Oh, they had spoken to Kim at length, and it had been hard not to demand a lawyer, but she assumed insisting on one—lawyering up, as they said on TV—would be suspicious. Luckily, the truth was more or less on her side. She had arrived that afternoon from Columbus, on a ticket paid for by her uncle, who had only recently come into her life. Email supported that. He wanted to discuss her grandfather’s inheritance with her. Why had it taken her so long to arrive at the apartment from the airport, which was only a twenty-minute drive? She said she had tried to use public transportation and screwed up horribly, ended up walking a good portion of the way. She was proud of that invention—if police really did check her cell phone’s GPS and determined she was in the neighborhood, it would be consistent. She knew all about cell towers from one of her favorite true-crime podcasts.
Ultimately, the police ruled it a homicide “abated by death” and a state’s attorney closed the case: a man had killed a woman, accidentally killing himself in the process. “Weirder things have happened,” one of the detectives told Kim when she followed up. “You should see this Wikipedia page on bizarre deaths.” No one could figure out why he had killed her, or if it had anything to do with his missing girlfriend and assistant. Again, the why of it was of no interest to the detectives. It was speculated that Gerry had been paranoid and possibly delusional after his fall in January—consulting a private detective, then a neurologist. It appeared that he had been taking some medications that were not prescribed, possibly in dangerous combinations, although tox screens showed nothing and an autopsy found that the only damage to Gerry’s brain was from the injury that killed him. If Gerry had lived to see how his death was treated by some Internet outlets, he would have killed himself.
Kim felt she was doing Gerry a favor of sorts when she finished the manuscript she found in his computer. Giving him the last word, rescuing him from being a morbid punch line, another bizarre death logged on the Wikipedia page of bizarre deaths, a terrible thing Kim wishes she could unsee. She is especially haunted by the little boy whose head got stuck in the floor of a rotating restaurant. Why had the detective told her about that list? God, men can be awful.
She wrote far more of the book than she let on to Thiru. The memory of Columbus, the night in Gerry’s hotel room—that wasn’t in the original, an omission she found hurtful. How could the worst thing that ever happened to her not be one of his pivotal memories? She added other scenes as well, invented memories that she felt softened him. When she was finished, she realized she finally had some empathy for Gerry Andersen. She had expended so much energy, for so long, on hating him, but he might have saved her life and sacrificed his own in doing so. Not intentionally, perhaps, but he had believed himself brave, he had seen himself as a hero, and that had to count for something.
A two-book deal. It’s not enough. It’s too much. Kim doesn’t lack confidence. She can write another novel. She wrote one in her MFA program. She wrote and revised much of The Floating Staircase, a title about which Thiru is dubious, but Kim has been gently insistent that the book be submitted with that name, claiming it was Gerry’s choice. She simply doesn’t know what she wants. She remembers Gerry’s image of a wallet on a sidewalk, tied to a string, assuming that was Gerry’s image and not Aileen’s. She is not quite thirty. She doesn’t want to spend her life chasing wallets on strings. During the weeks she lived in Gerry’s apartment, readying it for sale, she found that the shelves full of his titles in various editions and languages exerted less power and charm with each passing day. It was, she supposed, like living near a beautiful vista, a mountain range, or an ocean. At some point, you stop noticing.
She has reached the northern edge of Central Park and the sun has disappeared, the wind is kicking up. The sky to the west looks dark, as if a storm might be coming in. She descends into the subway, a tune bouncing in her head: You must take the A train. That doesn’t sound like something she would be thinking, she’s not even sure how she knows that song, although she thinks she has heard Lin-Manuel Miranda sing it, but why would Hamilton mention the A train? Maybe it’s Gerry’s voice she’s hearing. Maybe Gerry will be with her forever, whispering in her ear, filling her mind with his old-man concerns and crotchets.
Good lord, how does she even know the word crotchet, so weird and old-fashioned, not something a thirty-year-old would say? Has she become Gerry Andersen by writing about him? She certainly didn’t bargain for that.