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When John Traynor landed his first real live job at an animation studio in New York after graduating from art school, he decided

to mark the occasion by getting himself a Mickey Mouse watch. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

“No, no,” said Annie. “Not Mickey. Too cliché. I’ll bet half the people who work there have a Mickey Mouse watch. Go for something

a little different.”

They wandered in and out of shops in SoHo and Greenwich Village, including a stop at an animation gallery—not because it sold

watches, but because it carried framed, original animation cels from early Warner Bros. cartoons and more recent shows, like

The Simpsons , all out of their price range. As a couple in their mid-twenties, they squandered any money they had left over after paying

the rent on pot and lattes.

But now that John had the prospect of a regular income, a minor splurge did not seem inappropriate. They were at that age

when they felt they had everything they could ever want because they had each other. Who cared about fancy cars and penthouse

apartments and dinner at the Rainbow Room?

They’d finished school and were trying this whole being-an-adult thing, even if their take on being grown-ups involved creating

entertainment for children. At least, that was John’s goal. Annie was less sure where she was headed.

Her dream had always been to write and illustrate books for young readers, but what chance did she have against the millions of others pursuing the same dream? So she’d put her résumé into several web and graphic design places. Being creative with a screen, a mouse, and a keypad was not her first choice, but you had to make a living, right? It beat waiting tables or being one of those poor bastards hawking umbrellas on a street corner when it started raining.

“This one,” Annie said, pointing into a display case.

They’d found their way to a comic book store that sold much more than adventures of Aquaman and Wolverine. It carried action

figures, models of ships from Star Wars and Star Trek , and every version of the Batmobile Bruce Wayne had raced through Gotham City in pursuit of the Joker.

And it had watches.

“Let’s have a look,” John said.

The kid behind the counter unlocked the cabinet and placed the watch in John’s hand. On its face was not Mickey Mouse, but

that oddball character whose goal of blowing up the earth was thwarted at every turn by Bugs Bunny.

Marvin the Martian.

He had his arms folded across his chest and an annoyed expression on his face, like, Every time I want to kill all of humanity I can’t, and I am soooo angry.

John hooked it around his wrist and admired it. “What do you think?”

“What do you think?” Annie replied.

“I think it’s perfect. Quirky.”

He didn’t bother to take it off so that it could be placed in its factory packaging. Paid for it and wore it home, where they dined on macaroni and cheese made from a box, killed off a bottle of the cheapest sparkling bubbly the local wine shop carried, then screwed their brains out before watching Letterman .

God, it was a great life.

One day, the two of them sitting at the breakfast table, John said, “You wanna get married this week?”

Annie took a sip of coffee. “I got nothin’ planned. How’s Friday?”

They called family and friends, keeping the number to under twenty, since that was the number of guests you could invite to

a city hall ceremony, then invited everyone back to their place for wings and beer.

They weren’t the kind of couple to get all corny about it, but they truly believed they’d been destined to find one another.

They’d met in the art school’s animation class, Annie doodling oddball creations more than she took notes, John leaning in,

whispering how much he liked them. Not the most gorgeous guy Annie had ever dated. Already, in his twenties, starting to lose

his hair. Had a little roll of fat over his belt, looked at the world through thick glasses, but, hey, this was art school,

with a heavy nerd enrollment and light on jocks, and if she were honest with herself, she was no pinup model. Big frizzy hair,

heavy through the hips, bought most of her clothes at “vintage” shops, which was a nice way of saying someone else had had

the pleasure of wearing them before she did, and she didn’t spend a lot of time, or money, at the makeup counter.

Fuck all that. She wasn’t put on this planet to have others gawk at her. She wanted to create . She wanted to make art . Even as she sat at her workstation picking out fonts and background colors and creating links, there was always a fine-point

Sharpie and a sketch pad on the desk next to the mouse pad.

She filled one entire notebook with sketches of an adorable polar bear she christened Barry. Barry traveled the world to warn people about the melting polar ice caps. She moved on from sketches to put together a prototype book. Twenty pages, words and illustrations on every one of them. Annie also, as was her custom, created a six-inch-tall, three-dimensional model of Barry so that she could picture what he looked like from any angle. She started with a wire armature, bulked up the body with crumpled tinfoil, then used plasticine to make his body, limbs, and head.

Annie sent the book off to multiple publishers. Few responded, and those that did took a pass. Too preachy, they said. Nothing

wrong with a message, but you don’t have to hit the kids over the head with it.

Annie put aside her dream for a time and continued to design websites. John went into the animation factory every day. Life

had settled into a routine that bordered on the mundane. They made a living that would have been decent had they lived someplace

other than New York, but rent was a killer. They had no car. They rarely took cabs and relied on public transportation, or

they hoofed it.

