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FOUR

I t’s late. Donna left for the airport a few hours ago, and Eddie’s alone again. He crawls into Cookie’s bed. This would seem creepy, he thinks, if he saw this in a movie. A dead woman’s bed, still perfumed with her lavender spray. But it doesn’t feel creepy. It feels true. He pulls her paisley blanket up to his chin and closes his eyes.

Later, when the city outside is as close to sleep as it ever gets, he awakens and, for the first time, notices a photograph on her nightstand, right there next to the record player. An old one, it seems, not a Polaroid, but one that was processed in a darkroom, stained sepia and fuzzy at the edges. One corner is missing, a clean tear, as if it was folded by accident, perhaps when put into an album or taken back out, and after some years, the weakened seam came apart. As seams do.

He carefully gathers it in two hands. How had he not seen this photograph before? Has it been here all this time?

It’s a photograph taken on the beach, with a boardwalk on one side, low grassy dunes on the other, and a white-capped sea in the distance. In the center, two people stand in the sand, hand in hand. On the left, a little girl, maybe six years old, in a striped swimsuit and a poof of curly hair, holding one hand up to shade herself from the sun. On the right, a young man, about Eddie’s age, with dark hair and luminous eyes and a wide smile.

He turns the photograph over. On the back, scrawled in faded pencil by a shaky hand, is this: “Princess Lenore and her faithful, forever protector, Sir Francis.”

Eddie flips the photograph back over. Yes, that is Francis. Maybe that should surprise him, but it doesn’t. It’s the girl’s face that draws him. It comes alive in the image, her eyes shining like Francis’s.

His breath stalls as a swell of recognition rises in his chest, a wave carrying a thousand emotions at once: feelings of warmth, of coolness, of celebration, of regret, of sorrow, joy, hope, invincibility, strength, wonder, apprehension, humanity, confidence. Of belonging.

Eddie knows this girl. Just like he knew the girl outside the Jefferson Market, the one who lost her hat. Just like he knew the girl in the shantytown, the one who accepted his coin. Yes, he knows this girl. He’d know Cookie anywhere.

In a cupboard over the kitchen counter, Eddie finds a picture frame, just the right size. He slides the photograph into it and sets it on the table next to the fainting couch. He looks at them, Francis and Cookie, beautiful then and beautiful now. And then he lies down under the disco ball, finally, to sleep.