Marisha Pessl - Night Film

But I was thankful for the company, for friends, for light conversation forgotten as soon as it began. I joined in wholeheartedly, I laughed, I ordered wine and duck and dessert, and people slapped me on the back and said they were happy to see me, that I’d been away too long. But occasionally I slipped, unseen, outside all the talk and stared in at it, wondering if I’d stumbled back to the wrong table, the wrong life. I felt at once rested and relieved the investigation was over, but also vague regret, even a dulled longing to go back, to return to something I couldn’t pinpoint — a woman I hadn’t realized had bewitched me until she was gone.

Lines of laughter on a face, rude waitresses with bony arms, dark figures hurrying along sidewalks eager to get somewhere, nearby voices filled with dusk, cabs and panhandlers and one drunken girl screeching like a wounded bird — all of it flushed with a warmth and sad beauty I’d never noticed before.

Maybe it was a consequence of reaching the end of the end, finding out the dark, mad, gleaming tale had concluded the only way it could in the real world — with mortal people doing mortal things, a father and daughter, facing their deaths.

Because there could be no doubt about what Gallo told me: I’d phoned Sloan-Kettering Hospital, posing as a health insurance agent from a disorganized HR department. After telling a few half-truths to three different assistant department heads, and giving Ashley’s Social Security number taken from the missing-person’s report — one of the few documents left behind — three different people confirmed it on two different days. Ashley Goncourt had been treated in the pediatric oncology department in 1992 and 1993, 2001 and 2002, and finally in 2004 in conjunction with the University of Texas at Houston, exactly as Gallo had said.

At night I strolled home on the crooked sidewalks, past silent brownstones with lit-up windows filled with lives. Glasses clinking, the street gasping with laughter as the door of a bar was shoved open — these sounds seemed to follow me longer than they ever had before.

I hadn’t returned to the Reservoir after seeing Ashley there, but in the aftermath of learning about her sickness, I went back.

There was no hint of her — not in the water or the green lamplight or the biting wind, the shadows that threw themselves at my feet. I ran, lap after lap, and could think only of how she’d gone to the warehouse and what a lonely walk it must have been, up the steps to the edge of the elevator, which was the edge of her life, staring it down.

She’d been dying when she’d appeared here. It made sense, given the way she’d walked. She’d been weak, in an especially precarious mental state, according to Inez Gallo.

Even accepting this, still, something gnawed at me. I’d come to believe Ashley had sought me out because she wanted to tell me something — something crucial and real — her circumstances preventing a direct approach. Now even this had an explanation: Gallo had mentioned Ashley’s fear, that she might cause physical harm to anyone she came in close proximity to — a fear that could very well have begun when she learned what had happened to Olivia Endicott or the tattoo artist, Larry, when they’d been in her presence.

It had to have been why she stayed away from me.

In all the stories I’d heard, Ashley stood for the truth. She was the antithesis of weak. Even hunting the Spider, she’d sought him only to forgive. To accept now that it’d been delusions that brought Ashley out here, spinning her straw into gold, a master of manipulation, as Gallo put it, felt off.

What had Ashley wanted me to know?

I took so many laps around the track I lost count, and then, lungs burning, exhausted, I left, jogging down East Eighty-sixth to the subway, and boarded the train, exactly as I had the night I’d seen her.

Staring across the platform, the neon light flat and bright, I wondered if I could manifest through sheer will her boots, her red-and-black coat — if she might come one last time, so I could get a clear glimpse of her face — decode, once and for all, the truth behind her.

But there was no one.

Even the sci-fi movie poster that had been there before — the sprinting man with his eyes scribbled out — even he was gone now, replaced with an ad for a romantic comedy starring Cameron Diaz.

She just doesn’t get it, read the tagline.

Maybe I should take the hint.

Days later, I packed away the Cordova research — what was left of it, anyway — shoved it back inside the cardboard box and the box inside the closet, Septimus quietly looking on.

I took a mountain of dirty clothes to the dry cleaner, including Brad Jackson’s herringbone coat. But then, eyeing the sad thing slumped over the counter under piles of my button-downs, I had the sudden paranoid thought that it was the last shred of evidence, my last tie to the insanity of The Peak, and if Brad’s coat were cleaned and steam-pressed, encased in plastic with a paper draped over the shoulders reading, We Love Our Customers! — gone, too, would be my recollections. So I awkwardly pulled the filthy thing back out of the pile, and, returning home, shoved it in the closet behind Ashley’s red one, and shut the door.

I wanted to see Sam. I wanted to hear her voice, have her hang heavily on my arm and squint up at me — but Cynthia never returned my calls, not once. I wondered if her silence meant she was working with her lawyers to petition for a new custody arrangement, as she’d threatened to do in the emergency room. Finally, my old divorce attorney called with this very news.

“They set a court date. She wants to restrict visitation.”

“Whatever she wants.” This appeared to jolt him, as simple acts of kindness did to attorneys.

“But you might never see your daughter.”

“I want Sam to be safe and happy. We’ll leave it at that.”

I did secretly go uptown to check on her, one late December afternoon. The day was graying from the cold, giant snowflakes drifting, bewildered, through the air, forgetting to fall. I didn’t want Sam to see me, so I remained behind a few parked cars and a FreshDirect truck, watching the gleaming black doors of her school opening, the bundled-up children in coats spilling out onto the sidewalks. To my surprise, Cynthia was there waiting, and after she tucked Sam’s hands into black mittens, they took off.

Sam was wearing a new blue coat. Her hair was longer than I remembered, secured in a ponytail under a black velvet hat. She looked more mature, too, quite seriously informing Cynthia of something about her day. I was overcome. Because I saw, suddenly, how it would always be for me, Sam’s life unfolding like slides in an old projector I’d always be clicking through in the dark, stunning leaps forward in time — but never the uncut reel.

But she was happy. I could see that. She was perfect.

When they crossed the street, I could make out only their blue and black coats. A surge of yellow cabs and buses flooded Fifth Avenue, and then I couldn’t see them anymore.

It arrived on January 4: an email from Nora inviting me to her New York theatrical debut at the Flea Theater in that gender-bending off-off-Broadway production of Hamlette. She’d done well in her audition and had won the lottery for all New York actors — an actual paying part. Granted, she was only Bernarda, one of two Elsinore castle guards (renamed from Bernardo ) who appeared solely in act one, scene one, and she received just $30 per performance— but still.