John’s one extravagance was his smartphone, which he used to connect to the Internet so he could watch animation clips on

YouTube and elsewhere. It was his addiction, he freely admitted, to the point that even as they walked down the street, he’d

be looking down at his phone, laughing at some snippet of a Daffy Duck cartoon or a politically incorrect Family Guy moment. Annie repeatedly warned him his obsession would be the death of him. She’d showed him online surveillance videos

of people falling into open sidewalk cellar doors, which were all over the place in New York.

He paid no mind.

One day, eyes fixed on his phone’s screen, watching the Looney Tunes classic Bugs Bunny cartoon Rabbit of Seville , he walked right into a streetlight pole, hard enough to raise a bump on his forehead. Annie felt bad about laughing, but,

honestly, he had it coming.

Bottom line was, as long as they didn’t have any unexpected expenses, they’d get by. And God forbid one of them got sick, because neither of them had a decent health plan.

And then came a surprise.

“Oh shit,” John said when she came home from the doctor’s office and gave him the news that she was pregnant.

Not exactly the words she was hoping to hear.

But he did some fast backpedaling. “We can do this,” he said, and then, unexpectedly, began to laugh. “I have no fucking idea

how, but we can do this.”

And they did. Seven months later, Charlie was born, and despite them now being down a salary, it was joyous. John took a part-time

second job in the evenings working in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant around the corner. (At least he got to score the

occasional free pizza.) John’s parents—Annie’s had both passed by the time she was twenty-three—sent them checks when they

could, but they were working-class folks who had their own financial worries.

There were no websites to design, at least for now, but even when Annie nursed, Charlie in her arms, the pen and sketch pad

were not far away.

One night, up for a feeding when the baby was seven weeks old, so tired she could barely keep her eyes open, Annie thought

about a penguin who wanted to explore the world beyond Antarctica.

When Charlie napped, Annie would sketch out her character in more detail. She made up another wire armature and created a

three-dimensional model, just as she had done with Barry the Bear. She would name her penguin Pierce. He would ask his fellow

penguins why the hell (okay, not hell , but why on earth) they had wings if they couldn’t use them to become airborne. They were about as useless as those forearms

on a T-Rex . He wasn’t going to let his superfluous wings keep him from traveling, so he saved up his money from his bookshop job (a store that sold mostly thrillers, and was called Chillers) to buy airline tickets. He always took off from Antarctica International Airport, where the jumbo jets were fitted with skis.

The first book Annie put together was Pierce Goes to Paris . He visits the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, buys himself a beret, and damned if he isn’t the jauntiest-looking penguin who ever

walked the Champs-élysées. He returns to the South Pole with tales of his adventures, but decides he won’t be staying long.

There is so much more to see!

One of the editors who had rejected her eco-minded polar bear book had said some nice things about her drawings, so she decided

to send a copy of her first Pierce Penguin story to him.

A week went by. Then two. A month without any response. She was getting ready to send the manuscript to another house when

her cell phone rang.

It was Finnegan Sproule.

“You know the Gramercy Tavern?” he asked.

Well, she had heard of it. But she had never stepped inside the doors.

Over their first lunch, he said to her, “This is very special. It has tremendous potential. Do you have an agent?”

“An agent?”

“A literary agent. Look, I could make you an offer right now, something you’d jump at that might seem like a lot of money

to you but would be lunch money for my publisher. You need someone in your corner. I’m going to suggest a few to you, all

reputable. Or you can ask around, find someone else. But I want this, and I’m prepared to do a preempt.”

“A who?”

“A preemptive offer. An agent will explain.”

Annie found an agent. A deal was made. Was it a fortune? No. But it was enough to calm some nerves, to allow Annie and John and Charlie to move to a slightly larger apartment in a better neighborhood.

The book came out. It did nothing.

Okay, not exactly nothing. It sold in the low four figures. Annie signed at a couple of Barnes this was before her passing, of course. Toured Buckingham Palace, went to the Victoria and

Albert Museum, rode around in a London cab. Ate fish and chips.

After the lukewarm reception to the first book, Annie didn’t get her hopes up for Pierce’s sophomore outing. She’d been thinking

of a third book where Pierce went to Tokyo, but was there any point?

Turned out, there was.

A New York morning show host happened to mention the book. Said she’d read it to her son, who loved it. Sales spiked for a

couple of days on Amazon. The publisher’s publicity team reached out to the host, said, “The author lives just a few blocks

from your studio. Maybe you’d like to have her on to talk about her world-hopping penguin?”

