“I miss you.”
That was all he could manage. He had never had a talent for speaking on the phone, was always hovering over the conversation’s true purpose or cowed by the speed of the interaction, reacting too slowly, forgetting to assent with his voice as well as his face.
“Okay,” Adeleine agreed hesitantly. “Me too. I think I’ll get back to Edith now, but I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Okay,” he echoed, but she had already ended the call. How could it be, he thought, that the people he had gone galloping off on this fool’s mission to help were so comfortably supporting each other in a warm room? He felt glad for them, for the idea of Edith’s chatter being caught and held, but the phone call had left him more and not less lonely, and he knew that every passing hour was another in which he hadn’t earned his way home.
THOMAS SLEPT LATE in the exorbitantly priced hotel room, succored by the white anonymous space as he dreamt, slowly, of untouched earth. Even as he walked through the dream, he knew it was strange that his mind, so accustomed to an urban setting, would conjure rivers rapid and green, footpaths curving under the grand theater of forest. When he woke, he thought of water. He wrapped the plush, bleached robe around him and crossed the empty hall, where he stepped into the washed glow of the elevator.
The pool possessed a certain type of lavish 1920s grandeur: the curved glass ceiling demarcated by thin white panes, the pale tiles and plush lounges immaculate, the verdant fronds tall and loose in each corner of the room. As he willed himself to float, he looked up through the glass at oxidized copper roofs, at office buildings pulsing with light, and marveled at how his liquid surroundings rendered the paralyzed side of him just the same as the other.
In the late afternoon, dry but still drunk with the sensation of floating, Thomas stepped out of the lobby and walked. He carried the last photo of Jenny in his pocket, studied it on various benches, patted it while he ascended and descended the hills that seemed impractical for the purposes of a city. Why build on such angles? But he admired them, enjoyed the performance, the way they routinely hid the next mile from view and surprised with an abrupt path downward. After two hours of walking he realized what he’d known but ignored: that the city wasn’t as large as New York was, wasn’t a place that offered getting lost as a gift. Through some unconscious set of lefts, he had already begun to return: to his scant luggage, the pennies and dimes on the night table.
He walked down Market Street, the early stretch of it still dominated by strip clubs and SROs and the woven dens of the homeless, constructed of scraps of cotton and cardboard as though designed by earthbound birds. Thomas dodged a handful of requests for change that varied in tone and volume, stepped over a half-dozen sleeping bags, and then he saw her. Her outstretched hands, her skin that appeared to have experienced flood and drought in an unending cycle, her eyes unchanged.
HARDLY FEELING THE DIP between curb and street, he glided towards her. He was sure, or nearly, that this was the child Edith and Declan had lost. She was standing with a foot on the concrete ledge of an angular fountain, working a denim pant leg up with one hand and holding the plastic handle of an overflowing shopping cart with the other.
He approached and stepped into the fetid scent, understanding too late he was interrupting her bath.
“Jenny?”
The woman wrinkled her forehead to regard him, and the dirt on her face realigned. She was worn in the way of broken things left out in brown yards, stretched and sun-bleached and sagging.
“Who are you to ask,” she spat. “You a cop?”
“No, I—”
She pulled on his sweater and tilted her head to the side. “No, you’re not a cop.”
“I came to talk to you—”
“I’m hungry,” she barked. “You gonna get me some fuckin’ food or what?”
Before he could answer she was shuffling off, pushing her cart against the light through protesting honks. He tried to keep up, weaving through traffic and raising his hand in thanks to the drivers who let him. In front of a McDonald’s she acknowledged two hunched and gaunt men pinching cigarettes between diminished lips and leaning against the intricately scratched window, and parked her rolling pile of possessions there.