If Only in My Dreams (22 page)

Nice clothes in all different sizes.

Realizing he might be close to solving the enigma one way or another, he checks the nearest address. Hers is only a few numbers away.

He walks on, and his heart seems to be beating in his ears.

Here. This is it.

He stops and surveys the tall townhouse.

It’s slightly shabbier than the one on the left and much nicer than the one on the right, proving the neighborhood clearly is in flux.

Once, this was a grand townhouse. Now the paint is peeling from the trim around the door and windows. English ivy creeps halfheartedly up the front of the building, obstructing most of a ground-floor window, and there is a Christmas wreath on the front door. Those splotches of green are the building’s only bright spots in the midst of the bleak December landscape.

Jed checks his watch. It’s just past seven o’clock.

He wonders whether he should knock now or wait until a slightly more respectable hour. He can’t afford to let too much time pass if he expects to get back home and open the store.…

Then he hears the voice.

“Hey, mister… what you doing?”

Sunday morning, Clara is awakened from a sound sleep—a sleep that had refused to descend until the sun came up—to a distant tapping sound.

It takes her a moment to realize that it’s coming from her door.

She jumps out of bed and hurries, barefoot, to the next room, rubbing her bleary eyes, wondering who it can be.

In fact…

She slows her pace as she approaches the door, remembering that people can’t just pop in. Not people without keys to the building, anyway. Or crazed killers who slip in when nobody’s looking.

Frowning, she peers through the peephole… and smiles.

The building super is standing there, holding a tremendous pinkish-white poinsettia plant.

Wishing she were presentable, she unlocks the door and peeks out. “Hello, Mr. Kobayashi,” she croaks in her morning voice. “What have you got there?”

“This is for you.” He thrusts the foil-wrapped pot at her.

“Thank you! It’s so sweet of you to—”

“No!” He looks downright alarmed. “Not sweet of me! This isn’t a sweet gift from me! I’m a married man!”

“I know, I know… don’t worry.” Confused, she wonders if Mr. Kobayashi has a crush on her and what she’s supposed to do about it—and the sweet gifts he won’t own up to even when he hands them directly to her.

“I found this here,” he says then, and gestures at the black rubber doormat.

“You… found it?”

“On the mat. Someone left a sweet gift. Not me.”

“No, not you. Of course not.” And she believes him.

“I just found it when I was coming to give you soup.”

“Soup?”

For the first time, she realizes that he is also holding a plastic container.

“My wife made it. When I told her last night you got mugged by street scum and beat up to a pulp, she said, ‘Isamu, my soup will help that poor girl.’ She says her soup will help everything. Here. For you. Homemade
nabeyaki udon.”

“Thank you so much.” Clara accepts the soup, balancing it on her arm, touched by his kindness. She also wonders who could have left the gorgeous poinsettia on her mat. “Please thank Mrs. Kobayashi for me, too.”

He nods and pads away in his slippers, down the stairs.

There’s a note
, Clara realizes, spotting a corner of white peeking out from amid the leaves.

She locks the door again, shoves the soup in the nearly empty fridge, and hurriedly opens the small florist’s card.

In red Sharpie, someone has scrawled,
May your day be merry and bright! Love, Santa
.

You again
, Clara thinks, bemused.
But who are you?

The small, accented voice seems to have come out of thin air.

Frowning, Jed looks around.

There is nobody in sight.

He hears a giggle.

Only then does he catch sight of the little boy squatting in the subterranean shadows of the brownstone’s front steps.

He’s about five, with a cap of shiny black hair and mischievous black Asian eyes. Clad only in a short-sleeved shirt and dungarees, he’s shivering.

“Shouldn’t you be wearing a coat?” Jed asks, and the child shakes his head. “Well, what are you doing out here?”

“Hiding,” is the reply.

“From whom?”

“Mama. She want to give me grilled fish for breakfast.” The boy makes a face.

“I take it you don’t like grilled fish?”

“Not for breakfast. I sick of fish! Every day, every day, fish.”

“You don’t say.”

The child nods vigorously.

“I see where that would be a problem,” Jed says thoughtfully, setting the heavy suitcase on the sidewalk. “Say, where do you live?”

