I told myself that.
We shuffled down the aisle, them to their weekend escape and me to my doom.
No. You can do this. You’re a big boy. They have no power over you.
That’s who I was, after all. As an artist. Someone who sublimated his pain into art. Even when I was scared shitless, or shivering with rage, or sick with lust, or inexplicably sad to the point of collapsing to the floor in the fetal position.
Almost all of which, right then, I was.
Really? None of them have any power over you? Not even—your father?
I gulped cold air, my breaths ragged and desperate. There was only one way through this.
Hold tight to the razor edge of your hate, the blade that Hudson lodged ages ago between your ribs. Twist it just enough to keep you sharp. If it cuts your hands and you bleed, so much the better—catch the blood in a rectangle and call it a photograph.
Chapter Four
A bell rings, in Dom’s pocket. Clear echoing bronze, sounding like the blue mountain sky above a temple. He’d listened to hundreds of bell sounds online, before he selected the one that would be his cell phone ringtone.
“Hello?” he says.
“Hey, hon,” his wife says. “What time you coming home?”
“Soon,” he says, looking down at Ossie, and feels so weary all of a sudden. “People still over?”
“Yeah, they’re leaving soon,” Attalah says.
Impromptu meetings have been happening in his living room a lot lately. Local businesses struggling with rent raises. Family friends—and then friends of friends—wondering what they could do about the eviction notice that had appeared on their apartment doors. His wife is a natural leader, fearless and well connected, and she always has something for everyone who calls her up or comes through the office of UPLIFT Hudson, the organization her mother founded. A lawyer who did favors, a social services agency that could help them access an obscure subsidy. But some things can’t be stopped, not by all the wisdom and connections in the world.
The tide is rising, in Hudson, and Dominick wonders how long it will be before it swallows them all.
“You need me to make dinner?” he asks, grabbing a fistful of Ossie’s sheet and sniffing it. She always went a little too long between changing the sheets on her bed. He’d given her shit for it, but now he is grateful. Her smell is strong on them. “I can swing by ShopRite on my way.”
“Shiloh Baptist had a chicken dinner fundraiser,” she says. “Joe brought enough for everyone.”
“That was nice of him,” Dom says.
Shiloh Baptist had been having a lot of fundraisers lately.
“You okay?” she asks.
“I’ll tell you when I get home,” he says.
“Somebody die?”
He chuckles. “Am I that predictable?”
“You are, and so is Hudson.”
“I guess,” he says. The town’s crime rate is high, for it being as small as it is. So are its suicide numbers. “Let me finish up here and I’ll see you soon.”
“Okay, honey,” she says.
“I love you,” he says, and here the tears really do come.
He isn’t in a hurry to share the details on this one. She’s just lost someone to suicide herself, several months ago—Katch, a brilliant, beautiful troubled kid she’d mentored in her organization’s after-school arts program. After graduation he’d spent a couple of messy years trying to be a model. Endlessly traveling down to New York City, “getting his face out there.” Loading up his arms with ink. Making a lot of bad decisions in both places. He’d overdosed, but he’d also left a note.
And soon after that, Attalah’s mother had had a stroke. A brilliant, incandescent woman, all rage and home cooking, who’d waged war on the newcomers from her public housing apartment when obesity compromised her mobility to the point where she could no longer visit the office of UPLIFT Hudson. Now unable to speak, barely able to move.
He looks back. Ossie is smaller than she’d ever been before. Already her corpse is replacing her in his head.
Dom goes downstairs, gets into his car. Sits for a while. Starts it up.
He isn’t sure why he goes home the way he does. Something he sees out of the corner of his eye, maybe, or he just doesn’t want to go right home. It’s the long way around, looping down to Front Street and then up Warren. Hudson is like that. There are so many ways to go, but every one of them leads to the same place. So you change it up every time you drive. Maybe you turn left on Fifth instead of Third, or right on Columbia instead of State.
Dumb luck, sailor, or something else, that Dom drives by the butcher shop that night at all.
Chapter Five
RONAN
The train blew its whistle and pulled out of the station. Heading north. On to Albany, Niagara Falls, maybe even Montreal or Toronto. Sleepy people watched me from the windows, and then they were gone. One last whistle, a long and taunting sound, mocking me for being where I was, and then it was swallowed up in darkness and distance.
Across the street, a billboard sported a smiling blue sperm whale and the words: WELCOME TO HUDSON: A WHALE OF A TOWN! Loud hellos were being said. Pretty hip people were being picked up by their pretty hip friends. A boy turned to grin, walking past me, and that bare raw flash of gay lust was like another twist of the blade. To be so free and careless of such dangerous desire—here in Hudson, of all places.
Doors slammed. Cars scurried off. In three minutes, five tops, the station was as silent as it had always been.
So. Evidently Hudson had evolved. Become something new. The depressed postindustrial dead end I’d left behind was gone. That corpse had been resurrected, Lazarus-like, to be some kind of weekend haunt for the New Brooklyn’s overflow. Vaguely, I recalled my father saying something about a story in the New York Times, the skyrocketing real estate market, “in a year or two we’ll be able to sell the old butcher shop building for millions. Actual millions.”
My father. Remembering his voice made my breath stop.
Idiotic, to have gotten off the train. To come here. To go see him. When I’d spent so long hiding from what was happening to him. When I’d ignored the desperate plea in his voice, the one he was too proud to put into words, begging me to come. Missing me. Wanting to tell me that things were serious. That whatever was going on in his brain, whatever was making him vanish into himself—he wasn’t getting better. That he wouldn’t.
Someone, hopefully human, howled from down by the boat launch. I turned onto Warren Street, scouring my phone for signs of why I was where I was. Still nothing but the calendar entry for coffee—but why couldn’t I recall the actual encounter? Katch didn’t have an email address. Not even a phone number. Our encounters had all been in person, since he first showed up at my studio a week ago. That hadn’t seemed strange, before, but now it added to the uncanniness of my predicament.
Shadows danced in my peripheral vision. Dark shapes at the ends of side streets. Figures watching me from third-floor windows. A glass bottle broke, somewhere down the block. I felt stretched thin, pulled too tight. Like the Ronan I had been, that poor sad fuck I left behind so long ago, he was here. He’d been waiting for me. And now that I was back on his home turf, he could come clawing out of me at any moment.