Fog rolling off the river obscured what Max might have seen through the windows of the cab. He could only just make out the Brooklyn Bridge — a gray, solid mass suspended above them. The driver rolled to a stop at the end of an empty street. Wordlessly, Max got out and started walking. He wondered where his mother had died, exactly, and what day, and in what weather. Had it been 3:20 on the day before Christmas Eve, in a foggy street beneath the Brooklyn Bridge?
“You can have five of my minutes,” came the woman’s New York-accented voice from the fog. “It’s almost Christmas, and I’m very busy.”
Max walked deeper into the white emptiness, looking for the owner of that voice. “You’re busy? Why, are you Santa Claus, too?”
“Yes. Ho, ho, ho. Don’t come any closer or this interview is over!”
Max stopped where he was, but he could see her outline now. It wasn’t a tall woman’s shape. She wasn’t dressed in robes or a crown, didn’t carry a book or a torch. She was short, in a long pea-coat, her hands in her pockets. “Why did you bring me here?” he asked.
“You insisted on meeting.”
“I mean to New York. I know you paid for our class trip. Why did you call my hotel room and talk to me?”
The fog concealed her face. “Have you heard that old story about midnight on Christmas Eve? When all the animals can talk as the bell strikes twelve? Let’s just say this is something like that — only I’m getting it out of the way early, since at midnight tomorrow I’ll be even more busy than I am now.”
“You want to make up for taking my mother away from me as some kind of Christmas miracle?”
A pause, then: “Most kids would have asked to meet the mayor or find a million dollars on the street, or to become a movie star or something simple like that. But you had to ask for a resurrection. You get credit for audacity, but I’m afraid what you want is outside my reach. Ask for something else and let’s get on with it.”
Max strained to see her better through the fog. “Okay,” he said. “Tell me your real name.”
“New York City,” she answered promptly.
“Come on.”
“Really. That’s my name, my real one.”
“No living person is actually named New York City.”
“I am.”
“Prove it.”
The woman’s figure dug into the pocket of her shadowy pea-coat and retrieved something. She held it out to Max in a gloved hand. He walked forward, and saw her face clearly. She had a square, Dutch jaw, dark hair, and wore large, mirrored sunglasses. He took what she held out: a New York State driver’s license. It plainly read “City, New Y.” Max barely glanced at the name. He stared instead at the photograph of a pretty, square-jawed woman, with a wide mouth and gray eyes — concrete-gray. Eyes that Max had seen every day of his life, looking back at him out of mirrors and polished surfaces.
Too late, New York City realized her mistake. She lunged for the card, which he released willingly in the fog that circled around them.
“I knew it,” Max said to his mother.
—
(To be continued… maybe.)