Outside, I stood before the stone arch and studied the sculpture at its top: the winged goddess of victory, a horse and chariot straining forward. It was spring, the earthy flowerbeds pungent and soft with thaw. Traffic flowed around me on Flatbush and Vanderbilt Avenues, but the green northern edge of Prospect Park dulled the noise and fumes. That day it seemed not that the world was right again but that perhaps the possibility of rightness would return. Gary Lightfoot’s calm confidence, the loping curl of his script across the page, the long haughty Ah: for the first time since Joe’s death, I did not feel crushed by the weight of his absence. The idea of Luna filled me like helium, and I ran down the subway steps and toward home.
But Gary Lightfoot did not find Luna. After four months he announced that Luna Hernandez was almost certainly dead.
Caroline and I met him in his little Brooklyn office. Rain fell heavily against Gary’s one window, which shook and rattled with the wind. The room appeared shabbier and smaller than I remembered.
“You’re almost certain she’s dead?” Caroline said. Already she had paid him sixteen thousand dollars.
There were no credit-card records, no travel records, no rental cars or car purchases, Gary explained. Internet searches turned up nothing. The last known address for Luna and her mother proved unhelpful, as had the national databases. “She’s a naturalized citizen, but she never applied for a Social Security number,” Gary said. He had found no death certificate, but this meant very little. Thousands of people died every year in the United States without identification or family to claim them, their bodies summarily cremated, the ashes scattered at sea. “And those are the ones who are found!” Gary exclaimed. “Imagine how many people stay where they fall. Those people are just gone.” I thought he said this with rather too much gusto. “Luna has effectively disappeared,” he concluded, waving his hand with a sharp downward chop.
“But we knew that already,” Caroline said. “That’s why we hired you.” A sudden flash of sun entered through the rain-spattered window and cast speckled shadows over the papers and books on Gary’s desk. The Best of Raymond Chandler, I read on one spine. Fingerprint Analysis for Dummies on another. I felt a mild responsibility for this situation, but it was dull and distant. Gary had done his best. Look at his sharp suit, the shirt cuffs white and starched stiff. Listen to the honey pour of that voice.
“Well,” Gary said to Caroline, shrugging, “disappeared and dead are versions of the same thing. I’m not a miracle worker, Mrs. Duffy.”
Outside on the street, Caroline turned to me. We had no umbrella, only our coats. I shivered. The rain plastered Caroline’s hair to her head and darkened it into rivulets of brown that streamed rainwater down her shoulders and chest. Her blue eyes blazed. “Fiona. What was that?” She pointed a finger in the general direction of Gary Lightfoot’s building. “Why didn’t you find someone better? That was all you had to do. That was it. I told you to find someone to help us. You have nothing else going on. You barely go to work, you’re not even writing anymore. You have all this time. I paid that man so much money. So much! Nathan and I can barely afford it. And for what?” She paused for the briefest moment, too short for me to formulate a response.
“You are always taking advantage, always using me,” Caroline continued. “Using us, me and Renee, for money or meals at fancy restaurants or help with whatever. And Joe. You used Joe, too. Why don’t you have your own life? Why are you never in a relationship? Why do you always say you hate your job but never look for another one? You’re the youngest, sure, Fiona, but you’re thirty years old! Nothing is serious for you. Everything is a game. And why did you pretend you knew what was going on with Joe? Why did you lie to me that day before his party? Why did you say he was okay? That he didn’t need help? Maybe Renee and I . . . maybe we could have helped him. Maybe—”
Caroline stopped speaking. She shook her head and looked at me through the rain.
“Caro, I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought—”
“What did you think, Fiona? What? That the detective was cute? That he might fuck you?”
“No.” I knew that Caroline was upset; she was angry, she didn’t know what she was saying. “I thought he could help us.”
“That ridiculous man?”
“I thought it would be okay.”
“It’s not okay. It will never be okay.”
The rain had infiltrated my coat and spread steadily across my shoulders and down my back. I felt it as a stain, a mold. “Caroline—” I said, and stopped.
Caroline shook her head one last time and then turned and walked very quickly along the sidewalk away from me. Within a block she hailed a cab and ducked inside.
I stood on the wet pavement, thinking that perhaps Caroline would return. We had arrived here together; her car was parked outside my apartment building—but no. My sister was gone.
* * *
I did not see or speak to Caroline for another five years. My calls and e-mails went unreturned. Nor did I speak to Renee, not really. She remained busy, traveling, always out of phone range or forgetful or uninterested, and I made no special effort to reach her. It was Noni who kept me informed about my sisters. Renee and Jonathan were in India, Venezuela, Zaire. Jonathan’s work appeared frequently in home-design magazines. Madonna had ordered a chair; Robert De Niro a twelve-foot-long dining table. Caroline isn’t doing well; Nathan is working so hard; the kids are great. Noni provided information in a straightforward way, withholding any advice or judgment, reporting the facts of my sisters’ movements and moods as though discussing the weather. I took the information in the same way. I did not respond with emotion or questions, only an acceptance of these facts.
During this period I considered myself an emotional vagrant. I did not reside in a specific place over which I might exert control—repaint the kitchen, say, or knock down a wall—but in a relentless state that remained absolutely the same regardless of what I did, where I traveled. I did not live in Queens, New York, with a rotating cast of underemployed roommates. Caroline did not live in Connecticut with her family and pets. Renee was not treating patients in Chiapas while a subletter watered her plants and gathered the mail in New York. Each of us occupied the same boundless space of a world without our brother. Each of us gazed at the same horizon that would never appear closer or farther away, that merely underlined the enormity of our solitude. Friends and family milled around us, and yet each of us stood in that space alone. It was as though the care we had shown each other as children had been revealed as faulty, flawed, riddled with holes. Now we avoided any interaction that reminded us of what we once had assumed ourselves to be.
I continued to search for Luna. In a way we all did. Even Renee. We searched for Luna as we searched for ourselves, the people we were forced to become.
Chapter 14
One Saturday I took the train from Long Island City, switched at Court Square, and rode the subway to Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. I exited to the quiet bustle of early-morning Bedford Avenue. The last big storm had hit two weeks before, and icy piles of gray snow remained in front of unused doorways, marking the sides of abandoned cars. It was cold, a dry, brittle cold that stung my lips and made my eyes water. The year was 2008, two years after Joe’s accident, a year since I’d last spoken to either of my sisters. The Iraq War dragged on, presidential candidates won and lost in state primary elections, but I barely read the news anymore. World events, even climate change, were happening elsewhere.