I'm jumpy in a way I wasn't before the park. Every man who walks too close gets assessed — height, build, gait. I catch myself scanning doorways, the mouths of alleys, the dark space between parked cars. My body has learned something new, or maybe remembered something old, something written into the DNA of every creature who's ever had a predator. I'm watching for him.
The strange part is that I don't know, from moment to moment, whether I'm watching because I'm afraid he's there or because I'm hoping he is.
I pull out my phone somewhere between a gallery and a coffee kiosk and I open the browser and I type my father's name before I've decided to. Robert Ayton. Delaware. That's what I have: a name and a state and six years of nothing. The results load and I stop walking, standing at the edge of the sidewalk with people moving around me, and I look at them.
His Facebook profile. A LinkedIn, updated two years ago, a job title at a company in Wilmington. A mention in a local news article — something about a community board, his name in a list of attendees, proof he still exists.
He's out there. He's been out there this whole time, kept living in the state I left, kept attending meetings and updatinghis LinkedIn and being the kind of person who shows up to community board events, while I was in Seattle and Portland and Chicago and New York, while I was being nobody in a series of cities that never needed me.
My thumb hovers over his profile photo.
He'll look older. He might be remarried. Sober now, a photo of him smiling with a new family — proof that he moved on while I stayed frozen. Or maybe he's worse, drinking himself to death in the same house where my mother died. Either way, reality would be confirmed, and I can’t face that.
I close the browser. Stand there for another moment with the phone in my hand and the city moving past me.
Then I keep walking.
Lori Yates surfaces somewhere around the second gallery. Lori was a sculptor, always had clay under her nails and a laugh that arrived too loud and without warning. We shared an apartment junior year. We stayed up until three in the morning talking about everything — art, families, fear, what we wanted our lives to look like from the outside. The kind of friendship that felt structural.
She texted me for eight months after I left. I have that number memorized still, which is a strange thing to know about yourself — that you memorized the number of a person you were ghosting, as if some part of you knew you'd want it later.
I miss her. God, I barely recognize the feeling at first because it's been so long since I felt anything at all. I miss her. The actual ache of Lori Yates not being here, of not being able to tell her about being kidnapped in the park, about last night, about the way my knees are bruised and my scalp is tender and I’m still wet from thinking about it and I don't know what to do with any of it.
She'd have something useful to say. She always did.
I stand in front of a mural of an eye the size of a car, scanning for strangers and missing my friend and not clicking through to my father's life, and underneath all of it my heart is beating in a way I can feel in my fingertips.
The numbness is seeping away, and I don’t know if I like that.
I'm back in the penthouse by three.
The afternoon light comes in at a different angle now, hitting the marble in long copper strips. The apartment has a smell I've started to recognize — climate-controlled air mixed with salt. I change out of my jacket, drink a glass of water, and drift through the space until I end up at the dining table with the sketchbook in front of me. My pencil is already in my hand. I don't remember reaching for it.
I draw the mask first.
Blank. Inhuman. The flat white oval of it — no features, no expression, just dents and bumps, a face that isn't a face. I shade the hollows and the result is wrong the first time — too symmetrical, too theatrical. I erase and try again. Closer. The blankness is the thing that's hard to capture; a face without expression still communicates something.
I get it on the third try.
Next I draw the face underneath.
I've only seen him clearly in certain lights — the bar at the Setai, the penthouse in the evening when he was injured, that one unguarded moment when the elevator doors were closing and the mask was off and I caught his expression before he'd had time to arrange it. Blue eyes. The precise jaw.
My pencil moves without intervention on my part. He assembles on the page — the sharp line of his face, the controlled mouth, the blond hair he keeps immaculate like control is his religion. The something-alive behind his eyes that he doesn't show but can't always keep hidden.
Then both together. The blank mask placed over the face it covers, the two versions of him transparent and superimposed, overlapping until you can't see where one ends and the other starts. Neither is false. The mask and the man.
I fill five pages before I surface.
The light has moved again.
I close the notebook. I set it on the table and look at it sitting there — this battered, cheap thing — and I leave it exactly where it is.
I go to the bathroom just before seven.
Turn on the light. Look up.
The mirror stops me.
