Port Judith in Winter: Part Four of Four

Changing trains. The subway takes me as far as the Hub, central terminus of the Judith rail system. It is situated at the intersection of thousands of miles of track, the focal point of an intricate latticework of stations, sidings, platforms, and depots. Incoming trains haul flatbeds high with timber, mountains of coal in metal cars. Outgoing engines carry the finished products to the farthest edges of the city, driving its outward grasp, its ceaseless expansion. The station itself was once located beyond the city limits. Now it nestles within a sea of skyscrapers, its domed roof broaching nothing but shadows.

I step off the two o'clock train and join the stream of commuters. I let it bear me along, limping on my crutches. It carries me up a wide concrete tunnel, a gentle incline that links the underground with the Hub. The blue lights bleed together overhead, melting into the shuffle of footsteps, the hum of the trains. Underlying everything is the odor of diesel exhaust.

I come to the stairs. Three flights of a dozen: steep, no railings or elevator. Men and women blow past, hurrying, holding folders, briefcases. The polite ones murmur apologies, but most elbow past in silence. I watch them ascend the stairs to the Hub's vaulted hall, jostling with each other on the narrow steps. Some halt at the top of the third flight. They linger, the way a river seems to pause before a waterfall, contemplating the great height before sliding over. And then they disappear.

I place one crutch on the first step. Shifting my weight, I pull myself up, readjusting my tilt and balance. I take a breath. Somewhere near by, an intercom crackles to life. A male voice drones through: garbled, unintelligible. There is nothing but noise here. A telephone is ringing in the Hub, echoed into static by the high dome.

On the landing between the second and third flights, I collapse from exhaustion, falling backward into a squat. No one moves to help me. My arms ache. My injured foot burns and throbs. I force myself to sit and stretch my legs. First I bring my breathing under my control, and then my heartbeat. I'm sitting that way when a young woman nearly trips over me. Catching her balance, she keeps climbing, oblivious. She is absorbed in thought. She mutters to herself, rehearsing her side of an imaginary conversation:

"Please. Don't go. I need you. Listen. I'm asking you. Please."

It is a one hour ride to the edge of the sprawl. I spend the time gazing out the window, my head resting against it, the train rattling in my teeth. There is no scenery. In the suburbs, all of the towns are identical. Every few minutes, a new sign rises in the window. A new name glides into focus, glimpsed briefly before whipping down the track. The names change, but there is only one city: a linked grid of factories, power lines, and parking lots. Even the houses look the same.

Thirty minutes into the ride, I drift off into a shallow sleep. My dreams draw back across images of a burning countryside, a series of still lifes: trees trailing veils of smoke, their trunks blackened, charred. Farmhouses alight beneath a snow-dark sky. A barn at night, its frame on fire, its cross beams crumbling.

The train wakes me. When the engine brakes, the window strikes my forehead, knocking me back against the seat. I look out and notice the station number. I'm here.

It is after five when I leave the station. I hobble through the sliding doors, overheated air gushing out behind me. Outside, the wind is bitter—ice-edged, frostbitten—but there is still daylight, a sure sign of the coming spring. I step sideways under a snow-weighed awning and unfold a road map. Squinting to read the names, I attempt to orient myself. I find north by the setting sun and rotate the map accordingly.

From behind me: "Where you going?"

I turn to find myself facing a young man, a boy. He can't be more than fifteen, but he is dressed like a street person, wearing black with the exception of a torn orange beanie, a hunter's cap. On his hands, he wears knit gloves: fingerless, bronze studs at the knuckles. His forehead is a mess of acne.

"You look lost," he says.

"I think I might be."

"Well," he says, repeating his earlier question. "Where you going?" Slipping a cigarette from a crumpled packet, he thrusts it between his chapped lips and lights up with a match. He exhales a mouthful of smoke.

"How old are you?" I ask.

"How old are you?" he retorts.

I tell him. "You?"

"Eighteen," he says. He's lying.

"Okay."

"You want a smoke?" He offers me the pack.

