The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

We move deeper into the park, wending our way along a roadside. We’re not alone. Couples wander with us, people walking little dogs on leads. Children weave around us on funny toys with wheels. We cross over a bridge, and off to the right spy a wide plaza leading down to a lake so perfect it almost doesn’t seem real. A fountain plashes in the center of the plaza, and under the bridge I hear a lone violinist playing music that sounds both beautiful and sad.

“I don’t know how to answer that,” I say, looking at Wes.

“It’s a pretty basic question,” he says, a line forming between his eyebrows under that sweet mop of hair on his forehead.

We keep walking, turning down a long promenade lined with trees so tall they meet overhead. Benches line the promenade, and people from all walks of life rest on them, watching us pass. Old women with wire baskets at their feet, tiny babies in wheeled carriages, men dressed only in undershirts. A family walks by, and the man has a cap on the back of his head like Herschel used to wear. He’s young, and so is his pretty wife in her modest clothes. Three children, two girls and boy in a cap, too, romp around their feet.

I have to look away.

“Tell me,” Wes says. “I need to know. Please?”

“We’d steal away to be together . . .” I hesitate. “But we weren’t allowed.”

Wes abruptly releases my hand, and as soon as the pressure is gone, I miss it.

“Two years,” Wes says, sounding almost angry as he walks next to me. He’s thrust his hands in his pockets. “That’s a long time.”

“I guess,” I say. I don’t know what to do with my own hands now. I wrap them around myself and cup my elbows.

“What’s the deal with the cameo, then?” he asks me.

I look down at my naked left hand. The next time I go back, I’ll find it. Finally. I wonder what will happen then.

“He gave it to me,” I whisper. “The last time I saw him. Been saving up for it, he said. Asked one of his cousins, a jeweler, to hold it for him, ’til he could pay.”

Wes greets this bit of information with scathing silence.

“We . . .” I pause.

Should I tell him?

“Go on,” Wes says. A chill runs down the back of my neck even in the heat of the summer night, when I hear how he sounds.

“We’d talked about running away,” I say at last.

It’s true. We did. In a roundabout sort of way. Like we were daring each other to say it. Seeing who could hold out the longest. At first we talked about it by not talking about it at all. And then we talked about it as though playing an imaginary game. If we ran away, which we weren’t, because it was impossible, but if we were, how would we go about it? What would we do for money? How long before they knew we were gone?

My cousin’s cart, Herschel says in my mind, a summer afternoon lazing next to me on the riverbank, shading his eyes from the sun. It’d be a while, before he missed it. We’d drive until the wheels fell off.

But where? I hear myself ask. Not south, surely. North? How far north?

I don’t know, Herschel replies.

He couldn’t imagine what would happen next any more than I could. I think about Wes’s friend Tyler, all that stuff he said about memories. That they’re always changing, each time we think about them. We think they stay the same, but they never do.

Is that really what Herschel said, about taking the cart until the wheels fell off? Or is it what I wanted him to say?

“So. Why didn’t you, then?” Wes asks, his hands digging deeper into his pockets.

We turn off the mall, leaving the watching eyes of New-York and disappearing along a winding path through the trees, meandering down to the artificial lake. I want to find Wes’s hand again. I feel safer, with him holding me here.

The lake is so calm in the moonlight that it perfectly reflects the outline of the trees on the opposite shore, like an ink stain on folded paper. The moon has moved higher in the night sky, and through the white glow of the city around us, I can make out two distant stars.

“He said”—I’m thinking, while I tell Wes this—“there was something he had to do first.”

“Oh? And what was that?” Wes asks, trying to make the question sound curious, but instead it comes out irritated.

“He wouldn’t tell me.” I hear myself say the words, and I have to stop walking.