Read Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories for Free Online Page A

drove, I waited for the ocean; sometimes we would stop and feed the seagulls from tissue-thin bread bags, the bags tumbling in the breeze, floating and sparkling.
    Eli eventually moved away. After a few years, I learned from a friend that he had married a painter, a Swiss woman, and was living in Cambridge. I found a picture of him online, taken at a gallery opening, and I almost didn’t recognize him, he looked so happy, so much at peace.

WHITE HEART BAR
    Years ago, I came across an article with the headline “Local History Professor Caught Stealing Maps.” Under the headline, I was surprised to find the name of a man who had once been a friend of mine. Years ago, not long after the girl had gone missing, I had watched him leave the library. I was under the shade of a tree, and he didn’t see me. There was an intensity about him—as if everything was wrapped into one emotion, not sadness, or despair; the closest I could come was confusion, but it wasn’t really that.
    After a time his face relaxed, and he continued down the stairs. I felt sympathy for him and thought I understood that moment on the stairs, what it was for him, but I’d been wrong.
    In those days, during the time of the lost girl, I was living with my husband in a grand but decrepit loft apartment in an area of Portland that was known as resurgent, a description that carried more than a little wistfulness. Near us, an upscale restaurant was tucked into an old brick warehouse. We would sometimes sit at the bar, eating complimentary cheese straws and ordering the cheapest bottles of wine before sweeping back up the street in our mismatched secondhand clothes, my crimson coat and rubber boots, Richard’s gray cashmere coat that must have once belonged to a wealthy man but now very much belonged to him—the military lapels, the satin lining, the soft matted pills under the arms.
    We lived on the third floor of a building that looked vacant from the street. Even when climbing the central stairs—a rattling, metal affair that echoed with every step—we felt an air of abandonment. Our apartment, too, was cavernous. In the middle of the space, we had created a sitting area out of Chinese screens. It was silly, really, looking like something the Red Cross might have set up as a triage area if Chinese screens had been considered appropriate. Inside sat two chairs, a newspaper rack, and a coffee table piled with books and newspapers.
    It was here that I first read about a twenty-four-year-old girl who had gone missing near the harbor. With the newspaper on my lap, I told Richard. He asked what day she had gone missing. When I told him, he said that she was a student of his at the night class he taught at the arts school. He had driven her that night after class, to a bar by the waterfront; he’d seen her walking along the road and offered her a ride. The police had been there after class on Thursday. What could I tell them? he asked me. What do I know about this girl?
    Over the following weeks, he told me the story several times. He also told me that on two occasions they had gone to a bar together, and she had told him stories about her life. He told me a little about it. I also read newspaper articles, a blog that her friends started, the police transcript. I talked to people at the local paper where I worked—enough so that I began to piece together what had happened.
    The night she disappeared had been warm for February, and the warmth had brought the fog in. It would have been hard to see her at the side of the road on the outskirts of the city, where there were a few boarded-up buildings, some empty warehouses. She would have been walking along a strip of sidewalk, the streetlights illuminating the fog.
    There would have been a darting quality to her, with her high shoulders and lanky arms. She walked without gloves, without a hat, her hands stuffed into her coat pockets, her breath a cloud in front of her. The fog, the buildings, the streetlights.