The four tenants watched him speak with a carefully groomed EMT, who touched a gold crucifix on his chest and stepped back towards the van. “Thank you for your help,” came Owen’s voice, wheedling, pitching up. The man in all white retreated further, his hands up to brush off the thanks, and hopped up and into the bright interior lights, which were hard and loud on the blues and violets of dusk. Paulie couldn’t believe how quickly it vanished — was it safe to go that fast, he wondered — and started to cry almost immediately and asked whether Edith was still alive. Claudia let out a small gasp, and Edward put a hairy hand on the back of his neck. Adeleine shifted the two inches back into the foyer and slipped up the stairs with her milky palm on her mouth. In the summer twilight, the wallpaper that followed her upward glinted.
Owen, with his hands on his head and his fists full of hair, swayed a little. His mother’s renters observed as he grew still for a time, then how his eyes came open, newly serene. He brought his wrist up and checked his watch, approached the building and climbed the stairs as efficiently as a commuter at rush hour. As he reached Claudia and Edward and Paulie, he wiped his hands on his khaki shorts and settled on the step beneath where they stood. “It’s hard to know,” he said, his voice speculative and restrained. “How do you tell someone her life has become too much for her?” Above him, unsure of their position, they transferred their weight from one hip to another, fiddled with the bodega receipts in their pockets. Paulie worked two fingers into the band of Edward’s pants. Soon they turned to go, leaving Owen to look down the view he’d been born into, the tall narrow buildings of the same cheerful brown, the old trees reaching for each other above the street. He looked like a child transfixed, face pressed to cool aquarium glass, willing cognition from mystery.
~ ~ ~
A FEW DAYS AFTER the ambulance took Edith away, Edward and Claudia sat on his tiny couch, dark bottles of beer in hand, their faces lit by a stand-up comedy special. Paulie sat between them on the floor, leaning his head lightly against Claudia’s knee and occasionally patting Edward’s calf. They passed things to each other wordlessly as they laughed: Claudia handed Edward the carton of lo mein; Edward removed a cushion from the sofa and placed it behind Paulie’s neck; Paulie, without taking his eyes from the screen, removed a pinecone from his pocket and placed it on Claudia’s right foot. That afternoon, while the three of them picnicked in the park, Drew had placed a trash bag on their stoop: Claudia’s dirty laundry, worn underwear and coffee-stained nylon button-ups she hadn’t bothered to wash before she left him.
Paulie finished eating first and began silently farting. Edward’s face contorted as though witness to a quick accident, a knuckle hacked off in shop class.
“Paulie! What the fuck! That smells like if celery were homeless!”
Claudia choked on her beer at this, sprayed it out the side of her mouth, and Paulie’s face reddened furiously. They were hidden in the safety of the moment, the comfort of intimate ridicule, when the lights went out.
~ ~ ~
THE FACT THAT THE WOMAN who wasn’t Jenny and her bumbling street colleagues hadn’t managed to steal anything made the humiliation worse. A stronger person, thought Thomas, would brush this off with a laugh, the thought of blindly following a homeless woman into a McDonald’s and babbling on while she devoured greasy food, preparing to rob him. The way they had wrenched his body left a series of bruises, and on the back of his head he felt a raised welt, but he knew it didn’t warrant the two days he had spent almost entirely in the hotel room. He had accomplished nothing, eaten little, felt that he deserved to remain hungry. On the third evening he resolved to rise early the next day, take himself to a museum, and develop some plan in the unfettered mental space a concentration of art almost always gave him.
At the Museum of Modern Art the next day, Thomas wandered through a photography exhibit focused on Depression-era small towns, thought how the dirt-faced children were all most likely dead. Later, he nearly stumbled into a sculpture that took up a whole room, a netting of tied rope that seemed to fall naturally but was in fact hardened with shellac. Signage prohibited venturing in or under it, and he felt a silent camaraderie with the others who skirted the edges as he did, looked a lingering while, perhaps thinking of parts of their life that had once seemed flexible and had irrevocably calcified. He drank expensive coffee on the rooftop garden, which seemed to gather all the heat the gray city had to offer in the bright steel of its abstract sculptures, its polished wooden benches. Nearby a new family talked loudly, their idealism pouring into a high-tech stroller, and from the street below came the sounds of someone with a bullhorn, trying to rally people for a cause that was not quite discernible. Thomas decided to try the library again, if only for the quiet.
At his pleading, Edith had finally admitted, in the benumbed voice she seemed to reserve for protected memories, that the last they’d seen of their daughter was a shot of her tangled hair in a television news segment. He thought it possible that if a news network’s team had been there, so had some local reporters, and he resolved to spend the afternoon at the microfiche machine, watching the nicotine-colored celluloid whir by like water escaping a hole. At the base of the library, a sloping lobby that looked up at six floors of smudged glass walls and people moving slowly behind them, Thomas felt a new wave of surrender to the search and followed the feeling into the elevator.
Edith had been unsure of the precise year, had finally whittled it down to two possibilities, and Thomas requested the reels of the Bay Guardian and the San Francisco Examiner. His hand on the lever, he spent hours moving the blown-up images forward, hastening the speed, quickly absorbing then rejecting headlines about the rare heat wave, the murder of a police officer, the kidnapping of a child. At the end of it all he had nothing; the final strip reached its ends and retracted back to its spool, and the screen, deprived of anything to project, glowed eerily white. Comfort had replaced purpose: the idea of Jenny had splintered and lost focus, but he felt calmed by the dated technology, the rolls stored in their time-stamped boxes and handled by librarian after librarian, the stories they held immutable, and so he requested two additional rolls from later years.
His right wrist, loose, let the blown-up reproductions float by rapidly, and he basked in the therapy of the changing ochre light, the steady hum. He settled back into his chair and imagined soothing, unlikely futures, apartments he and Adeleine might rent and furnish together, children he might have and carefully watch.
And there, unmistakably, appearing for half a second in a photograph that championed most of a page, was Jenny.
~ ~ ~
TWO MORNINGS BEFORE all the bedside lamps and televisions went dark and the refrigerators stopped humming, Adeleine answered her door in a half sleep, convinced by the dream she’d just exited that it was Thomas standing on the other side. Owen was in and past her before she’d even rubbed the yellow-green sleep from her eyes.
“I saw you in the lobby when the ambulance came,” he said, crossing her living room in a series of little stomps, gauging the strength of the floor. He pushed a curtain aside to inspect the lock on the window. “You’re the only tenant I haven’t met.” Adeleine felt exposed in the yellow lace nightgown she’d answered the door in, looked down and saw the bow at the neck and the gauzy skirt as signs of weakness. She felt the slow creep of a man noticing her, and pulled a throw blanket from the sofa to wrap around her shoulders, but this only seemed to thicken his attention.