Part 6:
” “Emma, you have your lunch?” “Yes, Abuelita.” “Good girl. Kiss your father.” Emma turned and ran back to Ryan and hugged him around the waist, hard and fast, the way she always did, like she was making sure the hug got all the way through, and then she ran back to Rosa and took her hand.
Ryan watched them walk down the block until they turned the corner. Rosa did not look back. Rosa never looked back. Emma looked back once, waved, and was gone. He walked home slowly. The sidewalks were slick with the kind of frost that wasn’t really frost yet, more like the memory of frost. A man across the street was trying to start a snowblower that probably hadn’t been started since last March.
The snowblower coughed and gave up. The man swore at it in Russian. Ryan didn’t know it was Russian, just that it wasn’t English. He got back to the apartment at 8:22. He made his bed. He hadn’t made his bed in a month. He didn’t know why he was making it now. He wiped down the kitchen counter. He put away the two clean dishes from the drying rack.
He stood in the middle of his living room and looked at it like a stranger would, and he saw the sag in the couch and the $2 lamp from the thrift store and the bookshelf he’d built himself out of boards from a pallet. And for a second he felt something that was not quite shame, but was adjacent to it, and then he let it go.
Because there was no version of the next hour in which his apartment became a different apartment, and there was no point in pretending there was. At 8:56 he heard the engines. He was in the kitchen when he heard them, rinsing out his teacup. He turned off the water. He listened. He walked to the front window of the living room and pulled back the curtain.
Four black SUVs were parked on Birch Street. They had come down the block without him hearing them arrive. They were parked in a kind of loose staggered line, the way military vehicles parked in the movies, although Ryan had never been in the military and couldn’t have said if he was right about that. They were big and clean and looked like they had never driven on a dirt road in their lives.
Men in dark suits were getting out of three of them. Two men from the first, one from the second, two from the third. The fourth SUV still had its driver inside and its passenger door closed. Ryan counted the men. He counted them again. He was not someone who was used to counting men in suits in front of his building. He let the curtain fall.
He stood in the middle of his living room and he noticed, with the small part of his brain that was still noticing things, that he was holding a dish towel. He set the dish towel on the arm of the couch. A car door opened downstairs. He heard it from the sidewalk, through the thin glass of his window. Footsteps.
The outer door of the building opening. The mailboxes clanging shut because the outer door always banged them when it swung too hard. Footsteps on the stairs. Three knocks. Ryan walked to the door. He stopped with his hand on the knob. He had the strangest feeling, which was that if he did not open the door in the next 5 seconds, his life would go on being his life.
And if he opened the door, it would not. He opened the door. The man on the other side was in his 50s, tall, clean-shaven, with the kind of build that suggested he had once played a sport nobody remembered him for. He had a Bluetooth thing in his ear. He was not smiling. Mr. Hale? Yes. My name is Marcus Pell. I work for Ms. Arden. She is in the vehicle.
She asked if you’d be willing to come down and speak with her. Down to the street? Yes, sir. She doesn’t want to come up? She didn’t say, sir. She said to ask. Ryan looked past him. The hallway was empty. He could see through the stairwell window the top of one of the SUVs. Ms. Arden, Ryan said slowly. Yes, sir. That’s her last name? Yes, sir.
Celeste Arden. Yes, sir. Ryan had heard the name before. He couldn’t place it exactly. He had the feeling of trying to remember a song lyric by its second word. Give me 1 minute, Ryan said. Yes, sir. Don’t say, “Sir.” Yes? The man stopped. A small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth and then gave up. All right. Ryan closed the door.
He leaned his forehead against it for a second. He walked back into the bedroom and put on a clean shirt, a blue flannel that had been Marlene’s father’s and that was a size too big for him. He looked at himself in the mirror over the dresser. He ran a hand through his hair. He needed a haircut. He’d needed a haircut for 2 months.
He went downstairs. Marcus Pell was waiting on the landing. He walked down behind Ryan, not beside him, the way a person walks who is used to walking behind someone. Out on the sidewalk, the other men in suits were standing in positions that were not random. Ryan noticed that. One of them was at each end of the block. One was watching the alley.
The other two were near the vehicles. Nobody was looking at Ryan directly. They were all looking at everything except Ryan. The fourth SUV, the one that had not let anyone out, was the one Marcus walked him to. Marcus opened the back door. Celeste Arden was sitting inside. She was wearing a different coat than yesterday, charcoal, longer, and a cream-colored turtleneck under it, and her hair was no longer pulled back messily, but was down and brushed, and sat on her shoulders like a thing that had been attended to.
