The Clarity Read online

  Matilda stepped out, but Clark stayed inside, hands holding the doors open.

  “You know,” he said, “you shouldn’t be too harsh on the spiritual kids. I’ve often found that, at the end of the day, we all end up hoping for something more than just this life. If I were to die tomorrow, you bet I’d be spending my last conscious moments praying there’s a heaven. Or thinking of your great ass . . .”

  With that, Clark let the elevator doors close.

  The last image Matilda had of him was a blurry grin.

  6

  MATILDA’S OFFICE WAS a shrine to memory.

  Though it was small—exactly ten feet by fifteen feet, and she had measured it several times—it was packed tight with all her thoughts. There was a heavy oak bookcase stuffed with psychology volumes, notebooks, and bound journals. Most of which she’d inherited from her predecessor: a tenured professor who shared a love for the smell of old books. Even though Matilda hadn’t thumbed through half the hand-me-downs, she frequently sat in her office and gazed at them. Bookshelves were little shrines to knowledge, her mother used to say. She assumed with some certainty that the bibliophile in her was a direct product of her genetics. The one and only fact Matilda truly knew about her father—or “drive-by sperm donor,” as Lucy called him—was that he collected first-edition, signed hardcover books.

  But it wasn’t the books that people who stopped by Matilda’s office noticed first. It was the walls. Or, rather, what was covering them: Post-it Notes, file cards, and scraps of paper. They made the walls look like they were growing multicolored bark. And all that paper went at least half an inch deep. It was so thick and ubiquitous that Matilda worried about the structural integrity of the room.

  Cutting a chunk out of one of the walls and viewing it sideways would provide a cross section of Matilda’s mind. She’d been in the office two years and each “stratum” of paper would reveal a different aspect of her work: from her first proposals to lab setup to experiments and data collection. The very bottom layer would reflect her initial thoughts on the chemistry of memory. That was Matilda’s true passion—the core of her drive. She wanted to find the neurochemical pathway that explained how memories were made and stored.

  And she would not stop adding to the walls until she did.

  Despite the appearance of the office, Matilda was not messy. She was a fastidious thinker. Her mother used to say she “never met an idea she couldn’t categorize” and almost threatened to have the saying (which she’d coined) crocheted and framed.

  Matilda tacked the note about Lucy up on the wall, just over her desk.

  Then, after shaking off her frustration with Clark, she let out a deep sigh and settled down into her well-worn desk chair. Mentally running through the rest of her day, Matilda let her eyes rove across the walls before settling on an organic molecule drawn on lined paper. It was glutamate, the most common neurotransmitter in the brain. The shape of it resembled a fish. One of Matilda’s juniors drew it for her a few months earlier. He was very nervous when he handed it to her. A big chemistry nerd with a crush on his prof, it was the only sort of love letter he could craft. And, of course, she adored it. Glutamate. Matilda liked how the word had a distinctive onomatopoeic resonance. To her, it sounded like someone chewing gum. Glutamate—glu, Latin for “sticky stuff” and ate, meaning “from a salty acid.”

  As Matilda turned the word over in her mind, she remembered why she found it so curious: her grandfather, Norbert, used to mumble something similar.

  “Gloyb yo gloyb nit,” he’d say. “Gloyb yo gloyb nit.”

  And just like that, Matilda was six again and climbing the narrow stairs in her mom’s old house to the second floor. In her memories, it was always autumn. The light was diffuse and the stairs creaked.

  Grandpa Norbert’s room was at the end of the hall, just past the tiny green-tiled bathroom. Matilda’s mother’s father had moved into their house when she was three. All she knew about Grandpa Norbert was that he was from a faraway country where they didn’t speak English, his wife had died in a war, he didn’t seem to like children, and he only ever came out of the bedroom to use the bathroom and stare down at her like a shadowy statue from the top of the stairs.

  Matilda was thankful her bedroom was on the ground floor beside her mother’s. Unlike most of her school friends, she was not scared of the basement—it was the upper story that hid a potential monster.

