Shadow Man: A Novel (24 page)

“James. James.”

Whispers in a cracked voice. A voice rich, resonant with tone, a smoker’s voice.

“James.”

“Yes.”

“Are you back?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What’s my name?”

“I don’t know but I feel we have met.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. There are no distinctions. Inside of me, nothing is distinct. Do you understand?”

“Sometimes when we make love you come all the way back.”

“Tell me.”

The lady slides alongside me, still. I hear her breathing and feel her tears, and between my neck and shoulder there is soothing warmth.

“It’s funny in a way, James. I am Eva from Poland. That’s what I keep telling you, and it makes me feel like years ago when I was a professor in Warsaw and the police suspected me of spying. They put me in a room. They kept asking me questions and I kept giving them answers, but they didn’t believe me. They looked at me blank, like you.”

“Were you a spy?”

“For a while, right before the world changed.”

“Was I a spy?”

“No. But you lived like one.”

“Do you love me?”

“Yes, James, very much.”

The lady stands naked in the light. Her body has no scars; it is the color of pigment, white, pink, like the polished shells they sell at souvenir shops, and another color, a shade of something deeper.

“See, James, I am much older than when we first met. The lines don’t hold so taut anymore, but I try. Can you look into me, look through me to the girl you met? Remember.”

She reaches for my hand. I sit on the edge of the bed in front of her. I wrap my arms around her; my head balanced beneath her breasts. I hear her heart, and she strokes my hair, and I don’t remember a thing, but I hold her not wanting to let go.

“We started every morning like this. I would get out of bed first. You were always groggy, and I’d come around and pull you up and you’d slump into me and hold me just like this, and then you’d gradually stir and we’d make love in the morning, before, as you said, the noises of the day found us.”

“If that happened, I was lucky.”

“You were.”

She kisses me on the head and turns toward the bathroom; a fish escaping through a net. She half closes the door.

“Don’t wander off again. I’ll be right out.”

I sit naked on the bed, listening to the shower, watching steam curl up the mirror. My arms are thin, shapeless; I think I was once stronger. I see raised veins and slackened skin where muscle must have been. I flex my bicep; a slab rises in a sad arc. I was a boxer once. No, Kurt was the boxer. He had the thick arms and biceps, dancing in our basement and slapping that bag, his sweat spraying onto the blackened beams that held up the house. I smile at the thwack, thwack, thwack of Kurt’s gloved fist against the leather. I stand and shadowbox like Kurt taught me, exhaling and throwing fists, a naked man fighting the air. I laugh. The rings on the shower curtain scrape; the lady, wet like a sheen, an ice statue melting, wraps a towel around herself and walks to me.

“What are you doing?”

“Boxing.”

She rolls her eyes.

“Your turn.”

I am alone in the shower, the curtain, like the shade in a confessional, is pulled but I can see the lady, like I used to see Fr. Heaney. I peek out through a crack in the curtain. She is wiping steam off the mirror and putting on makeup. She looks as if she’s crying, but that might be the steam and the water. I wash my face and step out and dry myself. She is dressing. I know I have watched this before; her back bent, I see the side of her breast, the bra rising over it, an arm through a strap and the breast hides, lost in black lace like a crescent moon slipping into clouds. Women do this, I think, when they dress. Mom did it. Vera, too. And this lady. They turn their backs like in paintings, images in profile with hair falling over their shoulders, their chins dipping, legs lifting into stockings, like dancers
backstage, and breasts hidden the way Mrs. Romano’s breasts were silhouette and mystery in Nut Johnson’s telescope. Men don’t dress pretty.

“Time to get you back, James.”

“Where?”

“The place you live. Philly.”

A man with a green hat and gold buttons waves good-bye. The car is cold. I watch the waves out the window. No one is on the beach; we turn and the ocean is gone, and we pass under a string of lights to the edge of town where a green sign points to the expressway and the lady shifts into fifth gear and we race up the ramp through a gray morning with a crack of sun in the distance.

“All the stories have been told, James. There are no more.”

She reaches down and holds my hand; wind is whistling and it feels like we are flying. We cross the bridge into Philly. I know these streets, not by name anymore, but I know them.

