she had to run after it. Then, in a single motion, she swung around and sent it curving toward her brother. Viera was businesslike, dispatching the toy toward Victor’s grasp with the neatness of a fact.
As the game progressed, Victor became more skilful. It even became easy. If only speech were this easy, he thought. If only trust and friendship could be so natural.
“This was a good idea,” he called to Viera. “To bring this thing along.”
“For a picnic, a Frisbee is essential. You didn’t know this?”
Viera whipped it straight and level, chest-high to Victor. Then Victor launched it into a graceful tilting flight to Lorca. She had only to take one step, a short leap, to pluck it out of the air. In that swift, clean motion she looked perfect, Victor thought. Undamaged.
“You two continue,” Viera said. “I am fat and middle-aged and require my rest.”
“Lazy!” Lorca yelled after him. “Lazy old man!” She stamped her foot in a comical way. Then she spoke to Victor for the first time that day. “You’ve had enough too, I suppose. You want to join the little old man? The senior citizen?”
Victor shook his head, holding out his hand for the Frisbee. With a flick of her wrist, Lorca sent the bright plastic disc whizzing into his palm. As they played on, his technique continued to improve. He could now place the Frisbee pretty much where he wanted to. Yes, he thought, I’m like a normal person now. I’m doing a normal thing.
Despite the cool breeze, he worked up a sweat. Several times he thought surely Lorca would have had enough, but they played on and on. How could this leaping, graceful girl be the hunched and bitter woman of an hour ago?
The clouds arranged themselves into high-banked columns of cumulus that now and then hid the sun. Victor and Lorca played in shade then sun, shade then sun. It got windier, it got colder, but they played on, Lorca silent and serious, Victor sometimes shouting “Good throw!” or “Sorry!”
No one would ever know what I did to this woman, he thought. She may even come to like me. Is this what being good feels like? This ease, this freedom, is this how the brave feel every minute, every hour? With me, of course, it is a performance, and all performances have their final curtain.
“It was the same when we were children,” Viera said when they joined him and his wife on the blanket. “Lorca never wanted to stop. She would have played in the pitch-dark.”
“Why not?” Lorca said, accepting a plastic cup of lemonade from Helen. “They make ones that shine in the dark, you know. They are called-I forget the word for it, this shining.”
“Phosphorescent.”
“Phosphorescent.” The word came out with a slight whistle, and she covered her mouth with her hand.
“We should get that tooth fixed,” her brother said. “It makes you look like a street person.”
The tip of her tongue probed at the tooth. She turned away and stared at the water. “I am cold now.”
“Because you’re sweating,” Helen said. “I told you to bring a jacket. Tell her she’s foolish, Ignacio.”
Victor said nothing. At the mention of Lorca’s injury, shame had coiled itself around his chest. He could hardly breathe.
They didn’t stay long after that. The plates and napkins were thrown in the trash, the Thermos and blanket packed away.
“This is the happiest I’ve seen her,” Viera said as they headed back across the park toward Fifth Avenue, “the happiest since she came here. This is how she used to be, Ignacio. So easy and free. Not this anger all the time, this rage.”
Lorca had been walking ahead of them, but she stopped at the edge of the park drive, where cyclists and roller skaters whooshed by. She said, “I think I would like those, the Rollerblades. I would like to try that sometime.”
“You would fall and break your head,” Viera teased her.
“I would not. Helen, you want to learn?”
Viera’s wife looked surprised that she had been addressed. She stammered a little. “Gosh, I don’t know. Skating is for children, isn’t it?”
“It’s not a crime. Grown men and women are still in part children.”
“Oh, that’s a lot of hogwash. I don’t believe that for one second.”
But Lorca did not hear. In a swift change of expression, her mouth opened-the broken tooth a sudden black triangle. She was staring beyond Helen’s shoulder at something on the road.
Victor followed her gaze.
Coming up the hill, lumbering amid the throngs of skaters and bicyclists, was a green Jeep Grand Cherokee. The windows were tinted, the driver and passengers nothing more than dark shapes. A terrible trembling shook Victor in the knees. It’s going to stop, he thought. It’s going to stop and Sergeant Tito will jump out and arrest me.
“What’s wrong?” someone was saying.
It’s just a Jeep, he told himself, a recreational vehicle. They’re everywhere. But his legs trembled all the same.
Lorca ran.
Viera and Helen turned on the path, gaping after her.
“It’s the truck,” Victor managed to say. “The Jeep. It’s what the Guardia drive.”
“Good God,” Helen said. “Where the hell’s she going? Does she expect us to go and pry her out of the bushes?”
“We can’t just leave her,” Viera said. “She doesn’t know the park. She might get lost.”
“Michael, Lorca is a grown woman.”
Lorca had rounded the pond. She vanished among the trees below Belvedere Castle.
“I will go,” Victor said.
“You’d better not,” Helen said. “You don’t know her moods.”
But Victor was already hurrying toward the pond. The trees were not yet in full bloom; dark figures moved among winding paths. As Victor entered the darkness of the Rambles, a ball of fur scuttled out from the bushes trailing a red leash. Victor nearly tripped headlong. “Sorry,” a young woman called to him. “Scampy, you come back here right now.”
He stopped at the crest of a small hill. Below him on one side, cars rushed across the Seventy-ninth Street transverse; above him on the other, laughing children ran around the castle.
“Lorca?” he called. “Lorca, where are you?” A couple walking hand in hand parted to let him pass. “Excuse me,” he said to the man, “did you see a young woman run in here? Dark hair? This tall?” He held his hand, palm down, about five feet off the ground.
The man shook his head and started to walk on, but the woman pointed down the hill they had just climbed. “There was a woman by herself, near the water.”
“Water?”
“By the willow trees. She was wearing blue jeans and a loose blue shirt.”
Victor thanked them and hurried on. He had to clamber down some rocks to reach the waterside path. The willows were visible from the far side of the tiny lake where youngsters and tourists rowed rented boats. Their fronds trailed over the banks and into the water.
As he came around the curve of the hill, he could see a flicker of blue between the emerald branches. “Don’t be afraid,” he said in Spanish, forgetting his fear for the moment. “No one will harm you here.”
There was a shuffling sound from the willow; the blue disappeared.
“Please don’t run,” he said softly. “There is nothing to run from.”
Silence from the willow. Distant laughter from the lake. From farther off, the barking of a dog.
“The truck,” he said. “I know it frightened you. It frightened me too. It’s just like the ones the Guardia drive- the tinted windows, everything. Believe me, I know them well.”
Two men came around the hill holding hands. They glanced at Victor talking to the tree, but were too engrossed in each other to remark on it or laugh.
“The tinted windows,” Victor pressed on. “They like them, the Guardia, because they know it is frightening to be watched by someone you cannot see.”
Not a word from the willow. From the water, the creak and splash of oars.
