When Eve Valentine got to her car, she had two sensations simultaneously—surprise that the bale-size conglomeration of bubble wrap was gone from the back seat, and amazement that someone would steal it. There was no sign of forced entry. Ariel—her friend from parking on Bennett Avenue—must have forgotten to lock the car. She’d given him a key so he could move her car on the days she couldn’t make it for street cleaning.

The bubble wrap was related to the sudden death of her husband seven months before. He mainly restored Hudson River pastels. He said he was “in art restoration,” but it was just these specific pictures that made him money. Living in the Hudson Valley helped establish his brand. He left at least 120 pieces—most from antique dealers who sent their finds in batches—in varying states of repair. For months, Eve had been packing and sending, starting with the museums. She could have moved faster, but the whole thing was a loss financially.

The truth was: they had debt; he had no life insurance. They’d done everything to pay for Anton’s education from day school to college. It had been a struggle to live off the grid of capitalism and what Chip called “class-upmanship.” He was a compassionate man who hated his legacy as Erastus Commager II so much that he nicknamed himself “Chip” in sixth grade. Eve had been a playwright, but for the past decade she sold rare books—a trade she’d got into because of his world of minutiae. He told her at the breakfast table the morning he died: “The market is dying, Eve. Nobody knows, wants, or cares.”

When she didn’t hear back from Ariel after texting him about the bubble wrap, she decided to go to the 34th Precinct to report the theft. She felt ridiculous, but someone had broken into her car.

“Any identifying markings?” asked the desk cop.

“Green tinted packing tape.”

“And why was this item in the car?”

This seemed a stupid question. “There’s no room in my apartment. There’s more in the trunk.”

The copy of the report she was handed described the missing item as “sealed air packaging.” It was odd to see the official rap on Chip’s perennial stash that came in with things and went out with other things. Who knew how long ago air from wherever had been sealed in that bale? It now occurred to her that it was a time capsule of their shared life. And now it was gone.

On the walk home she read a text from her son. He was coming down for a visit this weekend—only not to his mother’s one-bedroom apartment stuffed to the gills with disrupted life but to the Westport home of his father’s sister, who was married to a rich man and had two teenagers in elite schools. How had it come to this, Eve wondered, that she had to drive to her sister-in-law’s to see her own son?

In February, Anton was furious that his mother had “sold the house right out from under me.” Eve knew she should have told him right then that they never owned the house—that they’d maintained this monumental ruse (or lie) for nearly two decades. But then she hadn’t even said anything about “selling.” She simply told him, “I’m not staying in this house.” He praised himself for taking only a couple weeks off from school so that he’d graduate on time, whereas his mother, he claimed, was “eagerly liquidating assets.” She chose to take his Skype tirade on the chin—and again a month later when he called her “selfish” for wanting to move back to the city. He seemed to have forgotten that, unlike the Montroses of Westport, his parents had lived in Manhattan until he was three.

Eve still couldn’t understand why losing Chip had felt like one long day. They were glad Obama was reelected; they decided to go ahead with the expensive work on their landlord’s fireplace, to have it working well for Christmas. In between, Chip had a heart attack and died at a Starbucks. Suddenly, everything in Eve’s life was cut in half. Worse, she had to find a viable job at fifty. Because many of her old theater friends lived in the Heights, she made that the map pin. She took the first apartment she saw at the end of the 190th Street tunnel—an oasis at the base of tree-covered rock. Coming out to the illusion of the same forest she’d left behind made her feel like a bird stuck in the chimney flue flying out of the hearth and straight for the Christmas tree.

“You need big ideas,” advised her sister-in-law, Mill, who’d worked in interior design and used to do hotels. She and Eve were cutting vegetables in the enormous new kitchen that lived up to its role as the make-or-break of all real estate. The open space was so open that things echoed. Eve nodded as if “big” had never occurred to her, as if there was no irony in the fact that it was Mill’s brother who didn’t have ideas of any size.

“You don’t want some dumb salaried job,” Mill went on. “Maybe you could head up a foundation. You have experience with Chip’s philanthropy.”

Eve nodded in silence. Chip’s parents and the Commager network had written him off back in the eighties—when he gave big chunks of family money to insolvent arts organizations, when he looked like a kid and was usually high. He pissed through the bulk of his legacy before he and Eve had been a couple, when he was always loaning friends money for lunch or a Lufthansa ticket to Athens.

