Chapter 32 The Parable of Anca Dumitrescu
The Parable of Anca Dumitrescu
Even reclining on Anca’s couch, Candy looked coiled. That’s how she was, an embodiment of latent energy. Until she went kinetic.
At the moment, her eyes were ice blue. Evan couldn’t remember if that was their real color.
They changed depending on what she was wearing and she also had a variety of contact lenses that aided her chameleonlike propensity.
It wasn’t merely about disguise, this ability, it was an alteration of her carriage and bearing, energy and posture.
She could ignite your attention and then recede right before your eyes.
At the moment she seemed fully in the version he recognized as most like herself. But he could never be sure.
Flicking aside the magazine she’d been reading, she drew herself upright on the couch, a tigress-like undulation of her spine. “How’d it go with Joey?”
Evan looked at her.
Candy said, “That well?”
Evan said, “Anca?”
“Sleeping like a baby. I checked on her a few times. She’s out cold. Hasn’t moved an inch.”
“She needs to sleep for a month,” Evan said.
Candy gave a nod, her eyes distant.
Despite Anca’s best efforts, the apartment smelled of dust. Motes spun in the yellowed glow filtered through the lampshade.
A touch of moisture in the air, a harbinger of mold, the smell of wet brick.
Cold Bronx night leaked through a draft in the window with a moan.
The paint along the sill had flaked elegantly into a mosaic of cracked mud.
Candy said, “You fly back tomorrow to deal with RedLite?”
“Yes.”
“I booked a room at your hotel,” Candy said. “She wants to sleep here alone tonight.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“It’s not up to us,” Candy said. “Is it?”
Before Evan could reply, screaming ripped through the living room. A high-pitched undulated wail.
He knew the sound. Night terrors morphing into a panic attack.
Candy was halfway to the closed bedroom door already, having levitated directly onto her feet. “Got it, I got it—”
She blew inside, the door sweeping shut behind her. The screaming kept on. And on. Deep screeching breaths, wails guttering into sobs.
The sound—unadulterated anguish—was nearly unbearable. Evan paced around the living room, fingers shoved through his hair.
The keening kept on undiminished. Unintelligible words pushed through a constricted throat and a grief-spasmed diaphragm. One lamentation came audible—“Why, why, why—”
Between wails, he could make out Candy’s murmuring, low and cooing, the softest he’d ever heard her voice.
Just when the sobbing seemed to quiet down, the screams resumed, throttling back up, strident peaks interspersed with breathless weeping.
Evan paced some more.
Sweat matted his shirt, made his cargo pants cling to his legs. A dozen times he debated entering the bedroom and a dozen times he resisted the urge.
Fifteen excruciating minutes passed. And then another fifteen.
Anca’s moans grew hoarse and finally gave out.
The silence was even more awful.
Evan checked his Vertex fob watch. Forty-seven minutes had passed. He’d never known anyone to cry for that long. He didn’t know anyone could.
He was over at the window leaning on the sill, dried paint razoring his palms, the draft lifting his hair, cooling the sweat on his forehead. What was this darkness he felt roosting in his own chest, a shadow of anguish caught like an infection?
The bedroom door clicked and he spun around.
Candy emerged. A flush touched her cheekbones and she looked uncharacteristically rumpled, wrinkles wadding her shirt in whorls, wet splotches darkening her chest, her shoulder.
She returned to her spot on the couch and sat, elbows on knees, staring at the union of her hands. She breathed evenly, steadily.
Evan walked over to her, stood a moment in silence. “Does she need medical?”
Candy shook her head, the curved points of her long bangs brushing her chin.
“What did you do?” he asked.
“I held her.”
“You.” His voice was flat with a not unkind disbelief. “Held her.”
“Yes. I’m not a fucking animal.” Her eyes flicked up and she must have seen the words knife into him because her face softened. “Oh,” she said. “You’re in mission mode. If you weren’t, you would’ve known to do it, too.”
No, he thought. I wouldn’t have.
Instead, he said, “You good?”
“No,” Candy said. “I want to be held and comforted.”
“Really?”
Her lips twitched. “No.”
A squeak of hinges. Anca filled the doorway, her face pallid, lips and eyelids raw and rouged pink. She wore a sweater and a winter coat and a pair of boots with thick laces.
“I need…” Her voice cracked. She reset herself. “I need to go to the store.”
“I’ll go with you,” Evan said.
“No,” she said. “Thank you. I must start to be in the world myself. I want to go alone.”
She started for the door, hesitated with her hand on the knob. Then she turned.
“I saw hell,” she said. “I was there.” A quick intake of air jerked her chest, the aftermath of sobbing. “Tat? used to say that hell is locked from the inside. And we all have the key. You two? Helped me find the key.”
She dipped her head, a demure gesture of gratitude. And then she left.
Candy and Evan did not look at each other. They had no idea what to say.
He started for the door.
“Don’t,” Candy said. “She asked you not to.”
He hesitated.
And then continued out.
At the end of the hall, the elevator door had just closed behind Anca.
He jogged to the stairs and took them down in great bounds, not young-man parkouring but six steps a leap, landing squarely a boot at a time. He felt no twinge in his back, no complaint of the quadratus lumborum he’d wisely worked out before the mission.
Blowing through the lobby, he shot out through the spitting rain and across four lanes of sparse traffic, joining a current of pedestrians on the sidewalk.
Umbrellas were in abundance, a surveillance advantage.
