The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [99]
“God,” Phoebe said.
“Yeah, it was awful,” Wolf said. “Faith just bottomed out, like coming down from a two-month high. Hung around that empty ‘safe house’ awhile, crashing on a bare mattress. Incredibly dangerous—the cops might’ve raided it any minute. I think she was almost hoping they would.”
Phoebe tried to imagine her sister left behind, abandoned to those empty rooms, but nothing came to mind. Or no picture of Faith anyway; the apartment she saw, littered with the dregs of their haste, half-open doors, a bottle of milk, cigarette butts heaped on windowsills. The only sound her own footsteps. “Poor Faith,” Phoebe said, an ache in her chest.
“She kept trying to find her mistake,” Wolf said. “Should she have been more bold with them, or the opposite? Was everything fine until the fence, or had they already written her off? It went on and on, she couldn’t let go. Meanwhile, she was down to three hundred dollars.”
Phoebe felt the air in the room against her skin. It was painful, as if her skin were raw. “I wonder why,” she said.
“Why what?”
“They left her.”
“Who gives a damn why? They were assholes!”
They exchanged a hot look. Phoebe felt a swell of angry disappointment—in herself and Wolf for sitting uselessly in this dark room; in Faith, too, for failing to meet some expectation.
Faith had gone with Wolf to the shoe factory once, sat in the coffee room while he packed and loaded boxes. Afterward they’d stopped at the pub, a woodsy place with antlers on the wall, where the factory people went. Wolf thought it might revive her, flirting a little with the guys from work, and it did. But without her long hair Faith didn’t draw men’s attention the way she used to. She was thin, pale, both of which she’d been before, but with that gush of dark hair she’d always looked dramatic, wasted but spectacular. Now she looked more like any strung-out kid. Wolf liked it. It made her beauty his secret, not something every other guy could grope with his eyes as she walked by. But Faith despised the haircut, said she looked like an acorn. It sharpened her sense that the intensity of everything in the world—herself included—had been muted through some failure of her own. That night at the pub she had fun, though, was laughing on the streetcar home, and mid-laugh she turned to Wolf and said in this odd voice, “Maybe everything will be okay,” as if this were some crazy wish she hardly dared hope for.
“Two days later we went to the Hofgarten,” Wolf said. “I had the ring in my pocket, turquoise and jade, her favorites. Maybe I picked the wrong day. The minute I dropped to my knee she knew. ‘Don’t,’ she said, before I could speak. ‘Don’t, Wolf, please, I’m going crazy. There’s nothing left in me.’ I told her fuck all that, fuck it, here we are now, in this moment—zam—the head of a pin, we can do anything! But she couldn’t hear me, like some other noise was louder in her head. She just wiped her eyes, saying, ‘Please, baby. Please stand up.’ When I got back from work the next night, she’d left.”
Phoebe and Wolf sat in silence. “And that was it?” she finally said.
Wolf struggled to his feet and switched on a light. The room pounced. He moved to the kitchen stiffly, legs obviously asleep. Phoebe heard the glassy thunk of bottles hitting the garbage.
“You don’t know anything else?” she said when he sat back down. “Nothing?”
Wolf looked away. Phoebe gazed at the square of black window, trying to absorb the fact that the story was over. But of course it wasn’t over. Faith had simply eluded her, vanished just when it seemed the story might finally be at an end. And here it was, the triumph Phoebe had longed for and dreaded and known would come: Faith had disappeared.
Phoebe looked around the bright room, colorless now to her eye, looked at Wolf and found him colorless, too, one more person her sister had left behind.
He suggested a walk. In silence they roamed among the painted antique buildings of Munich’s Old