I cried out in frustration. “Is there anyone in the vicinity who is not addicted to something? I have one basic question.”
“They all left early and took a bus down to the Key,” offered a woman leaning over to scratch a cat.
“The Key?” I said.
“The Key Arena.”
The Key Arena was part of the Seattle Center, seventy acres in the middle of the city, home of the ’62 World’s Fair. The pristine campus now boasted five museums, seven theaters, a dozen restaurants, and zero places to park. I bit the bullet and used the valet.
My eye was pulled up the Space Needle towering fantastically overhead, its hot white spotlights beginning to win out over the bruising sky.
“Can I pee?” Timby said.
“Quickly.”
“I’ll take him,” Alonzo offered and they headed into the children’s theater.
I went to a deck, leaned against the rail, and looked out across the expanse.
Summer was over: the cheery red popcorn wagon was locked and on its side by a concrete wall. Soft salmon the color on the weeping Japanese maples. Armies arrived each dawn to erase any sign of autumn on the ground; it was only on the trees. The lawn was freshly mowed and striped like vacuumed carpet. Bearded, topknotted men in their twenties walked their bicycles through, tech lanyards swaying. The enormous fountain in the center blasted water up and out, fifty nozzles pointed skyward, all synchronized to music, violent classical, it sounded like from my faraway perch. Kids in various stages of dress dashed up and down the fountain’s embankment trying to outrun the unpredictable blasts. Many shivered violently from having failed: it was the eve of winter.
The Key Arena loomed.
Ugly, squat, concrete. It was hard to imagine the thing was ever considered beautiful, even back in ’62. The Beatles played there. So did Elvis. It’s where the Sonics won the championship. But time had passed it by. The Sonics left for Oklahoma. No NBA team wanted any part of the place. Bands resisted playing there. The logical thing would be to tear it down. But there was always an outcry. Even its defenders couldn’t find anything to recommend it other than dogged sentimentality.
Alonzo joined me at the rail.
“I want to go home,” I said, feeling a sudden gust of fear. “I don’t want to know where Joe’s been going.”
“I do!” Alonzo said with a laugh.
“Timby, let’s go.”
But Timby was gone, running down the hill toward a nondescript group of people strolling along, swinging Starbucks.
“Dada!” he cried.
And one of them was Joe.
My mother was represented by the young theatrical agent Sam Cohn before he became the legendary Sam Cohn. She threw him a surprise birthday in our rambling, rent-controlled Upper West Side apartment. Her twist: Each guest had to bring one friend Sam had never met. While all Sam’s real friends hid in the back staircase, Sam entered to a roomful of strangers yelling, “Surprise!”
Now it was me, scanning the unknown faces, wanting to be relieved to see these people who called up nothing.
They smiled and chatted animatedly as if still trying to make good impressions. The silence of familiarity hadn’t yet descended.
Joe spotted Timby. His face lit up. He handed his coffee to one of the strangers just in time for Timby to leap into his arms. Timby’s legs were so long it looked like Joe was holding a grown person.
Joe looked around and spotted me at the rail.
I gave him a wave.
Joe shook his head, but not in surprise or remorse. It was almost as if… dare I say… he welcomed the wonder of it all.
The Plan
From where Joe was standing Eleanor was thirty again, in cutoffs and a button-down covered with red roses, her bare feet crusted in sand.
Joe had been two years into his residency then, pulling a graveyard ER shift at Southside Hospital on Long Island. Friday night always delivered revelers with alcohol-related injuries, but never anyone as captivating as the Flood girls.
Ivy was the one your eyes went to, six feet tall, milky skin, ethereal and lissome, her flowing yellow dress blackened at the hem from dragging on the ground. Something about her made you want to reach out and confirm she was real. Eleanor was the hurt one, though, her right arm in a sling made from a bedsheet.
“So tell me what happened,” Joe said.
Eleanor had green eyes and a dusting of freckles. Pretty, but not the pretty one.
“You know how you’re walking along the beach,” she said, and paused to burp. “Excuse me. And you see those share houses with rickety decks and you think, What idiot would be stupid enough to stand on one of those, let alone throw a keg party and pack it with thirty people?”
“The answer is…” Ivy pointed at Eleanor.
“Let’s see the damage.” Joe rested her arm on a rolling table. He gingerly untied the bedsheet.
Eleanor looked around, as if pillaging the exam room for details. Joe watched her watching. He caught himself and lowered his eyes. They landed on the curve of her waist peeking through a gap between her shirt buttons. He quickly looked away.
Her wrist was badly swollen.