“Okay, I’ll let him go.”

“I do not want him going anywhere.”

“I see.” A pause. “I’ll have it taken care of.”

“I want you to take care of it. No one else, understood?”

“But that’s not my—” The middleman stopped. “Of course.”

“And I will need verification, some documentation, photos. Find a way to get them to me. Safely, of course.”

The collector hung up, took a step closer to the paintings, eyes flicking between them. “Oh, Lisa,” he said. “What I do for you.”

80

It had been a week since I’d gotten back to New York, the first few days spent getting over my bender, nursing my grief and exhaustion and shame. When not attending AA meetings, I had stayed home, moving from bed to couch, finally to the paint-stained chair in my Bowery studio where I’d stare, for hours, at the makeshift altar I’d created for my great-grandfather so many years ago. It appeared different now, laced with danger and tragedy. I considered dismantling it, had started twice, but a sense of hollow disappointment and unfinished business stopped me. Intersession would be over in a couple of days. I’d be back in the classroom, and I worried about facing my department chair and dealing with the tenure committee. What would I tell them? What did I have to show?

I wanted to forget everything that had happened, especially Smith’s death, but his ghost would not give up. Most of all, I wanted to forget Alex. Impossible. I could not stop thinking about her—who she was and where she was. I had tried her cell phone twice, listened to a recording that told me it was no longer a working number, had searched Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, had called Brooklyn Friends and was informed they’d never had a student named Alexandra Greene.

Had she lied about everything?

I had done my share of lying too, but not about my name.

Would I ever find her or hear from her? Did she even exist? I tried to pretend I didn’t care, though I thought about her every day, dreamed of her most nights. I wondered if she ever thought of me, if she had ever cared for me at all.

When my mother called and asked me to visit, I said yes, mainly out of guilt—it had been six months since I’d seen her. I took the bus from Port Authority, brought my laptop along and tried to do some schoolwork, but there was so much on my mind that I couldn’t.

Bayonne’s West Sixth Street never changed, and the overcast day didn’t help, gray sky, gray houses, gray leafless trees, gray siding of my old attached home in need of a touch-up. I was planning my escape before I reached the front door.

Inside, it seemed smaller than I remembered, the ceiling low, plastic-covered furniture crowded, fake flowers on the laminated-wood dining table, the air musty with melancholy. My mom had prepared dinner, and it wasn’t bad, had even made those pop-up oven rolls I’d loved as a boy, and I still liked them. She had stopped drinking a few years ago and was the better for it, though she still looked a decade older than her fifty-eight years, and it made me sad. My dad, the same age, looked eighty, and not a good eighty, fleshy pouches under bloodshot eyes, splotches of red on his cheeks and nose. He was distant at dinner, where he sucked down a six-pack, then collapsed in front of the blue light of the TV.