Innocence

“There’s a place. But that doesn’t matter right now.”

The streets were busy, cars crowding all around us. Delivery trucks. Buses. Well-bundled people on the sidewalks hurried through the wintry night.

I said, “When you got your driver’s license, you must have had to be around a lot of people at the DMV or somewhere.”

“I don’t have a driver’s license.”

I can’t say that I was shocked, but I was a little dismayed. “It’s against the law to drive without a license.”

“It’s illegal,” she said, “but it’s not immoral.”

“What if you’re in an accident and hurt someone?”

“With or without a license, an accident can happen. The fault wouldn’t be in the lack of a license. The fault would be driving inattentively or recklessly, or drunk.”

“You don’t drive drunk, do you?”

“No. And not inattentively or recklessly, either.”

I considered all of that for a minute, and I guess she wondered what my silence meant.

She said, “Well?”

“Well, I guess it’s okay then.”

“It’s okay,” she assured me.

“All right. Good. You see what the snow’s doing?”

“Snowing.”

“No, I mean the way it floats over the front of the car and up and over the roof and never touches the glass.”

“When we’re moving, we create a slipstream that floats the snow over us.” She pulled to a stop at a red traffic light, and right away the snow stuck and melted on the warm glass. “See?”

“Neat,” I said.

A Clear in hospital blues appeared out of the slanting snow and stepped into the street, indifferent to the foul weather. He stopped in the middle of the intersection and turned his head from side to side, the way they do, maybe looking for something but almost seeming to be listening more than looking.

The traffic light changed, and Gwyneth ran down the Clear. I saw him pass through the SUV between our seats, but I didn’t turn to watch him recede out the tailgate.

I didn’t say anything to her about him. What could I have said? She tolerated my hood and mask and gloves, my inexperience and what must have seemed to her to be my deeply paranoid conviction that most people, if not all, would respond to the sight of me with disgust and violence. If I told her about the Clears and the Fogs, she might decide that I was one kind of crazy too many for her taste, pull the Rover to the curb, and tell me to get out.

Our relationship was delicate, perhaps no less so than the crystal intricacy of those first huge snowflakes that had spiraled around me in the Commons. We had at once accepted each other because we could accept no one else. I admired her brave attempts to cope with her phobia, and perhaps she admired the way that I had coped with what she assumed was my irrational paranoia. We were outcasts, she by election, I by the condition in which I was born, but that did not ensure our friendship. She didn’t want the world, and the world didn’t want me, and when you thought about that, it became clear that we were less alike than we seemed to be, that strains could easily develop that would lead to an irreconcilable parting.

Already I loved her. I would be content to love her all of my life without touching her, but I saw no indication that she loved me in the same way, or at all. Considering her social phobia, if she were to suspect the depth of my feelings for her, she might recoil, retreat, and banish me. She might not be capable of loving me as I already loved her, let alone in the more profound way that I would surely come to love her over time. I drew hope from the fact that she had clearly loved her father, and I needed that hope because, after living my life with one loss after another, losing this might at last break me.

I hadn’t thought to ask, but now I did: “Where are we going?”

“To see someone.”

“Who?”

Until this moment, the girl’s Goth makeup had seemed exotic and fanciful, but it did not convey upon her an air of danger. Now her face hardened, her mouth became like a crack in stone, her teeth clenched as if she had bitten into something that she wanted to tear apart, and the scarlet bead on her pierced lip glistened and seemed to quiver as if it were a real drop of blood.

In answer to my question, she said, “Nobody knows her name. They say she’s dead, but I refuse to believe it. I refuse.”

34

THE STREET WAS IN A COMFORTABLE NEIGHBORHOOD, lined with maples, their bare limbs a becoming architecture, a perfect grace when green, and as red as fire in autumn. The yellow-brick house stood behind a shallow front yard and a raised porch trimmed with Christmas lights. A wreath hung on the door.

When Gwyneth parked at the curb, I expected to stay in the car, but she said, “I want you to come in with me. You’ll be safe.”

“The only house in the city that I’ve ever been in is yours. The only one. A house is a trap, a place that I don’t know and too few ways out.”

“Not this house.”

“I can’t.”

“You can, Addison.”

I slid lower in my seat.

She said, “They won’t harm you.”

“Who are they?”

“They take care of her.”

“Of the girl with no name?”

“Yes. Come on now. I want you to see her.”

“Why?”