Dangerous Neighbors (10 page)

She felt a loosening, a lightening. Her arm went slack,
and she recognized, too late, that Anna had fled. She was tunneling through the crowd, running across Fifth and down Chestnut: running. East, under a sky that was aluminum and glittered copper, through a noise Katherine could never describe. East, to the very edge of the city.

Anna’s blueberry skirt was kicking up above her boots. Her gray wrap was flying out behind her. Where, Katherine wondered, was she going, and why would she not stop for Katherine? Why would she force Katherine to take off running, too, past the banks, past the market, past the rows of brick homes and marble lintels, over cobblestones and streetcar tracks, past a ravaged horse tied to a thick lamppost? Anna ran. Katherine had to run faster.
Bennett
, Katherine thought, but it wasn’t him. Tonight, in fact, it wasn’t.

And it wasn’t until Anna had gone all the way to the city’s edge that Katherine stopped running. Not until then did she understand that the river was here. The wide, black Delaware that hemmed Philadelphia in on its eastern side and that held now, on its slickened face, the mirror image of the sky. Whatever broke open up above was breaking on the river, too, and if you were out on the Delaware, if you made your way past the docks and lowered yourself down and stood or floated, you’d be inside a globe of fizzing color. Anna stood near the edge; Katherine came closer. She reached for Anna as the colors broke over the sky, over the
river. But still Anna shrugged her sister off and walked out even closer to the edge. She was breathing hard. By now they both were.

“Don’t you dare, Anna,” Katherine said. “This is as far as we go.”

“It’s just a river, Katherine. It’s harmless.”

“No, it’s not, and you know it.”

“It’s the New Year.”

“I know what it is.”

“I just want to get closer.”

“Anna,” Katherine warned, and Anna threw her bright head back and laughed, then all of a sudden grew somber.

“I couldn’t find Bennett,” she said. “All of Philadelphia in the streets, but Bennett wasn’t there.”

“He was probably out somewhere, searching for you,” Katherine said grudgingly.

“Oh, Katherine,” Anna sighed. “Do you think so?” She turned at last to look at Katherine, to study her with eyes that were, if full of fierceness, sweet. Then she opened her arm to Katherine, and the sisters stood as the river held its mirror to the dazzling New Year’s sky.

Anna leaned in close. “I forgive you,” she said.

“For what?”

“For caring so much that it makes you mean.”

“He’ll ruin us both,” Katherine said, but not out of anger this time.

“Look in his eyes sometime. Try and see him.”

“I have, Anna. I understand. I know why you love him.”

“I’ll marry him.”

“But Father won’t allow it.”

“Perhaps Mother will, then. Pursuit of happiness. Constitutional and whatnot.”

“You’re slightly mad,” Katherine said.

“Of course I am.” Anna laughed. And then she turned toward Katherine and leaned in for a kiss. “Love you,” she said, and Katherine thought,
Remember this
.

That night Katherine gave up trying to talk sense into Anna. That night she did not try to argue her twin sister out of her gargantuan joy; she did not try to save her. It was then that Katherine decided to begin to look the other way on purpose, but this time without anger, without the intent to prove a point. She decided to stop protecting Anna, so that she might love her more truly.

It was a decision she had made. She didn’t foresee the consequences.

N
OW AT THE
C
ENTENNIAL, A BARBERSHOP QUARTET
prepares to sing, and whoever has been playing the organ has disappeared.
More smoke
, Katherine thinks.
More mirrors
. The afternoon is running on and Katherine knows that if she’s serious about letting it all go, she must begin to move toward her final destination.

She zags in and out of inventions, finds herself at the telegraph just as a message gets tapped to another corner of the globe. The crowd masses and moves, and Katherine moves with it, like a leaf floating on the back of a wet current.

The wonders of the world slide past. Parisian corsets cavorting on their pedestals. Vases on lacquered shelves. Folding beds. Walls of cutlery. The sweetest assortment of sugar-colored pills, all set to sail on a yacht. Brazil, she discovers, lives inside its own Frank Furness–designed house with its own flowers made of feathers, its own yams and sarsaparilla.

