Innocence

“To live in these cramped spaces, without sun, for eighteen years, the last six without company, and always with the expectation that there would never be more than this, to endure that and not be driven mad… Sanity in such circumstances takes more courage than I possess.”

With that, she gave me a somewhat different perspective on my life, and I didn’t know what to say.

She said then, “What do you want to take with you, Addison?”

“Take with me?”

“What’s most precious to you? Don’t leave it here. After we go, you won’t ever be coming back.”

I couldn’t fully comprehend her meaning, and it seemed that I must have misheard what she said. “Not coming back? But where would I live?”

“With me.”

“You mean in the apartment with the piano?”

“No. We’re not going back there, either. That’s over. All of it is over. We’re moving on to something new.”

Until then, I would not have thought that great happiness could coexist with fear, but the latter came upon me without fading the former. I found myself trembling, not in either dread or rapture, but in a kind of neutral expectation.

“We have a lot to do in the next few hours,” she said. “So hurry and decide what you don’t want to leave behind, and let’s be going.”

Trust, I told myself, and I did trust.

Pressed between two books on one of the shelves, an envelope contained a photograph, a simple snapshot, that I never wanted to be without. From between the front cover and the endpaper of a special book on another shelf, I withdrew an index card on which Father had printed words of special meaning to me. I slipped the card into the envelope and tucked the envelope into an inside pocket of my jacket.

I followed Gwyneth to the passageway that led from the hammock room—which was also my kitchen—and there I paused to look back. I had lived more than two-thirds of my life in those windowless rooms, and for the most part they had been years of contentment and hope. I felt as though ten thousand conversations between Father and me were recorded on those concrete walls and that if I could only sit quietly and attentively enough, with adequate patience, they would replay for me. Nothing in this world, not even the most mundane moments of our lives, is without meaning, nor is any of it lost forever.

In leaving, I had neglected to turn off the lamps. I considered going back through the rooms to extinguish them, but I didn’t. I left them aglow, as the lights in a shrine are never put out. Following Gwyneth, I allowed myself to imagine that the bulbs in those lamps would prove to be blessed with uncanny life and that if, a thousand years from now, some adventurous explorer of storm drains were to come across that haven, he would be welcomed by lamplight, by books perfectly preserved, and would know that in this humblest of places, in ancient times, many treasured hours had been passed in happiness.

64

SNOW SHEETING THROUGH THE HEADLIGHTS, THE streets vacant except for the laboring plows, the people of the city sequestered in their warm and civilized rooms, the wind keening across the windshield and along the passenger door beside me…

Gwyneth drove a route familiar to me, and only minutes after we set out, her cell rang. She glanced at the screen, put the phone on SPEAKER, and said, “I would pray that Simon haunts you forever, but he deserves his rest.”

“How touching that you should care so much for a useless burnt-out boozer who couldn’t even keep from pissing his pants at the end.”

Ryan Telford’s voice was throatier than before, and in spite of his cocky words, he sounded shaken.

When she said nothing, Telford pressed into her silence: “You were right that he didn’t know where you have a ninth apartment. The only useful thing we got from funky Simon was how he came to know you in the first place.”

Gwyneth stiffened but still did not speak.

“He saved a little girl from death in a Dumpster, probably so drunk at the time, he didn’t know what he was doing. And because he saved her, you saved him. Your weakness, Miss Mouse, is that you’re a sentimental little bitch.”

“Where are you?” she asked.

Instead of answering, he said, “With the Internet, it’s easy to find an old news story.”

He paused. The sound he made suggested that he was straining at something, a weight that was difficult to lift or the lid of a jar too tight to unscrew. He muttered a curse.

Gwyneth waited.

The curator said, “The newspaper story and follow-ups tell me the hospital where the girl was treated, how she became a ward of the court, how she was in a coma, a vegetative state. Then the stories end. There’s like a press blackout or something, nothing about her fate. Did she die? Is she still alive, with the brain of a carrot?”

When Telford paused again, Gwyneth handed me the phone to hold, so that she could drive with both hands, and she accelerated.

The curator grunted, made that straining-to-lift sound again, and then took a couple of deep, shuddery breaths. “Remember I told you two of Goddard’s guys, they now work for me, they’re ex-cops?”