The art, he reminded himself, might still be forged. Even if everything worked out, there was still the possibility, however remote, that their trouble getting into the house today, and all this protestation, were part of some long, crazy con behind which Frank was the mastermind. But what in the world could these people gain from it? Not money.
Yale had never been able to take good fortune on its own terms. His fear of being tricked went back to at least sixth grade, to the day the basketball roster was posted and a classmate added Yale’s name to the list in careful mimicry of the coach’s handwriting. Yale showed up for practice unaware he’d been cut, and the coach looked at him and, with no trace of meanness, said, “Mr. Tishman, what are you doing here?” Behind him, the team had laughed and coughed and pounded each other’s backs. While they ran laps for punishment, the coach asked Yale if he’d like to be the equipment manager. He didn’t look surprised when Yale said no.
This had been followed by a thousand small cruelties over the next seven years of school, a thousand baits and traps. And all the while, Yale had tried, hopelessly, to trick everyone around him about the biggest thing of all, hoping against hope that they’d fall for his professed crush on Helen Appelbaum, his ogling of the girls’ volleyball team. But they never did, and Yale understood that he would always be the tricked, never the tricker. It was why part of him had assumed, the night of Nico’s memorial, that he was the victim of some coordinated meanness. And perhaps it was for similar reasons that Charlie had assumed even worse things that night. Charlie had it worse growing up, English schools being what they were.
But Yale was a grown man, and even if the world wasn’t always a good place, he reminded himself that he could trust his perceptions now. Things were so often exactly what they seemed to be. Take Bill Lindsey here, leaning across the table to Roman, talking about the art professor who “really opened me up, if you know what I mean.” Take the snow out the window, falling so deliberately. Take the waiter, checking his watch.
2015
Fiona covered as much ground as she could that afternoon, figuring that even if Claire was no longer here, someone who’d known her when she had been here could be helpful. She tried art supply stores, yoga studios, every vaguely approachable person on the sidewalk.
Shrugs, sympathetic smiles, confusion. Two people took pictures of the photo with their phones, copied down her number.
She ought to be back in the States, where Claire was most likely to be. But after they searched the apartment, she could lasso Kurt, with or without Arnaud’s help. Enormous as he was, she could sit on him till he talked.
She ended up back on the Pont de l’Archevêché. Mostly empty, again. Sections of it were still covered in padlocks, as they’d been in the video, but some panels of chain link had been cleared and covered with plywood. A giant heart sticker was affixed to the sidewalk, an English message printed in white on the red: “Our bridges can no longer withstand your gestures of love.” In the heart’s right atrium, a crossed-out lock.
On the other side of the bridge, a man leaned over to stare at the tour boat passing below.
She rested her back against the railing, facing not the water, not Notre Dame, but the width of the bridge itself. It was a cold day, foggy and damp. How long could she stand here, waiting and watching, before someone worried she was a suicide?
When no other pedestrians were on the bridge, she called Claire’s name down the river. Because it wouldn’t do any good, and wasn’t it nice, for a change, to do something she knew would do no good? She was tired and hungry again, and she needed to get back to the apartment and call Damian before it was too late in the States. She needed to call the store and make sure Susan was running everything smoothly.
She shouted for Claire ten times. It felt like a lucky number.
Beginning in fifth grade, Fiona was in the habit of taking the train nearly every Saturday to see Nico while her parents thought she was at Girl Scouts. The leaders never cared if you showed up, so she made sure to put in just enough appearances (the first meeting of the year, the last, the field trips) that she remained on the troop’s roster. But most Saturdays, she’d take the Metra to Evanston, and then the El all the way down to Belmont.
She’d carry a backpack filled with things she’d filched from the cupboards and refrigerator up in Highland Park. Half a carton of cottage cheese, a stick of butter, leftover chili, a sleeve of Ritz. Spoons, once, when Nico didn’t have enough. Items from his room, so slowly her parents wouldn’t notice: socks, photographs, tapes. She wished she could bring his records, but they wouldn’t fit in her backpack—and besides, his roommates seemed to have plenty. It dawned on her only years later that they hadn’t needed any of the things she’d brought, not really. They could have stolen spoons from a restaurant. Between them, they could have afforded food.
There were five of them, sometimes six or seven, living in one room above a bar on Broadway. Almost all of them teenagers. She found out only years later, as Nico was dying, that some of them had been hustling. Nico had a job bagging groceries, and between that money and Aunt Nora’s money, and the few dollars Fiona managed to sneak him (she’d steal change all week to pay for her train tickets, give him what was left), he managed to stay off the streets. At least this was what he’d maintained to the end. She didn’t imagine he’d tell her, though, because then she’d have felt it was her fault, that she hadn’t done enough, back when she was only a kid and was doing all she could.
She would knock on the door and he’d fling it open and say “Feef the Thief!” and scoop her inside. It was Christmas every time, watching him open the backpack, remove the items one by one. His roommates would crowd behind him, cheer for things like the spoons. Once, she managed a bottle of wine. They couldn’t believe it. One of them—was it Jonathan Bird?—made up a song about her. She wished she could remember it.
Nico had his own place by the time she moved to the city after high school, but a lot of those guys were still around, still called her Feef the Thief, loved to tell these stories right in front of her. “This kid was Robin Hood!” they’d said. James, Rodney, Jonathan Bird. She might not have remembered Jonathan Bird, except that he was the very first to die. So early that he didn’t die of AIDS, because there was no such acronym; he died of GRID. The G stood for gay, and she’d blocked out the rest. Jonathan had been healthy one day, and the next he had a cough, and a week later he was in the hospital, and the next day he was gone.
It hadn’t occurred to Fiona till just now, her hands gripping the cold bridge railing, that her mother might have known where she was going all those weekends, all those years. As she got older, when Girl Scouts wasn’t a legitimate excuse, she’d made up stories about skating parties, study sessions. Maybe her mother had left her purse unguarded for a reason. As she called Claire’s name one last time into the wind, as the city returned her voice on the wet air, Fiona remembered her mother calling and calling for Nico in the yard when they were kids. Had she ever stopped calling for him? Had she ever stopped leaving coins around, hoping they’d find their way to her boy?