The Echo in the Shoes

The rooftop bar sat on top of the underground parking garage like a hat nobody had asked for, and Laurie Beaumont, twenty-seven, hated it a little and loved it a lot. The heat came up off the concrete in slow waves even after dark, and it clung to her arms and the back of her neck as a second skin she hadn't consented to.

"Hand me the other cable," Cyn called from the little stage corner, up on her knees with her hair stuck to her forehead. "And don't just stand there looking tragic, Laurie, hand me the cable."

Laurie handed her the cable. "I'm not looking tragic. I'm looking like a woman having a normal summer."

"You're looking as a woman whose ex lives rent free in her head. Sit down. Drink something. The mic test is in ten minutes and I need you to be normal by then."

"I'm always normal."

"You texted me 'what if I moved to Marseille' with no punctuation on Tuesday. That's not normal, that's a cry for help with a plane ticket attached."

So that was true, and Laurie let it be true. Two months since Jason. Five years together, and the last thing he said to her, standing in the doorway of the apartment with a duffel bag over his shoulder, was that she'd never once done anything spontaneous in her life, and that a person could go a whole decade that way and call it stability. She had replayed it so many times the words had worn a groove, and the groove had filled up with spite, and the spite had gotten her on a plane.

The point of the whole thing, she reminded herself, was to have one reckless summer and then tell him about it in the most casual text ever written.

By nine the rooftop had filled up with people sweating politely over paper cups of warm rosé. Cyn's open mic was exactly as chaotic as Cyn's everything, which meant a man recited poetry about seagulls and a woman did card tricks and nobody booed, because it was August in Marseille and everyone was too hot to boo.

Manuel showed up at nine forty.

She recognized him before he recognized her, which gave her time to be annoyed in advance. Manuel Kepler, thirty-three, paintings conservator, built entirely out of calm. He'd been at Cyn's birthday three years ago, back when she was twenty-four and he was thirty, and she remembered exactly two things about him: he talked about varnish for twenty minutes, and he never once seemed surprised by anything, including the cake.

"Sorry," he said, arriving at their table with the timing of a man who had planned to arrive late. "The tram. Then I walked the wrong way twice."

"That's okay," Cyn said, hugging him. "Laurie, you remember Manuel."

"I remember the varnish speech," Laurie said.

He sat down across from her and did the dry smile thing. "It was a good speech. People still bring it up." Then, to Cyn, "How long is this going?"

"Two more performers, then a break. Behave. I have to go tell the seagull guy he's cut off." And she was gone, because Cyn believed in leaving people alone together like a botanist leaving two plants to cross-pollinate.

"You're staring at me," Manuel said, folding his hands on the table. "Should I be worried?"

"I'm deciding if you're the same person you were three years ago."

"And the verdict?"

"The verdict is you dress worse."

"Conservation gets into everything. Eventually you stop buying clothes that can snag." He tilted his head at her. "You're angrier than you were at the party."

"I'm not angry, I'm motivated." She drained her cup. "Long story. Bad breakup, spite summer, don't ask."

"I wasn't going to ask."

"See, that's the problem with you. You never ask anything. You just sit there being patient like a doctor's waiting room, and it makes me want to say things I didn't plan to say."

For a moment he looked like he might actually laugh. "Is it working?"

"Don't be smug. You don't have the face for smug."

During the lull after the card trick woman, Manuel leaned over and said, quietly, "Do you want to see something genuinely strange? Downstairs. Five minutes."

"Downstairs where. It's a parking garage."

"Underground. It's cool down there, and there's something I restored that I need a second opinion on. A nonprofessional opinion. Everyone at the archive says the same things."

"You're asking me to leave an open mic to look at a painting."

"Not a painting." He stood up, and the dry smile came back and stayed a little too long. "Come on. You wanted a reckless summer."

Laurie narrowed her eyes at Cyn across the roof, who was very obviously not watching them while watching them. "Fine. Five minutes. If you murder me down there, Cyn will identify the body by my terrible outfit."

