Indigo(24)
Selective amnesia they’d called it. The therapists, the experts, her parents’ friends and colleagues. She couldn’t remember any of them now. Once it was all over—the initial trauma, the funeral, the aftermath—those people had melted away, though she suspected it was partly her doing. She’d wanted to be alone, to escape her grief and seek out some sort of … meaning, or solace. And so she’d …
But no. She was getting ahead of herself.
That night. Focus on that night. If only to prove the lie in the priestess’s words.
The celebration is at a restaurant. An Italian place. Family-run affair, small but classy, in the theater district. Maybe West Forty-Fourth Street. Somewhere around there.
They’re happy. Drinking champagne. Laughing a lot. Her dad is square-jawed, handsome in his double-breasted suit, his dark hair slick and neat. Her mom is wide-mouthed as she laughs, bright red lipstick framing gleaming white teeth. She’s elegant in an off-the-shoulder number, which shimmers like gold.
Checked tablecloths. Candles. Music. It’s all as hazy as a dream. But Nora carries the images within her, enclosed in a fragile bubble of happiness.
Then … the dark night. It’s drizzling. The streets gleam like black metal. Light reflects off passing cars like white shards of endlessly shattering glass. Everyone is bundled up in coats and scarves. Her father opens an umbrella, holds it over the heads of his wife and daughter.
“Got to keep my girls dry,” he says. It isn’t particularly funny, but they all laugh.
Stepping from the warm restaurant into the cold air, Nora shivers. The soles of her shoes crackle on the gritty pavement. But the car isn’t far away. Her dad has parked it in an almost-empty lot owned by a company he does business with.
“Special privileges,” he’d told them earlier that evening as he cut the lights and he engine. And Nora thought how important, how respected, he must be among his colleagues, and how proud that made her feel.
The quickest route between the restaurant and the parking lot is an alleyway, little more than a cut-through. Too narrow for even a single vehicle to negotiate and made narrower still by the Dumpsters lining its walls on both sides.
Alone, she might be scared, but flanked by her parents, she feels safe, impregnable. Even when a black, hunched shape detaches itself from the dark block of a Dumpster ahead and glides along the alleyway toward them, she feels not a flutter of unease. Only when the figure raises its arm and she sees light slither along the barrel of the gun in its hand does she realize with a jolt what terrible danger they are in. Even now, though, her overriding emotion is not terror but indignation.
You can’t do this! she thinks. Not to us! How dare you!
She looks at the man’s face but she can’t see it. He is nothing but a void in her mind. Later she will be no use when the police question her about the incident … or at least …
She blinked, coming back to herself for a moment. A faceless man? Of course not. He was only faceless either because he kept to the shadows or because she’s blocked his features from her mind. As for the police, the truth is, she remembered nothing of the evening’s immediate aftermath simply because she was—quite understandably—deep in shock.
The gunman’s voice is a generic bad-guy growl. He demands her father’s wallet, her mother’s jewelry. How the mugger knows her mother is wearing a diamond necklace beneath her thick scarf Nora has no idea. Perhaps he’s been watching them through the window of the restaurant.
What happens next happens so quickly that to Nora it’s like a series of flash images, like movie stills:
The mugger makes a grab for her mother’s throat.
Her father yells and steps forward, arms outstretched.
A flash of gunfire, and her father reels, arms outflung, head back.
Then he is on the ground, sprawled, perhaps already dead, and Nora and her mother are screaming.
The gunman panics, the gun blazes again, two more shots ring out.
Now Nora’s mom is on the ground beside her husband, arms and legs outflung obscenely, bloody holes in her forehead and chest, rain falling into her open eyes …
Time slows, to shift back on track. The movie camera in Nora’s head clicks and whirs back into life. All at once the movie stills are once again replaced with real-time footage, and Nora sees …
… sees herself leap at the man, both in a desperate attempt to save her own life and to prevent him inflicting more damage on her parents. Hands curled into fists, she slams into him before he can bring the gun to bear on her, knocking him backward.
Down they go, the two of them, in a sprawl of limbs. The impact with the ground causes the mugger to let go of the gun, the weapon spinning and clattering away.
In an instant Nora is up again, quick as a rabbit, chasing after the gun. Slivers of light wink and flash on its metal surface as it skids across the slick ground.
By the time she’s scooped it up, the mugger is back on his feet. But he doesn’t close in on her or attempt to retake the weapon. Instead he turns and flees, his feet splatting in the rain, his elongated shadow stretching behind him.
Nora raises the gun and levels it at his back, her finger tightening on the trigger. But she can’t bring herself to kill him. Not in cold blood. And so she lets him get away. Lets the man who killed her parents slip into the darkness.
The instant he’s gone, her hand drops to her side. The gun that ended her parents’ lives suddenly feels heavy. With a cry of revulsion she opens her fingers. The weapon hits the ground with a thud. A second later she’s dropping, too, her legs folding beneath her, no longer able to support her weight.