And that was how Annie got on the Today show.

The London book edged onto the children’s books bestseller list. More stores invited Annie to do readings for young audiences.

The publisher sent her on a six-city tour.

The Tokyo book entered the children’s bestseller list at number one.

Then the merch offers started coming in. Pierce the Penguin notepads and stickers. Very basic, simplified tales that could be made into board books for infants. A Pierce the Penguin plush toy. There were TV offers, and while the money was tempting, Annie turned them all down. Pierce was not a TV star. He would not sell out.

But even without the TV money, what was coming in was more than Annie and John could ever have imagined. They vowed they wouldn’t

let the money change them, but despite their best intentions, it did. The Bank Street brownstone was proof of that.

John continued working his animation job, even though what he brought in was a fraction of what Annie’s books were making,

but he still enjoyed it. Charlie was growing up, changing every day, and they’d enrolled him in a private preschool program,

mysteriously jumping ahead of countless other parents in the queue. (Fame did have its benefits.)

Things could not have have been more perfect.

Annie began to think Pierce deserved to more fully realize his flying ambitions. She would make him a penguin who could really fly. It would be a book about ambition, about being who you wanted to be, about not letting others hold you back.

Yes, Pierce was going to fly.

First, he tried working out. Figured if he could bulk up some, his wings would be strong enough to support him. But, try as

he might, he couldn’t do it. Pierce’s research led him to Leonardo da Vinci’s attempts to create a flying machine, particularly

his bat-winged glider. A person would slip his arms into the wings, and off he’d go. Leonardo might not have perfected a working

model, but that was no reason for Pierce not to give it a go.

It was, for Annie, the most wonderful project she’d ever undertaken. It allowed her to do some of her most ambitious illustrations. Not just of the device that Pierce would build, but of the views he would take in as he soared over such places as the Grand Canyon, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Empire State Building. Finnegan Sproule said it was her best Pierce book yet.

The book came out with great fanfare. A full-page ad in The New Yorker , for fuck’s sake. If that isn’t making it, Annie remarked to John one night, I don’t know what is. Pierce Takes Flight sold nearly thirty thousand copies in its first week. And continued to sell at that pace for seventeen straight weeks.

One of the lucky children to receive a copy was six-year-old Evan Corcoran.

He already had all the other Pierce the Penguin books. And a Pierce the Penguin notepad. And Pierce the Penguin stickers.

And a Pierce the Penguin doll that he clutched every night when he went to bed.

Evan was inspired.

Of all the Pierce books, he loved this latest one the most, and had his parents read it to him again and again and again.

Evan was a bright kid, and when his mother or father wasn’t reading the book to him, he was racing through the pages himself.

What fun it would be to see the world as the birds do. Pierce had decided this was something he wanted to do, and by gosh,

he did it.

If Pierce could fly, then why couldn’t Evan?

One day when his parents were both at work and his nanny was busy in the kitchen preparing dinner, Evan made himself a set

of cardboard wings, taped them to his arms, opened the unlocked balcony door of the tenth-floor apartment on the Upper West

Side, pulled a chair over to the railing to stand on, and off he went.

Annie, who was not an iPhone doom scroller or news addict, had no advance warning when Finnegan called to say he was fielding

calls from media outlets about the tragedy. Seconds later, she looked out the third-floor window of their Bank Street brownstone

and saw the gathering crowd. news vans, people with cameras.

She collapsed to the floor of her brownstone studio where she was already at work on what would have been the next Pierce volume. She was sobbing, shaking uncontrollably. She couldn’t get up. John, arriving home with Charlie after picking him up at school, had to fight his way through a cluster of reporters, managing to get a sense of why they were there, that something truly horrible that involved Annie had happened. He found her in a heap on the floor, nearly catatonic.

An ambulance was called.

Three months passed.

Consumed with guilt, Annie descended into a deep depression. It didn’t matter how many times John told her she was not at

fault. She could almost understand, at some intellectual level, that she could not be blamed for what had happened. When an

artist—author, songwriter, moviemaker, whatever—created something, put it out there for the world to critique, to love it

or hate it, it was impossible to control how people would react. There were as many ways to respond to a creative work as

there were people who read it or watched it or listened to it.

But rational arguments didn’t help much.

Even in those moments when Annie could accept that she was not directly responsible, she could not shake the fact that she’d

had a role to play in Evan’s demise. John did his best to shield her from much of the fallout, good and bad. Emails and letters

from fans who still loved her and Pierce. Emails and letters from the lunatic fringe who believed she was an evil sorceress

out to poison children’s minds. There were op-eds in the Times and other publications, debates online, about whether the incident would spark a round of self-censorship by creators, particularly those whose audience was made up of children. Would there be a chill factor? Would they second-guess every single thing they produced, wondering whether it would be the spark that made some child, somewhere, do something that might end up hurting them? The Washington Post even ran a front-page story: “Will Fear Kill Creativity?”