“Excuse me.” It’s an old man with a barking brogue—a man with a cane—and Katherine’s in his way. She’s not even sure how she got here, what secret internal engine
brought her down one aisle and up another and through vale and hill and plains toward here, between the countries of Holland and Belgium at the entrance to the Moorish palace of Brazil, with its decorative arches and wooden pillars. Everything above is color—yellow, red, green, blue panels of painted wood—and wedged into the color are iridescent tiles that spell the names of provinces.

More insistently this time, the man pounds the floor with the end of his cane. He clears his throat. “Please,” he says.

“Forgive me.” She steps aside, into the kingdom of Brazil, where before her now is a bouquet of blooming feathers. Beyond the bouquet is a case of butterflies pinned into false flight and next are insects that will never lose their gleam. Brazil is here in photographs, in maps, in charts, in the native ingenuity of manioc, castor tree, mahogany, laces, and wool hats, in the strong odor of leather saddles and tribal hammocks.

She weaves back and forth across acres. Past zinc ore and printing inks; a library of blank books; a cabinet of violins; an iron letter box; a woman in a rolling chair, a pink-nosed pup upon her lap. The man selling Centennial guidebooks smiles, inviting a sale. Katherine shakes her head no, for how could a book explain the stuffed Russian bear hanging from his toes, the jars of black powder, the wall of soda ash?

At the intersection of the main aisle and the central
transept is a palace of jewels: Tiffany, Starr & Marcus, Caldwell. If you see nothing else at the Centennial, see the jewels, Katherine had been told. See these cinnamon-colored cameos; this diamond necklace; these perfect solitaires; these black, white, and pink pearls. She waits her turn before sapphire and ruby, before tiaras, before the famous peacock feather with the massive Brunswick diamond nestled within.
Precious
. It’s the only word that comes to mind, and suddenly she feels terrified of all that will begin today, and of all that will end.

Behind her, in the open aisle, something is wrong. Katherine senses a low-grade panic, and in an instant, turning, she understands: a child is missing and a mother is blaming herself. “Darcy?” the mother has begun to call. “Honey?” An elderly woman beside the mother says, “Tell us what she looks like, dear. She can’t have gone far.”

“But she was right here,” the mother insists. “There.” She points to a place by her feet. She turns and takes a few steps west, a few east; she circles back, clearly afraid to go too far, to leave the daughter’s starting spot, and now a small surge of strangers has gathered, now more questions are being asked, now the mother grows increasingly confused. Katherine hears herself repeat the question, “But what does she look like? Your daughter. How old is she? How big?” She repeats herself, until the mother understands that she is only trying to help.

“Four years old,” the mother says. The hair has fallen out from beneath her hat; her eyes are desperate and black. “In a pink dress. Darcy’s sherbet dress, she calls it. She was right here. I was here. And she was there, beside me.” The mother gestures toward her own shadow again; she raises her arms, bites the bottom of her lip.

“We’ll find her,” Katherine says, wondering where in the world her sudden confidence comes from. “You stay where you are.” Just like that, as if she knows where a girl might go in a place like this, she takes off in one direction, hearing the mother’s cry at her back: “Darcy? Honey?” Katherine runs, remembering Anna, remembering that day in winter, when she could not move fast enough, when she could not, did not, save her sister.

When she let it happen.

Past the Leviathan Ostrich Incubator, past the pyramids, past the tower of wine bottles, past buttons and straw hats and tie silks, past the fire clay and slate, the bandstand, another iron letter box, the faces, and in all that distance, no little girl in sherbet pink. A quarter hour goes by at least, until at last Katherine turns a corner and sees a child alone, at the display of Watson nutshells. A child, tantalized and unafraid. The girl is amazed, Katherine can see, by the dangling oddities, the carved nuts and fruit stones that hang as if from the rims of a giant birdcage; Katherine is amazed that she has found her, that rescue remains a
possibility. Too short to reach the nearest ornament, the girl is stretching nonetheless, balancing on her toes, not nearly lost in her own mind, not nearly on the verge of being found.

