Faithful

  “It’s just a present, Shelby.”

  “Because my mother’s dead?” Her voice breaks and then she’s embarrassed.

  “Because I wanted to give this to you. I’ve wanted to for a long time.”

  Shelby opens the box. It’s a Burberry raincoat. The last time she saw him she’d gone on and on about wanting a Burberry raincoat and he must have believed her.

  “Ben,” she says.

  “I was an ass the last time I saw you. I didn’t want you to know how much you used to mean to me. When we were together I could never afford to get you anything nice. This is for old times’ sake.”

  Shelby decides she doesn’t want to go back to her parents’ house. She has a timetable for the Long Island Rail Road in her pocket, so Ben drives her to the station. This is as over as a relationship can get. She used to mean something to him. Ben gets out of the Volvo to wait for the train with her. Shelby has Buddy tucked into her coat. The raincoat is draped over her arm.

  “Well, that was fun,” Shelby says. “Remind me to invite you to the next funeral.”

  “Maybe she will be a cardinal,” Ben says.

  Shelby laughs. “You said that kid was a liar and bad news.”

  “That doesn’t mean he’s not right.”

  When the train arrives Ben hugs Shelby as best he can without crushing Buddy.

  “It’s okay if your girlfriend is beautiful,” Shelby says. “I want you to be happy.”

  Ben grins. “Really? You never did before.”

  They laugh and embrace, then Shelby gets on the train. At this hour, it’s almost empty and she has a double seat all to herself. There is so much snow it’s like taking a train through the clouds. Buddy’s even breathing means he’s fallen asleep again. She’ll keep her promise to her mother and take him home. As they near Penn Station, Shelby considers leaving the raincoat behind for some needy person to find. It’s not really her style. Then she realizes she’s the needy person. She didn’t thank Ben, and she probably should have, but maybe he knows that she’s grateful. Maybe he understands that saying thank you can be just as hard as saying good-bye.

  CHAPTER

  12

  Ever since her mother’s death Shelby has had trouble sleeping. She’s filled with regret, it’s in her blood and bones, it lies down beside her with its head on her pillow and whispers a list of all she’s done wrong. She wishes she hadn’t burned her childhood books and could read them every night; perhaps then she would find some peace. She wishes she had spent more time with her mother, and that she could call her on the phone. She dials her home number late at night, but either no one picks up or her father answers, his voice full of worry and sleep. Her father has sent her all the sympathy cards from her mother’s friends and from the co-worker she had when she was a librarian. We loved her so. She was one of a kind. We will miss and mourn her. In between the Hallmarks, there’s a postcard. It’s plain white, no illustration this time. Trust someone, the message reads in black ink. It is so simple and so pure that Shelby fears it’s the writer’s last message.

  As the weather improves, Shelby takes to roaming the streets whenever sleep eludes her. Walking is man’s best medicine, Hippocrates stated and maybe it’s true. In the evenings she heads along Broadway, merging with the late-night crowd. Occasionally she stops for a drink at Balthazar on Spring Street, where her usual waiter knows she wants the cheapest white wine. On other occasions she stands outside a tattoo parlor called Scorpio in the East Village, although she never goes in. Would she be transformed once she stepped over the threshold, with her sins and sorrows revealed to all in ink? On one occasion, while she was considering if she should finally get the tattoo she’s always had in mind for herself, someone inside opens the shop door for her. “Just looking,” she calls as she hurries away.

  Shelby often thinks about the tattooed girl in Union Square and how they might have exchanged lives on the day Shelby took the dogs. In fairy tales, such things happened, you stole from someone, then were handed their fate as a punishment. She has always wondered what the difference was between herself and the girl in the park, why she had been saved from her own desire to destroy herself. Shelby was the one who had to be tied down to her hospital bed, who would cut herself with anything she could get her hands on, including plastic forks and spoons. But that girl is like a little sister inside of her now. She doesn’t know why she didn’t turn out like the girl in Union Square, screaming at passersby, caught in the web of her own pain, but on nights when she’s reading her veterinary journals, and the dogs are sleeping, she wonders if it’s possible that when she rescued them, they rescued her as well.

