He sits on a bench facing New York harbor.  He is enveloped in silence but for the twilling of a nearby     bird sitting in an old English Oak by the path. Or perhaps the Norway Maple. He is uncertain. The sound is low and sorrowful. As it makes its way from the branches and nearer to Joe he sees it is a Mourning Warbler. Fitting.

He is thinking of his wife, Lucy. It has been two years since he last held her in his arms yet he can still feel her shape. Still feel the gentle weight of her close to him. His eyes feel heavy as does his head and his heart. The home where he lived with Lucy remains dark and closed. The only light in fact the only brightness in his otherwise listless existence is eight-year old Anne. Her bright brown eyes and unmanageable curls so like her mother. She is often loud and brash in her comments, yanking him from his reverie. She peppers him with question after question and there is little to dissuade her.

Joe knows Anne needs him. He knows her talk is truly at times just to fill the silence that settles upon them at dinner in their little apartment on Eldridge.  Her incessant chatter is a welcome distraction. Sometimes his friend Bobby and his wife Lizzie join them. The table is heavy, despite the rationing of the time, with pan-fried sausages and canned-spaghetti or liver loaf and mash. Jack comes too and he and Anne drown out the rest with their talk of Jack’s Philmore blackbird crystal radio set which could pick up stations from 75 miles away!

But then night comes and Joe remains downstairs on the sofa long after he has sent Anne off to bed. The sounds from the darkened street outside hold his thoughts.

A few times over the years he asked their old neighbor Mrs. McGillicutty to join them for supper. She had always seemed to have a soft spot for his Lucy. He’d see them sometimes sitting close together on the old woman’s stoop, heads close together, deep in conversation. About what he could only guess. Something far from frivolous though judging from the stiffness of his wife’s back and the steel grip of the old woman’s aged hand on his wife’s arm.

Mrs. McGillicutty begged off most times save one. It was a hot night about a year after his wife had disappeared. The front room was loud with the raucous laughter of Anne and Jack being egged on by Bobby as always lounging in the threadbare paisley chair nearest the front window, a cigar in one hand and a glass of something warm in the other.

Mrs. McGillicutty was in the small kitchen with Joe as he threw together some after dinner coffee. In the early days of Lucy’s disappearance the old woman had asked after her, her wrinkled face pinched with concern. But after a while these inquiries became less and less. And that night, the last night in fact Joe recalls seeing the old woman, she’d said something so odd it left Joe feeling cold. She’d muttered to herself in some strange language, sitting on the old wooden chair by the wood stove, cold from lack of use. A low guttural sound that left Joe cringing, his insides curdling like spoiled milk.

“What’s that Mrs. McGillicutty? Are ye feeling alright?” he’d asked in a cheery voice. Much cheerier than he was feeling. She stared at him with pale hard eyes. Her thin lips curled and an ugly smirk marred her thin face.

“There is no disease that I spit on more than treachery. Aeschylus said that. He did. Do you know him?” her voice was thick with mucus that needed clearing.

Joe’s breath came out slowly as if being held. “Ach, no mam’. I can’t say that I have.”

The women tsked and her chin quivered. “You should. You should know.” She continued muttering as she pushed her way back into the bright front room, past the children crouched over some new wooden contraption Jack was trying to fashion, and out into the dim evening, warm despite the hour, the skyline an orange slash marring the deep gentle violet.

Joe stood long moments in the kitchen after she’d gone. A dank decaying chill filling the air where she’d been. He never saw her again.

A boat horn startles Joe back to life and also the little bird from its seat beside Joe on the bench. It is approaching Ellis Island’s landing.  Joe slowly snakes his hand into the pocket of his brown double-breasted trench coat. His hand closes around the small hard sphere. He fingers it delicately. He had found the locket tucked into his small wooden carved box. Lucy had given him the small box for Christmas one year and would leave him little notes and tokens in it every so often. The carving was intricate and smooth. He had kept it on his dresser and that very morning he’d opened it for the first time since Lucy had gone. It had opened slowly and with effort as if it too was reluctant to move forward. To his heart wrenching amazement, it was not empty. 

Next Chapter: Anne, Los Angeles, 1955