“Darcy?” Katherine says quietly, so that the girl won’t run. “Are you Darcy?” The girl falls off her balance and takes in the spectacle of Katherine, whose face is flushed, whose heart is high and wild, whose thoughts are seized, again and again, by images of Anna, a memory, now, of Mother, once she came to understand the irreversibility of Anna’s being lost. “Your mother has been looking for you, Darcy,” Katherine says. “I can show you where she is.”

“Did you see the nutshells?” Darcy asks.

“I did,” Katherine says, taking the girl’s hand.

“Do you think they’re pretty?”

“Very pretty,” Katherine says.

The little girl nods.

“This must be your sherbet dress.”

“It’s pink,” Darcy says.

“It’s a nice pink.”

The girl’s hand in Katherine’s hand is small and complete. An anchor in a vast sea.

Katherine stands and listens to the bedlam noise of the Exhibition Hall. She closes her eyes, for maybe that will help her hear the voice of Darcy’s mother, calling. If not the word,
Darcy
, won’t Katherine hear the thrash-sound of fear,
for she knows how that sounds, what it sounded like that day, when she called out Anna’s name, and Anna did not answer, and Anna would not answer ever again.

“Let’s find your mother,” Katherine says, and Darcy is content to go on with this ginger-haired stranger, though she glances twice over her shoulder at the glamorous display of nutshells as now the two trace backward, toward the Brunswick diamond. There is the iron letter box—is it the same one? There are the straw hats and the tie silks, and they, at least, are the same, and now beside the towering wine bottles is Darcy’s mother, who is bent forward at the waist, as if every fiber of herself has already been damaged by the possibility of loss.

“The nutshells,” Katherine says, and Darcy’s mother turns and looks up at Katherine, then down at Darcy, and her eyes do not know what to do.

“You found her,” she says, barely a whisper.

The mother hurries forward and lifts Darcy up into her arms and locks her in close, as if she will never again let her go.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” she says to Katherine, over Darcy’s squirming head, the little kick of her legs. “I don’t know what—”

“Please,” Katherine says, putting up her hand, stopping the mother from coming any closer. “It was nothing.” And it is nothing; it does nothing to bring Anna back. It had been
Katherine’s job to keep her sister safe. It had been Bennett’s obligation. Both of them failed, and now Katherine recalls the look on Bennett’s face that fatal day, and suddenly she is certain: he is there somewhere, among the crowds; he has followed her; he is waiting. This afternoon in the Main Exhibition Hall of the Centennial, she feels sick with knowing that he will attempt to stop her again. That he cannot, just as she cannot, let this business go.

“Excuse me,” she says to Darcy’s mother, who reaches out toward Katherine, but she is gone. She is escaping into the crowd that has massed around Tufts—all those people waiting for a soda pop. She can camouflage herself here, she thinks, until she carves out her plan.

And so she moves through the crowd and toward the fountain statuary, toward the only open squeeze of space at the narrow bar. Sliding into place, she says to the girl across the counter, “An orange soda, please.”

The girl is as pallid as her uniform and in no hurry to please. She adds Katherine’s order to her list of orders, tells Katherine it could be some time, saying, “We’re busy,” as if Katherine herself hasn’t looked about. Katherine can only wait. She checks over her shoulder. Nobody could find her here.

“Makes you wish you were in the soda business, don’t it, though?” says the man to Katherine’s right, a rasping voice, but not an old one. Turning, she notices how it is that he’s
either lost his jacket or left it behind, and how to his vest he’s pinned a dozen gold watches, like buttons sewn into the wrong spots. He watches her watching. She feels his eyes on her and blushes, and her embarrassment pleases him so much that he smiles. The eyetooth on his left side is only half its proper length and torqued.