"Just directions," I say. "I'm looking for a certain place, a hill."

"Not many of them around here," he says.

"I know. I grew up here."

"Oh." Wryly: "Must have been a long time ago."

"It was. But the place I'm looking for—it's called Morning Hill. I don't know if they call it that anymore, but they used to." I describe it to him, closing my eyes to recall its granite paths, its glacier-hewn overlook.

He listens blankly. When I finish, his face registers no emotion at all: not recognition, not even amusement or faint interest. "Only hill I can think of like that," he says, speaking slowly. "Is in the graveyard."

"Graveyard?"

"It's a newer place, I think. It's maybe a mile from here? Saint someone or other. There's a bus stop over there. I think it heads in that direction. Should be by shortly."

I thank him.

He doesn't even respond. Instead, he palms a knife from his pocket, a switchblade. Ignoring me, he opens the knife, contemplating his reflection in the blade before clicking it shut. He does this over and over, occasionally stopping to take a drag from his cigarette. He doesn't even look at me, so I refold my map and head across the parking lot to the bus stop.

It is an enclosed glass booth, unheated but sheltered from the wind. There are two benches inside, both unoccupied, so I take a seat on the nearest one, collapsing with a sigh. I can see my breath before my face, the steam clouds growing larger, denser as my breathing slows and deepens. I check the posted schedule. I have another ten minutes to wait.

Someone left a newspaper behind on the bench. I pick it up, noting today's date on the masthead. On the front page, a massive banner screams the word BREAKTHROUGH. Below that, in slightly smaller text: POLICE UNCOVER CRUCIAL LEAD IN NORTH SIDE STRANGLER CASE. The accompanying photograph shows a city detective flanked by uniformed officers. He is holding a length of rope in front of him, dangling it from one hand and pointing to it with the other. He is grinning proudly, like he has just landed a marlin. I skim through the article quickly. According to the writer, police have discovered the murder weapon in the case of Deborah Rose, leading them to finger a "definite suspect." The writer closes with a quote from the lead detective, the one pictured. "We're hot on the trail," the newspaper quotes. "It's only a matter of hours now."

* * *

St. Stephen's Cemetery. It is dusk by the time I make it there. The sky is dwindling into the west, cold and blue like the lights of Port Judith, but there are men working in the graveyard. Wearing orange vests and headphones, they weave between the rows of graves, using snow blowers to clear the headstones. Another uses a snowplow to clear the path. "Cemetery closes at dusk," a sign reads, but the wrought iron gate is open, and I go inside.

Morning Hill is clearly visible at the far end of the graveyard. Situated among the neat rows, it resembles a stone ruin, a fallen arch. An electric cross has been mounted at the summit, a white beacon fifty feet high. Across its horizontal arm, garish lights spell out the word PEACE. As I approach it, threading the plowed rows, some of the workmen wave. Others stop me to remind me of the cemetery's closing.

It is dark when I arrive at the base of the hill. A yellow moon is in the sky, waning to a thumbnail. Ahead of me, the familiar path climbs to the summit. Its winding course scales mossy ledges and granite walls, rising through darkness to meet the neon cross at its top.

A structure has been erected at the foot of the path. Like the hill itself, it is squat and shadowed, but it is a new building, twenty by forty: marble walls gleaming, polished by snowfall. The door is high and heavy, Judith steel. There is an engraved plaque mounted to front. It is too dark to make out the text, but I run my finger along the lettering, tracing each curve and angle. For the nameless, it reads, followed by a quote from scripture. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs in the Kingdom of Heaven. A tomb for the homeless, I think, and then I remember the notices in the Herald.

I tremble. My fingers slip from the plaque, and I am suddenly very cold. My bones ache. I slump between my crutches, exhausted. Almost instinctively, I glance up. I am expecting darkness, the black well of an urban sky, but I am far from the city now, and the night withdraws to bare its cache of starlight.

