Seven Minutes to Noon

PROLOGUE
    Jen followed her mother to school, earning a come on or hurry up when she fell too far behind. The early morning air was thick and warm on her summer-tan arms, and Jen wanted to swim, not study; she wanted to play with her friends.
    Halfway along the Carroll Street Bridge, she stopped and looked up at the vast blue Brooklyn sky, streaked with cottony wisps: a rabbit, a ship, a baby. She ran her hand along the bridge’s iron railing. Someone had painted it blue. Jen liked it. She leaned over and looked down into the Gowanus Canal.
    “Let’s get moving!” her mother called.
    Jen had loved looking for creatures in the canal ever since kindergarten, when she’d learned how a fixed pump had brought the dead water to life. Her teacher had told them all about it. Up until the 1960s the pump had kept the water moving in the man-made canal and all kinds of living things had grown in it. Then the pump broke, and no one fixed it, and the water sat still and festered. By the time Jen’s class had come to study it, it was a kind of electric green color, a dead river running between Jen’s neighborhood and her school. Some people said the canal was worse than dead, that it was poisonous, and if you fell into it you would get sick and maybe even die. Jen had pictured herself tumbling over the railing and for one brief moment flying, then evaporating the instant she touched the water.
    Her teacher had told them that a businessman on Court Street had a dream about the canal and it was this: it could be another Venice, Italy. Instead of factories on its banks, there could be restaurants and parks, and there could be boats on the water. “Gondolas on the Gowanus,” Jen’s teacher had said, and the class didn’t understand what it meant but it sounded so funny they all laughed. But first the canal would have to be brought back to life. So finally, after all those years, the businessman talked to someone who got someone else to fix the pump. Jen’s teacher had said that by the end of first grade, they should be able to see life again in the Gowanus Canal.
    Now she was starting second grade, and it had happened; it was true. Since last year the color of the water had improved; it was pale green and partly transparent. She looked and looked and looked for something alive. And then she saw it: a turtle the size of her hand, skimming the top of the water.
    “Mom!”
    “Hurry up. We don’t have time for this!”
    “I saw a turtle!”
    Jen knew she had to move along but couldn’t resist one more look. And then she saw something else, and this time, it was magical. She saw a fairy, a woman with a peaceful face covered by the murky water, eyes wide open. The face slowly rotated upward toward the sky, as if looking, then rotated slowly away, and was gone.
    “Mom!”
    “Jen!” Her mother turned around and planted her hands on her hips.
    “I’m coming!” Jen ran. “But Mom, I saw a fairy in the canal! She had long hair and it was flying all around her. Like this.” Jen spun around so her own hair would puff and float.
    Her mother’s breath hissed out like steam. She looked at her watch. “Do you realize what time it is, young lady?”
    Jen skipped across the bridge. She would tell hermother again when she was ready to listen, maybe at cuddle time, right before sleep. She would tell her mother she had seen a lady, a fairy, and it was magical and it was real.

PART ONE

Chapter 1
    Alice Halpern waited on a bench in Carroll Park in the sticky heat of early September. She drained the last of her iced decaf from a waxed-paper cup that buckled in her grip. Lauren was late. Her cup, sealed with a plastic top, had formed a skin of tiny droplets. The ice had probably melted by now. She would be disappointed; she liked her drinks icy cold.
    The sun shifted and Alice felt its rays burn into her skin, still milky white from months of pampering with sunblock. A redhead, she knew better than to go out without her wide-brimmed hat, which she had left hanging on the coat stand as she hustled to get the kids out the door to school this morning. She moved down the bench into a remaining patch of shade and glanced again at her watch; it was now ten to three.
    In a few minutes, the neat brick school building across the street from the park would open its doors and spill the little ones back into the world in a rowdy convocation. Alice took a long, deep breath, savoring the relative calm of these last minutes before the riptide of