Mill idled her beautiful Shun knife and looked up. “It’s just so tragic with Chip. Evar and I thought that maybe he’d be a late bloomer like Cézanne—you know? Do his best work in his sixties and seventies.”

Eve had to bite her tongue. When you produced practically no work over a lifetime, there could never be a best period. To her, the one thing that made Chip an artist was his addictions. She remembered going to see the movie Fargo back when he was still painting. She teased him that he was like Norm Gunderson, whose vocational goal is to get his painting of a mallard on a U.S. postage stamp. Later in bed, she thought how sad it was that Chip wasn’t even as creative as Norm Gunderson.

“The best thing that happened to Chip was getting clean in 1997,” she told her sister-in-law. “Because it showed him that he couldn’t paint when he was high and he couldn’t paint when he was sober. He took the right contingency route.”

“That’s harsh,” said Mill.

Eve was tempted to inform her that, just a couple months ago, she had overheard Evar saying that Chip’s dying was “just as well” given his problems with carpal tunnel. She looked up from the rhubarb to see Anton standing with an empty glass in this auditorium kitchen.

“Why so glum, chum?” asked his aunt.

Eve kept quiet to give him the opportunity to share his woe. When he didn’t, she filled the unnerving silence: “He wants to move to San Francisco, but he’s nervous to go there without a job. It’s so expensive.”

Mill stopped cutting and looked at Anton. “Oh, for Chrissakes. We’re Commagers! We can do anything!”

Eve tried to signal telepathically to Chip’s sister: Give the kid some of your excessive money, why not?

After dinner, Eve suggested a walk to her son.

“Not now,” he said.

“I’m afraid it has to be now.”

The picturesqueness of the area was like a staging for a film shoot. Thinking of Fargo earlier had put Eve in the mindset of those kinds of movies from the nineties. “Do you remember seeing The Truman Show when you were a kid?”

“I actually saw it again for a class,” he said, “a couple years ago.”

She nodded. “Well . . .”

“Well what?”

“Well . . . geez.”

He was impatient. “What is it, Mom?”

Why was she struggling so much with this? He knew long ago that Eve was pregnant before she and Chip decided to marry. He knew that he himself was the catalyst for their life together. It was this novel thought of a baby that made Chip want to go Upstate and be a painter with a studio in the woods, like all the greats from the fifties and sixties who supposedly loathed the commodification of art and yet kept carrying those paychecks to the bank tellers in Frostbite Falls.

She, too, was suddenly impatient with the idea that she needed to rationalize adversity. “Your father and I lied to you about something.”

He laughed in a way that he obviously intended to be knowing but actually sounded fearful. “You gonna tell me all this isn’t real?”

“We never owned the house,” she said. “We just rented it.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I’m sorry,” she told him, “but it just happened.”

“Why the fuck did you do that to me?”

“We fell in love with that house immediately when we moved up there. We knew Abe was never going to sell it to anyone; he was so strange. But that wasn’t the issue. We looked at all these houses back when real estate was achievable, but we couldn’t afford anything. We didn’t have regular income.”

“Why the fuck didn’t you both do something else? Get real jobs?”

She felt her throat burn. “We did it for you, Anton.”

“Fuck you did it for me.”

“We wanted you to have the option on being normal, not some poor kid with hippie parents.”

“But you’re telling me right now that I fucking was a poor kid with hippie parents!”

“We used everything to send you to private schools. You’re graduating without debt, with a clean slate. I came out of school twenty grand in the hole.”

“Stop!” he shouted. “I don’t want to hear it, your hard times. Dad was fucking rich. He went to Yale. If you did it all for me, how come I’m not graduating from Yale?” He stormed off but came back to say something else: “It’s like Bernie Madoff or something what you did!”

Eve left her son staying overnight with his Commager bloodline. On the drive home, she thought how there were so many things she could have told him that might actually wound rather than simply disappoint. What if, for starters, he knew that at some point she’d stopped loving his father? She spent her life trying to help Chip, but he had exhausted her capacity for passion. What if she said that, with his father now gone, she finally had the space to resent that twenty-year compromise?

