Chapter 2
Four Hours Earlier
The boy’s finger was cool to the touch as Nora moved it along the bumpy texture of the Braille text.
“And what does that part say, little man?” Nora asked, her voice low and sweet.
“The… zems… zeps…” The boy’s voice trailed off, confused.
“Try again,” said Nora, not a trace of impatience entering her tone. “I’ll give you a hint: It’s like a horsie, but all striped.”
The boy’s face flashed with recognition. “A zebra!” he said, speaking through a broad, silly smile.
“Very good! A zebra is absolutely right,” Nora said, tussling his thick, mustard-yellow hair. “Try again.” She moved his finger back to the beginning of the sentence.
“The zebra,” he said, placing extra emphasis on that word, and looking up in the general direction of Nora’s face with a proud smile, “lived at the zoo with its friends, the hipa… hipi…”
“Hippo…”
“Hippopotamuses!”
“Very good.”
“And the hippopotamuses were very big, and very—”
A low, warm bell tone chimed through the expanse of the dining room, accompanied by a slow dimming and brightening of the lights.
“Fat!” he shouted, laughing at the idea of big, fat hippopotamuses.
“Good job, Jacen,” Nora said, “but you know what that sound means.”
“Awww,” he said, frustrated.
“I know, I know,” Nora said, closing the thick, flesh-colored pages of the Braille-typed book.
“And how did my boy do today?”
Surprised, Nora spun around where she stood behind Jacen and was face-to-face with the heavily-made-up face of Amanda Atherton, Jacen’s mother.
“Oh!” said Nora, in a sharp exclamation.
Amanda stepped back, her face marked with a small trace of shock.
“Mrs. Atherton, I’m so sorry,” said Nora, gathering herself.
Amanda’s look of surprised was replaced by one of knowing. “Oh, no, I’m sorry, Nora,” she said, holding up her palms. “I, of all people, should know to keep in mind people’s disabilities.”
“It’s just this thing,” said Nora, pointing to the clear, plastic tubing of the hearing aid in her left ear. “It works, except when it doesn’t want to.”
“It’s perfectly fine,” Amanda said, each syllable spoken in the crisp diction of the educated Manhattan upper-class.
Amanda then turned to Jacen, who looked up at her with milky-blue eyes and a beaming smile.
“And what did my little man learn about today?”
“Uhm, uhm, we learned about animals at the zoo, like zebras, and, uhm, birds, and hippo-uhm.”
“Hippopot…” said Nora, raising a slim, delicate finger.
“Hippopotamuses!” he said, smiling again, imagining what these strange animals must look like in person.
“Isn’t that exciting!” Amanda smoothed Jacen’s hair.
“Nora, I just want to tell you how impressed I’ve been with what you’ve been able to accomplish with Jacen these last few months.” Amanda’s brow lowered in earnestness. “We couldn’t get this little guy to sit still for five minutes before, but you’ve got him reading books for fun.” She shook her head in pleased disbelief. “So thanks, again.”
“Oh, it’s my pleasure,” said Nora, a florid blush spreading across her complexion of rich cream. “I’m happy to do what I can for the little man.”
Amanda gave her another warm smile.
“Well, I’ll see you out.”
“Bye, little man,” said Nora, giving Jacen’s shoulder a light squeeze. “I’ll see you next Tuesday.”
“Bye, Ms. O’Brien,” he said, before turning his attention back to the book.
With that, they strolled through the vast, open rooms of the Atherton’s Tribeca townhome. Although Nora had been in this home three times a week for the last two months, she was still floored by the opulence. The ceilings were vaulted and painted bone-white, the walls were made of rich, lacquered wood, and the living room was dominated by a massive fireplace that crackled with a warm, inviting fire. It was a far cry from the Harlem studio where she lived.
Amanda stopped when they reached the twin, glass-paneled front doors of the home.
“Nora, I just want to thank you again. I don’t know what you’ve been doing with Jacen, but things have been peaceful around here now that he isn’t just, you know, running around screaming his head off whenever he got frustrated. Which was, just, all the time.”
Nora’s face flashed with blooms of red, just as the previous blushing was beginning to fade. She turned her head down in slight embarrassment.
“I’m happy to help,” she said, turning her body toward the door, eager to step away from the compliments she felt undeserving of.
“And…” Amanda’s voice trailed a bit. “I know you’re new in the city, and I know how hard that is. Believe me,” she said, pressing her palm against her chest, “I’ve done it, too. It’s lonely and scary. So, if you ever want to stop by for dinner, or just to have a cup of coffee, you’re always welcome.”
A warm rush emanated from Nora’s chest and out to the tips of her limbs. She was never able to handle kindness very well.
“Oh, why thank yeh, Mrs. Atherton,” she said, immediately bringing her fingertips to her mouth in embarrassment. Nora was American by birth, but her mother and grandmother were as Irish as they come, and Nora found their accent slipping out of her mouth when she was angry, or in this case, flustered.
“Amanda!” she said, giving Nora a playful push on the shoulder.
“Amanda,” Nora stammered out.
With that, Amanda opened the door, causing the chill of the night air to slip in through the entryway.
“Have a good night, sweetheart. Get home safe.”
“Good night, Mrs… I mean, Amanda.”
Amanda held the door open while Nora slipped out, then down the gray granite steps, and out onto the sidewalk. Amanda gave a finger-wiggling wave and closed the door.
