Subway Love (17 page)

An older woman with a severe face-lift rushed up from behind with her dog, some kind of poodle, and passed by. As if on cue, both Casper and Jengo got up and started walking again.

“Look, I tried searching everything. Google, WhitePages. I plugged every spelling of her name, first and last, into Facebook and
Classmates.com
and whatever that Linked-on thing is. There’s nothing. Or nothing that’s her. Nothing that fits.”

Nick listened. They were almost at the dog park on Riverside. “Well, did you try that microfiche or microfilm at the public library?”

“What’s that?”

“You know, those rolls of teeny, tiny print from, like, a hundred years ago — records and documents and newspapers from everywhere. You have to go downstairs and use this huge machine, but I think it’s got stuff that never made it onto the Internet.”

“No,” Jonas said. “Should I?”

“If you want to find out once and for all. . . . I mean, I think maybe this is a way.” Nick slowed his steps and his voice. “I mean, I don’t get any of this, Jonas. But if you can find some peace, I really wish you would, and if I can help, I will.”

“Thanks,” Jonas said. He unfastened the leashes inside the fenced-in area, and they watched both dogs bound off about four or five feet with their new and sudden freedom, then sit back down in the grass and wait.

“YOU’RE
going to the library?”

“Is that so strange?” Jonas didn’t feel like explaining, not to his mother.

“You don’t have to be nasty. Just a straight answer would do. It’s not too much to ask for. I’m not trying to control you, just be a part of your life.”

Jonas didn’t answer, though he thought his mother had had a little more
oomph
lately, and that was a good thing. He grabbed his backpack, the one he hadn’t used since middle school but found in the bottom of his closet, his camera bag, and his keys.

“Sorry, Mom.” He stood at the door. “I’ve just got to do something, and I don’t feel like talking about it.”

“Well, at least that sounds honest,” she said. She smiled, which made Jonas feel worse. He should have understood how she felt about anything that sounded cryptic or secretive. He had been both, for quite a few months.

“I’ll be back by dinner,” he told her. He leaned in and kissed her on the cheek, something he hadn’t felt like doing for a long time. “Tell Lily I’ll pick up some good books for her.”

Jonas’s mother looked like she was going to cry. “That would be real nice,” she said, and Jonas slipped out the door, into the hall.

“That’s downstairs,” the librarian informed him. “You do have a current New York Public Library card?”

Jonas thought about lying, but that didn’t make much sense if he needed it to access the microfilm. Playing dumb was the next best thing.

“Uh, no, actually. Do I need one?”

The librarian didn’t appear to be buying his act or didn’t care. “You can use a temporary card for today or maybe you’d like to get a real library card. We still have some things here you can’t get online.”

“I’m counting on just that.”

Another librarian showed Jonas how to search for microfilm and how to load the microfilm reader.

“You can search a town, but you might want to narrow down the year and probably the month. You said you were doing research on the nineteen seventies in upstate New York? What part?”

“Woodstock.” Jonas figured there was no harm in answering.

The librarian laughed. “Well, that’s not exactly upstate. Have you looked at a map of New York State lately?”

Jonas didn’t like this woman at all.

“Are you researching the music festival?”

Some librarian; she didn’t even know Woodstock wasn’t at Woodstock.

“Because then you’d need to go to Bethel, New York,” she went on. Jonas really wanted her to leave him alone.

“I got it,” Jonas told her. “Thanks.” He felt his phone buzz in his pocket.

“I’m over there if you need me.” She looked back. “And please, no cell phones.”

He decided not to ask her if texting was allowed; he was going to do it anyway. It was Nick, asking where he was.

And Jonas began to sift through the tiny rolls of film, scrolling them one by one through the light machine that read the film and projected it into a private viewing box. It was completely different from surfing the Net. You couldn’t search a particular word; you had to scan the whole document with your eyes, side to side, up and down. Jonas wasn’t even sure what he was looking for.

Notices, property records, announcements, any newspaper article that might mention Laura or anyone in her family. He wished he had asked her more questions, anything. Her father’s first name, her mother’s maiden name, you know, all the regular information you get when you’re getting to know someone.

This was impossible.

It was near noon when Nick showed up.

“How did you find me?” Jonas asked, rubbing his eyes.

“You’re the only one down here under forty-five,” Nick said.

Jonas looked around. That wasn’t exactly true; there were some people who looked like grad students, but mostly there were professor types and older people at the other machines.

“How’s it going?”

“Not so good,” Jonas told him. Several heads were raised in disapproval. Jonas lowered his voice. “But I’m only up to Woodstock, April nineteen seventy.”

“Are you going through every year?”

Jonas nodded. “Well, it’s a weekly paper, and yeah, I thought I’d start in nineteen sixty-nine and work my way up.”

Nick pulled out his wallet. “Well, I’ll start down, then, and we’ll meet in the middle.”

“You have a library card?”

“Screw you, Goldman. I’ll be right back.”

For the next ten minutes they worked quietly. “What year did she think it . . .
say
it was?” Nick asked.

“Nineteen seventy-three. July, same month as now,” Jonas answered. He was sifting mechanically through articles, police blotters, obituaries, wedding announcements, and even advertisements. He remembered Laura mentioning a store her mom worked at stringing beads. And all the while, he was hoping she had left Woodstock and was living with her dad. New York City would be harder to search — he had already discovered there were over two hundred and fifty people in New York with the surname Duncan — but that would be next.

