“Can I Sit With You?” The Mafia Boss Asked The Homeless Woman — Unaware She Was His Past Eye Donor

Chapter 6

Beyond the window, Providence rain fell across the rooftops of the West End and ran down toward the harbor. Julian Voss stood there with the phone in his hand, and for the first time in ten years, he felt that old and familiar sensation — the feeling of a man who had just realized there was a night in his own life when he hadn’t remained long enough to learn what had truly happened. He told Milo to keep digging. He didn’t tell Dean.

On that night three years ago, Nora Ashford was twenty-six years old and had perhaps one-tenth of the world left to her. She slept in an abandoned woodworking shop about a quarter mile from Kestrel Road, on a foam mattress she’d dragged out of a garbage dump. What remained of her sight then was like looking through a sheet of frozen glass. She could tell light from darkness, could sense where a shape was moving, and nothing more. She had learned to live through other things. She knew there were seventeen steps from the mattress to the door of that workshop, and she never placed her water bottle anywhere else.

The first explosion came shortly before one in the morning, and it didn’t sound like an explosion. It sounded as though someone had slammed an enormous door somewhere very far away, and the floor beneath her back trembled once, then went still. She sat up. Then the smell arrived — not burning wood, but something else, oil and plastic and something harshly sweet that scraped at her throat. She knew at once it wasn’t an accident, because accidents didn’t smell that deliberate.

She followed the wall to the door and stood there, and the wind carried toward her the sounds she would carry for the rest of her life. Dogs, many of them, but they weren’t barking. She had lived close enough to Kestrel Road long enough to know what sounds came from that place at night, and this was different. Higher, thinner, and it didn’t stop to draw breath.

Nora recognized it, because she had made it herself three years earlier in a hospital corridor in Boston, when they told her the sight in her remaining eye was fading and there was nothing anyone could do, and she had sat down on the floor and made exactly that sound. It wasn’t the sound of pain. It was the sound of something that had just understood it was about to be left behind, and that no one was coming back for it.

She went. She didn’t decide to go. She simply realized she was already moving barefoot across frozen ground, a quarter mile through the smoke. She crawled through a cut in the fence because she heard the wind passing through a wide opening, and the wind didn’t lie. Inside, it was hot and blind. The one-tenth of sight she still possessed was completely useless there — all she could see was a vague orange glow rising and falling. So she closed her eyes, and everything became easier at once. She followed the sound.

Some of the kennels had already fallen silent, and she passed them quickly, refusing to let herself stop there. Then she reached the place where the sound was still alive, and her hands found the bars, and behind them was a mass of flesh so large her hands couldn’t find its edges. The latch was so hot she had to pull it with the hem of her shirt. She opened it.

The animal didn’t run. That was the thing she wouldn’t understand for many years afterward. It didn’t run. It stood there, and when she reached inside to find its neck, it bit her, closing its jaws around her own forearm, hard. Nora didn’t scream. She only heard the rhythm of her own breathing change. She didn’t pull her arm away. She left it inside the animal’s jaws and said, her voice rough from the smoke, that she was losing everything too. And if it came with her, then they could lose it together.

She didn’t know why she said those words. They weren’t a command, weren’t meant to soothe. They were simply true. And perhaps that was why its jaws loosened. She found the collar, braided leather as stiff as rope, and pulled, and it followed her — a hundred and thirty pounds bearing down against her as the two of them dragged themselves out through the same opening in the fence. Outside, the air was below freezing, and she lay on her back on the ground with the dog sprawled across her legs, and they breathed together.

About a hundred and thirty feet away, higher on the slope, two men stood beside a car. They had been there for an hour. They saw her — a thin, barefoot woman with blood running from her arm, dragging a dog out of the fire — and one of the men drew on his cigarette and said to leave it alone, that the order had been to burn the kennels and not touch anyone. The other man nodded. They watched her rise and walk away into the smoke, and they never spoke of it again. Not because they were hiding anything, but because that night it hadn’t mattered to anyone.

No one told Julian Voss that a blind woman had crawled into his fire and carried out the only living thing left inside. Three years later, she placed her hand on its head beneath a table on Ashcroft Street, and it stopped growling, and she still carried the crescent-shaped scar on her left forearm, exactly where its teeth had sunk into her on the night she refused to let go.