Peter stops moving suddenly. He plants his feet—his pricey shoes, his Italian leathers—in a stance, as if he’s going to box or segue into a yoga move, and Dana breaks away.
She twirls toward the dining room, her hands high above her head. She bows and swoops, her hair loose and flying down over her face. She is a tree, waving in a storm, a cloud diving across the sky, a speck of dust on the wind. She is everything and nothing, all at the same time. She is no one, and she is everyone. She stands on her toes, and she is amazed at her lightness, at her balance, at her ability. I’m channeling Anna Pavlova, she almost says, but then she sees Peter’s face.
“It doesn’t matter what they saaaaay,” she sings, and her voice is loud and strong and true, like the Shirelles. She is the Shirelles. “ ’Cause, baby, it’s yoooou.” She ends with a pirouette. She ends in an awkward quasi split on the dining-room rug, her head thrown back, her arms reaching toward where Peter bends over the end table for his coffee.
“Is that supposed to mean something, Dana?”
“Why, whatever do you mean, darlin’?” she says, and she is awed by her own voice, by the southern lilt she’s managed. It’s such a wondrous thing, this new freedom, this letting-go that allows her to be all things, all people, that allows her to transcend space and even time, to escape the confines of her flesh and bones, to show her that all separation is merely illusion.
“Are you trying to accuse me of something?”
“Oh,” she says. “But wait!” She stands up. She cups her hands around her mouth and closes her eyes, and her voice is haunting and sad. She is the Cure, singing on a beach with palm trees, somewhere she’s never been, somewhere in a video, and the words come out and fly across the dining room to Peter in his chair, sliding his feet out of his shoes, clutching his coffee cup, as she sings these words she didn’t know she knew: “I’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you that I almost believe that they’re real. . . .”
“All right,” he says. “I’ve had enough.”
“Isn’t it wonderful?”
“No,” he says. “It isn’t. You are crazy, Dana,” but Dana smiles. He doesn’t understand. He looks so small, struggling up in his stocking feet, so pitiful and lost. She wants to say, What happened to us, Peter? She wants to say, We loved each other once, but she doesn’t. He looks as if he might run at her, wrestle her to the floor. He looks as if he might restrain her, and she slides sideways, dancing. She is on her toes, so light she could almost fly, so light she’s iridescent—a moth, a butterfly. She moves faster and faster. She’s so much faster than he is, so much lighter than he is, there in his stocking feet, there stuck to the floor. She sees him reach for her, his hands fumbling toward her as she flies forward through the dining room, past him, past the living room, but she’s too quick for him.
“Stop!” He stands still again, stares at her as if she is a wild boar charging, or maybe a bird, flitting, flapping, free of its cage. “Stop! You’re out of your mind, Dana, which you’d know if you had any sense left at all.”
“Hmmm.” Dana stops her twirling, her flying. She stops dead still in front of him, so close they are nearly touching. “Maybe just a little sense,” she says, and she sticks a wad of paper, a small, crumpled gob, inside his hand and closes it, pressing his fingers in place with her own, as if she were pressing the edges of a pie, fluting the crust, trapping fruit inside, or pecans, instead of his receipt from the Days Inn. She backs away, flaps her arms. She stands on her toes, snatches her purse, and twirls toward the door as Peter makes a grab for her, two, three grabs, but she’s too quick for him. He can’t fly.
She drives out of her neighborhood without looking to either side. She concentrates on the road, oblivious to the aging houses with their alleyway yards and their fading summer gardens, to Wanda on her front porch and Lon Nguyen making his rounds. She speeds along the streets with the radio on, with St. Christopher watching from the visor. These last weeks, while the threads inside her frayed and tugged, she was afraid of Peter—afraid he’d leave her, that he’d go out one night and never come back home. But now the threads have broken clean away, ripped and floated off as if they never were. Now she doesn’t care if Peter looks at her with love or hate. She doesn’t need to know where he sleeps or who he sleeps with, whether he tossed the cat into the yard or if Spot found a small unnoticed gap in the basement wall, a half-closed window—a forgotten space. It doesn’t matter. Everything’s forgotten spaces now, and Dana, too, is sliding—Thumbelina, slipping through.