  The winter has been a hard one, and in April it’s still chilly. Shelby sleeps in sweaters, and sometimes in the Burberry raincoat Ben gave her. When she thinks of him she wants to cry, but she doesn’t. She wonders if it’s possible that she’s lost the ability to produce tears. When her apartment feels too small, she sits on the fire escape, the way she used to with Ben. In the spring chill the Hudson turns a silvery color, as if the moon has fallen straight down to the river bottom, a cold, white stone. On clear nights it’s possible to see stars in the black sky above Tenth Avenue, a rarity in the city. A few brave leaves have shown themselves on the flowering pear trees, but they tremble in the wind that comes off the river, and some of them freeze solid on thin, wavering branches.

  Shelby has had a terrible cold, which turns out to be pneumonia. At night she feels like she’s drowning. She coughs so loudly her downstairs neighbors, who fight so furiously she can hear shoes hitting the wall, complain about her hacking. She orders egg drop soup from the Hunan Kitchen, and throws most of it away along with the fortune cookies. The lost are in need of a compass, she thinks her fortune will read. What becomes of someone who is unbecoming? Her dreams are all of water. Sometimes she spies a girl swimming. She knows it’s not Helene. Helene never went into the ocean; she was terrified of sharks and crabs. Then Shelby realizes she’s seeing herself out in the sea, the girl she used to be before all of this happened, when she still had hope and a future she wasn’t afraid to know.

  Her illness worsens; she cannot stop coughing. She finally goes to the ER at Bellevue one night when she can’t breathe. She’s given antibiotics and an inhaler and is told to keep hydrated. She who drinks water will never thirst for knowledge. As she’s leaving Shelby stops to lace her boots. An orderly looks her up and down. She stares back at him, annoyed.

  “Interested?” the orderly says with a thick Russian accent. “I’m single.”

  Only now does Shelby realize he is the one who took her to see the old man who collapsed on the pavement years earlier, on the day she met Harper Levy. She can hardly remember Harper’s face, he’s become a ghost in her memory, but she will never forget this orderly. Now Shelby has long hair that reaches past her shoulders and is likely her best feature. Maybe that’s why the Russian doesn’t recognize her. All the same, she feels as if she’s stumbled upon an old friend. She goes up to him, surprising him with a kiss on the cheek. “You did me a favor once,” Shelby tells him.

  “Good for me,” he says, amused.

  On her way home from the ER, Shelby wonders if there was ever a year in which spring never came. She sits out on the fire escape to have her dinner, hot and sour soup and shrimp toast. A girl who is cold has only herself to blame. If you have burned a book, don’t complain that there is nothing to read. Shelby has on two sweaters, her raincoat, and a scarf looped around her throat. The weather is cloudy and miserable, but birds have built a nest on the fire escape. Shelby enjoys watching the nesting birds as she recovers. But one pale morning she wakes to find the nest has been abandoned. Some larger bird, perhaps a hawk that is said to circle the neighborhood, has torn it apart. A single blue egg has been left behind. She looks it up in her copy of Birds of America. Her birds would have been robins, another rarity in Manhattan.

  This is the w
eekend when Ben Mink is getting married. Shelby was invited to La Scala restaurant in Huntington for the wedding dinner. Ben is nothing if not gracious, unless you cheat on him behind his back, then he calls you every name in the book and slams out the door so he can cry in the hallway and hold his broken heart in his hands, so damaged and ripped apart it’s clear he’s never coming back. Although Shelby never bothered to RSVP, she’s kept the invitation taped to her refrigerator. She’s torturing herself with it every time she gets something to eat. There is a photograph of Ben and his impossibly beautiful bride-to-be, Ana. Shelby has spent the past week obsessed by wicked thoughts. She is vindictive, even when she’s the guilty party. Perhaps it’s always true that when you wreck your own life you blame everyone else for your misfortune. She wants Ben’s wedding day to be ruined and has imagined dozens of possible scenarios, from lightning strikes to floods. Now her wish has come true. It’s April and it’s snowing. She feels a stab of joy when she wakes to see six inches of powdery white has fallen onto Tenth Avenue. No wonder the robins abandoned their nest. Perhaps Ben should do the same with his marriage. Now the wedding guests will have trouble on the Long Island Expressway. Their cars will skid and swerve, and those who do manage to arrive at the service on time will drag in wearing boots, the hems of their dresses soaking wet.

