Halfway to the urns Claudia stopped, turned back to me; hesitated, then reached out, gave the key hanging from my neck a little pull, as though I were a talking doll from whom she was soliciting benediction.
You are the prettiest girl in the whole wide world!
“You’re sure this is okay?”
Her words appeared from thin air, as immaterial—unreal—as the ones that had fallen from Parker’s book a few minutes before. I looked down at her hand but saw only my own, still black with dirt from the hallway. I scratched at something I thought was the letter
I
and it turned out to be a tiny splinter, scratched again and it relinquished its berth like a starship embarking from its hangar into the vastness of space.
“Jamie? Still with me?”
The weight of Claudia's hand on my neck was barely noticeable, yet I felt that with the tiniest of tugs she could jerk me to the floor or, who knows, pull the thin chain right through my neck like piano wire. I loosened her fingers then, lifted the key free, wrapped my fingers around its sharp teeth as if it were Claudia I was shielding, not myself, not my mother's key. Deep breath. Big smile. Then:
“Come on. We've got a treasure hunt—”
“Oh my
God
.”
The panic and wonder in Claudia's voice: it was
my
hand that nearly snapped the key from my neck, even as Claudia’s right palm slapped her forehead and her left went, more tenderly, to her stomach, and then she lifted her left hand and looked at the splayed fingers wondrously, as if they were responsible for the miracle of life
.
“It just
hits
me sometimes. I’m going to have a
baby
.”
An old riddle popped into my head:
a train leaves Selden, Kansas traveling east at fifty miles an hour…
Claudia's face shone as brightly as a convert’s but her eyes were grim, a mixture of fear and determination. They defied me to say anything—as if there were nothing to say to this most basic of facts. She was going to have a baby. End of story.
“You are,” I affirmed tentatively. Then, more confidently: “You’re going to have a baby.”
Without another word Claudia turned to the urns on the mantle. In front of each was propped an old snapshot, both as curled as the board they sat on, a bitter widower’s spine or his pregnant daughter’s belly, and the hand that had touched that belly and touched my mother's key now touched her lips and reached for the mantle, and with one fingertip she transferred the tiniest of kisses to the premature deaths memorialized there.
“Momma,” she said to the bridal-veiled woman in front of the brass container, “Ellis” to the bright hopeful young face in front of the leaden. Her damp finger removed the film of dust that had covered the faces in the pictures and they stared down at Claudia, heads ringed by tiny shiny penumbras, as if haloed by her touch.
I BLANKED OUT THEN, or blacked out—is it a blackout if you haven’t had anything to drink (or eat for that matter) or taken any drugs? At any rate I was at Dutch Street when I came back to myself. I was sitting in the chair in my bedroom, my fingers clutching the key around my neck. But even as I tried to remember how I got there I felt a thump under my feet and immediately knew it was Claudia on the floor beneath me, swabbing a decade’s worth of cobwebs from the ceiling of my mother’s old apartment with a stringheaded mop. Another thump and everything fell into place—the ride downtown, unloading the van, walking to the hardware store to pick up a fresh mophead. The events were vivid in my memory, save for the fact that I saw myself as you do in a dream: from the outside, as a stranger, with no idea what thoughts had passed through my doppelganger’s head.
I glanced at my wrist: Trucker's watch said that it was 4:05. It had just passed noon when we left Claudia’s father’s apartment. I splashed some water on my face, then, like Claudia, spent the rest of the day cleaning, or at least stuffing dirty clothes and books and food tins into closets, shelves, trash bags. More than once I felt Claudia bang the ceiling below me as if we followed a parallel track, one atop the other, an iron filing tugged by an invisible magnet through a sheet of paper. But which of us was the magnet, which the unwitting sliver of metal?
Before I went out for groceries I ran an extension cord down the dumbwaiter to see if the dining room chandelier still worked. Waves of heat floated up the dumbwaiter's shaft but when I tried to wipe the sweat from my eyes it felt as if the air itself held my hand back, and I jerked my arm free. Even as I did so, however, I realized all that had happened was that Trucker's watch had caught on the chain around my neck. I felt the thin links strain against my skin, heard a
snp!
, saw a metallic flash as my mother's key flew past the glowstick I’d tied to the bottom of the extension cord, and when it hit bottom a thin sound, the sound a mouse might make jumping from one place to another, floated back up at me. Damn thing, I thought. I should let it
stay
lost.
