Don't I Know You? (13 page)

S
he walked across the park and uptown to her place. She hadn't been there in days, and she knew when she opened the door that someone had been there in her absence. The smells were wrong. The hallway light was on.

She tried to decipher the disturbances. It went without saying that nothing like this had ever happened to her before, or maybe even found lodging in her imagination. So there was something almost wonderful about it, as if she had been walking along and someone had taken her face and turned her toward something that was available and possible, all the things she'd been missing by looking only straight ahead. It wasn't a completely healthy reaction, but it was the one she experienced nonetheless, and she felt it was only fair and honest to recognize it as such.

The two chairs on either side of the small dining table were angled away from the table and each other as if they'd argued. There was a fresh half-gallon of skim milk in the fridge. A brand she never bought. The bok choy she'd left in the vegetable crisper was there, limp and wet, a new pint of robust cherry tomatoes next to it.

The bed had been remade. The sheets and blankets hung, un-tucked, off the sides and ends. The pillows were at the foot.

Her drawers, the old trunk in the closet, the shoeboxes on the closet shelf had all been gone through. The lids sat skewed like awkward smiles.

Matthew was not a possibility. It was Nikolai. She could smell his aftershave. It came in a dark glass bottle shaped like a polished rock, and she liked it so much that she used it herself on occasion.

It didn't surprise her. He was sending her a message about intimacy. It was the same part of him that insisted on dropping by friends' apartments unannounced, walking into coworkers' offices without knocking.

There were crumbs around the toilet. He liked to snack while using the bathroom. Her hand towel was not hanging on its hook. She knew she would find it wherever he had gone next.

She did not know how threatening she should find the message he was sending.

She brushed her teeth, avoiding herself in the mirror.

She imagined telling someone that the first thing she'd done upon discovering that her apartment had been searched in her absence by her fiancé was to brush her teeth. She imagined telling someone that he'd searched her apartment. She did not want to think about Gina Engel.

Maybe this would be her life, she thought. Her husband would present her with his varied and slightly menacing oddities.

Oddities, she understood grimly, might be the wrong word to describe what was going on here. Or it might, she understood equally grimly, be the perfect word.

She spit, rinsed, sat on the toilet. Her mind was not made for this kind of problem. She could barely get her mind around the physics of weather. Reading the installation instructions for her stereo system had made her anxious and sleepy.

But one way or the other, she was going to have to do something. There was no getting around that.

S
he tried to think of people she admired. What would they do?

She tried to think of someone who would not look at her in disbelief, who would not say, touching a concerned hand to her forearm, Of course, you know you have to leave him. You know that you've stayed this long is not a good sign.

“I find Nikolai Belov completely admirable,” she said to the ceiling. She closed her eyes and repeated the sentence quietly to herself, switching back and forth between past and present tense.

She went to the window. Outside, it was early afternoon and still snowing. At those children's concerts her parents had taken her to at Lincoln Center, behind the musicians a giant pad of paper ran the length of the stage. A woman ran here and there in sensible shoes, drawing to the music with a thick black marker. Her shoes made soft thumps on the wooden stage. Lily had liked listening for them.

She put her palm to the glass. The snow took no notice.

Was she trapped or protected?

She went to the phone and dialed Nikolai. His phone rang. One way or another, there would be answers. She reminded herself that she was the kind of woman who could take solace in what she had.

Take solace, she told herself. It's what you do best.

O
n her way to meet him, she walked by Gina Engel's building. It was on the same block as hers, closer to the park.

The snow blew off the river. She walked with her eyes closed. There was no one else on the sidewalk, and she was moving too slowly to hurt herself. She stopped by a man trying to dig his car out. He stabbed his shovel into some snow, sat next to it, and stared into space.

This whole part of the sidewalk had been taped off after the murder. She hadn't known what had happened until the next morning when she'd gone to do her shopping. She'd met Muriel Yablonsky from 8D on her way back. “You met her,” Muriel had reminded her. “At the block party.” Lily didn't remember. “Yes,” Muriel insisted. “Her son got lost.” Then Lily did. She hadn't liked her.

After Muriel gave her the details, Lily remembered thinking that she hadn't asked to know any of it.

She'd been stopped on the street twice—once by a detective and once by a reporter. Both men's lack of enthusiasm matched her own. No, she hadn't seen anything unusual. No, she didn't
know the woman or her son. Yes, she lived alone, and no, she told the reporter, she wasn't more worried now about that.

She'd had one dream about the murder, and when she woke with a start in the middle of the night, she'd strained to remember it, knowing that was the surest way to watch it slip away for good.

A window in Gina Engel's building opened and a woman's head and torso appeared. She was an older woman, but her hair had been dyed jet black and was styled around her head in soft waves. She called down to the street. “Almost?” she said.

“Almost,” he called back, not moving from his hill.

The woman disappeared; the window slid shut.

She wondered if Nikolai had come here often. She wondered how they'd met. Had he been introduced to Steven? What had Steven thought of him?

