The gallery was smaller than Dick expected. Not the kind of space that announced itself with big windows and bold lettering, but the kind that hid in the ground floor of a brick building on Avenue C, reachable only by a flight of stairs that smelled of boiled cabbage and old paint. He was looking for a place to sell a painting he hadn't finished, but the first thing he saw when he walked in was not a painting. It was a woman made of clay.

She sat on a windowsill, one leg drawn up, her chin resting on her knee. She was perhaps eighteen inches tall, but the detail was extraordinary: the way her fingers curled around her knee, the slight parting of her lips, the tilt of her head that suggested she was listening to something just beyond the edge of hearing. Dick stood in front of her for ten minutes without moving.

"Margaret," a voice said.

He turned. The woman who had spoken was standing in the doorway of a back room, wiping clay from her hands onto a stained apron. She was maybe twenty-six, with dark hair pulled into a messy knot and eyes that were the kind of grey that changes colour depending on the light. She wore a paint-splattered shirt and jeans and looked at Dick the way a person looks at a dog that has wandered into their kitchen—curious, not unwelcoming.

"That's Margaret," she said. "She's not for sale."

"I wasn't going to ask," Dick said. Which was a lie. He would have asked. He would have offered three hundred dollars, five hundred, a thousand. He didn't know why. Something about the clay woman made him want to possess her.

The sculptor's name was Clara Whitmore. She had grown up in Boston, she told him, in a house on Commonwealth Avenue with a father who was a lawyer and a mother who collected Impressionist paintings and never spoke to either of them. She had run away at eighteen, studied at RISD for two years before running away from that too, and ended up in New York with forty dollars and a duffel bag and a talent for making clay look like flesh.

"Margaret was my sister," she said, as if this explained everything. It didn't. "She died when I was eighteen. Car accident. Rainy night. You've heard the story before."

"I don't think so," Dick said.

"She wasn't real," Clara said. And then, immediately, as if correcting herself: "I mean, she was real. She just wasn't—she wasn't my sister. Not by blood. But she was my sister."

Dick waited. When Clara didn't continue, he said, "I'll come back."

He came back every day for a month. He sat in Clara's studio—a converted loft on the fourth floor of a building in the Village—and watched her work. She made things that breathed. Not metaphysically breathing. Literally. Her hands moved over the clay with a speed and precision that made Dick's scientist brain ache to understand the mechanics of it, but this was not mechanics. This was something that could not be reduced to muscle and bone and nerve.

He also watched her talk to Margaret. Every full moon, Clara would sit in front of the clay woman and talk. She talked about the weather, about a painting she had seen, about a dream she had had. She talked the way a person talks to someone who is listening. And Dick, who had spent twenty-three years learning to read people, to assess risk, to calculate the value of everything he encountered, could not read Clara at all. She was not faking. She was not performing. She genuinely believed that Margaret was listening.

Or she genuinely believed that Margaret was there.

The distinction, Dick found, was not as clear as he had thought.

He began to investigate. He went to the New York Public Library on a Saturday afternoon and searched the newspaper archives for Margaret Whitmore, cross-referencing death records, funeral notices, obituaries. He searched the Whitmore family name. He searched eighteen-year-old girls who died in car accidents on rainy nights in the 1970s. He found nothing.

Not a single record.

He told himself it didn't matter. Clara was real. Her talent was real. The way she looked at Margaret when she thought nobody was watching was real. None of that required Margaret to be real.

But he couldn't stop looking.

The party was at Clara's request. She had a friend who owned a house in Long Island, she said, and she wanted to throw a party. "A real party," she said, with a smile that was almost mischievous. "Jazz, champagne, people who don't know each other and don't care. Margaret would like it."

Dick didn't ask how Margaret would like it. He had learned by now not to ask how anything related to Clara worked. He just said yes.

The party was everything Dick expected and nothing he remembered. Champagne flowed. A jazz quartet played in the living room. People danced in the garden under strings of lights. Dick moved through the crowd, smiling, drinking, feeling the familiar hollow ache in his chest that he had learned to call ambition but was actually something else—something closer to hunger.

He found Clara in the kitchen, pouring another glass of champagne. "Where's Margaret?" he asked.

"Meeting people," Clara said.

Dick looked around. He saw a woman in a white dress sitting on a sofa in the corner. She was blonde, perhaps twenty years old, with a face that was both familiar and impossible. He walked over and sat beside her.

"Are you Margaret?" he asked.

The woman smiled. It was Clara's smile. "Does it matter?"

"Does it?" Dick echoed.

She laughed. It was Clara's laugh. And then she reached for his hand, and her skin was warm, and Dick felt something shift inside him, something that had been locked for years suddenly turning in its lock.

He spent the rest of the night dancing with Margaret. She was an excellent dancer—better than excellent, she danced the way Clara sculpted, with a kind of unconscious mastery that made everything look effortless. Dick didn't ask her name. He didn't need to.

When the party ended, he followed Clara back to the city. He walked her to the door of her building and said, "Can I come up?"

"No," Clara said. And then, softer: "Not tonight."

He watched her go inside. He watched her turn on the light and sit down in front of something he couldn't see. He stood on the sidewalk for a long time, listening to the city breathe, feeling the champagne and the jazz and Margaret's warm hand still on his fingers.

The next morning, he went to the studio. The door was locked. A neighbour told him that Clara had been taken away the night before—ambulance, police, something about a mental health evaluation. The landlord had let the police in. The studio was empty except for a pile of clay on the floor, shattered into pieces, and a single glass eye rolling slowly across the wood, as if something had knocked it off a shelf and it was still, somehow, in motion.

Dick picked up the eye. It was glass, brown, and it looked exactly like Margaret's eye, which was exactly like Clara's eye, which was exactly like his own eye in the mirror when he looked too long and didn't recognize the person looking back.

He went to work on Monday. He stood on the trading floor of the brokerage and shouted buy and sell and the numbers flashed on the screens and the money moved and the world kept turning and Dick stood in the centre of it all and heard jazz playing in his head and felt a warm hand in his and knew, with a certainty that was both his greatest strength and his deepest wound, that some things are real not because they exist but because they make you feel real.

He still goes to the studio sometimes. The door is locked. The windows are boarded. But on full moon nights, if he stands outside and listens, he can hear music. Not jazz. Something older. Something that sounds like hands shaping clay, like water hitting earth, like the sound a woman makes when she is speaking to someone who will never answer but who listens anyway.

Dick listens. And sometimes, he almost believes he hears Margaret breathing.

OTMES v2: JAZZ-1925-LONGISLAND-CLAYMEMORY-4ACT-1380W-NO-SUP-PER-1PL-LIM