I swiped at my eyes again, and when they were clear a catlike face stared up at me. It took me a second to realize it was Claudia, all the way down on the shop floor.
“Hey, could you—”
“Don’t worry, I got it.”
As Claudia’s voice overlapped mine I remembered again the riddle I’d thought of in her father’s apartment:
a train leaves New York City, traveling west at sixty miles an hour…
I felt a tug in the extension cord like a dog straining at its leash. Vibrations thrummed in my fingers, in my arms and shoulders and stomach and ass, and for a moment I considered relaxing my muscles and letting my plans tumble down the shaft after my mother's key. But there was Claudia’s voice again, catching my thoughts, stuffing them back in my brain.
“What do you think?” She waved the glowstick around, tracing filigrees in the air. Three letters in I realized what she was writing.
“Claudia, come on. That’s a terrible name for a baby. And what if it’s a boy? Did you ever think about that?”
Claudia continued tracing letters in the air. “So. Tonight’s the big night, huh?”
I must have made some kind of face—and Claudia must’ve been able to see it four stories down—because she dropped the glowstick. “Look, tell me to butt out if I’m butting in, but are you sure you want to get with this guy? I mean, he
is
a little old for you.”
“You mean, like, ‘old enough to be my father’?”
“God, is he
that
old? Man takes care-a himself.” She shook her head. “Look, maybe I’m being over-protective. Mommy hormones, all that shit. It’s just, I don’t know. You been a little weirded out since you came back from his place is all. I mean”—she smiled to ease the sting of her words—“you’re always a little weird, but you’ve been even weirder the last few days.”
Before I could think of something to say I felt another tug on the extension cord.
“I’m-a go plug this in.” She heaved her upper body out of the dumbwaiter, leaving the glowstick curled in the space where she’d lain, its arc as delicate as the initial of her name. A moment later a light came on behind me: I guess the chandelier still worked. I waited for Claudia to return but nothing disturbed the silent waves of heat floating up the shaft.
C
.,
the glowstick taunted me.
C.? See?
I decided to head out for groceries before it got too late. As I made my way up Dutch Street I sniffed at my underarm. A day of moving and cleaning hadn’t exactly left it first-date fresh. I checked the time to see if I’d be able to bathe before K. got here—eight after seven already, although that hardly seemed possible—then reached a hand up to fiddle with the key around my neck, and even as I did I realized the two gestures had become paired for me: first Trucker, then my mother. But the key wasn’t there, of course. It was at the bottom of the dumbwaiter. I thought of running back for it but didn’t have time. Oh well. As far as I knew it hadn’t opened anything in at least a decade. One more night could hardly make a difference.
The fetid odor of fish hit me as soon as I turned on William. It was hard to believe anything could be edible after a day on these scorching sidewalks, but I couldn’t afford the fancier fish places up in the Village, and besides, I preferred the wordlessness of Chinatown shopping. You point, the fishmonger hefts a foot of ice-shiny perch, you frown as though actually looking for flaws, then nod, and even as the fishmonger folds your selection in a Chinese newspaper he holds up five fingers and you count out the wrinkled singles one at a time.
But the silence was disconcerting as well. Fountains of words were building up in me, and in the Korean deli on the corner of Ann and William I did speak, lest something burst from my mouth like the words that had spewed out of the book in Claudia’s father’s apartment. What I said was:
“Sewing needles?”
The woman behind the counter handed me a package containing twenty silver slivers, their spiked ends aligned like the teeth of a lethal comb, then rang me up and stared vacantly into space while I counted out the last of my change.
I glanced at my wrist: 7:32. The setting sun was just beginning to smear the horizon with streaks of industrial red and orange on the Jersey end of Ann; over Brooklyn the sky was the color of blue steel. Dutch Street, as always, was hotter and darker than the rest of the city, the entrance to No. 1 hotter still, and darker, but I didn’t want to turn on a light in case it drew Claudia’s attention or, even worse, her aunt’s. I ran up the stairs, wondering how K. would negotiate them in the dark; I doubted Nellydean would take him in the elevator. But when I got to my apartment I was surprised to find the door standing open.