Nora pulled her pea coat tight against the cool breeze of the late-September air and fastened the buttons. Heading toward the subway, she found her eyes wandering, as usual, to the windows of the expensive townhomes, looking in to catch glimpses of the lives of people who could afford multi-million dollar homes. She sighed, envying the spacious interiors, exquisite, hand-crafted furniture, and expensive, original prints of art. Nora knew that there was money in New York, but seeing it on every street corner only made her more conscious of what she didn’t have.
Maybe someday. She passed one window through which she could see a family dining at a long, wooden table that would have a hard time fitting in her apartment.
Turning onto the main road from the quite street where the Athertons lived, Nora dialed her hearing aid down to its lowest level. The thing worked, but almost too well. The din of cars, with its constant horn-blaring, could be amplified loud enough to feel like a spike going through her head. And the less said about the ear-splitting wailing of the fire trucks and ambulances that raced down the street seemingly every few minutes, the better.
With the sound lowered, leaving her with only her sight, the city was almost peaceful. The air was calm and cold, and the towering, glittering buildings of the Financial District loomed overhead. The Empire State Building, its lights orange and red for fall, could be seen off in the distance.
Nora continued down the sidewalk, she stopped at the intersection. Only a couple more blocks before she was at her stop.
Oh, fuck yeah, that’s nice.
Nora snapped into alertness and looked around. To her left was a middle-aged man in a long, beige trench coat. It must’ve been him. But her hearing aid was off; how could she have heard him? Nora watched him suspiciously out of the corner of her eye, holding her purse close to her body and hoping the light would change soon. Between catcalls from passing cars and the occasional grope on the subway, the perverts in this city were almost too much for Nora.
Mmm, I gotta see her from the back now.
Again! Nora heard the man’s voice, but this time one eye was on him, and she saw that his mouth didn’t move. What was she hearing?
She then looked down at the phone the man was holding close and looking at, a wry smirk on his face. She leaned a bit, enough to see what was on the screen: It was a woman wearing nothing but white panties, her arm crossed over her very full breasts, a sly grin on her face.
Then the man caught Nora’s side-eye. He became flustered, turning the display off on his phone and shoving it in a clumsy, haphazard fashion into his front pocket, nearly dropping it onto the pavement.
Nora couldn’t make out what he was saying exactly, but given his flummoxed, wide-eyed expression, she was sure it wasn’t anything kind; one word was unmistakably the lips-behind-lower-teeth mouthing of the “F’ word. Nora looked away as fast as she could, though it was clear that she had seen something she shouldn’t have.
And what’s more, she sensed something from the man, a color emanating from him. Light red, almost a dark shade of pink, like the color of her cheeks when she became nervous or flustered. The color seemed to come from the man in waves, like the air over a street on a hot summer’s day.
Fortunately for Nora, the man was more concerned with the immediate shame, and once the crosswalk light changed, he traversed the intersection with quick, frantic steps.
Nora took a moment to collect herself before crossing the street. Her steps were slow and deliberate. She was trying to wrap her mind around what had just happened, that she had been able to hear the man’s thoughts.
It wasn’t the first time this had happened. It had begun a few years ago, after she turned eighteen. She started hearing the thoughts of those who stood close to her; just words here and there, like a radio tuned into a weak signal.
And the colors, too, began to appear; strange, shifting waves of color that were the general shape of the person. Nora wasn’t sure what they meant, why they were different, but she was noticing that certain colors seemed to match certain moods. Someone who was sad would be a shade of blue, depending on the exact nuance of their emotion. A person in a deep depression would be a deep, Prussian blue, almost a black. A person in an erratic, paranoid mood would be yellow. And someone in a strange melancholy would be a mixture of the two, resulting in an unsettling, sickly shade of green.
But these gifts, if she could call them that, only seemed to manifest under two conditions: One, being in close proximity to the person, and two, that her hearing aid was turned off.
The experience with the man was still running though her head as she stepped down the stairs of the Chambers Street station. As she walked into the station and its dirty stone walls and ceilings and harsh lighting, she noticed that something was off. No one else was there. Not even an MTA employee in the booth. Not wanting to miss the train, she swiped her card through the reader and stepped through the turnstile.
She reached the platform and the story was the same. No one was there. The low rumbling of a departing train vibrated through her body. Nervous, Nora reached for her hearing aid and turned the small, ridged knob.
“— an uptown, three train, approaching the station. Please step back from the yellow line,” said the pre-recorded announcement from the loudspeaker in its stilted, chipper voice.
“Hey, miss.”
Nora turned on her heels, shocked. Now there was someone, a homeless man in a tattered parka and dirty workpants, his face smeared with grime. Nora was shocked; either she hadn’t noticed the man when she arrived at the platform, or—
“Got anything you could spare?” he said in a ragged voice, shaking one of the ubiquitous blue-and-white coffee cups every vendor used in New York.
Nora reached into her purse. She knew that she couldn’t give change to every homeless person, but the Midwest courtesy had yet to be completely driven from her. Withdrawing a quarter, she approached the man and dropped it in his cup. It landed with a hollow thud against the bottom.
“Why, thank you, ma’am, God bless,” he said.
“Sure,” said Nora, noticing that the man was looking her over with hard, inspecting eyes.
He then pulled the collar of his parka up, and spoke into it. “We’ve got a positive,” he said. But now his voice was different. Clear and professional.
Then, with inhuman speed, he withdrew a small, silver item from his parka pocket and jabbed it into Nora’s hand. Shocked, she pulled her hand back and held it close.
“What did you do to me?” she asked, her voice frantic.
But then her vision began to blur; her limbs felt weak and wobbly.
Two pairs of heavy, firm hands grabbed her arms before the darkness swimming in from the borders of her vision consumed her completely.