* * *
As it turned out, the whiskey didn’t help.
Other than telling him where they were going, Trix had been resolutely silent on their short drive to the North End. Jim had found a parking spot across the street from Mike’s Pastry, and they’d walked past the strange spectacle of a trio of fiftyish Italian men sitting in lawn chairs in front of a small shop as though nothing had changed in the century since the North End had been the heart of Boston’s Italian-immigrant community.
These days, the people descended from those immigrants couldn’t afford to live in the trendy neighborhood, but nearly every storefront was an Italian restaurant. The North End was a dining mecca for tourists and locals alike, and the sidewalks were always thronged with people, the streets jammed with traffic. And yet those men in their lawn chairs seemed unmoved by the changes in the neighborhood. They were either Mafia or Mafia-connected, but even the Mob had been watered down tremendously over the years, and they were the only ones who didn’t seem to realize it.
They had passed by a dozen more modern restaurants, walking along Hanover Street away from the worst of the crowd. On a block of three-story apartment houses, tucked between a small Laundromat and an even smaller Italian grocery, was a restaurant called Abruzzi’s that seemed to make no effort to draw the attention of passersby. There was no sandwich board advertising specials on the sidewalk, no awning, no valet parking—just a menu taped to the inside of the tinted front window.
Inside, Abruzzi’s seemed stuck in the 1970s, with red vinyl booths and Sinatra playing on the sound system, photographs of Italian landscapes and cityscapes on the wall, and paper placemats upon which a map of “the boot” had been printed. But the moment they walked in, Jim’s stomach growled, betraying him. He hadn’t eaten anything since that morning, and hunger had been gnawing quietly at him, subordinate to hysteria and grief but now making itself known.
Reluctantly, he agreed to eat. Trix ordered pizza.
Now they waited, and Jim watched her as he sipped his whiskey. Glasses clinked. An old man celebrated his ninety-first birthday with what appeared to be three younger generations around a long table. When they sang to him, the whole restaurant joined in except for Jim and Trix, who feigned smiles and applauded politely. And then at last everyone turned their attention back to their own dining companions, and Jim took another sip, relished the burn of the whiskey in his throat, and looked at Trix.
In the car she had fixed her hair as best she could, pushing her fingers through it, but still he knew they both looked like something the cat had dragged in. He had to wonder what the other diners must have thought when they first came in. But then he realized he didn’t care. None of these people meant anything to him. They weren’t even really of his world. In some unsettling way, because they were only aware of a world where Jenny and Holly had never existed, they felt like the enemy to him. In fact, it felt like he and Trix had snuck behind enemy lines and at any moment might be discovered as outsiders.
We don’t belong here, he thought, taking another sip. And maybe that was true. It made him wonder if other people had vanished, too. If there were other people out there who were aware that the world had been subtly altered. He and Trix might as well be invaders from Mars.
She stared at the bottle of Heineken on the table in front of her, passing her thumb over the green glass like she was trying to see something floating in the beer inside. Every ten or fifteen seconds she glanced toward the door.
“Trix,” he said.
She blinked, focusing on him like she’d forgotten he was there.
“What the hell are we doing here?” Jim asked. “How is this helping, and what was that crazy shit about your grandmother?”
Trix took a swig from her Heineken and gave him the Cheshire cat grin that he had seen before, whenever she felt stupid or embarrassed. “Do you know the story of the Oracle of Delphi?” she asked.
Jim stared at her. “Sure. The Athenians went to her for guidance. She communed with the gods or something and could give them answers, see the future. That kind of thing.”
Trix stared at her beer. Someone came in, and she looked up hopefully, then turned again to Jim, dejected. “I don’t know about seeing the future.”
“What does this have to do with—”
She cut him off with a glare. “Just listen.”
“I’m trying,” he said sharply. “You’re not saying anything.”
Trix sighed. “All right. So, you know my father took off for L.A. when I was little and that after my mother died, my grandparents raised me.”
“Yeah.”
She started to strip the label from her beer bottle. “When I was maybe nine or ten my grandfather started to slip. Dementia. Alzheimer’s. He went downhill fast, and he died the day before my twelfth birthday.
“When I was in the fifth grade, I came home from school one day and my grandmother was a wreck. She totally flipped out. By then there were times when my grandfather had no idea who we were or where we were. He would think it was, like, the fifties again and that my grandmother was his sister Paulette. The neighbors all sort of kept an eye on him during those times. But this one day he’d been doing pretty well. My grandmother had been ironing in her bedroom, watching television, and when she went to look in on him, he’d disappeared.”
Jim felt a sick twist in his gut. “Vanished? You mean like Jenny and Holly? You’ve been through something like this before?”
But Trix shook her head. “No. Nothing like this. He just … he wandered off because he didn’t know where he was. He barely knew who he was. Well, how far can an old man get, right? But by the time I got home from school, six hours had passed with no sign of him and my grandmother had started to freak out completely. She said there was only one person she knew of who could really help, and we got on the bus—she didn’t have a car and couldn’t afford a cab—and she brought me to the Old State House, to that same spot.”
Jim frowned. “But what is it?”
“I’m surprised you don’t know. You’ve lived in Boston your whole life, and you’ve never followed the Freedom Trail?”
“Maybe when I was a kid. What does—”
“The Boston Massacre. That’s the spot, right there in front of the Old State House, within spitting distance of the balcony.”
He knew the story well enough—colonials throwing snowballs at British soldiers posted in the city, taunting them until the situation became so tense that there was musket fire, killing five men. It had been one of the events that fed the growing anti-British sentiment that led to the Revolution. “You’ve totally lost me,” he said.
Now when Trix glanced at the front door of Abruzzi’s, Jim looked as well.
“What are you waiting for?” he asked.
Trix smiled nervously. “I’m getting to that.”
“Fine. So your grandmother took you to that spot?”
“And she asked for help—”