The child points up at the townhouse.

“Really? In there? What’s your name?”

“Isamu.”

“Hello, Isamu. Nice to meet you.”

“What’s your name?” the boy asks haltingly and somewhat self-consciously, using the same inflections as Jed in a clear attempt to perfect his American accent.

“I’m Jed.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“Say, Isamu… if you live here, you must know Clara.”

The boy is expressionless.

“Clara McCallum,” Jed elaborates, and, for good measure, adds, “Miss McCallum. She lives here, too.”

The child shakes his head.

“What do you mean?”

“Just Mama… Papa… Mr. Sloan… Mrs. Sloan,” Isamu informs him. “Oh. And me.”

“That’s everyone who lives in your apartment?”

“In whole house.” The little boy waves a hand at the townhouse.

“What about Jezibel? Do you know her?”

“No.”

Jed reaches into his pocket and crouches down beside the low wrought-iron fence, on the same level with the child on the other side of the rails. “Come over here, Isamu. Let me show you something.”

The child obediently approaches the fence.

Jed pokes Clara’s card through a space between the black bars, picture side up. “Does she live here?”

“No.”

“Have you ever seen her before?”

Isamu shakes his head solemnly.

Suddenly, the door opens and a woman’s voice calls out from the doorway overhead.

Jed straightens to see a worried-looking middle-aged Japanese woman on the stoop shouting, “Isamu! Isamu!”

“He’s right here, ma’am.” Jed tips his fedora at her. “You must be his mother.”

Obviously relieved to see her son, the woman just gapes. Then she says something in Japanese to Isamu, whose long-winded reply is of course inscrutable to Jed. He’s pretty sure it involves him, though, because both mother and son are now eyeing him inquisitively.

“What did she say?” Jed asks Isamu.

“She want to know why you here, what you want, who you are.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I say I don’t know. Maybe you detective like Dick Tracy, protector of law and order.” This time, Isamu perfectly nails the booming inflection of the announcer on the popular radio show.

“No, I’m not a detective, Isamu… I’m looking for my… friend. Clara. I thought she lived here. See? This address is on the back here.”

“I show Mama,” the boy tells Jed, and plucks the card from his fingers.

Jed watches him dart up the steps to his mother, who turns the card over and over, scrutinizing it, as her son speaks to her in their native tongue.

Jed’s heart sinks as she looks down at him and shakes her head, shrugging to indicate that she doesn’t recognize Clara, either.

“She never know this girl,” Isamu informs him, descending the steps and returning the card to Jed’s grasp. “Mr. Sloan own house. He live here with Mrs. Sloan. We live in basement. Take care of things.”

Jed shoots a probing gaze up at Isamu’s mother, waiting on the stoop, her arms folded against the chill. Is she telling the truth?

Even if
she
weren’t, he’d probably be able to tell if the little boy were lying. And he doesn’t seem to be. There wasn’t a hint of recognition in Isamu’s face when he spoke Clara’s name, much less when Jed showed him her photo.

“Isamu!” the mother calls sharply, beckoning.

“See you, mister,” the little boy says before scurrying up the steps, where he is promptly herded into the house.

The door closes sharply behind them.

Jed looks again at the address printed on the card, then checks it against the number above the townhouse’s door.

They match.

Wait a minute
… maybe he’s on the wrong street!

Maybe he wasn’t paying enough attention on his way over, and he’s actually on West Tenth Street… or West Twelfth…

He picks up the suitcase, turns, and retraces his steps to the corner, striding quickly despite the weighty bag in his hand.

The white lettering on the arched blue sign is clearly visible before he even reaches the corner.

West Eleventh Street.

He had the street right.

Again, he checks the lettering on the card. Just one more time, to be absolutely certain…

No, he had the address right, too. And it matches the address range listed in the arched panel above the street name on the sign.

Obviously, the card—like the clothing in the suitcase, and everything else about Clara McCallum—is just part of an elaborate charade.

It’s all he can do not to pitch the card into the nearest trash can, and deposit her luggage along with it.

But he can’t do that.

It’s important evidence.

The authorities are going to need it.

