The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

Ed has already leapt to his feet and climbed into the wardrobe, his two feet sticking out behind him as he roots through the clothes inside.

“I found one shoe already!” he cries in triumph, voice muffled by layers of cotton and wool.

Beattie raises a hand as if she were going to stop me, but I shake my head once, firm.

With a look of silent commiseration at my sister, I vanish out the door of our bedroom as quietly as I can go.





CHAPTER 6


I ease open the front door. And I wait.

I can still hear muffled arguing coming from Papa’s study upstairs, and in the instant when the argument boils into shouting, I slip through unobserved and click the front door closed behind me.

The fog has finally burned away, and I take a long inhale, surveying up and down First Street. Crisp autumn sun blinks down onto the Bowery, and a lone seagull wheels by overhead, riding the salty harbor air with a cry.

I look to where I left Wes waiting for me on the stoop, and see that he’s gone.

“Dash it,” I say under my breath.

Why didn’t he wait for me? I said I was coming right back! Now I’ll have to walk the Bowery by myself. I don’t have much time. They’ll be missing me any minute.

Looking left and right, knowing neighbor women are observing me from behind panes of glass, I hurry away from our town house. I can make the walk in a quarter hour, if I’m not held up. Fifteen minutes to Herschel’s store, and fifteen back. I can just make it.

I round the corner to the Bowery and hunch my shoulders up, avoiding eye contact with the various men lounging in the coffeehouses and beer halls. I feel very small, sometimes, when I walk on the avenue. Some of the buildings are six stories tall, with everyone packed together jaw to jaw, people crammed into every cellar and windowless back room and under the eaves and spilling out into the street. Papa says the governor thinks one day the entire island will be filled. I wonder where all the people will go, when that happens. Already there’re so many people here that listening at any open window will reveal six other conversations.

I squeeze my naked ring finger between the opposite finger and thumb as I walk, not meeting anyone’s eye.

The last time that I lived this day, I didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t know what Herschel was going to say to me. I wonder if I can keep my secret, when he tells me this time. But in a way, I knew it already the first time, too. I feel a twinge of misgiving, having flirted with Wes on my stoop on the very day Herschel gives me the cameo. But I resolve that if Wes were as good as all that, he wouldn’t have abandoned me. I don’t care if I never see him again.

Maybe.

I’ve only been alone with Herschel a handful of times. And even then, we’re never really alone. No one is ever alone, in the city. Sometimes down by the waterfront, flecks of cotton from all the unloaded bales drift through the air like snow, dotting Herschel’s eyelashes and making him sneeze. Between the shipyards and forests of masts with their nets of rigging, sailors straddling the spars and looking down with envy at our idleness, where the children swim on hot days, we lose ourselves in the crowd of other people our age and younger, screaming and laughing and splashing water. He first took my hand on one of those summer afternoons, and no one saw. But I felt it, when he squeezed my hand, and it thrilled me to the roots of my hair.