Among the debris in the alleyway lay a discarded empty pint of whiskey and the brown-paper bag in which it was now only partially concealed. I left the bottle, replaced it with the eye, and twisted shut the neck of the bag.
Sound quickly returned to the world, faint at first, but within a few seconds rising to the usual level of a metropolis populated by industrious—or at least restless and bustling—citizens. I stood there for a minute, listening, wondering, no longer chilled but mystified and wary.
After using a key to let myself in through the alley entrance of the apartment building, I decided not to use the back stairs, because I half expected to find Tilton waiting for me on the landing where Mom had put his packed suitcases back in June. I imagined that he might have with him a chloroform-soaked rag with which to subdue me and a steamer trunk in which he would take me away forever.
I followed the first-floor hall to the front stairs and, having totally spooked myself, sprinted two flights before discovering a woman who was halfway up the third flight. She was dressed all in black, her long hair black as well. On the handrail, her pale left hand appeared as well formed as the finest porcelain.
She heard me, paused, and looked back. Blue eyes shading to purple. Pert nose formed to perfection. Generous mouth. Small beauty mark at the high point of the left cheekbone. Here stood the dead girl from my dream, still alive, no throttling necktie cinched around her throat. Fiona Cassidy.
In my surprise, I merely gaped at her, holding the twisted neck of the paper bag as if I might offer her the contents, and no doubt I appeared simpleminded. She neither smiled nor frowned, and without a word, she continued climbing the stairs.
I left the stairwell then, hoping she wouldn’t suspect that I was especially interested in her. I didn’t allow the door to close entirely, but stood in the second-floor hallway, listening to her ascend, and when I thought she had passed the third floor and had continued toward the fourth, I returned to the stairs to follow her as stealthily as possible.
18
Fiona Cassidy went past the fourth floor, on which I lived with my mother, went past the fifth, where Miss Delvane wrote her magazine articles and researched her rodeo novel, where also Mr. Yoshioka led his quiet and perhaps tragic life in Apartment 5-C. She continued to the sixth and highest floor.
Each floor of our building offered three apartments. Two were of the size in which Mom and I lived. The third offered twice as many square feet as those smaller units and was better suited to families with more than a single child, although they were far from spacious. The superintendent, Mr. Reginald Smaller, occupied an apartment on the ground floor, leaving seventeen available for paying tenants.
Because the building offered neither an elevator nor desirable views of the city, fourth-floor units leased for less than those on the first three levels, fifth-floor units for less than fourth, and sixth-floor units for less than fifth. Back in those days, rent subsidies for the poor were a trickle, not yet the flood they would one day become. My mother received no subsidy at all and didn’t want one. If the government had covered all or nearly all of the monthly cost, the sixth-floor apartments would have been filled; but when tenants had to pay their own way, they were not quick to shell out good money for the privilege of climbing ten flights of steep stairs and bathing in water that often came out of the tap lukewarm by the time that it was piped from the basement boiler to the top of the building. Consequently, rarely were more than two sixth-floor units rented, and there were periods when all three remained vacant.
Some of our neighbors kept to themselves, but even if they were inclined only to grunt when I said hello and to avoid eye contact, I knew their faces and their names. I was no less inquisitive than I was imaginative. That August, I knew only fourteen apartments were rented, and all three on the highest level were currently for lease.
At each floor, the door to that hallway featured a foot-square window, so that as you approached it, you could see whether someone was about to open it from the other side. When I stood tiptoe, I could see through that pane into the sixth-floor hall, where Fiona Cassidy just then entered 6-C.
Maybe she was considering renting and Mr. Smaller had given her a key so she could tour the unit, but I figured such a maybe was as thin as a human hair. The superintendent always accompanied potential tenants and never let them have a key until he had received the first month’s rent with a security deposit.
Mr. Smaller was a jack of all trades, capable of repairing any of the building’s systems, but he was an eccentric, a believer in all sorts of conspiracies. He once told me that I should trust no one, “not even God, in fact especially not God, because He wouldn’t have given us life and made us a whole world to live it in if He didn’t want something big and terrible in return.”
Carrying the juju eyeball in a bag, I stepped silently along the hallway to 6-C. The door stood half open.
I knew that I should be cautious, that the wisest thing I could do would be to leave at once, return to our apartment, and engage both locks. I had seen Fiona Cassidy dead, however, if only in a dream, and the woman on the stairs had been no ghost. I felt that I should warn her, although I doubted that she would believe a scrawny boy who, in our first encounter, gaped at her as though he must be a simpleton.
Through the open door, I saw a shabby vestibule with yellowed and peeling wallpaper. Beyond lay an unfurnished room carpeted in cracked linoleum, its ash-gray walls streaked with rusty stains.
The city hadn’t fallen silent again; the old building issued its endless settling noises, and the discordant symphony of the busy world outside penetrated its windows. But I couldn’t hear any sound particular to the apartment, no footsteps, no closing of a door, no voice.
Although I was not a reckless boy, I crossed the threshold, dismayed by my boldness but compelled as if some powerful spell of mortal curiosity had been cast upon me. The lowering sky must have grown darker even in the short time since I had left the alleyway, because when I proceeded from the vestibule into the living room, the light at the windows wasn’t just cheerless but steely with storm threat.
