They came to lick at my face and hands and let me know it was long past time for a walk. I pulled Bear toward me and cried into his thick neck, for Joey and Alex and even Ned and what had just happened and everything, everything. There was always somuch, and now I wasn’t sure how much I had suffered and how much suffering I had caused.
Lemondrop nudged in against me, her head pushing against my hand to pet her. Bear sat next to me, and I clung to his neck. I didn’t know what else to do.
Sirens were wailing along Milwaukee Avenue, finally, finally, too late. Lemon’s ears pricked up, listening, and then she lifted her head and joined in, howling-ow-owling along. Singing at the top of her lungs.
57
After a few minutes, I crawled to the window bay overlooking Milwaukee Avenue and pulled myself up. My fingers were dark with Quin’s blood. Down below, the street was blocked with police cars, a fire engine, ambulances—whirling lights and a gathering crowd. The sirens wailed up and ground down, and Lemondrop tried to keep up. When someone on the street screamed and pointed in my direction, I drew back from the window.
They would say they’d seen the ghost. I wasn’t sure they were wrong.
Leaving the dogs behind, I stumbled through Oona’s closet to the door at the back and through the scuttle space. I had to drag the heavy box, tinkling glassware, out of the way, face the fairy door again, cringing with memory. On wobbling legs, I descended the stairs from the second apartment and entered the empty storefront, dreading what I might find, or who.
I crept through as quickly as possible, avoiding the bad section of floor by a wide berth, and arrived at the papered glass of the door.
Outside the air was so fresh, so cold, it stung my eyes.
The street was mad. Lights, sound. Police tape stretched from light pole to light pole, a crowd herded to the other side. An audience.
Faces turned as I emerged, dirty, quaking, my right hand red with someone’s blood.
Look, what do you need to see here?
My bandmates rushing to me with relief? Lumpy Jim, raising a shy hand from the back bumper of the ambulance? Pascal, our hero, his head in his hands?
Marisa and Sicily, reaching to envelop me? Do you need to see me flinching away to know that I did? I searched over their heads, impatient. Where was he? Where was Alex?
Do you need to see Detective Aycock lifting an eyebrow as I pushed through the bodies and questions, his colleagues and mine, to get to McPhee’s entrance?
No, you’re here for the same moment I was, scrambling through the vestibule.
I spotted Alex through the porthole window of the pub door, sitting on the customer side of his own bar, head low.
Oona turned at the sound of the door opening. Her expression crumpled and she stepped back, nodding to answer questions I couldn’t ask: Is he—? Are we—?
The door thumped closed behind me, and Alex looked up. His flannel shirt was filthy, the top button undone. A mess.
“Alex McPhee,” I said. “Lookat yourself.”
Alex slid off the stool and took the room in three big steps. We are not hugging people, but I leapt at him and drew in deep the scent of him: human, familiar, home. He swept me up, the toes of my boots barely touching the floor.
“Did you drag them on a tour of the entire city?” I asked.
“He took them to the bungalow,” Oona said from the bar. “They didn’t think much of his collection of old bottles, can you believe it?”
“Even the ones with whiskey still in them?” I cried, laughing through snotty tears.
“They’re worth a lot of money,” Alex said, as though he’d justthought of it. “But I guess…” He set me back down on my boots. “I guess we didn’t find any treasure.”
But I wasn’t ready to let go. I held on.
“That’s weird,” I said. “I’m pretty sure I did.”
Bridge
It snowed that night, fluffy flakes that blanketed the streets, the dirty ice. The city would be wrapped in white for Christmas. I couldn’t sleep. I watched from the window in the bungalow’s little blue bedroom as the city forgot, erased, and started over.
We had a couple of padded days like that, quiet interrupted by questions, visits from Aycock. The pub, closed. The landline at the house off the hook against media intrusion.
