Innocence: A Novel (15 page)

Never before had I seen more than three or four Clears in one night. I was delighted by these multitudes.

They neither spoke to one another nor appeared to be engaged in coordinated activities. Each seemed to be going calmly about his own business, whatever that might be, and some were solemn while others smiled. I felt that they were all listening to something I couldn’t hear, which might mean that they were telepathic and were attuned to one another, though I had no way of knowing.

The few drivers who were out at that hour were oblivious of the luminous crowd. They drove right through some of them, and it was
as if both the Clears and the vehicles were mirages, each unaffected by the others, as though they were from different dimensions, combined in this one scene only by virtue of my gifted eyes.

As I moved in wonder, block after block, a few of the Clears looked at me, and in each instance I turned away at once. But in the split second during which our eyes met, I felt every time as though a cube of dry ice had been swiped the length of my spine, the chill so intense that I wouldn’t have been surprised to discover my skin blistered from my topmost vertebra to my coccyx.

They did frighten me then, but only briefly, and I continued to delight in the sight of them. I saw thousands of Clears that night, and never again enjoyed a spectacle like it.

For days afterward, I felt that something new should happen, some event that the city had never played host to before and that no one could have imagined in advance of its occurrence. But time went by, and nothing came to pass that didn’t befall the city’s people every day. I was mildly disappointed until I thought that perhaps the unimaginable episode that I anticipated had been something that the Convocation had been there not to facilitate but to forestall.

And with that realization, I felt the dry ice sliding down my spine again, though not a single Clear was present.

IN THE COMMONS, ON THE FOOTPATH BY THE POND
, I waited in a cold that deepened by the minute, thinking I might see the first crystals of ice form on the shallow black water along the shore.

Gwyneth wasn’t late. I was a few minutes early. I hadn’t quite finished picking up all the broken glass and china on her kitchen floor, but all of a sudden I had felt an urgent need to get out of there. I don’t know why. I was overwhelmed by the feeling that when I’d closed the bedroom window, I hadn’t latched it, and that someone or maybe something was at that minute climbing the fire escape and soon to enter the apartment with bad intentions.

So affecting was that intuition, I abandoned caution and left by the front door, went down the communal stairs two at a time, at risk of encountering one of the neighbors, and burst into the night as if I had been blown out of the house by an explosion. There was traffic in the street, but I was hooded and masked and gloved, and I dodged across the lanes to a Gershwin-jazz performance of car horns and shrilling brakes.

Just inside the gate to the Commons, I paused under the great pine where Gwyneth and I had stood the previous night, and looked back toward the house, expecting something to be at her living-room window, but it was just a rectangle of unobstructed light. Hopeful that I had not been seen in flight, I continued to the pond, where now I stood in expectation of the first ice.

Because I had earlier remembered the murdered nurse found in the water and now stood near the spot where she had been pulled to shore by the coroner, pity swelled in me, not just for the dead woman and her family but also for the city, though certainly the city did not want my pity. So tender did this feeling become that I knew I was losing the degree of self-control that I needed every minute that I was aboveground.

When I tried to turn my thoughts away from the nurse, they went unaccountably to the marionette, of all things. As irrational as it may
sound, I wondered if the puppet had sat on this shore for part of that grim night, watching her pale body float and the koi bump against it under the mistaken impression that it was a great mass of bread thrown to them by admirers. Seemingly irrational, yes, but the thought became an image in my mind’s eye, and I felt in my bones that it was true, and I wished that I had not come to the Commons sooner than necessary.

Precisely then the first snow frolicked down the sky, flakes as big as rose petals, wheeling through the bleak dark and flaring in the light of the pathway lamps. They vanished into the black water but gathered on the stiff brown grass and on the pavement. So quickly did smaller snowflakes follow the larger ones in such greater numbers that I knew this would be a storm that the city would long remember, whereupon the night breeze stiffened just enough to be called a wind.

When I looked at the dead man’s watch on my wrist, I saw that the moment of our rendezvous had arrived. On time, the Land Rover appeared, following the one-way blacktop service lane, but then she turned off the road and drove across the picnic meadow, to the shore of the pond, switching from headlights to parking lights as she drew near.

The vehicle looked immense, maybe because I knew Gwyneth was petite and I couldn’t quite believe that a hundred-pound girl could maintain control of such a formidable machine. I was also a little spooked because I’d never ridden in a motor vehicle before, only under a tarp on a flatbed and only once.

Sometimes your life rolls away with you, like a big stone going downhill fast, as on the day when my mother put me out on my own, and then nothing is ever the same. I could feel my long-stable world
in motion again, beginning here, as Gwyneth stopped the Rover beside me, and though the roll can sometimes be a good thing, and you come to rest in a better kind of life, there are no guarantees.

If that night I had listed a thousand ways that my coming life might possibly be different from the one I had lived for the past eighteen years, what I might lose and gain, I would not have proved prescient about anything, and I would have greatly underestimated both the losses and the gains.

I KNEW WHAT A SEAT BELT WAS, AND I KNEW THAT
the law required its use. I had never before trusted my life to one, however, and though it sounded simple enough when I read about someone belting up in a novel, I took so long figuring it out that Gwyneth said she wished she could help me. She said it with sweet forbearance, not with impatience or scorn. But if she tried to assist me, we’d almost certainly touch, which she couldn’t tolerate.