She jams her foot down harder on the gas and rounds the corner. Nothing can keep up with her thoughts; they’re everywhere at once. She knows everything all at the same time, the secrets of the universe presenting themselves like gems before her. The world is alive with motion. It shimmers beneath her, above her, all around her.
She pulls the car up to the George Washington Bridge, the upper level, but she doesn’t have the thirteen dollars. Never bought the pass. Shit. Traffic fans out on either side of her, stifling her, shutting her in. She eases her foot off the brake, and the car inches forward as she swats around the inside of her bag, feeling for bills she hadn’t thought to bring. The traffic moves in a sudden gush, sending her to the tollbooth.
“Thirteen dollars,” the cashier says. Her voice is vague, unpleasant. Her voice is cold like Peter’s, her eyes already off Dana and on the next car, all of them lined up like sheep going to slaughter. Or, Dana thinks, did sheep actually go to slaughter? In such large groups? Or did they merely get sheared, only the occasional sheep going for mutton?
She looks up. “Do sheep go to slaughter?” she asks the uniformed woman in the tollbooth.
“Thirteen dollars,” the cashier says again, as if there’s been some sort of misunderstanding, as if Dana hadn’t heard her correctly the first time. “You’re holding up traffic.” She reaches for something. A telephone? A gun? Dana can’t see. A terror-alert button? Dana sticks her head out farther, but all she can see is the woman’s side, her hand reaching forward in the tiny space.
“Please!” she yells, much louder than she’d intended. “Don’t shoot! Don’t call them. I’m not . . . I swear I’m not dangerous. I’m not a terrorist. I’m only disorganized. I should have thought ahead, but I’m not . . . I’ve not felt quite . . . well, quite right lately. But I can promise you I’m not a threat. I just—”
The woman isn’t looking at Dana. She’s leaning forward. Her lips are moving. Butterflies flit around her head, filling up the tiny booth. Dana jams her foot down on the gas, and the Toyota jerks forward into a sea of cars. “Oh, shit,” she says. She changes lanes. She shifts from spot to spot, but it’s a Friday evening, and traffic barely moves. She feels incredibly large and noticeable, her car with all the bumper stickers a dead giveaway. She imagines Peter being phoned. “She’s crazy,” he’ll tell them. “She’s a danger to herself and others. To society. To the nation as a whole. It’s only the cat she likes. Adores our son, of course—she’d give her life for him. Only he and the cat are safe, and in my opinion as a celebrated lawyer—I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to look at my shoes—the cat is suspect, too. In fact, he may not even really be a cat—a plant of some kind, a hybrid, a tracker. My friend and I, the one with the large breasts? Allow me to show you Exhibits A and B. We’ve discussed it, the Tart and I, and we’ve decided. They gotta go!” She glances at the visor. St. Christopher shakes his head.
The traffic is nothing but a snarl. Her car is stopped in the lane. A siren smears the night. She feels her body strain against the seat belt; the harness cuts into her shoulder. She unsnaps the thing and takes a jagged breath. The siren is inside her ears, inside the car. It screams and pries inside her brain. She opens the car door and steps outside. She’s forgotten her shoes, but she can’t feel the pavement. She’s so light her feet are barely touching down. She looks out over the cars toward the Hudson, and it shimmers, it hums, it sings, eclipsing the sound of the siren with its lovely, lilting song. She c
limbs up the side of the bridge, and her body is an ash floating on air. She flaps her arms, lightly, delicately, gracefully, stepping out into the current so she can fly.
But something stops her, pinning her arms against her sides, tucking her wings back inside. Something lashes her to the earth; to the harsh, unyielding concrete of the bridge; to the screaming of ambulances and people; to a large woman with jet-black hair and bangle bracelets running toward her. She tries to turn around, tries to see behind her, where she’s caught—a net, she thinks, she’s caught in a huge net like a fish—but something stops her. This thing she can’t see, it stops her. And then it whispers in her ear. “Just relax,” it says. “It’s over.”
