The war between the two Hudsons was particularly acute on Warren Street. Old establishments like the West Indian grocery, with its beef patties and a cat asleep on the bread, or the sporting goods store that had been there since the fifties. But there weren’t very many of those. Mostly it was antique shops. So many antique shops. Windows full of cow skulls. Empty bottles of laudanum or mercury. Campaign buttons for candidates long discredited. Gnarled statues that were probably racist once, but now the paint had peeled away. All of history was here, caught and carved up into tiny profitable pieces.
I passed Third Street. I stopped in front of one window, which boasted a bronze statue of three stacked life-size pigs. Capped with a weird sort of hat that I swiftly saw was a lampshade. A lamp. A fucking six-foot-tall, six-foot-wide bronze lamp. I took a step back, on outraged instinct. Raised my camera. And only when I looked through the wide-angle lens, taking in the entire storefront, and saw the precise shape of the darkness behind the pig lamp, did I know where I was.
My father’s butcher shop. Fifteen years gone; died when Wal-Mart came to town. Vacant all this time, I’d imagined. I never knew he rented it out. I never knew so many things.
HUDSON BUTCHER, said the sign across the front. Where my father’s name once was. An old-time, tongue-in-cheek typeface. Blue letters ribbed in red. So clever. So hip.
A phantom stepped forward from the darkness. Shaped like me—same height, same stoop—so that we each could have been looking at our own reflection—but this was not me. This was Narcissus’s nightmare; Dorian Gray’s portrait. His wrinkled face cracked into a curiosity that was a mirror for my own, but the pajamas he was wearing were a mockery of my own attempt to be sharp, to be fashion, to be somebody.
“Hey, Dad,” I said, except that no sound came out.
With mild amusement, I saw that I wasn’t breathing. The amusement evaporated when I saw that even when I tried my hardest, I still couldn’t.
I dropped to my knees. That helped a little, but I still had to gasp and wriggle to get half a lungful of air. So I fell onto my side, and then lay on my back on the filthy sidewalk that smelled like dog pee. That was better. My father looked down on me from inside the shop. I crossed my arms over my chest and shut my eyes and what did it matter that tears were streaming out of them?
Chapter Six
RONAN
The cop car pulled up, flashed lights, double-parked. A door opened.
Shit, I thought, pressing my cheek into the cold dirty sidewalk. What kind of bullshit town has Hudson become, where a damaged addict can’t even lie in the street anymore?
“Sorry, Officer,” I said, shutting my eyes, gathering my strength, my charm. “I fell.”
“I thought that was you,” the cop said, his voice strumming a chord deep in my belly. “Didn’t quite believe my eyes.”
Against my will, my eyes opened. It was him all right. Tears clouded my vision again.
“Dominick?”
“Hi, Ronan. Having some trouble?”
“You might say that.”
I stared. Black bare tree branches spread out in a crown behind his head. Past that, the sky. Stars. I hadn’t seen them in so long.
He held out one hand. I grabbed it, held tight. His touch unlocked something that had been locked up tight for a long, long time, except I wasn’t sure what exactly it was.
He pulled. I pulled. Dom was trying to bring me back up to my feet, and I was trying to pull him down to the ground with me. Of course he won out. He’d always been the strongest man I knew. I rose up slowly, unwillingly, but when I was standing again he tugged me forward, into a hug.
“It’s good to see you, Ro.”
“You too,” I said, and shut my eyes again, let myself collapse into the hug. He smelled the same. Same body oil he’d always worn, like the inside of a mosque, clean and sacred and earthy. Once, on 125th Street, I’d passed a street vendor with a table full of incense, burning a dozen different kinds at once, and one of them had been Dom’s, except I couldn’t separate it out from the panorama of overlapping scents.
“You’re a cop,” I said, stupidly.
“Don’t hold it against me. I try not to be one of the bad ones.”
I laughed. It couldn’t be easy for him, downstreet. Cops were right up there with cockroaches on the list of things people complained about. I got shit from the girl behind the counter at a store once because I have the same last name as an officer, someone I’m absolutely no relation to.
“So . . . my dad’s in there,” I said, pointing to the inside of the antique shop that had once been our butcher shop. “He doesn’t . . . look well.”
“No worries,” Dom said, opening the door and calling my father’s name. He stepped from the shadow, looking lost and little in his pajamas.
“Does this happen often?”
“Not often,” Dom said, taking my father by the hand, leading him out into the streetlamp light.
“Hey, Dad,” I said, trembling—startled at how much this hurt. After how hard I’d been trying to hide from him. From this. The tiny man he’d become. The damage that had clearly been done.
My father didn’t answer. He looked in my direction like he could see me, but not like he recognized me.
Or he does, and he’s too disappointed to know what to say to you.
“You’re back,” Dom said, the way you do when you want to distract a guest from something embarrassing. “For a day, or . . . ?”
“Not sure,” I said, and then thought, Wait, now we’re not sure? Now it’s not, you can bet your ass I’ll be on the first train out of here tomorrow morning?
“You’re one of them, now,” he said. “The hipster invaders.”
“I’ll try not to be one of the bad ones,” I said.
“I set that up for you. You’re welcome. Come on, I’ll give you two a ride home. In the back like a perp, or in the front like my partner?”
“Your partner,” I said, and wondered if he could hear the hunger in my voice.
He opened the door for me. “Some people get a thrill out of riding in the back, is all.”
“Yeah, maybe some other time.”
“Your dad gets to be the perp then,” he said, opening the back door for him. Another twist of the blade, to see the childlike way he obeyed. Allowed himself to be seat-belted.
It smelled like Dom in there. Dom, and coffee, and leather. I got an instant erection and put my bag on my lap to hide it.
“My dad still lives in the same place,” I said, pointing to the tippy top of Warren Street.
“I know,” he said.
Of course he did. Hudson was small. Everyone knew everything about everyone else. “How’s he . . . been?”
It was an idiotic question. The answer was right behind me, and it was Not great. Walking the chilly streets at night, barefoot and pajamaed, going to work at a job he hadn’t done in ages. Living in a city that no longer was.
I felt skinned, stripped bare. Like I was the barefoot streetwalker. Exposed to Dom and everyone in Hudson as an utter failure of a human being, the selfish son who abandoned his father, ignored his descent into . . . whatever this was.
Dom shrugged, started up the car. “It’s been hard on him, these last few years. The way the town is changing.”