Night Film(190)

I couldn’t help but be awed by the shock of it.

Even like this he was having the last word.

Strange emotion abruptly swelled in my throat. It might have been a laugh or just as easily a sob. Because I realized, staring at this man, that I was actually just staring at myself, at what I’d become much sooner and more suddenly than I’d ever know. Life was a freight train barreling toward just one stop, our loved ones streaking past our windows in blurs of color and light. There was no holding on to any of it, and no slowing it down.

It was so calm standing next to him, so lonely. I swore I could hear his breathing, every breath he borrowed from the world then set free. It wasn’t the simple lungs of an ordinary man, but the faint howl of a gust of wind as it snagged the rocks of some far-off bluff by the sea. I wondered—another unchecked wave of feeling rising in my chest—what in the hell I was going to say to him after all this, all I’d done and come to see—if I had the nerve to say anything at all.

Or maybe, like a child encountering the reassembled bones of a dangerous species of dinosaur he’d dreamed about, read about with a flashlight under a comforter for nights and days, maybe I was going to simply reach out and touch his shoulder, wondering if in that touch I could get a sense of what he must have been like when he was alive, in his prime, roaming the Earth, a force of nature, when he wasn’t silent grayed bones on display, but something splendid to behold.

In the end, all I did was pull up a chair and sit down beside him.

And together, for what seemed like hours, we did nothing but stare out at that empty lawn, which seemed to hold in its strict boundaries and flawless green, the empty space in which we could pile our memories and questions, what we’d once loved but let go of, taking silent inventory of it all. When I became aware of the music again, piano music, a pale, listless approximation of what Ashley would have played, I realized then that all I was going to say to the man was “thank you.”

I did. Then I rose and left, not looking back.





112


What can I say about the ensuing weeks?

Marlowe Hughes said it best: “When you finally returned to your real life after working with Cordova, it was as if all of the colors had been turned way up in your eyes. The reds were redder. Blacks blacker. You felt things profoundly, as if your very heart had grown giant and tender and swollen. You dreamed. And what dreams.”

I drove home from Enderlin Estates, pulled the curtains, and slept for twenty hours, a sleep as blacked-out and resolute as death. I woke up around nightfall the following day, shadows streaked across the ceiling, the dying light outside making the street blush with the elegance of a memory.

My old life took me back, the old faithful mutt that it was.

I was somewhat shocked to learn it was December. I spent a few evenings at dinners with friends, most of whom assumed I’d been away, traveling. I let them believe it. In a way it was true.

“You look good,” quite a few of them remarked, though certain lingering stares seemed to suggest this wasn’t exactly true, that there was something else altered about me, something they sensed best left alone. I wondered, half seriously, if it was residue from the devil’s curse—if, even though it had turned out not to be true, perhaps one never recovered from having once believed. Maybe certain far-flung attic rooms in the brain had been violently broken into—doors bashed in, lamps broken, desks flipped upside down, curtains left dancing strangely by open windows—rooms that would never be reached again or ever reordered.

But I was thankful for the company, for friends, for light conversation forgotten as soon as it began. I joined in wholeheartedly, I laughed, I ordered wine and duck and dessert, and people slapped me on the back and said they were happy to see me, that I’d been away too long. But occasionally I slipped, unseen, outside all the talk and stared in at it, wondering if I’d stumbled back to the wrong table, the wrong life. I felt at once rested and relieved the investigation was over, but also vague regret, even a dulled longing to go back, to return to something I couldn’t pinpoint—a woman I hadn’t realized had bewitched me until she was gone.

Lines of laughter on a face, rude waitresses with bony arms, dark figures hurrying along sidewalks eager to get somewhere, nearby voices filled with dusk, cabs and panhandlers and one drunken girl screeching like a wounded bird—all of it flushed with a warmth and sad beauty I’d never noticed before.

Maybe it was a consequence of reaching the end of the end, finding out the dark, mad, gleaming tale had concluded the only way it could in the real world—with mortal people doing mortal things, a father and daughter, facing their deaths.

Because there could be no doubt about what Gallo told me: I’d phoned Sloan-Kettering Hospital, posing as a health insurance agent from a disorganized HR department. After telling a few half-truths to three different assistant department heads, and giving Ashley’s Social Security number taken from the missing-person’s report—one of the few documents left behind—three different people confirmed it on two different days. Ashley Goncourt had been treated in the pediatric oncology department in 1992 and 1993, 2001 and 2002, and finally in 2004 in conjunction with the University of Texas at Houston, exactly as Gallo had said.

At night I strolled home on the crooked sidewalks, past silent brownstones with lit-up windows filled with lives. Glasses clinking, the street gasping with laughter as the door of a bar was shoved open—these sounds seemed to follow me longer than they ever had before.