John showed none of it to Annie. And her agent and editor passed along none of the requests for interviews. Annie went to

a therapist by the name of Dr. Maya Hersh—she’d come highly recommended by Finnegan, who had sent other authors her way—to

deal with what she was going through, one of the few times she was able to laugh during this period. “How is it we’ve lived

in New York all this time without at least one of us seeing a therapist?” she asked John before going to her first session.

She did little work. She rarely entered her studio, which was on the top floor of the Bank Street residence, the walls decorated

with oversized framed blow-ups of the Pierce book covers. It had been her second-favorite spot in the house, after the kitchen,

but to enter was to be reminded of her creation, and what it had led to.

But as her third month of despondency was coming to an end, Annie started coming out of her funk. She’d had a dozen sessions

with her therapist. She wrote a letter to Evan’s parents expressing her sorrow, and they’d written back to tell her how much

joy her stories had brought their son, adding that they did not need to forgive her, because there was nothing to forgive

her for.

That brought tears to her eyes, but it had helped.

She returned to her studio for an hour or two a day, often sitting at her desk and staring at a blank sheet of paper, but

it was something. Annie debated whether to create a new character, one who didn’t fly. Maybe it was time to move on from Pierce

the Penguin. Charlie, who was now seven and well aware of what his mother had gone through, said she should do a book about

a camel who solves crimes.

Annie had smiled. “Let me think about that.”

She and John began reappearing at their favorite restaurants. They went to the movies. They took Charlie on a trip to Montreal. Annie spent more of the day in the studio, sketching out ideas, putting down anything that came into her head. One day, to her own surprise, she found herself drawing a short, stout little guy who looked like a headwaiter with wings and a beak.

Pierce.

And then she drew a bubble above his head and inserted the words, I’m sorry, too.

“It’s not your fault,” Annie told him.

She thought she could hear him saying back to her, Well, if it’s not mine, then it’s not yours, either.

“I’d like to believe that. I really would.”

Are you going to end me?

Tears welled up in her eyes. “I don’t know. I need... time. But maybe. Things are... things are getting better.”

And then John died.

He’d worked at three animation studios over the years, moving for money or to take on more challenging work. His latest job

had been at Cliff Drop Animation, located on 18th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues. Its name was inspired by Wile E. Coyote,

who, when he was tricked by the Road Runner into running off the side of a cliff, would spend a moment suspended in air while

he assessed his situation. And then down he would go.

Cliff Drop was a few short blocks from Bank Street, so John always walked it, even in the worst weather. If it was cold, he’d

throw on an extra layer or two beneath his coat, and if it was raining, he’d grab an umbrella, because the chances of scoring

a taxi or an Uber in terrible weather were about as good as that coyote ever catching that crazy bird.

He was crossing 6th when a van, turning the corner, hit him.

And took off.

Which was kind of strange, because from the NYPD’s reconstruction of the events, the driver was likely not at fault. They

believed John had been looking at his phone and walked into the vehicle’s path when he stepped off the sidewalk.

Of course he was , Annie thought. Goddamn it, John, how many times did I tell you?

When John was struck, the phone flew from his hand and landed on the pavement about twenty feet away. When the first emergency

responders arrived on the scene, they heard something. Someone saying “What’s up, doc?” followed by a familiar melody. There

was a Warner Bros. cartoon playing on the phone’s screen. John had been watching it on YouTube as he walked to work.

The paramedics were able to do nothing for him at the scene. He’d died instantly. According to witness reports, the van had

stopped briefly, the driver jumped out and ran over to John, knelt over him long enough to realize he had to be dead, then

ran back to his van and took off. He was described by the half dozen witnesses who saw what happened as “average.” No one

could provide any telling detail.

The vehicle itself was equally generic. No markings on the sides, no business name. No one noticed the license plate. Of all

the surveillance video the police were able to acquire, none showed the plate clearly, or the driver behind the windshield.

The police promised to keep the investigation alive, to follow every lead. But as the days turned into weeks and the weeks

turned into months, it was clear the driver of the van that killed John would never be found.

Annie was again plunged into despair. If Evan’s death had felt like a cinder block on her shoulders, weighing her down, John’s death was a Sisyphean boulder she could never get up the hill even once. His passing overwhelmed her, cocooned her in grief. And as much as she probably needed to emotionally, she could not wallow in her misery this time. She had to pull herself together. If she couldn’t be strong, she at least had to present herself as such.

