“Queers,” Robbie said flatly as they passed the crowd. Disco music was playing from a big box radio on the sidewalk—“Boogie Nights,” a song Joe recognized because on the radio it began with a dreamlike harp-plucking sound. The men seemed to move in unison to the driving bass beat that followed the intro.
“How do you know?”
“You see a single woman over there?”
“So? They don’t want girls around.”
“Queers,” Robbie said. “Uncle Mike’s a queer, you know.”
“Is not.”
“Is too. Mom told me.”
“You don’t . . . you don’t even know.”
“No, you don’t know,” Robbie said. “You were, like, barely born. And guess what? If we can’t find Mom, we’ll have to live with him.”
“We’ll find Mom,” Joe said. The likelihood of that was slipping further and further behind them, though, like the counted street signs in this smelly city that felt more and more like a steaming graveyard. “We will, right?” The sense of dread and abandonment was bewildering, but Joe had no way of expressing it. The thumping music in his ears just made him feel colder inside.
“I don’t know,” Robbie grumbled. They walked another block in silence. They could see more traffic at Seventy-Second Street, a big intersection a couple of blocks ahead with a square or a little park in the middle. Across its expanse, people stood around in small crowds, lighting cigarettes and tilting up bottles.
“Is he nice, at least?” Joe asked when they reached Seventy-Third Street. “Uncle Mike, I mean?”
“For a queer, yeah,” Robbie said. This meant nothing to Joe, and he had a feeling it was little more than something for Robbie to say. He tried to picture his uncle Mike. He had seen a photo, a yellowing one in a drawer in the living room. Joe pictured Uncle Mike smiling, as he was in that long-ago photo with his sister, Joe’s mother, at Christmas and tried to pin some hope on that.
Then a plump, curvy woman in an apron called out to them.
“Where are you going, you two?” Her voice was high, delicate, and accented. She had one hand on her hip and a long, thin cigarette in her mouth. She stood in the open doorway of a small restaurant. There was a plate-glass window to her left with painted letters in a semicircle. La Quenelle. More candles than they had seen anywhere burned inside, and a small group of people sat at the bar fanning themselves.
“We’re just walking,” Robbie said, looking straight ahead. Joe knew he should follow Robbie’s lead, but the woman’s face was soft and inviting. Everything about it seemed round—the curve of her chin, the red of her cheeks, the pug nose. Her mouth was like a little red target with a cigarette in it.
“Are you hungry?”
“Us?” Robbie asked. “No, I mean—”
“Kind of,” Joe said. The fact was, they were both famished but hadn’t had a chance to think about it. There had been no food since lunch, and Lois had quashed any requests for dinner on the road. It was “wait till we get to your uncle’s” and nothing else.
“We don’t . . . we don’t have any money,” Robbie said to the sidewalk.
“Money, what’s money? Everything we have goes bad if we don’t serve it. Come in.” The words came out in a funny string, each syllable stressed like the one before it.
“It looks like adults only, though,” Robbie said. Indeed, there were no kids inside, just drunk, sweaty grown-ups, mostly at the bar. At the tables, couples leaned in close.
“Et alors? Come in.”
CHAPTER 47
Monday, August 21, 2017
St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center
Ogdensburg, New York
1:05 p.m.
Aideen had learned from psychologists over the years that, in the presence of psychopaths, a decent percentage of people actually felt something physically distressing, like hair going up on the back of the neck. For her, though, there was none of that, and she had been around her share of psychopaths. That morning she had hopped a quick flight from LaGuardia up to Ottawa, Canada, rented a car, and driven over the International Bridge back into New York State in order to reach the psychiatric center where Aaron Hathorne was confined for at least another eleven months.
The center itself was just on the US side of the bridge. The grounds still held some terrifying stone buildings from the nineteenth century; one could almost hear the screams of the chained patients who had been housed there. The modern facility, though, was clean and friendly. From the outside it looked like an elementary school, with a circular driveway in front and a little portico. She signed in and was searched, then followed a pleasant female attendant with a Nigerian accent to the room where Aaron Hathorne had been directed to wait for her.