“No,” she says, she screams, but it isn’t really her screaming—it’s a sad, thin wraith inside her, struggling to get free. The voice flies from her mouth and sails into the air above the Hudson, streams like the tail of a kite she made in art class as a child, filled with crumpled bows and folded magazine pictures she found stacked up on the sun porch—the blues and browns and oranges of her mother’s magazines. It blew off in the wind in April. It flew away.
“No,” she says again. She motions to the woman with the bangle bracelets. She motions with her eyes, and the woman nods. She moves toward Dana on the bridge, her hands outstretched. Her sari drifts around her on the wind. St. Christopher, Dana thinks, and she smiles. He’s ducked inside the woman with the sari and the bangle bracelets. He’s letting her know. He’s found this body to inhabit for a moment, to let her know he’s with her still. St. Christopher is always there. He never lets her down.
She sees her mother in the crowd. She sees the Poet and the friend who died of uterine cancer. “Sheila!” Dana screams. “Sheila! It’s me! It’s Dana!” But it comes out wrong. It comes out thin and wispy, another ribbon trailing off into the sky, and Sheila waves. She’s wearing a tank top and shorts, and her hair has grown back lush and full. There are so many people. She looks for Peter, but he isn’t there. Her car stands silent in the stack of traffic. She sees it when the crowds move, when they make a path for the EMTs, and then there is a second, but it stretches out into forever. There’s a second when she flaps her arms, when she is free, when the owner of the disembodied voice has finally let her go and the EMTs have not yet strapped her to the stretcher—there’s a second when she flaps her arms and they are long and graceful. They sparkle with the specks of the bay, the foam from the tops of the waves, the sparks from the tops of the world, the tiny bits of broken stars from all the universe that rest, for that one endless second, in her wings. She lifts them up, up, and they are soft, and all the world shimmers.
CHAPTER 28
It’s nearly midnight when Jack’s cell phone rings, but he isn’t sleeping. Margie left a message on his answering machine that afternoon, and he’s played it so many times he knows it by heart. Maryanne’s in labor—about to have the baby. It’s up to Kyle to decide how much a part, if any, Jack will play in their lives, but she felt he should know; Kyle is his son, too. Jack’s thought about calling her back to find out if Maryanne’s okay, if the baby’s okay. Kyle looked pretty rough in the restaurant, pretty ragged, and the way he bolted out is definitely cause for worry. It’s late, though, and Jack doesn’t want to press his luck with Margie, who usually hates him.
Sooner or later he’ll hear from his son. The apartment key is on his dresser in a small ashtray he uses to collect change, now that he’s stopped smoking. After losing track of the charm, he’s learned his lesson. Although whether to use it or not was a choice he’d hoped he wouldn’t have to make, that charm was integral to the case when or if it comes to trial. He hates to think the facts will point to Dana killing her neighbor, but Jack will go where the evidence takes him, unless . . . unless it takes him to his son, and he hopes to God it doesn’t. He turns over. The bedspread lies crumpled on the floor, and the sheets are a tangled rope at the foot of the bed.
When the phone rings, he jumps. It could be Kyle or Margie; it could be the hospital. He sticks on his reading glasses and glances into his phone, but the number isn’t one he knows. “Hello,” he says. “Moss.”
“It’s Peter Catrell,” a somewhat slurred voice informs him.
“Why are you calling me at—he glances at his clock—midnight, Mr. Catrell?”
“It’s Dana,” Peter says.
Jack sits up, props the pillow against his headboard. “What about her?”
“I was watching the news,” Peter says. His voice is shaking. He clears his throat. “I think she might be dead.”
“Who? Dana? Your wife?” Jesus. “You sure?”
“No,” Peter says, and Jack sits up straight, swings his legs over the edge of the bed. “Apparently somebody jumped off the bridge. I don’t know . . . I missed the first part of the— Anyway, the local news panned in on Dana’s car. The driver’s-side door was open and everything. The bumper stickers. I saw the bumper stickers, and I knew it was— Her Toyota was just there, stopped in the middle of traffic, by the tollbooths on the George Washington Bridge. She was in such a hurry, they said, she didn’t even close the door.”
“In a hurry?”
“To jump, I guess! To die!”
“That true? That sound like your wife?”
