Innocence

My heart felt enlarged, not swollen with grief as it had been after Father died, but with complex emotions, swollen but not heavy, buoyant. I reminded myself that the heart is deceitful above all things, though I was sure it did not deceive me now.

I pushed my chair back from the table and got to my feet. “Leave the window open. At that hour, I’ll have to be very quick, out of the storm drain and up the fire escape.”

Rising from her chair, she said, “The rules don’t change.”

“The same rules,” I agreed. “You don’t look, and I don’t touch.”

She smiled and quoted me: “‘We hold each other hostage to our eccentricities.’”

After following me through the apartment to the dark bedroom, she remained in the open doorway to the softly lighted hall as I switched on my flashlight, dimmed it with fingers across the lens, and went to the window.

I turned to look at her and quoted something that she had said earlier. “‘There is one who comes and goes infrequently, but I won’t speak of that.’” When she said nothing, I asked, “Will you speak of that at dinner?”

“Perhaps. But as I said before, it’s nothing that’ll put you at risk. Not in any way.”

When I raised the window, the beam of my light reminded me of the words hand-printed on the windowsill with a felt-tip marker, which I had half seen when I first entered. If they were words and not just symbols, they were in a foreign language, and in fact they somewhat resembled letters of the Greek alphabet, with which college sororities and fraternities named themselves.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Remember the sun. Go, Addison. Go, while you still have the night.”

Switching off the flashlight, I slipped out of the room, onto the fire escape, where the air was cool, and all around the city seemed to be rising from its dreams, the millions of its cells waking one by one.

As I descended the iron steps, I heard the window sliding shut behind me and the latch being engaged.

Suddenly I was sure that I would never see her again, and the thought was so piercing, so sharp with intuition, that I froze on the iron, there above the alleyway.

22

AFTER A MOMENT, I FOUND MY HOPE AGAIN AND continued down the fire escape. At the second-floor apartment, light still glowed at the window, and the draperies remained partly open. But this time movement in the room caught my attention in passing.

I would not have stopped, would not have moved closer to the glass, if I had glimpsed only the man. But in the room with him was one of the Fogs.

The man appeared to be in his thirties, as ordinary as anyone, with a pleasant face and hair damp from a recent shower. He wore a sapphire-blue silk robe and stood barefoot before an entertainment center, sorting through a small stack of DVDs.

The Fog traveled that living room, swimming through the air from wall to wall, from ceiling to floor and up again, like an eel lazily exploring an aquarium with which it had long ago grown bored. White from end to end, lacking eyes and mouth, in fact without any features whatsoever, it should have seemed no more threatening than a blind worm. But it inspired such repugnance that a sour mash of coffee and brioche rose in the back of my throat, and though I had to swallow hard to force down that acidic mass, I could not look away from the thing, wondering what its intentions might be, for I had never before seen one in such an intimate setting.

On the coffee table in front of the sofa, an ice bucket chilled a carton of orange juice and an open bottle of champagne. A waiting glass, empty at the moment, suggested that the man in the robe would have mimosas for breakfast.

He selected a DVD from the small collection and inserted it into the tray of the player. Oblivious of the circling Fog, he went to the coffee table and poured equal measures of orange juice and champagne into the tall glass, sipped it once, then again, and put it on a coaster on an end table next to the sofa.