  In Matilda’s memory, Grandpa Norbert’s door was open a crack and she was desperate to peek inside—she had only ever seen inside Grandpa Norbert’s room once, just a few weeks earlier, when her mom was sick and asked her to bring him some hot tea. Then, Grandpa Norbert had been in bed, a lump snoring beneath rough blankets. Matilda placed the tea on his dresser, and when he coughed, clearing his throat like something at the Chicago zoo’s big-cat exhibit, she ran. A timid child, Matilda had recently learned to be scared of three new things—thunderstorms, spiders, and jaguars. Jaguars were the worst. Her school friend, Annie, had terrified her at recess with a story about a jaguar dragging a Brazilian woman from her bed. “And,” Annie delighted in saying, “they only ever found her feet.”

  Matilda approached her grandfather’s door very slowly, cautiously, and peeked inside. She saw his bed, the rough blankets in a scrambled pile, the dresser, and, most disturbing, his worn and muddy leather shoes. Just as she was opening the door farther to look at the closet, Matilda heard the toilet flush in the green-tiled bathroom.

  Her heart nearly exploding, Matilda raced into Grandpa Norbert’s room and slipped underneath his twin bed. It wasn’t until she’d pushed herself up against the wall, her clothes covered in dust and cobwebs, that she realized the mistake she’d made—she should have turned and run downstairs. If she had been fast, and she was a very fast runner, she could have passed him in a blur.

  Now she was trapped.

  Matilda watched through a narrow rectangle of light under the bed as Grandpa Norbert shuffled into the room. She could see his bare feet—toenails thick and yellowed by fungus, and veins snaking around his joints like thick worms.

  Grandpa Norbert mumbled to himself, “. . . momzer . . . barchot shonnen . . . zolst lingen in drerdi . . . veshat laphu na ushi . . .”

  Matilda heard him go through a paper bag. She cringed when he dropped a black skeleton key on the floor. It was one he wore on a string around his neck. Mom told Matilda it was for the closet in the bedroom. She wondered what he kept in there—the bones of children? A jaguar he’d smuggled from the zoo? Possibly.

  “A brokh tsu dayn lebn . . . hoch mast osten . . .”

  Matilda held her breath as Grandpa Norbert’s gnarled hand appeared and snatched up the fallen key. She could see numbers tattooed on his forearm in faded ink. They reminded her of spider’s legs. Matilda exhaled slowly as he crossed the room and unlocked the closet door. She had to remain calm.

  From her vantage point, Matilda could see the closet was filled with canned food. Stacked neatly, can upon can, it created an aluminum wall that reached up to the ceiling. There was no obvious organization to the cans. Peas sat on clams; yams were tucked in beside peaches. As he stood there looking in, Grandpa Norbert spun several of the cans around to better see their labels. He continued to mumble. Matilda was fascinated by the cans. Mrs. Cartwright, her first-grade teacher, once told her that she should bring an extra snack to school, one to put in her desk for “a rainy day.” Matilda wondered what rainy day Grandpa Norbert was waiting for.

  Maybe it will be a flood.

  “Hundert hayzer zol er hobn, in yeder hoyz a hundert tsimern, in yeder tsimer tsvonsik . . . pul shecken . . . vot ma’ya vi’zitka . . .”

  Mom told Matilda that Grandpa Norbert’s talk was his own language. It wasn’t what he used to speak where he came from; it wasn’t what his wife who died spoke. Mom said it was mostly Yiddish, some Russian, and a lot of it made up.

  Regardless of what it was, it sounded scary.

  Grandpa Norbert closed the close
t door, and Matilda listened intently as he locked it. Then, she heard the bedroom door open and then close. She moved to get a better angle but couldn’t see Grandpa Norbert’s feet anymore. Carefully, sliding on her belly like a seal across the Antarctic ice pack, Matilda emerged.

  And Grandpa Norbert was standing right there, just off to the side of the bed by the dresser. He had tricked her.

  Matilda wanted to scream but couldn’t.

  Grandpa Norbert’s face reminded Matilda of a wild animal. The kind that rampaged through a forest, howling as it ran. His eyebrows were bushy and unkempt explosions of hair that overhung deep-set glacier-blue eyes; his lips were hidden behind his scraggly beard.

  “Hit zikh, du host zikh shoyn eyn mol opgebrit!”

