The Goldfinch

“That’s her, isn’t it?” I said—at the same instant I realized it couldn’t possibly be her. This photo, with its faded colors and outmoded clothes, had been taken long before I was born.

Hobie turned, came back to look. “No,” he said quietly, hands behind his back. “That’s Juliet. Pippa’s mother.”

“Where is she?”

“Juliet—? Dead. Cancer. Six years last May.” And then, seeming to realize he’d spoken too curtly: “Welty was Juliet’s big brother. Half brother, rather. Same father—different wives—thirty years apart. But he brought her up like his own child.”

I stepped in for a closer look. She was leaning against him, cheek inclined sweetly against the sleeve of his jacket.

Hobie cleared his throat. “She was born when their father was in his sixties,” he said quietly. “Far too old to interest himself in a small child, particularly since he’d had no weakness for children to start with.”

A door in the opposite side of the hallway stood ajar; he pushed it open and stood looking into darkness. On tiptoe, I craned behind, but almost immediately he backed away and clicked the door shut.

“Is that her?” Though it had been too dark to see very much, I had caught the unfriendly glow of animal eyes, an u

“Not now.” His voice was so low I could barely hear him.

“What’s that in there with her?” I whispered—lingering by the doorway, reluctant to move along. “A cat?”

“Dog. The nurse doesn’t approve, but she wants him in the bed with her and honestly, I can’t keep him out—he scratches at the door and whines—Here, this way.”

Moving slowly, creakily, with an old person’s forward-leaning quality, he pushed open a door into a crowded kitchen with a ceiling skylight and a curvaceous old stove: tomato red, with svelte lines like a 1950s spaceship. Books stacked on the floor—cookbooks, dictionaries, old novels, encyclopedias; shelves closely packed with antique china in half a dozen patterns. Near the window, by the fire escape, a faded wooden saint held up a palm in benediction; on the sideboard alongside a silver tea set, painted animals straggled two by two into a Noah’s Ark. But the sink was piled with dishes, and on the countertops and windowsills stood medicine bottles, dirty cups, alarming drifts of unopened mail, and plants from the florist’s dry and brown in their pots.

He sat me down at the table, pushing away Con Ed bills and back issues of Antiques magazine. “Tea,” he said, as if remembering an item on a grocery list.

As he busied himself at the stove, I stared at the coffee rings on the tablecloth. Restlessly, I pushed back in my chair and looked around.

“Er—” I said.

“Yes?”

“Can I see her later?”

“Maybe,” he said, with his back to me. Whisk beat against blue china bowl: tap tap tap. “If she’s awake. She’s in a good deal of pain and the medicine makes her sleepy.”

“What happened to her?”

“Well—” His tone was both brisk and subdued and I recognized it at once since it was much the tone I employed when people asked about my mother. “She’s had a bad crack on the head, a skull fracture, to tell you the truth she was in a coma for a while and her left leg was broken in so many pieces she came near to losing it. ‘Marbles in a sock,’ ” he said, with a mirthless laugh. “That’s what the doctor said when he looked at the x-ray. Twelve breaks. Five surgeries. Last week,” he said, half-turning, “she had the pins out, and she begged so to come home they said she could. As long as we had a nurse part time.”

“Is she walking yet?”

“Goodness, no,” he said, bringing his cigarette up for a drag; he was somehow managing to cook with one hand and smoke with the other, like some tugboat captain or lumber camp cook in an old movie. “She can hardly sit up more than half an hour.”

“But she’ll be fine.”

“Well, that’s what we hope,” he said, in what did not seem an overly hopeful tone. You know,” he said, glancing back at me, “if you were in there too, it’s remarkable that you’re okay.”

“Well.” I never knew how to respond when people commented, as they often did, on my being “okay.”

Hobie coughed, and put out the cigarette. “Well.” I could see, from his expression, that he knew he’d disturbed me, and was sorry. “I suppose they spoke to you too? The investigators?”

I looked at the tablecloth. “Yes.” The less said about this, I felt, the better.

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I found them very decent—very informed. This one Irishman—he’d seen a lot of these things, he was telling me about suitcase bombs in England and in the Paris airport, some sidewalk café thing in Tangier, you know, dozens dead and the person right next to the bomb isn’t hurt at all. He said they see some pretty strange effects, you know, in older buildings especially. Enclosed spaces, uneven surfaces, reflective materials—very unpredictable. Just like acoustics, he said. The blast waves are like sound waves—they bounce and deflect. Sometimes you have shop windows broken miles off. Or—” he pushed the hair out of his eyes with his wrist—“sometimes, closer to hand, there’s what he called a shielding effect. Things very close to the detonation remain intact—the unbroken teacup in the blown-out IRA cottage or what have you. It’s the flying glass and debris that kills most people, you know, often at pretty far range. A pebble or a piece of glass at that speed is as good as a bullet.”

I traced my thumb along the flower pattern of the tablecloth. “I—”

“Sorry. Maybe not the right thing to talk about.”

“No no,” I said hurriedly; it was actually a huge relief to hear someone speak directly, and in an informed way, about what most people tied themselves in knots to avoid. “That’s not it. It’s just—”

“Yes?”

“I was wondering. How’d she get out?”

“Well, it was a stroke of luck. She was trapped under a lot of rubbish—the firemen wouldn’t have found her if one of the dogs hadn’t alerted. They worked partway in, jacked up the beam—I mean, the amazing thing too, she was awake, talked to them the whole time, though she doesn’t remember a bit of it. The miracle of it was they got her out before the call came to evacuate—how long were you knocked out, did you say?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well, you were lucky. If they’d had to go off and leave her there, still pi

The plate of food, when he set it before me, was nothing to look at—puffy yellow stuff on toast. But it smelled good. Cautiously, I tasted it. It was melted cheese, with chopped-up tomato and caye

“Sorry, what is this?” I said, taking another careful bite.

He looked a bit embarrassed. “Well, it doesn’t really have a name.”

“It’s good,” I said, slightly astonished how hungry I really was. My mother had made a cheese-on-toast very similar which we ate sometimes on Sunday nights in winter.

“You like cheese? I should have thought to ask.”

I nodded, mouth too full to answer. Even though Mrs. Barbour was always pressing ice cream and sweets on me, somehow it felt as if I’d hardly eaten a normal meal since my mother died—at least, not the kind of meals that had been normal for us, stir fry or scrambled eggs or macaroni and cheese from the box, while I sat on the kitchen step-ladder and told her about my day.

As I ate, he sat across the table with his chin in his big white hands. “What are you good at?” he asked rather suddenly. “Sports?”

“Sorry?”

“What are you interested in? Games and all that?”

“Well—video games. Like Age of Conquest? Yakuza Freakout?”

He seemed nonplussed. “What about school, then? Favorite subjects?”

“History, I guess. English too,” I said when he didn’t answer. “But English is going to be really boring for the next six weeks—we stopped doing literature and went back to the grammar book and now we’re diagramming sentences.”