“Until someone comes for it. I think it’s what he would have wanted.”
Natalie looked at Sam, then she looked again. Then she said, “Where did you get those from?”
“What?”
“The flowers. The ones you’re holding, Sam. Where did they come from? Did you have them when we left the Coffee House? I would have seen them.”
Sam looked down. Then she grinned. “You are so sweet. I should have said something when you gave them to me, shouldn’t I?” she said. “They are lovely. Thank you so much. But wouldn’t red have been more appropriate?”
They were roses, their stems wrapped in paper. Six of them, and white.
“I didn’t give them to you,” said Natalie, her lips firming.
And neither of them said another word until they reached the movie theater.
When she got home that night Sam put the roses in an improvised vase. Later, she cast them in bronze, and she kept to herself the tale of how she got them, although she told Caroline, who came after Natalie, the story of the ghost-roses one night when they were both very drunk, and Caroline agreed with Sam that it was a really, really strange and spooky story, and, deep down, did not actually believe a word of it, so that was all right.
Shadow had parked near a pay phone. He called information, and they gave him the number.
No, he was told. She isn’t here. She’s probably still at the Coffee House.
He stopped on the way to the Coffee House to buy flowers.
He found the Coffee House, then he crossed the road and stood in the doorway of a used bookstore, and waited, and watched.
The place closed at eight, and at ten past eight Shadow saw Sam Black Crow walk out of the Coffee House in the company of a smaller woman whose pigtailed hair was a peculiar shade of red. They were holding hands tightly, as if simply holding hands could keep the world at bay, and they were talking—or rather, Sam was doing most of the talking while her friend listened. Shadow wondered what Sam was saying. She smiled as she talked.
The two women crossed the road, and they walked past the place where Shadow was standing. The pigtailed girl passed within a foot of him; he could have reached out and touched her, and they didn’t see him at all.
He watched them walking away from him down the street, and felt a pang, like a minor chord being played inside him.
It had been a good kiss, Shadow reflected, but Sam had never looked at him the way she was looking at the pigtailed girl, and she never would.
“What the hell. We’ll always have Peru,” he said, under his breath, as Sam walked away from him. “And El Paso. We’ll always have that.”
Then he ran after her, and put the flowers into Sam’s hands. He hurried away, so she could not give them back.
Then he walked up the hill, back to his car, and he followed the signs to Chicago. He drove at or slightly under the speed limit.
It was the last thing he had to do.
He was in no hurry.
He spent the night in a Motel 6. He got up the next morning and realized his clothes still smelled like the bottom of the lake. He put them on anyway. He figured he wouldn’t need them much longer.
Shadow paid his bill. He drove to the brownstone apartment building. He found it without any difficulty. It was smaller than he remembered.
He walked up the stairs steadily—not fast, that would have meant he was eager to go to his death, and not slow, that would have meant he was afraid. Someone had cleaned the stairwell: the black garbage bags had gone. The place smelled of the chlorine smell of bleach, no longer of rotting vegetables.
The red-painted door at the top of the stairs was wide open: the smell of old meals hung in the air. Shadow hesitated, then he pressed the doorbell.
“I come!” called a woman’s voice, and, dwarf-small and dazzlingly blonde, Zorya Utrennyaya came out of the kitchen and bustled toward him, wiping her hands on her apron. She looked different, Shadow realized. She looked happy. Her cheeks were rouged red, and there was a sparkle in her old eyes. When she saw him her mouth became an O and she called out, “Shadow? You came back to us?” and she hurried toward him with her arms outstretched. He bent down and embraced her, and she kissed his cheek. “So good to see you!” she said. “Now you must go away.”
Shadow stepped into the apartment. All the doors in the apartment (except, unsurprisingly, Zorya Polunochnaya’s) were wide open, and all the windows he could see were open as well. A gentle breeze blew fitfully through the corridor.
“You’re
spring cleaning,” he said to Zorya Utrennyaya.