To the right lay a dining area and an open door through which I could see a portion of the kitchen. To the left, shadows as soft as crêpe de Chine swagged a windowless hallway.
With no windows open for ventilation, the air was warm and heavy and stale, woven through with old cooking odors and the reek of cat urine and the sourness of cigarette smoke that had condensed into a thin yellow film on many surfaces.
The linoleum looked as if it must be brittle and would crackle underfoot. Instead it proved to be unpleasantly spongy, as if webbed with mold, and I made hardly a sound as I went to the kitchen door and dared to look beyond. No one.
On the farther side of the living room, the hallway served a bathroom and four small bedrooms without furniture. In one of the latter, I discovered a sleeping bag beside which stood a large canvas satchel.
All of the closet doors had been standing open, perhaps as a less-than-adequate precaution against mildew growing and sporing while the apartment had remained unoccupied. I didn’t believe I had overlooked any corner in which Fiona Cassidy could have hidden.
The bottom sash of the single bedroom window had been raised. A feeble influx of air couldn’t stir the greasy, threadbare draperies.
Surely the young woman had not bunked here the previous night only to leap to her death in the morning. Nevertheless, with some dread, I ventured to the window and leaned out and peered down into the serviceway. No dead girl sprawled below.
If my dream ever proved in fact to be predictive, her fate was to be murdered, not to leave this world by suicide.
Turning from the window, I expected to find her behind me, but she wasn’t waiting there. Heart knocking, mouth dry, wondering again at my uncharacteristic audacity, I returned to the half-open front door and stepped into the sixth-floor hallway without encountering anyone—though I suspected that my intrusion had not gone unnoticed and that there would be a price to pay
for having followed the girl across that threshold.
As I reached the stairwell but before I entered it, I heard the door to Apartment 6-C slam shut. I looked back. No one. Either the door had been closed by a draft or … Or what? Was I to suppose that Fiona Cassidy had flown, not fallen, out of that open window to elude me and had flown back in after I’d gone? Even my spacious imagination could make no room for that possibility. And there had been no draft.
19
In our apartment once more, I took the plush-toy eye from the paper bag and put it in the center of my freshly made bed, looking toward the pillows. I walked from one side of the bed to the other and back again, watching the eye, but it didn’t turn to follow me.
“Idiot,” I said, chastising myself for indulging in such a childish fear.
In the kitchen, I took a pitcher of lime Kool-Aid out of the refrigerator, poured a glassful, and sat at the table.
I thought about going to the community center and putting in four hours at the keyboard. School would start in less than two weeks, and after that my practice time would be limited to at most two hours in the late afternoon. Usually I couldn’t wait to get to the piano and see Mrs. O’Toole, but that day, I felt something big was happening right under my nose, something incredible, like on Christmas Eve when I still believed in Santa. Except that this was not all sparkly and hopeful and fun like Christmas; it was something closer to that old movie about voodoo in the city.
Except that this was for real. I couldn’t just switch it off.
On the Formica-topped dinette table, sweat beaded the drinking glass. The droplets of water on the upper part of it were clear, glimmering, like diamonds. The beads on the lower part of the glass, which still contained the lime drink, were as green as emeralds. They were neither diamonds nor emeralds, of course; they were just beads of water, but I couldn’t stop staring at them and thinking about jewels, about being rich, about how if I were rich, we wouldn’t have any problems. Mom wouldn’t have to work at Woolworth’s lunch counter. We could own a nightclub, and she could sing there as much as she wanted, and we could own a record company, too, and she could be as famous and happy as she deserved to be. We wouldn’t have to worry about Tilton trying to snatch me away from her, because we’d have expensive lawyers and bodyguards. We’d live in a big house on a hill somewhere, with lots of land around it and a high fence, and we’d be safe from everyone, everything, even riots and war and young punks who talked dirty to women they didn’t know.
After all these years, I vividly remember that sweating glass of Kool-Aid, the anxiety that plagued me, anxiety on the trembling edge of foreboding, too much for a boy of nine to handle, and the false hope of riches that, even if it had been fulfilled, would have solved nothing.
One of the best things about growing up is that, if you can learn from experience, you come to the realization that two things matter more than anything else, truth with a lowercase t and Truth with an uppercase T. You have to tell the truth, demand the truth from others, recognize lies and refute them; you’ve got to see the world as it is, not as you want it to be, not as others who wish to dominate you might say it is. Embracing truth frees you from false expectations, fruitless pursuits, disappointment, pointless anger, envy, despair. And the bigger kind of Truth, that life has meaning, is the surest source of happiness, because it allows you to recognize your true value and potential, encourages a humility that brings peace. Most important, the big-T Truth makes it possible for you to love others for who they are, always without consideration of what they might do for you, and only from such relationships arise those rare moments of pure joy that shine so bright in memory.