* * *

During the ride back to the station, the bus driver switches on the radio. The signal crackles at first, fading in, followed by three harsh beeps and a mechanical voice. "Attention: the government has issued a severe weather warning for the Port Judith metropolitan area. A large blizzard is expected to make landfall during the night. Up to thirty inches of snow is expected in the next twenty-four hours. If possible, try to remain indoors. Have candles on hand, as brownouts may be possible."

Three beeps, and then quiet. The cabin bumps and slides over the bus' shocks. A woman yawns and fans the stuffy air. The man sitting next to me leans closer. "Winter's last breath," he tells me, nearly whispering. "After this, we're home free."

* * *

My apartment. I turn on the lights and shut the door. I hang my coat and hobble to the window. The first flakes of snow are already in the air. They glitter and spin past the city lights, wheeling on their six axes, reflecting bursts of neon. I draw the blind. It hits the sill with a crack and I go into the bathroom.

At the sink, I wash my hands, my dry and cracking hands. I face myself in the mirror. Gently, so gently, I reach my hand to my reflection, brushing my fingertips across my sunken cheeks, my pale and shapeless lips. I close my eyes. Rosemary, I think. Pain moves in my chest, a suffocating loneliness.

I peel back my reflection and open the medicine cabinet. Pills. I shake them out in my palm. There are six in all, a colorful mix of capsules. Staring down at them, I remember my dream of the farmhouse, its broken floors and windows. I think of the snow-swept country, its miles of fallen fences and ruined barns. And I imagine midnight in the suburbs, moonlight showing on the tomb for the nameless. I drop the pills in the toilet. I let them slip from my fingers one at a time before flushing them down.

* * *

Port Judith. Tonight it is the city of my nightmares. Deserted. Desolate. But something is different. Something has changed. The air is windless now, heavy with the smells of urban spring: trash disgorged from melting snow banks, water standing in fetid pools. The lake ice is no longer frozen, sculpted to static waves. Instead, its surface is a perfect plane, wave-less and un-rippled. Springtime and the city is still, silent but for the dripping of icicles, the murmur of moving puddles.

When I wake to the dream, I am walking along Cherry Street. I pass the park, the bench where I met Whitcomb. Free from my crutches, I pick up the pace. I begin to walk faster, and then faster. Soon I am running, sprinting beneath the ice-hung eaves, their constant drizzle. The ground flows backwards beneath my feet, receding as the city blocks whip past. April odors intensify in one moment before fading in the next, left behind by the hurtling street, the hollow staccato of my shoes on the pavement. On Canal Street, I catch a glimpse of myself in the window of a pawnshop. I am young again. Nineteen years old: fleet, fit, and flying.

The streets are emptied of traffic, of all cars. It is too soon for flowers, but the light has cast off its gray pall. From the east, the sunlight comes golden and unfiltered, the mirrored buildings robed in oak and chestnut. They are like great trees, crowned at the top by the sun's brightest rays. The sky is clear. It is dawn.

* * *

"Rosemary?"

She turns. The dream tides draw back across her face, her brown hair shimmering. She smiles. "Finally," she says. "I've been waiting for you."

"You have?"

She nods.

"Here?"

"Here."

We are on the Harbor Bridge. Below us, the lake is two-dimensional, an unblemished mirror. Bronze and featureless, it doubles the bridge above it, the morning sky yawning darkly in its depths. Linked at their columns, the two bridges run parallel to the far shore, their steel frames stemming from each other. For a moment, I don't know which is real and which is the reflection.

"I missed you," I say, speaking rapidly. "The other night. I went back to the farmhouse, but you were gone."

She purses her lips. She appears confused, but I press on.

"I thought it was the end," I say. "Of this. Of everything."

"But I was there," she says. "At the farmhouse. It was winter. The trees were gone, the elms. The farmhouse was abandoned, a ruin, the walls covered in graffiti. They were building a superstore."

"Then why did we miss each other?"

She thinks it over. Puts a finger to her lower lip and nibbles the nail. "What time did you go to sleep?"

"Late," I admit.

"Midnight?"

