Chapter 47
JOEL
Now that she was no longer wearing the tobacco-colored shirt from the morning of his run, the woman with the shaved head looked just like all the others in the magazine photo. Overalls buttoned at the chest. In the dock’s heat, his skin went cold.
Shay was speaking. There was a conspiratorial slant to her shoulders, but perhaps he just felt that because the wind carried her words across the waves, to where he could not hear them.
The woman shook her head, scratching the back of her neck wildly, like a dog sensing a tick.
Shay stilled her by grabbing both hands and pressing them between her own.
Joel did not understand. A part of him had the impulse to run down the dock and push the woman into the water, but Shay did not act like she was in danger.
The stray cat approached the women, paws soundless against the planks until the animal was impossible to ignore, each of them startled by its black form rubbing against their elbows. They looked up and found Joel.
The woman whipped back to Shay, who said something else Joel could not hear over the ocean. Shay lifted her finger, asking him for one minute, and he nodded his head. What choice did he have?
After a moment, Shay stood to come and speak to him, leaving the woman cross-legged by the water, worrying her knee like a stone.
“She needs to get off the island,” Shay said.
“Why is she here? What in the hell’s going on?”
“They sent her here.”
“They sent her?”
“Yes. Her name’s Cleo, and they know—she was the closest to me, so I think they believed she could be the one that really got through.
They’ve been having people trail me in the subway.
Sometimes there’s a man standing in the doorway of the apartment across the street from mine.
And now it’s broken windows and kitchen fires, a goddamn snake.
They’ve gotten more paranoid, people have been talking to journalists—”
“Jesus, why didn’t you say something? Have you told the police?”
“Can we really trust the police to do anything anymore? And it’s fine, I’m handling it.”
“How? How are you handling it?”
Shay sucked in her bottom lip, biting it with her front teeth. “I’ve convinced her to leave, all right? She knows how bad it’s gotten, and I’d find a boat myself, but I need to go to Haven House, everyone’s waiting there—”
He realized she hadn’t spoken to anyone about calling off the wedding. He had so many questions, but at the end of the dock, Cleo was calling Shay’s name.
“Can you help her? Find a way to get her off the island?”
“You should have told me.”
“I know, I’m sorry, and I wish I could take care of her on my own, but—”
Joel rubbed his brow bone. “It’s all right, I know someone who can take her. I thought they would—but, well, I’ll figure it out.”
Cleo approached tentatively—another cat, though this one was more fearful of strangers, eyeing Joel like he might handcuff her, which he wished he could.
He remembered how she’d held the knife yesterday morning and wondered whether she still had the blade in her pocket.
Shay introduced them both, though he did not know what to say to make her trust him, as he did not trust her.
Joel hoped Terry could sail now, that this woman would soon be on a distant shore.
The sooner she was gone, the sooner he could convince Shay to leave.
Shay nodded at her, as if everything had been said. She then turned to hug him, and for a brief breath, he relaxed into her, remembering how it had felt to fall asleep side by side. Her arms were tight at his neck, her mouth at his ear.
“Thank you.”
Joel did not know Shay had moved into Riverside until March, when she had been living there for three months.
It was not uncommon to have large gaps between her phone calls.
He knew without her having to say a word that she often tried to stay away from him, that she thought it was for the best—not just for her, but for him.
But then he’d run into Grace outside the 12th Street Cinema, and she’d told him everything. He went to Riverside the next day.
The first time he visited, he was told no one named Shay lived there.
The next day, that she was not allowed any visitors.
The next, that she did not want any. When he was finally admitted into the neglected bramble of garden at the back of the house in early April, he was sure it was because Shay had said this was the only way to deter him.
That he’d continue to come every day, which was true.
“Hey, stranger,” Shay said.
She was seated at a wrought iron table and wrapped in a coat too heavy for the mild spring day.
The garden’s empty soil beds were thawing.
Her head was shaved by then, her face so gaunt he could see the shape of her skull.
It made her seem shockingly vulnerable, even as her body was hidden beneath folds of thick wool.
Her eyes seemed to have difficulty focusing.
“Hey, yourself,” he said and took a seat across from her.
Even though he couldn’t see him, Joel sensed the man who’d led him through the hallway hovering behind the door.
His presence alone felt violent. Joel struggled to imagine taking him in a fight; he was built like a linebacker, his thermal straining at his shoulders.
Though he did not look like any of the young vets Joel had met in New York—their skin riddled with bug bites they’d scratched into scars, the dirt of the jungle never seeming to fully wash off so their complexions were shaded red—he did seem like a soldier.
When he first opened the front door, Joel noticed a rattlesnake tattooed on his hand, the black lines bleeding into one another.
They’d passed by an empty bathroom, a tower of toilet paper stacked next to the sink, and a library where two older men were playing chess.