Little more than two months past my ninth birthday, I was many years short of understanding all of that. In our tenement kitchen, I daydreamed of diamonds and emeralds, wishing away all troubles and threats. When I finished the Kool-Aid, I washed the glass, dried it, put it away. I wiped the condensation from the dinette table. I went into the living room and stared at the TV. I didn’t turn it on, which I suppose might have been a small step toward a far-off maturity.
In my bedroom, the fabric eye lay on the mattress, still gazing at the pillows. I’d been foolish to think it might be animated by juju. There was nothing supernatural about it. It was just trash.
I didn’t return it to the paper bag, which lay on the floor, where earlier I’d dropped it. But I didn’t throw it away. Instead, I hesitated, picked it up, circled the bed, and opened my nightstand drawer, from which I withdrew a metal box with a hinged lid.
The fancy painted box had once contained candy, a Christmas gift from Mr. and Mrs. Lorenzo the previous year. The lid featured a portrait of an Italian maiden dressed in a costume from centuries past. Flowing, gold-trimmed red script declared La Florentine, and below that, in a different font, blazed the word Torrone. The box had contained a pound and a half of almond nougat candies, a product of Italy, in three flavors—lemon, orange, and vanilla. The candy had been delicious, but of the bonbons and the colorful metal container, the latter seemed to be a greater treasure.
I kept things in the box that I valued or that intrigued me for reasons only a boy my age would understand, some more important than others. There were a dozen items, among them: a cat’s-eye marble in vivid shades of gold and blue, a penny flattened by train wheels and now the size of a half dollar, the copy of the lunch check from the restaurant where Mom and I ate the day after she sent Tilton packing, a silver dollar Grandma Anita had given me when I memorized the Our Father, which she said I should spend on the day of my confirmation.
The box didn’t contain the heart pendant with feather. I still kept that in a pants pocket, always with me.
I hesitated before adding the plush-toy eye to the trove. In the unlikely event that some dark magic was embodied in it, perhaps it might in some way contaminate the other items.
“Idiot.” I dropped the eye in the box, and replaced the lid.
I put the box on the nightstand, rose from the bed, and turned to discover Fiona Cassidy standing in the doorway.
20
I was certain that I had engaged the deadbolt on the apartment door. A couple of windows were open, but she couldn’t have gotten to them either from the sixth floor or from the street.
She didn’t say anything. She stared at me, expressionless, her face lovely but robotic, as if what she did next would be decided by the application of certain algorithms and computations run on printed circuit boards. Her blue-purple eyes seemed to be luminous.
I would like to say that I was worried but not afraid, though the truth is that she scared me, the way she materialized like a ghost, the way she just stood there, staring.
Instinctively, I sensed that I shouldn’t speak first, that repaying her stare with a stare and silence with silence might unnerve her. But I couldn’t restrain myself: “What’re you doing here?”
She stepped off the threshold, into the bedroom.
“How’d you get in?”
Not deigning to answer me, she looked around the small room, paying special attention to the poster of Duke Ellington in a tuxedo—he was standing in the Cotton Club sometime in the late 1920s, with the famous murals behind him—to a framed photograph of Grandpa Teddy with Benny Goodman, to a poster of my favorite TV star, Red Skelton, dressed as Freddy the Freeloader because I hadn’t found a poster of him as Clem Kadiddlehopper, the character who made me laugh the most.
She closed the door behind her, alarming me, and I said, “You better get out of here.”
Returning her attention to me, still expressionless, she finally spoke. “Or what?”
“Huh?”
Her voice was soft and dead-flat. “I better get out of here—or what?”
“You don’t belong here.”
“Or what?” she insisted.
“You’ll be in big trouble.”
The lack of inflection in her voice chilled me more than would have any quality of threat. “What’re you going to do—scream like a lit
tle girl?”
“I don’t need to scream.”
“Because you’re so tough?”
“No. Because my mom will be home in a minute.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, she will. You’ll see.”
“Liar.”
“You’ll see.”
I began to think that her emotionless demeanor was not the truth of her, that under her surface calm was volcanic potential.
“You know what happens to little snoops?” she asked.
“I’m not a snoop.”
“Bad things happen to them.”
In the ashen day beyond the window, light pulsed, pulsed again, so that the building next door, just six feet away, seemed to leap closer, as if collapsing toward us, and in the aftermath of those flashes, thunder rolled deep in the throat of the sky.
The woman started around the bed, and I thought about jumping onto it and plunging across it, but I knew she’d catch me before I reached the door.
“You don’t scare me,” I said.
“Then you’re stupid. A stupid, lying little snoop.”
Backing into the corner, acutely aware of my vulnerability, I said, “I’ll bite.”
“Then you’ll be bitten.”
She was maybe five foot seven. I was a lot shorter. I felt like a pygmy, if you want to know.
As she rounded the foot of the bed and as stutters of lightning again broke across the wall beyond the window, I said, “The thing is, I saw you in a dream.”
This time when thunder chased the light, it seemed to me that she had brought the storm with her, had called it forth. “How old are you, snoop?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Better answer me.”
I shrugged. “Going on ten.”
“So you just turned nine.”
“Not just.”
She stopped and stood looking down at me, an arm’s length away. “You dream about girls, do you?”
“Just you. Once.”