Seven Minutes to Noon

What saved her from drowning in the ebbs and flows of memory and implication was the immediate goal: finding a house, getting away from Julius Pollack and the mysterious partner. And the bigger goal, the hard one, that lurked in the back of her mind: locating Ivy.
    As she walked the five blocks to Blue Shoes Wednesday morning, Alice felt a trickle of nausea work its way up her throat. Exhaustion and nausea seemed in collusion, one triggering the other. Despite her promise to Mike to take a sleeping pill tonight, she wasn’t sure she would. It worried her. Thalidomide was once called safe; how much did they really know about the chemical environment of a developing fetus? She promised herself another sleeping pill only when she really needed it. Did she need it now, or would this get worse? She sensed her loose foothold on the slippery slope of panic. But she had summoned the detectives, told them about Julius, about the baby. She was doing everything possible. And now, today, she was seeing another house with Pam, trying to get her family out from under Julius Pollack’s roof.
    A date, in writing... telling me when you’ll be gone. Julius’s tough words boomeranged inside her head.
    And Lauren’s: bloodsucker.
    She had the law on her side, Alice reminded herself. And if Julius did have Ivy, if he was in any way involved in Lauren’s or Christine Craddock’s deaths, it was too late now for him to elude detection. They were watching him.
    She moved tenderly along Smith Street, slowing as a tidal wave of dizziness gave way to an avalanche of nausea. The next thing she knew, she was hinged over, kneeling on the dirty pavement.
    She looked down to see if she had vomited; she had not. Having never fainted before, she was just as surprised by the acute embarrassment that overcame her next. Her stomach inexplicably settled and she carefully stood up. She looked around to see who had noticed her. An old man in a doorway across the street nodded soberly and waved. At the corner, a teenage girl with huge gold hoop earrings and dramatically outlined eyes in the style of a hip-hop Cleopatra stared blankly at Alice. In those eyes she saw that she had become the woman every teenage girl disavowed, and she wanted to call out, No, you’ve got it wrong. Just you wait and see. She pulled her purse in close and walked carefully to the corner, where she waited for the light to change. She crossed without looking at either of her witnesses.
    As she walked, she felt a shadow of the nausea materializing over her. Not again. She stopped in her tracks, to let the feeling pass. Footsteps abruptly halted behind her. It was like the sudden quiet after a refrigerator’s buzz cycles off; only then do you realize how loud it had been.
    Alice turned around and saw him. The limo driver was right there, so close she could touch him. Deep creases sagged the skin on a once-handsome face, and those eyes: one green, one blue. He nodded and passed her at a crisp pace. He smelled of unwashed clothes andcigarettes. She watched him cross the street, huddled into his shoulders.
    A cloud moved and the sun spilled down, blinding her just as it had before she steered the car into the bus. Everything flashed white, and for a split second the beach reappeared — she could smell its salts and mildews, it was so real — with the limo driver walking in his dark city clothes on the shifting sand. Smoking his cigarette, flicking his butt into an ocean that instantly absorbed it.
    A horn blared. The limo driver disintegrated. The beach vanished like a pulled veil.
    The teenage Cleopatra had come up close and was staring at Alice now with a mixture of indignation and concern. Under all the makeup, her eyes were a gentle brown.
    “You okay, ma’am?” the girl asked.
    Alice rubbed her eyes, refocusing herself on the concrete and the buildings and the natural music of everyday urban life. This she recognized clearly, and was grateful for; it was more vibrant than the beach dream that endangered her whenever it came.
    “I didn’t feel well for a minute,” Alice said.
    “That guy knocked into you,” the girl said. “I saw him, the a-hole didn’t even notice you.”
    So he was real. Alice had started to wonder if the limo driver was part of a hallucination that was edging out her hold on reality.
    “Thanks,” Alice told the girl, and resumed walking. As she moved forward along Smith Street, each step hit the pavement with resolve — banishing the beach,