"Later. Closer to four."

"Well," she says. "That solves it. Simple."

"I don't see how."

"Isn't it obvious? I told you—I always go to bed early. I was asleep by nine. By the time you made it to the farmhouse at four, I was already up."

She is smiling: placid, serene. When she notices me staring, she raises her eyebrows. She nods vigorously with her lips sucked in, an exaggerated gesture. She wrinkles her nose, distorts her face.

I smile.

"You see?" she asks me, and her voice is tender. "It's that simple. You got yourself all worked up—and for what?"

I don't respond.

"This is more than a coincidence," she continues, her tone becoming insistent. "More than just luck. No matter what happens, no one is going to take this away from us."

* * *

"I went back," I say. "To Morning Hill."

"Tell me."

I describe the train ride through the suburbs: the meaningless town signs, the row on row of identical houses. She laughs when I mention the young knife-wielder at the bus station, and her eyes widen when I tell her about the cemetery: the snow blowers and electric cross, the marble tomb for the nameless.

"St. Stephen," she reflects.

"The first martyr."

"It's strange, but I find that fitting somehow. Encouraging, even."

"What do you mean?"

"It makes me think..." she trails off, her gaze drifting out over the mirrored water. She collects her thoughts, begins again. "It helps me to believe—despite all evidence to the contrary—that they didn't die for nothing."

Pause.

"But they did," I say. "They did."

* * *

Time passes, but it is dreamtime. Hours come and go, but the lake remains bronze and featureless. Clad in amber sunlight, the city radiates and refracts the dawn, time-trapped: an ancient insect, perfectly preserved. We stand shoulder-to-shoulder at the railing, hundreds of feet above our reflections. In the distance, the mountains are half-shorn, tonsured by evergreens beneath snow-tipped summits, bare maples shading the lower slopes.

"I can't help but wonder," I say. "Why are we here?"

"The bridge?"

"Port Judith."

She shrugs. "For the same reason we were in the country before. You see: this is where I grew up." She gestures with one hand, turning her wrist to encircle the bridge, the lake, the city. "This is my home."

"Home," I echo. "I've been so alone here. Everything is so temporary here, so anonymous. I never thought it could be anyone's home."

"Maybe not." Folding her hands together on the railing, she rests her chin over her joined fingers, green eyes sweeping sideways beneath their long lashes. She clears her throat. "It's true I've always lived here," she says. "But, like you, I think I lost my home long ago."

"What happened?"

"My family," she says.

"Divorce?"

"Yes. And more."

I touch my hand to her back, spreading my fingers between her shoulder blades. She doesn't flinch from my hand, and I let it rest there, lightly. "It's sad," I tell her. "But everybody loses their home. Sometimes people are able to find a new place, to make it their own. But they're the lucky ones."

She looks at me. "Not you?"

"Not me."

I let my hand drop. It slides down her back, falling to my side. But Rosemary catches it in mid-descent, squeezing it in her own hand. Earnestly: "But we can change that. Can't we?"

Her words tug at my memory. They are the same words she spoke to me the night we met.

I shake my head. "I don't think so."

"How do you know?"

"I just do."

"Let me try."

"How?"

Her eyes flash. She is suddenly so youthful, so beautiful that I have to look away.

She says: "Meet me."

"Here?"

"In real life."

Something is quickening. At first I think it is my heartbeat, but the rhythm is wrong: irregular, syncopated. A muted pounding. Distant drums. The sound is coming from somewhere far off, loud and low enough to ripple the water, to make the twin bridges waver together, shimmering.

I hold my breath.

"When?" I ask.

"Tomorrow," she says, squeezing my hand. "Dawn."

The pounding is growing louder. The bridge itself trembles beneath us, rocking violently along its span, swinging seesaw-like between the columns. Waves are spreading across the harbor, obliterating our reflections.

"You'll be here?" I say.

"I'll be here."

