to him. She sat back from him, erect, soldiering through this bad moment, perhaps a little appalled. The photograph was of a teenaged girl, her husk-colored hair cut short, her face reddened by the sun, her chin, her nose, her hazel eyes, the green muddied with brown. He didn’t know whether he was looking at her at a daughter’s age or at a daughter destined to become the woman he saw sitting here.
He turned the picture back around. He sat back. He put it to her squarely. “Take me there. Show me the spot. I won’t ask any more of you, and I won’t be back.”
She shook her head. “It won’t mean anything. There are dozens of parks like that one in Madrid.”
“All with a Civil Guard headquarters?”
She chose not to answer him and, stepping to her office door, spoke to her assistant instead. Her name was Concha. Madeline Pratt spoke in Spanish, but he understood that she was telling her assistant what to do in case a certain argumentative woman who housed their students showed up before she could return. Concha smiled at him as they left the room; in return, he thanked her, although she would never know for what. He was thanking her for her Spanish eyes, the eyes of the song that when he was a boy he had sat beside his mother and sung. They had sung through stacks of sheet music, the whole romantic songbook. To her credit, when she had closed the piano lid, his mother had trapped the romance inside, where it took on the mustiness of the old ivories, the old felt hammers and pads. Ben thanked Concha for showing him her eyes. They were real. They had nothing to do with the world.
In the hall he asked Madeline Pratt, “She lived here, didn’t she? Where did she live, upstairs?”
The director nodded. “Now not as many students do. More live with families. But your daughter chose to live by herself. She said she was here to learn.”
Her tone was detached, informative. If they were going to do this, would he allow her this tone?
She continued, “She went running every morning. She was running that morning. But you already know that.”
He did, but he wanted to know everything. He wanted her to skip nothing. He nodded, and they descended that last flight of stairs, pushed through the iron gate and stepped onto the street.
Where, two years and eight months earlier, September the twenty-ninth, his daughter, Madeline Pratt’s program member, Michelle Williamson, turned left and ran up this street. She ran along the sidewalk her father had walked down, only she ran earlier in the morning. How much earlier? Between seven-thirty and eight. Before reaching Paseo San Francisco de Sales, the street where her father had jostled that passerby, she turned left up a narrower street, Calle Domenico Scarlotti, and ran uphill, a gradual incline. She passed office buildings and apartment buildings and a small hotel, the Mindanao, where he might have taken a room. There were three upscale restaurants and a jewelry store—they were quickly leaving the student scene—and two beauty salons. After four blocks, Domenico Scarlotti dead-ended in Calle General Ampudia, and there, before an elegant furniture store, she turned right and ran past apartment buildings in whose glassy façades she might have observed herself, had she not had her attention turned to more important things. On Paseo San Francisco de Sales she ran past that string of banks her father had noticed from down the street, closed at that early hour. Directly ahead she came to a plaza that turned out to be a small park, Parque Santander, where cypresses and sycamores and locusts grew and short gnarled trees she would have known the name for and her father didn’t. Paths led off into the park. A runner could either piece these paths together or use the broad sidewalk that surrounded the park as a track. The trick would be to cross the heavily trafficked streets and reach the park without breaking stride.
She would know the trick. She had been running in this park for a month. It was where she came.
When the light changed, Madeline Pratt led him across the street. He saw no runners at this late-morning hour. No students. But he put his daughter there; he allowed her to appear before him. The gold of her hair was drawn up in a ponytail. She ran with her upright carriage and measured stride. She wore light-colored shorts and shirts—pale greens, blues, oranges, pinks— clothes he’d never seen darkened with sweat. She wore her timer’s watch with the black band. She didn’t wear headphones. She would hear the world around her, as well as see it, smell it, feel its crunching give under her feet.
On her face Ben saw an expression of great diligence, as though she were monitoring all her vital signs at once.
He followed Madeline Pratt into the park. Tables were set out before a concession stand. Two women whose small children played on some teeter-totters were having coffee. These were working-class women—at least the jeans and featureless tee-shirts they wore indicated little interest in clothes. They wore no makeup; their hair did not look combed. There was a dry itemizing tone to their voices, with a hint of some grievance. He asked Madeline Pratt to have coffee with him. When he offered to bring the coffee to her, she cautiously corrected him. Even in such informal surroundings they would be served.
He had what she had, a cortado, an espresso with a splash of warm milk. One sugar.
Fate had brought his daughter here. For the last month of her life she’d run around this park, and there on the far side, beyond bushes and trees, he lost her to view. He believed he could hear her then, a sort of whispering pant, like a sound she made in her sleep, but she wasn’t calling him to come drive away the spooks of her dreams. She was simply on the dark side of his moon.
He had no idea of the expression that had appeared on his face. But when Madeline Pratt said, “I can’t let you do this,” she was clearly more concerned for his well-being than her own, and he didn’t want that.
“Take me there now,” he said. “I want to stand on the spot.”
A building occupied the entire side of the block, tan-colored stucco alternating with columns of brick; it was four stories high, its two visible corners dominated by guard towers. There was a guard booth at the driveway leading in. From the sidewalk where he stood he estimated the distance across the street to where two Civil Guards patrolled their stretch of sidewalk at sixty feet. The Civil Guards were dressed in a darker, denser green than army green and carried machine guns slung over their shoulders. Sixty feet was the distance separating a pitcher from a batter. As a teenager he had pitched. These two Civil Guards might have been teenagers themselves. They had fresh bony faces that looked struck from the same Spanish mold. They had vigorous eyebrows and hair along their upper lips. The predecessor of one of them had not survived. Ben asked Madeline Pratt where, and she moved them farther along the sidewalk, up from the headquarters’ entrance. When she stopped, he estimated the distance between them and those two patrolling boys now at ninety feet, or the distance between home plate and first base. As well as Madeline Pratt could remember, his daughter had died here. There was a tree just inside the park, one of those low gnarled trees with what looked like carob pods hanging from its limbs. He could see how the bark had been blown away. What remained of the tree looked indestructible. The car loaded with dynamite had been parked almost directly across from the entrance where the two Civil Guards patrolled. And the blast had caught her here.
“What kind of car?”
Madeline Pratt had newspaper clippings from that day. As documents pertaining to the center she’d felt obligated to keep them. He could consult the clippings.
But she must have remembered the car.
She nodded. It was a Seat Ibiza. She looked up the street and raised her hand and pointed at an unexceptional white car wedged into a parking spot.
“Like that one,” she said.
It was a hatchback model. It had no trunk. There would be a storage area for luggage, but anyone peering in . . .
“And other than my daughter and that Civil Guard . . . ?”
“Two more people were slightly injured, and there was a lot of shattered glass. But I hope you’ll believe me when I say it was truly miraculous that there were no other casualties. I know that’s small consolation.”
“It’s been two years and eight months since it happened. Look around.