“What if we do find something?” Nick leaned over and whispered. “I mean, isn’t that kind of creepy? I don’t even want to think of all the possibilities, but like . . .” And then he stopped.

“What?” Jonas said. “What? What do you see? What did you find?”

“You said her name was Laura Duncan and she had a brother, Mitchell?”

Jonas nearly tipped over his chair, climbing out and looking into Nick’s screen. Heads popped up all over, but Jonas didn’t care. He looked down into the microfilm projector, and there it was, a small notice, in the
Woodstock Village News,
July 23, 1973:

“Oh, man,” Nick let out. “I am so sorry. Oh, God. Oh, Jonas, I’m so sorry. Hey, wait for me.”

By the time Nick cleaned everything up, returned the film, and signed them both out of the machines, Jonas was nowhere to be found.

LAURA
wished she could have killed off Mitchell too, but the way she explained it to Zan, it was just easier this way. Oddly, Zan didn’t question any of it at all. She only said she was going to miss Laura after she moved to New York City with her dad, but agreed that it was the best thing.

We can stay best friends, Laura said. We can talk on the phone and you can visit. They hugged and promised, but of course it didn’t happen that way.

Laura also hoped that after she talked to her dad about Bruce, nobody would bother her much about the fake notice in the paper. Heck, they might not even see the obituary she had called into the
Woodstock Village News.

It was much easier to do than Laura had anticipated, but on another level much harder.

“Can you spell that, please?” the woman on the phone asked. She sounded busy and as if she were making a huge effort to sound sympathetic. Laura wanted to let her know there was no need to pretend to care, since no one had really died, but that would have defeated the whole purpose, of course.

“
D-u-n-c-a-n.
Henry, of New York City.”

“Yes, I got that part. And there’s no funeral information? No place to send donations? Flowers? Cards?”

Laura hadn’t thought of that when she made the call. “Uh, no. It’s private. The family is very private.”

“OK, then. You will see it in next week’s obits. I am sorry for your loss,” the woman said.

“Thank you very much.” Laura hung up and then it was hard. It was like a piece of her very soul had been torn out of her body. The very thing that could make her whole, that had filled her heart and given her meaning, she had just thrown away. There was no worse feeling, because it was her choice. It would be like a starving person denying herself food and feeling herself die. She was dying, and yet they were both just beginning to live.

They had to live.

It was as if imagining the impossible — like being in the Holocaust and choosing not to be liberated — because Laura knew she had to let Jonas go and she wanted to believe there truly was another world to come, where they would be together.

Laura decided to tell her father everything on her next visit, although she made sure not to take the subway.

“Well, I’m not walking,” Mitchell told his sister. He had gone with her this time, as it had been three months since he had been to the city and their dad was leaving for Europe in a few weeks.

“Suit yourself,” Laura said. She turned to see Mitchell fall into step beside her. “I’m going to tell dad I want to live with him.”

They walked together up Eighth Avenue. When they got to the next corner, Mitchell put out his hand to stop her from crossing. The light was about to turn red. It was almost like old times.

“That’s probably better,” he said.

Laura looked at his face. He looked sad, confused, maybe. He wasn’t all that much older than she was. Everyone has to figure out their own way to survive.

“You could lie and tell me you’ll miss me,” Laura said. The light changed and brother and sister stepped down off the curb.

“As a matter of fact, I will,” Mitchell said.

HARDEST
of all was telling her father. He looked sick and then angry and then sick again and then guilty as hell, and then he looked like he was going to cry, which was the worst thing of all. When Laura saw her father’s pain, she nearly regretted telling him about Bruce. She would rather have continued living in Woodstock than have brought this anguish to her dad.

You can’t protect him from the chance to protect you.

But Laura wasn’t so sure. In that moment, it seemed more frightening to see her father so defeated, but it was too late.

And in the end, nothing so horrible happened. Her dad drove to Woodstock and picked up her things. He got her bed, her desk and chair, her chest of drawers, and most of her belongings. There were a few things he left behind, because he didn’t know they belonged to her. Laura didn’t want to see Bruce ever again, and not even her mother for a long time.

TO
tell the truth, Laura didn’t see or talk to her mother again until she herself was thirty-eight years old and received her cancer diagnosis, malignant neoplasm of the breast documented as carcinoma. Her mother drove across the country, from her home in Salt Lake City. Bruce was long gone. No one knew anything of what had become of him. Laura had spent some time in her early twenties trying to track him down, considering maybe confronting him, punching him in the face with her fist. But after a while it didn’t seem important anymore. Just as she knew she had to move on and live her life without Jonas, at some point she let finding Bruce go. She could finally store all those bad memories in another part of her mind, where they couldn’t hurt her anymore and they became just memories. And slowly, over time — not at first, and not for a long while, but eventually — she began to forget about Jonas as well. She went to the High School of Art and Design and then to RISD to study graphic art, always partial to urban art forms. Whenever the girls at school started talking about boys, about sex and love, Laura would think of a dream she had, a long time ago, and it made her smile.

Mitchell lived nearby in New Rochelle, running a software company out of his home. He had three children. Laura fell in love and married Bobby Rabinowitz, and they were together for twelve years. They had no children of their own, but Bobby had two young sons from a previous marriage, and when Laura died, in 1996, they cried for her as they would have for their own mother.