By the bookcases, a boy was sitting on the floor ripping pages out of a book.
At that point, no more effusive editorials were being published.
Politicians were frightened away by the reports of beatings and abductions, and Joel had read that most of the dwindling disciples now lived in California.
The house felt abandoned—no sounds of life, no footsteps from the upper floors.
“You’ve been pretty persistent,” Shay said.
“Yeah, well, I had to be—I’ve been worried about you,” Joel said.
“It’s part of the program. We’re not supposed to see anyone at the beginning.” Her voice was hollow, like she was reading words from a script.
“Well, this isn’t really the beginning for you, is it?”
He remembered that evening at the bar in October.
She had seemed ebullient, brimming with words, overflowing—like the men and women in the footage he’d seen of tent revivals, their bodies vibrating with God.
But now it was like the fever had passed.
She was drawn and quiet. Her nails looked brittle.
“It’s a more serious beginning, now that I’m here,” she said. “A different sort of commitment.”
“Which means, what? Staying in this empty house? Not seeing anyone you know?”
“I know the people here.” A comma of annoyance formed at the side of her mouth, a familiar expression, which gave him some relief. “They know me better than anyone.”
“That’s bullshit.”
She looked toward the door, the comma deepening, and he knew this was not the way. They were always honest with each other, and they could be tough and acerbic, but sometimes they had to be tender.
He leaned toward her, his forearms on the table. “I’m sorry. I just—miss you.”
She looked back at him, her mouth dropping open, like she had been caught off guard.
In the neighbor’s garden, he heard the flare of a match being lit for a cigarette.
How odd it was, that the world was so near—taxis rolling past ferrying men and women to doctors’ appointments, to films, to meetings, children ambling home from school.
That this house, which had felt impenetrable as a fortress, was in the middle of a teeming city.
“I miss you too.” She unfolded her arms and pressed her thumbs against the table’s latticed top. Her voice was softer, but more like her own. “I miss a lot of people.”
“Maybe it’s time to leave then. Maybe you’ve gotten what you came for.”
She pulled away, wrapping her arms again, her hands lost in the folds of brown wool. “It’s not like that anymore. There is no after.”
“Of course there is. What are you going to do, live in this building when you’re fifty? Eighty?”
“I don’t need you to open my eyes, to rescue me like Rapunzel in a tower. I don’t need that. I chose—I am choosing—to stay here. Everyone stays.”
“You’re not everyone,” he snapped.
The garden was still, the bare tree branches like cracks in the sky.
The only movement Joel could sense was his own chest heaving up and down and the man shuffling behind the door, waiting to take Joel back through the cavernous house and turn the lock behind him.
What had he imagined? Of course he wanted to rescue her.
To take her hand in his own and lead her out the front door and into the cold light of the afternoon, to feed her until her hair was thick as fleece.
To take her running in the mornings, to run away together.
But even if it meant taking her back to Andrew, he did not care; he just wanted her away from this place.
“You should go,” she said.
“I don’t think I should.”
“I want you to go.”
“You don’t know what you want.”
“Joel.” Her voice was rigid. She was focused now, but not in the way he’d hoped she would be. The door opened.
The man said nothing to Joel as he led him back through the house.
Joel felt lightheaded as he walked down the hallway, like the building was flooded with some noxious gas that was making it difficult to breathe, his vision narrowing to the lens of a microscope.
Daylight spilled into the entryway, and he stumbled out onto the sidewalk as if he’d been shoved.
When he turned back to take a final look at the building, the man was still there, watching him.
His height and width were so great that he consumed the doorway, the stubble at his head the flat gray of a stingray, though he could not have been more than thirty.
His stance reminded Joel of a fight he’d gotten into with Peter Lindt in sixth grade, a scuffle over an insult to Joel’s youngest brother and his stutter, which he’d outgrow before high school but which at the time seemed incurable, the subject of concerned, late-night conversations between his parents that they assumed their sons couldn’t hear.
Fuckin’ moron, Peter had spat, and Joel walloped his fist against the boy’s cheek.
Peter was stronger, though, larger at that age, and soon Joel was on the ground with a split lip, his blood spattered bright as quarters on the concrete, Peter standing over him.
The man in the doorway had that same looming weight of victory, though he had done no more than open and close a door.
Joel rested his hand on a parking meter to find balance, and the man smiled, revealing a row of small, rotting teeth.
After a moment, he disappeared back into the house. The lock was bolted.
Joel waited a few days, and then no one had answered when he knocked.
The day after, an older woman opened the door, whispering to him in a low panic that he should stay away, as Shay had left at dawn the day before.
She wouldn’t return Joel’s calls, but Grace told him: Shay had cut through Central Park to find her way back to the Upper East Side like she was on a pilgrimage. Wholly on her own.