I don’t know enough about New Haven any more to know if I’m safe or not, Frannie thought. That’s the problem. When Frannie was growing up here, New Haven was almost a country place. There was a slum, but nobody ever went there. There was crime, but it was the kind of crime that held very little interest for the media. Once, when Frannie was small, there was a corruption scandal in city government. Once, when she was in high school, a boy killed his girlfriend and left her body near the tracks behind the New Haven Railroad station. It all happened to people she didn’t know, who had nothing to do with her. Frannie and her mother lived in a big old Victorian house on Prospect Street. Frannie went back and forth across town on city buses, always in a crowd of girls in Saint Mary’s uniforms, always dreaming what she would do when she finally Got Out. Getting Out was the only real ambition of Frannie’s adolescent life, and now, back on the corner of Church and Chapel, she couldn’t even say whether she had ever achieved it.
There were car sounds in the distance again, coming from the right direction this time, Frannie was sure of it. She turned to look up the road, toward Yale. The streetlights seemed too dim to her, straining to shine through filthy glass globes. Something like rain was coming down on her head and stinging her ears. She was colder than she could ever remember being before in her life.
That’s what comes of spending twenty years in California, Frannie told herself, and then she saw it, the little blue station wagon, stopped for a light two blocks up. Frannie readjusted her duffel bag on her shoulders and leaned out into the road. The lights changed and the little blue station wagon came toward her, moving very slowly. The station wagon’s headlights looked like they were straining to shine through filthy glass globes, too. Maybe it was something in the air. Maybe, instead of being the place to come for good libraries and good museums and interesting theater, New Haven was now the place to come to collect free-floating dirt.
As the little blue station wagon reached Frannie’s corner, it pulled into the curb and rolled to a stop. Frannie took a deep breath. There was a man in the car, blonder than she was and very young and muscular. He could be the man she was waiting for, or he could be some jerk looking for a little action. Frannie had run into jerks looking for action before.
The driver’s side window came sliding down. The young man stuck his head out into the cold and asked, “Frances Jakumbowski? Is that you? Frances—”
“Frannie Jay,” Frannie said. “I don’t use the Jakumbowski. Nobody can spell it.”
“Right,” the young blond man said.
He fiddled with something inside the car, and Frannie heard a sharp click. It took her a moment to realize that the car’s doors were now unlocked. Back in California, a woman Frannie worked for had an entire apartment rigged up like that. Push a button near the front door, and every door and window in the place locked up. Frannie got a more comfortable grip on her duffel bag and went around to the car’s passenger side, out into the street. There were no other cars coming anyway. Frannie opened the back door on the passenger side and threw her duffel bag in. Then she opened the front door on that side and got in herself. At the last minute, she realized that the front door had letters painted on it in gold, nearly impossible to see in this bad light.
“The Fountain of Youth Work-Out,” the gold letters on the door read. Then, when Frannie was safely inside, she found more gold letters on the dashboard. These were printed on a plaque that had been fixed to the glove compartment door. They said, “Bring Your Body to the Fountain of Youth.” Frannie closed her eyes.
“It’s weird out here,” Frannie told the blond man, as the car pulled out into the street again. “Doesn’t New Haven celebrate Christmas anymore?”
“Of course New Haven celebrates Christmas,” the blond man said. “It’s weeks before Christmas.”
“Every other town in America has had its Christmas decorations up since the day after Thanksgiving. Why aren’t there any Christmas decorations here?”
“There are Christmas decorations here. You just didn’t notice them.”
Frannie peered through the windshield. There were no Christmas decorations that she could see. There were no people, either.
“It’s so deserted here,” she said. “When I was growing up, New Haven was always full of people. Even at night. Especially this close to Christmas.”
“When you were growing up here, there probably wasn’t this much crime. I come from Massachusetts myself. I hate this place. I want to go out to California, but there never seems to be a place. Not with Fountain of Youth. Maybe I should just take off.”