What I Loved

jeans that didn't fit her anymore. I studied the gap of bare skin between her short sweater and the waistband of her pants. After a moment, I stood up and walked toward the window. The cigarette had an acrid chemical smell, but behind the smoke I breathed in Violet's perfume. I wanted to touch her shoulder, but I didn't. We stood in silence and looked into the street. It had stopped raining, and I watched as fat drops of water broke and slid down the pane. To my right, I could see plumes of white smoke rising from a hole in the street on Canal.
    "All I know is that nothing he says can be believed. I don't mean just now. I mean nothing he's ever said. Some of it must have been true, but I don't know what." Violet was looking into the street with narrowed eyes. "Do you remember Mark's parakeet?"
    "I remember the funeral," I said.
    Only Violet's lips moved. The rest of her seemed to have frozen in place. "It broke its neck in the cage door." Several seconds passed before she spoke again in the same low voice. "All his little animals died—the two guinea pigs, the white mice, even the fish. Of course they often do, small pets like that. They're frail..."
    I didn't answer her. She hadn't asked me a question. The smoke from the manhole was beautiful in the light of the street lamps, and we watched as it billowed upward like some infernal cloud of our own blooming suspicion.
    The telephone call from Mark three days later became the catalyst for the strangest journey of my life. When Violet came downstairs to tell me about the call, she said, "Who knows if it's true, but he said he's in Minneapolis with Teddy Giles. He said that he saw a gun in Giles's bag and he's afraid that Giles is going to kill him. When I asked him why, he said that Teddy told him he had murdered that boy they called 'Me' and thrown his body into the Hudson River. Mark said he knows that it's true. I asked him how, but he said he couldn't tell me. I asked him why he lied when we confronted him with the rumors, why he didn't go to the police, and he said he was afraid. Then I asked him why he went off with Giles if he was afraid of him. Instead of answering the question, he started talking about two detectives who had been asking questions at the Finder Gallery and in the clubs about the night the boy disappeared. He thinks Giles might be running from the police. He wants money for a plane ticket home."
    "You can't send him money, Violet."
    "I know. I said I'd arrange to have a ticket waiting for him at the airport. He said he doesn't have enough money to get to the airport."
    "He could change the ticket," I said. "And use it to go somewhere else."
    "I've never been close to anything like this, Leo. It feels unreal."
    "Do you have a gut feeling about whether he's lying or not?"
    Violet shook her head slowly. "I don't know. For a long time I've been afraid there was something underneath ..." She took a breath. "If it's true, we have to get Mark to the police."
    "Call him back," I said. "Tell him I'll meet him and fly back with him to New York. It's the only way to make sure he gets here."
    Violet looked startled. "What about your classes, Leo?"
    "It's Thursday. I don't have another class until Tuesday. It won't take me four days."
    I insisted that it was my job to retrieve Mark, that I wanted to do it, and in the end Violet agreed to let me go. But even while I was speaking, I knew that my reasons for going were murky. The idea that I was behaving rashly excited me, and that thrilling picture of myself carried me through all the arrangements. I packed while Violet called Mark and told him to meet me in the lobby of the hotel at midnight—an hour after my plane arrived—and advised him to stay in public places until then. I threw a shirt, underwear, and a pair of socks into a small canvas bag as if I routinely flew off to midwestern cities to lasso wayward boys. I hugged Violet good-bye—more confidently than usual—and instantly found a cab on the street to take me to the airport.
    As soon as I took my seat on the airplane, the spell began to wear off. I felt like an actor who leaves the stage and suddenly loses the adrenaline that kept him sailing through his performance as someone else. While I studied the camouflage pants of the young man in the seat next to me, I felt more quixotic than heroic, older rather than younger, and I asked myself what I was flying toward. Mark's story was bizarre. A body dumped in the river. Detectives asking