The middle-aged woman who’d spoken earlier, the one who’d mentioned the Survivors’ Facebook page, that’s who talked now. She sat two seats away from Apollo, but he hadn’t really looked at her until now. The woman was so narrow, she looked as if she hadn’t eaten in aeons. Her hair had been pulled back into a haphazard ponytail, and her face showed creases along the forehead and the sides her mouth, the edges of her eyes, yet she might’ve been younger than Apollo. Her face wasn’t aged but agonized. As she spoke, she turned to Apollo.
“But who took the picture?” She seemed to be asking him directly.
She reached into her pocket, and instinctively, any number of the people in the group curled in their chairs as if she was about to pull a gun. Instead she retrieved a sheet of paper, bunched into a ball.
Father Hagen looked to Apollo quickly, then back to the woman. When he spoke, he sounded utterly, impossibly, casual. Like a man more than used to cracked characters.
“I once opened my Gmail account,” Father Hagen said to her, “and saw an ad running along the side of the page. This ad addressed me by name. It said, ‘Jim, we think you deserve a vacation in Costa Rica.’ And I wondered how they knew I liked to be called Jim because my given name is Francis. James is my middle name.”
The woman turned her head from Apollo to Father Hagen. A quick baffled look crossed her face, as if Father Hagen were the one who sounded nuts. She unrolled the paper, so wrinkled and creased that it looked more like a piece of cloth.
“The photo is from across the street, some apartment window,” the woman said softly. She wasn’t showing the page to them—she looked at it herself. “Who would be taking pictures of my child from up there? We don’t even live across from that park. My mom and dad took her there to play.”
Apollo felt himself shudder. The other people in the room seemed to be moving at half time, the whole world in slow motion. Alice, Julian, Father Hagen, the rest—were they all looking at him, or did he only feel that way?
“There were more pictures,” the woman continued. “Other places and days, but whenever I tried to show one to Gary, they were always gone. Deleted. Erased from my emails. Who could do that? I had the sense to hit print as soon as I saw this one. It’s the only proof I’ve got.”
She leaned forward now, staring at the page as if she might dive in.
“But when I looked at it long enough, I realized something else. That girl in the picture. That’s not my daughter. That’s not Monique.”
Father Hagen came alongside her. He put a hand to the person in the chair next to her. The priest pulled this man up and out of the way, but he didn’t touch the woman. He sat beside her and spoke in a voice too soft for Apollo to hear.
“I told Gary all this, and do you know what he said?” The woman looked up from the paper, back to Apollo again. “He told me to go on medication. They took my daughter, and he called me a crazy bitch.”
Apollo needed to leave. Hit the escape pod. A sense of suffocation threatened him. He reached down for his phone but had to paw around because the woman’s gaze had captured him.
“I had to find my own help,” she said. “No surprise, I found it with the mothers. The wise ones. Cal told me how to get my daughter back. Cal told me what to do.” Her eyes dropped, and she leaned forward. “But I don’t know if I can do it.”
Apollo stood, pointing. “That woman is going to kill her baby.”
Father Hagen looked up at him.
Apollo pointed directly at the priest now. “If you don’t call the police on her, she’s going to go home and kill her baby. You can’t say you didn’t know this time.”
His words had the force of revelation. He couldn’t stay in this room, this church. He moved toward the basement doors. Behind him the woman sobbed.
“It’s not a baby,” she muttered.
“DON’T MAKE ME chase you!”
Apollo scurried down the block like a city rat. He didn’t look back until he’d reached Amsterdam Avenue. He couldn’t flee any farther east. The island of Manhattan was at an end. Across the Harlem River the Bronx came into view. The big, broad evening sky shrank that borough until its skyline of high-rises looked quaint. He wondered if he could make the swim.
“Don’t make me chase you!”
Apollo heard the voice a second time and, this time, realized it was a man and not that woman. He stopped on the corner of Amsterdam and 179th and let the man catch up. He recognized him. He’d been at Holyrood, too. It was the paunchy guy, the one who’d been caught using his cellphone.
“You’re fast,” he said, when he finally caught up, “and I’m old. I’m William.” The man didn’t extend his right hand for a shake because it held his cellphone. His left quivered as he held it against his rising and falling belly. “William Wheeler,” he said more loudly. “Patrice sent me. Patrice Green? I want to buy the book.”
Buy the book.
Despite what he and Patrice had discussed last night, no sentence in the English language seemed stupider right now.
“So buy the fucking book,” Apollo said. “Why did you need to come see me?”
This man—William Wheeler—clutched his neck as if he wore a string of pearls. “Well, I didn’t insist. I mean, I’m sorry, but it was Patrice who told me to come here. If you’re going to curse at someone, you should give him a call, but I certainly don’t deserve it.” He dropped the hand and slipped his phone back into his pocket, hitched his pants, and straightened his posture. He turned away from Apollo, and Apollo watched him go. The man made it about five steps before he stopped and looked back.
“But I really would like that book,” he said with a bashful smile.
—
Half a block from Holyrood, and they could see the ambulance lights. Apollo stopped and watched, and William Wheeler went quiet, too. Apollo recognized some of the Survivors standing in a small cluster on the sidewalk, talking to one another and gesturing toward the church’s basement doors. Eventually Father Hagen appeared, following two paramedics and two police officers. Hidden between the four uniforms was one wiry woman. She’d been handcuffed, hands in front. All these men led her to the ambulance and helped her inside.
“I didn’t think they’d really call anyone,” Apollo said.
“It was a pretty bad scene,” William whispered back.