At last I got it done, though I felt no safer in the belt than out of it. I
did
feel dangerously trammeled. I wondered which was the
greater risk: being thrown through the windshield when not wearing a belt or being trapped in a burning car because the belt buckle would not release.

I said, “Does it have air bags, too?”

“Yes, of course.”

“What do I need to do about that?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Air bags are automatic.”

“I guess that’s nice.”

“Well, it’s easy. Anyway, I’m not going to crash into anything.”

“Have you ever?”

“No. But I don’t drive much, hardly at all.”

She switched on the headlights, released the brake, and piloted that monster SUV across the picnic meadow to the service lane as easy as if it were an amusement-park ride gliding on a rail, the steering wheel just for show.

Let me tell you, it was quite a sensation: sitting up in a warm capsule and moving smoothly through the cold night, across the land and then the blacktop, windows all around so you could have a good look at anything you wanted to see. Lots of books have thrilling scenes involving cars or trucks, but none of them prepared me for the sheer delight of that ride, for the magic-carpet quality.

As Gwyneth turned out of the park onto the avenue, I said, “With your social phobia, how did you learn to drive?”

“Daddy taught me. When I turned thirteen, we went way out in the country a few times, just the two of us. He worried that when he was eventually gone, something might happen that I would need to leave the city.”

“Something like what?”

“Like just about anything. Anything can happen.”

“But if you left the city, where would you go?”

“There’s a place. But that doesn’t matter right now.”

The streets were busy, cars crowding all around us. Delivery trucks. Buses. Well-bundled people on the sidewalks hurried through the wintry night.

I said, “When you got your driver’s license, you must have had to be around a lot of people at the DMV or somewhere.”

“I don’t have a driver’s license.”

I can’t say that I was shocked, but I was a little dismayed. “It’s against the law to drive without a license.”

“It’s illegal,” she said, “but it’s not immoral.”

“What if you’re in an accident and hurt someone?”

“With or without a license, an accident can happen. The fault wouldn’t be in the lack of a license. The fault would be driving inattentively or recklessly, or drunk.”

“You don’t drive drunk, do you?”

“No. And not inattentively or recklessly, either.”

I considered all of that for a minute, and I guess she wondered what my silence meant.

She said, “Well?”

“Well, I guess it’s okay then.”

“It’s okay,” she assured me.

“All right. Good. You see what the snow’s doing?”

“Snowing.”

“No, I mean the way it floats over the front of the car and up and over the roof and never touches the glass.”

“When we’re moving, we create a slipstream that floats the snow over us.” She pulled to a stop at a red traffic light, and right away the snow stuck and melted on the warm glass. “See?”

“Neat,” I said.

A Clear in hospital blues appeared out of the slanting snow and
stepped into the street, indifferent to the foul weather. He stopped in the middle of the intersection and turned his head from side to side, the way they do, maybe looking for something but almost seeming to be listening more than looking.

The traffic light changed, and Gwyneth ran down the Clear. I saw him pass through the SUV between our seats, but I didn’t turn to watch him recede out the tailgate.

I didn’t say anything to her about him. What could I have said? She tolerated my hood and mask and gloves, my inexperience and what must have seemed to her to be my deeply paranoid conviction that most people, if not all, would respond to the sight of me with disgust and violence. If I told her about the Clears and the Fogs, she might decide that I was one kind of crazy too many for her taste, pull the Rover to the curb, and tell me to get out.

Our relationship was delicate, perhaps no less so than the crystal intricacy of those first huge snowflakes that had spiraled around me in the Commons. We had at once accepted each other because we could accept no one else. I admired her brave attempts to cope with her phobia, and perhaps she admired the way that I had coped with what she assumed was my irrational paranoia. We were outcasts, she by election, I by the condition in which I was born, but that did not ensure our friendship. She didn’t want the world, and the world didn’t want me, and when you thought about that, it became clear that we were less alike than we seemed to be, that strains could easily develop that would lead to an irreconcilable parting.

Already I loved her. I would be content to love her all of my life without touching her, but I saw no indication that she loved me in the same way, or at all. Considering her social phobia, if she were to suspect the depth of my feelings for her, she might recoil, retreat, and banish me. She might not be capable of loving me as I already loved
her, let alone in the more profound way that I would surely come to love her over time. I drew hope from the fact that she had clearly loved her father, and I needed that hope because, after living my life with one loss after another, losing this might at last break me.

I hadn’t thought to ask, but now I did: “Where are we going?”

“To see someone.”

“Who?”

Until this moment, the girl’s Goth makeup had seemed exotic and fanciful, but it did not convey upon her an air of danger. Now her face hardened, her mouth became like a crack in stone, her teeth clenched as if she had bitten into something that she wanted to tear apart, and the scarlet bead on her pierced lip glistened and seemed to quiver as if it were a real drop of blood.

In answer to my question, she said, “Nobody knows her name. They say she’s dead, but I refuse to believe it. I refuse.”

THE STREET WAS IN A COMFORTABLE NEIGHBORHOOD
, lined with maples, their bare limbs a becoming architecture, a perfect grace when green, and as red as fire in autumn. The yellow-brick house stood behind a shallow front yard and a raised porch trimmed with Christmas lights. A wreath hung on the door.

When Gwyneth parked at the curb, I expected to stay in the car, but she said, “I want you to come in with me. You’ll be safe.”

“The only house in the city that I’ve ever been in is yours. The only one. A house is a trap, a place that I don’t know and too few ways out.”

“Not this house.”

“I can’t.”

“You can, Addison.”