Innocence

SHE WAS A GIRL WHO OPENED DOORS, NOT BECAUSE she wanted to open them, but because she knew that she needed to open them.

The chocolate-brown paneled door between Simon’s living quarters and the other rooms of the bungalow seemed like a monolith to me, a formidable slab beyond which lay something to be feared, either past or future violence. If the choice had been mine, I might have left right then; but the decision was Gwyneth’s.

The door opened to a short hallway. To the left were a bath and a room used for storage, both doors open and lights softly aglow. To the right lay the studio in which Simon created his works. No one, dead or alive, waited for us in those spaces.

At the end of the hall, we entered a gallery that had once been two rooms. Fixed to the rafters of the open-beam ceiling, pin spots brightened walls that were enriched by oil paintings that astonished and amazed, appealing equally to emotion and intellect. He excelled at figurative painting, both portraits of single individuals shown from head to foot and groups of people engaged in communal activities in a variety of exquisitely detailed and rendered locations.

Gwyneth said, “They’ve taken him.”

“Where?”

“Not to Telford’s apartment, not anywhere they would be seen with him. They think they can carve out of him the address of my ninth apartment.”

“You said he doesn’t know where it is.”

“He doesn’t. In fact, he doesn’t even know it exists.”

“What can he tell them?”

“Nothing. And even if he knew, he wouldn’t tell them. Clearly, he didn’t tell them I was coming here to take him someplace safe, or they would just have waited for us.”

“What will happen to him?” I asked.

For a moment forgetting the terms of our relationship, she looked at me, and an instant before our eyes met, I bowed my head, not willing to trust that my ski mask would be sufficient to ensure against her sudden and vehement rejection.

She switched off the pin spots, leaving the gallery faintly illuminated by the inspill of hallway light, and she went to a window to stare out at the snowy night.

Although I didn’t know Simon except through Gwyneth and through his stunning paintings on the surrounding walls, I felt we must do something. I repeated my question: “What will happen to him?”

“They’ll torture him, Addison. And when he gives them nothing, they’ll have to kill him.”

“All just to get to you?”

“I told you, Telford has stolen millions. And there are many millions more to steal from the warehoused collections of the museum and the library, items that won’t be missed for years, especially considering that Telford controls the inventory logs. And he alone decides what paintings, sculptures, rare books, and illuminated manuscripts will be taken out of storage to be featured in special shows. So he won’t be caught easily, as he might be if someone else had that power.”

I didn’t know what to say or do. I was a creature from the deep dark, an outsider who had known but one friend, Father, in the past eighteen years, and no friend at all since he died. I had thought that, with Gwyneth, in spite of her social phobia, I was learning how people were with one another, how they acted and reacted and interacted, what they said and how they said it, what they wanted, what they hoped for—more than I could learn from books alone. I thought that I might eventually discover, through her, how people arrived, if they ever did, at an understanding of the why of their lives, because the why of mine weighed heavily on me and seemed unanswerable. But if I had learned anything in the past twenty-four hours, it wasn’t knowledge that I yet understood how to use. I didn’t know what to say or do. I didn’t know. I just didn’t.

I couldn’t hear her crying. She stood there as quiet as the snow falling in the light of the streetlamps, yet I was certain that she wept. Tears had no scent, as far as I knew, but my five senses were not the instruments by which I became aware of her grief, nor was it merely intuition, but instead a perception more profound, one that I couldn’t name.

If I had been allowed to touch this sweet girl, I would have put my arms around her. In her current mood, however, with her emotions raw, she might not just recoil from a touch, but might instead fling herself away from it as if she’d taken an electric shock. And then my violation of the rules surely would have opened a gulf between us that could not be bridged.

She turned from the windows, crossed the gallery. “Come on.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

I hurried after her along the hallway. “Where are we going?”

“I don’t know.”

We left the rest of the lights on, the television as well, and we stepped out of the kitchen onto the back porch as the network newsreader said, “—to our reporter Jeffrey Stockwell in Mumbai, India.”