Back in the Heights, heading toward home, I felt a perceptible shift in my thoughts. Already Anna Brody was less present in everything—in the black patches of unmelted snow, in the gray winter sky, and in the ash-smudged foreheads of the parishioners filing out of St. Charles Borromeo on Sidney Place. With each exhalation of my cold, steamy breath, I felt her leaving me, so that by the time I hit Oak Lane, I felt like a new and improved version of my old self. I was Tim Welch again.

And thus began a period of unprecedented productivity.

Day and night I worked, fueled by Coca-Cola and loud music that I blasted through headphones plugged into Kate’s portable CD/tape player. Incidentally, any music with lyrics distracted me, so I began each night with Pachelbel’s Canon in D cranked at full volume—then later, Bach, Vivaldi, Beethoven. Under these influences, I slashed my work, moved entire sections, edited with abandon.

Like old Thomas Edison, I didn’t sleep much. I took brief naps, sometimes lying down under my worktable. I didn’t shave. I showered at odd times. I began to look like a savage. I didn’t recognize myself. I didn’t go to the gym as planned, so I didn’t do the sit-ups and the push-ups and the pull-ups and the full-body crunches. There was no time, which may explain why I began to speak more quickly, my words and phrases clipped. I stood a bit straighter. Still, I loved the simplicity of my life. During those hours the boys were in preschool, I worked. When they bathed, I edited. When they watched a video or the Cartoon Network, I revised. And after an all-nighter, my eyes raw from no sleep, my caffeinated body shaking from all the Cokes, I’d stop in time to make breakfast for Kate and the boys—pancakes or oatmeal, turkey bacon, apple slices, cantaloupe cubes—an early-morning feast. Then I’d hurry them out the door, do the dishes, and get back at it.

My goal? Just finish the fucking thing.

KATE

KATE

UNDERSTAND THAT I WAS THE LEAST DRUNK OF THE VERY DRUNK, BUT ONLY BECAUSE I arrived late. Had Debbie Beebe stayed, she would’ve had clearer, more reliable memories of what has since become the most notorious of those evenings that we call Girls’ Night Out. But since Debbie had given birth to twin girls a few months earlier—in fact, this was her first night away from them—she was eager to get back home, which conveniently happened to be just upstairs. The Beebes lived on the top three floors of a two-family brownstone co-op they shared with Claudia and Dan Valentine.