The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

She gives me a wide-eyed, puzzled look. “Why, where it’s always been, I imagine.”


Great. That’s so helpful.

I scroll through a few pages of the guy’s memoir, which looks like it was written right around then. He talks about how during the construction of the canal there were a couple of explosions that seemed deliberate, but it didn’t hold up the construction any. He doesn’t talk about anything weird happening at the Grand Aquatic Display. What a name. They couldn’t just call it a barge party? It’s kind of stiff, how the memoir’s written, but even I can tell it was an epic scene. I imagine I can see it, the flotilla of barges all lit with oil lamps and sparklers, drifting sedately down the river with Indians in canoes on either side, flags flying.

Annie’s eyes are wide and blinking as she watches my fingers move on the keyboard, and the changing letters on the screen. It must look like magic to her. I can’t wait to take her to see a movie. Maybe I can take her to something tonight. I should rent The Others and show it to her! That would be hilarious. No, that might be too intense. We’ll go for some big monster CGI-type thing, something that will really blow her mind.

“Let me try something else,” I mutter, typing quickly. Maybe I’m showing off, a little.

“You play it like a pianoforte, almost,” she says.

This time I try searching her last name, Van Sinderen, and cameo.

She claps her hands with delight when pages of cameos on eBay and Etsy come up. Some of them are kind of pretty. For the name, there’s a street in Brooklyn, and a book award at Yale founded by some dead guy. But nothing that shows both terms together.

I click through pictures of cameos, rings and brooches. They’re pretty old-fashioned. But seeing Annie’s face alight with pleasure gives me a shiver of satisfaction.

“Are any of these yours?” I ask.

She squints at the screen, her nose inches away.

“No,” she says at length. “None of them.”

I must look disappointed, because she quickly adds, “They’re quite nice, though!”

I drum my fingertips on the desk by the computer, thinking.

“The Society Library always had the daily newspapers for anyone to read. They were laid out on a large table in the center of the reading room. And they’d keep them, for a time. Does this library subscribe to the penny papers?” she asks, her fingertips together in front of her mouth.

I laugh through my nose. Like NYU is going to have newspapers from two hundred years ago, just lying around. I’m sure they were all wrapped around fish and then thrown into the garbage within days. All the newspapers that might tell us what happened are in the bottom of Fresh Kills landfill, or maybe even at the bottom of the sea. Or they’ve been burned to cinders and we’re breathing them right now.

“Annie,” I say, trying to be patient. “Do you have any idea what year it is? Right now, I mean. What year I live in.”

A weird expression crosses her face, and she moves a little bit away from me. Her hand gropes over to the counter, lands on an abandoned pencil, and picks it up to fiddle with it.

“I think,” she says, without looking at me, “that we might ask someone. About the newspapers. I think that’s what we should do.”

I peer at her. Isn’t she curious? That’d be the first thing I’d want to know, if I was a Rip van Winkle.

Maybe she doesn’t want to know.

Maybe she can’t bear to look at it too closely.

“All right,” I say slowly. “We’ll do that.”

She glances at me, and her eyes are wet.

I reach over and put an arm around her shoulders, pulling her to me until the top of her head tucks under my chin. I can feel the soft cloud of her hair, tickling my throat. Her arms go around my waist. I close my eyes, relishing the rhythm of her breath and the texture of her dress under my hands. It doesn’t seem possible. She’s so utterly, completely real.