They said good night to Whitney, who liked to drive her Suburban in the snow just to show she could, sometimes rescuing addled Baltimoreans who had driven off the road in panic. Daniel followed Tess and Crow to midtown, where they tucked their cars into the University of Baltimore parking garage, indifferent to the fact that they would be held hostage overnight. At least they wouldn’t have to dig them out in the morning, after the plows had gone through. They strolled around midtown, looking for an open restaurant, and finally found a few hardy souls at the Owl Bar in the Belvedere Hotel. The kitchen wasn’t exactly open, nor was it closed. They ordered a bottle of red wine and ate blue-cheese potato chips, followed by steak-and-mushroom sandwiches on whole wheat toast.
“F. Scott Fitzgerald used to come here,” Daniel commented, offhand. Crow’s face brightened, and he took a second look around the high-ceilinged room, with its dark paneling, stained-glass windows, and carved owls behind the bar. Owls were also depicted in a triptych of stained glass.
“I knew he worked on Tender Is the Night in Bolton Hill, right around the corner from my apartment, but I never thought about him in the Owl Bar,” Crow said. “Do you think he brought his pages here, that he might have written while having a drink, or two, or twelve? He could have sat at this very table.”
Tess was dubious-the sturdy table was probably younger than Crow-but she allowed the fanciful assertion to stand, as did Daniel. After all, Fitzgerald had been in this space, had stared up at the stained-glass owls. It always appeared one was missing from the set, for the legend beneath the winking owls was clearly an incomplete quatrain:
A wise old owl sat on an oak, The more he saw, the less he spoke, The less he spoke, the more he heard…
No one, not even Daniel, knew what the last line was, although they all had guesses.
Listening, or the lack thereof, turned her thoughts toward Cecilia. Tess hoped she was avoiding her because she was humiliated, not guilty. She wished Cecilia would reach out to her now. It was unsettling to see a man die. Tess was one of the few people Cecilia knew who had any experience with such things. The word hubris went off in her head, a neon sign that flickered and then came on at full strength.
“What are you smiling at?” Crow asked.
“Myself. I just caught myself in a full-blown act of idiocy. I was thinking that I was one of the few people Cecilia knew who had watched a man die. But as an activist in the gay community, she’s seen many more people die than I ever will-slower deaths, expected deaths, but deaths all the same. No one owns death. Ready to go? It’s a long walk, especially on these slippery streets.”
“”Walkin‘ in a winter wonderland,“” Crow sang. “What’s the next part? Something about building a snowman and naming him Reverend Brown-”
“Parson Brown. He’ll ask if we’re married, and we’ll say, No, man, but we’re shacking up and having great sex, and if you don’t melt you can watch the next time you’re in town,” Tess sang back. Daniel blushed, hustled into his coat, said good-bye, and headed east, in search of a cab, while they walked west.
Even without ecclesiastical snowmen, the walk back to Bolton Hill felt not unlike what Tess would have considered a sappy falling-in-love montage in a movie. But what was sappy in art could be delightful in life, and she enjoyed every slipping sliding minute. They were a half block from Crow’s apartment, laughing in the hysterical, jagged way that feeds on itself, when he decided they needed provisions for the next day. He stopped outside a corner grocery that appeared to be open and peered in the windows to see if it had been picked clean by neurotic Baltimoreans.
“They probably won’t have any milk or bread, but we should be able to get half-and-half for your coffee in the morning,” Crow said. “And I’ll grab some Entenmann’s, too. That okay with you?”
“Sure.”
“Aren’t you coming?”
“I’m safer out here than I am in there. That store’s been hit three times in the past six months.”
He gave her a stern look, but Crow had no talent for this. He backed into the store, trying to keep an eye on her as he went about his errand.
Tess stood in the circle of light cast by a streetlamp, turned her face to the sky and caught a few snowflakes on her tongue, giggling. The city was so peaceful tonight, people sitting out the storm at home, resigned to their inability to cope with any snowfall greater than two inches. It would be gone by tomorrow, and people would return to their normal lives, sheepish about how they folded in the face of such a small threat. But tonight it was as if time had stopped. She had forgotten her own troubles. All she wanted was to go home, kick the dogs off the bed, and get warm.
Entenmann’s was good; they made a decent coffee cake. But if you were going to eat coffee cake for breakfast, why not cake? And if you could eat cake, then it followed that you could have cookies. If cookies for breakfast, then they should be Pepperidge Farm, preferably Lido, although she would settle for a Mint Milano. Any port in a storm. Any Pepperidge in a storm. Laughing at herself, she turned to go into the store after Crow, only to find herself suddenly on her knees, a searing pain in her neck, where a hand-she thought it was a hand, she hoped it was a hand-had slapped her with enough force to cause whiplash.
“You bitch.”
The voice was behind her or above her. Maybe both. She could not orient herself. She wasn’t wearing gloves-when had she taken them off? had she ever had them on?-so her palms curled reflexively as she clawed through the snow and her feet seemed to run in place as she tried to stand. A foot-yes, a foot, definitely a foot this time, heavy in the rubber and leather of a laced duck boot; there was a strange relief in being able to identify it-landed in the small of her back, flattening her.
The voice continued to rail, as harsh as the chains spinning on auto tires on Mount Royal, which seemed so far away. She needed to get there or into the store. She needed to get to where there were people.
“Why did you bring my name into this?” a voice harangued her. “Haven’t you done enough? I already lost money because of you, you bitch, and now the cops are at my door, threatening me. I… don’t… need… this.”
Each word of the last sentence was accompanied by a stomp, starting on the back of her thigh and working up toward the tailbone. But on this, the foot’s aim was off, and the blow landed to the right of its presumptive target. Tess waited, assuming the next one would find its mark, wondering if one’s back could be broken this way. She felt strangely resigned, her inertia a byproduct of wine and pain.
But the blow didn’t come, only shouts, deeper than the first voice. She saw a carton of half-and-half skitter by her and then burst, wasting its white in the snow, and soon she had a companion on the sidewalk, a long sturdy body flattened by running tackles from Crow and the smocked convenience-store clerk.
“You all right?” Crow asked anxiously, rubbing her hands between his, trying to warm her. She might have been seven again, coming into the basement after a day of sledding on Suicide Hill; everyone’s sledding site was called Suicide Hill. She had forgotten how the skin felt as if it were on fire, after you were exposed to cold and snow, how the flesh burned.
“Sure,” she said, but only because she wanted to be agreeable. Strange, she almost felt sorry for the other one, the person no one was tending to, even if it was her attacker. The clerk sat perched on the broad back, looking absurdly small, an elfin broncobuster who could be thrown at any moment. But the body beneath him offered no resistance, just pushed the hair back from its face and sighed, defeated.