The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen (20 page)

I
flop back into the booth, and I can't tell if I'm hurt or angry. She wasn't in the ladies room—I checked. And she's nowhere in the diner. Annie ditched me. And she didn't even eat anything. Finally I swallow a few bites of her cold bacon, just so it doesn't go to complete waste, and now I'm just sitting here seething. It's nine in the morning, and I'm so hurt and confused I could punch a wall.

I lean my head back on the booth, staring up at the ceiling. Why do I always do this? Why do I let people barge into my life, spreading chaos? I let my mom persuade me to get that mushroom haircut that basically ruined junior year of high school. I let my high school girlfriend convince me we'd stay together after college started. Look how well that went. Barely a month into freshman year and I walk in on her tangled up with some Pike brother. In
my
room. I let Tyler convince me his project is some big art masterpiece that I should spend all my time on. I let Maddie drag me into abandoned buildings full of psychotic camera-stealing girls. I let Annie bail on me for no reason, all the time, and I never even say anything to her about it. What, do I not have enough chaos of my own to deal with? And
now Eastlin thinks Annie's some kind of thief. Whatever she is, she's clearly completely messed up.

I fiddle with the video camera, reviewing the footage I took of Annie during breakfast. My heart contracts, as I watch it. She fades in an out of focus, my lens roving over her mouth, lingering on her mole. Her black eyes blink at me on digital video, red-rimmed and tired. I try a few different things to see what's wrong with the focus, but I can't figure it out.

I pull out my phone to text Tyler and see what he's doing today. I'm also curious, I admit, to hear how
Shuttered Eyes
went down with the gallery person. I don't want to be attracted by the electric snap of Tyler's imminent success, and yet I am.

There's a new text that came in while I was busy being pissed off.

It's from Maddie.

Thanks for last night
, it says.
You doing anything later?

Last night. I can't believe that Maddie was in my room just last night. I feel a sick twinge of guilt as I realize I fell asleep before I could follow up to make sure she got home okay. And I've been awake for hours now and haven't texted her yet.

I am a huge jerk.

Hey,
I text back.
Maybe. What are you doing?

Is that cold? Maybe that's too cold. I frown, and then add,
I had a lot of fun last night, too.

Better.

Irritated, I shove the phone back in my shorts pocket, leave a heap of dollar bills on the table, and pack my camera into its padded bag. The table is cleared before I even have both legs out from the booth—breakfast rush. Basically kicking me out. Whatever. I shove my hands in my pockets and lope, head down, out of the diner to go find Tyler.

I stop short, though, when I see what's going on outside.

It's Annie. She's got some kind of cloak on, and her back is pressed to the glass front diner window. She's flailing her fists at nothing, thrashing her head, her eyes squinched closed, and she's screaming. People pass her on the sidewalk, but nobody pays her any attention. In her weird frayed dress and cloak thing she probably just looks like a homeless person.

“Hey!” I shout, rushing up to her and putting my hands on her shoulders. “Whoa, Annie! Hey!”

I try to get ahold of her, but she's thrashing so hard that I can't get a good grip. Her shoulders are bony enough that they twist under my hands like eels. We struggle, and before I know what's happened, there's a
crack
and an eruption of stars rains down in my eyes.

“Jesus,” I slur, my hands flying to my jaw as I stagger backward. I taste copper on top of bacon grease, and I hock out a glob of metallic spit that lands in a wet red splotch on the pavement. I take my hand away from my jaw and look at my fingertips. They're red with blood.

“Oh!” Annie cries. She's opened her eyes and looks at me with a mixture of terror and concern, like it's taking her a second to place me.

“What the hell, Annie?” I shout. Blood is running from my lower lip down my neck.

“Wes! It's you!” she cries. She flies over to me and flings her arms around my waist. In a flash of blind anger I peel her off me, pushing her away.

“Where the hell did you go, huh?” I shout. “What is this?”

“I'm so sorry,” she says, raising a fingertip to my lip and touching it gently. The contact of her skin with mine makes me shiver despite the heat of the sun. “Did I hurt you? I did, didn't I. I'm so sorry.”

Instantly I'm ashamed. Because she did hurt me, only not in the way that she means. “You have to stop doing that,” I say to her, my voice, catching in my throat. “You can't just bail on me like that!”

“I didn't mean to.” Her black eyes plead into mine. There's an explanation in them, but I can't see what it is.

“It's . . .” I falter. “You didn't even eat anything.”

“I know,” she says. The lower rims of her eyes glimmer with moisture.

