“Vincent Callais,” Finch said. “French actor, did some American movies in the forties. He played Myrna Loy’s bad boyfriend once, so that’s pretty cool. His writing is hilariously terrible, but I’m a sucker for film history so I flipped through it.” He opened the book to the photos at its center. “So here’s poor old Vincent standing kinda near Anita Ekberg at a party … Oh, here you can see the netting of his toupee … But look—check this one out.”
I leaned over the book. An elderly Vincent and his shit-eating grin sat at a restaurant table, looking greasy and overexposed. On one side of him, a blonde bunny smiled for the camera, all eyelashes and chest. On the other was a man with a perm and a boxer’s build, much younger than Vince. His eyes basically had comic-book arrows coming out of them, pointing toward the blonde’s chest. And next to him, looking like she was beamed in from another photo entirely, sat my grandmother.
My eyes flicked down to the caption. L to R: Unknown woman, Callais, Teddy Sharpe, Althea Proserpine. 1972.
My grandmother would’ve been twenty-eight then, her book a year old. I looked back at her face. Hers was the kind of liquid loveliness that held a secret: you look at it again and again, trying to catch it. That quirked brow, the lip with a nick in it, like maybe she’d fallen off her roller skates as a girl. She wore a sleeveless patterned top, and her hair was in a messy bob, dark bangs swept over her forehead. The fingers of her right hand touched her chin, absently. On her first finger, the same onyx ring she wore in her author photo. On her third, a coiled metal snake.
“She looks like you,” Finch said.
Not even close. If I was a house cat, she was a lynx. “My scar’s on my chin, not my lip,” I said, touching the white dent I’d gotten during a particularly ugly run-in with the bad luck.
“You know what I mean. It’s the eyes, I think. You look like you’ve got a million things going through your mind, but you’re not saying them.”
I hated unsolicited compliments, if that’s what that was, so I kept my eyes trained on Althea. “Is there anything about her in the book?”
“Nothing. This is how I discovered her, actually, this photo. I read the entire 1970s section hoping she’d show up.” He rubbed his chin with the flat of his palm, thoughtfully. “It was just … her face, you know? She looked like she was somebody I should know about. And that name. It’s a lot of name. Finally I Googled her, which I should have done first, and found out about the book. I couldn’t find it anywhere, not even reprints of the stories, just old articles and stuff. Not very long, except for the Vanity Fair piece. I became weirdly obsessed with reading the book, mostly because it’s impossible to find.”
“Is it good?”
“Good?” He thought for a moment. “Good isn’t the right word. It puts you in this weird headspace. I’d just gone through some family stuff when I read it. I was all messed up. Getting the book at that exact moment was just what I needed. It gave me a feeling like…” He stopped, narrowed his eyes at me. “Don’t laugh. It made me feel the way love songs do when you’re falling in love. Except in a messed-up way, ’cause that’s where my head was at. There’s a lot of darkness in them. I can’t remember now how much of that was in the stories and how much of it was mine. I loved them either way. I’m really sorry I can’t read them again.”
“So am I.”
He must’ve heard the trouble in my voice, because his changed, too, got more serious. “Why now? You don’t seem like … you don’t seem interested much in talking about her. Your grandmother. What changed?”
I opened my mouth, and the awful confusion of it pressed in. The red-haired man, the stench, the empty apartment.
“I got home from school today,” I began.
Finch waited. We looked at each other in the warm library light. His eyes were brown and guileless.
“I got home, and someone had been there—someone had broken in. There was this weird smell, and I could just tell.”
“A smell? Was there—was that it?”
“No, that’s not it. Whoever it was had left something for me. On my bed.”
He recoiled when I said the word bed. “Oh, god. What was it?”
I pulled out the envelope, flattened the title page onto the table. He grew still, then reached for it. He touched it like it was a relic. “No way,” he breathed.
“And my mom.” Something in me didn’t want the words said aloud, like it might make them true. “She’s not there. I can’t reach her. I can’t reach any of them. I don’t know what to do. And weird shit has been happening, stuff that’ll sound stupid if I try to explain…”
Finch’s eyes were trained on the page. He looked like he wanted to grind it up and snort it.
“Finch?”
He looked up at me and I saw the shift, when he went from geeked-out fan back to friend, I guess. “Wait, wait.” He grabbed my hand, gently. He wasn’t much taller than me—our eyes were almost level. “Someone broke into your apartment and left something very rare and, in context, very creepy in your room, and now you can’t reach your mom. What if she’s filling out a police report somewhere? I’m so sorry this happened to you, but I don’t think you have to panic. Have you thought about calling your grandmother? Just in case?”
I pulled my hand sharply from his. “I can’t call her. She’s dead.”
He startled back. “What? No. I would’ve heard something.”
“Why would you have heard something?”
“Because there’s this thing called the internet, and she’s famous. Or was. Everyone gets an obituary. She can’t be dead.”
My chest burned. “I can’t have you telling me my dead grandmother isn’t dead right now, Finch. That’s like the second or third worst thing you could pick to argue about.”
“Shit. You’re right, that was a stupid thing to say. This is very, very weird.” He stared at me for a minute, like he was calculating something. “Okay. Okay. Your mom is fine, I’m sure there’s an explanation.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Well, no matter where they are, you shouldn’t go back to your place alone. Let’s go together—maybe they’re already back. Or maybe I’ll see something you didn’t.”
And there it was. Behind his gentle expression of concern, a bright curiosity. A hunger. My vow to Ella kept me away from Althea fans, rare as they were, but that didn’t mean they kept away from me.
“Forget it,” I said, standing suddenly. I lurched away from the table clumsily, shouldering my bag.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t talk to fans.”
I thought the ice in my voice would make him shrivel, or tell me to fuck off, I’m just trying to help you. Instead, he looked confused. “Why?”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. If talking to a fan was a betrayal, the betrayal had happened. It was too late to turn back.
“I don’t know,” I said finally.
“Then how about getting over it? I don’t think you have anyone else you can go to with this.” He said it gently, but I felt pinpricks of shame anyway.
“That’s not true. I could go stay at my friend Lana’s.” I probably could, too, but Lana already lived with two other sculptors and half a klezmer band in a stuffed Gowanus flat. And calling her my friend was pushing it.
“But you didn’t go to Lana,” he said. “You came to me.”
In that moment, I wondered when the last time was that I’d made eye contact with someone for this long. Someone who wasn’t Ella. I wanted so badly to not need him, but the idea of going back out into the city alone sent a feeling of cold desolation blowing through me. In my mind Harold’s apartment was an alien landscape—something had passed through it, something that didn’t belong. I couldn’t be alone there with that feeling.