A mustached vendor stood outside a newsstand, hocking his wares like a carnival barker: “Ponchos, ’brellas, coffee! ”
Without breaking stride, Evan dipped his shoulder and liberated a cheap umbrella from the bouquet blooming from a wooden merch bucket. Telescoping, it foomped open, shielding his face as Anca emerged from her building.
Sliding along the opposite sidewalk, he tracked her, one bobbing umbrella among many.
She walked briskly, body language tight and scared, a hand fisting the throat of her jacket shut, the other shoved in a pocket. Shoulders elevated, head ducked submissively, eyes low to the ground. She gave passersby a wide berth, moving skittishly.
She looked terrified.
He eased past a streetlight, across an alley, through a cluster of men smoking sickly sweet cigarillos.
When Anca entered a bodega, he loitered at the crosswalk.
Taking a twenty-dollar bill from his pocket, he folded it into a stiff rectangle and tucked it into the top of his pocket for easy reach. Then he pretended to study his phone.
Big glass windows protected with accordion security shutters provided a diamond-split vantage into the bodega.
He watched Anca shop.
Hesitating in the first aisle, she plucked a blocky green package from the shelf.
Adult diapers.
To manage the damage to her.
Something sharp-edged turned in his chest. Even beneath the umbrella, flecks of rain pelted his cheeks. He had forgotten to breathe.
As Anca moved to the counter to pay, she held her shoulders back and her posture upright, a bulwark against shame. The clerk started to bag her purchase in a translucent plastic bag and she pointed behind the counter, had him switch to discreet paper.
Curling the top against the rain, she stepped back outside and started back, package tucked beneath her arm.
Across the street, Evan stalked her.
She looked jittery, eyes darting up alleys. Someone behind her popped an umbrella open and she started, her expression wild. She moved faster, feet blurring in a trot.
Halfway up the next block, a clamor erupted before her—bus hissing to a stop, two homeless men squabbling schizophrenically at the bench.
Just beyond, a grizzled beggar lay propped like a pile of rags against the side of a stoop, cardboard sign tilted against her hip, dirt-blackened hand loose around a Big Gulp cup that had spilled a slick of pennies onto the sidewalk.
She was passed out, head tilted severely back against the rugged stone, face glazed from one substance or another, mouth stretched open, a drugged retreat.
Her daughter, no older than five, lingered at her side in a daze, mouth moving silently.
Grime formed crescents beneath her nails, her cheeks marred with Dickensian smudges.
She’d plucked a dandelion from a weed that had sprouted in a sidewalk crack and spun it between thumb and forefinger, marveling down at the yellow bloom as if it were a kaleidoscope.
Jerking away from the bus stop racket, Anca curled into herself, ducking her head, shoulders hunched protectively. The little girl locked on her.
Over the rain and traffic and the bus-stop quarrel, Evan couldn’t make out the girl’s words, but he could read lips.
For you, she said, raising the dandelion as Anca passed. Lookit my flower for you.
Anca kept her gaze lowered, shuttered up within herself. At her back, the deranged argument at the bus stop continued.
For you, the girl said again, twisting the yellow bud.
Anca stepped around her and the beggar’s outstretched legs, her nose wrinkling at the odor.
A few steps past, Anca halted. Splotches turned the bag under her arm a darker brown. Rain peppered her cheeks, pasted her hair along her forehead and cheeks. She was breathing hard; even from across the street, Evan could see the rise and fall of her chest.
She gathered herself up. And then turned to crouch by the girl, grimacing through pain.
Taking the proffered flower, Anca looked into the girl’s eyes. Thank you, her mouth said.
The girl’s smile was delirious and yet genuine joy shined through. Mouth ajar in a childlike grin, peg teeth showing. She held Anca’s gaze as Anca rose, tucking the flower behind her ear.
Anca continued on.
Evan shadowed her. Passing the newsstand from which he’d appropriated the umbrella, he bumped into the vendor, sliding the twenty-dollar bill into his back pocket. “’Scuse me.”
Anca entered her building.
She stood a moment in the lobby, facing away, rainwater dripping off her, shuddering. Her shoulders canted. One arm dipped low. Her head sagged. The package dropped.
And then she slumped to the floor.
Dumping the umbrella, Evan sprinted across the street, horns blaring.
Banging into the lobby, he slid to her on his knees.
She was convulsing, irises half-moons beneath her upper lids, cheek jittering against the worn tile.
He slid a hand beneath her face, tugged her into his lap, rolled her onto her side, checked her airway.
Snaggles of hair tangled across her forehead, curtaining her eyes.
He smoothed it back. Her boots kicked and squeaked against the floor, her fingernails clattering. Her back arched and arched again.
He held her.
She was unconscious, so it felt safe for him to do so.
At last she stilled.
Her head lolled. Long, long blinks.
And then she gazed up at him. Awareness came into her slowly but palpably.
“I’m sorry,” Evan said. “I was following you.”
Her words came out fuzzy. “I know.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“You’re right.” The faintest smile. “I didn’t.”
She pushed herself up to a sitting position on the floor, and he helped her.
“I saw you,” he said. “With the girl.”
Propped on one arm, Anca breathed a few times, steadying herself. “It takes so much meanness to keep good out.”
“Yes,” Evan said, “and to protect it sometimes.”
She gave a slight nod, more reassuring than affirming.
The dandelion had fallen from her hair. She picked it up from the tiles. It was slightly crushed, like the one floating in Joey’s cocktail.
Anca rose and stood once more on wobbling legs, gripping Evan’s arm until she found her balance. With a quavering hand, she slid the dandelion back behind her ear.
“Onward,” she said, and turned to summon the elevator.
There it is, he thought. The Parable of Anca Dumitrescu.