She accepted responsibility for acquiescing to Chip’s way of life, but he worked hard to make this happen. He got her to stop associating with her theater group when it moved to Brooklyn. He demanded full immersion in his world of old things, giving them a reason to survive. Meticulous detail as compensation for raw ideas—that was his coping mechanism. One of Eve’s big ideas was for her and Chip to write a book on unknown American art forgers. He couldn’t write, but she was willing to do most of the work. Still, he could never commit to an act of creation.

By the time she got home, she’d forced a conclusion: I just don’t care. The kid’s got everything, she told herself—intelligence, good health, a good education, no debt, lots of friends. And besides that, he was pretty stupid for not figuring out his parents were renting the damned house. He should have come to that conclusion on his own . . . and then not have said anything, to spare his old mother’s feelings.

The next morning, Eve was floored when a police lieutenant called to say that they’d located her bubble wrap. He asked if she’d mind stopping by an address on her street. The number seemed like it might be Ariel’s building, and when she got there, it was.

The officer waiting outside was the one she spoke to on the phone, Lieutenant Meade. He seemed stalwart and reliable but a bit sloppy in the manner of a BBC procedural. They shook hands, went inside, and took the elevator to the third floor. He took a set of keys from his pocket and opened the door of an apartment that was empty except for the bubble wrap with green packing tape. They walked not far inside and stood staring. After a moment she felt compelled to say something relevant about her recovered sealed air. “Free as the air that you breathe—except when somebody seals it.”

Lieutenant Meade was reading something on his phone “We have reason to believe that Mr. Rodrigo recently killed a man in Miami,” he said without looking up.

“No!” she cried, turning to face him. “My God! Ariel’s so nice!”

“It’s narcotics, ma’am, so it’s a business.”

She turned back to the bubble wrap.

“We think he’d been planning to murder another man in this organization locally. He may have already taken action on that.”

She was so disconcerted. “Was he going to put the body in bubble wrap?”

He caught himself in a laugh. “I have no idea. But it was a coincidence that you reported the theft and reported that Mr. Rodrigo had the keys to your car.”

She continued staring at the green plastic monster of old air. “I didn’t even know his name was Rodrigo. You’re the ones who put two and two together.”

He shot an equivocal expression at the same monster. “There’s not a lot of Ariels.”

“Why did he take the bubble wrap and leave the car?”

“It’s a pretty old car, ma’am.”

She hated hearing that, but it was true.

“We’re fairly sure Mr. Rodrigo has left the area,” he said, “but we want to talk to a man he was friendly with on this street, on Bennett Avenue.”

“Yeah,” she said, thinking. “I remember he had a buddy.”

“You mean like a lover or something?”

Now she had to laugh. “No, like you said—a friend.”

He nodded.

“He was always out on the street—Ariel’s friend—doing something. Moving furniture out of a van or heaving things into that dumpster out front. I think he was Russian.”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Some tenants in this building have seen him, but no one knows his name.”

She had a sick feeling knowing that none of them wanted to get involved.

“Could you identify him if you saw him?”

“I guess so,” she said warily.

“Would you mind driving around the neighborhood twenty minutes or so?”

She inhaled deeply. “Sure, but would this guy really be sticking around?”

“He might be like you and not even know that part of Mr. Rodrigo’s life. He may have helped with everyday stuff. We just want to talk to him.”

As Eve got inside Lieutenant Meade’s Camry, she suddenly got in her head the image of Chip’s dead body wound up inside his bale of bubble wrap. There was a gaping emotional hole in her life that kept getting torn wider and wider. She missed the house so much—probably more than anything. She thought how cruel it was of Anton to have said that she had sold it out from under him.

“I wouldn’t worry about Mr. Rodrigo for your personal safety,” said Lieutenant Meade. “We don’t think he’s violent outside of his business dealings.”

“I know you want to find him,” she replied, “but I don’t want to think anything bad about Ariel. He seems such a warm person.”

He made a face to the windshield—one that said If you only knew.

“His dad recently died in Miami,” she went on. “He was really upset. We talked a lot about that.”

“Why,” he asked, “did your dad die too?”

“Oh, no. My parents are both alive—old, coupon-clippers but very much alive. It’s my husband who died.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you.”

After an almost brittle silence, she said absently, “I’m not seeing any Russians.” Then she laughed at herself. “But then it’s only one we’re after.”

