“She has to,” I said.
Ellen got her coat from the floor and came over to me again. She spoke softly. “I swear to God, Natalie, I thought your deal was great.”
“It was perfect,” I said. My teeth were chattering.
Her gaze moved to my bandaged hand resting on the pillow. “No. But it was the best I ever saw.” She shut her eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
She watched my face a moment and then left, shutting the inner door behind her and then the outer one.
“Open the blinds,” I said to Harley. “Right away. Please.”
She opened them, and from the loveseat I watched Ellen through the window, walking through the falling snow to her car.
“Unwrap the gauze,” I said.
“What?”
“Harley, you have to do it.” Each breath was getting harder. “Do it fast. Please.”
I watched out the window again and then dug with my good hand beneath the afghan and into my front pants pocket. I had to shift a little to the side. The slightest movement sent my hand screaming.
Outside, Ellen’s car door slammed shut.
I removed my hand from my pocket and looked. There had been no time earlier, when I stole it from Ellen, to do anything with it other than shove it into my pocket. There was no time now, either, to examine it, but I had to know what had been worth all this risk, all this deception, all this misery.
“What is that?” Harley asked.
It was a bell.
Silver and very small, it was about the length of a thumb. Engraved on it was a single word—REVERE—and a year: 1775. The clapper was stuck to the bell’s side, silenced, with a Band-Aid.
“Wrap my hand up again,” I told her, pressing the bell against the palm of my injured hand, “with this inside. Please. Hurry.”
Harley glanced outside, where Ellen had gotten into her car but wasn’t driving away, then back at me. For the first time, I think she understood that either she was going to do what I asked or she wasn’t, but that logic and reason were not in play—that all this would be beyond her, at least for a while longer.
Rather than remove all the gauze from my fingers, she cut what was left and began to wrap the new gauze around the old, going over the wound, then up my hand to the wrist, back to the wound, again and again. I prayed that Ellen would drive away, but I wasn’t surprised when her car’s interior light came on. Of course she would want to touch the bell, hold it, remind herself it was hers finally, before leaving. And when she couldn’t find it, there was going to be an explosion.
She got out of the car and climbed into the backseat. I couldn’t see her any longer, but I knew she had to be searching under the seats, reaching into the car’s crevices. She had to be frantic in that car. She had lost it. Everything she’d worked for this past year was unraveling. She left the backseat and got into the front passenger seat. More searching. Only a matter of time before she came back up the walkway.
The bell’s shape was vanishing into the bulge of gauze when I heard a hissing sound through my thin living room windows. I couldn’t place the sound until my beautiful, pathetic young neighbor came into view. He had on a leather jacket. No hat or gloves. The sound was the shovel dragging behind him across the top layer of snow.
He crossed to our side of the street, approached Ellen’s car, and said something I couldn’t make out. The passenger door was still open, and she turned around and looked up at him. I had no trouble hearing her response: “Get the hell out of here!”
Calvin watched her another moment, and without saying anything else he walked past the front of her car and began shoveling snow away from my rear tire. He dumped the snow by the curb. Shovel, dump. Shovel, dump.
“You’re shivering,” Harley said, tucking the afghan tighter around my legs. “You’ve lost a lot of blood. You’re going into shock. You need a hospital.”
I shook my head no and watched Ellen crawl across the center console to get into the driver’s seat again. More searching. By the time she left her car again, my rear wheels were free from the snow, and Calvin was over by the passenger front tire. Ellen shut the driver-side door, went around and shut the passenger door, and headed back toward the apartment. My hand was fully bandaged again, the bell making only the slightest bulge at the palm. I covered my hand with the dish towel as Ellen came charging back into the building, then into my apartment.
My expression, pained and exhausted and frozen and lightheaded, was no act.
Hers wasn’t either: sheer panic.
Without a word, she crossed the living room toward the kitchen. I heard cabinets opening, items being thrown around. Then she was back in the living room. On her knees, she felt under the loveseat, looked under the coffee table. She slid her hand into the corners of the sofa, grazing my legs, my torso, as if I were an inanimate thing—a heavy duffel bag, a log—no longer of consequence. Every jostle sent a million volts through my hand.
“What are you doing?” Harley asked.
Ellen stood and leaned over me, examining the loveseat, and I noticed her exposed thumb, the neat stiches made with black thread, which the Band-Aid had been covering up until very recently.
“What are you looking for?” Harley asked. “Maybe I can help.”
My neighbor wasn’t going to win an Academy Award, but Ellen, scanning the living room, was too busy to notice. She went into the kitchen again. There were only so many places to search, but she had to keep at it because the alternative was too awful for her to consider: if it wasn’t in her car or in my apartment, then the bell, whose theft she had planned and plotted with such precision