I lean my head down until my forehead meets hers. Her skin is cool against mine. I rest my hands on her shoulders to reassure myself that she's really there. She feels so small. Like she's made of paper.

“Listen, I don't care. It's fine. Do whatever you want. I'll help you look for your thing that you lost. Just don't leave me like that again,” I whisper. “Please.”

My breath stirs the fine curls over her ears. I wait for what I want to hear, which is her promising me that she won't. But she doesn't say anything. She just stands there, pressing her forehead to mine.

Finally I open my eyes and stare hard into hers.

“Please? I hate it. You disappearing on me like that,” I confess before I've really thought through whether I want to tell her this or not. Once the words are out there and I can't take them back, I'm sick with fear.

“I'll try,” she says. “I will. But . . .”

“But what?” I have to swallow what feels like a lump of rat poison, to get that last word out.

“But I'm a Rip van Winkle,” she whispers.

I pull away so she can't see the pain in my face.

“I don't know what that even means,” I choke. “What are you even talking about?”

I can't look at her. I'm too hurt. But I feel slim fingers worm their way into my fist, and she takes my hand.

“I'll try to explain. Come with me.”

She pulls on my hand, and at first I won't move. But then she pulls again, and I give in and we're walking together. We're holding hands,
walking, not saying anything. The streets have started to fill up with people going about their days, and a couple of them do a double take when they see my split lip. We walk for several blocks that way, passing other people in the summer street, not hurrying. I start to calm down. I start to feel like maybe we're making up. If we had a fight, which I feel like we did, but we didn't, exactly. Which is weird, because with my high school girlfriend, there was never any question about when we were fighting. She was a big screamer. Exactly the opposite of Annie. I'm puzzling this out, trying to tease apart the weird ways I feel when I'm standing next to her, when she leads me around a corner into a tiny Village side street and stops us short. On this overlooked stretch of sidewalk, surrounded on all sides by tidy low brownstones and shady trees, we're alone.

Annie's steered me to some kind of disused community garden. It looks weedy and overgrown. The gate is locked with a chain and padlock.

She's acting kind of nervous. I'm worried, but I'm ashamed to realize that I'm sort of excited, too. She's turning to me, for help. She needs me.

“What's this?” I ask, gesturing to the garden with my chin. I've steeled myself. I'm ready for the truth.

Annie's looking everywhere but at me—at her shoes, at the door across the street, at a squirrel watching the action from one of the shade trees overhead.

“Look inside,” she says.

Obediently I peer through the bars and into the dark recesses of the garden. I don't see anything, though. Some old statues, but mostly it's all overgrown with weeds.

“What?” I ask. “I don't see anything.”

Annie rocks on her feet, anxiety crackling off her like static.

“You can't see it?”

I try again, but it would help if she, like, gave me a hint.

“Why don't you just tell me?” I suggest. The idea is knocking again at the back of my head, but I'm not listening to it.

With a sniff of frustration, Annie points a slender arm through the gate, steering my gaze. “It's right there! In the back. Don't make me read it to you.”

“Read
what
?”

Annie stamps her foot, irritation with me boiling over, though I'm at a loss to figure out why she's the one who's angry now, instead of me.

“I'm
a Rip van Winkle
, Wes!” she almost shouts, taking my T-shirt in her fists and bunching it up with insistence. “Do you understand? What do Rip van Winkles do?”

“How should I know?” I look at her with alarm.

“What do they do?” She's almost shaking me.

“I don't know!
Bowl?
” I sputter.

She looks desperately into my face, her nostrils flared, and for a fleeting second I'm worried she's going to hit me on purpose this time.

But instead she drops my shirt and throws her head back and laughs.

When she laughs, her whole body shakes, and she opens her mouth so wide, I can see her molars. I grin out of one side of my mouth, watching, unsure what's going on.

She wraps her arms around her waist, holding herself until her laughter collapses into a fit of hiccups. “Oh my God”—she wipes a tear from her eyes and smiles at me—“they
sleep
, Wes. Rip van Winkles sleep.”

I'm still smiling at her, not sure what's so funny. Is she trying to tell me she lives on the street? Does she sleep in this alley?

“Are you saying this is where you . . . sleep?” I ask gently.

Her smile fades.

I knew it.

“Sort of,” she says quietly. “You really can't see?”

She's pointing at a marble slab built into the wall of the overgrown garden. There's writing on it, but it's too shady in the park for me to read. I shrug at her, helplessly.

She rolls her eyes. With a long, resigned sigh she sinks to the sidewalk, leaning her back against the locked garden gate with her knees drawn up. She looks up into the sky. A traffic copter goes chopping by overhead, and her eyebrows rise.