I walked toward the dining room, barely illuminated by three flickering bulbs in the sixteen-armed chandelier.
“K.?”
I set the groceries on the table and unplugged the chandelier and the room went dark, padded back down the hall.
“K.? Are you here?”
8:19. Had he come and gone? Surely he wouldn’t have left so quickly? And how had it taken me almost fifty minutes to walk one block, climb four flights of stairs?
Suddenly Trucker’s watch felt too heavy for the thin bones of my wrist and I had to rest my hand on the ledge of the wainscoting. I would have taken it off but it seemed to me that the metal band held my hand to my arm like a heroine in a Hawthorne story, and if I loosened the clasp my hand would fall off and something would spew from the fissure, not blood but some poisonous goo that would reveal me for what I was.
I found him in the bedroom. He stood in the window, a silver-edged shadow. On a horizon precipitous as Dutch Street the distance between sunset and nightfall is measured in inches and minutes. In the city beyond the narrow alley in which I lived the sun was only just starting to set, but my room was already so dark I could hardly make out K.’s face—his mouth, his eyes, the hair at his temples, silver like our dinner’s shiny flukes.
He was still looking out the window when he spoke. “Quite a setup you have here.”
“It’s a roof over my head.”
“I suppose that’s one way to put it.” He nudged something on the floor, and I had to squint to see that it was an extension cord, its cracked plastic coating bandaged by fraying duct tape. “Do you get all your power through these?”
“Only on the top three floors.”
“You do realize that’s a fire—” He shook his head, took a step toward me. “I can’t understand why you don’t accept this Manny person’s offer. Even if you want to stay in the city you could buy something a lot nicer than this junk heap.”
He was close enough to touch me, but he didn’t touch me, as if he were waiting for something—permission maybe, or maybe an excuse to call it off.
“His name is Sonny,” I said, my voice louder, faster than I’d intended, “and I haven’t accepted his offer because Claudia told me my mother buried some kind of treasure on the property before she died. It’s in the building or maybe out back, in the garden, and it’s worth a fortune. More than anything Sonny could ever pay me. Claudia offered to help me find it if I let her live here till she has her baby.”
The words tumbled out of me, ridiculous, unbelievable—and the most honest thing I’d ever said to him. K.’s face took on a tinge of distant, almost anthropological curiosity, as Kevin From Heaven’s had earlier in the day, and then, as Kevin From Heaven had done, he shrugged the evidence away.
His nose wrinkled. “You smell like—”
“Fish,” I finished for him, even as he said, “Pot.”
He sniffed a second time. “That too.”
All at once his palms were on my shoulders, and when he spoke again his voice was quieter, calmer. “You’re shaking like a leaf. Is something wrong?”
When I answered him my voice was quieter too, but sounded no less shrill to my ears. I said, “Why?” to K., and he studied me a moment.
“Is that a joke?”
I pulled myself close to him as if for warmth. “I’m just cold.”
K.’s palm brushed the crewed expanse of my skull and a cool mist filled the air. “You’re sopping wet.”
I shrugged. It seemed too early to mention night sweats, or maybe too late.
The shirt under my cheek was starchy smooth, and K. himself smelled freshly laundered, as if his body had been unfolded from a dry cleaner’s plastic with his clothes. I sniffed deeper and there I was, the clothes I’d worn through three—four?—blistering days, the skin beneath, unwashed for the same length of time.
“You’re hot too,” K. said, tipping my head back and laying his hand against my forehead, running a fingertip the length of each of my eyebrows. I think I’m running a little fever, I said, or thought I said, but maybe I didn’t say it because K. was kissing me before I could have said anything. It was ten after nine when I pulled away to tell him I had to get the condoms. In fact they were in my pocket, and when I got to the dining room I pulled them out. I pulled out the perch too, the needles. The tiny spikes were aligned just like the skeleton of the fish beside them, and before I knew it I’d pushed one of my fingers through the skin of the perch and ripped it open and extracted a toothpick-thick bone I found just behind the head. I was afraid the bone might not be strong enough, or sharp enough, that my shaking fingers might not be equal to the task, but the bone pierced each of the foil-wrapped condoms easily, and afterwards I threw the package of needles down the dumbwaiter and washed my hands, not because they smelled but because they were even dirtier than they had been before, and I hurried back down the hall.