The attendant sighed. “It is Mary Kunkle?”
He’d butchered the last name. Willy glanced down the length of her shrouded body and noticed a toe tag ludicrously sticking out from under the far end of the sheet. It made her seem as if she were for sale.
He moved down to read the tag. It had her name and an address in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, just south of the Williamsburg Bridge.
That small detail triggered the dormant analytical part of his brain and made him lift the sheet off her left arm. The detective on the phone had said she’d died of an overdose, and there, as stark evidence, was not only the single fresh wound of a needle mark in the pale, skinny crook of her arm, but ancient signs of similar abuse clustered about it like memories refusing to disappear.
“Yes, that’s her,” he finally answered, stepping back, allowing the attendant to flip the sheet back over Mary’s face with all the detached flair of a custodian covering a sofa.
Willy stepped out into the city at night—huge, enveloping, teeming with life, extending for miles beyond reason. He looked around at the vaulting, gloomy, light-studded buildings looming over him like haphazardly placed monoliths, their black profiles outlined against a sky whose stars had been blotted out by the dull ocher stain of the city’s reflected glow. He knew it was a cliché, but he couldn’t shake the feeling of being just one of a million insects lost in an enormous ant farm, each a part of something whole, and yet, perhaps precisely because of that, utterly isolated. Mary had been one of them, and now lay dead, unnoticed and unmourned, for all he knew. He’d been one of them, too, and was feeling the ambivalence of being back in the fold. He wondered if erstwhile prisoners of Alcatraz felt the same way when they returned as ancient tourists.
The air had turned cooler and felt good against his forehead. He was hot and slightly dizzy, still teetering over the abyss between his past—exemplified by this city and the body in the morgue—and what he’d once thought was his future, but which all of a sudden was feeling impossibly remote. He stood on the sidewalk struggling to make sense of this time warp, worrying that the weight of the past would prove too heavy to shake off.
The smart thing would have been to get back in his car then and there and return to Vermont. He’d signed the morgue’s paperwork on the way out. The police and other authorities would be satisfied with his service and would know where to find him in any case. He could even make arrangements for Mary’s disposal long-distance, perhaps shipping her to her mother as a small poetic gesture.
But he knew he wouldn’t be doing any of that. He’d known it on the drive down. Mary’s death had made clear the need to settle issues he’d tried to abandon by escaping New York, but which had continued to cripple him as surely as any rifle bullet.
The real question, therefore, wasn’t whether he would stay in the city to discover what had pushed Mary to virtual suicide. It was whether the small glimmerings of hopefulness he’d recently been acquiring in Vermont would be strong enough to fight the undertow he could already feel tugging at his ankles.
He shivered and pulled his light coat tighter around his neck. The twilight season between winter and summer was hard to call spring in a world of concrete and steel. The days were pleasantly warm, but the nights still held a snow-sharpened edge. Burying his hands in his pockets, he set off toward the Lower East Side, some thirty blocks to the south.
The decision to walk had immediate benefits. It put him in motion, it let him blow off steam, and it took him outside of his own head, a place he knew wasn’t the healthiest of environments. In a telling paradox, however, walking these streets helped resurrect memories he’d been struggling to suppress since hitting the city limits.
He’d grown up in New York, near the George Washington Bridge at the north end of Manhattan. He knew these urban sounds and moods in particular, and was familiar with the almost organic energy that seeped from the city’s pavements like a steady pulse, twenty-four hours a day. Alone in the middle of a darkened street, you knew you were amid a huge number of people. You could almost hear their collective breathing.
And despite the sterility implied in the “concrete canyons” of lore, there were as many smells to this world as might linger in any rain forest. As he strode along, reacquainting himself with the rhythm of the evenly spaced city blocks, ignoring the metronomically regular pedestrian crosswalk signs in favor of what the traffic was really doing, Willy Kunkle picked up dozens of odors, some sour, some surprisingly sweet, most reminiscent of food, cooking or rotting, depending on his proximity to restaurant or alleyway. Most surprising was the occasional whiff of grass or silage, a furtive gift from an elusive Mother Nature.