As the drums intensify, Rosemary lets go, and the dream dissolves. Adrift in darkness, the pounding enters into my skull, becoming louder, sharper: two steel rods clanging in time. The vibrations travel throughout my entire body, spreading through tendons, ligaments, seeking the heart's quiet echo. The sound is growing within me, swelling my diaphragm, choking my lungs, and I ride its upward movement to the surface.

* * *

Someone is hammering on the door. The sound is rushed, rhythm-less, panicked. In my room, it is completely dark, the window sealed over by the blizzard. As I listen, the knocking grows more insistent, more desperate. Shawling myself in the blanket, I hobble to the door.

A young man stands framed in the doorway, blanched and pale, spotlighted by the hallway blues. He is dressed for a night out: jeans and a tee shirt, a flannel shirt with the buttons undone. It takes me a moment to recognize him. My neighbor.

"Oh thank God," he blurts. "You're here."

"What's wrong?"

"My wife," he says.

"What is it?"

"Please," he says. "Just come."

* * *

Next door, I follow him through the living room and into the bedroom. His wife lies fully clothed across the bed, tall and thin, her platinum curls massed across her face, hiding her features. She is very still. A lamp burns brightly on the nightstand, yellow light spilling across the rumpled sheets, inking every fold and hollow. A medicine bottle lies on the floor beside the bed: empty, missing its cap.

"I found her like this," he says. "I was working late. I came home and she was in here." From his pocket, he produces a piece of loose-leaf paper, folded neatly in two. "She left a note."

I approach the bedside. Taking a seat on the bed, I turn the woman's right wrist over in my hand, probing with my fingertips, searching for a pulse. It is slow and faint, but it is there. Almost imperceptibly, her chest inflates, swelling outward from the belly like a baby's breathing.

"She's still breathing," I say. "Have you called the ambulance?"

He responds with a blank stare, his mouth hanging half-open. He is in shock.

"Do you have a phone?"

He nods dumbly.

"Go now," I say. "Call them now."

Without a word, he turns on his heel and disappears into the living room. I hear him slip the phone from its cradle. Three quick beeps. A pause, and then a muffled conversation, concluding with his profuse thanks. "Thank you," he tells the operator. "Thank you so much."

He comes back into the room. "They're on their way," he says.

I nod. I pluck the medicine bottle from the floor and rotate it to read the label. Sleeping pills. Reaching out, I brush the sweat-damp hair from her face. Her lips are bulbous, contorted into a kind of smile. Her eyes are clenched shut, but the lids flutter, one after the other, fanning shadows across her face. A soft moan escapes with her shallow breathing.

"Listen," I say, steeling my voice. "I'm going downstairs to alert the building manager—he'll need to open the service elevator for the paramedics. I want you to stay here with her, keep an eye on her breathing."

"Okay."

We trade places at the bedside. He cradles her head in his lap, drawing his fingers through her tangled hair. He is so gentle, and when he bends to kiss her forehead, I hear him whisper what sounds like an apology.

* * *

The manager is out. I batter the door for a full two minutes, but there is no response. I give up. Leaving the door, I follow the hallway to the lobby. It is deserted. The noise of the radiator is deafening. The windows are steamed up, the mist becoming crystalline. I step to the nearest window and wipe it clean, cupping my eyes to peer out.

The city is awash in blue light. Curling banks of snow tumble and flow on the air like the ocean along a coastline, breaking against the buildings in rotating eddies of reflected neon. As the wind picks up, the snow erupts from the mouth of every alleyway, swerving sharply, like bats driven from the dark of a cave. In the midst of it all, I can just discern the shape of the building manager. He wears his customary wool and flannel, head half-hidden in a tall fur hat. He is shoveling the sidewalk in front of the building, keeping the walkway clear even as the snow accumulates. There must be close to two feet on the ground.

I rap sharply on the glass. He stops at the sound, squinting through the snow to see me. He lowers the shovel and approaches the building.

I meet him in the doorway. He is dusted head to foot in powder, but it is a dry snow: clean, cottony, white beyond purity.

"Evening," he says.

