She leaned away again.
Her gaze moved to one of the pictures of Chris as a baby. In this one, he was staring off to one side. But then she tilted her head and frowned. Something about it wasn’t right. The nose and the eyes. The shape of the whole face. There were other photographs of her brother as a baby in the composition, and in each of those she could already see traces of the man he would grow up to be.
But this one didn’t look anything like him at all.
She stepped back from the painting. As she did so, the individual images of the past disappeared, vanishing into the larger picture of the present they had been arranged to create. Then she turned around and walked over to the table, and began to search through the material Alderson had been working from. Most of it was photographs, but halfway down the pile she found something else. It was a small, torn piece of newspaper. There was no date visible, but the paper was brittle and yellow, and it was clearly many years old.
The baby on the canvas.
The print composing the child’s face was long faded now, and the words beneath only barely visible. But she could still just about read them, and as she did so she felt a shiver run down her back, like a cold finger tracing the length of her spine.
Nathaniel Leland, seven months, remains missing.
A door opened downstairs, and the distant sound of the radio became a little louder.
“Hello?”
A man’s voice calling up from the landing below.
Then the creak of a foot on the stairs.
“You guys back?”
She held her breath and kept still. Just a student, she told herself. Nothing to worry about. And yet she didn’t want to be discovered here. So she waited. There were a few more seconds of silence, and then she heard whoever was down there retreating, followed by the sound of a door being closed.
She looked down at the newspaper clipping again. Who was this child? But that was a mystery she couldn’t solve right now, and so she folded the clipping carefully and put it in her pocket.
You guys back?
The man downstairs must have been referring to Chris and Alderson. And while they weren’t here now, if they had been once, then perhaps they would be again. She found a chunky pencil, the tip sharpened roughly with a knife, then leaned over the blank canvas on the table and began to write.
Chris. It’s Katie. I want to know you’re okay. Please call me.
She added her cell phone number. Then she stared at the message for a few seconds, hesitating.
Unsure.
But in the end she did it, adding another line in underneath. One that had felt blocked in her head for a moment there, but which then seemed to unspool out of her.
I love you.
Katie leaned the canvas against the wall, where anybody walking into the room would see it. And then, after one last look at that painting behind her—at all those pasts that had come together to create the present—she headed out of the room, closed the door behind her, and crept quietly downstairs again.
Thinking:
Who were you so frightened of, Chris?
And where the hell are you?
Fourteen
A park.
It was in the middle of the city, and nobody’s idea of a destination: just one of the center’s few remaining squares of something approximating greenery. There were no flower beds here, and the trees were arranged in ugly, unplanned bunches, the grass between them dotted with fallen leaves. The paths crisscrossing the area could be walked in half a minute or less, and most people kept to the sidewalks outside instead.
Not a special place to anyone.
Except them.
Chris and James were sitting on an old bench, their backpacks on the ground in front of them. They had spent most of the day so far aimlessly walking the streets of the city. It was something to do. Now they were sitting quietly, drinking coffee in silence—or a sort of silence, Chris thought. Because it was that awkward kind of quiet where it felt like a lot was being said without it being spoken.
He looked up. The sky above was a shade of gray that couldn’t even bring itself to promise rain. It was just a blank, featureless expanse, entirely uninterested in the world below it. For many years, that was how he had thought of the city in general. Other people saw it as home, but sleeping rough on its streets had given him a different perspective. Everywhere you looked—if you looked—you saw shuttered windows, boarded-up doorways, unfriendly faces. Even the shops seemed to stare at you suspiciously. And the message you received if you could bring yourself to listen was loud and insistent. You don’t belong here. You’re not welcome.
And for a long time, he had believed that was true.
He didn’t anymore, but that made him think about Alan Hobbes, and he wasn’t ready to do that just yet. The question came anyway. The one that was hanging unspoken between him and James right now.
What the fuck are we going to do?
* * *
A different memory.
This was a year and a half ago—maybe a month or so after he’d gotten clean, and at a point when he had still been unaccustomed to the freedoms available to him. During his time in the clinic, the rules had been strict and his routine rigorously regimented. When he emerged on the last day, blinking at the harsh light, it had been as though he were experiencing the world for the first time, like a newborn child. A month after that, it had still felt alien to him that he could leave his apartment—his own apartment!—at will and go wherever he wanted. By that point he was working for Alan Hobbes, but the requirements of the job were far from arduous or time-consuming. There had been nothing much demanded of him at all, beyond basic household tasks, being available on call to attend to the occasional request, and—this most of all—sitting and listening to the old man when he was taken by the desire to talk.
On a day off, he had wandered into the city center one lunchtime and found himself here, sitting on this bench, eating a sandwich from a plastic package, with a takeaway carton of hot coffee beside him.
Soaking in the silence.
Minding his own business.
Chris had seen the man from the back to begin with, his attention caught first by his long hair and the large waterproof coat he was wearing, and then by his behavior. The man was taking photographs of the cluster of trees across from them both. He kept squatting and holding his camera to his face, standing and checking the screen, then shifting position and crouching down again.
The whole time, he was moving gradually backward in Chris’s direction, like a chess piece slowly maneuvering itself into position. Chris might have mistaken it for a deliberate approach if the man hadn’t been so clearly unaware of his presence.
In the month or so he had been out, he’d barely spoken to anyone. There had been Hobbes, and a couple of the other workers at the house when their paths crossed, but nothing really initiated by him. And there was no reason to speak to this stranger now, of course, beyond their growing proximity.
But a part of him wanted to.
A little, at least. But it was also stupid. If he’d had a die with him, he might have rolled it. Ten or below, say, and he would speak; anything above and he would mind his own business. Leave it up to chance, in other words—albeit heavily weighted toward maintaining the status quo.
But the thought reminded him of a conversation he’d had with Hobbes a couple of nights before. The old man had been intrigued that Chris had enjoyed role-playing games when he was younger. Chris wasn’t sure how the subject had come up, but Hobbes had a way of doing that—of steering the conversation round to whatever he wanted to talk about—and they’d ended up talking about what it meant to leave decisions and repercussions to the rolls of dice.