“Are you the one who killed him?” she says, losing her composure. A cry escapes from her, almost like a guttural, barking laugh, an ugly sound that the crashing music can’t cover. A friend asks if she’s all right. She clenches her jaw. She’s trembling, her skin grown somehow paler, losing more color except for scarlet blotches on her cheeks and neck. She wipes at her eyes with a cocktail napkin. “I’m okay,” she says, “I’m all right—”
“No,” I tell her, “it wasn’t me—”
“Then what do you want from me?!” she says. “I’ve done nothing to you—”
“My wife,” I tell her. “I want my wife back. I want her back—”
The words temper her hysteria. She’s staring at me with bloodshot eyes, nearly panting, trying to figure out who I am, what I mean, why I’m here, why she’s been discovered.
“I’m sorry?” she says.
“You took her from me. Mook took her from me. I want her back—”
Trembling, now, my voice cracking, I also start to cry—heavy sobs. Telling this woman that I no longer have my wife is somehow like admitting for the first time that I lost Theresa ten years ago, that I’ve been alone for all these years. I’ve never felt Theresa’s absence so acutely, I’ve never admitted to myself that even if I found her now, there’s nothing left to find.
Someone asks her, “Do you want me to call the police?”
“No,” she says. “We’re all right. We’re all right here—”
“Please,” I tell her.
Albion gazes around the room, at the artwork and the people surrounding her—bewildered, it seems, but more like someone emerging from a pleasant dream into a harsh morning, knowing that all the pleasing illusions surrounding her are on the cusp of fading, trying to take them all in, to absorb them, before she wakes.
“I’m so sorry,” she says to the two other artists, to her friends, who’ve gathered around us like we’re actors playing a scene. “I’m mortified for interrupting your show, please forgive me. I’m so sorry about all of this. This gentleman and I have some things to discuss—”
She leads me to a quieter corner of the room, the others warily watching us. She studies my face inquisitively—it’s unnerving, like I’m being dissected.
“Don’t I know you?” she says. “I think I recognize you, but you were different then. Didn’t you—you were a poet, weren’t you? I think I’ve seen you at readings—”
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I think, maybe—”
“What’s your name?”
“Dominic—”
“You’re full name,” she says. “Tell me—”
“John Dominic Blaxton,” I say. “I was married to a woman named Theresa—”
“Theresa,” she says, testing the name, weighing the sound of it. “I don’t remember a Theresa, but I remember you. You look different than you used to, but I can see you now. I was at a reading once, at ModernFormations Gallery in Garfield. Twelve years ago, at least—isn’t that right?”
“That’s right,” I tell her. “A small-press festival. I was Confluence Press. The New Yinzer was there, Copacetic Comics, Autumn House—”
Saying these names to someone who remembers them is like remembering how to speak a coded language invented as a child.
“Caketrain,” she says, “City of Asylum—”
“I remember standing onstage, the other poets on couches behind me, looking out across the audience but I couldn’t see any faces because of the stage lights so I looked down at the sheets of typed poetry I brought with me, and was surprised to see my hands were shaking—”
“I loved your work that night,” she says. “I bought two of your books—”
“The Stations of the Cross? The blue one?”
“That one, and another one,” she says. “You’d brought a chapbook with you, of love poems. Those were my favorites—”
I’d forgotten about that chapbook, something I made to sell along with The Stations of the Cross when I gave readings, little love note sketches I’d given to Theresa over the years and collected together.
“You wouldn’t happen to still have those, would you?” I ask her.
“Everything was lost,” she says.
We’ve drifted farther away from the others and are standing beneath a white sheet of paper with black words that say fucking in a car at 85mph running into a brick wall.
“I don’t remember you from that night,” I tell her. “But I know you were there—I saw you in the Archive, but I wasn’t sure if I saw you. I thought I would have remembered meeting you before—”
“There were a lot of other people there that night,” she says.
The gallery’s filling in again as people drift through from other parties. Albion suggests we take a couple of drinks and head outside for fresh air. She gives assurances to her friends that she’ll be all right, that I’m an old friend. She promises she’ll voice them, to check in later. The evening’s grown cold and I offer her my jacket. She turns me down at first, but later accepts to keep from shivering. The front windows of the Glass Dome gallery have fogged over, the people inside like specters through the glass. We walk a few blocks in silence until she sits on the front steps of an antique store that has closed, lost in the shadows of the awning. I join her. Laughing people passing by don’t notice us—it feels like we’re invisible, here.
“Tell me about your wife,” she says.
“Theresa Marie,” I tell her. “Mook deleted everything about her, just like he deleted you. He warned me off from looking for you in the City, but he killed her anyway. I need you to bring her back—”
“I can’t bring her back,” she says. “I can’t. Maybe he could have—”
I lean into the shadows, watching my breath billow out from my lungs like it’s my soul that’s escaping. The familiar depression settles over me, blacker and deeper than I’d ever felt it before—I want Theresa, I want her back, I want to kiss her, I want to hear her talk to me, I just want to see her again. Albion lets me regain my composure. She’s patient. I imagine swallowing the steel of a gun barrel, aiming into the roof of my mouth.
“Did he send you here?” she asks.
“Waverly?”
“Is that who sent you? I was thinking it would be Timothy—”
“Timothy, too,” I tell her.
“Is he here, then? Is he the one who killed my friend?”
“I don’t know—”
She nods. She’s considering who I am.
“Are you working for him? Are you going to tell him where I am?”
I explain everything. I tell her that I’d started for Waverly thinking I was searching for his daughter but kept looking only because I thought she and Mook could protect me from Timothy, help me disappear. I tell her I was hoping she could recover my wife.
“Are you hungry?” she says.
“Yeah, I actually am,” I admit. “I only had an omelet earlier—”
“I’m starving,” she says. “All I’ve had was a salad for lunch. Do you like Thai?”
We leave the antique store stoop, emerging from beneath the awning. Albion sees a few friends heading to the show. They ask if she’s coming along and Albion smiles, a brokenhearted smile. “I’ll be along,” she says.
We walk together. “You don’t mind if I keep your jacket on?” she asks. “You won’t be too cold?”
“It’s not too cold,” I tell her, but she says she’s freezing. She knows a place called Thaiphoon that’s too busy to get a table, so we place takeout orders and she offers her apartment, just around the corner. She says we’ll be able to talk there. We wait at the counter, thinking of things to say—organizing our thoughts. I pay for our food, and once we’re outside I ask if she made her own clothes and she says that she did.