I tell him what has happened. He listens intently, immeasurably calm. His face is wrapped in a scarf, but his eyes don't even flicker. When I mention my neighbor's suicide attempt, he merely nods—unmoved, unaffected. "I'll see to it," he says, meaning the service elevator. "But I've got to get the keys first."

Behind me, the radiator pours out heat, melting the snow as it billows in through the open doorway. The manager pivots to gaze into the raging blizzard. For a moment, we simply stand there, poised on the brink of winter's ending, neon raining down around us.

"Damn," he says, leaning on his shovel. "But isn't that a thing to see."

* * *

I follow him to his room. Despite everything, he remains aloof, dispassionate. Outside the locked door, he kicks the snow from his boots and stamps them dry on the welcome mat. "And that reminds me," he says. "I've got something for you too."

"Me? Are you sure?"

"Of course I'm sure," he says.

"What is it?"

"Hang on a minute," he says. "And I'll show you."

He disappears inside. He closes the door behind him, leaving me alone in the dim hallway. A few minutes later, he emerges coat-less with a brass key ring at his belt and a potted plant in his hands.

He offers me the plant. "This came for you earlier tonight."

"In the mail?"

He shakes his head. "Some kid dropped it off," he says. "A young man, I should say."

"Did he leave his name?"

"No."

"What did he look like?"

"Oh—like everyone else, I reckon. He was wearing a trench coat, a ratty gray thing. To be honest, he looked a mess."

Whitcomb. I look closer at the plant in my hand. It is a small seedling: three inches high and exceedingly delicate, planted in a miniature clay pot. It is crowned by a single leaf, pale and frond-like and faintly familiar.

"He left this too," the manager says. He reaches in his pocket and hands me an envelope.

I rip it open. Inside is a single sheet of unlined paper, blank but for a few lines of text printed halfway down:

 

I have to go away for a while, but I want you to have this. I would have dropped it off in person, but I didn't want to wake you. It's an elm seedling—but you must know that. This is what I've been working on—it's immune to the rot.

Plant it.

A.

 

We open the shutter. Afterward, I rejoin my neighbor in his apartment. He holds his wife's head in his lap and runs his fingers along the waves of her hair. She is still breathing, her chest filling and falling, but she remains unconscious. There is no clock in the bedroom, but periodically, he checks his watch. It is after four. The blizzard has delayed the ambulance. We wait.

"This isn't the first time," the husband tells me, breaking the silence. He is calmer than before, oddly dispassionate.

"What do you mean?"

"That this has happened. That she's done this."

I don't know how to respond.

He continues. "The first time she used a razor blade," he says. He turns over her left wrist, revealing a roadmap of white scars.

I look away. "How long ago was this?"

"Before we met," he says. "When she was still a teenager. Even before she told me about it, I knew. I knew by the scars, by the way she tried to hide them with her sleeve. She told me the night I proposed."

I wait for him to go on.

"And you know that I said? I told her I understood." He opens his mouth to continue, but no sound comes. He shrugs miserably, and returns his eyes to his wife's bone-white face, her gently heaving chest.

I change the subject. "How long have you been married?" I ask.

"Six months."

"Ah."

"You?" he says. "Are you married?"

"No. I never was."

"It must be hard for you," he comments. "At your age. Being alone."

I shrug away the question.

"She told me once," he says, his gaze never straying from her closed eyelids. Gently, he touches a finger to her sweat-slick forehead and lets it trail away, following the curve of her sloping brow. "When she was a child, she said, she never wanted to grow up. She never wanted to be old."

"There are harder things," I say.

"Are there?"

"Being young," I respond, and we are both quiet.

The minutes drag together, indistinguishable in their silence, and it is another quarter-hour before we hear the wail of the ambulance on the street below, sirens striping the snow.

* * *

"She'll be alright," the building manager tells me. We stand together in the doorway, watching the ambulance trundle uphill, closely pursued by a red tail of blowing powder. Her husband is riding beside her in the back, holding her hand. "She was still breathing when they got here. She was out cold, sure, but she was moaning, tossing about. She was still dreaming, and that's the important thing."

