The Cloisters(94)
Back at Laure’s apartment that night, after her boyfriend cooked dinner and I dried the dishes, I pulled my computer from my bag and let it sit on my lap. And then, I pulled up the article Rachel and I had worked on and highlighted her name with the cursor. After a minute of looking at her name in blue, the cursor blinking at the end, I hit Delete. Then I submitted it, without so much as a second thought. Me, listed as the sole author.
From my bag, which I had wedged under the couch that doubled as my bed, I pulled out the worn leather box wrapped in green ribbon, and opened it. Inside were the cards, the complete set. I let my finger touch the top card, the Lovers, and feel its history. The light caught the ring Rachel had bought me at Stephen’s shop, the one I had worn since that day. I pulled it from my finger and walked from Laure’s apartment out to the East River. There, with a view of the Manhattan skyline, I threw it into the brackish water.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The article came out in December. By then I had already been given my own office at The Cloisters—the smallest, but nevertheless, it was mine. And by the time the first snow burned the tips of the grasses in Fort Tryon Park brown, no one mentioned Rachel or Patrick anymore. Only I would remember every detail of that summer. And every spring, there would come an evening, just one, when I would walk home at night, down the glowing, sticky streets of New York, and a warm wind would bring it all back to me. Even when I stopped walking home at night in the springtime, those breezes found me—through windows or the rush of a subway train approaching—unbidden, in stillness.
I owed everything to the summer that everyone was eager to forget. In March, acceptances to doctoral programs arrived by the dozen, and countless departments hosted me and celebrated my achievements. The article had received widespread acclaim and generous reviews. No one, of course, mentioned my previous rejections. They—like me—believed that my time at The Cloisters had remade me. Indeed, I knew it had. Ultimately, I decided to go to Yale, not because it was haunted by Rachel’s ghost, but because Aruna was there and she had become the closest thing I had, at that point anyway, to family.
For months, the cards sat in their box unopened, until Aruna suggested that I consider selling them to the Beinecke in a private sale, one that would quietly sweep aside the question of their provenance. The number we agreed on was large enough that I could breathe in New Haven, knowing I wouldn’t need to take on extra jobs or loans to sustain myself as a graduate student, perhaps longer.
My second year at Yale, I attended the Morgan symposium again, this time with Aruna by my side. There I met Karl Gerber, the Renaissance curator whose absence had sent me to The Cloisters, to Rachel, to Patrick, to the shadows of my past. He was gentle and kind and expressed regret at the situation he had inadvertently thrust me into.
“But,” he said as we nursed coffees between sessions, “I thought you knew. Knew that I would be gone. It was arranged in advance, of course, my departure.”
And it struck me that perhaps Patrick had set up the entire gambit. That the moment I thought had been fate, the moment when he knocked on Michelle’s door, had in fact been orchestrated. Maybe it had been Lingraf’s name on my application.
“Did Patrick arrange it?” I asked.
“Oh no,” he said, voice lowered. “Rachel did. She was the one who helped facilitate my position that summer at the Carrozza Collection, in Bergamo? She said you would be coming to The Cloisters. She was sure of it. And that you would be taken care of. She was very eager to see what you might have learned working with Lingraf, you know.”
He offered me a cigarette, and I took it, inhaling deeply.
Lingraf, it turned out, did not live long enough to see the publication of the article, or even the cold winds that rushed off the Cascades the winter after my summer at The Cloisters. He died of a heart attack, at home in his study, a month after my graduation. He was eighty-nine. As a result, I would never know if Rachel had reached out to him, if he had told her about me, if in all of it, she had sensed an opening, however slim. An opening that would blow open her world and mine in irrevocable ways.
The past, I now know, can tell us more than the future. It was a lesson I had learned even before I stepped foot in The Cloisters. Knowing, that day, that stretch of asphalt, would forever change me. And while the cards had told me so much, there were still some gaps to fill in. Which was how I learned, poring over microfiche at the New York Public Library, that Rachel’s parents had loved to sail Lasers. Slim, shallow boats that were popular in races. Lasers, however, were occasionally problematic because their hulls contained two drain plugs: one in the stern that, if omitted, would swamp the boat immediately, and another, inside the cockpit, that would cause the boat to swamp more gradually.
Boat accidents on Long Lake, it turned out, were very common, but drownings were rare. Because of this, the investigation into Rachel’s parents’ deaths and her miraculous survival had occupied the police and journalists of Johnsburg for months. The biggest question was: How did the second plug, the one that should have been in the boat’s cockpit, end up in the trash of the restaurant where Rachel and her parents had dined that night?
The police, naturally, interviewed everyone. But no employees or visitors could remember anyone boarding their Laser, tied alongside the wooden dock, buffeted by the wind and waves against the squeaking plastic bumpers, except, of course, for Rachel. With little in the way of motive and no witnesses, the police eventually abandoned the search. A decision, no doubt, that had been spurred by the intervention of the Mondray family attorney who had requested, in rather stern legalese, that the police allow the family time to grieve. Rachel, after all, had been a victim of the sunken boat as well. She was just, the lead investigator would say, extremely lucky.