  If she were to go to Ben’s wedding she would cut in during the first dance. She’d have on a long black skirt and hiking boots; she’d be so awkward and bitter no one present would imagine she was Ben’s old girlfriend, the one who dumped him and then regretted it ever after, the way she’s regretted everything in her life. It’s a good day to be alone. She’s horrible company, worse than usual. Even the dogs leave her be. Shelby tries not to think about centerpieces of roses and orchids and a red velvet wedding cake. Ben actually talked about those things to her on drunken evenings when he thought they’d be the couple to be marrying. He wanted to go to Mexico on a honeymoon. He had it all planned.

  In the afternoon Shelby walks through the snow to East Third Street. On Ben Mink’s wedding day she finally goes inside the tattoo parlor to mark herself for her sins. She stomps fluffy snow off her boots. Three men are in mid-conversation, which stops dead when they see Shelby. Because of the weather they’re clearly surprised to have a customer, particularly someone like Shelby. She used to resemble a homeless person, someone who could snap, who might have a knife in her pocket. People often crossed the street when they saw her, bald head, torn red sweatshirt, but now, in her Burberry raincoat and new pair of boots, she may look too upscale for her surroundings. All the walls are covered with tattoo patterns, some intricate and tribal, others colorful and traditional. There’s low jazz playing on the radio. The men all have elaborate tattoos. One guy says something to his cohorts, then approaches Shelby. He’s dark and brooding, a large man with a demeanor that can be taken as threatening. He appraises Shelby in a way that makes her feel uncomfortable.

  “Just looking?” he says with a scrim of sarcasm.

  “I’d like a tattoo.” For some reason Shelby feels judged. Her hackles are up. “Isn’t that what you do?”

  “I’ve seen you lurking around before, but you always disappeared.”

  Shelby furrows her brow. “I don’t lurk.” Then she thinks of the time the door opened and she managed to avoid a shadowy figure. “Well, maybe sometimes,” she admits.

  The artist has dark, liquid eyes, with an intense gaze that goes right through her. “Where do you want it?” he asks. When he sees that she’s puzzled, he grins. In his amused expression she sees the glimmer of another side of him. “The tattoo?”

  Shelby has considered her choice for a very long time. “Over my heart.”

  “Are you sure?” He’s not handsome, but something about him draws her in. Can it be that stepping through the door of this shop has brought her into a world where another fate is possible?

  “I’m sure,” Shelby tells him. She hopes that if you reveal something on the outside, it won’t cause as much pain on the inside. It will float to the surface and leave you alone.

  The tattoo artist holds up his hands, as if giving in to someone who is clearly making a mistake. “You’re the customer.”

  They go into the back room. The tattooist says his name is James. He informs her that he learned his craft at the School of Visual Arts on Twenty-Third Street and in prison. If that’s supposed to scare her, it doesn’t. She’s always felt she should be in prison for what she did to Helene. She used to fall asleep in her parents’ basement waiting for the police to knock on the door.

  “Drugs,” the tattooist tells her. “When you’re young and desperate for something you act before you think.”

  “I don’t believe you were ever young,” Shelby blurts. Then, embarrassed, she apologizes. “Sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”

  “Because it’s true. Old soul.”

  There are several tattoo chairs separated by black curtains and one faux leather table that reminds Shelby of something a masseuse might use. The room smells like sweat and incense. For a minute Shelby’s afraid she might have to get naked. She already feels overly exposed. “I’m not undressing,” she says.

  “Did I ask you to?”

  Again, she feels embarrassed. They exchange a look that makes her even more ill at ease.

  “Just the clothes that cover the area,” he tells her.

