Memories Without Him novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: Goodnight, Gemma

He called every night at ten.

I let it ring the first three times and watched his name light up the ceiling of the studio I had rented over a laundromat in Park Slope.

I had moved out of Aldo's house the morning after the Tower, and Aldo had called it a phase.

On the fourth night I answered.

"Goodnight, Gemma," Vincent said, and hung up.

That was all.

On the ninth night I answered before the second ring and said, "Ask me again."

"Will you have dinner with me?"

"No. Walk with me."

He was at my door in forty minutes with no car and no men.

We went down to the Promenade and stood at the rail with the whole harbor lit up beneath us.

He told me about the day he was shot, and about the four days he had lost.

I told him what I remembered of being nineteen, which was a library and a paper on the Medici and a dull wish to be left alone.

He laughed once, low.

"I was always afraid of you at nineteen."

"You were afraid of me?"

"You'd look at me over a book," he said, and put his hands in his coat. "I always felt I'd done something wrong."

We walked on.

At the end of the Promenade, where the lamps thinned out, he began to hum under his breath.

It was four bars of a slow song, old, from a time before either of us was born.

I stopped walking.

My mouth opened, and I hummed the next four.

We both stood still.

I had no memory of learning them.

Vincent stared at me.

"You've done that before," he said, hoarsely.

"In the car?"

"In the car. I thought you were asleep."

I could not tell him why my eyes were stinging.

I only knew that my body remembered something my head did not, and that it had known the answer before I asked the question.

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