“So what do you do for a living?” he asked, slowing down in front of men unloading things on 181st near Audubon.

She shook her head in regard to the men. “I used to sell old books—rare ones that oddball people pay a lot of money for. But I need to find something where I actually make money.”

He laughed. “Making money’s the name of the game.”

“I’m supposed to be a playwright,” she told him. “That’s what I used to tell my mother.”

He seemed to like the mother part. “You write plays?”

“I just started writing again. That’s something else Ariel and I talked about. He was thinking of writing a movie script about his father. I guess there were a lot of exploits between the two of them.”

He laughed. “Always a lot to say about fathers and sons.”

She nodded. “Mothers and sons, too. At least my son.”

“How’s he doing after losing his dad?”

“He’s OK now,” she said, “but he’s being a brat because he just found out we didn’t have as much money as he thought. He’s twenty-one years old and we paid for his college. What did he think, the Bank de Mom would just keep paying dividends?”

He laughed. “You tell ’em.”

“We did everything for that kid—everything. He thinks he’s better than the life we could afford.”

“Well, I hope you can work that one out.”

“He’ll have to work that one out.”

He laughed again. “If it’s any consolation, I was a lousy father to my oldest son in Louisville. That was during Part 1 of my life.”

“Everyone’s entitled to a Part 1,” she told him. “In theater, it’s the first act, and you get three.”

“His mother died back in ’94. She was shot.”

“God, that must’ve been hard for him.”

“He was raised by my mother. His own could barely take care of herself.” He paused. “He never forgave me when I became a cop.”

“Why?”

“He thinks cops are responsible for Dawn getting shot. He thinks they didn’t protect her.”

“Do you think they didn’t protect her? Is that why you became a cop?”

A look for the ages crept across his stoic face. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I don’t even know why I became a cop. There weren’t a lot of options.”

“I hear you,” she said, nodding. “There are never enough options in life, though you can only take one at a time.”

He laughed. “But over three acts, right?”

She laughed with him. “My favorite playwright is the Russian writer Anton Chekhov. He has a character say: In reality, life was arranged and human relations were complicated so utterly beyond all understanding that when one thought about it one felt uncanny, and one’s heart sank.”

He made another face at the windshield. “That’s just about how it feels.”

“I named my son after Chekhov. I wished he’d taken on some of those qualities. A little respect maybe.”

“Jarobi—my son—said to me once, a long time ago, ‘You don’t get my respect just because you’re my father. I give that respect to other people, and if you want it, you gotta claw it back.’ Can you believe that? Claw it back?”

“So has he come round any?”

“Not really.”

“But you had to have worked hard to advance to where you are. You’ve gone from Kentucky to a Lieutenant with the NYPD. That’s impressive.”

Another face to the windshield—he seemed to have so many. “I hear everything about him through my mother. He’s got a kid on the way now, and my mother said he doesn’t want a gender-reveal party that’s all the rage down there. She says, ‘That’s just how you’d be about your son.’ ”

Eve smiled. “So the cat’s out of the bag.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know you’re having a grandson.”

He laughed uncomfortably. “My two kids are 2 and 7. I don’t want a grandson yet.” Then he slowed down. “Any of those guys over there?”

She hated looking at strangers as if they were guilty of something. It seemed like everyone was staring back at them as if they knew they were the law. “None of them,” she said, adding, “Do people know you from the 34th?”

“I’m not from the 34th,” he said. “I’m not known around here.”

“People look at you like they know you’re a cop.”

“I’m a nosy Black guy driving a Toyota slowly. I got a white woman riding shotgun. That’s the story.”

She nodded. “I’ve been away from this city for a while—eighteen years I only talked to white people from New England.”

“Yeah, well, there’s a lot them there. I got some relatives in New Haven.”

She laughed. “Lieutenant, that’s practically Manhattan. I’m talking up there with Maine and the blueberries and the black flies.”

He laughed, shaking his head. “I don’t want to think about that.”

After a few moments, she asked, “So you’re happily married in Act 2?”

“Pretty happily I’d say—live in Yonkers. Only I’d call it more like Act 3.”

She smiled. “Third time’s a charm.”

“My wife constantly thinks I’m cheating though.”

She shot him a theatrical frown. “I hope you’re not giving her cause.”

