Night Film(194)

“We’re family!” I shouted at the walk-ups, my voice half swallowed by the deserted street.

“We heard ya, Aretha,” said Hopper.

“But we are,” Nora said. “We always will be.”

“With you two in it?” I went on. “This world has nothing to worry about! You hear me?” Nora, giggling, put her arm around me, trying to pry me off the telephone pole I was hugging like Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain.

“You’re wasted,” she said.

“Of course I’m wasted.”

“It’s time to go home.”

“Woodward never goes home.”

Filing down the sidewalk, we fell silent, knowing it was coming within minutes, our parting, knowing we might not see each other for a long time.

We hailed a cab. That’s what you did in New York at the close of a night, cramming together into your filthy yellow stagecoach with the faceless chauffeur, who delivered you, one by one, relatively unscathed, to your quiet street. The night would be filed away somewhere, one day brought out and dusted off, remembered as one of the best moments. We piled in, Nora in the middle, her now-exhausted roses slung over her knees. Hopper was crashing on a friend’s couch on Delancey Street.

“Right here,” he said to the driver, tapping the glass.

The cab pulled over, and he turned to me, extending his hand.

“Keep looking for the mermaids,” he told me in a hoarse voice. He lowered his head so I wouldn’t see the tears in his eyes. “Keep fighting for them.”

I nodded and hugged him as hard as I could. He then kissed Nora gently on her forehead and climbed out. He didn’t immediately go inside, but stood on the sidewalk watching us drive away, a dark figure drenched in orange streetlight. Nora and I watched out the back windshield—the moving picture we had to keep our eyes on, reluctant to blink or breathe, as it’d become only a memory in seconds.

He held up his left hand to us, a wave and a salute. And the taxi rounded the corner.

“Now we’re heading to Stuyvesant Street where it intersects East Tenth,” I told the driver. “Close to Saint Marks.”

Nora turned to me, eyes wide.

“You told me where you live,” I said.

“I didn’t. I purposefully didn’t.”

“But you did, Bernstein. You’re getting absentminded in your old age.”

She huffed, crossing her arms. “You spied on me.”

“Nope.”

“You did. I can tell.”

“Please. I have better things to do with my time than worry about Bernsteins.”

She scowled, but when the taxi pulled over in front of the brownstone she didn’t move, only stared ahead.

“You won’t forget me?” she whispered.

“It’d be physically impossible.”

“You promise?”

“You should really think about coming with a warning Do-Not-Remove-This-Tag. You’ll fall for her against your will, like it or not.”

“You’ll be all right?”

She turned to me, really asking it, worried.

“Of course. And so will you.”

She nodded, as if trying to convince herself, and then suddenly she smiled as if thinking of an old joke I’d made, one she was finding funny only now. She leaned forward and kissed my cheek. And then, as if some spell were about to break, she streaked out of the cab, door slamming, up the stoop with her leaden purse and arms full of roses.

She unlocked the door and stepped inside. But then, she slowly turned back, her hair gilded by some hidden light behind her.

She smiled one last time. The door closed and the street went still.

“That’s it,” I whispered, more to myself than the cabdriver. I turned around, sitting back against the seat, pale yellow light washing over me as we pulled away.





115


It was a fluke. But then, life is.

It was a few days after my night out with Hopper and Nora, when I’d just started recovering from my hangover. I was cleaning my office. I let Septimus out of his cage, so he might fly around for a little exercise. I yanked the leather couch away from the wall and noticed, wedged along the floor, the three black-and-white reversing candles Cleo had given us.

I’d forgotten all about them. They must have fallen there, unseen, when the room was ransacked.

We’d barely burned them, preoccupied with everything else. But why not finish the job? I set them on a plate and lit all three. Hours later, when I was on the couch with a scotch and The Wall Street Journal, I glanced up and saw they’d burned down to nothing, just a sliver of white wax. The first and then the second extinguished, as if waiting for my full attention, the wicks flaring orange for a moment before going out. The third held on, the flame twisting as if refusing to let go, to die, but then it went dark, too.

I realized my cell was ringing.

“Hello?” I answered, not bothering to check the caller ID. My accountant was due to call back to inform me my life savings was on its last leg and it was time to either apply for a new teaching position or consider another investigation, one that actually paid money.

“Scott? It’s Cynthia.”

Fear instantly gripped me. “Is Sam all right?”

“Yes. She’s wonderful. Well, no, actually, that’s not true.” She took a deep breath. “Is this a good time to talk?”