  “I’m s-s-sorry, Grandpa,” Matilda stuttered, backing away. “I didn’t mean—”

  Matilda turned to run, but Grandpa Norbert grabbed her and placed something in her hand. When she finally wrenched herself free, she ran downstairs and didn’t stop running until she was safely outside in the small backyard, beneath the sweeping “hair” of the dying weeping willow. After she’d caught her breath, she opened her hand to see what Grandpa Norbert had placed there.

  It was a black, polished river stone.

  She cried looking at the stone and cried when Lucy came home and made her go up to Grandpa Norbert and apologize. Grandpa Norbert was taken to the hospital for an ulcer two weeks later and died twenty-four hours after he was admitted. Matilda never learned where the stone had come from or why her grandfather had given it to her. But she kept it on her desk throughout school. She knew it was buried somewhere beneath her papers on her desk. She leaned forward to look for it when she was startled by a knock at the door.

  Todd Garcia-Araez stuck his head in.

  He was a thirty-year-old assistant professor of psychology from Baltimore. Tall and chubby, with a mop of red hair, Todd loved the clinical aspects of his job. And, unlike Matilda, he found endless satisfaction in promoting talk therapy. Real talk therapy, as he liked to call it. Old-school. Todd even had his office decked out with a leather armchair. The type nineteenth-century therapists had in their book-lined bureaus. And plants. He had a lot of plants.

  “You ready to go?”

  “Yeah,” Matilda said. “Just, uh, just give me a minute.”

  “Okay. I’ll be outside, warming up the ride.”

  Todd closed the door.

  Matilda dug around her desk for the stone. She found it under a stack of newsletters. She touched it to her cheek.

  It was warm.

  7

  2:29 P.M.

  NOVEMBER 13, 2018

  MARCY-LANSING APARTMENTS

  CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

  CLOUDS THREATENING RAIN hung low as Todd’s Volvo station wagon pulled into the parking lot outside the Marcy-Lansing Apartments.

  He killed the engine and grabbed a file folder from his backpack. Flipping through the pages, he read off the visits for the day.

  “Following up on the self-harm thoughts that Tanisha told us about. There’s Shana and Derrick too. We really need to talk to their aunt about some of the abuse stuff. Would be good to fill them in.”

  “We ever hear back from Chicago welfare on Jamir?” Matilda asked.

  Todd looked over his notes. “Still waiting.”

  Matilda turned to the apartment building. Its gray hulking bulk sat low in the late-afternoon shadows. She scanned the floors, eyes falling over boarded-up windows and the telltale charcoal marks where past fires had licked the bricks. The apartments were built in the mid-1970s. Perhaps back then its builders saw great things ahead like ambitious futures for the residents they hoped to pull out of poverty. As well-intentioned as they were, they were also very wrong. For the vast majority of the two thousand people who called Marcy-Lansing home, it was yet another ghetto to escape. Only this one went up instead of out.

  “You ready?” Todd asked.

  “Yeah, let’s go do some good.”

  As they made their way inside, Matilda and Todd passed a huddle of young boys milling around the entrance. Tight denim, black ball caps, and puffy coats, the boys—none of them older than fifteen—smoked cigarettes, cursed, and laughed loudly. The tallest of them, with a knit cap and freckles, stepped in front of Todd.

  “Where you think you’re going, bro?”

  “We’re from the university,” Todd said. “We’re here to visit a few people.”

  “What people?”

  “What people?” one of the boys parroted. “You all doctors or something?”

  “Yes,” Matilda said.

  The boy with the cap looked her up and down, “Maybe I need a physical. . . .”

  A few of the other boys laughed, gave high fives. Cap stepped up to Matilda. His head cocked to the side, he stared at her hard. His smiled revealed the glint of his gold fronts. He was close enough that Matilda could smell the menthol cigarette on his breath. Instead of shying away, she stepped even closer, inches from his face.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Huh?” Cap asked.

  “What’s your name?” Matilda said again.

  “Shit.” Cap stepped back, looked over to his friends to read their faces. They were transfixed. No help. “Why you want to know?”

  “I think I know you,” Matilda said, reading the microexpressions dancing across Cap’s face. He was compressing his lips, squinting. Very nervous.

  “Your mom’s Raenice, right?” Matilda continued.

  “Yeah. So . . .”

  “So . . . She asked me to talk to you. Said she’s worried about you. You’re having trouble sleeping. You should talk to me about it. I can help.”