“She thinks that when girls get in trouble, they’re always on the make with the cops to keep them out of jail.”

“My husband once thought I was having an affair with a guy who deals in smalls.”

He laughed. “What’s smalls?”

She laughed with him. “Hummel figurines! These scary porcelain statues of German children—knickknacks, toys for grownups.”

He smiled at the windshield like it was an old friend. “Lots of men I know collect toys. Only their wives call them grown-ass men.”

She slapped her knee. “That’s what I’m calling my next play—Of Mice and Grown-Ass Men.”

“What kind of things do you write about?”

“I used to write about my husband’s friends who were artists because I thought they had so many problems. Then when we moved to the boondocks where no one came to visit us, I realized it was us who had the problems.”

He nodded knowingly. “Yeah, well you have a great name for a playwright. Eve Valentine sounds so happy. People will show up not expecting to be bummed out.”

Her laughter seemed thunderous inside a vehicle. “You got my number, Lieutenant Meade. But you know what? I don’t think we’re going to find the Russian.”

“Yeah,” he conceded, “kind of looks like it.” Then he added, “It’s been nice just driving around talking. I’ve got to go downtown and I don’t want to go back there. It’s a better day just driving around with a lady who writes plays.”

“What a nice thing to say. Ditto for me.” Then she added: “If you’re going downtown, could you drop me off around West 110th?”

They didn’t speak as he turned onto the parkway. “That area,” he said, “Morningside, was so bad back in the eighties, when I was a kid in Louisville.”

“Here too,” she said, gazing idly at the river and beyond that to random splotches of Jersey. “I never came up here once, even to go to the Cloisters. It seemed like the North Pole from where everyone wanted to be.”

She couldn’t help but think how the landscapes to which her husband devoted so many hours of his life are all about the nirvana of the other side—everything is always better over there, across the river or the sun-dappled clearing. Saturated with Rembrandt light, Chip’s rosy pastels were already like a dream. The other side gave you a place to park your desires, a place where a better version of yourself was living and loving—perhaps even painting a picture of the idealized spot you currently occupied.

“Here OK?” he asked when he turned at Riverside.

“This is great,” she said as he slowed. When he stopped, she hesitated getting out. “I know no one asked my opinion,” she said, “but I think you should go visit Jarobi. It doesn’t matter whose fault it is. You don’t want his little son to start out with that legacy of bad feelings. Fathers and sons—aways a lot to say.”

He nodded at the windshield. Then he tooted and she looked back. He was leaning over the passenger seat. “I’ll have someone at the precinct drop off your stolen property.”

Everything was so different from when she left the city in 1995—like the place where her theater group used to rehearse in the meatpacking district and the actual meatpacking district. The men who moved around meat back then still used the word hooker. This neighborhood looked the same, though there were no vans with tinted windows where dealers lured in middle-school kids with Super Mario.

Outside her old building, she answered a call from her son. “Mom, I’m a shit.”

“Yeah, well.”

“I’m like Dad. I don’t think I’m a Commager.”

She hoped he was telling the truth, but she didn’t know for sure. “Your father was an honorable man. You can respect him without wanting to be like him.”

“I’m going to Frisco.”

“That’s good,” she said. “Be brave like Stuart Little.”

He laughed. “You used to say that when I was afraid of walking past the wild turkeys.”

She debated telling him she was friends with a murderer but decided against it. After saying goodbye she got a text from Mill: Evar and I have given Anton a substantial graduation gift. He told me about the house. I wish we had known. It’s worse than we thought.

Well, she rationalized, now he had his starter money. Now his standard of living would never waver. Maybe being a Commager was like those genetic disorders that skip a generation. But why, she wondered, did it have to be a sliding scale of extremes—lots of money or hardly any at all? Why was the issue for their nuclear family being or not being a Commager when that was only half the story? What about being a Valentine?

Eve wondered what a Valentine scale would even look like. She was never going back to the Eve Valentine of 29 and start from there; that person was gone. She had so little to say about the Eve Valentine of 49, wife of the pastel restorer. And now the Eve Valentine of 50 was looking anywhere for a clue. One thing she knew though: She would always love her son to bits, throw her body on a grenade to save him. But as far as her respect . . . well, if you want it, you gotta claw it back. §