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Even though all I want to do is forget.
“That’s right,” I say.
The doctor casts me a curious look from behind his tiny frames. “That’s not exactly normal behavior.”
“It wasn’t exactly normal circumstances.”
“It sounds to me like you ran away.”
“No,” I say. “Iescaped.”
FOUR DAYSEARLIER
12
I dream of my family.
My mother. My father. Jane, looking exactly like the last time I laid eyes on her. Forever nineteen.
The three of them walk through an abandoned Central Park, the only people there. It’s night, and the park is pitch black, all its lampposts having been snuffed out. Yet my family gives off their own light, glowing a faint greenish gray as they traverse the park.
I watch their progress from the roof of the Bartholomew, where I sit next to George, one of his stone wings folded around me in a gargoyle semi-embrace.
Out in the park, my parents see me and wave. Jane calls to me, glowing hands cupped around her mouth. “You don’t belong here!” she shouts.
As soon as the words reach me, George moves his wing.
No longer hugging.
Shoving.
The stone of his wing is cold against my back as he pushes me right off the roof. Soon I’m falling, twisting in mid-air as I plummet to the sidewalk below.
I wake with a scream in my throat, on the verge of setting it free. I gulp it back down, coughing a few times in the process. Then I sit up and eye George through the window.
“Not cool, dude,” I say.
My words have barely faded in the cavernous bedroom when I hear something else.
A noise.
Coming from downstairs.
I’m not even sure it qualifies as a noise. It’s more like a sensation. An ineffable feeling that I’m not alone. If someone asked me to describe it, I wouldn’t know how. It’s not an easily definable sound. Not footsteps. Not tapping. Not even a rustle, although that’s the nearest comparison I can think of.
Motion.
That’s what it sounds like.
Something moving through space and leaving a slight whisper in its wake.
I slip out of bed and creep to the top of the steps, leaning over them to hear more. I end up hearing nothing. But the feeling—that hair-raising sensation—persists. I am not alone in this apartment.
It occurs to me that it could be Leslie Evelyn, making an early-morning check of the apartment to see if I’m following the rules. I’m sure she has a set of keys to the place. Annoyed, I throw on my tattered terrycloth robe and whisk downstairs. She said nothing about apartment checks. I wouldn’t have agreed to that.
Who am I kidding? For twelve grand, I’d agree to almost anything.
But when I get downstairs, I find the apartment empty. The door is locked and deadbolted and the chain remains undisturbed. The noise or presence or whatever the hell you want to call it was just my imagination. The foggy remnants of my nightmare.