“I feel lost, too, James. In the strangest way. Years spent translating for you. Changing words from one language into another. I was a magician. Your rhythms became mine. Your words became mine and the words I gave you back became yours. But now you are not here and all words mean nothing. You are not you and because of that I am not me.”

We stop in front of a brick building with white pillars, ivy, and a small gabled roof over the entrance. The windows have shutters; a statue of the Madonna stands in a garden. There is rust at her feet. The lady shuts off the car but doesn’t move. She stares through the windshield; she looks at me and back to the windshield. The car creaks, the sound of oil cooling against engine metal. Tick. Tick. Tick. The lady turns toward me, takes my face in her hands, and kisses me on the forehead. She runs two fingers through my hair. I feel special but I don’t know why. The lady gets out and opens the trunk. I get out, too. She hands me a small zippered bag.

“I’m going to Poland for a while. Remember, I told you? Of course, you don’t. You’ve stopped remembering, haven’t you?”

“I remember Kurt and Vera.”

“I know. They are your only story. A man who once wrote thousands of stories has one left. Why does it have to be that one?”

She is crying.

“I feel you love me, but I’m sorry I don’t know why.”

“What’s my name? Say it, James. Please, just once.”

I look down. She holds me near the side of the car; the morning is gray and the streets are slick, shiny almost, with autumn frost, and children, off-balance with book bags, run toward a school bus and a crossing guard holds up a stop sign and the world seems to stop as the children step onto the bus and the lady keeps holding me, pressing into me hard, and the bus doors close and the stop sign comes down and the crossing guard walks to the corner and lights a cigarette and I think I see snow in the distance, just a few flakes over a car, and then whirling toward me, but they disappear or maybe they weren’t there at all. My eyes are blurry from the cold and the lady lets go of me and gets into the car and I am standing alone with a small zippered bag in my hands and the lady rolls down the window and I see tears on her face and I think she was pretty when she was young because she’s so pretty now and it bothers me that I should know her name but I don’t; the engine starts and the lady waves for me to come closer and she whispers to me. Her hands reach out the window. I bend down; her fingers run through my hair. She pulls me close. I feel her breath in my ear.

“I am Eva, James. I was with you when the world changed.”

She releases me. She rolls the window up and drives away, down a street shiny with autumn frost.

A woman in a coat and white hat steps beside me.

I am the woman in white. James stands on the curb with his overnight bag as if he’s waiting at the wrong bus stop. It makes me sad. I take his arm. His eyes are fixed on Eva’s red car; she turns and is gone, leaving only a wisp of tailpipe smoke at the corner by the market she often stops at to buy cigarettes on her way back to New York. Not today. She had called me earlier to say she was going away and wouldn’t be seeing James for a while. That’s not like Eva, but I understand, and maybe she’ll be back or maybe it’ll be just James and me from now on. She loves him, so I have hope, but sometimes hope is hard. I nudge James and smile at him. Vacant. It’s cold and Christmas decorations will be up soon — tinsel strung, blown-up Santas, snowmen painted on windows. I’m a simple wreath girl; the world’s full of too much sparkle as it is.

I have to shop for James, though. Last year I bought him one of those little iPod Shuffle things and had a friend’s son download the
White Album
on it. James liked it. I think he did. I’d better get him inside. We walk up the stairs, take two lefts, and follow the long hallway to his room. I take off my coat so he can see my white uniform and he looks at me as if he thinks he has seen me before. He does this every day; white is soothing. The color of angels.

I will spend the weekend with James. It’s all planned. We’ll go for a walk along the river and watch the scullers in the late afternoon when the coming night air draws mist from the water. I like the end of the day, that enveloping pause between two worlds; just like Kurt used to stand on his back stoop drinking a beer at twilight and breathing in the city. Vera told me that in the long letter (book) she
wrote me while she was institutionalized, after she killed my father. He didn’t know about me. I was just a smattering of substances in Vera’s belly when she pulled the trigger. Poor Kurt, mistaken for the man from Marrakesh who never, never was, or was he? That’s what I don’t know.

Vera’s book is so convincing I get goose bumps when she describes “this speck of shadow trailing me across two continents.” They never found him; they judged her mind, her imagination, guilty.

