LITMIR.BIZ

       Nineteen

      THE ADDRESS THAT THE GIRL GAVE ME WAS adjacent to Riverside Commons. She lived in a block of handsome detached houses, some of brick and others of limestone, that faced the park. About half were still single-family homes. She occupied the fourth floor of a four-story house that had been converted to apartments.

      Under the commons lay Power Station 6, which once stood in plain sight. Decades earlier, to beautify the neighborhood, they buried the utility in a deep and massive vault, and built the park atop it. The workers’ entrance, air intakes, and expulsion vents were along the river quay. Station 6, like the basement of the library, could also be entered by a tributary drain in the floor, provided in the event there should be a rupture in the pressurized water lines supplying the natural-gas-powered boilers that fed the steam generators.

      Entering through a manhole, we were on the lookout for power-company employees, though fewer staffed the graveyard shift, when the plant produced below maximum potential. The drain lay at the west end of the structure, behind ranks of boilers, turbines, generators, and transformers. Workmen seldom had reason to venture into that shadowy space. Ten feet from the drain, a door opened on a concrete spiral staircase, a secondary exit in the event of an emergency.

      I had instructed Gwyneth to go directly to the door, while I eased the manhole back into place. Haste was the key to passing through unseen. We didn’t need to be concerned about noise because the spinning vanes of the turbines, the rotors of the generators, and the laboring pumps provided us with cover.

      In the stairwell, with the insulated door closed, the clamor fell to a quarter of what it had been. As we ascended turn by turn, it steadily diminished.

      With her natural grace, Gwyneth rose in the stair light, not as if climbing but as if she were all but weightless and were drawn up by a draft that I couldn’t feel.

      The light fell bright enough to reveal me within my hood, and I kept my head down in case she glanced back. I wanted this unexpected adventure to last for a while, wanted to be able as long as possible to share the night with her.

      The door at the head of the stairs opened into a dark building that served as storage for the riding lawn mowers and other equipment used to maintain the Commons. With flashlights, we found the exit.

      I followed Gwyneth outside but paused, holding the door. As an emergency exit from Power Station 6, it was always unlocked from the inside; but it would be locked from the outside when closed. I didn’t have a key. Some homeless people lived in the park, and although most were timid and kept to their hidden nests in warrens of shrubbery, now and then one would be belligerent, stropped to sharp edges by either mental illness or drugs, or both.

      This December night, no one approached us. The park lay as quiet as any place in the city could be, and we didn’t need to retreat.

      We followed a footpath across lawns, past the pond where, in warmer seasons and in a full moon, half-sleeping koi sometimes rose into view. They were thick from eating bread cast to them by daytime visitors, too spoiled to take night insects off the surface.

      As if she knew my mind, the girl said, “By now they will have netted the koi and moved them inside for the winter.”

      At home in my hammock, when I slept, those fish sometimes swam into sight, mottled and pale, fins wimpling in the gentle currents, smoky presences. On the mirrored water of those dreams, I saw my face reflected darkly. The koi shimmering under my reflection had a place where they belonged in this world. Waking from such a dream, I was always filled with longing, yearning for a home in the light, a garden flowering and fruiting as it ought to be.

      Now, at the Kellogg Parkway entrance to the Commons, as we stood under a towering pine, Gwyneth pointed to a house across the street. “That’s one of the places where I live. Come in for coffee.”

      Having no friends, I had no experience of such invitations, and I stood speechless for a moment before I could say, “I better not. The night’s nearly gone.”

      She said, “There’s almost another hour and a half of darkness.”

      “I have to go to the food bank, get supplies before they open.”

      “What food bank?”

      “St. Sebastian’s.”

      “Come up, have breakfast. Go to the food bank tomorrow night.”

      “But I’ll be seen going in your place. Too dangerous.”

      She said, “No doorman. Nobody’s coming or going at this hour. Quick up the stairs.”

      I shook my head. “I shouldn’t. I can’t.”

      She pointed to a narrow walkway between her house and the one next door. “Go through there to the alley. At the back, there’s a fire escape.”

      “No. I really can’t.”

      “You will. Come on.” She ran into the street in the wake of a passing limousine with tinted windows as black as its paint job.

      Before other traffic might appear, I sprinted after her. She raced up the front stairs of the house as I followed the passageway that led to the alley.

      The fire escape switchbacked up the building, looking as though it ought to ring loudly beneath my feet like the bars of a xylophone struck exuberantly, but my ascent was quieter than pianissimo. A window framed soft light at the second-floor apartment, and the draperies were only half closed. As far as I could see, the room beyond was deserted. I turned onto the next flight of iron treads.

      At the fourth floor, Gwyneth had opened the window for me; but she was not waiting. At the farther end of the dark room, beyond an open door, a cut-crystal ceiling fixture brightened a hallway wall with prismatic patterns.

      Switching on my flashlight, I noticed words printed in black letters on the white windowsill, but before I could consider them, Gwyneth appeared beyond the open door and said, “Addison. Come to the kitchen.”

      By the time I climbed through the window and slid it shut behind me, the girl was gone. I stood in a generously proportioned room as sparsely furnished as a nun’s cell: narrow bed, single nightstand, lamp, digital clock. The place smelled fresh, and I could relate to the minimalism.

      Across the hallway lay an equally large room, containing only a desk, an office chair, a computer, a scanner, and two printers.

      A lamp turned low illuminated a living room that must have been twice as large as my three underground rooms combined, but the place felt like home because of the books. There was, however, only one armchair, as if her