate—grabbed her wrist. Oblivious to the one red balloon that had drifted out from the party, wobbled above the heads of the fire escape, and begun to ascend, with serene intent, over the roofs of the East Village, as if it knew exactly where it was going.

  He died somewhere on Avenue A, sirens yowling, in an ambulance with two strangers. One of the paramedics, the younger man, twenty-two years old and three weeks on the job, took the old guy’s hand and made himself look straight into his eerie blue eyes, which were wide, wide open with shock, or wonder, or terror. But when the man let out a terrible heave, he couldn’t quell his flinch, nor his soft Oh my god. His fellow paramedic, dad to three teenage boys and two stepdaughters, a man who’d seen it all and had, through no fault of his own, stopped caring a long while back, looked away, made a tiny upward flick of his eyebrows—in weariness, or embarrassment—and checked the time on his watch.

  32

  Inez had fallen asleep on the bed and Kate, sitting upright beside her, took this as forgiveness, of sorts. Not that it mattered now, not that she needed it. She listened to Inez’s soft, heedless snores and felt herself wide awake. Which seemed right, somehow, as if it was her responsibility to stay here, alert and calm, keeping some kind of vigil until it was time to go.

  Earlier, on the street outside Casey’s, in the melee of hysterical party guests and angry neighbors and the Dopplerizing effect of the ambulance sirens, Kate had noticed a lycraed cyclist, stopped in the street to lift his phone and film the whole scene, grinning. The second Kate saw him, she’d grabbed Inez’s wrist hard, told her she was taking her home. And although Inez hadn’t fought her off, she’d yelled and cried at Kate as they walked, breaking free only to wipe away snot on her sleeve, after which she took Kate’s hand.

  There were traces of Bill’s smell in the apartment. Even as she’d faced the waning storm of Inez’s derangement, she’d noticed them, catching, while Inez had begun chucking small objects at her, the fragrance of coffee, paperback books, and beyond that, his clean, dry scent. A few minutes after Inez had flung herself on her bed, fetal, she’d finally got quiet and soft, and her crying faded out to occasional sniffs.

  Now Kate rolled over and settled into the enclave of Inez’s neck, sheltering there, making her own body very small.

  “Are you awake?”

  Inez made a sound, a grunt. Kate paused.

  “You just found me in a park,” she said. “And I was the wrong Kate. That’s all.”

  

  Daylight had begun glowing when she heard him come in. The whir of the lift, the latch, then his whispered words to the dog, whose skittering paws had seemed to greet him, a whine of happiness escaping. When the dog settled, there was full quiet again, and Kate didn’t move, she stayed curled with her eyes resting on the back of Bill’s daughter’s neck.

  The sound of his slow footfalls, then the shift of light in the room, so that she knew he was there, standing behind her in the doorway. He must have sensed she was awake, must have heard it, or felt it, taking in these two bodies. She didn’t move, but then he said her name, a question, quiet, incredulous. She turned, and he looked awful. Real blood, very dark, rust colored, obliterating splashes of fake. When he glanced beyond her, to Inez’s sleeping head, then back to her again, she just blinked back at him, refusing the question. He stood a moment longer and then his face changed and he began to nod slowly to himself. He looked at her one moment more then lifted his right hand, spread his fingers, and closed the door.

  When she woke, there was a faint burble of birdsong outside, which seemed a mistake; the wrong soundtrack playing by accident. She listened to the apartment and felt or knew that she was the only one not sleeping. Inez was on her back now, head flopped to the side, and Kate looked at the uncanny, incomprehensible, pure-pointless beauty of her face.

  She crept out into the main space and stood there, poised. She opened one door, but got a laundry cupboard. Opened another, and it was a bathroom. His bathroom, she said to herself, and she began opening cabinets, poking through jars of prescription pills, reading their labels—Klonopin, Zoloft—then investigating pots of things, aspirational unguents. She wanted to take something of his, find a small item to steal. She unscrewed a sleek black cylinder with lux in tiny gold letters running down its side, and sniffed. It was him, his smell, sandalwood, and even as she felt a flush of triumph and betrayal—this was the smell all along—she couldn’t stop breathing him—it—in. Nothing human, just some fancy fucking deodorant, a white stick of it in its matte black case.

  She looked up at the mirror, at her older face, the dark roots of her hair, her tired, sore eyes, and then back to the object in her hands. With her thumbnail she gouged dents in the smooth white dome, scoring it into mess, churning, fucking it up. She smeared a gobbet of it across the mirror, a bleary comet leaving its trail across her face as she watched herself. A kind of relief—a weird, deep peace—came from this small and stupid vandalism, and she left this apartment that wasn’t hers, left both of them, each in their own room, sleeping.

