sifted through with white gloves and whisk brooms, with fanatic care—and while the frame of The Goldfinch had been found, intact (and had been hung empty on the wall of the Mauritshuis, in the Hague, “as a reminder of the irreplaceable loss of our cultural patrimony”), no confirmed fragment of the painting itself, no splinter or antique nail fragment or chip of its distinctive lead-tin pigment had been found. But as it was painted on wood, there was a case to be made (and one blowhard celebrity historian, to whom I was grateful, had made it forcefully) that The Goldfinch had been knocked from its frame and into the rather large fire burning in the gift shop, the epicenter of the explosion. I had seen him in a PBS documentary, striding back and forth meaningfully in front of the empty frame in the Mauritshuis, fixing the camera with his powerful, media-savvy eye. “That this tiny masterwork survived the powder explosion at Delft only to meet its fate, centuries later, in another man-made explosion is one of those stranger-than-life twists out of O. Henry or Guy de Maupassant.”
As for me: the official story—printed in a number of sources, accepted as truth—was that I’d been rooms away from The Goldfinch when the bomb went off. Over the years a number of writers had tried to interview me and I’d turned them all away; but numerous people, eyewitnesses, had seen my mother in her last moments in Gallery 24, the beautiful dark-haired woman in the satin trenchcoat, and many of these eyewitnesses placed me at her side. Four adults and three children had died in Gallery 24—and in the public version of the story, the received version, I’d been just another of the bodies on the ground, knocked cold and overlooked in the hubbub.
But Welty’s ring was physical proof of my whereabouts. Luckily for me, Hobie didn’t like to talk about Welty’s death but every now and then—not often, usually late at night when he’d had a few drinks—he was moved to reminisce. “Can you imagine how I felt—? Isn’t it a miracle that—?” Someday, someone had been bound to make the connection. I’d always known it and yet in my drugged-out fog I’d drifted along ignoring the danger for years. Maybe no one was paying attention. Maybe no one would ever know.
I was sitting on the side of my bed, staring out the window onto Tenth Street—people just getting off work, going out to dinner, shrill bursts of laughter. Fine, misty rain slanted in the white circle of street light just outside my window. Everything felt shaky and harsh. I wanted a pill badly, and I was just about to get up and make myself a drink when—just outside of the light, unusual for the coming-and-going traffic of the street—I noticed a figure standing unaccompanied and motionless in the rain.
After half a minute passed and still he stood there, I switched the lamp off and moved to the window. In an answering gesture the silhouette moved well out of the streetlight; and though his features weren’t plain in the dark I got the idea of him well enough: high hunched shoulders, shortish legs and thick Irish torso. Jeans and hoodie, heavy boots. For a while he stood motionless, a workmanly silhouette out of place on the street at that hour, photo assistants and well-dressed couples, exhilarated college students heading out for dinner dates. Then he turned. He was walking away with a quick impatience; when he stepped forward into the next pool of light I saw him reaching in his pockets, dialing a cell phone, head down, distracted.
I let the curtain fall. I was pretty sure I was seeing things, in fact I saw things all the time, part of living in a modern city, this half-invisible grain of terror, disaster, jumping at car alarms, always expecting something to happen, the smell of smoke, the splash of broken glass. And yet—I wished I were a hundred percent sure it was my imagination.
Everything was dead quiet. The street light through the lace curtains cast spidery distortions on the walls. All the time, I’d known it was a mistake, keeping the painting, and still I’d kept it. No good could come of keeping it. It wasn’t even as if it had done me any good or given me any pleasure. Back in Las Vegas, I’d been able to look at it whenever I wanted, when I was sick or sleepy or sad, early morning