Sea of Tranquility(11)

Gaspery shot him a troubled look. Mirella watched him while she waited for an opportunity to ask about Vincent. Gaspery seemed foreign in a way that she couldn’t quite parse.

“And then once you grasp that,” the fedora was saying, “it all just falls into place, right? Buddy of mine, he was struggling to quit cigarettes. Guy must’ve tried six or eight times. Not happening. Couldn’t do it. Then one day he takes LSD, and bam. He calls me up the next evening, says, ‘Dan, it’s a miracle, I haven’t even wanted a cigarette today.’ I tell you, it was—”

“What happened to her?” Mirella asked Paul. She knew she was being rude but she didn’t care, she was sitting there growing older by the minute, sinking into grief, and she wanted to know what had happened to her friend so she could leave these people.

Paul blinked at her, as if he’d forgotten she was there.

“She fell off a ship,” he said. “About a year and a half—no, two years ago. It was two years last month.”

“What kind of ship? Was she on a cruise?”

The fedora was glowering at his drink, but Gaspery was listening to the conversation with great interest.

“No, she was…I don’t know how much you know about what happened to her in New York,” Paul said, “that crazy thing with her husband, where it turned out he was a crook—”

“My husband was an investor in his Ponzi scheme,” Mirella said. “I know all about it.”

“Jesus,” Paul said. “Did he—”

“Wait,” the fedora said, “are we talking about Jonathan Alkaitis?”

“Yes,” Paul said. “You know the story?”

“That crime was insane,” the fedora said. “What was the size of the fraud, twenty billion dollars? Thirty? I remember where I was when that story broke. Call comes in from my mom, turns out my dad’s retirement savings were—”

“You were telling me about the boat,” Mirella said.

Paul blinked. “Right. Yeah.”

“You have a bit of an interrupting problem,” the fedora said, to Mirella. “No offense.”

“No one’s talking to you,” Mirella said. “I asked a question of Paul.”

“Yeah, so Vincent and I, we were out of touch for a few years,” Paul said, “but after Alkaitis abandoned her and fled the country, I guess Vincent got some training and certifications and went to sea as a cook on a container ship.”

“Oh,” Mirella said. “Wow.”

“Sounds like an interesting life, right?”

“What happened to her?”

“No one really knows,” Paul said. “She just disappeared from the ship. Seems like it was an accident. No body.”

Mirella didn’t know she was going to cry until she felt tears spilling down her face. All of the men at the table looked acutely uncomfortable. Only Gaspery thought to pass her a napkin.

“She drowned,” she said.

“Yeah. I mean, it seems like it. They were hundreds of miles from land. She disappeared in bad weather.”

“Drowning was the thing she was most scared of.” Mirella dabbed at her face with the napkin. In the quiet, the small noises of the restaurant swelled around them: a couple arguing softly in French at a nearby table, clattering from the kitchen, the restroom door closing.

“Well,” Mirella said, “thanks for telling me. And thank you for the drink.” She didn’t know who was paying for the drink, but she knew it wasn’t her. She rose and walked out of the restaurant without looking back.

Outside, she felt directionless. She knew she should get in an Uber and go home, just go home and sleep and not do anything stupid like go for a walk after dark in an unfamiliar borough, but Vincent was dead. Mirella would find somewhere to sit for a few minutes, she decided, just to collect her thoughts. The neighborhood seemed fairly tame to her and it wasn’t that late, also she was afraid of nothing, so she crossed the street and entered the park.



* * *



—

The park was quiet, but by no means unoccupied. People moved through pools of light, couples with arms around one another’s shoulders and small groups of friends, a woman singing to herself. She sensed free-floating menace in the air, but it wasn’t directed toward her. How could Vincent be dead? It was impossible, everything about it. She found her way to a bench and put on her headphones so she could pretend not to hear if anyone spoke to her, and willed herself toward invisibility. She would sit here for a while, she would sit here and think about Vincent, or sit here until she could find a way to stop thinking about Vincent, then she would go home and go to bed. But her thoughts shifted toward Jonathan, Vincent’s former husband, living out his life in a luxury hotel in Dubai. The thought of him being there, wherever he was, ordering room service and asking to have the sheets changed and swimming in the hotel pool—while Vincent was dead—was an abomination.

A man walked in front of her and sat on the bench. She turned and it was Gaspery, so she took off the headphones.

“Forgive me,” he said, “I saw you go into the park, and it’s not a bad neighborhood, but—” He didn’t finish the thought, because he didn’t have to. For a woman alone in a park after nightfall, every neighborhood is a bad neighborhood.