The Night Tourist Read Free Page A

marriage, begins to sputter and smoke. This was considered a bad omen, an auspicium gravius , but all omens weren’t necessarily bad. In fact, Jack reminded himself, auspicium was the root of the English word “auspicious.”
    As the train chugged toward them, his father handed Jack his cell phone, Dr. Lyons’s address, and four twenties. “Call to let me know what train you’re coming back on,” he said. “And be careful.”
    There was something about the way his father’s face softened that made Jack suddenly think he could ask him about his mom. Not something big, like why his father never talked about her, but something small, like whether she had liked living in New York or what had made her laugh or whether she had any irrational fears. But as swiftly as the softness had come over it, his father’s face reassembled into its usual stern expression. After an awkward, silent hug, Jack boarded the train.
    Five minutes later Jack was on his way to New York. He took out the Viele map and began charting his route from the train station to Dr. Lyons’s office. But it was hard to trace it on the map. The street numbers were small and he couldn’t decipher the mazy blue lines that branched and looped through Manhattan. He leaned his head up against his backpack and looked out the window at backyards filled with old car parts and washing machines, empty parking lots, the occasional patch of field, yellow and crackled with frost. The sun wafted in and out behind the clouds, illuminating the ice-covered branches of the trees. Birds swooped overhead, landing on the electric wires, fluttering off. Jack’s head bobbed.
    “Final stop, Grand Central Terminal!”
    Jack opened his eyes. His head throbbed and his mouth was dry and metallic-tasting. The train began to plunge into an underground tunnel. As the daylight faded into shadow, Jack’s ears began to pop. The lights in the train flickered on and off, illuminating flashes of tunnel covered with red-lettered warning signs and graffiti scrawls.
    “Grand Central Terminal! Please check for your belongings before you leave the train. Thank you for riding Metro-North.” The train inched wearily to a stop. Jack folded the map and slid it into his backpack. Hoisting the backpack onto his shoulders, he stumbled onto the platform and began to follow the rushing tide of people into the station. The crowd climbed a flight of marble stairs and carryied him up a ramp and out a door. A few minutes later he was in the backseat of a cab, heading downtown to Dr. Lyons’s office.
    The office, which shared the twenty-third floor with a cleaning service and a piano tuner, was much smaller than Jack expected. The waiting room was empty save for a receptionist with a blue-tinted bouffant, scribbling in a log beside an enormous stack of yellowed papers. As Jack approached, he could make out the letters atop one of the pieces of paper— CERTIFICATE OF DEATH . It seemed as if most of Dr. Lyons’s patients hadn’t fared well at all. But before he had a chance to turn back, the receptionist looked up.
    “You must be Jack,” she said. She stood up and gestured for him to follow her down a dimly lit hallway and into an office. “Have a seat,” she said, pointing to a worn couch. “Dr. Lyons will be with you in a minute.” As soon as he sat down, the receptionist left, closing the door behind her.
    The office wasn’t much of an improvement over the waiting room. The walls were lined with rows of antique, leather-bound books, their spines sagging and titles peeling. A framed certificate to Augustus Lyons for Distinguished Alumni Service from the George Chapman School hung lopsided on a hook. The most interesting object in the room was a bookcase made out of shellacked tree limbs. It had five glass shelves; on the middle one, Jack noticed a collection of what looked like ancient coins. They were all the same dull, bronze color except for one, which flashed gold. Jack walked over to the shelf