Feeling as though he’s been sucker punched in the stomach, Jed slowly makes his way back to the subway.

That Jonathan Kershaw—the
right
Jonathan Kershaw—is listed in the Manhattan white pages is perhaps the first thing that’s gone smoothly for Clara in the past forty-eight hours.

It would be too much to hope for that her former high school physics teacher might not only be home when she called, but remember her.

Yet he was, and he did.

“Clara! You’re a big movie star now. Do you have any idea how proud I am of you? To hear Sandra Nelson tell it, she’s single-handedly responsible for your success.”

Sandra Nelson was, of course, her high school drama teacher. The one who, when casting the sophomore musical, assigned the plum parts of Dolly Levi and Irene Molloy to two other girls, leaving Clara to giggle her way through a supporting role as frivolous Minnie Fay.

She’s come a long way since
Hello, Dolly!
, thank goodness.

And a long, long way since she last spoke to Mr. Kershaw.

He seemed surprised to hear from her, and even more surprised when she asked to see him—in person. Today.

But he readily agreed, and now here she is, climbing out of the subway on the southern fringes of the Upper West Side neighborhood where the retired, divorced Mr. Kershaw has been living for decades.

Somehow, since having made the initial contact with him this morning, she’s managed to temporarily clear her head of the unsettling thoughts that have haunted her these past few days. Just knowing she’s going to see him has brought a temporary reprieve—though for all Mr. Kershaw knows, the purpose of her visit is a nostalgic trip down a figurative memory lane, not a scientific inquiry into whether a literal one is remotely possible. And for all she knows, he’s going to confirm that she’s lost her mind.

But right now, she isn’t thinking ahead. Nor is she looking back. She’s just walking up Amsterdam Avenue, content, for a change, to be in the moment.

She’s taken great pleasure in avoiding makeup on her day off and her face feels wonderfully unadulterated, as does her hair, falling loose and squeaky-clean from beneath a red knit hat that covers her bruise.

She’s cozy and comfortable in jeans, sneakers, and a sweatshirt, a red down jacket, and of course the treasured—and mysteriously returned to her—pair of warm red mittens with a white snowflake pattern that exactly match the hat on her head.

“Why do you go around wearing mittens?” Jason frequently asked last winter.

“Because when I wear them, my fingers can keep each other warm.”

That didn’t fly with Jason. Of course he believes that mittens—sentimental value notwithstanding—are impractical, mostly because you can’t wear them while dialing a cell phone or pressing the numbers on the ATM keypad.

“So what? You can’t stash things in your gloves, but you can in your mittens,” Clara would point out to her ex-fiancé. “Like money, your license, credit cards, your keys…”

“Or you can wear gloves and keep those things in your pockets, where they belong,” said Jason the killjoy.

“I don’t always have pockets.”

“Then carry a purse.”

Today, gloriously unencumbered—by purse, or gloves, or Jason—she carries only some cash in her right mitten, her keys in her left. She even left her cell phone at home,
not wanting to hear from anybody for a while. Not on her day off.

The air is crisp, the sky a brilliant winter blue. Church bells are ringing, and for the time being, all is right with the world.

She smiles to herself as she passes an open doorway and hears Bruce Springsteen’s exuberant “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” playing somewhere above.

It’s a heck of a lot more welcome than “Midnight Train to Georgia.”

As she waits for the light to change, she catches a whiff of Sunday brunch—or perhaps a dozen different Sunday brunches from a dozen different restaurants—wafting on the cold breeze. She finds herself swallowing a sudden flood of saliva and remembers that she hasn’t eaten anything yet, and it’s past one o’clock. She put Mrs. Kobayashi’s soup in the refrigerator and forgot all about it.

Come to think of it, she didn’t eat much yesterday, either. Or the day before.

Guess you’ve learned the ultimate magic bullet for an actress’s appetite control
, she thinks wryly.
Cancer diagnosis with a time travel chaser. Next thing you know, your Levi’s are bagging around your hips
.

Nearing Mr. Kershaw’s cross street, she slows her pace a bit. It isn’t that she’s changed her mind about seeing him… she just wants to put it off until the last possible moment because she has no idea how he’s going to react to her question.