  Cap blinked rapidly as he ground his teeth.

  Tight as a coil, tension hung in the air.

  “Ha,” Cap laughed, breaking the moment. “I’m just playing with you, lady.”

  He stepped aside and let Todd and Matilda pass.

  Matilda nodded to him. “Seriously, if you need help, I’m here.”

  “Nah, I’m good. I’m real good.”

  As Cap and his friends laughed and tossed their cigarettes, Todd and Matilda traversed the small apartment lobby to a graffiti-festooned elevator.

  “You handled that well,” Todd said after the elevator doors had closed.

  “They’re just kids.”

  “I’ve seen ‘just kids’ beat a man unconscious for his shoes.”

  At the ninth floor, they navigated a narrow series of hallways lined with doors to apartments. Most had new locks installed, and there were trash bags sitting outside half the doors. As they walked, Matilda looked over at a box of old toys by one door. In and among the ratty stuffed animals and broken electronics were Barbie dolls that had been colored with markers to make their skin black.

  Matilda and Todd stopped at a door near the end of the hall.

  They caught their breath before knocking. The day’s first case would be a rough one. Behind the door was a thirteen-year-old heroin addict. The kid had tried to stay clean, but his father was in jail and his mother’s boyfriend routinely assaulted him. During their first meeting, the boy told Todd and Matilda he had no future. That no one listened to his worries, his fears, or his dreams. Matilda noted dozens of cuts on his arms from where he’d dragged a naked razor blade across his flesh.

  “Ready?”

  “Let’s go.”

  8

  4:32 P.M.

  NOVEMBER 13, 2018

  NORTHGATE MALL

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  GABI DE LA CONDI was hearing the voices again.

  They told her that this, this was it.

  This is what you’ve spent the last eighteen years waiting for.

  Gabi zigzagged through the crowds of shoppers; their clothes were still beaded with raindrops and the smell of their perfume and cologne and hair spray and breath mints was nearly overwhelming. Gabi had to stop by the food court to dry-heave into a trash can. As she caught her breath and wiped sa
liva from her lips, she noticed a boy, no older than eight, staring at her over his lunch. A little boy with freckled cheeks and olive-pit-colored eyes, just like . . .

  “Mommy,” the boy said, his mouth half filled with pizza crust, “what’s wrong with that woman over there?”

  The boy’s mother, a pretty woman who looked existentially exhausted, refocused her son on his food. “It’s not nice to stare,” she said.

  Gabi didn’t want to think about the freckled boy she knew. The one they’d damaged so badly he had to be kept in a cage like an animal. Gabi closed her eyes and pushed away the worst of the memories.

  Focus, the voices told her. Today is the day.

  Riding the escalator to the second floor, Gabi noticed the big toenail on her left foot—thick, curved with fungus—was sticking out through the unstitched leather of her falling-apart flats. The voices didn’t even need to tell her she was losing it.

  She already knew.

  But if there was anything she prided herself on, it was being tough. Tough in the way Father Broderick at the All Saints orphanage taught her to be. She knew the dictums: you never fall, you roll; you don’t take a punch, you slide into it; illness is only an opportunity to improve your immune system; loss makes for a cleaner house. Being so desperately poor that your shoes are falling apart on your feet? she asked herself. Yes, that’s true commitment. This is because I am the cause I am the reason we’re still alive. The reason we’ve gotten to this moment.

  And, yeah, she had had to sacrifice her dignity. Numerous times. She had to put up with an unbearable amount of scorn and hate and shit. She knew that anyone in her situation would go a little crazy. It had been fifteen years. Or was it seventeen? Gabi couldn’t recall the last time she’d slept in a bed with clean sheets.

  Upstairs, Gabi found her mark examining suits at Macy’s.

  He was a businessman with unnaturally tan skin and marbled hair that was crisp with gel. Judging by the coat haphazardly slung over his shoulder and the fact that one of his loafers was untied, Gabi knew he’d be easy. And so she moved quickly, weaving through a crowd of loud teenagers, before bumping into the businessman hard enough to knock him off-balance. He turned to her, ready to shout, but choked on any ounce of ambitious rage he might have had when he saw her face. The disheveled, filthy look got them every time.