Many people feared the subway these days, since the anthrax letters and the smallpox threats and the knowledge (no truer than before, but now everyone's eyes had been opened) that any briefcase could be a bomb and any rider, a bomber. Some people had stopped taking the subway. Some wouldn't ride the bus, go to the movies, or shop at Lord & Taylor. Laura did all these things, though now on the subway or in a store her eyes roved her surroundings, she swung her head toward sudden sounds, her skin prickled the same way it did when she walked alone down a dark street at night.
No, fear of the subway was not a problem for Laura. But the subway would take her uptown quickly, and Laura understood enough about herself to know that that was the reason why, today, on her way to Harry's apartment, she was tempted to walk.
Harry's building: rough tan brick patterned with bricks of a darker brown. Sunlight flashed off the windows, cast watery squares on the building across the street as Laura approached from the west. She'd walked around the block to come up from Riverside Drive, a way she seldom used. The ploy was not effective, though. As the building came into view, even from this unfamiliar angle, her heart faltered and her feet slowed and stumbled.
The lobby: calm walls of a clear, pale blue, quiet lighting from discreet sconces, lustrous terrazzo floor. Two chairs by the elevator and a table for your mail. A painting of sailboats; a gilt-framed mirror. Music, as always, just audible from the doorman's radio. Different doormen, different music. As Laura walked in, it was opera.
The doorman himself: Hector, a Puerto Rican twenty years with the building. He hurried to the door for Laura and told her in accented English that he was very sorry. He said it again in Spanish, as though his grief wasn't complete until put that way.
The elevator: dark wood paneling, gouged and chipped with age but carefully polished. Creaky noises and slight shakes as it went about its business. Like me, Harry always said.
Harry's door: black like all the others. His name in the bronze square. Today's papers piled on the mat.
The dryness of her mouth and the chill on her skin as she turned the knob surprised Laura. Reporter-Laura pushed her forward. Reporter-Laura was not afraid of ghosts. She stumbled through the door, her heart choppy. A breeze from the open window rustled papers on Harry's desk; she jumped, then stood still and looked dumbly around. Reporter-Laura waited, her impatience growing, as the real Laura, her heart breaking, stared at the chairs, tables, rugs, and books. All these things were Harry's. He'd lived among them for so long, and now they stood patiently waiting, and they didn't know he wasn't coming back.
She could feel Reporter-Laura's amused contempt at the idea that she was feeling bad for the furniture. She didn't care. But what blurred her vision was the thought, too swift, too natural for her heart's guards to embargo and turn back, that she'd have to ask Harry if he'd ever felt this way, too.
Laura sat in the armchair and cried. A few times in the last year, she had cried with Harry there, for reasons she couldn't remember now. Except September 11, the obvious reason, which took no remembering, permitted no forgetting. She did remember Harry's silence, and the stroke of his hand on her hair. The indifferent empty blankness of the room now was so utterly unlike Harry's enveloping, companionable quiet that she could not use the same name for it.
Shakily she rose. She went into the white-tiled kitchen with the ancient fixtures Harry had refused to replace. Water hissed into the sink from bronze piping with ornate handles. She splashed it on her face, ran it up her arms, rubbed it on the back of her neck. She stared at it running away, racing to disappear.
Why had she come here, where everything was so hard?
She wasn't sure of the answer, but Reporter-Laura was.
Work.
Work was what she'd come for. Harry's desk, his computer, his file drawers—she had a lot to do. She turned off the tap. The silence that flooded the room was so thick and swampy, she had to force her way through it.
As she turned to walk back into the living room, though, she stopped, she and her heart, for a moment. On the kitchen table stood a pitcher holding roses Harry had brought her early in the week. Their buds had been tightly furled when he'd pulled them with a flourish—ta da!—from behind his back; now they'd shattered, dropping crimson petals on the tabletop, on the floor. Laura gathered the fallen petals and the sad stems, and threw them out.
She had not told Leo about the roses. She had not known how. The truth was so simple, she was afraid it would sound simpleminded, would confirm Leo's suspicion that Laura Stone was on a baseless, emotional crusade: not a reporter chasing a headline but a forlorn lover chasing a vanishing ghost.
But Harry had brought her roses.
