Rachel Alexander 04 - Lady Vanishes

too.”
    I turned to look at her, dreadlocks loose today, hanging around her pretty face, her big eyes shining as she told about this man she loved, this married man who was so tender when his wife was dying.
    Or so he wrote.
    “For months, I read the books he read to his wife, listened to each new symptom, knew the names of the medications she was on, stayed up late, writing him, giving him letters for company when he was lonely.”
    “Did he talk about an autistic kid?”
    She shook her head, the curls swinging one way, then the other.
    “Did you talk about your kids?”
    She shook her head again.
    “It was understood, because of how we met, that autism affected his life and mine. But how, I didn’t tell him. He didn’t say either. We had the autism chat line for that. This was about our own feelings, not about anyone’s kid. This was to feel ordinary, like other human beings.”
    I nodded, watching the light on the river, the peaks of water silver, the water moving on, toward the Statue of Liberty, south to where the ocean was.
    “She died last winter, a week before Christmas.”
    Venus increased the speed on her treadmill, starting to run.
    I took a sip of water, going fast enough walking, my T-shirt soaked even before I got here. I could see Dashiell through the open arch, see his back as he lay on the cool floor, fast asleep, his head pressed against the water basin. “A few weeks after that, he began to talk about us meeting.“
    “He was local? Close enough so that you could see each other?”
    “He was. That’s the strangest thing, isn’t it? He could have been anywhere, in Iowa, Alaska, New Zealand, anywhere at all. But he was right here, in Manhattan. Sometimes you think something was meant to be. But then—” Venus looked at her watch.
    “I don’t have a lot of time.”
    “Another meeting?”
    She shook her head. She wasn’t going to say.
    “So did you get together?”
    “We negotiated for a month.”
    When she smiled, I realized I’d only seen her smile once before. Whether she was in danger or not, she surely believed she was, a haunted look on her pretty face.
    “Then he picked a spot.”
    “Where?”
    “Provence, in Soho. Do you know it?”
    I nodded.
    “I wondered at the choice.”
    “A very romantic place,” I said.
    Venus nodded.
    “A place for lovers,” she said. “That’s what he said. We’ve never met, I said. You don’t know me. I do, he said. And I know I love you.
    “Rachel, this was so extraordinary. We hadn’t switched from the internet to the phone. I’d never heard his voice. There was so much I didn’t know about him. But I felt it, too. My heart would race before logging on to read his letters every night. I felt exactly the way you do when your lover walks into a room. Only this room, it was a computer screen. It was black words on a white screen. No smell. No catching your breath because you see a wrist sticking out of the white cuff of a shirt and it makes you crazy. Nothing like that, like what you’re used to.”
    I began to laugh. “I know what you mean,” I said. “All that longing, it can—“
    “But there was none of that.”
    She hit the cool-down button, going from a run to a walk.
    “You must have been scared.”
    “I was. And I wasn’t. Both sides powerfully strong.”
    Venus shook her head, smiling at the memory.
    “And?” I said, afraid she’d cut and run without telling me what I was dying to hear, so absorbed in her story, as if it were a girlfriend thing, forgetting for the moment why I was here and what this was all about.
    “Finally, after so many months, after sharing so much, I was going to meet him. Well, maybe that’s the wrong word, Rachel. I’d met him long before. But now, I was going to see him, this man who made my heart pound, this man I didn’t know any of the normal, ordinary things about, the way you do when it’s a more traditional sort of thing.
    “I didn’t know how I’d feel. Or how he would. Trust me, I was scared. There was so much at stake, Rachel. If it was no good, I’d lose my best friend.
    “But I was excited, too. I couldn’t wait.
    “What never occurred to me at the time was that we might already know each other.”
    “And did you?”
    Venus nodded.
    “Can you imagine my surprise when I got there, carrying a red rose, as we’d planned, asked for his table, and saw who it was?”
    Venus stopped the belt. She turned to face me.
    “Who?” I asked, stepping off on the edges and