I never told James that Vera died of an overdose. It happens so easily in institutions, pills hidden, stored up, a dispensary door left unlocked, a sympathetic orderly. The report said she “expired” between early-morning rounds. It must have still been dark. I imagine she slipped away, scared at first, but then succumbing, like drowning. Maybe in her final moments my mother believed that the “evil chameleon” from Marrakesh would never catch her. She was free. They cremated her and for years her ashes were kept in an urn on a shelf in a storage closet. No one claimed them. They disappeared when the institution was renovated to take patients with insurance.

I won’t tell James. This is my secret. I don’t know if he ever knew anything about Vera after Kurt died. James went to live with his grandparents in Florida and then on to college and into the newspaper business. Maybe Vera wrote to him from the institution, the place where I was born and taken from before I even suckled, handed over for adoption. I doubt it. Vera only wrote that long letter-book to me, her daughter. That’s what I like to think. But James and I were orphans, taken in by people who loved us, yes, but raised away from the magic of Kurt and Vera. It must have been magical; listening to James talk about the time on Virginia Beach with Vera laughing in her straw fedora and Kurt sleeping on the sand and getting burned and the waves crashing down and the Impala, with its top down, waiting to whisk them away like a flying carpet. I would have
loved even a minute of that. I won’t tell James he is my half brother, either. I’ve decided I could not bear his forgetting such a thing so cherished minutes after I uttered the words. I will keep it to myself. It is enough that I have found him and can check his blood pressure, sit with him by the window, and lay his clothes out in the morning. He’s reading his old newspaper clippings. They don’t register; all those lands and cities, all that joy and suffering he witnessed and wrote about mean nothing to him now.

Vera was a writer, too. On page sixty-seven in her letter-book she tells me: “Daughter, will I ever see you? I am trapped behind this wire and stone, and there is no way to you. Where would I look? I am good with maps, but maps need destinations and I don’t know where they’ve taken you. But you are safe. A good couple loves you, this is what they tell me. They give me shreds of news from the world beyond, the world where you are growing up without me. I will write some more later. They’re bringing my pills — yellow, blue, and white — and after I take them I get drowsy and I sit in a chair on the lawn and take my slippers off. The grass tickles my feet. Sometimes I think I see the man from Marrakesh, this Mounir, standing outside the iron fence in the shadows. But the people here tell me there is no one there, only tree branches moving in the wind. But that’s what they would say, wouldn’t they?”

James puts his newspaper clippings on the windowsill and stands and looks down the street. He is agitated; he gets this way, I think, when a memory flashes inside him and almost brings him back, but then leaves him. This is what doctors call Depletion. A terrible word. I hate to see it written in the charts, reducing someone to such a sad description. Science and medicine are cruel, but I suppose they must be. James turns from the window and sits on his bed. He stares at me as if I am a riddle.

“Do you know Kurt and Vera?” he says.

“Tell me about them.”

“Where is Kurt buried?”

“Not far.”

“Will you take me there?”

“Yes.”

I help James into a sweater and a coat. I tie a scarlet scarf around him.

“It’s cold. Do you want gloves?”

“No.”

We walk outside and cross the street and take a right at the tailor’s — an old Armenian man whose glasses have so magnified his eyes that they look like floating blue moons — and then we walk straight for seven blocks, and that’s when James begins to know where he is.

“It’s Clare Street. That’s my old house.”

“Someone else lives there now, James. You left many years ago.”

“Yes, but this is it. Kurt boxed in the basement. He’d hit the punching bag so hard, the house shook.”

“This way.”

“That’s St. Jude’s. Kurt and I came here on Saturday nights. He played tennis on Sunday, so Saturday was our mass day.”

James and I step through the church gate and walk over a sidewalk cracked by elm and chestnut roots. We haven’t been here in a long time. The church is not well tended these days; most of the congregation moved to the suburbs and broken panes of stained glass have been replaced with colored cellophane. A boy — he’s not here today; it’s nearly winter — mows the cemetery grass and clips around the gravestones. The trees lend a sense of peace. James and I walk the rows toward Kurt. I hear a shuffle behind us.