Shadow Man: A Novel Read Free Page A

Fr. Heaney laughed and said: “Jim, just give it to me straight.” I didn’t tell him all my sins. Some of them belonged to me and not to God.
    I was going to knock, but I left Fr. Heaney alone with his mystery novel. The city was quiet, its great energy washed and calmed by the rain. Dogs were rooting in the garbage of a blown-over trash can, and I walked home and stepped up the stoop and into the kitchen. Kurt and Vera were drinking vodka and lemonade, sitting across from each other like two poker players; Kurt cagey and Vera garrulous, making you wonder if she had a full house or a handful of nothing. They weren’t drunk but they were happy.
    “When you hit a backhand, Vera, your body flows in one long twist. People think a forehand is easier to hit than a backhand, but I disagree. A backhand is more natural, and much prettier when hit correctly. It’s like opening up your wings to fly.”
    Forty-six words. Kurt had spoken forty-six words. A paragraph. Without stopping. It might have been a record.
    “Teach me to hit a backhand, Kurt.”
    “One day, maybe.”
    “Now.”
    “It’s dark and there’s no court.”
    “In the alley.”
    Tennis was sacred to Kurt, and Vera was asking him to hit in the alley, which I suspected may have been sacrilege. Kurt sat for a minute. He sipped his lemonade and vodka. He got up and left the room, and I figured this was the end of Vera. But Kurt returned with a tennis racquet (not his best one) and two cans of balls (old). He walked into the alley.
    “Jim, get down there. Vera, come here.”
    He gave her the racquet. She slipped between his arms. Kurt bent her body and taught her the flow of the backhand. Vera hit wet balls down the alley. I chased them and threw them back. She was laughing and Kurt was telling her to concentrate and to pretend she was lifting into flight. One time she did and the ball zipped down the alley with topspin, water streaming off it like a shooting star in a telescope. I ran after it into the dark, my breath and heart beating harder, my sneakers soaked, a smile breaking across my face. The whole neighborhood was sleeping except the three of us and when I turned with the soggy ball in my hand, Kurt and Vera shimmered like cutouts in the night. As I walked closer, I heard their voices and for a moment pretended that Mom was home and nothing had changed. Another rainstorm rolled in and Vera and I went running for the house while Kurt jumped on the stoop and back off again, juggling two balls in puddles beneath the sputtering streetlight like some crazy kid or a guy with a night pass to the carnival.

two
    There’s light through the window shade. It’s morning, or perhaps some luminary trick. I’m lying on my back like a corpse, waiting for what, I don’t know. I think something’s supposed to happen. It seems to me there should be sounds by now, some shape moving toward me. I try to remember my name. I can’t, but I know I am somebody; I can count my fingers. Is every day like this? I don’t know. I know Kurt and Vera by heart. They live inside of me, and I know that they were real. I can still hear them. The shade is bright with light and someone, a woman in white, is saying, “Good morning, James.” I must be James because she’s pulling down my sheet and propping me up on a pillow. She hands me a glass of water. It seems like this scene has happened a million times, but I can’t recall what happens next. The woman in white opens a drawer and rattles things; she combs my hair and holds a mirror up. An old man looks back. Not old, entirely. Maybe fifty or fifty-two. Lines fan out from the eyes, but the face is sharp, perhaps a bit slack under the chin. The hair is gray and black, the color of a sweater Kurt used to wear, but Kurt’s is not the face I’m looking at, although there is a resemblance. The man in the mirror, not a bad-looking guy really, seems lost, as if he’s trying to remember where he put the car keys, or how he ended up at