Sea of Tranquility(12)

“Who are you?” Mirella asked.

“I’m a kind of investigator,” Gaspery said. “You’ll think I’m crazy if I get into the details.”

There was something familiar about him, it seemed to her now, something about his profile that rang a distant bell, but she couldn’t quite place him.

“What are you investigating?”

“Look, I’ll be frank with you, I have no interest in Mr. Smith or his art,” Gaspery said.

“That makes two of us.”

“But I’m interested in, well, in a certain kind of anomaly, like that moment in the video when the screen goes black. I waited outside the stage door to ask him about it.”

“It is a strange moment.”

“Can I ask, did your friend ever talk about that moment? Since it was her video, after all.”

“No,” Mirella said, “not that I remember.”

“Stands to reason,” Gaspery said. “She would’ve been quite young when she shot that video. The things we see when we’re young, sometimes they don’t stay with us.”

The things we see when we’re young.

“I think I’ve seen you before,” Mirella said. She was looking at his face in profile in the dim light. He turned to look at her, and she was certain of it. “In Ohio.”

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

She rose from the bench. “You were under the overpass,” she said. “In Ohio, when I was a kid. That was you, wasn’t it?”

He frowned. “I think you’re mistaking me for someone.”

“No, I think it was you. You were under the overpass. Right before the police came, before you were arrested. You said my name.”

But he looked genuinely confused. “Mirella, I—”

“I have to go.” She fled, not quite running, but walking in the flying unstoppable way that she’d perfected over years in New York City, darting out of the park, back down to the street, where in the fishbowl glow of the French restaurant the fedora and Vincent’s brother were still deep in conversation. Gaspery hadn’t followed her. She was grateful that he was wearing a white shirt; he would all but shine in the dark. She plunged into the shadows of a residential street. She flew past old brownstones standing beautiful in the streetlights, iron fences, old trees; faster and faster, toward the bright lights of a commercial avenue up ahead, where a yellow cab was gliding across the intersection like a chariot, like some kind of miracle—a yellow cab in Brooklyn!—and she hailed it and climbed aboard. A moment later the taxi was speeding over the Brooklyn Bridge, Mirella crying quietly in the backseat. The driver glanced at her in the rearview mirror, but—oh, the grace of strangers in this crowded city!—said nothing.





2


When Mirella was a child, she lived with her mother and her older sister, Susanna, in a duplex in exurban Ohio. The housing development was located in a territory composed of strip malls and big-box stores. Farmland extended to the back of the Walmart parking lot. Some miles away, there was a prison. Mirella’s mother worked two jobs and spent very little time at home. In the early mornings—well before dawn in the wintertime—Mirella and Susanna’s mother rose after a few hours of sleep, poured milk over her daughters’ cereal and did their hair while blearily drinking coffee, and drove them to school. She kissed her daughters goodbye and they were at school for the next ten hours—early drop-off, then school, then after-school programming—until at the end of the afternoon they boarded a bus that dropped them a half-mile from home.

It was a bad half-mile. They had to walk under an overpass. The overpass scared Mirella, but in all the years she lived there, from when she was five until she dropped out of school and took a bus to New York City at sixteen, there was only one truly terrible incident. Mirella was nine, which made Susanna eleven, and they did hear the gunshots as the school bus pulled away, but the sounds were clear only in retrospect. In the moment, they looked at each other in the winter twilight and Susanna shrugged. “Probably just a car backfiring or something,” she said, and Mirella, who would have believed anything Susanna told her, took her sister’s hand and they walked together. Snow was falling. The mouth of the overpass was a dark cave waiting to swallow them. It’s fine, Mirella told herself, it’s fine, it’s fine, because it was always fine, but this particular time it wasn’t. As they stepped into the shadows, the sound came once more, impossibly loud now. They stopped.

Two men lay on the ground a few yards ahead of them. One was perfectly still; the other was twitching. In the dim light, at this distance, she couldn’t see exactly what had happened to them. A third man was sitting slumped against the wall, a handgun dangling loose in his hand. A fourth was running away—his footsteps echoed—but Mirella glimpsed him for only an instant, scrambling up the embankment at the far end of the overpass and out of sight.

For a long time all of them—Mirella, Susanna, the man with the gun, the two dead or dying men on the ground—were frozen in a winter tableau. How much time? It felt like forever. Hours, days. The man with the gun had a sleepy, sedated look about him; his head nodded forward once or twice. Then came the police lights, blue and red washing over him, and this seemed to wake him up. He stared at the gun in his hand, as if unsure how it had arrived there, then he turned his head, and looked directly at the girls.