But it wasn’t her. Not exactly. A witch. That’s what he saw.
He wouldn’t ever have thought the gaunt figure was the woman he’d married. It was the coat he recognized, the knee-length maroon down puffer coat she’d been wearing in the video from the night she escaped. The coat was torn and dirty, and the same could be said about Emma. She looked as thin and tough as the limb of a tree. But also—really and truly—she glowed.
As she stepped out of the woods, she seemed to walk in a cloud, an actual nimbus of blue energy. She cast off a color almost as bright as the blue police lights flashing on the patrol car; it was as if she wore sparks of electricity.
Emma Valentine stepped out of the woods and picked up the bags of Starbucks food. Then she turned and walked back into the deeper darkness and disappeared.
And that was that.
“Seriously, chief,” the cop closer to Apollo said. “If you need shelter space, we can point you the right way, but you can’t be lurking around people’s houses.”
“Gives people the creeps,” the other cop said.
“No, sir,” Apollo muttered. “I mean, yes, sir. She was glowing. She was…”
It took a clap on the shoulder from one of the cops to bring Apollo back to himself. That was Emma. Was she living in the park? And why had the old man brought food to her?
Now he looked at the officers with clarity. “I don’t need a shelter or anything,” he said. “I just got confused. I’ll go back home. I’ll catch the bus.”
“You got money?” the cop asked, arm still on his shoulder. It would be easy for the man to tighten his grip and force Apollo into the back of the patrol car.
“I can—”
But before he finished floating some lie, the cop walked back to the patrol car. “We got any more of those MetroCards?” he asked his partner.
“Look in the pack,” the driver said, and while his partner leaned into the car, he came around the front, closer to Apollo, hand floating near his hip, his holstered pistol.
“Got it.” He returned to Apollo. “This has twenty dollars on it. This is a gift from the NYPD.”
The MetroCard lay inside a clear plastic sleeve. The cop tore it open and handed the card to Apollo.
“You can catch the Q11 or the Q21 right over on Woodhaven Boulevard,” the cop said.
“Thank you,” Apollo said. He accepted the MetroCard, but then he just stood there. If the cops drove off, he could still rush up the stairs right now and hope, maybe, to find her.
“I tell you what,” the driver said. “We’ll give you a ride to the bus stop right now.”
The other went back to the patrol car and opened a back door. “You don’t have to thank us,” he said. “But you do have to accept.”
He climbed in, and the lights were turned off. As the car approached the bus stop on Woodhaven Boulevard, the officer on the passenger side spoke without turning his head.
“We love driving down Park Lane South. It’s one of our favorite streets. We’ll be driving down it most of the night. We don’t expect to be seeing you there again.”
They reached the bus stop, and one cop let Apollo out. Apollo wheeled the suitcase onto the sidewalk.
The driver rolled down his window. “It’s going to be a while for that bus,” he said. “But you need to be on it. Don’t let us see you out here again. It’ll be a bad night for you if we do.”
Apollo didn’t respond because no response was required. The cops drove off, and he stayed at the stop until their car went well out of view. He wasn’t returning to Washington Heights, but no doubt those cops had been telling the truth. They would be patrolling the perimeter of the grounds all night. He needed to shelter until morning.
THE FOREST PARK Visitors Center sat only thirty yards behind him, just inside the park, and beside it a smaller brick structure, the public bathrooms. Apollo waited at the bus stop for fifteen minutes. No bus, no cops, no one around but him. Finally he hurried through the front gates into the park. He shut his eyes as he crossed from the sidewalk to the concrete path leading to the bathrooms, expecting the cops to jump him, but they didn’t.
He reached the bathroom. There were two doors, one on either side of the small brick hut, the men’s room and the women’s. Heavy black doors showed chipped paint and faint names or symbols, many pictures of tits and dicks, etched into the surface. Both doors were locked, large padlocks hanging from looped handles, but Apollo had brought along the right tool. He laid the suitcase flat, unzipped it and took out the mattock. If he slid the flat mattock blade between the door and the frame, he could force the door open quickly. Now the only question was which bathroom he wanted to hide inside: the women’s or the men’s? If he had to guess which side would be cleaner, there really was no question.
He popped the lock of the ladies’ room door with two sharp yanks. The metal door shrieked loudly each time. So loud Apollo felt sure the cops would arrive or a denizen of Little Norway would call them in. Some “concerned citizen’s” anonymous phone call had killed many a black man before him. But the bathrooms were far enough inside the park and flanked by trees.
Apollo pushed the bathroom door open. There were no windows, so the room remained murky. He stepped inside and let his eyes adjust. Two stalls, one sink, enough floor space for him to set his suitcase flat. So cold here that the bathroom didn’t even stink, or maybe his nose had just gone numb. He stepped outside once more. Why not just go looking for Emma now? He took four steps in the direction of the forest but stopped at the sight of all that territory, the shrouded dark. Would Emma welcome him? Would she even give him a chance to admit the mistakes he’d made? The woman who’d stepped out of those woods hardly seemed human, and he was the man who hadn’t believed in her. What might she do to him if he stumbled across her in the woods well after midnight?
Finding her in daylight seemed safer. No shame in admitting it, he felt afraid. Also, the park spanned hundreds of acres. Wandering that much land late at night, in the midst of winter, was a surefire way to end up frozen dead in the maze of trees. No thanks, Jack. He returned to the bathroom. The darkness inside the ladies’ room would become total as soon as Apollo shut the door. He welcomed this idea. Like bedding down inside a cocoon.
Apollo still couldn’t quite believe what he’d seen. All these months, and there stood Emma. The last time they’d seen each other, they were the exhausted parents of an infant, estranged man and wife. What were they now?
Apollo needed to talk all this through with someone. Wanted to explain what the old man had done: setting the food at the top of the stairs like an offering. And when Emma appeared, she’d scooped up the bag quickly, as if she’d been expecting to find it.
He took out his cellphone and dialed a number.
“You shouldn’t be using your old phone,” Patrice said as soon as he picked up. His mouth pulled away from the phone. “It’s Apollo.”