P
ROFESSIONAL MOVERS WERE COMING,
at some point, to pack my mother’s things and put them in storage. Before they came, I was to go to the apartment and pick out anything I wanted or needed. I was aware of the painting in a nagging but vague way which was entirely out of proportion to its actual importance, as if it were a school project I’d left unfinished. At some point I was going to have to get it back to the museum, though I still hadn’t quite figured out how I was going to do that without causing a huge fuss.
Already I had missed one chance to give it back—when Mrs. Barbour had turned away some investigators who had shown up at the apartment looking for me. That is: I understood they were investigators or even police from what Kellyn, the Welsh girl who looked after the younger
children, told me. She had been bringing Toddy home from day care when the strangers showed up asking for me. “Suits, you know?” she said, raising a significant eyebrow. She was a heavy, fast-talking girl with cheeks so flushed she always looked like she’d been standing next to a fire. “They had that look.”
I was too afraid to ask what she meant by
that look;
and when I went in, cautiously, to see what Mrs. Barbour had to say about it, she was busy. “I’m sorry,” she said, without quite looking at me, “but can we please talk about this later?” Guests were arriving in half an hour, among them a well-known architect and a famous dancer with the New York City Ballet; she was fretting over the loose catch to her necklace and upset because the air conditioner wasn’t working properly.
“Am I in trouble?”
It slipped out before I knew what I was saying. Mrs. Barbour stopped. “Theo, don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “They were perfectly nice, very considerate, it’s just that I can’t have them sitting around just now. Turning up, without telephoning. Anyway, I told them it wasn’t the best time, which of course they could see for themselves.” She gestured at the caterers darting back and forth, the building engineer on a ladder, examining inside the air-conditioning vent with a flashlight. “Now run along. Where’s Andy?”
“He’ll be home in an hour. His astronomy class went to the planetarium.”
“Well, there’s food in the kitchen. I don’t have a lot of the miniature tarts to spare, but you can have all the finger sandwiches you want. And after the cake’s cut, you’re welcome to have some of that too.”
Her manner had been so unconcerned that I forgot about the visitors until they showed up at school three days later, at my geometry class, one young, one older, indifferently dressed, knocking courteously at the open door. “We see Theodore Decker?” the younger, Italian-looking guy said to Mr. Borowsky as the older one peered cordially inside the classroom.
“We just want to talk to you, is that okay?” said the older guy as we walked down to the dreaded conference room where I was to have had the meeting with Mr. Beeman and my mother on the day she died. “Don’t be scared.” He was a dark-skinned black man with a gray goatee—tough-looking but nice-seeming too, like a cool cop on a television show. “We’re
just trying to piece together a lot of things about that day and we hope you can help us.”
I had been frightened at first, but when he said
don’t be scared,
I believed him—until he pushed open the door of the conference room. There sat my tweed-cap nemesis Mr. Beeman, pompous as ever with his waistcoat and watch chain; Enrique my social worker; Mrs. Swanson the school counselor (the same person who had told me I might feel better if I threw some ice cubes against a tree); Dave the psychiatrist in his customary black Levi’s and turtleneck—and, of all people, Mrs. Barbour, in heels and a pearl-gray suit that looked like it cost more money than all the other people in the room made in a month.
My panic must have been written plainly on my face. Maybe I wouldn’t have been quite so alarmed if I’d understood a little better what wasn’t clear to me at the time: that I was a minor, and that my parent or guardian had to be present at an official interview—which was why anyone even vaguely construed as my advocate had been called in. But all I understood, when I saw all those faces and a tape recorder in the middle of the table, was that the official parties had convened to judge my fate and dispose of me as they saw fit.
Stiffly I sat and endured their warm-up questions (did I have any hobbies? Did I play any sports?) until it became clear to everyone that the preliminary chit-chat wasn’t loosening me up very much.
The bell rang for the end of class. Bang of lockers, murmur of voices out in the hall. “You’re
dead,
Thalheim,” some boy shouted gleefully.
The Italian guy—Ray, he said his name was—pulled up a chair in front of me, knee to knee. He was young, but heavy, with the air of a good-natured limo driver, and his downturned eyes had a moist, liquid, sleepy look, as if he drank.
