The Vanishing Year(71)
“I’m being pursued. I know it.” I dig my nails into the soft denim on my thighs until I feel the sharp tang of pain.
“Zoe, I wanted to tell you this last night, but then you called me and the attempted break-in took precedence.” Her voice lowers a register until I can barely understand her. “I looked up Michael Flannery. I don’t know how to say this, but I couldn’t find any record of him in the system.”
“What?” Her words make no sense, this looming untenable feeling, like I’m about to be harpooned and left as chum for circling sharks.
“Your guy, Mick.” She coughs nervously into the phone. “Zoe, he doesn’t exist.”
? ? ?
I cross Fourteenth Street and hail a cab. I pull the index card out of my purse and huff the address across the divider to the cabbie. The East River is in front of me, wide and almost dark green in late morning sun. Within minutes, the cab is crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, speeding through those iconic double stone arches, surrounded by ramrod cables so thick and straight that if I squint my eyes, they look like prison bars. I think of the mysterious Mick, so elusive now, so present in my mind. Yates said she could find no record of him: in prison, in the system, now or ever. He wasn’t living in San Francisco. She couldn’t find a man with that name and approximate age anywhere in the United States. He was a ghost. A phantom.
Phantoms can slip in and out of your life with ease. Nothing she said was a comfort. If anything, the fear had worked its way down into my heart and my stomach flipped and gurgled. I still felt the connection between the strange events of the past two weeks, as real and tangible as though they were tied together with metal cables. But even Cash seemed skeptical. How do you convince someone of an unlikely truth, even if you know it down deep in your bones? You don’t.
Mick was always less of a concern than Jared, with his shock of black hair, his black eyes, pale skin, the bulging scar that ran from his forehead to his chin. The smell of his breath, hot and sour on my face. The feel of his hands on my arm, twisting, twisting behind my back. Rosie’s pink, shining lip glistening with the word JAREd in black ink. A man who will brand a teenage girl will think nothing of tracking down the woman who put him in jail, only to kill her. Terrify her, then kill her. Mick was never a ringleader. He was a user, of both people and drugs. He was lost, like me. Did Jared kill Mick, and now he’s after me?
Bay Ridge, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, sits in the loop between Gowanus and Shore Parkway, punctuated at the bottom with the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, like a happy exclamation point. Exit here!
I wonder how long she’s lived here, if she commutes to Manhattan. If so, have we been to the same stores, the same hair salons? What would have happened if we’d seen each other? Would we have gotten the same haircut, switched places, like a Hayley Mills movie? I would be Sharon, she could be Susan. I imagine biting my nails to match hers, exchanging wardrobes.
Although we’ve lived mere miles apart, it might as well be a thousand. New Yorkers are shockingly local—if it’s not available within a three-block radius, it simply no longer exists. We like to walk everywhere, even subway rides are inconvenient. I once overheard a man in a coffee shop refer to his girlfriend as a “long-distance relationship” because she lived on the Upper East Side and he lived in the Village. There were just too many train connections. You can forget anyone who commutes in from Jersey. Brooklyn and Manhattan are like different states.
The cab pulls on to Seventy-Seventh Street and parks in front of a tan-painted Cape Cod, almost gingerbread-like, with a brick facade and a cemented-over front yard. It looks well cared for, surrounded by a black iron fence. I pay the cabbie and climb out, taking a deep breath at the gate.
The hedges are neatly trimmed, and the window boxes have bright, bursting flowers. Too bright for April, pinks and yellows, daisies and spring mums, it’s much too early for so much bloom. In front of me, looking solemn and kind with her arms outstretched in welcome, stands a concrete bathtub Mary. She’s beautiful, ensconced in a periwinkle shrine, two clamshelled cherubs at her feet. I look up and down the street—more houses with too bright flowers, more Madonna statues. The flowers, I realize too slowly, are silk.
I ring the bell and from inside calls a voice, “Hang on!” A woman opens the door. Big hair, dark skin, long nails, probably sixtyish. She visibly pales and yells into the house without taking her eyes off me. “Bernie? Bernie! You betta come here!”
She opens the door for me, wide so I can pass her, without waiting for me to speak. I scoot past her awkwardly. The front hallway is red deep-pile carpet, with a tin-covered radiator acting as a hall table. The whole house smells like meat loaf. Until this moment, I never knew I wanted to live in a house that smelled like meat loaf.
A man ambles in, sweaty and red-faced, the sort of man who people might call jolly. He sports a yellow-white ribbed tank top, tucked into plaid belted shorts. He pushes his thinning hair back and blinks at me.
“Hi, um, my name is Zoe, and I’m—”
“I know who you are.” She cuts me off and wanders into the living room, sinking into a chair. “Damn near gave me a heart attack, you did. But I know who you are.”
Bernie stares at me, his fat little fingers keep pushing that one strip of hair against his red scalp, again and again. He peers at me, blinking, with giant gray, watery eyes. “Goddamn, you look just like her.”