I sit down next to her. I've already made up my mind that if she needs me to smuggle her into my dorm for the last week of summer school, it's no problem, and Eastlin can just deal with it. I mean, she may not want to share my bunk or whatever, but I guess I can sleep on the floor for a week. I indulge in a brief fantasy of us together in my bunk, her bare feet pressed to mine, talking about movies under the musky breath of the air conditioner.

“So,” she begins, not looking at me. “Remember how I said I last had my cameo at the Grand Aquatic Display?”

“Uh-huh,” I say, watching her face.

“You've never heard of that, have you?” she asks the treetops arching over us.

“No,” I say. It's not like she has to remind me about parties I wasn't invited to. I am already well aware of all the parties I'm not invited to.

“You don't know anything about it. Not where it was held, what it was for, nothing.”

I flush. “I already said I didn't.”

“So you don't know when it was,” she presses.

“No idea,” I say.

She laughs, but it's a dry laugh.

Then she levels her bottomless black eyes at me.

“It was in October. October twenty-seventh.”

Huh. That's a while ago. Seems like if her cameo's been lost since then, it's staying lost. “So?” I ask. “It's been lost for a long time. No big deal. We can still try and find it.”

“Wes,” she says with a sad smile. “The Grand Aquatic Display, which is the last place where I wore my cameo, and which is the last thing I remember being before I woke up in my parents' house? It was a huge celebration put on by my father's company. They'd been planning it for months. The whole city decked out and celebrating, you can't even imagine how big. How many people. All the fireworks, and the lights. Bunting on every building. Newspapers, the governor, the mayor, Aborigines in breechcloths and paint. It was held the night of October twenty-seventh, 1825. Two nights from now.”

I
feel like I'm on five-minute tape delay. But there the idea is, it's back, and it's burst through a door in my brain and now I see that it's the truth.

That's how she could get into my locked room. She doesn't need a key.

“What?” I ask, struggling to keep up.

“
Asleep,
” she says, giving me a meaningful look. Then she glances over her shoulder. “In there. That's what I was trying to tell you.”

“You're serious.”

I stare at her. Her skin looks translucent in the late morning sun. Flecks of golden light are caught in her hair. I can see her chest rise and fall with her breath, the soft swell of her breasts in that oddly constructed dress she's wearing. She can't be. It's not possible.

“You mean to tell me you're a—”

“Please don't say it.” She cuts me off.

“B-b-but—” I sputter.

“Please.” She stares into the sky again so she doesn't have to meet my eye. “I'm sorry. I can't have you saying it.”

I start to reach over to touch her arm, but something stops me.
I realize that I'm afraid of what will happen, when my hand touches her arm. What will she feel like? Is this even real?

“You're sure,” I say, wondering if there is any room for this to be some colossal mistake. It's got to be a mistake. This stuff doesn't really happen. In movies, okay. It's standard. A sheet with eyeholes. A rattling chain. Scooby jumping into Shaggy's arms, yelling,
Zoinks!
Maybe a girl with her hair in her face climbing in sped-up motion out of a Korean well. But not in real life. In real life, when people die, they're just . . . They just . . .

“You don't think there could be some other explanation? I mean, no offense or anything, but what if you're just crazy?” It pops out before I can stop myself, and I immediately clap my mouth shut. Oh my God, I have got to learn how not to have verbal diarrhea. But she laughs.

“I considered that,” she says. “But I'm afraid the carving on the marble slab isn't.”

I stare at her dumbly.

“It's my name,” she clarifies. “My name's on the slab.”

She jerks her thumb over her shoulder to indicate the abandoned park. Which I have just realized isn't a park at all. With a sickening shudder I consider that she's in there, right now. She's in there, yet she's right here.

My mouth opens and closes, fishlike, until I realize that I'm not actually saying anything, and I shut it.

“I've found,” she says slowly, “that I can't think about it too closely. I can't . . .” She trails off. Then she tries again. “If you look too closely, you'll see too much.”

“What do you mean, look too closely?” I whisper.

She watches me out of the corner of her eye. We're both sitting in dappled summer shade, and there's a pool of sunlight splashed on the sidewalk between us.

“Are you sure you want to know?” she asks me.

I don't know what I'm supposed to be sure of. But I say yes, anyway.

She lifts a hand from where it's resting on her knee. Slowly, deliberately, she moves her hand from the dappled shade into the hot pool of sunlight.