“We just want to know what you remember,” he said. “Probe around in your memory, get a general picture of that morning, you know? Because maybe by remembering some of the little things, you might remember something that will help us.”
He was sitting so close I could smell his deodorant. “Like what?”
“Like what you ate for breakfast that morning. That’s a good place to start, huh?”
“Um—” I stared at the gold ID bracelet on his wrist. This wasn’t what
I’d been expecting them to ask. The truth was: we hadn’t eaten breakfast at all that morning because I was in trouble at school and my mother was mad at me, but I was too embarrassed to say that.
“You don’t remember?”
“Pancakes,” I burst out desperately.
“Oh yeah?” Ray looked at me shrewdly. “Your mother make them?”
“Yes.”
“What’d she put in them? Blueberries, chocolate chips?”
I nodded.
“Both?”
I could feel everybody looking at me. Then Mr. Beeman said—as loftily as if he were standing in front of his Morals in Society class—“There’s no reason to invent an answer, if you don’t remember.”
The black guy—in the corner, with a notepad—gave Mr. Beeman a sharp warning glance.
“Actually, there seems to be some memory impairment,” interjected Mrs. Swanson in a low voice, toying with the glasses that hung from a chain around her neck. She was a grandmother who wore flowing white shirts and had a long gray braid down her back. Kids who got sent to her office for guidance called her “the Swami.” In her counseling sessions with me at school, besides dispensing the advice about the ice cubes, she had taught me a three-part breath to help release my emotions and made me draw a mandala representing my wounded heart. “He hit his head. Didn’t you, Theo?”
“Is that true?” said Ray, glancing up at me frankly.
“Yes.”
“Did you get it checked out by a doctor?”
“Not right away,” said Mrs. Swanson.
Mrs. Barbour crossed her ankles. “I took him to the emergency room at New York–Presbyterian,” she said coolly. “When he got to my house, he was complaining of a headache. It was a day or so before we had it seen to. Nobody seems to have thought to ask him if he was hurt or not.”
Enrique, the social worker, began to speak up at this, but after a look from the older black cop (whose name has just come back to me: Morris) fell silent.
“Look, Theo,” said the guy Ray, tapping me on the knee. “I know you want to help us out. You do want to help us, don’t you?”
I nodded.
“That’s great. But if we ask you something and you don’t know? It’s okay to say you don’t know.”
“We just want to throw a whole lot of questions out there and see if we can draw your memory out about anything,” Morris said. “Are you cool with that?”
“You need anything?” said Ray, eyeing me closely. “A drink of water, maybe? A soda?”
I shook my head—no sodas were allowed on school property—just as Mr. Beeman said: “Sorry, no sodas permitted on school property.”
Ray made a
give me a break
face that I wasn’t sure if Mr. Beeman saw or not. “Sorry, kid, I tried,” he said, turning back to me. “I’ll run out and get you a soda at the deli if you feel like it later on, how about it? Now.” He clapped his hands together. “How long do you think you and your mother were in the building prior to the first explosion?”
“About an hour, I guess.”
“You guess or you know?”
“I guess.”
“You think it was more than an hour? Less than an hour?”
“I don’t think it was more than an hour,” I said, after a long pause.
“Describe to us your recollection of the incident.”
“I didn’t see what happened,” I said. “Everything was fine and then there was a loud flash and a bang—”
“A loud flash?”
“That’s not what I meant. I meant the bang was loud.”
“You said a bang,” said the guy Morris, stepping forward. “Do you think you might be able to describe to us in a little more detail what the bang sounded like?”
“I don’t know. Just… loud,” I added, when they kept on looking at me like they expected something more.
In the silence that followed, I heard a stealthy clicking: Mrs. Barbour, with her head down, discreetly checking her BlackBerry for messages.
Morris cleared his throat. “What about a smell?”
“Excuse me?”
“Did you notice any particular smell in the moments prior?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Nothing at all? You sure?”
