In the midst of all his desperate searching for her, he had to fight the thought that Kay might never be found. He had to push away the fear that she was gone forever, that he would never see her again. On the surface, he allowed the possibility, and in long conversations with Egon or the police, they had broached the subject now and again, and he thought how kind they were, trying to prepare him for the eventuality, or should we say possibility, probability, likelihood, chance. But underneath all their palaver, he refused to accept any other reality than that she would return, alive, whole, the same as she had been. She would have been shocked to see how he had let himself go.
He stabbed at the disorder, piling his books and papers into neat stacks. Washing the dishes, gathering the sheets, linens, and piles of clothes for a drop-off at the laundry. He cleaned out the fridge, discarded every open carton, and he made a hash from what remained edible. For the first time in weeks, he sat down to a normal homemade meal alone in the apartment.
Between bites, he took out his phone and leaned it against his glass and searched for more Muybridge. In his fascination with animals in motion, Muybridge had made scores of other studies—a running bison, a charging lion, an ostrich, an elephant, a parrot in flight. And then he photographed people, how they moved in the simplest of tasks. All very clinical, the bodies in question either barely draped or without any clothes. Theo was entranced by the sequence of a nude woman descending a short staircase over and over, and he suddenly remembered what happened the night Kay disappeared. The light in the toy shop. He had been eating at Brigands bistro on rue Saint-Paul, just down the street from her favorite store, when the lights went on in the abandoned building.
In all of his interviews with the police, when Thompson and Foucault had asked him to re-create the events of that night, he had neglected to mention the incident, perhaps because in comparison to Kay’s disappearance, it seemed inconsequential in his confused mind, but now he remembered clearly his surprise that evening. He had told them all the rest, leaving the apartment and walking to the restaurant, what he ate, how long he stayed, at what time he arrived back home, and the long wait to hear from her, the message in the middle of the night. Perhaps the lights in the toy shop meant nothing at all. The juggler in the bowler hat had reminded him of the puppets, and a string of synapses fired in his tired brain, but despite the late hour, he needed to go check that shop, if only to fill in the puzzle.
“Wait just a minute,” she had said, tugging on his crooked arm. “Stop, let me see.” Kay acted like a child when they passed the Quatre Mains. She could not resist staring at the dolls and puppets on display, sometimes putting her hands on the glass to peer inside and stare at the wonders. And nearly every time, Theo indulged her whim, for in those moments, the little girl emerged, the one he had never known, the essential child inside, like the core of a matryoshka, the Russian nesting doll. Some bright spirit responsible for the grown woman he loved.
The chilly night air foretold the end of summer and the autumn soon to come. He stuck his hands in his jeans pockets and ambled along the sidewalk, vaguely excited about remembering the missing detail. A few stragglers lingered at the outdoor café tables, and a fiddler’s reel from an Irish pub spilled out onto the cobblestoned street. At the corner nearest Quatre Mains, a ghost appeared, and at first, he mistook her for the drowned woman and shook with a spasm of fear, but it was a scullery maid in white cap and apron, her face ashen and nicked by makeup scars, with an iron necklace and a length of chain ringed around her neck. She nearly ran him over, and then looked as though she recognized him for a brief moment. “Pardonnez,” she said, smiling. Both hands were clenched to hold a hurricane lantern which glowed with the flicker of faux whale oil that gave a deathly pallor to her makeup. He laughed, realizing she was one of the actors from les Visites Fant?mes de Québec, the nightly summer ghost tour through the Old City streets. Looking back once, the phantom sped away to join her hidden comrades.
The puppet shop stood just as always, dark and quiet. The dolls had not moved. The bear with the red fez had not bicycled away. The aboriginal doll underneath the bell jar, the one Kay so adored, stood like a guardian to another world, his black eyes staring into the distance. Theo tried the door, but it was locked as always. Perhaps his memory was just playing tricks, and no light had ever flashed in the abandoned store. He pressed his nose against the window as she had always done, but he could see nothing but darkness behind the puppets.