The fire escape stairs clanged and echoed, and the temperature dropped with every flight until the rooftop felt like a rumor. The garage was mostly empty at night, a cathedral of gray pillars and yellow lines, their footsteps coming back at them from three directions. Manuel led her along the wall of level two to a dented metal locker with a padlock, and he had the key on his ring like he'd been given it on purpose.

"So," she said, breath fogging faintly in the cold air. "The strange thing."

He opened the locker. Inside, on a shelf, under a soft cloth, sat a pair of dancing shoes.

Not a painting, like he'd said. Shoes from the nineteen twenties, silk and satin gone soft with age, dyed a blue so deep and strange it wasn't any blue she had a name for. Cyanide, she thought, and didn't know where the word had come from. They looked new. They looked impossible, sitting in a maintenance locker in a parking garage.

"You restored shoes," she said slowly. "You're a paintings guy."

"A friend of the archive, a historian, brought them in. They were wrecked. Silk rotted at the vamp, one heel crushed. I spent six weeks on them." He turned one shoe so the light caught it. "And here is my problem. Nobody at the archive can tell me how. There's no dye record for this color. The silk weave matches nothing in the reference books. It's like they were made by somebody who had never made shoes before and was very good at it anyway."

Laurie reached out before she thought about it and touched the toe of the left one.

The cold went up her arm like water up a straw.

Not pain. Longing. A want so big and so hungry it had no edges, a wanting that knew exactly what it wanted and had been waiting years to get it back, and for one clear second it wasn't her want at all, it was somebody's, pressed into the silk like a fingerprint in wax. Her hand came off the shoe fast.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. What the hell was that."

Manuel didn't ask what she meant. That was the worst part. He just nodded slowly, the way he probably nodded at cracked varnish.

"So you felt it too," he said. "When I'm alone down here, they hum. Not sound, exactly. More like a fridge, but in your teeth. And last Thursday I put my hand on one and I wanted something so badly I couldn't name it, and I don't want things, Laurie. I am famous for not wanting things."

"Who owned these?"

"A dancer. That's all the historian knows. She performed here in the twenties, and then she vanished. Left the shoes, left her room, left everything. The historian told me, very seriously, that the woman who owned them never let anyone dance in them twice. Not if she wanted to keep them." He looked at the shoes the way he'd looked at her earlier, like something measured and patient that wasn't fooled. "And she's right. They don't want to leave the locker. I put them in a case and the case comes back here. I don't know how else to say it."

Laurie looked at the left shoe again, and the wanting reached out toward her hand like a cat toward a warm window, patient, ancient, sure of itself.

"Five minutes, you said," she managed. "It's been five minutes."

"It has," Manuel agreed, and he didn't close the locker.

They went back up into the heat like divers surfacing, and the rooftop had changed while they were gone. The mic test was over, a singer was halfway through something slow, and Cyn had arranged her face into elaborate innocence.

"There you are," Cyn said, handing Laurie a sweating glass of something pink. "You missed my sound check."

"It was five minutes."

"It was longer than five minutes. I counted." Cyn looked between the two of them the way a jeweler looks at a stone, then smiled at Manuel. "You remember Laurie. From my birthday. Three years ago."

"I remember the varnish lecture," Laurie said.

"I remember you escaped at minute twelve," Manuel said. "I respect the tactic."

"And now you're back for the rest of the story," Cyn said, and drifted away before either of them could answer, which Laurie suspected was the whole point of her.

The night had gotten thicker. August in Marseille didn't cool off, it just went soft, the air hanging on the skin like a second shirt. Manuel ordered two more drinks and they took the low wall at the edge of the roof, where the string lights didn't quite reach and the singer's voice came off the little stage in warm pieces.

"So," Manuel said. "Second opinion."

"Whatever's in those shoes is not silk and dye. You know that, right? You're a scientist."

"Conservator. Science is half of it. The other half is knowing when a thing is lying to you." He turned his glass in his hand. "Those shoes are not lying. They're just not telling the whole truth."

"That's a very poetic thing for a man who spent twenty minutes on varnish."

"It was a good lecture."

"It was a hostage situation," Laurie said, and he laughed, actually laughed, and she felt it land somewhere under her ribs and hated how good it felt to make a stranger laugh. Not a stranger. A man