“Never mind, I’ll talk to you later,” Jim said, ending the call.
He tossed the phone onto the seat beside him. There were other people still in his contacts list-friends and colleagues who knew him well enough to know his wife and daughter-but he no longer had any desire to call them. Another conversation like the one he’d just had with Menken, and he might completely fall apart.
Instead, he drove in silence. No talk radio. No music. No phone. Several times he encountered snarled traffic, but he knew these streets well enough by now to avoid most of it, and soon he was pulling up to Jonathan’s Marlborough Street brownstone. He cruised another block before noticing an aging BMW pulling out, and he slid into the vacated parking space.
As Jim climbed out of the car, an unseasonably icy breeze swept along the street and seemed to eddy around him. He looked toward Jonathan’s apartment, and a coil of fear encircled him. He could almost picture Marlborough Street as the road to Oz, and he felt a terrible trepidation at the prospect of approaching the wizard. Jonathan had been the last to see Jenny and Holly.
Hollybaby, he thought, missing his daughter so much that he nearly fell to his knees. He practically flung himself across the street, picking up his pace as he hurried toward Jonathan’s brownstone, so that by the time he reached the front door he was running. With a quick glance at the intercom, he pressed the bottom-most button. It made a sound less like a buzzer than an old-fashioned school bell. Seconds ticked by, each one an eternity, and he hit the button again.
Crackle. “Who is it?”
“It’s Jim. I need to-”
“What are you doing here?” Jonathan asked sharply, the intercom crackling.
“We have to talk,” Jim said, hearing the pleading in his own voice and hating it. “I really… I’m at my wit’s end here, Jonathan. I need a reality check, man. I need a friend.”
For several seconds the intercom did not even crackle. And then the door buzzed.
Jim hauled it open, then made sure the heavy door latched behind him. The foyer of the building smelled of disinfectant. He headed past the stairs toward the door at the rear of the foyer. Jonathan lived on the ground floor. He could have easily afforded the view from the top-floor apartment, but he didn’t like heights.
As Jim approached the door he heard the dead bolt slide back, and then the door swung open. Jonathan stood outlined in the doorway, the wan light from the hall casting shadows on the lines and hollows of his face. The sight of him startled Jim so much he came to an abrupt halt. At fifty, Jonathan had perfected the aura of a 1940s movie idol trying to hold on to his looks. Always tan, his silver hair always neatly trimmed, he was a man with expensive tastes.
But this was not the Jonathan that Jim knew. This man was a withered husk, his clothes hanging on his thinning frame, his silver hair gone dull and gray, his skin jaundiced and sagging. “Jesus,” Jim whispered. “What the hell’s happened to you?”
Jonathan’s eyes flashed with anger, and he straightened himself up. “What kind of question is that? First that crap on the phone, and now you show up here with your eyes wide like it’s your first fucking day on Earth? What’s so goddamned important?”
Jim shook himself and took a step forward, frowning. “Sorry. You caught me by surprise.”
“ I caught you?”
But Jim barely registered the sarcasm. He took another step nearer, the sadness that already enveloped him growing heavier. “Are you sick?” he asked. Then he shook his head. “I mean, obviously you are. But what is it? How did it happen so fast? Christ, Jonathan, you never said anything.”
Jonathan cocked his head, regarding Jim anew. His eyes narrowed. “You’re really asking that,” Jonathan said, almost to himself. When he spoke again, he had softened. “What’s wrong with you? You really forgot I have cancer?”
Jim closed his eyes, shaking his head, wishing it all away. “Cancer?”
“In my brain. I… hell, Jim, you know all this. I’ve got eight, maybe nine months.”
They stood in the hallway, those two old friends, and stared at each other.
“So you can’t have been at my place this morning,” Jim said.
“I haven’t been over to your place since Labor Day,” Jonathan replied. Then he stepped back into his apartment. “Come in, Jim. Call your shrink. I’m serious. I don’t know what that stuff was on the phone before about Julie or whatever-”
“Jenny.”
“-but you’re having an episode or something. Are you on any medication?”
Jim stood paralyzed in the hall, bathed in that hideous yellow light.
“Hey,” Jonathan said, coming out into the hall and reaching for his arm. “Please, don’t. I’ve had enough tears.”
Only when Jim tasted salt on his lips did he understand that he had started to cry. Instantly he shut off the tears, wiping them from his cheeks. He pulled away from Jonathan. “I have to go.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Jonathan said. “Come in. Please. Sit with me. I’ll make tea and you can clear your mind, talk to me about what’s going on in your head right now.”
Jim backed away from him, toward the foyer. “I’m sorry. I have to go.”
This isn’t my Jonathan. This isn’t my life. Somehow, the world he knew had been stolen from him while he slept. Or maybe this is my life, and the rest was just me inventing one that isn’t so fucking ugly. Maybe I’m meant to be alone.
But he rejected that instantly. Even with all the hours that had passed, his lips could still remember Jenny’s kiss. He could close his eyes and picture her, recall her smell, the perfect way her body cleaved to his when they slid into bed at night. He knew Holly’s laugh, the dimple in her left cheek, the silly way she would dance to make him smile whenever he grew too serious for her liking.
They were his wife and his little girl. They weren’t inventions.
“Call Dr. Lebowitz,” Jonathan said, starting to follow him into the hall but too weary to chase him.
“First thing in the morning,” Jim muttered.
“Promise?”
“I’ve got to go.”
Then he was out the door and running for his car, wondering what else would be taken from him today… and then realizing that he had nothing else in his life that really mattered.
Jim felt invisible to the world. He drove home in a fog, trying to figure out what to do next. Memories of Jenny and Holly kept crowding into his thoughts. He found himself singing softly in the silence of the car-all those songs he had used as lullabies on nights when Holly had trouble falling asleep as a toddler. No one remembered them. If he called the police, they would probably think he was crazy. He might even end up on some psych ward for evaluation. But what other choice did he have? He couldn’t just do nothing. Prayer wasn’t going to bring them back. He knew a private detective-a poker buddy of Menken’s-who would at least listen without calling him crazy.
Jonathan had been afraid for him. Jim had seen it in his eyes, the sympathy for the artist who had finally lost his mind. But he refused to believe that insanity could summon up the vivid details and the heartbreaking emotions that filled him now. Maybe schizophrenia could produce such delusions, but didn’t the very fact that he could so coolly examine the possibility make that unlikely?
“Oh, Jesus,” he whispered, gripping the steering wheel tighter as though holding on for his life. Perhaps, in spite of himself, he was praying without even realizing it.
He would search the apartment top to bottom, and much more meticulously this time. If any trace of them remained, he would find it. And if he found no trace, then what? It had all happened while he was sleeping. Maybe if he went back to sleep, he would wake up in the morning and the world would have returned to normal, and it would seem like it really had been a dream.
A little bit of madness had crept into him. Jim knew that, and he welcomed it. He thought he would need it to survive.
Adrift in his own mind, he parked in his space behind his building. His sense of dislocation made even those most familiar surroundings feel surreal. He hurried along the sidewalk beside Tallulah’s and turned right at the corner, keys clutched in his hand, thinking of the nooks and hidden corners of the apartment where some evidence might still be found that he did not live there alone.