“The apartment building across from ours burned down,” Engales said. The memory, when verbalized, gained physical traction; he felt the heat from the fire on his face. “When I was fifteen, the year after my parents died. We were just teenagers, alone in this giant house, just me and my sister. I woke up because it had gotten so hot, the flames were all the way across the street but the heat was blasting through our window. Bright orange flames, like they were fake, from a movie. I woke up my sister and we ran downstairs and out into the street, where the whole neighborhood was outside watching the fire eat up this building. We stood and watched it for a while, and I knew exactly what my sister was thinking, because I was thinking it, too.”
“Which was?”
“We wanted to be the kids whose house had burned down,” he said.
James was quiet. By the looks of it, his bodega coffee had gotten cold, its cream blanketing its surface.
“All the families from the apartment building moved into a temporary pavilion in the park, all together,” Engales went on, his eyes glazing as his mind moved away from the present and into the past. “We didn’t have a pavilion. We just had this huge, freezing house.”
Down on the street, they saw Selma begin to scream and try to wriggle from the cop who held her: a huge, red-faced man with a blond mustache and porky lips. With seemingly little effort, he stilled her.
“We tried to go and stand with the group of people from the fire,” Engales went on. “They were all crying, and we wanted to cry with them, but we couldn’t. We knew it wasn’t ours; it wasn’t our tragedy. And suddenly we looked at each other and without even consulting each other, we took off running down the street. We had both known the other was going to run, and to where. We went to the cemetery and sat on top of our parents’ graves. I was on Dad’s and Franca was on Mom’s. We had never been to the graves before — we were too scared to see them, or to imagine that our parents’ bodies were actually in them. But we went that night. We had both known we had to go, at exactly the same time. We knew where our tragedy was, and we had to feel it right then.”
Why he was telling this to James Bennett now he didn’t know exactly, but Engales couldn’t stop talking. It was the first time he had spoken about Franca since he had arrived in New York; he hadn’t even told Lucy about her. It was as if Franca had been a caged animal inside of him, and now she was thrashing around, trying to get out.
“With Franca,” he went on. “It was one of those things where we were too close. We understood too much about each other. We saw too much. It almost hurt to be around her.”
“Is that why you came here?”
“It’s my fault,” Engales said. His voice had gotten low and dark, as black as the coffee in his hand.
“What’s your fault?”
“I left her there. Even when I fucking knew what would happen.”
“What would happen?”
“I had a dream about her on the morning of my accident. And then I saw her, right when it happened, when the blade was in my arm I saw her.”
“So you don’t know something happened. Have you called her?”
“You don’t get what I’m saying, do you? You have no idea what I’m talking about. I left her alone with a man who can’t take care of her. Something’s happened. The country’s fucked and something happened, I just know it.”
“But you haven’t talked to anybody yet and—”
“Just shut up,” Engales said, his face suddenly enflamed. “Just stop telling me things you know nothing about. And also? So you know? I’m not going to paint again. Never a-fucking-gain. Do you hear me? Can your associative brain comprehend that? So stop trying to act like you know anything about my life. Like it’s all so fucking clear to you.”
“I’m sorry, I… I shouldn’t have said anything,” James said, taken aback by Engales’s sudden hostile outburst. “I just get confused. Because it seems clear. When I’m around you, everything seems clear.”
“Well, it’s not,” Engales said, his heart still trampling over his lungs in his chest. He wanted to show Franca his arm right then. She was the only one who would understand its scar.
The two men went quiet and looked back out the window, where a white plastic bag had gotten caught in the nearest tree. When the wind freed it, its message was revealed: I 
NEW YORK. It soared into the white sky until the sky swallowed it. Below, switches were flicked and sirens started. Then the artists were gone.
THE MISSING BOY AND THE LOST GIRL
Lucy woke from a whiskey-soaked sleep to the unsettling sound of sirens and a loud knocking on the apartment door. A siren in the morning was like a drink before noon: it was a signal that things were getting bad. The sound of knocking, however, was a relief. James had come back.
She wobbled up into a sitting position, rolled her legs off the bed. Her head china-dolled to one side, too heavy for its own neck. The floor of the apartment was betraying her, tilting this way and that, and she had the distinct feeling that she couldn’t place herself in time. Was it actually October? Had the last month of her life actually happened? Had Engales actually lost his hand? And disappeared? And had James Bennett actually taken his place in the bed for two whole weeks after the show, then abruptly disappeared himself, without so much as a call? Also: last night. Was she, could she possibly be, twenty-three?
She stumbled to the door, the idea of James’s warm body under his ugly trench coat pulling her forward. She’d sink into him. She’d ask him where he’d been all week, but then she’d tell him she understood. She knew he had a life. She knew he couldn’t come every day. Still, she’d say. I missed you. Which was only true within the confines of the thing they’d created together, which was, of course, a big old lie. Stilclass="underline" a soothing lie. A lie she wouldn’t mind right now; at least there was another human involved.
No, said the cruel, pulsing world of the worst hangover of all time. You shan’t be wrecking any homes today. It was not James at the door. At the door, when Lucy yanked open the rusty deadbolt and pulled it open, was a tall, blond woman in a gray overcoat, holding the hand of a very small boy.
The missing boy, Lucy thought, just before she felt a hand grab her insides and twist. She ran to the bathroom, emptied herself of last night.
Last night had been a mess of lipstick and whiskey: the kind of night a girl has when the men she counts on to save her do not. It had been her twenty-third birthday, and there had been no one to celebrate with, and nothing worth celebrating. There was no Engales — she’d tried in vain to track him down, but nothing—and there was no James; he’d stopped showing up at the apartment a week ago, without any explanation. She spent the morning feeling sorry for herself, remembering her last birthday, when Jamie and the R boys had made her a lumpy cake and, when it proved to be inedible, took her out to the Mudd Club, where they’d spun around and around on the dance floor, spilling their drinks, just one in a million groups of friends in New York, out to feed on the city together. Now there was no together, there was no one, and when a birthday alone became too much for her to fathom, she’d finally decided to take things into her own hands; she would call James’s house, ask him where he’d been, convince him to come over, kiss him until he adored her again.
This call called for the steely nerves that could only be achieved through alcohol, so she’d gone to Telemondo’s for a flask. She chose Jim Beam, held the bottle to her chest like a comforting teddy bear, humble in its little brown bag. As she was leaving, she had paused to flip through a magazine on the rack near the door. It flapped open to an ad for lipstick that read: Does any man really understand you?