  The streets were quiet, gray, and strewn with small pieces of wreckage from a Halloween that had still not officially arrived: candy wrappers, the occasional guttered wig in shiny pink or scarlet. She wore a huge sweatshirt of Bill’s she’d stolen from where it lay over an arm of the sofa. Beneath this was the stained dress she longed to ball up and throw away.

  On a street corner, a vertical word: BAR, in enormous letters. Neon in daylight was strange. It was strange in the same way daffodils at dusk were strange: flowers born for bright mornings, bewildered to find themselves in shadows. It meant something new, neos, for a city that was always claiming to make itself new. As she passed a newsstand, with all its quaintness of magazines and papers, she found herself scanning headlines with a hungry dread. Would there be something about Casey? Or would that come tomorrow? Or not come at all? It was hard to gauge where people stood in the world, or where they had stood at earlier points in time—and who cared, who still cared? What was old news; what was new news?

  There was no mention of a former Factory superstar’s suicide party. Instead, the papers shouted the doom of a historic impending weather event, a MONSTER STORM. Of DEADLY
FURY. It was coming to WREAK HAVOC.

  The headlines reverberated with the same stentorian voice-over she’d heard when she looked at those subway movie posters of New York under destruction. This season . . . In a world . . . The excess of it was comic, infantile: a toddler building up a tower of blocks just to topple them.

  A man bustling toward her, leering like it was his day job to do so, launched “Keep on smilin’, sugar!” with a smirk. As she walked on, away from him, coming closer to her bodega and its bright signage, she saw a scrum of people hauling five-gallon containers of water, bags and bags of chips and pretzels and cookies, saying things to one another with the hearty pluck of those bracing for a shared misfortune. She walked past them slowly, wondering whether she was meant to be buying things too.

  In the apartment, Joni Mitchell mewled at her. How weird to hold eye contact with an animal.

  “Big storm coming,” Kate said finally. “But maybe you know that.”

  The cat blinked and tensed her small cat jaw.

  What was one meant to do in a storm? Go home, was the answer. Go to your home, find your tribe, hold them close, hunker down. But a cat called Joni Mitchell was not her tribe and this stranger’s apartment was not her home.

  In the city beyond the window, there was never not movement. The stop and start of cabs, honking, doors flung open, doors flung closed. The progress of bow-backed Chinese ladies with their enormous clear garbage bags stuffed full of plastic bottles, like giant speech bubbles in a travesty of consumerism. The darting scooters and bikes of delivery men, the cheerful discord of their bells as they dodged one another. Café owners, wide-stanced, hosing their storefronts, killing their jets, as white people stooped to scoop up shit from their glossy dogs. She could get lost in it, yes, in the way people did with TV: total passivity, meeting animation with your own motionlessness. But right now the screen was dead. No one, no people, just a darkening sky and a mean wind whipping down past storefronts, blind and faceless with their shutters down. The bodega was boarded up too now. Her bodega guy, whose name she had never known and would never know, because it was now, after all this time, too late to ask, must have shut up shop and gone home to his family. The red-and-yellow awning buckled violently, as if in the grip of unbearable pain. It was hard even to look at.

  Acknowledgments

  For your radiant brain, your dauntlessness, and for sending chills down my spine when you guessed I’d written most of it while listening to Philip Glass, Marya Spence. (And thank you, Philip Glass.) For your faith, intelligence, humor, diligence, and patience, Jonathan Lee. For your support, enthusiasm, and hard work, Andy Hunter, Erin Kottke, and everyone at Catapult. For your extraordinary wisdom and heart, Emily Stokes. For making the Atlantic not so wide, Lucy Sherwood and Brigid von Preussen. For your early encouragement, Amy Rose Spiegel, Osheen Jones, Alexandra Kleeman, Sophie Smith, Matthew Hammett Knott, Brenda Cullerton, Zhanna Chausovskaya. For providing a roof over a head, and pup therapy: Robin Bierstedt and Peter Mayer (and Harper); Hadley Freeman (and Arthur). For upstate retreats, Julia Joern. For a roomba with a view, Maxwell Neely-Cohen. For being a sensei in the gutter that night, Katherine Bernard. For New York in the first place, Jon Swaine. For a gift that got me started, Alison Wood. For nothing short of everything, but especially books and words and your great love, Phil Hoby and Jane Buckland. For your heroic sanity, Matt Buckland-Hoby. And, last, for being the reason this got written, and the reason, my love, Michael Barron.