1 #6
“You must be Sebastian,” she said. “Please, come in.” She turned, and I followed her into a labyrinthine apartment lined with art and bookcases.
Ari was reading at a dining room table. She maintained an air of formality, even sitting at a table with a book in her own home.
It seemed to me that she was someone who never fully relaxed.
She looked up, and for just a heartbeat before she smiled, her expression was that of a hawk evaluating its prey.
She was wearing full makeup. I glanced around the room in what I hoped was a casual fashion, and there it was: Swan Dive, my window into the sea from childhood, the last trace of my father in the world, crammed in amidst all the other works on an overcrowded wall like it meant nothing to her.
Childhood memories of lying on the couch after school, imagining being somewhere—anywhere—other than in the oppressively silent apartment where my mother worked hour upon hour behind a closed door, imagining swimming, diving, weightlessness, escape.
Sometimes I imagined my father was the diver.
“Good afternoon,” she said.
“Hi. Hi. Good afternoon.” I was more nervous than I’d hoped. I shook her hand and exchanged pleasantries and then launched into a prepared monologue about Post-Collapse Formalism, which I’d researched precisely because it had nothing to do with the painting I was about to steal.
The theft itself wasn’t difficult. I found a way to walk with her as far as possible from the painting, and then told her that we’d met before, at Gloria’s apartment in Vincennes.
I’d noticed that she closed her eyes whenever she was trying to remember something, and she didn’t disappoint.
When I asked to use the bathroom, she nodded distractedly.
I walked back the way I’d come, past the bathroom door and then silently through the kitchen, where Pilar was stirring soup, her back to me; she didn’t turn.
I lifted Swan Dive from the wall, grabbed my shoes, and slipped out of the apartment.
I felt wildly alive. I’d brought a thin piece of cloth with me, and I wrapped the painting on my way down the stairs to the fifth floor, where by some miracle the elevator was waiting.
I put on my shoes in the elevator and within minutes was in a taxi bound for Vincennes.
How had this been so easy? I could have done it years ago, that was the thing I kept thinking.
“Sebastian,” Gloria said, when I walked into her apartment. I hadn’t lived here in a long time, but I’d kept a key on principle. She was sitting cross-legged on her sofa with a laptop. The apartment was messier than I’d ever seen it, cups here and there on surfaces. “You still have a key.”
“Thanks for not changing the locks.” I hadn’t seen her in how long now, three years? Four? She’d slipped over some threshold and was visibly older.
“You came for a visit?” Gloria asked.
“I just stole something,” I said. “I’m going to lie low here for a few hours.”
“Oh,” she said. “Does that mean someone’s following you here?”
The thing about terrible parenting is that it creates a debt. She owed me and she could keep paying me back forever, that was how I saw it.
“It’s possible,” I said. I took the painting into her bedroom and locked the door, and was struck by the absolute unfamiliarity of the space.
I couldn’t remember ever having come in here, in all the years I’d lived in this apartment with my mother.
It was her room, and hers alone. There was a large desk that could be adjusted between standing and sitting heights, with two monitors and a keyboard.
A computer hummed quietly under the desk.
A wave of sticky notes cascaded over a wall.
There was a professional-looking camera for her video calls, and an attractive wood screen that ran from floor to ceiling as the video background.
On the other side of the screen, there was just enough space for a single unmade bed.
No art of any kind on the walls, just featureless white paint.
I stood there in my mother’s private little realm, and only then did it occur to me to wonder why I’d come here.
Why here, and not my own apartment? Because the police would come to my apartment, I thought, but on the other hand, does a person like Ari call the police?
The thought chilled me. Perhaps a person like Ari would have other contacts at her disposal.
Why had she been imprisoned in the United States?
By what means had she acquired her fortune?
Gloria knocked softly at the door. Some time had passed, perhaps an hour, wherein I’d paced and wondered if I was going to die.
“Ari Soriano is on her way up,” she said. “You stole something from her?”
“I’m not here,” I said.
I heard her sigh. “I understand,” she said. I understood too, now that I thought of it: I’d come here because if any bad luck followed me in, I wanted that bad luck to adhere to Gloria, not to Nico or to me.