When her fingertip reaches the light, I see something begin to change. The very tip of her finger blackens with soot. When her whole hand is in the light, the nails all turn black, the skin scorched and stained. Her arm moves deeper into the sunlight, dark mottling traveling up her skin, and when the lacy edge of sleeve at her elbow reaches the light, I see clearly that it's tattered. Rotting.

I have to turn my head away and swallow a bubble of nausea. It's too much. I can't think about it. I can't look.

Without a word she withdraws her arm and rests her hand back on her knee. In the dappled shade, her skin is buttermilk perfect. Her dress looks old, antique, even, it's true—Eastlin was right! Well, sort of right—but not destroyed. Not . . . rotting.

“The
sun
does that?” I say, horrified.

“No,” she says, uncertainly. “Not exactly. It's more the thinking about it that does it. Looking closely. I just used the sunbeam because it's easier to see.”

We sit side by side, chewing over this idea. A woman in leggings and huge sunglasses strides past, her heels clacking loudly on the sidewalk. She doesn't say anything to us, but chucks some quarters onto the sidewalk between my sneakers without a backward glance. Confused, I watch her go. Then I hang my head and start picking the quarters up, one at a time. My head buzzes with questions. Like, what is she going to do? How does she move around? What are the rules, for this kind of thing? How long will she be here? They all crowd together in my mouth, each vying to come out first, but then I
realize that I'm taking too long to say something, and I should probably say something. She needs me to say something.

“Does it hurt?” I finally ask Annie in a whisper.

Her eye rolls to its corner and stares at me.

“Sometimes,” she says.

“But . . . how did it happen?” I ask.

Did she know? Did she feel it? What's she been doing, between then and now?

“I have no idea,” she says, her voice so quiet it almost doesn't exist.

“So when you vanish . . . ,” I begin, my mind trying to keep up with the sudden fact of the impossible. But I don't know how to finish the thought.

“I don't know,” she says. “I've been having trouble with time lately. With knowing where I am.”

She faces me and puts her hand on my arm. I have to force myself not to flinch away from her touch, but her hand feels like it always does—cool, real, flesh over delicate bone. Just to be on the safe side, I don't look at it. Instead I look into her black eyes.

“Will you help me?” she asks.

“But I don't know what to do,” I confess.

I'm never ready for anything.

I wish I did know.

I wish I were filming this, right now.

“I have to figure out what happened,” she says.

I stare at her long and hard.

“What'll happen then? If we figure it out, I mean,” I ask.

She reaches over and places her fingertips on my mouth, in that way that she has. Her touch makes my lips feel warm and prickly.

“Shhh,” she says. “I can't think about that now. I just know that I can't solve this by myself. And I have no one else to ask. No one else sees me like you can.”

I love having her fingers on my mouth. It makes me want to keep talking, so she'll put them there again.

“Okay,” I say. “I'll do whatever you want me to do.”

As I say it, I hope that I'm telling her the truth.

• • •

So she's a . . . Rip van Winkle.

Okay. Maybe.

I eye her as we walk together through the Village, and it's actually sort of fun, watching her look at everything. If it's true, she's never been in a car. That's crazy. Does she even know how big the city is? How does she get from place to place? Right now she's just walking like a normal person. But that's not how she got into my room. She must have gotten in some other way. Can she walk through walls? Can she even control where she goes?

What is she thinking about?

What happens when she disappears?

Is she stuck like this forever?

I have this vague plan that maybe we should go to the library, though the truth is, I'm not a big library guy, so I'm not really sure what we'd accomplish there. But when I suggested it, she brightened up, said, “The Society's still here?”—whatever that means—and so off we went. It made me feel good, that I could come up with a plan. As long as I don't let on that I'm making this up as I go.

Should I be explaining everything to her? Like, this is what an airplane is and stuff? No. Maybe she doesn't want to know. She'll ask, if she wants to know.

God, I wish I were filming this right now.

My phone vibrates in the pocket of my shorts, and I pull it out to take a look. It's a text from Tyler, saying he'll look at my camera if I want him to, and he's around after twelve. I text back that I'm heading to campus, and does he want to get coffee?

Annie watches my thumbs move with a curious smile.

“What's that?” she asks.

“What, my phone?” I say, but calling it a phone doesn't really sum it up.

“Your . . . phone?” She cranes her neck to look at the screen.

“Yeah. You know. Like a telephone. Only small. And no wires.”

Annie's looking at me with a smile of complete amusement, and I'm starting to figure out that I maybe should have paid more attention in AP US history. They had telephones back then, didn't they? One look at Annie trying to keep herself from cracking up tells me that of course they didn't.

