The Angel Esmeralda - Don Delillo [18]
“How old are you?” she said.
“Twenty-three.”
“Then you don’t know.”
He was surprised by the sharpness in her voice. He ran in place, unprepared and dripping, feeling heat rise from his chest. A police car swung up over the curbstone and everyone at the blanket turned and looked. The woman came near collapse when the policeman got out of the car. He moved in a practiced amble toward the group. She seemed to want to drop, to sink into the blanket and disappear. A sound came out of her, a desolation, and everyone moved a little closer, hands extended.
The runner used the moment to break off the dialogue. He went back to his laps, trying to recover the rhyme of stride and respiration. A work train passed beyond the trees on the other side of the pond, grave horn braying. He made the wide turn at the south end, feeling uneasy. He saw the small girl trail her father along a narrow path that led to an exit. He saw a second police car on the grass far to his left. The group was breaking up. He crossed the bridge, trying to spot the woman he’d been talking to. Ducks sailed in wobbly lines to the scattered bread.
Two more laps and he could call it quits.
He ran faster, still working at a cadence. The first police car left with the woman. He saw that the far end was empty now, sliding into deep shade. He made the turn, knowing he’d been wrong to cut the conversation so abruptly, even if she’d spoken sharply to him. A traffic cone jutted from the shallows. The runner approached the bridge.
Several strides into the last lap he veered onto the slope, gradually slowing to a walk. A policeman leaned on the door of the cruiser, talking to the last witness, a man who stood with his back to the runner. Cars hurried past, some with headlights shining. The policeman looked up from his notebook when the runner drew near.
“Sorry to interrupt, officer. I just wonder what the woman said. Was it her husband, someone she knew, who snatched the child?”
“What did you see?”
“Just the car. Blue with one discolored fender. Four-door. I didn’t see the plates or notice the make. The slightest glimpse of the man, moving kind of crouched.”
The policeman went back to his notes.
“It was a stranger,” he said. “That’s all she could tell us.”
The other man, the witness, had half turned, and now the three of them stood in a loose circle, uncomfortably caught, eyes not meeting. The runner felt he’d entered a rivalry of delicate dimensions. He nodded at no one in particular and went back to the path. He started running again, going in a kind of skelter, elbows beating. A cluster of gulls sat motionless on the water.
The runner approached the end of the run. He stopped and leaned over deeply, hands on hips. After a moment he started walking along the path. The police car was gone and tire marks cut across the grass, three sets of curves that left ridges of thick dirt. He went out to the street and walked across the overpass toward a row of lighted shops. He never should have challenged her, no matter how neat and unyielding her version was. She’d only wanted to protect them both. What would you rather believe, a father who comes to take his own child or someone lurching out of nowhere, out of dreaming space? He looked for her on the benches outside their building, where people often sat on warm evenings. She’d tried to extend the event in time, make it recognizable. Would you rather believe in a random shape, a man outside imagining? He saw her sitting under a dogwood tree in an area to the right of the entrance.
“I looked for you back there,” he said.
“I can’t get it out of my mind.”
“I talked to a policeman.”
“Because actually seeing it, I couldn’t really grasp. It was so far-fetched. Seeing the child in that man’s grip. I think it was more violent than guns. That poor woman watching it happen. How could she ever expect? I felt so weak and strange. I saw you coming along and I said I have to talk to someone.