Indigo(3)

The priest finished his prayer. He put a hand on the father’s shoulder and faced the crowd, offering a blessing to them for their support of the Ortiz family in their time of need. The boy handed the mother his wilting lily and she took it, eyes wide with such pain that she must have slipped into a world of numb incomprehension.

Nora had wanted to blend. To get the story from inside the sorrow, not merely as an outside observer. Now she wished she were anywhere else.

Rafe gave her another disapproving glance, and she moved away from him even farther, barely even aware of the priest’s intonations. Circling behind Rafe and the rest of the onlookers, she moved toward the stairs. She had left her car down on Bailey Avenue, thinking she’d return to it when the family was gone and the crowd had mostly dispersed. Now she did not want to wait. She had the information and the photos. The one thing she didn’t have was the only thing that mattered—answers.

The sun had shifted in the sky, moving the shadow of the house to the top of the stairs so that she could not avoid passing through it. Five steps from the summit, adjacent with the first lamppost, she entered the shadow and faltered, sucking in a tremulous breath. Her limbs felt leaden and cold, and a sharp pain stabbed at her eyes. A dreadful stink washed over her, along with a wave of nausea.

Just go, she told herself, and staggered down two or three more steps.

Pain lanced through her skull again, and her knees felt weak. The shadow around her seemed to breathe with malice. Angrily, she pushed it back, casting the shadow away so that it clung to the wall of the house and left the stairs in full sunlight for an eye blink before she allowed the shade to return to normal.

The shadows were hers.

She refused to fear them.

*

The block of Seventy-Fourth Street between Columbus and Amsterdam was lost in time. The sidewalks were broken and uneven and interrupted at regular intervals by old trees whose branches created a canopy over the street, their leaves rustling pleasantly three seasons a year. Cars parked on either side narrowed the one-way street to the bare minimum needed for vehicles to pass. Despite its location in a busy part of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, that block tended toward a kind of quiet much of the city never achieved. Nora always imagined that her little block had changed hardly at all in the past half century. Only the cars gave it away.

She lived in a third-floor studio in a building that looked even narrower than the street. Three flights of stairs kept her in decent shape, but she nearly always stumbled on the way to her floor, as if the stairs conspired against her, with steps taking turns being the one that unaccountably grew in height on a given day. An extra inch or so, just enough to catch the toe of a shoe. The banister had saved her many bruised shins.

The original advertisement for the apartment had described it as a “loft,” but she’d quickly discovered that this was code for “studio so small that you’ll put your mattress in a loft space not much bigger than the top shelf of a closet.” Still, for all the time that she spent at home, the studio suited her needs well enough. A bathroom, a tiny galley kitchen, a closet, and a high-ceilinged living room complete with a ladder that let her climb up to the shelf above the kitchen. Her mattress smelled like food 24-7. A tiny space, but enough room for Nora and her three cats.

Kelso, Red, and Hyde had been named after her three favorite characters from That 70’s Show, which turned out to have been a generous gesture on her part because the cats were assholes.

Nora told anyone who would listen, My cats are assholes. But at least they’re my Assholes.

She regretted it every time, but somehow she couldn’t stop herself from saying it.

Just after eight o’clock that night she sat on her sofa, a thirdhand piece of furniture whose original color was lost to history and its fabric threaded through with cat hair that the vacuum cleaner never drew out.

“I hate you little shits,” she told Kelso.

He arched his back and sneered down his nose before marching away.

Hyde jumped onto the sofa, walked onto her lap as if he’d barely noticed her, then curled into her lap. He knew a lie when he heard it.

Nora preferred dogs, but she spent too much time out of the apartment to be a dog owner. In truth, she disliked other people’s cats and other people’s cats disliked her, but she loved her three Assholes.

Sometimes, though, they watched her with more than typical feline interest. On early mornings when she stumbled out of bed or on exhausted late nights when she fell asleep watching television, she would mutter accusations that the three of them were hatching some sinister plot. Joking, mostly.

Hyde purred as she stroked his fur.

On her TV screen, Jason Statham used his fists and a sharp knife to avoid being killed by a trio of grim men with guns. Nora had been channel surfing when she stopped at the sight of Statham’s chiseled features. She had no idea what the movie might be, but it didn’t matter. After a full day at work, she needed to unwind with something that did not demand much of her attention.

One thing she refused to do was watch the news. She’d spent the entire day writing about dead kids and grieving parents, with tangents into New York City politics and various criticisms of the police investigation into the Kingsbridge murders.

She’d had enough of reality.

A quick rap at her door brought Nora off the sofa. She dumped Hyde from her lap and hurried to answer the knock. The deliveryman from the Golden Lotus stood in the hall with a fat brown paper bag, redolent with the smell of Chinese food. Nora’s stomach growled as she quickly signed the credit-card slip, adding a nice tip as she thanked the man.