She had Charlie to think about.

Annie wasn’t the only one who’d suffered a devastating loss. Charlie had lost his father, and his sadness was more than she

could bear. She had to be there for him, be strong for him. She had all the love in the world for him, but she lay awake at

night wondering whether that would ever be enough. Charlie’d lost more than a father; he’d lost a role model. How would she

be able to provide the intangibles that a dad passed on to a young boy?

As gently as she tried to explain to him that his father would never be coming home, he still stood at the window most days,

watching pedestrians pass by on the Bank Street sidewalk, occasionally calling out to his mother, “I think I saw him!”

There were days when it was more than she could bear.

Even more alarming, Charlie’d had, since his father’s death, episodes of sleepwalking. Annie would hear padding about the

house around midnight and discover Charlie wandering in a trance-like state. Once, she found him standing in front of an open

closet door, peeing, as though he were standing in front of the toilet. She would gently try to wake him, getting on her knees

and holding him by the shoulders and softly speaking to him. When he came out of it, he would be baffled to find he was not

in his bed.

Annie believed his sleeping self was looking for his father.

She took him to the doctor, who advised her not to be alarmed. Many kids sleepwalked, and in all likelihood it was no more than a phase Charlie was going through. There were many factors linked to sleepwalking, fatigue and stress among them. The death of Charlie’s father had certainly taken its toll on Charlie in those areas. Whenever Annie and Charlie were out, and Charlie spotted a white van, he would ask if that was the one that had killed his dad.

John’s personal effects were eventually returned to Annie. They came to the door one day by courier. She was in such a daze

when they arrived in a padded pouch she didn’t know whether they’d been sent by the funeral home or the coroner’s office.

Anyway, there wasn’t much. He didn’t carry a lot of stuff on him. There was the fucking phone, of course. There was his wallet.

It still contained all his credit cards, plus eighty-five bucks in cash. There was his pair of glasses. There were two pens

that he had tucked into the inside pocket of his sport jacket. There was three dollars and forty-five cents in change that

had been retrieved from the front pocket of his black jeans.

When the package arrived, Annie brought it into the kitchen and set the various items on the table. She held each and every

item as though she could draw some of John’s life force through her fingertips. She took the eighty-five dollars in cash from

the wallet and wondered what to do with it. Tuck it into her purse? Spend it? What do you buy with the last bills your loved

one touched? No, she couldn’t spend those. She couldn’t do anything with that money. She put it back into the wallet. She

brought out the Visa and American Express cards, realized she would have to cancel them. Same with the phone bill for his

cell. God, the shit you had to deal with.

His glasses.

She unfolded them, peered through them for a moment, imagining John working on some project as he used them. She folded the

arms back down, put them in the kitchen drawer where she tossed all the things she didn’t know what to do with.

Something was wrong.

Something was missing.

Where was Marvin?

The Marvin the Martian watch was not in the pouch. He’d worn it every day since they’d bought it together years earlier. He

always wore it to work.

Where was it?

Had the impact been of such magnitude that the watch was flung from John’s wrist? If it had been attached to a flexible, stretchy

band, maybe. But the watch was on a leather strap John had to pull taut and secure with a small buckle. It seemed unlikely

it would have been thrown clear. And even if it had, why hadn’t it been found? The phone had been recovered.

It didn’t make sense.

There was only one explanation. It had been stolen. But by whom?

Annie considered the list of suspects. It could have been one of the paramedics. It could have been a cop. It could have been

someone at the coroner’s office. It could have been someone at the funeral home.

Annie made calls to all of them. “Where’s my husband’s watch?” she asked the funeral home director. “Someone stole his watch!”

The director said she would investigate and get back to her. When she did, she had nothing to report. Annie went down a voicemail

rabbit hole trying to find anyone accountable with the various emergency services people. The paramedics knew nothing. The

police knew nothing.

She even went, in person, to the coroner’s office and demanded to speak to someone, anyone , who could tell her what had happened to John’s watch. She was met with shrugs and a chorus of, “Beats me.”

Her despair had morphed into rage.

How dare someone steal John’s watch? What kind of sick fuck stole a watch off someone who’d just been run down by a van?

What kind of city was this, where something like that could happen?

What kind of city was it, where a kid could crawl out on a balcony and think he could fly?

What kind of city was it, where someone could mow down a total stranger in broad daylight and suffer no consequences?

All of which was to say, this was why Annie Blunt wanted to take a goddamn break from this goddamn city, and who the fuck

knew whether she and her boy were ever coming back?