“No. I mean, I don’t know. She was upset. We had an argument.”
“About what?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Actually, it might matter.” And it would matter a lot more, Jack thinks, if the argument got out of hand. Did he have more than a peripheral impact on what happened to Dana? Did Peter kill the Steinhauser woman and send his own wife over the edge—gaslight her, like in that old movie? Her face comes back to him, her stick-thin arms that afternoon, the way she looked up when he said he had to get down to the office, the fear in her eyes when he asked her to come back in the next day. He remembers stopping in her entryway, scanning the desk for details, for anything that might help with the case. Remembers his instincts telling him to stay. He wishes now he had—that he’d done something, said something, to change the course of events.
“Like I said, we had a fight,” Peter says as Jack pulls a shirt off the back of a chair. She was acting really crazy, singing about a photograph. She thought I was— She found a receipt for a hotel and figured I was having an affair.”
“Yeah? Imagine that.” Jack tugs on his pants and tucks in his shirt. In the bathroom he runs a comb through his hair, brushes his teeth, throws cold water on his face, letting Peter babble on speaker from where he’s set his cell on top of the john. “Listen,” he says when he’s dried his face, when he’s laced his shoes and buckled his holster, when he’s ready to go out the door. “Listen, Catrell. Could you hang up so I can call around, find out what’s going on?”
“Oh,” Peter says. “Yes. Of course. I—”
“I’ll get back to you,” Jack says, and he jogs out to the driveway. Inside the Crown Vic, he grabs his radio, and when a faintly midwestern-sounding voice comes on, he says, “What do we have on a suicide? On the GW Bridge? Tonight.” He looks at his watch. “Last night now.”
“Unidentified woman.” The dispatcher’s voice comes through static; the air is heavy with storms. “Five-eight, hundred twenty pounds. Light brown hair. Early forties. The car’s registered to a Dana Catrell.”
“Right,” he says. “Suicide?”
“Attempted suicide. A commuter got out of his car and grabbed her before she went over.”
Jack releases the breath he only now realizes he’s been holding. “That’s good,” he says. “That’s great. Where’d they take her?”
“Bellevue,” the dispatcher says. “The ambulance was routed over to Bellevue on account of an accident on the—”
“What time?”
“Nine thirty-five.”
“Thanks,” Jack says. “Appreciate your help.”
“Sure thing,” the dispatcher says. “Have a good one.”
Jack knows very little about mental illness. He
knows that his mother suffered from depression the year leading up to her death and that his father was understandably depressed after she died. He suspects there was something going on with Margie when they were married—still is, probably—an anxiety issue, although he never knew exactly what it was, only that she sometimes looked like she was crawling out of her skin. She was high-strung, she used to tell him—that was why she liked to have a drink now and then. It settled her nerves, she said. It calmed her down. If anything good came out of all that nightmare mess with Margie, it was that she let the boys see what can happen when you get drawn in, give in to your addictions. She’s shown Kyle how not to live his life.
Jack hits the REPLY button on his cell, and Peter picks up on the first ring.
“Moss?”
“Your wife’s in the hospital. In the ER,” he says. “Bellevue.”
“She’s all right?”
“I doubt that.”
“But she’s alive.”
“Yeah,” he says. “She’s alive. She didn’t jump. Somebody grabbed her.”
“On the bridge, you mean?”
“Listen,” Jack says. “I wasn’t there. Suppose you talk to her about it.”
“Sure,” Peter says. “Sure thing, Detective. And thanks. I owe you one.”
Jack ends the call and sets the phone on the seat beside him. He figures Peter’s afraid Dana might say something about him or about the photograph that Jack is now certain exists or did at some point anyway. He’s probably worried about his reputation, his professional image, that his wife’s mad ravings might shed too much light on things he wants kept under wraps. In fact, his involvement with the murder might go far deeper than that, his distress more about his own well-being than Dana’s. There was concern in Peter’s voice, but though on some level Catrell clearly still has feelings for his wife, he’d throw her under the bus in a heartbeat. And, Jack thinks, turning the key and backing the Crown Vic down the driveway to the street, maybe that’s exactly what he’s done.
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