Maybe—
“That was great!” Adrienne exclaimed, coming through the door, glistening with vitality.
He watched as this very real woman drew a glass of water from the tap, and turning her eyes toward the ceiling, drank in long, slow gulps. His eyes washed over her, lingering here and there, then moving on, as if she were a banquet.
The glass drained, she set it down on the counter and cast a questioning look in Duran’s direction. “Penny for your thoughts,” she told him.
He opened his mouth to answer. Thought better of it. “No way,” he said.
She’d just come out of the shower when the telephone rang, and she picked it up.
“Oh, right,” she said. “Of course… yes. Yes it is. It went out three, four hours ago.” Because Duran was looking at her in a puzzled way, she put her hand over the receiver and whispered, “Trish.”
The real estate agent.
Then back to the phone. “Sure… no. No, it’s no problem. I keep a little penlight in my purse.” She rubbed at her hair with a towel, and laughed. “Yes I am one of those people. My nickname is Scout.” She leaned over, wrote something down. “Okay, if we have any trouble, we’ll give you a buzz.” Hung up the phone.
“What was that?” Duran asked.
“There’s a sump pump in the basement,” she told him. “And when the electricity goes out, it does ‘t work—and the basement floods. Which causes problems with the furnace. There’s some kind of generator that’s supposed to kick in, but half the time it doesn’t. So she asked if we’d go down and flick on the emergency switch.” Adrienne disappeared into the bedroom and returned with the tiny, plastic penlight that she carried in her purse. And, together, they went down.
It wasn’t a basement, really. It was a cellar with a dirt and gravel floor. The entrance was outside, behind the house, where a pair of angled metal doors opened onto a short flight of concrete steps. Adrienne led the way.
“Kinda spooky,” she muttered, as her flashlight cut through the darkness, a dim orange beam.
“The sump pump’s over there,” Duran told her, pointing to a contraption beside the south wall. Adrienne went over to it and, reaching down, flipped a switch. The pump clattered, and roared into action.
It was a little after nine when the electricity came back on. They were eating a pizza by candlelight, and drinking beer, when half the lights in the house flared. For a moment, it was as if they were caught in a photographer’s flash. They froze as the television revived with an accelerating growl of sound, followed by a spurt of canned laughter.
Duran began to chuckle, then fell silent when he saw the look of desolation on Adrienne’s face. Her eyes surged with tears.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
She shook her head, and looked away, hiding the tears.
“What is it?”
Finally, she said, “When I was looking for Nikki, in her apartment… the lights were off… because there’d been a short circuit. From the heater. And then Ramon threw the breaker and… suddenly, there she was. In the tub.” Tears rolled. She looked away.
“I’m sorry,” Duran told her.
He washed up—not that there was much—while Adrienne got back on the computer. She logged in their start and finish points on a mapping site, which then provided directions to Dr. Shaw’s office in New York. Finally, she searched for a hotel, grumbling about how expensive they were.
The thought of money made Duran frown because it was obviously an issue with Adrienne and, so far, she was paying more than her share. He didn’t have his checkbook with him and he didn’t have a bankcard. Adrienne found this unbelievable. “Everyone has an ATM card.”
“There was a bank in the basement of the Towers,” Duran told her. “I just went there when I needed cash.”
Adrienne tapped and clicked on the computer, as Duran drifted toward the living room. He’d been resisting the impulse to watch television because he knew that she disapproved of it, but he was exhausted by the uncertainties that, taken together, seemed to be his only real identity. He needed to not think. And television was good for that.
“I can’t see paying that kind of money just for a place to sleep,” Adrienne remarked as he walked past her. “I’ll take some numbers along. Maybe we won’t need to stay there.”
“Whatever,” Duran replied and, dropping onto the couch, picked up the remote. Ghosting from one channel to another, he finally settled on Dharma & Greg. Sat back. And disappeared into himself.
Chapter 25
They left in the dark like thieves in the night, with Duran riding shotgun.
Adrienne drove the entire way using cruise control, the speedometer frozen to sixty-five. The trip was pleasantly tedious, thankfully uneventful—and mostly silent. They could have been anyone. As they followed the shafts of their headlights north, Adrienne worried about her absence from work, while Duran sat beside her in a carefree mood, gazing into the darkness. If he closed his eyes, it was easy to imagine that he was leaving town with his girlfriend, heading off on a long vacation. Even when dawn overtook them, and the rising gray light revealed the bleak landscape of exurban New Jersey, Duran’s buoyant mood dimmed only a little.
Eventually, the Dodge carried them through the Lincoln Tunnel to Midtown, where they turned north, heading for the Upper West Side. When they found the address that Doctor Shaw had given her, Adrienne circled the neighborhood for fifteen minutes, waiting for a parking space to open up. Finally, one did.
“I hate to pay for parking,” she explained.
“I’m not surprised,” Duran replied. “After all the gas you’ve wasted, we probably can’t afford it.”
Shaw’s office was on the twenty-third floor of a smoked glass skyscraper that had probably seemed the height of modernity when it was built, circa 1965. Now, it had a forlorn and grimy look, as if the future had passed it by.
The office itself was more cozy than tidy, its walls hung with paintings, diplomas, and memorabilia, most of which were slightly askew. Books and papers stood in stacks on every horizontal surface but the floor—which lay beneath one of the most exquisite Oriental rugs that Adrienne had ever seen.
Shaw had the comfortable look of a Dutch uncle. A heavyset man with watery brown eyes under unruly brows, he wore a soft, almost regretful, smile. Greeting them with a firm handshake, he led the way to an overstuffed sofa and bade them to sit.
He wore a corduroy jacket, khakis, and running shoes, and sported a bright red, plastic Swatch that he’d buckled over the cuff of his shirt. The watch had such a large face that Duran could read it halfway across the room. Adrienne guessed the doctor was in his midfifties, though his face was as unlined as a baby’s—and somehow radiant.
“Coffee?”
They agreed to some, then got down to business.
“I’m intrigued by what you told me on the phone,” Shaw began. “I suppose you might say, I collect case histories of unusual memory loss. So I think the best way for us to start would be for you to go back over what you said on the telephone. You might start,” he continued, focusing his brown eyes on Adrienne, “by telling me when the man next to you first crossed your radar. And then,” he said, inclining his head in Duran’s direction, “we’ll get to you.”
Shaw propped an ankle on one knee and sat back in his chair, fingers interlaced behind his head, elbows out, as if he had all day.
They broke at noon, with Shaw signaling an end to the session by stretching, massively, in his chair.
“Well, it’s a remarkable story,” he told them, “but even psychiatrists have to eat. What I’d suggest is this: I have a luncheon engagement with my daughter, and a 1:30 appointment after that. If you’ll come back at three, I’ll do an intake interview, and we can go on from there.”
“What’s in an ‘intake interview’?” Adrienne asked.