I don't question this insight.

Rummaging in his pocket, the manager pulls out a cigarette and lights up. He heaves a heavy sound, something like a sigh, but he doesn't say a word. I glance at my watch. It is five o'clock.

"I have to go," I say.

Confused: "At this hour? Where are you going?"

"The Harbor Bridge."

"Now?"

"Now."

"It's liable to be closed," he says.

"I know."

"And it's nearly a mile from here. The roads are probably impassable anyway."

"I know."

"Besides, you're in no shape for it. Not with that foot."

"I know," I say. "But I'm going."

* * *

There is no one out. The only vehicles are plows and salt trucks. They lurch forward through churning clouds of powder, snowfall muffling their engines. While the snow has drifted two feet high over the sidewalks, the cover is fairly thin on the road. Only a few inches have accumulated since the last plow came through.

It is a half hour to dawn. I look up, but I can't tell if the blizzard has ended. There are flurries on the air, but they may just be windblown. On every street a stillness prevails, silent but for the creak of my crutches, the whistle of air in my chest. My heart is galloping: beating too fast, my lungs struggling to keep pace.

On Cherry Street, the wind explodes through a gap in the buildings. The drifts shift and sweep like dunes across the street: halting, curling back at each extremity. Colors: the blue of the snow-light, the road crews' orange lamps. All around me, the bright hues bleed together, rising in torrents on the gusting wind, rearing like painted horses above the rush of frigid air.

The snow cover deepens. It grows slippery, freezing in layers, turning to ice from the bottom-up. Soon it becomes too difficult to use the crutches. I cast them aside and watch them sink soundlessly in a snow bank. My foot throbs and pulses, but the snow cushions it somewhat. As I tire, the pain moves into my thighs, racing through the deepest muscles to singe the bone. I reach Canal Street. It is the weekend, but the bars are boarded up. The clubs are all closed, their windows dark, left to catch the light like mirrors. My reflection ripples wraith-like across each one, passed window-to-window down the length of the street. The city is unreal: a mirrored lattice, a web of spreading light. A dreamscape, but I am still awake.

* * *

I pause when the Harbor Bridge looms into view. I grip my thighs and breathe, forcing air in and out of my burning lungs. It is dawn, but the city's shadow stretches across the span, plunging it into darkness. Even at this hour, the bridge buzzes with activity. Instead of the usual traffic, it swarms with road crews and snowplows. They are trying to clear the bridge, keeping off the weight of the snow by plowing it onto the ice below. The sound is like gunfire: a muted thunder, a rattling cavalcade that shudders in the ground and windows. The crews use high-voltage sodium lamps in place of headlights, globes of amber fire that bob like beacons as the bridge rides the lake wind.

* * *

By the time I reach the bridge, the snow has ceased. The blizzard has lifted, dissolved with the dawn. The sky is gray and overcast, but there is a sun. It burst through countless seams and cracks in the cloud cover, flooding the bridge with all its color, drenching the girders in molten gold. The shadows are gone.

The entrance to the bridge is blocked off, but I step around the barricade. I'm shaking: trembling all over, but I'm not even cold. I keep walking, my footfalls rattling, passing unnoticed among the road crews. I am halfway across when a man waves at me. He motions frantically, but I ignore him. "The bridge is closed," another shouts, but I walk past, the pain in my foot evaporating until it feels like I am floating.

And then I see her. An old woman is approaching me. She is wearing a yellow parka, iron hair bunched beneath a woolen cap. A small cross glints at her neck, flashing back the morning sun. Her eyes are very green.

We stand face to face, ringed in sudden silence. The road crews are gone, vanished. The morning is ours, the lake as it flows through stasis. The city too, a broken mirror: the unreal made real, as timeless as dreams. My voice flutters in my throat. "Rosemary," I say, and the sound aches against the bronze sunlight, twin flares dwindling through the green of her eyes. She smiles. Her lips part slightly. She says my name.