8
I didn’t expect Ari to follow me, when I left the apartment an hour later, but I stopped at a food stand by the equestrian centre settlement in the Vincennes forest, and Ari appeared before my curry rice was ready. I looked up when I heard my name.
She was quite close, walking toward me with a grim expression.
But she was looking past me, at another man approaching.
I thought for just a second that perhaps they knew one another, I didn’t quite follow the sequence of events, but then he pushed her hard with one hand and grabbed her handbag with the other, and she hit the pavement with a horrible thud.
I ran to her and knelt by her side. “Ari,” I said, “Ari,” but it took her a moment to come to, blinking. There was blood on the pavement under her head.
“You have to go to the hospital,” I said, and at first she didn’t protest. I helped her to her feet—it was awkward to support her while I held on to the painting I’d stolen from her, and yes, I was aware of the absurdity of the situation—but I half-walked, half-carried her to the roadway and flagged a passing cab.
She let herself be bundled into the back seat without protest, and seemed to drift off for a while, then she was awake and arguing with me.
She wouldn’t go to the hospital. If I tried to force her, she would tell everyone I’d stolen the painting.
Finally, exasperated, I took her back to Nico’s place and somehow got her up the stairs and into my old bedroom, where I helped her lie down.
Ari looked terrible in the lamplight, dazed and ill. One of her pupils was larger than the other. I would wait for Nico to come home, I decided, which would be any minute now, and then I’d insist she go to the hospital.
“I’m not going to the hospital,” she said, as if she’d read my mind.
“Fine,” I said, and left her there with the painting.
I sat in the living room for a while, researching concussions, and then returned to the bedroom and asked her questions to keep her awake.
She had a long strange story about fleeing the Republic of Texas, a flight across the Atlantic under an assumed name, a first husband, a second husband, murder, an explosion.
Finally she trailed off, and I realized she’d fallen asleep.
Her breathing sounded all right, quiet and steady.
The sleep just seemed like sleep, nothing sinister.
Perhaps it wasn’t the worst thing to let her rest.
I returned to the living room, and paced for a while.
I had my father’s painting, the thing I’d most longed for, but things had gone so catastrophically wrong.
Although, on the other hand, was I at serious personal risk?
If she died, I thought, if she died here in the apartment, I could call either Obie or a guy Obie worked with who’d once given me his number, one of the local gangsters who spent considerable time smoking in front of the café on the corner, and I was fairly confident that he’d make the body disappear.
But then, of course, I’d owe him a favour.
He’d own me. I saw a life of crime unfolding before me, grey decades where I wouldn’t be the kind of person I’d hoped for. I had to wake her.
“Sebastian,” Nico said. I startled, my hand on the bedroom door handle. She’d come in quietly, while I was pacing around and not paying enough attention.
“I wanted to see you on your birthday,” I said, and realized at the same moment that soon, very soon, I’d have to explain why Ari Soriano was asleep in her guest bedroom.
For how long should I let Ari sleep? I should call an ambulance, I thought, and yet in a strange way I admired Ari, and she’d made her wishes clear.
Who was I to insist on the hospital? What did I know about head injuries or actually literally anything?
It was none of my business, I told myself, although the presence of a woman bleeding into a pillow in the next room logically made it my business and I knew it.
I forced myself to sit in an armchair and stop jittering around.
“You seem preoccupied.” Nico was taking off her coat, hanging her keys on a hook. She had a faraway look that I knew too well.
“I have a lot on my mind,” I said.
She came to sit by me. “How long were you waiting?”
“Not long,” I said. “You were out for a walk?”
“For hours.”
“Is that any kind of way to spend your birthday?”
She managed a thin smile, and looked at her clasped hands. Birthdays were the worst days for her, the absolute hardest. In another timeline—a better timeline—her birthday was when her children had made her crayon drawings and helped her blow out the candles on her cake.
“How old are you, Sebastian?”
“Twenty.” I leaned forward, and maintained steady eye contact. Sometimes that was enough, sometimes that alone could bring her back.
“Twenty,” she repeated, and shook her head.
“That means Marlowe’s twenty-three now, doesn’t it?”
She nodded.
“And Samir’s twenty-five.”