But it wasn’t long before they spotted and approached her, with questions about Engales’s whereabouts. “We haven’t seen him around,” said Toby. “And he’s always around,” said Regina. Lucy shrugged and changed the subject to the problem of commercial galleries, which she knew would distract Toby, at least long enough to figure out another tactic of evasion. When he got to the part where he compared the gallery artists to factory laborers, she snuck away into the crowd, where she began to see that the rumor of Engales’s absence had officially started to circle. A family emergency maybe, one large woman with an alligator head on her purse said. I heard no one’s seen him in a week, someone else countered. Soon, after enough time had passed and enough wine had been consumed, Raul Engales’s absence began to gain even more dramatic traction. I hope he didn’t disappear like that boy, an old woman with an emerald broach said with passion. Isn’t that just the most tragic thing? Horatio stopped Lucy next to a painting of a Chinese woman with a deformed cheek, holding a wad of bok choy. Lucy noticed only now a blank spot in the woman’s sweater: a spot that had not been finished. She thought of the floor of the studio where she’d picked up the painting a few days earlier — stained with blackish blood.
“When do you think he’ll show up?” Horatio said in his blocky accent.
“Probably soon!” Lucy said, trying to be cheery, though her eyes were still on the blank spot and her stomach was hot with fear that she had done every single wrong thing.
She knew Engales wouldn’t show up soon, or ever. And if he did — if by some stroke of magic they had let him out of the hospital and he happened to find out that the show had not been canceled — he would only be furious with her, even more than he already was. He would know or find out that it was her who had made this whole thing happen. That it was her who had called the number Winona had left on the message machine, set up a meeting. Who had gotten Random Randy from the bar to come over with the truck and help her haul the paintings to the gallery. He’d find out that it was her who had signed the papers agreeing to the terms of sale, whose fault it would be when all of his paintings were gone, and all that was left was a wad of cash. She thought, desperately now as she watched Winona stick a red dot on the bok choy painting: Why on earth did I do this?
She did it because of cereal. More specifically, she did it because of milk. She hadn’t eaten anything for two whole days after seeing the bloody gauze wrapped around Engales’s arm, and, while trying to buy cigarettes and beer with the vague idea that she needed some sort of sustenance, the Telemondo guy noticed the shape she was in.
“You look no good,” he said to her, and she just shook her head, put the blue package of cigarettes on the counter.
“You look no good,” she said back.
He ignored her and pulled a box of cereal from a shelf and a carton of milk from the fridge behind him.
“No charge,” he said, his brown eyes steady on hers. She slowly, tentatively, pulled the meager groceries from the counter, seeming to sense from the Telemondo guy’s eyes that she should take them, or else. Or else what? she wanted to say, but instead she just left, walking like a zombie through the East Village with the cereal in one hand and the milk in the other.
It was because of these groceries that she went into the kitchen, a skinny arm of a room that she seldom entered; she wasn’t much for cooking, and lately, not eating, either. And it was because she went into the kitchen and set down her miserable fare and stood there wondering if she should eat some of the cereal or not that she noticed two things. One: on the back of the milk carton was Jacob Rey’s face. Two: on the bulky black answering machine was a blinking red light.
These things were surprising not only in their juxtaposition but in their novelty: Jacob Rey’s face belonged on telephone poles and bulletin boards, out in the grave wide world, not here in her domestic realm. Never before had Lucy seen a missing person advertised on a household product, and Jacob Rey’s face, a mascot for that terrible night, seemed to have been placed here just for her, as if his ghost had followed her into Engales’s kitchen. His image both haunted and intrigued her: a family’s private loss made into a public image, then sent by way of a common dairy product into people’s private homes. Involuntarily she imagined her own face on the milk carton, but it was while she was doing this that she noticed the message machine — a relic of the previous tenant’s, Engales had told her, that still had François’s outgoing message: Bonjour. It’s François. Who are you? — blinking for her attention like the eyes of a hopeful puppy waiting to be pet. Lucy pushed the button.
First the machine spoke in the way machines speak: a human’s voice turned into a robot’s, unable to make the curves of words and so piecing them together at the angles, like numbers on a digital clock.
TOOSDAY, SEPT-EM-BHER SIX-TEENTH. THREE OH FIVE PEE EM.
Last Tuesday. The same day as the accident.
Then, in stark contrast to the robot, a husky woman’s voice.
Raul. Sorry to call so late. But I have wonderful news. Sotheby’s went swimmingly. More than swimmingly — you’re practically rich already and we haven’t even had the show! And you won’t believe who bought it. Let’s just say it’s someone with fantastic taste. Call me back, Raul. Five five nine, oh nine four seven. It’s Winona, by the way, Raul. Oh and get your ass over here with the rest of the paintings, my little star. We’re about to show you off to the world.
Lucy had understood right then that the message was meant for her, just like Jacob Rey’s face on the back of her milk. Just as she had been asked by the mother on Broadway to help her search for Jacob, she was being asked now, by Winona, to make sure Raul Engales’s show went up next week. Her logic was perhaps skewed, she knew. But in the blur of the moment, so rife with messages, she reasoned that it was her duty to share Raul Engales’s paintings with the world. She even went so far as to convince herself that the show, if it went as swimmingly as the auction, might turn Engales back toward himself, that he would witness his own success and visualize a future of possibility and prospects, rather than one of hopelessness. If Engales could see that the world loved his paintings, she thought, perhaps he could love himself again. And maybe even love her.
So she had called Winona back. And as for the milk carton, she had dumped out its contents into the sink — forgoing cereal altogether — and set it on the windowsill above Raul Engales’s bed: a talisman, or an offering to no one.
Now, at the gallery, as she deflected questions dizzily, Lucy realized she had been an idiot to think this was a good idea; it wasn’t her place. If Engales were to see her now, in her sparkly shirt drinking sparkling wine, he would hate her. He would hate her more than he already seemed to hate her. (It isn’t your project, she imagined him saying, over and over in her head.) And now all she wanted to do was leave. But Winona — who was in a tizzy, Lucy could tell by her hair: usually a pristine fountain, now teased into a Pomeranian-like pouf — would not have that. She found Lucy in the corner, by the wine, and put one of her pointy-nailed hands on Lucy’s shoulder.