She imagined a sleepy boy stumbling down the hall to the bathroom in the middle of the night, running into Nikolai, naked and carrying two whiskey glasses down the hall.

What was wrong with her? Other people's narratives were just that—other people's.

What would she ask him? She didn't want to have the conversation they had to have. She wanted to be on the other side of it.

Snow made epaulets on her shoulders. It fell off her hat.

The man with the shovel regarded her. “So,” he said, looking up at the thick sky. “Snow.”

She nodded. She'd seen him around the block.

“You just standing?” he said.

“I'm waiting for someone,” she said.

He nodded.

She wished she hadn't said anything. Now what would she do?
Nikolai wasn't meeting her here. She'd have to walk away, pretend she'd been stood up. Minutes would have to pass before she could do that.

He regarded her. “Don't I know you?”

Matthew's face and voice appeared for her. “I don't think so,” she said.

He was unpersuaded. “I know you.”

She shrugged.

“I live here with Mommy,” he said, gesturing toward the window that had opened.

He was a grown man. It seemed charming and creepy at the same time. He was wearing blue sweatpants and a gray sweatshirt. His hair came out from under the hood. It was below his shoulders, straight and brown. He was wearing athletic socks with plastic sandals. In the snow.

“You like baseball?” he asked.

Lily checked her watch. She needed to move on. Nikolai would be waiting.

“I like the Yankees,” the man said. “They're the crème de la crème of the baseball world.” He held his hand up like he was measuring someone tall.

She could barely follow this conversation. She registered her surprise at his vocabulary. Snob, she thought. You are a horrible person.

“Sixth game of the series, nineteen seventy-seven,” he said. “Bleacher seats, a post right in front of them. I was supposed to go with this girl from the building. Said she was a fan, but something came up, so I scalped her ticket. Guess how much I made?”

Nothing was really required of her in terms of a response.

He stood up. His pants were soaked. His feet must've been numb.

“One-five-oh,” he said. He made an “okay” sign. “Man,” he said. He seemed happy thinking about it.

He hadn't made eye contact during the entire conversation.

She took a step back. “I've got to go,” she said. “I just remembered.”

He held his hands up like he was surrendering. “Sure,” he said. “You go.” He picked up his shovel. “Maybe I could give you a call,” he said. “You know, sometime.”

Lily brushed the snow off her coat, shook out her hat. “Oh,” she said. “I'm going to have a husband.”

“Sure, sure,” he called as she walked away. “Bring your husband,” he said. “Come by anytime. I'm here mostly.”

She kept herself from running. He was just lonely. Lonely
was
threatening, she thought. For the first time, she felt shame at what she had done to Matthew. She assuaged the guilt by reminding herself that he liked to believe he needed people more than he actually did.

She bowed her head and watched her feet make their thick march through the snow. She was not like that. She did not want to be a person who was lonely. She did not want to be a person who was alone. “I'm going to have a husband,” she said to her feet. “I'm going to have a husband.”

N
ikolai had wanted to meet at his West Side place. She was late, but he wasn't there yet.

She used Tina's key. What's one more thing to explain? she
thought. She would tell all, he would too, and they would go on together and alone, leaving Matthew Cullen and Tina Hernandez and Gina Engel and all the rest at the gate.

He'd already started packing up. She tried to guess which piles were to be saved. She hoped that he'd chosen what she would've chosen. The photo of young Nikolai, the samovar.

She checked the oven drawer. The journal was gone. It was becoming impossible to keep track of the possibilities of the situation. She needed a flow chart.

She wandered back into the living room with the cookie sheet and put it on what she felt sure was a throwaway pile.

A collection of postcards was stacked in piles, a cityscape beneath the glass coffee table. Next to the postcards was a box of note cards. Black-and-white photographs of Asian foods. A bowl of noodles, a pork bun, a custard tart, dumplings. One of the envelopes had “Steven” written in block letters on it. It was a picture of a bowl of rice. Inside, in the same block letters: “I think of you often and wish you well.”

The door swung open, hitting the wall hard. Nikolai was there, a gun in his hand.

“Lily,” he said, somewhere between anger and relief. “How did you get in here?”

“You have a gun?” she asked. She was sitting on the floor. The gun was small and black.

He slid it into his coat pocket, unbuttoned the coat, and flapped the snow from the black cashmere like a bird contemplating flight. “Everyone has a gun,” he said.

Even the boys she'd known in high school, the Chinese ones in Chinese gangs, hadn't had guns.

He was standing over her. He smelled of snow and vaguely of gasoline.

“I don't think that's true,” she said, standing.

He shrugged.

“How did you get in?” he asked. His dress shoes were soaked and looked permanently misshapen. He'd left the house in them this morning even though it had already been snowing for hours. His closet was lined with multiple pairs of the same shoes in black and brown. She'd never seen him in anything else.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out the key. “Tina's,” she said.

“Okay then,” he said. He shook out of his coat and threw it over a chair. He toed his shoes off and pulled his socks off inside-out.

