Even this close, it was hard to tell that anything had happened. The trees were green and healthy in appearance. Birds called and the sun rained down fat drops of light between the leaves. Poison. It was all poisoned. After America Unida sympathizers took down the plants, the standoff was off and the USA showered Caracas with warheads. And after that, AU flattened New York City with its fusion-boosted fission bomb. That was the end of the war, but everything within fifty klicks was still Excluded. Would be forever, the old-timers said.
He put his ear to the fence. Didn’t hear any buzzing. He could risk it. He stretched out a hand to the metal links.
The closest he’d ever gotten to the place where his mother had died.
But it hurts, wondering like that. Makes you ache. It ain’t real. Don’t do no good. I don’t think this is healthy, Helen. And having him come there, for you? Putting himself in danger?
Jonas decided. This was the nearest he would approach. He could not see her city, that mass grave. When he was a kid, he used to imagine she got out, in that lottery. Now, he knew how unlikely that was, and he could mourn. It was the feeling, here, that made the journey worthwhile. The feeling he got standing here in the Neverlands of upstate New York. Remembering a picture he’d made once, a drawing of a tiger. He’d signed it with a shaky, deliberate J. He remembered traveling by airship to meet her, long ago. How she’d been waiting when he disembarked, just like she’d said she’d be. How she’d taken him into her arms.
You never meant to leave him.
Yes I did. Are you kidding? They called my number and I went.
You couldn’t have saved him, though. There’s no way. You wouldn’t have done him any good by staying behind.
Still.
I don’t think you should beat yourself up.
I can’t help it.
Think about it logically. What do you think you were supposed to do?
I don’t know.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
William Sleight stayed at the Califone Hotel. After his son died, he holed up in a luxury suite for weeks. Daniel, the archivist from the public library, had showed Hel a digitized copy of the hotel’s registry book, found in the Brooklyn Collection. In later years, the elder Sleight never talked or wrote about the period of time surrounding his son’s death, the period—just over a year—when he himself had vanished. Daniel had to do a lot of work to put together the pieces.
He had showed Hel everything he had when she went to visit him after her trip to the school upstate. “See here,” Daniel had said, spreading papers in front of her on the desk in his overheated office. “First, Sleight Sr. stayed at the Califone. Here’s him checking in. Then, two weeks later, he checked out, and there’s no record of where he went. The big town house he owned in Brooklyn Heights that had been his primary residence, he closed it up, see? His brother Hiram worked for the Suffolk County DA, so most of his private correspondence is at the state archive up in Albany, but there’s no indication that William told Hiram where he was going. Hiram went back and forth with the NorthKing Baking Soda board of directors about William’s whereabouts when William first stopped attending meetings, said the family was looking for him.” Daniel indicated a pile of letter facsimiles, written in a dense, ornate hand. “Hiram thought he might be traveling abroad, but I think the better bet is his property in Brownsville.”
“Brownsville?”
Daniel pushed forward a deed. “Yeah, he’d bought a parcel of land out there in the early years of his marriage, when he was on the make. The cottage was old—left over from when the Dutch used to farm out there—but Sleight was probably going to knock it down and put up tenements for the influx of poor European Jews, like everyone was doing. He just never got around to it. Then, all of a sudden, about a year after his son’s drowning, Sleight Sr. got rid of it. The whole Brownsville parcel. I think that’s where he’d been living after he left the hotel—in the cottage there.”
“The painting,” Hel asked. “What about that?”
“No known connection to Sleight Sr. No paper trail at all, after 1909.”
She imagined the grieving father at the Califone. Beds made up every day, but never slept in. Food on trays, untouched. Tall windows, their curtains drawn. Just like his adult son in another world, typing away with paper over the panes, William Sleight would have prevented all light from entering the suite. He would not want to be able to distinguish day from night.
How might he have grieved?
She imagined Sleight cross-legged on the floor, cards spread in front of him. Asking, where is he? Where is he now? Where did he go? She imagined him sifting through the cards, searching in vain for a picture of the tiger with red-stained teeth that he could, perhaps, feel, gnawing at his vitals.
But that didn’t make sense. No Truth deck. No tiger. Those belonged to her, not William Sleight. How had he lived through those first days?
William Sleight paced. He ordered room-service meals and then left the plates of food to congeal under their cloches. He stared at the paneled walls. Poured bourbon from a crystal decanter into a crystal glass. Lit his pipe with Califone matches. He picked up the telephone receiver, put it down. Dropped the glass. Threw the pipe.
The father of the dead boy tried to convince himself that he’d done nothing wrong. He’d sent Ezra away to be educated when it became unsuitable—impossible—for him to look after the growing child on his own. There’d been no reason to suspect danger. His son wrote him tormented letters to which he’d seldom found time to respond. Since he hadn’t known it would be permanent, their separation hadn’t even pained him. This was William Sleight’s secret shame. Only now was he sensible of what he’d lost.
And then, of all places, he’d gone to Brownsville.
“What happened to the cottage?” Hel asked. “You said he sold it?”
“No, he transferred it to a Mrs. Effie Washington.” Daniel pointed out the name on the deed. “I guess she’d been his housekeeper at the big house in Brooklyn Heights. Look at the date on the deed—just about a year and a half after Ezra’s death. That’s when I can pick up a paper trail for William again. Like his life starts back up. It’s a funny thing. You never stop feeling a death, but at some point, the pain stops being so sharp.”
“Does it.”
Hel imagined William Sleight in the cottage, neither comforted nor disturbed by the specter of his grown son who might otherwise have written tales of horror in that very room. William Sleight, perfectly unaware, kneeling on the boards, just as Hel had knelt on the grass between two graves—searching, feeling. And in front of William, she imagined the painting. The Shipwreck.
There was no record of the painting in Sleight Sr.’s possession. She was making it up, but that didn’t matter. The fantasy—William staring into George Lowery’s masterwork, propped up against the wall in the cottage—it felt true. His only son had drowned, after all, just like the painted sailor. Where else would he look for rescue?
William almost touching it, the pads of all ten fingers a fraction of an inch away. The big canvas, tall as a growing boy. As delicate, as wonderfully made. How senseless. How unpredictable. He might have seen the painting as a door, and wondered how it could be unlocked. In extremities of drink and laudanum and grief, he might have viewed the heavy gold frame as a gate that could be stepped through, a threshold that could be breached. Crossed.
