She was in a bad way after Lorry. Her grief was immense, overpowering. It didn’t help that she had to leave their apartment. The building Lorry owned turned out to have been an inheritance from his grandmother, and it went directly to his brother upon his death. Michael sent a notarized letter asking Elv to move out, although he allowed her to stay until after the funeral. It was held at Our Lady of Sorrow. There was a surprisingly large crowd, all his hoodlum friends who had done nothing to save him, the old ladies who had adored him when he was a boy, the cousins he’d never mentioned. One of those cousins had looked stunned when Elv mentioned foster homes. “Lorry and Michael were never in foster homes. Their grandmother raised them. I don’t know what you’re talking about! She was a saint. Their parents were in a house fire, and Mimi took them in. She did a great job. It was this neighborhood that got to them, all the drugs floating around.”
She heard another cousin talking about how good Lorry had been to his grandmother. He’d lived with her for the last three years of her life and had taken excellent care of the old lady, shoveling snow, maintaining the building, making certain she got to her doctor’s appointments. People said that on the last day of her life Mimi was seen on the street for the first time in months. Lorry had carried her downstairs so she could sit on a bench in the sunlight. She had waved at everyone who passed by. She was a good-natured, friendly woman who had butted into everyone’s business and wished everyone well. Lorry had been the light of her life. “Good-bye,” she had called in a small voice, until the sunlight began to fade and Lorry took her back to her top-floor apartment.
Elv wore a black coat and high boots and a black scarf to the funeral. The weather was dreadful and the church seemed unheated. She didn’t know the priest or the other mourners. Pete Smith had driven her and was waiting in his parked car on the street. She went up to Michael, one of many who waited in a long line to offer him their sympathies. Everyone acted as if Elv was a stranger. There’d been many women before her, and several of Lorry’s old flames were in attendance, weeping, gathering in sad little groups.
“I told you he was a mistake,” Michael said. “You should have listened.”
“I didn’t know about your grandmother,” Elv said.
“That was Lorry. You never knew what to believe.”
“Did he talk to you much about his life underground?” Elv asked.
Michael said something to a friend of Lorry’s who was standing nearby and they both laughed. Then Michael took Elv by the arm. It had been a long time since they had both been at Westfield, sneaking cigarettes behind the stable. They walked away from the crowd, stopping beneath one of the pine boughs that was drooping, snow-laden.
“What did he tell you?” Michael wanted to know.
Elv shrugged, suddenly embarrassed. Everything between her and Lorry had been private, a world big enough for two.
“Did he tell you that bullshit about how he lived with the Mole People?”
“No,” Elv said, defensive. She had a lump in her throat. Sometimes all of New York City smelled ashy, the way it had been underground below Penn Station. “He just told me some stories.”
“Yeah, he was good at that. He liked telling people what they wanted to hear,” Michael said fondly. “That was my brother. My grandmother raised us and we paid her back by being wiseasses and getting into trouble. I’ve gotta say he made up for it at the end. He took good care of her.”
“Right,” Elv said, dazed.
“One thing that’s true. I never saw him with another woman after he got together with you.”
“Now you’re probably bullshitting me.” She glanced up, trying to gauge whether or not she could really believe him. She seriously didn’t know what to believe anymore.
“I mean it. It was you, Elv.”
She glanced away. She felt burning hot standing there in the snow. “Thank you,” she said.
“I wouldn’t go that far. If it wasn’t for me, you never would have met him, so I guess I’m to blame for the whole thing. The least I can do is be honest with you. Plus, you wrote a good term paper.”
Elv tried to smile. “Right,” she said again.
SHE OFTEN SPENT time in Central Park after he was gone. She had a ritual of taking the subway in on Sundays after she visited his grave. By now the lilacs in the park were abloom. The air was soft with humidity. Elv read for a while, then closed her book and strolled along the paths. The air smelled like hay and manure, jungle smells wafting up from the zoo. She yearned for the sound of wolves, but in the warm weather they had always hunkered down in the shade of the rocks, silent and wary. It was only in winter that you could hear them howling, the plaintive call sounding like unrequited love. Sometimes she felt Lorry was beside her, walking with her, although he would never be so quiet. He was a talker and she had loved listening to him. She had asked for stories and that was what he’d given her. She missed him so much she couldn’t think of anything but him. That’s what love was. That’s what it had turned out to be. She stopped at the entrance to the underpass where they used to meet during the winter she lived with her grandmother. It was filthy in there, pitch-dark. Elv was afraid to go farther. She saw a bundle of rags. It seemed as if someone was living there. She walked around it, through the green glint of light cast by the trees, past the patch of woods where Lorry said he’d buried his dog. She always stopped there and said a prayer. She wasn’t even certain how to pray, but she did her best. Claire was better at it; she’d known what to say, whereas Elv had needed to invent words, she’d needed a whole new language to even begin to get across what she felt.