Marisha Pessl - Night Film

“You walked her back to East Seventy-first Street?” I asked.

He eyed me. “Where we were last night.”

“ That’s why you knew how to get in,” whispered Nora, astonished. “You’d climbed in before.”

“After the first night we were together, when she didn’t come home, her parents were furious. They kept a pretty tight rein on her. They insisted she be home by one in the morning or they were going to take her away or something, to their house upstate. So, every night that week, I’d drop Ash off at her house at one, wait for her across the street, where we stood last night. At about one-thirty, Ash would climb out and we’d take off, heading to the docks or the Carlyle or Central Park. At six in the morning, she’d climb back in. She’d cut the wires so the sensors on that window weren’t rigged for the alarm. Her parents never knew about it. They still obviously don’t. When I saw the place last night it looked exactly the same. I half expected to see Ash come climbing out.”

He dropped his gaze to the floor and drained the glass of scotch.

“When that week was over,” he went on quietly, “I went back to school and the first thing I did was write a letter to Orlando’s parents, telling them what had happened. She’d given me the courage, even though she never said a word. When I put it in the mail, I felt like a noose had been removed from my neck. It took them a few weeks to write back to me, but the letter, when it finally arrived — it awed me, I guess. They blessed me for coming forward, telling the truth. They asked me to forgive myself, said that they’d pray for me and I’d always have a place in their home.”

Hopper, still awed by this, shook his head. “For the next couple of weeks, Ash and I wrote every day,” he went on. “In late May, for a week I didn’t hear. I went crazy, worried something had happened. Then I got a phone call. It was Ash. I’ll never forget how she sounded. She was desperate, sobbing. She said she couldn’t live with her parents anymore and wanted to go where they couldn’t find her. She asked if I’d come away with her. And I said —well, I said the best word in the English language.”

“Yes,” I whispered.

He nodded. “I borrowed money from one of my teachers to buy the tickets. June the tenth, 2004. Nine-thirty-five P.M. United, Flight 7057. JFK to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. There was a city way in the south on Santa Catarina Island that I’d been to once. Florianópolis. The most beautiful place I’d ever seen, second to her. A buddy of mine ran a bar down there on the beach. He said he’d help us out with work till we knew what our plan was. Summer break arrived, and I traveled on those three Greyhound buses all the way back to the city to see her. The moment I did, I knew it was on. We were going to leave it all behind. Best night of my life was when we got those tattoos. I’d heard about Rising Dragon. But the kirin was her idea.”

“Did Larry do it?” asked Nora.

“Yeah. He was a big guy. It was just the three of us in the shop. The design was intricate. You were supposed to do that kind of thing over a month’s time to handle the pain. But our flight was the next day, so it was that night or nothing. When it was over, she threw her arms around me, laughing, like it hadn’t hurt at all, and she said she’d see me tomorrow. Tomorrow it would all begin.”

Hopper took a deep breath, interlacing his fingers, staring beyond us and out the window, where the rain still whipped against the glass. He seemed suddenly very far away, lost in a bottomless crevice of the past he couldn’t pull himself out of. Or perhaps he was recalling a detail he chose not to disclose to us, words she’d said or something she’d done, that would remain forever between them.

When he looked back at us, he seemed reluctant to continue.

“Mind if I smoke?” he asked quietly.

I shook my head. He stood up to retrieve his cigarettes from his coat pocket, and I glanced at Nora. She was so mesmerized, she hadn’t moved a muscle in fifteen minutes, elbow on the armrest, chin planted in her hand.

He sat back down and tapped out a cigarette, lighting it fast. There was a long silence, his face dark and pensive, cigarette smoke clinging to the empty space around him.

“That was the last time I ever saw her,” he said.

“Next day, we were due to leave,” he went on. “June the tenth. Ash was meeting me at six P.M. at Neil’s Coffee Shop. It’s a diner on Lex, a block from her house. Then, together we’d head to JFK. Six o’clock came and went. There was no word from her. Soon it was seven. Eight. I called her cellphone. No answer. I went to her house and rang the bell. Usually there were lights on. It was dark. I knocked. No one came to the door. I climbed up there, exactly the way Ash did, up the iron bars to the second-floor balcony and in the far-right window. The place was luxurious, a palace, but it’d been packed up. And in a hurry. Like a bunch of criminals had decided to run for their lives. The furniture was covered with sheets, randomly, so they were half on the floor. Beds stripped. Milk and fruit and bread tossed out on the sidewalk in piles of garbage bags. I found Ash’s room on the third floor. There were a few photographs, books, but a lot of her things had obviously been taken, thrown in bags really fast. The lamp was tipped over on her bedside table. But inside her closet, hidden beneath blankets on the top shelf, I found a small leather suitcase. I pulled it down, unzipped it. It was packed with her clothes, sundresses, T-shirts, cash, sheet music, a Lonely Planet guide to Brazil. She was planning to go. I knew then her parents had found out, and they’d taken her away, probably to that estate where she’d been homeschooled her entire life.”

He paused, anxiously twirling the end of the cigarette with his thumb.

“I was all set to go to the police, when I heard from her. She sent me an email. She was sorry, but she’d made a mistake. We were just a couple of delusional kids, caught up in the moment. She didn’t want to be tied down to anyone. She said she loved our time together, but it was over, simple as that. She told me to keep riding the waves seaward, keep searching for the goddamn chambers of the fucking sea, where the mermaids sang …”

He irritably cut himself off, taking a long drag on the cigarette.

“I was sure her parents had put her up to it,” he went on, exhaling smoke in a fast stream. “I wrote back, said I didn’t believe her. I was going to find her and she could say it to my face. She asked me not to contact her. I wrote back again. If this was my Ashley, what was the address of the stoop we’d sat on that first night, when the sun was rising over the block? She wrote the right answer back, in seconds. 131 East 19th. And I’m no one’s Ashley, she wrote. It was a dagger to the heart. A year later, I found out she was attending Amherst. So she was fine. It had been her decision.”

He brushed his hair out of his eyes, leaning back in the chair, his face calm, even slightly dazed.

“Did you ever hear from her again?” Nora softly asked him.

He nodded imperceptibly, his eyes shifting to her, but said nothing.

“What did she say?” Nora whispered.

“ Nothing, ” he answered tersely. “She sent me a stuffed monkey.”

Of course, the monkey —that faded toy with loose stitching, covered in dried mud. I’d almost forgotten about it.

“Why?” I asked.

He stared at me. “It was Orlando’s. He slept with it. I don’t know how Ash had it or where she’d found it. But when I pulled it out of that envelope, I was sick. She was sick, sending it, when she knew every day I thought about that kid, lived every day with the horror of this thing I’d done. I went to the return address she’d written on the envelope, thinking I’d find a reason why she did such a thing.” He looked at me. “That’s when I ran into you.”