Chapter 5 - A Girl in the Photograph
Wren didn't let Adrian take the picture back. She held it by the corners, as though pressing the faces might rub them away.
"The floor had white flowers," she said. "Not real ones. Little pieces. You could stand on them."
"Mosaic tile," Adrian answered. "Celia had the kids lay the entryway. It took six Saturdays because everybody kept arguing over the pattern."
"I remember that," she said, and then her confidence collapsed. "No. Maybe I'm just seeing it in the picture."
"You don't have to remember anything today."
Wren pointed toward a window barely visible behind the two women. "Was there a blue curtain?"
"Green, I think."
"I hate green."
Adrian couldn't tell whether this was memory or a preference she had carried for a decade without knowing why.
He reached out for the picture. She moved it away.
"You came to tell me a name," she said. "Now you've got a face. What happens if I look enough like her? Do I become Iris whether I want to or not?"
"No."
"People have a way of saying that until they get excited."
He let his hand fall.
Wren asked about Celia's relatives. He told her about Evelyn Vale, Celia's younger sister, a former public-school music teacher who lived in Queens. Evelyn had helped establish a smaller arts program after the fire and still led a free choir on Thursday nights. She'd tried to keep the old building's name alive long after the insurance claims and investigations were finished.
"Does she still think the girl is alive?" Wren asked.
Adrian pictured Evelyn in the hospital ten years earlier, refusing a sedative while she repeated the description of her niece's coat to a detective. "I don't know what she believes now."
Wren glanced at the cheap wall clock. "What time's choir?"
"Six."
"It's Thursday."
Adrian checked his phone. The hour was ten in the morning. "We could go, if you want. We don't have to speak to anyone."
"I want to see the room."
"Okay."
"Not with ten men."
"No men following you inside."
She gave him an impatient look. "I said ten, not none. You can come. I know you now."
It wasn't forgiveness. The difference mattered.
The afternoon went badly in small ways. Wren tried to wash a borrowed sweater and poured an entire cap of detergent into the machine. Suds spread across the laundromat floor. The attendant cursed. She apologized so many times he finally told her he was angrier at the washer than at her.
At a corner grocery, a little boy kept staring at her cropped, uneven hair. His mother pulled him away with a muttered warning not to be rude. Wren stared at the cereal boxes until the store's cheerful music became unbearable. She left without buying anything.
At four, Jo called. Her daughter had a fever, and she couldn't stop by to check Wren's scalp. "I'm sorry," she said. "I can come Saturday if you want."
"You don't have to," Wren replied.
"I know. I said I would. Those are different things."
After hanging up, Wren sat on the kitchen floor for twenty minutes. She knew people could be busy. She simply hadn't expected to be told where the boundary was and still be allowed to matter.
At five-thirty Adrian met her outside the building. He had changed from his dark overcoat to a plain jacket and was standing badly, one shoulder higher than the other.
"You were supposed to rest," she said.
"I have rested."
"In what universe?"
"One where watching daytime television counts."
"You watched television?"
"Nine minutes. I hated everyone on it."
She shook her head and got into the car.
The community room was above a public library near the East River. Children in bright coats were hurrying up the stairs, arguing about whose turn it was to play the tambourine. The old arts center's name was painted over the door: CELIA VALE COMMUNITY MUSIC. Someone had added a paper snowflake to the V.
Wren touched the railing. A smear of yellow paint came away on her fingers.
The rehearsal began noisily. A teenaged pianist played the wrong opening chord, and half the children started singing before Evelyn was ready. Evelyn was smaller than Adrian remembered, with silver hair pinned using two mismatched clips. She was firm, impatient, and visibly delighted by the chaos.
"From the top," she called. "And if you sing that verse like you're waiting for the bus, I'll make you sing it again."
Wren stood at the back beside a shelf of board games. As the choir stumbled into the second verse, her mouth moved without sound.
Adrian saw it. He looked away.
One boy dropped his sheet music. Wren picked it up and handed it back. The boy said thanks without examining her hair. She didn't smile, but her shoulders lowered.
After the song, Evelyn asked whether any parents had brought the permission slips. A father waved a folder. Two children ran to the water fountain. The ordinary movement gave Wren courage; she stepped toward the wall where photographs of earlier performances hung in uneven rows.
In a picture of the old arts center, a young woman in a dark sweater was helping a smaller child adjust a violin. The young woman's face was turned away. The caption underneath read Iris, always late, 2015.
"She used to tune everybody else's instruments," Evelyn said behind her. "Then she'd come onstage and discover she hadn't tuned her own."
Wren turned. Evelyn's gaze moved over her short hair and thin face, then stopped at her eyes.
"Do you know her?" Evelyn asked.
"No."
"Then why are you crying?"
Wren hadn't realized she was. She wiped her cheek with the sleeve of her coat.
"I don't know."
Evelyn looked past her at Adrian, standing by the door. The older woman's expression hardened. "Adrian Kane."
"Hello, Evelyn."
"What have you brought into my room?"
"Someone who wanted to listen."
"That's not what I asked."
Wren backed toward the stairs. Evelyn reached out, then stopped herself. Her hand hung between them like a question she was afraid to ask.
May you like
"Iris?" she whispered.
Wren turned and ran.
