We made a hell of a family tree. Edgar. My father. Me. But I wasn’t going to stand there and let him tell me I was lucky because Karly was dead.
“I’m going to walk around a little,” I said in a clipped tone, swallowing down my desire to shout at him. I just needed to get away, or I’d say something I’d regret.
“Yeah, whatever. We’ll get a hot dog later, right?”
“Right.”
“Is Karly coming?” Edgar asked. “She’s a keeper, that one.”
This time it really was Edgar’s age. He’d already forgotten.
“No,” I replied, not wanting to say it again. “No, Karly can’t make it today.”
“Too bad. You don’t deserve a girl like her, you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
I left my grandfather in front of Nighthawks. He didn’t need me to stay with him. He’d be there for hours some days, staring at the painting and telling everyone who came up beside him the story of Daniel Catton Rich.
I had nowhere in particular that I wanted to go. I just needed to breathe, but that was hard to do in here. It was a crowded day inside the museum, with tourists crushed in front of the standards like American Gothic and Water Lilies. I wandered from wing to wing, barely stopping, my chest heavy. When I went into the men’s room to wash my face, I turned on the faucet at one of the sinks and realized that just the sound of water was enough to make me hyperventilate. Even the barest trickle crashed through my head. I had to turn it off and grab the counter for balance, and my reflection stared back at me, still as opaque as a total stranger. I staggered back out of the restroom in a sweat.
Faces stared at me wherever I went. That was how I felt. I imagined eyes on me everywhere. The people, pushing around me, blocking my way, all looked at me as if they were murmuring under their breath, “He’s the one. His wife died.” Even the paintings haunted me. Warhol’s Elizabeth Taylor flirted with me from behind her red lips and blue eye shadow. The younger of Renoir’s two sisters studied me curiously from under her flowered hat. They were so close, so vivid, so bright that I expected them to come to life.
I know what you’re thinking. I was in the midst of a panic attack. That’s the explanation for what happened next. My grief, my anger over Edgar, my hyperventilation, my face in the mirror — it all came together, and I began seeing things that weren’t there. Maybe you’re right, but that’s not how it felt.
It felt real.
As real as it had been when I was drowning in the river.
I was in the room with Seurat’s enormous pointillist masterpiece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, ten feet wide, nearly seven feet tall. I’d seen that work a thousand times, probably more. I could tell you the details from memory: the long pipe of the man in the muscle shirt, the monkey with the perfectly curved tail, the parasols all in different colors. It was one of the museum’s most famous works, and I couldn’t get anywhere close to it because of the crowd, so I stood at the back of the gallery, eyeing the painting over the heads of thirty or more people clustered in front of it. They made a kind of Grande Jatte themselves, different ages, races, heights, sizes, clothes, all frozen in wonder by the art.
Then my gaze drifted to one man with his back to me. What drew my attention was his jacket.
It was a leather motorcycle jacket, weathered and black, with parallel seams down the backs of the sleeves. The jacket was just like the one my father had been wearing that night when I was thirteen. That night when my life became Before and After. For years, I’d kept that jacket in a closet, unable to touch it but also unable to throw it away. After Karly moved in, she finally convinced me that the day had come to get rid of it. I burned it. It became ash. It no longer existed.
So it was a shock to see the man in front of the painting wearing a jacket of the exact same style.
Except, more than that, I realized that this was my father’s jacket.
When I looked closely, I could see the chocolate-brown bloodstains. They were soaked into the leather, a permanent reminder of the night that changed my life. Believe me, I’d memorized the pattern of the blood spray long ago, like the paintings I saw in the museum. I would never forget it.
The man in the coat glanced back, revealing his face. When he did, my knees buckled beneath me. I couldn’t stand; I had to grab for the wall to hold myself up. Our eyes met as dozens of people came and went between us. He looked at me; I looked at him. He reacted. He recognized me. I watched his steely blue-eyed gaze grab on to me like a predator spotting prey.
The encounter lasted only a second, and then he turned casually away and disappeared into the next gallery.
But I’d seen him. I’d seen myself.
My profile. My face. Just like at the river. That was Dylan Moran studying La Grande Jatte and wearing my father’s murder coat. The shock of it left me paralyzed, but he didn’t look surprised to see me at all. It was as if he’d been waiting for that moment, waiting for me to find him.
I shook myself out of my coma and pushed off the wall. I headed across the exhibit floor, weaving through people in my way, who didn’t understand the impatience of the crazed man pushing past them. My doppelgänger had disappeared, but I rushed after him into the next hall, where I stopped to pick him out in the crowd.
Where was he?
Where was I?
But the man I’d seen wasn’t in the room. He’d already vanished.
I continued to the next gallery, and then the next, and finally I ran down the stairs to the first floor of the museum and all the way out to the busy traffic on Michigan Avenue. I collapsed on the steps near one of the green lions facing the street. It was a summer afternoon, warm and perfect. People surrounded me everywhere, but there was no Dylan, no man in a biker jacket, no identical twin taunting me.
I sat on the museum steps and breathed in and out like a piston. I thought about Edgar, his memory failing, his mind drifting around in time, unable to distinguish what was real and what wasn’t.
Maybe the same thing was happening to me.
Maybe this was what it felt like to go insane.
Chapter 4
“Your blood pressure is elevated,” Dr. Tate told me. “So’s your heart rate. But that’s not surprising. All of your other vitals are normal. As far as the scans go, I don’t see any physical abnormalities in your brain that would explain what you’re seeing. No tumors, no aneurysm. So that’s a good thing.”
“I’m just crazy,” I said.
The doctor gave me an affectionate smile. “I wouldn’t go that far, Dylan.”
She got up from the rolling chair and went to the sink in the examining room to wash her hands. When I heard the water, I twitched a little. I’d come to her clinic on Irving Park just east of the river without an appointment, but I knew that Alicia Tate would always fit me in. She’d known me since I met her son Roscoe in sixth grade. After my own mother was killed, she became a kind of surrogate mother to me. As with Edgar, I didn’t make it easy. I could appreciate everything she’d done for me now better than I did as a hostile teenager. I also appreciated that after Roscoe died in the accident, she didn’t blame me for his death.
That made one of us, because I definitely blamed myself.
I picked up the picture of Roscoe that sat on her desk. Four years later, I could still hear his voice in my head, and I missed him more than ever. The photograph didn’t show him smiling. Roscoe rarely smiled; he was serious, both as a boy and as a man. That didn’t serve him well in school, where the other kids picked on him because he was bookish, small, and black. I wasn’t much bigger myself, but Edgar had taught me to be a dirty fighter, and I beat up the largest of the bullies who taunted Roscoe. They didn’t bother him after that, and Roscoe and I became best friends. That fight was also the last time I ever felt like he needed any help from me. Instead, Roscoe was the one who became my rock through my many ups and downs.