Chapter 12

Ever since her mother’s death Shelby has had trouble sleeping. She’s filled with regret, it’s in her blood and bones, it lies down beside her with its head on her pillow and whispers a list of all she’s done wrong. She wishes she hadn’t burned her childhood books and could read them every night; perhaps then she would find some peace. She wishes she had spent more time with her mother, and that she could call her on the phone. She dials her home number late at night, but either no one picks up or her father answers, his voice full of worry and sleep. Her father has sent her all the sympathy cards from her mother’s friends and from the co-worker she had when she was a librarian. We loved her so. She was one of a kind. We will miss and mourn her. In between the Hallmarks, there’s a postcard. It’s plain white, no illustration this time. Trust someone, the message reads in black ink. It is so simple and so pure that Shelby fears it’s the writer’s last message.

As the weather improves, Shelby takes to roaming the streets whenever sleep eludes her. Walking is man’s best medicine, Hippocrates stated and maybe it’s true. In the evenings she heads along Broadway, merging with the late-night crowd. Occasionally she stops for a drink at Balthazar on Spring Street, where her usual waiter knows she wants the cheapest white wine. On other occasions she stands outside a tattoo parlor called Scorpio in the East Village, although she never goes in. Would she be transformed once she stepped over the threshold, with her sins and sorrows revealed to all in ink? On one occasion, while she was considering if she should finally get the tattoo she’s always had in mind for herself, someone inside opens the shop door for her. “Just looking,” she calls as she hurries away.

Shelby often thinks about the tattooed girl in Union Square and how they might have exchanged lives on the day Shelby took the dogs. In fairy tales, such things happened, you stole from someone, then were handed their fate as a punishment. She has always wondered what the difference was between herself and the girl in the park, why she had been saved from her own desire to destroy herself. Shelby was the one who had to be tied down to her hospital bed, who would cut herself with anything she could get her hands on, including plastic forks and spoons. But that girl is like a little sister inside of her now. She doesn’t know why she didn’t turn out like the girl in Union Square, screaming at passersby, caught in the web of her own pain, but on nights when she’s reading her veterinary journals, and the dogs are sleeping, she wonders if it’s possible that when she rescued them, they rescued her as well.

The winter has been a hard one, and in April it’s still chilly. Shelby sleeps in sweaters, and sometimes in the Burberry raincoat Ben gave her. When she thinks of him she wants to cry, but she doesn’t. She wonders if it’s possible that she’s lost the ability to produce tears. When her apartment feels too small, she sits on the fire escape, the way she used to with Ben. In the spring chill the Hudson turns a silvery color, as if the moon has fallen straight down to the river bottom, a cold, white stone. On clear nights it’s possible to see stars in the black sky above Tenth Avenue, a rarity in the city. A few brave leaves have shown themselves on the flowering pear trees, but they tremble in the wind that comes off the river, and some of them freeze solid on thin, wavering branches.

Shelby has had a terrible cold, which turns out to be pneumonia. At night she feels like she’s drowning. She coughs so loudly her downstairs neighbors, who fight so furiously she can hear shoes hitting the wall, complain about her hacking. She orders egg drop soup from the Hunan Kitchen, and throws most of it away along with the fortune cookies. The lost are in need of a compass, she thinks her fortune will read. What becomes of someone who is unbecoming? Her dreams are all of water. Sometimes she spies a girl swimming. She knows it’s not Helene. Helene never went into the ocean; she was terrified of sharks and crabs. Then Shelby realizes she’s seeing herself out in the sea, the girl she used to be before all of this happened, when she still had hope and a future she wasn’t afraid to know.

Her illness worsens; she cannot stop coughing. She finally goes to the ER at Bellevue one night when she can’t breathe. She’s given antibiotics and an inhaler and is told to keep hydrated. She who drinks water will never thirst for knowledge. As she’s leaving Shelby stops to lace her boots. An orderly looks her up and down. She stares back at him, annoyed.

“Interested?” the orderly says with a thick Russian accent. “I’m single.”

Only now does Shelby realize he is the one who took her to see the old man who collapsed on the pavement years earlier, on the day she met Harper Levy. She can hardly remember Harper’s face, he’s become a ghost in her memory, but she will never forget this orderly. Now Shelby has long hair that reaches past her shoulders and is likely her best feature. Maybe that’s why the Russian doesn’t recognize her. All the same, she feels as if she’s stumbled upon an old friend. She goes up to him, surprising him with a kiss on the cheek. “You did me a favor once,” Shelby tells him.

“Good for me,” he says, amused.

On her way home from the ER, Shelby wonders if there was ever a year in which spring never came. She sits out on the fire escape to have her dinner, hot and sour soup and shrimp toast. A girl who is cold has only herself to blame. If you have burned a book, don’t complain that there is nothing to read. Shelby has on two sweaters, her raincoat, and a scarf looped around her throat. The weather is cloudy and miserable, but birds have built a nest on the fire escape. Shelby enjoys watching the nesting birds as she recovers. But one pale morning she wakes to find the nest has been abandoned. Some larger bird, perhaps a hawk that is said to circle the neighborhood, has torn it apart. A single blue egg has been left behind. She looks it up in her copy of Birds of America. Her birds would have been robins, another rarity in Manhattan.

This is the weekend when Ben Mink is getting married. Shelby was invited to La Scala restaurant in Huntington for the wedding dinner. Ben is nothing if not gracious, unless you cheat on him behind his back, then he calls you every name in the book and slams out the door so he can cry in the hallway and hold his broken heart in his hands, so damaged and ripped apart it’s clear he’s never coming back. Although Shelby never bothered to RSVP, she’s kept the invitation taped to her refrigerator. She’s torturing herself with it every time she gets something to eat. There is a photograph of Ben and his impossibly beautiful bride-to-be, Ana. Shelby has spent the past week obsessed by wicked thoughts. She is vindictive, even when she’s the guilty party. Perhaps it’s always true that when you wreck your own life you blame everyone else for your misfortune. She wants Ben’s wedding day to be ruined and has imagined dozens of possible scenarios, from lightning strikes to floods. Now her wish has come true. It’s April and it’s snowing. She feels a stab of joy when she wakes to see six inches of powdery white has fallen onto Tenth Avenue. No wonder the robins abandoned their nest. Perhaps Ben should do the same with his marriage. Now the wedding guests will have trouble on the Long Island Expressway. Their cars will skid and swerve, and those who do manage to arrive at the service on time will drag in wearing boots, the hems of their dresses soaking wet.