Free Double Take by Abby Bardi Page A

father’shigh-rise. I tried to call his mother, but she’d moved and left no forwarding address. I thought he would have left me a letter or something, and it seemed so weird to me that he didn’t. It never occurred to me that he had been, you know,” I lowered my voice to a whisper, “murdered.” Then I said in the pleasant voice of my mother, “I’d really like an explanation.”
    â€œOkay, Cookie. I’ll try. I don’t really know much.” He took a sip of Scotch and leaned toward me. “You knew he was strung out on smack, right?”
    â€œYeah, I knew.”
    â€œHe told you?”
    â€œLet’s just say it was apparent.”

XIX.
    1972
    It was strange how you could get on an airplane on a sunny, pastel day and then get off and be so cold your skin hurt and everything was dark and colorless. Outside Rachel’s bedroom window was a web of frozen tree limbs. Beyond the trees, the sky was swollen with snow waiting to fall. Her parents were at work and everything was quiet except for the cracking, settling noise the house always made and the click of the dog’s toenails against the scratched wood floors. Going back and forth between places made her feel confused, almost panicked, because it was hard to know which, if either, place was real. It was a logical problem. Both could not exist simultaneously because in one of them, life was easy and colorful, the sky brilliantly blue when it wasn’t brown, the sun turning everything golden. In the other, dark buildings were etched against a frozen gray sky, a land of shadows. It was easy to conclude Southern California was the illusory place, with its plastic palm trees and fanciful pink stucco, but she felt uncertain. She imagined herself in a meadow, picking flowers, sun pouring down on her, when suddenly a dark, hooded figure in a speeding chariot grabbed her and sped away. She felt her body relax as she and Hades galloped off toward the underworld, as if the beautiful day in the meadow couldn’t possibly have lasted, and she was too numb to be afraid.
    She picked up the phone to call Bando. For the past three days, she had been hanging around Bert’s expecting to see him, but he hadn’t come in. She tried walking up and down 57th Street where Casa Sanchez used to be, but he wasn’t there either. She had rarely been forced to phone him before, they always just ran into each other. A woman’svoice answered, and Rachel asked for Bando. His mother had a sweet, musical voice that seemed incongruous. In fact, it was weird that Bando had a mother at all.
    When Bando came to the phone, Rachel said, “It’s me.”
    As she neared the corner, she could see that the building Casa Sanchez had been in was still not occupied, and its front door was boarded up. She had found out from her mother that it had closed last October. There had been a fire, perhaps arson, or maybe even—it was rumored—a bomb that had gutted the inside of the building. Even though everything else on the street was the same, it looked completely different without Casa Sanchez, the way a face is transformed by a missing tooth. She stood on the corner, hopping from one foot to the other and shivering. Her coat was not warm enough, and although she had borrowed a scarf and hat from her mother, she had forgotten gloves. The ground was covered with snow that had begun to go black around the edges, and she broke up a few stiff patches with her foot.
    At the far end of the street, a thin figure in a black coat and a broad-brimmed hat approached, leaning slightly sideways as if buffeted by wind, though in fact this was the way he always walked. As he drew closer, she could see his round wire-rimmed glasses, then his face. His skin was dead white, as if he hadn’t seen the sun in months, and his face was thin. She thought of a poem she had read in English class about someone who drank the wind and took a mess of