As the questioning wore on—the same stuff over and over, switched around a little to confuse me, with every now and then something new thrown in—I steeled myself and waited hopelessly for them to work around to the painting. I would simply have to admit it and face the consequences, no matter what the consequences were (probably fairly dire, since I was well on my way to becoming a Ward of the State). At a couple of points, I was on the verge of blurting it out, in my terror. But the more questions they asked (where was I when I’d hit my head? Who had I seen or spoken to on my way downstairs?) the more it dawned on me that they didn’t know a thing about what had happened to me—what room I’d been in when the bomb exploded, or even what exit I’d taken out of the building.
They had a floor plan; the rooms had numbers instead of names, Gallery 19A and Gallery 19B, numbers and letters in a mazelike arrangement all the way up to 27. “Were you here when the initial blast occurred?” Ray said, pointing. “Or here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Take your time.”
“I don’t know,” I repeated, a bit frantically. The diagram of the rooms had a confusing, computer-generated quality, like something from a video game or a reconstruction of Hitler’s bunker that I’d seen on the History Channel, that in truth didn’t make any sense or seem to represent the space as I remembered it.
He pointed to a different spot. “This square?” he said. “That’s a display plinth, with paintings on it. I know these rooms all look alike, but maybe you can remember where you were in relation to that?”
I stared hopelessly at the diagram and didn’t answer. (Part of the reason it looked so unfamiliar was that they were showing me the area where my mother’s body was found—rooms away from where I’d been when the bomb went off—although I didn’t realize that until later.)
“You didn’t see anybody on your way out,” said Morris encouragingly, repeating what I’d already told them.
I shook my head.
“Nothing you remember at all?”
“Well, I mean—bodies covered up. Equipment lying around.”
“Nobody coming in or out of the area of the explosion.”
“I didn’t see anybody,” I repeated doggedly. We had been over this.
“So you never saw firemen or rescue personnel.”
“No.”
“I suppose we can establish, then, that they’d been ordered out of the building by the time you came to. So we’re talking about a time lapse of forty minutes to an hour and a half after the initial explosion. Is that a safe assumption?”
I shrugged, limply.
“Is that a yes or a no?”
Staring at the floor. “I don’t know.”
“What don’t you know?”
“I don’t know,” I said again, and the silence that followed was so long and uncomfortable I thought I might break down crying.
“Do you recall hearing the second blast?”
“Pardon me for asking,” said Mr. Beeman, “but is this really necessary?”
Ray, my questioner, turned. “Excuse me?”
“I’m not sure I see the purpose of putting him through this.”
With careful neutrality, Morris said: “We’re investigating a crime scene. It’s our job to find out what happened in there.”
“Yes, but surely you must have other means of doing so for such routine matters. I would think they had all manner and variety of security cameras in there.”
“Sure they do,” said Ray, rather sharply. “Except cameras can’t see through dust and smoke. Or if they’re blown up to face the ceiling. Now,” he said, settling back in his chair with a sigh. “You mentioned smoke. Did you smell it or see it?”
I nodded.
“Which one? Saw or smelled?”
“Both.”
“What direction do you think it was coming from?”
I was about to say I didn’t know again, but Mr. Beeman had not finished making his point. “Forgive me, but I entirely fail to see the purpose in security cameras if they don’t operate in an emergency,” he said, to the room in general. “With technology today, and all that artwork—”
Ray turned his head as if to say something angry, but Morris, standing in the corner, raised his hand and spoke up.
“The boy’s an important witness. The surveillance system isn’t designed to withstand an event like this. Now, I’m sorry, but if you can’t stop it with the comments we’ll have to ask you to leave, sir.”
“I’m here as this child’s advocate. I’ve the right to ask questions.”
“Not unless they pertain directly to the child’s welfare.”
“Oddly enough, I was under the impression that they did.”
At this Ray, in the chair in front of me, turned around. “Sir? If you continue to obstruct the proceedings?” he said. “You
will
have to leave the room.”
“I have no intention of obstructing you,” said Mr. Beeman in the tense silence that followed. “Nothing could be further from my mind, I assure you. Go on, please continue,” he said, with an irritated flick of the hand. “Far be it from me to stop you.”