He held his hand out. She held his eye and handed over the key.

“I'll make tea,” he said, heading to the kitchen.

It had only been this morning when she'd seen him last, but she felt as if she'd been alone for days. Here he was, someone with opinions and counterarguments of his own. He had a gun. It made her thoughts tumble out of formation like unruly children. She thought about padding by the kitchen door, letting herself out. She thought about staying put and lying about what she wanted to talk about. She could tell him she wanted to elope. By tomorrow, they could be married.

He came back in carrying a mug for her, a cup and saucer for himself. She watched him sip from the black cup, his fingers too large for the delicate handle. He looked like a trained animal.

Her heartbeat was thumping in her head. What did she want most? Most people passed their whole lives without even asking this
question. He sat on the couch and patted the seat next to him. He seemed to feel there wasn't a surprising thing she could say, but that was okay because surprises had not been her draw in the first place.

A strategy she used with the preschoolers came to her. Don't demand. Ask. Let them think it's you who need the help, they who hold the solutions.

Just tell the truth, her father used to say to her.

“I'm confused,” she said. This was the truth. “And I need your help figuring things out.”

He sat up like this was some kind of quiz.

“I need for you to tell me about you and Gina Engel. I need to know why Tina Hernandez would want me to read Gina Engel's journal. I need to know why you even had it. I need to know what you were looking for in my apartment. I need to know why you're having me followed.”

And once the litany was under way, the big question stepped forward as if standing in the wings the entire time. “I need to know that you had nothing to do with Gina Engel's murder.”

She could leave him. It was just a bigger version of leaving Matthew. If he couldn't give her what she needed, she could leave him, and do so without being destroyed. They'd changed her. This certainty of hers had come from them.

But if he
could
give her this, there'd be a wedding, she'd have a husband, there'd be a life, a glorious life. Because it wouldn't be a broken bone that had been incorrectly set, but something rebuilt, stronger than before.

There was nothing. He was still. He was breathing.

She opened her eyes and he was weeping.

She was skeptical. He wept all the time. But he was scared. This was not something she'd seen before.

He put his cup and saucer down. His fingers tapped against his knees. “I have things to tell you,” he said.

Her anxiety elbowed aside the comedy of the line. She waited, watching. Watching was a way to learn. Surely the face of the man she loved more than she'd loved anyone would be eloquent.

He seemed to know not to touch her. He kept his hands laced. He did not hang his head, did not look at his feet. He looked at her. She did not know whether to interpret this as a good sign or a bad one. Sincerity or performance?

“I met her in May of seventy-six,” he said.

“Who?” she said.

“Gina,” he said.

She nodded. Okay, she thought. So he knew her.

“Okay,” he said. “Don't interrupt. I just talk.”

She leaned back to reassure him that he wouldn't be hearing another sound out of her.

“I met her at the bar. At our bar,” he said. He looked past her to the bookcases. “I'm sorry about that part.”

“Me too,” Lily said.

The apartment was growing darker. Neither of them moved to turn on the lights.

“What else are you sorry about?” Lily asked.

He looked pained. How, his expression seemed to say, had he become the kind of man who caused damage to the people he cared about most?

“What am I not sorry about?” he said, stirring his tea with his middle finger.

He was not asking for sympathy. His upset seemed genuine. She loved him. It made her want to pursue her questions more, not less. She owed them that. The two of them were worth at least that kind of rigorous care.

“Where do I begin?” he asked.

“The murder part,” Lily said. She was remarkably calm.

So was he. “I didn't kill her,” he said.

She studied him. There were no bells going off inside her either way, but nothing about her insides had relaxed. How would they ever get out from under all of this?

“But,” he said. “It's complicated.”

He was beating on her heart with the heels of his hands.

He seemed to have lost his train of thought.

“What?” she said. “What? You didn't kill her, but? Was there a problem because of your drinking?” she prompted.

“There's always a problem,” he said like a disappointed parent.

She waited, trying not to be impatient with matter-of-fact statements and sweeping generalities.

He took a breath. “There was a disagreement,” he said.

The passive voice bothered her. “Between whom?” she asked.

He glanced at her as if to say that if she kept asking questions like this, he'd never say what he had to.

“It was idiotic,” he said. “
I
am idiotic. It was about shirts.” He shrugged, embarrassed.

Lily looked at him.

“She was supposed to pick up my shirts at the cleaner, and she
didn't, so I didn't have a clean shirt, and I had to be somewhere, I forget where now, and—” He looked to the ceiling. “And. So.” He shrugged again. “So there was a disagreement.”

“Are you using the right word?” Lily asked.

He looked at her quizzically, as if it were entirely plausible that he was using all the wrong words.

“Disagreement,” she said. “Do you mean
disagreement
?”

He was unsure. “I think it's right,” he said. “One person thinks one thing, the other thinks something else.”

“I'm just trying to hurry this narrative along a bit,” she said. “Are you talking about thoughts or actions?”