Demon

glittering intellect in their eyes. Three days after the morning I stood in front of the Gospel Room, I swore I saw a blonde soccer mom walk around the corner of the local Starbucks. Remembering Lucian the day at Vittorio’s, I hurried to get a glimpse of her, but she disappeared a block ahead of me as I tried to catch up to her.

Two days later I thought I saw the black man who had met me in church the day we saw the Halloween masks. But I lost him when he crossed the street just before an onslaught of cars.

A week and a half had passed since the day Mrs. Russo left to stay with her grandkids. She didn’t call, and though I might have been able to look them up in Long Island, I took it to mean that she was busy and so left her alone. Meanwhile, I continued to water her plants and collect her mail. I had eaten all of her perishables and regularly went to the co-op for soup and the daily special. My life, my mind, might be falling apart, but I was determined to get my body back together. I rescheduled my appointment with my doctor, the dizziness continuing to plague me despite my improved habits.

Though I recovered some semblance of routine, I knew other vestiges of my former life had left me forever. Every expensive car that passed me on the street, every new display in the window of Bowl and Board summoned to mind a pile of debris. I found I craved none of these things, all of them equally unpalatable to me.

I spoke with Katrina a second time, just briefly. She was ill that day, and we had had to keep it short. I told her I had something to show her when she felt up to it, though I knew she had plenty of clients she was already unable to give her time to. She was gracious enough to say she would discuss it with me later.

Thinking of her health, I felt like a clod. But I needed to sell the book if I could—not for the hope of interviews in the Bristol Lounge, or for the Paris Review, but because I had received my last paycheck from Brooks and Hanover and had yet to hear back on any of my application letters.

Meanwhile, I continued to stare at the blinking cursor at the end of the story that had once been Lucian’s but was now solely mine.

RETURNING FROM MY MORNING coffee run four days later, I thought I saw the punk kid from the Commons coming out of a shop. He was half a block down from where I was crossing the street when I saw him. But as with the soccer mom and the black man—and the taxi driver I thought I’d seen just yesterday dropping a passenger at a corner before speeding off, deaf to my hailing—he never turned when I shouted. And I wondered if I was not really the author of Dreaming: A Memoir, having hallucinated this entire series of encounters.

Still, I looked every day for that cast of guises, for the figure sauntering onto Inman, or leaning against the post of the house across the street.

That day I arrived back at my apartment to find Mrs. Russo’s door standing open. For the first time in longer than I could remember, my heart lifted with a jittery start induced by hope rather than fear.

“Mrs. Russo?” I stepped inside. Sounds issued from farther in, shuffling, the crinkling of something being rolled in paper. “Mrs. Russo?”

Her daughter, Jeanette, who often came to visit with her children, came out of the bedroom. Her face was haggard, her eyes swollen and red-rimmed.

I halted.

“Clay.” Jeanette offered a slight smile, and then her mouth crumpled. She lifted her hand to her eyes, and then pushed her hair back from them.

I stared at her. I could hear someone working in the bedroom and assumed it was her husband, Kevin. My heart took on a ragged rhythm.

“Mom had a stroke.” It came out in a tight squeak. Behind her Kevin emerged from the bedroom.

“No. No.” I was unsure if I said it for her or for myself or out of some strange guilt that I felt settling like a load of boulders upon me. Kevin laid an arm around his wife’s shoulders and reached out with his other to clasp my cold hand in greeting.

“But she went to New York.” I gave Kevin’s hand an absent shake. None of this made sense.

“They took her to the hospital, but she never regained consciousness,” Kevin said.

“What does that mean? What happened?” My hands began to shake. Had I contributed to this in some way? Had I brought undue attention to her by the simple fact of hiding in her prayerful shadow, albeit unwittingly, all these months?

Jeanette laid her hand along my arm, as if she was the one comforting me. “It means God called her,” she said with a tiny smile.

“Why?” I felt like a child.

Her smile, just then, was too much like her mother’s, with that hint of serenity amid obvious pain. “Would you want Mom far from you?”

But I need her here! I wanted to shout. The apartment was collapsing around me, the plants, my new computer, the stairs, into a heap of rubble, of meaninglessness.

Jeanette squeezed my shoulder. “Mom sure loved you, Clay. On her last visit she brought your name up in church, asking for prayer for you. You were on her heart.” Tears rolled down her cheeks. She eventually turned away, her hand over her face.

I fell back a step, unable to take it all in. Unable to believe Mrs. Russo would not be back, could not go with me to the tiny Gospel Room, tell me the things I needed to know.

“I have her plants,” I said faintly, stupidly.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do with all her things. Rob, my brother, is still recovering from his accident. If you wouldn’t mind keeping them—”

“No, no, I don’t mind.” I looked around her apartment. She had packed her carry-on bag there on the table, had given me her perishables standing here in the kitchen, had told me to water the plants until water came out the bottom.

“I’m sorry. If I can do anything to help . . .” I don’t know if I said it more for them or for me.

INSIDE MY APARTMENT, I reeled, grabbed at the back of a dining room chair, the table, the wall. I rushed to my desk. I grabbed the top of that stack of