“Could be someone fucking with you.”
“Why? What would anyone have to gain?”
“Some people just like to play with lives. Some psycho sees your picture in the paper, you remind him of someone he used to know, someone who died. You become his target.”
“Okay. Explain this,” I said, pointing to the tiny mole just below the corner of my left eye. He looked at the photograph and saw an identical mark on the face of the child as I sat across from him.
He nodded slowly and looked over at me. “I’ll admit it’s weird.”
There were things about him that I hadn’t noticed the night before. There was something sad around his eyes, lines there that seemed to mark the vision of tragedy. I could see through his white T-shirt that the tattoo, which peeked out of his short shirtsleeve, also worked its way along his chest and over his collarbone. I saw a scar on his neck; it was an inch long, thick and raised as though there were something beneath the skin.
“But what do you want me to do?” he asked gently, coming to sit beside me.
I looked at his hands; they were thick and square, the knuckles calloused, blue veins roping beneath the skin. Something about them simultaneously turned me on and sent a shock of fear through me. In the daylight, he looked harder, tougher, bigger than I remembered him looking last night.
“You know what?” I said, getting up. “Forget it. You’re right. I don’t even know you. I’m sorry.”
He didn’t say anything. What an idiot I was. I gathered up the papers. I wished the floor would fall out beneath me.
“I’m overreacting.
“I don’t think you’re overreacting,” he said. I let him take the papers from my hand. He put them down out of my reach, then put his hand in mine.
“It’s okay, Ridley. I’m not sure how, but I’ll help you figure this out if you want me to.”
And we stood like that. The joining of hands is highly underrated in the acts of intimacy. You kiss acquaintances or colleagues, casually to say hello or good-bye. You might even kiss a close friend chastely on the lips. You might quickly hug anyone you knew. You might even meet someone at a party, take him home and sleep with him, never to see him or hear from him again. But to join hands and stand holding each other that way, with the electricity of possibilities flowing between you? The tenderness of it, the promise of it, is only something you share with a few people in your life.
His pull was irresistible.
“Really?” I said, feeling a wash of relief and gratitude.
“Really.”
“Okay.”
I felt the skin of his hand, hard but warm against mine. I could see all the facets in the gems of his eyes and I could feel that gaze searching me inside. I could sense the many layers of the stranger before me and I was afraid, intrigued, and deeply moved. When he guided me into his arms and held me there, the lines of our bodies melted into each other. I placed my cheek to his throat and felt his pulse throbbing. I was on the precipice of some yawning darkness, glad to have even this uncertain ally.
I don’t know how long we stood like that. A long time, I think.
Finally he said, “So this guy wants you to call him.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said, lingering a second in his arms and then pulling away. I sat at the table.
“Doesn’t that seem weird to you?”
“Why?”
“Well, think about it,” he said, sitting across from me.
“First of all,” I said, “why did you assume it was a man?” I had made the same assumption and was wondering what it was that led him to that as well.
He considered it a second. “The handwriting is masculine, for one thing. And the article says the woman in the picture is dead and the little girl missing.”
“Okay, why do you think it’s weird that he’d send a note?”
He shrugged. “If this guy thinks he’s your father and that you’re the little girl in this picture, then he’s been looking for you for a long, long time. And it means his daughter was
I thought about it a second. “Maybe he’s uncertain. Or afraid.”
He shook his head slowly. “Maybe,” he said. “But maybe he’s got something to hide himself.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” he said, picking up the newspaper clipping. He seemed to be considering something but stayed silent.
“What?” I asked finally. “What are you thinking?”
“I have a friend,” he said, turning his eyes on me. He seemed suddenly unsure and held up his hands. “Listen. I don’t want to overstep my bounds with you.”
I figured that he was thinking about last night when I’d scurried away from him, when he thought he’d scared me off.
“If anyone’s overstepping their bounds,” I said, “it’s me dumping all of this on you.”
He hesitated another second. Then: “This friend of mine, he’s a detective,” he said, not looking at me but at his feet. “Someone I grew up with. He might be able to help.”
If you’re wondering why he would be helping me, I didn’t know. But I was more grateful than curious. Men who are attracted to you will pretty much do anything, right? Right.
eight
I went east toward the river. In this new skin, I couldn’t think of anything else to do but wander. Wandering is not new to me. I’ve done a lot of it and New York City is the perfect place to lose yourself for a while— permanently, if you want to. You could walk a hundred blocks and pass a thousand people and no one would ever notice you, even if, five minutes ago, your face was on everyone’s television, on the front page of every paper. That fast, you could become a ghost. I was already losing myself, slipping through the fissures that were suddenly appearing in the facade of my life. I was vapor. I wafted down Eighth Street toward Tompkins Square, past the newly gentrified tenement buildings that held within their walls the energy of generations of strife and poverty, now gutted and newly painted, fitted with picture windows boasting trendy East Village boutiques. In that gleaming glass I caught sight of a woman who didn’t know who she was anymore, who didn’t know from where or from whom she came.
I stopped to look at her. She looked real enough, like flesh and blood and bone. But if you reached out to touch her, she faded like a hologram.
I’d left my problems with Jake. He told me to take a break, get some distance and get my head together. So I left the question of my very identity at his doorstep like a bag of unwanted clothes at the Salvation Army. For the time being, I wanted to get as far away from the questions as I could. And yet as the East Village morphed into Alphabet City, unfortunately I realized that every time I caught my reflection in the mirror, I’d be reminded that I was suddenly a stranger to myself.
Maybe you think I was overreacting. Did I really have enough information at this point? Hadn’t I felt guilty and embarrassed not even twenty-four hours earlier for having entertained these very thoughts? What can I say? This idea had wormed its way into my consciousness and was now burrowing and expanding beneath my skin. I wouldn’t say I felt shattered exactly. But I felt like one of those East Village tenement buildings, stripped to naked wood, gutted, old brass pipes exposed, wires hanging like webs, a shell of myself waiting for reincarnation.
I found myself on Avenue C. This is the real Alphabet City. Not the one on Avenue A before Tompkins Square, packed with trendy shops and cafes, million-dollar co-ops, shabby-chic lofts, all struggling in their new opulence for the look of East Village grit that had seemed so undesirable when it was real. The money hadn’t made it down this far yet. It was as though once you passed the park, you’d entered a dead zone, a place that the city had decided to
