Through the open door, I saw a shabby vestibule with yellowed and peeling wallpaper. Beyond lay an unfurnished room carpeted in cracked linoleum, its ash-gray walls streaked with rusty stains.
The city hadn’t fallen silent again; the old building issued its endless settling noises, and the discordant symphony of the busy world outside penetrated its windows. But I couldn’t hear any sound particular to the apartment, no footsteps, no closing of a door, no voice.
Although I was not a reckless boy, I crossed the threshold, dismayed by my boldness but compelled as if some powerful spell of mortal curiosity had been cast upon me. The lowering sky must have grown darker even in the short time since I had left the alleyway, because when I proceeded from the vestibule into the living room, the light at the windows wasn’t just cheerless but steely with storm threat.
To the right lay a dining area and an open door through which I could see a portion of the kitchen. To the left, shadows as soft as crêpe de Chine swagged a windowless hallway.
With no windows open for ventilation, the air was warm and heavy and stale, woven through with old cooking odors and the reek of cat urine and the sourness of cigarette smoke that had condensed into a thin yellow film on many surfaces.
The linoleum looked as if it must be brittle and would crackle underfoot. Instead it proved to be unpleasantly spongy, as if webbed with mold, and I made hardly a sound as I went to the kitchen door and dared to look beyond. No one.
On the farther side of the living room, the hallway served a bathroom and four small bedrooms without furniture. In one of the latter, I discovered a sleeping bag beside which stood a large canvas satchel.
All of the closet doors had been standing open, perhaps as a less-than-adequate precaution against mildew growing and sporing while the apartment had remained unoccupied. I didn’t believe I had overlooked any corner in which Fiona Cassidy could have hidden.
The bottom sash of the single bedroom window had been raised. A feeble influx of air couldn’t stir the greasy, threadbare draperies.
Surely the young woman had not bunked here the previous night only to leap to her death in the morning. Nevertheless, with some dread, I ventured to the window and leaned out and peered down into the serviceway. No dead girl sprawled below.
If my dream ever proved in fact to be predictive, her fate was to be murdered, not to leave this world by suicide.
Turning from the window, I expected to find her behind me, but she wasn’t waiting there. Heart knocking, mouth dry, wondering again at my uncharacteristic audacity, I returned to the half-open front door and stepped into the sixth-floor hallway without encountering anyone—though I suspected that my intrusion had not gone unnoticed and that there would be a price to pay
for having followed the girl across that threshold.
As I reached the stairwell but before I entered it, I heard the door to Apartment 6-C slam shut. I looked back. No one. Either the door had been closed by a draft or … Or what? Was I to suppose that Fiona Cassidy had flown, not fallen, out of that open window to elude me and had flown back in after I’d gone? Even my spacious imagination could make no room for that possibility. And there had been no draft.
19
In our apartment once more, I took the plush-toy eye from the paper bag and put it in the center of my freshly made bed, looking toward the pillows. I walked from one side of the bed to the other and back again, watching the eye, but it didn’t turn to follow me.
“Idiot,” I said, chastising myself for indulging in such a childish fear.
In the kitchen, I took a pitcher of lime Kool-Aid out of the refrigerator, poured a glassful, and sat at the table.
I thought about going to the community center and putting in four hours at the keyboard. School would start in less than two weeks, and after that my practice time would be limited to at most two hours in the late afternoon. Usually I couldn’t wait to get to the piano and see Mrs. O’Toole, but that day, I felt something big was happening right under my nose, something incredible, like on Christmas Eve when I still believed in Santa. Except that this was not all sparkly and hopeful and fun like Christmas; it was something closer to that old movie about voodoo in the city.
Except that this was for real. I couldn’t just switch it off.
On the Formica-topped dinette table, sweat beaded the drinking glass. The droplets of water on the upper part of it were clear, glimmering, like diamonds. The beads on the lower part of the glass, which still contained the lime drink, were as green as emeralds. They were neither diamonds nor emeralds, of course; they were just beads of water, but I couldn’t stop staring at them and thinking about jewels, about being rich, about how if I were rich, we wouldn’t have any problems. Mom wouldn’t have to work at Woolworth’s lunch counter. We could own a nightclub, and she could sing there as much as she wanted, and we could own a record company, too, and she could be as famous and happy as she deserved to be. We wouldn’t have to worry about Tilton trying to snatch me away from her, because we’d have expensive lawyers and bodyguards. We’d live in a big house on a hill somewhere, with lots of land around it and a high fence, and we’d be safe from everyone, everything, even riots and war and young punks who talked dirty to women they didn’t know.
After all these years, I vividly remember that sweating glass of Kool-Aid, the anxiety that plagued me, anxiety on the trembling edge of foreboding, too much for a boy of nine to handle, and the false hope of riches that, even if it had been fulfilled, would have solved nothing.
One of the best things about growing up is that, if you can learn from experience, you come to the realization that two things matter more than anything else, truth with a lowercase t and Truth with an uppercase T. You have to tell the truth, demand the truth from others, recognize lies and refute them; you’ve got to see the world as it is, not as you want it to be, not as others who wish to dominate you might say it is. Embracing truth frees you from false expectations, fruitless pursuits, disappointment, pointless anger, envy, despair. And the bigger kind of Truth, that life has meaning, is the surest source of happiness, because it allows you to recognize your true value and potential, encourages a humility that brings peace. Most important, the big-T Truth makes it possible for you to love others for who they are, always without consideration of what they might do for you, and only from such relationships arise those rare moments of pure joy that shine so bright in memory.
Little more than two months past my ninth birthday, I was many years short of understanding all of that. In our tenement kitchen, I daydreamed of diamonds and emeralds, wishing away all troubles and threats. When I finished the Kool-Aid, I washed the glass, dried it, put it away. I wiped the condensation from the dinette table. I went into the living room and stared at the TV. I didn’t turn it on, which I suppose might have been a small step toward a far-off maturity.
In my bedroom, the fabric eye lay on the mattress, still gazing at the pillows. I’d been foolish to think it might be animated by juju. There was nothing supernatural about it. It was just trash.
I didn’t return it to the paper bag, which lay on the floor, where earlier I’d dropped it. But I didn’t throw it away. Instead, I hesitated, picked it up, circled the bed, and opened my nightstand drawer, from which I withdrew a metal box with a hinged lid.
The fancy painted box had once contained candy, a Christmas gift from Mr. and Mrs. Lorenzo the previous year. The lid featured a portrait of an Italian maiden dressed in a costume from centuries past. Flowing, gold-trimmed red script declared La Florentine, and below that, in a different font, blazed the word Torrone. The box had contained a pound and a half of almond nougat candies, a product of Italy, in three flavors—lemon, orange, and vanilla. The candy had been delicious, but of the bonbons and the colorful metal container, the latter seemed to be a greater treasure.
I kept things in the box that I valued or that intrigued me for reasons only a boy my age would understand, some more important than others. There were a dozen items, among them: a cat’s-eye marble in vivid shades of gold and blue, a penny flattened by train wheels and now the size of a half dollar, the copy of the lunch check from the restaurant where Mom and I ate the day after she sent Tilton packing, a silver dollar Grandma Anita had given me when I memorized the Our Father, which she said I should spend on the day of my confirmation.
The box didn’t contain the heart pendant with feather. I still kept that in a pants pocket, always with me.
I hesitated before adding the plush-toy eye to the trove. In the unlikely event that some dark magic was embodied in it, perhaps it might in some way contaminate the other items.