“It's like a tool,” I try again. “You can talk to people, or you can send messages. Like letters, I guess. You can read newspapers, listen to music.”

“Read? Like a penny paper?” she asks me.

“Um. I guess?” I say. “It's cool. You wanna see?”

I hold it out so she can see the face of my phone.

“It's cracked,” she says.

“Yeah. I dropped it in the subway,” I say, and then immediately wonder if I need to explain what a subway is. God, how old are subways? I don't even know.

She peers at it, and then glances up at me.

“How do I make it work?” she asks.

“You just swipe it. Like this.” I demonstrate, scrolling through several texts from Tyler, and then accidentally swiping to my text exchange with Maddie. My ears flush pink, and I quickly swipe back to Tyler, but I don't think Annie noticed.

“Here,” I say. “You try.”

She doesn't take the phone from me, but places her finger on the screen, eyes alight with curiosity. She swipes. She swipes again. Nothing happens.

“Am I doing it wrong?” she asks me.

“Um . . .” I watch her try again, but the screen doesn't change.

Annie tries a few more times, beginning to look crestfallen. When she touches it, the screen doesn't respond. It dawns on me that the phone doesn't know that she's there. It looks like she's here, in the world, standing next to me. But she's not really here.

“Don't worry. Sometimes they just don't work,” I say, trying to make it sound like it's not a big deal. I don't want her feelings to get hurt. I shove the phone back in my pocket and take her gently by the elbow, leading her across the street past a row of idling taxicabs and black cars.

“My sister, Beattie, loves letters,” she remarks, gazing off into the distance.

“Beattie?” I ask.

“Beatrice,” she says. “She's twelve. When she was little I used to post letters to her pretending to be Dietrich Knickerbocker, telling her stories of when Manhattan Island was enchanted. Mermaids in the Collect Pond. Indian spirits along the riverbank. Mysterious ships sailing up the Hudson on dead calm days with no wind. She loved them.”

We're strolling up LaGuardia Place, heading for Washington Square Park. Annie watches the face of each passerby, peering at them with interest. Old women, babies, teenagers, it doesn't matter. She looks closely at everyone, and I can tell that she's filing them away, in her mind. Annie remembers things. She's a watcher. Like me.

I bet Annie would really love movies.

“Why'd you stop?” I ask. “Writing imaginary letters for your sister.”

Annie's eyes turn sad, and she says, “Mother made me. Said Manhattan was no place for enchantment.” She stops and looks at
me. “Isn't that an awful thing to say? I always hated her for saying that.”

I'm surprised. Annie doesn't seem like the kind of person to use the word
hate
very often. I'm on the point of asking her more, but we've reach the southern edge of the park, and she stops up short, grasping my arm.

“Oh!” she gasps, a huge smile breaking over her face. “Look at it!”

“What?”

I follow her gaze, trying to see what the big deal is. It's just a park. I mainly think of it as the place where they shot Billy Crystal leaving Meg Ryan for the first time in
When Harry Met Sally . . .
It was right by that big arch.

Grinning, she jostles my shoulder. “It's a park!” she exclaims.

“Yeah,” I say, trying to be nonchalant. “It's okay, I guess. It's not Central Park, though.”

She's so excited she bounces up on the balls of her feet. “The Central Park! They really built it?”

I laugh, baffled. “Well, yeah.”

On impulse she throws her arms around my neck and breathes, “Can we go see it?” into my ear.

“Sure!” I say, surprised. “Of course we can. Whatever you want.”

She smiles happily to herself, a dreamy look of pleasure on her face. Then, newly resolved, she turns to me and says, “Library first. Then park.”

“You're the boss, boss.” I grin at her.

“I'm the boss,” she repeats, and mock-punches me on the arm.

What a weird girl. She makes being a Rip van Winkle seem almost fun.

We make our way over to the NYU library, which squats on the corner of Washington Square Park like a supervising bulldog. I heard
that they put a pattern on the library floor that looks like spikes coming up at you if you look down on it from too high up, to discourage kids from leaping to their deaths down the central atrium. Pretty dark, if you ask me. But I don't know if it's true.

I pull out my summer school ID and prepare to swipe it to get through the turnstile, when I realize that we might have a problem.

“Um,” I say, waylaying Annie with a hand on her arm. “Wait a second.”

“What?” she asks me, eyes wide.

When we first stepped inside she gawked so hard at how big the building was that her mouth actually fell open. It was pretty cute. I didn't realize people actually did that, when they were surprised.