  Shelby slips off her raincoat and sweater, then sits on the table.

  “Do you want me to tell you about the process?” James pulls up a stool. “Some people feel more comfortable if they know what I’m doing. Like when a doctor explains the steps of a surgery before he starts cutting.”

  “Don’t tell me anything,” Shelby says.

  She tugs her T-shirt over her head. She’s wearing a bra, which she assumes she can keep on. It’s nothing special, she doesn’t believe in name brands like Victoria’s Secret, despite her Burberry raincoat from Ben. Her bra is simple, black, a little too small for her, something she didn’t realize until this moment.

  “We haven’t discussed the art,” James says, his eyes all over her.

  “It’s a name.”

  “Of course.” He sounds contemptuous. “You want a heart with that? And a forever?”

  Shelby glares at him, unsettled. “Do you make fun of all your clients?”

  “Names are usually a bad idea.” He sits beside her on the table, close enough so that their legs touch. Shelby feels burned. She moves her leg away. She’s here for only one thing. She doesn’t want to talk to anyone, she wants to get this over with, but the artist won’t shut up. “I think of life as a book of stories,” he goes on. “You move through the stories and the characters change. But once you have a name on your skin you are stuck with one story, even if it’s a bad one.”

  Shelby is surprised by the way he expresses himself. It’s not what she would have expected given his tough appearance. But she disagrees with him and isn’t afraid to say so. “Well, I think of life as a novel. You can’t just hop out of the mess you’re in and into another story. You carry it all with you.”

  “You’re wrong,” he says.

  Maybe she is. She tells him about The Illustrated Man, how it’s a book of stories, but those stories are threaded together, tattoo by tattoo, until they become a novel. Bradbury’s book is a hybrid and that’s why she loves it so. That’s what life is, Shelby claims.

  “I’ll have to read it. Sounds great.”

  “You read?” Shelby says.

  It’s supposed to be a joke, but it falls flat. James smiles wearily. He’s used to this kind of judgment. Everything he’s wearing is black, including heavy black boots, not unlike the ones Shelby used to wear. Now her pretty leather boots have high heels. Frankly, they’re not very good for trekking through snow. James takes off his sweatshirt, and she sees his arms are colored sleeves filled with dragons and roses, skulls and blue-black
geometric patterns. She wonders if James’s tattoos come alive in burning color when he sleeps. If she spent the night with him would she know everything there was to know about him?

  When he sees her staring, James rolls his shirt up his forearm. Inside a circle of thorny, blue vines there is a name. Lee. “Sometimes what feels right turns out to be wrong. It turns love into a burden.”

  Shelby actually feels a surge of jealousy when she sees the name inked onto his arm. She wonders whom he might have loved so deeply that his love became a burden. Still she shrugs. She has been planning this tattoo since the accident. “I want a name, and I don’t much care what you think.”

  Her eyes are burning. There is a wave of grief rising to the surface. She didn’t think she could cry anymore, but now it is happening in this highly inappropriate place. Shelby covers her face with her hands, mortified. Maybe it’s because it’s Ben Mink’s wedding day and she’s here alone and she still hasn’t punished herself enough for her crime. “I don’t cry,” she manages to say.

  Before she can leap off the table and pull on her shirt, James embraces her. He doesn’t say anything; he just lets her cry. He doesn’t tell her It’s okay or You’ll be fine or any of that other crap people try to tell you when you’re breaking apart. For a guy who talks so much, he knows when to shut up.

  “I’m an idiot,” Shelby says when her tears subside. “I’m ready. Let’s get this over with.”

  “Is it Ben’s name you want?”

  Shelby looks at him, more confused than ever. “You know Ben Mink?”

  “I’m Jimmy,” the tattoo artist explains. “From fourth grade? Out in Huntington? James Howard.”

  This is worse than she could have imagined. He’s someone she knows, or at least she did, once upon a time. In their fourth-grade class photo session he leapt up and down so much the photographer finally tied him to a chair with a jump rope. “You’re the one who shot Ben with rubber bands when he cried over Bambi.”