Fifty-Six Cold Nights

The rain had been falling since Tuesday. It was now Friday, and it showed no signs of stopping. Los Angeles in November rain is a city pretending to be somewhere else, a place that has forgotten what it is and is inventing a climate to fill the void. The streets of Hollywood ran with a water that was not quite clean and not quite dirty, something in between that the poets would call "lyrical" if they were drunk and the sanitarians would call "a public health hazard" if they were sober.

Lo Morales sat in her car—a 1948 Chevrolet with a rusted fender and a heater that worked only if you hit the dashboard at the right angle—outside a apartment building on Sunset Boulevard and counted the nights. Fifty-five had passed since she had decided to do this. Fifty-five nights of rain and rehearsing and sitting in the dark with her hands on the steering wheel and her eyes on the building like a woman waiting for a man who might never come out.

She was not supposed to be here. She was a former prostitute with a record for disorderly conduct and a face that most men recognized from the times they had passed her on the corner of Vine and Adams. But recognition works both ways. She recognized faces. She recognized the particular walk of a man who carries money in his inside pocket. She recognized the way Jack Harrison walked—shoulders back, head down, purposeful but not hurried, the walk of a man who knows exactly where he is going and has all the time in the world to get there.

Jack Harrison had been known as "Harrison" to most people. To the few people who knew him well, he had been "Jack." To the men he worked with, he had been "the accountant." And to the federal agents who had been looking for him since 1951, he had been a ghost—a ghost who moved money through three countries and left no paper trail and who, as far as anyone could tell, had simply vanished one night in 1951 and reappeared six months later under a new name in a town fifty miles north of here.

But Lo had known him before the money and before the name change. She had known him in 1944, when he was "Jack Harrison" and a sergeant in the Marine Corps and he had come into the bar where she worked—not as a prostitute, not then, just as a waitress—and he had sat at the counter and ordered a coffee and sat there for three hours staring at a photograph he would not show her. She had refilled his coffee five times without asking questions. Questions were for people who thought answers mattered.

When he left, he left a quarter on the counter and a photograph on the seat. She looked at the photograph. It was a woman and a child, standing in front of a house with a white picket fence. She put the photograph in her purse. She never gave it back. He never came back.

Fifty-six nights. The number meant nothing to anyone else. To Lo it was the number of times she had rehearsed this: walking into the building, taking the elevator to the third floor, knocking on door 3B, and saying the words she had not yet found. Words were always the hard part.

The elevator arrived on the third floor with a sound like a tired animal. She stepped out and walked to door 3B. The paint was peeling. The number was crooked. She knocked.

The door opened and a man stood there who was not Jack Harrison and was Jack Harrison. He was older than she remembered. The war had done something to him—something to the eyes and something to the mouth, the way a river changes a landscape it flows through without meaning to.

"Can I help you?" he asked. And his voice was the same, the way a river&x27;s voice is the same even when the water is different.

"Miss Morales," he said, reading the name tag she had pinned to her coat. "Is there something I can—"

"Do you remember a photograph?" she asked.

He went very still. The hallway light buzzed. Somewhere down the stairs, a door slammed.

"Of a woman and a child," she said. "White picket fence."

He closed the door. She put her hand between it and the frame. It did not work perfectly—the door caught on her coat and closed most of the way, leaving a narrow gap through which she could see his face.

"Who are you?" he asked. Not angry. Not afraid. Just a question, simple and direct, the way a man asks a question when he is trying to figure out if he is in danger or just in a conversation.

"I was a waitress at a bar on Sunset. 1944. You ordered coffee and sat for three hours. You left a photograph."

He stared at her through the gap. His hand was on the door knob. His knuckles were white.

"I gave that back," he said.

"You didn't."

"How do you know that?"

"I know what I saw."

He opened the door fully. "Come in."

The apartment was small and sparse, the kind of apartment a man keeps because he has nothing he wants to look at. A desk. A chair. A bed with a blanket pulled taut. A single photograph on the wall—a landscape with mountains and a sky that took up most of the frame. No woman. No child. No white picket fence.

He poured a glass of water and offered it to her. She took it and drank it without thanking him, because thanking him would make it a conversation and she was not ready for a conversation.

"I served in the Marines," he said. "I was stationed in Okinawa. I saw things that make a photograph of a woman and a child with a white picket fence look like the only real thing in the world. I needed that. I needed to believe that things could be simple. I gave the photograph to a woman in a bar in San Diego because she looked at me the way I needed to be looked at. I didn't remember her name. I didn't ask for it."

"That was me," she said.

He looked at her. Really looked. Past the makeup and the coat and the age and the years of living on the edges of other people's lives, he saw the waitress who had refilled his coffee five times without asking questions.

"Did you keep it?" he asked.

She reached into her purse and took out a photograph. It was faded. The colors had shifted. The woman and the child were grey now, and the white picket fence was the colour of old bone.

"I kept it," she said. "For twelve years."

"Why?"

"Because you left it. That makes it a promise, whether you meant it as one or not. And promises are the only things that have ever kept me warm."

He took the photograph. He looked at it the way a man looks at a map of a place he has never been but always wanted to visit.

"I'm not Jack Harrison," he said. "I haven't been for seven years."

"I know," she said. "I know who you are. I know about the money. I know about the federal agents. I know about the war and the photograph and the bar and the coffee and the three hours and the five refills."

"Then you know I'm in trouble."

"I know you're a man who sits in a bar for three hours staring at a photograph. Trouble is just the word people use when they don't understand why you're sitting there."

He set the photograph on the desk. He sat down in the chair. He put his head in his hands. The rain continued outside, because it always continued outside, because the rain does not care about any of this.

"You can go now," he said.

"Tomorrow night," she said. "I'll be here tomorrow night."

"Why?"

"Because it's fifty-six nights. And I don't know what comes next. But I know what I did tonight. And that's something."

She left. He did not close the door. She walked to her car and sat in the rain and watched the building the way she had watched it for fifty-five nights before this one. The rain felt cold. The rain always feels cold. The rain does not care about any of this.

Author Note & Copyright: