How does she know about his father, Bird thinks with a jolt.
He doesn’t know I’m here, he says, and as the words pass his lips, it hits him again how alarmingly true this is. His father has no idea where he is; his father cannot help him or save him.
The Duchess leans closer, scrutinizing him, her eyes needle-sharp. Up close he can see that her face is only just beginning to wrinkle, that her hair is not yet gray. She’s maybe the age, he realizes, that his mother would be.
So who does know you’re here? she demands. A steel glint of menace in her tone.
Bird’s throat swells. No one, he says. I didn’t tell him. I didn’t tell anyone. I came alone.
You can trust me, is what he wants to say. A sweaty panic slithers over him, that he might have come so far and in the end be turned away. That this dragon of a Duchess and her gilded palace might swallow him and trap him forever.
Interesting, the Duchess says. She turns away, and to Bird it feels like a very bright light being switched off. Wait here, she says, and without another word she sweeps out, leaving him alone.
Bird circles the room, unable to be still. Dusty-gold drapes at the windows, through which he can see the glitter of traffic on the street below. A grand piano in the corner. On the end table, a silver-framed photograph of a woman and a man: the Duchess, much younger and with longer hair, hardly more than a girl, and someone who might be her father. The old Duke, he decides, though the man in the picture is wearing a polo shirt and khakis, and they seem to be on the deck of a sailboat, blue sky and bluer water colliding at the horizon behind them. A stern, almost angry expression on his face. He wonders where the old Duke is. He wonders how the Duchess knows his mother. He wonders what his mother has been doing all these years, away from him. If she will recognize him when she sees him. If she’s sorry, if she ever thinks about him. If she regrets.
Outside the sky has darkened, hardening to flat, steely gray. To his amazement, he isn’t hungry at all anymore. He imagines his father arriving at home to their tiny cinderblock dorm, finding the apartment dark and deserted. Searching for him. Calling his name. It’s okay, Dad, he thinks, I’ll be back soon. He feels oddly alert and alive, his veins electrified. He is almost there. After all this time.
Far off in the recesses of the house, a clock strikes, a deep sonorous chime. Five o’clock. And then, as if it is a signal, the Duchess returns.
If you really are who you say, she says, then prove it. What color is your bicycle?
What?
You should be aware, she adds, that if you aren’t who you claim, I have no compunction at all about calling the authorities.
I— Bird stops, bewildered. His father has not let him ride a bike since that day he fell off and the neighbor called the police.
I don’t have one, he blurts out. The Duchess’s face remains calm and impassive and blank.
What kind of milk do you put on your cereal in the morning? she asks.
Again Bird is too baffled to speak. He hesitates, but the only thing to do is tell the truth, however odd it seems.
I eat my cereal dry, he says.
Once more the Duchess makes no reply. Where in the cafeteria do you eat lunch? she says, and Bird pauses, seeing himself as if from above, a solitary dot perched on the steps with a brown paper sack.
I don’t eat lunch in the cafeteria, he says. I eat outside. By myself.
The Duchess says nothing, but she smiles, and by this he understands that he has passed.
So you want to see your mother, she says.
It is not a question.
Well then. Come with me.
In the hallway she presses a button on the wall and a panel slides away. Magic? No: an elevator, cunningly camouflaged in the hall. The same elevator, in fact, in which he arrived. At a touch of the Duchess’s finger, the button labeled B glows the color of flame. When the doors open again, they are in a dim cave: an underground garage, a sleek black sedan with the engine already running. A mustached man in a suit stands at attention beside the waiting car. The footman, Bird thinks, as they slide into the back seat.
And then they’re off.
The car glides up the ramp and out of the garage and injects itself into the crowded streets: smoothly, liquidly, regally. From inside, Bird can hear nothing at all. Not the voices of the throngs that gather at street corners, thinning and bunching with the rhythm of the crossing lights, like a great snake inching its way downtown. Not the growling engines of the cars that surround them in a pack. Not the honking that he knows must pierce the air, those deafening blares of impotent frustration. There is simply no sound, and through the tinted windows the city scrolls by in sepia, like a silent film. To him they seem to be not driving but floating.