“That would be possible. But I live in Flatbush.”

“No way!” I said cheerily. “I’m practically your neighbor.”

“Small world,” he said with a (genuine? perturbed?) chuckle. “In that case, there’s a place called the Little Sweet on Church. I can meet you out front if that would be convenient.”

I knew the place; it was one of several popular Caribbean restaurants clustered near the Church Avenue subway stop on Nostrand. I had passed them many times with interest, but I had never gone inside, figuring the people there probably didn’t want people like me encroaching. (Or was this a justification for staying away from places that made me nervous?)

I told him I could be there in fifteen minutes. “I seriously can’t thank you enough,” I said before hanging up. “I’m wearing a blue blouse. I’m Emily.”

AS I made my way to the Little Sweet, I told myself it wasn’t him. Though I could not deny that the voice on the phone had a familiar softness, it simply could not belong to the same Clive Richardson who’d spilled my french fries in the sand all those years ago (chips, he’d called them, and how I’d loved that), the one everybody had called Gogo, the man with whom, along with Edwin Hastie, my sister was last seen alive. I would meet him on the sidewalk and see immediately that his face was all wrong, or that he was too short, or too light-or dark-skinned. I would give him twenty bucks, thank him, and be on my way, and though I might be shaken for a couple of days, my life would quickly snap back to its usual dimensions. Whether I hoped for or dreaded this outcome, I’m no longer sure.

The landscape changed as I walked north and east. Though the building I lived in was run-down and situated on an unlovely block of vacant lots and midrise apartment buildings, it was also not far from the Edison-bulb eateries along Cortelyou Road, from cafés whose menus featured an entire section of “alternative milk” options (soy, almond, cashew) and boutiques where one could purchase a vintage Berber rug or an olive-wood cheese platter for exorbitant sums. I was just a few minutes’ walk from an especially picturesque stretch of Argyle Road, where in the summertime the Victorian mansions with their wide front porches and twilight-hued hydrangeas seemed to have been lifted from some seaside idyll and set down gently on this street in central Brooklyn. Though I prided myself on living beyond such places, it was also true that I found comfort in my proximity to them. As I neared The Little Sweet, I left all of this behind. The signs on the commercial thoroughfares became more urgent: CHECKS CASHED! PLAY NOW! WIRE CASH LOW FEE!

By the time I reached my destination, the sky was dingy pink, darkness touched by neon storefronts. The Little Sweet was a takeout spot with half a dozen tables, a long steam table behind the counter, and an illuminated menu with stock photos of combination platters hanging above it. It was located between a MoneyGram and a Chinese takeout called Hunan Star, across the street from a West Indian grocery and a discount shop with a hodgepodge of merchandise on the sidewalk: coolers and pushcarts and mop heads, reflective vests and nursing scrubs. Farther down the block, a Creole and English bookstore transmitted ESL recordings into the night: I run to the house. She bakes a cake. He goes to sleep.

I stood in front of the narrow storefront and tried to appear occupied. I put a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket to give to the man as a reward. I cleaned out my handbag, disposing of fistfuls of receipts and a cough drop that had been floating loose in my bag, stuck with grit and lint. It had not been necessary to specify what I was wearing. I was the only white person here, with the exception of a man about my age, bearded and man-bunned, who sat at a table in the center of the Little Sweet and alternated between eating and drawing in a sketch pad.

When I saw Clive Richardson coming up the sidewalk I knew at once it was him. It was his walk. The hunched shoulders, the bowed head. He moved like he thought he took up too much space and was sorry. I clenched my jaw to quell the chattering of my teeth and willed myself to be still.

In a flash I saw my parents. They would be sitting down now to one of their abstemious locavore dinners in their kitchen in Pasadena. I imagined them seeing me seeing Clive Richardson on this sidewalk in Brooklyn. I felt them reaching out, pulling me back into the safe, blind world our family had inhabited all these years, our aftermath of SoCal sunshine and ceramics and racket sports. Forget my phone. Turn around. Run straight home and don’t look back. That’s what they would want me to do.

“Emily?”

I nodded. I couldn’t raise my eyes to look at him.

“I hope you didn’t wait long.”

“Not long at all.”

He pulled my phone from his pocket.

“Thank you so, so much. You just have no idea how much I appreciate this.” I held out the twenty-dollar bill to him.

“I can’t accept this.” He spoke softly, as if worried his refusal would offend me.

“Please take it,” I implored.

“I would prefer not to.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, miss.”

Miss.

I looked up and for the first time our eyes met. Clive Richardson must have been at least forty now, and he looked it—his hair had already started to go white and his forehead was deeply lined. My body trembled. My jaw was clenched so tightly it would ache later. At the same time, my mind spasmed as it tried uselessly to understand that this ordinary man standing before me in a windbreaker and black loafers was him.

I tucked the money back in my pocket. “Well.”

We stared at one another awkwardly. The moment was lifting away from me. Could it be that I would do nothing? That I would simply let him leave? But what else could I do? Even as I wondered this I was saying, “Thanks again. I really appreciate it,” and Clive Richardson was telling me it was nothing, and I was wishing him a good night. The bells on the door of the Little Sweet jingled as he opened it and stepped inside. I turned and hurried down the sidewalk. My eyes filled with hot, stinging tears. It had happened too fast. I hadn’t been ready, had missed my chance. My chance for what, exactly, I wasn’t sure, but I was filled with the sense that I’d failed to capitalize on this extraordinary convergence and, more than this, with a sense that this failure was at the center of who I was—a person who let things slip through her hands.

THAT NIGHT I dreamed I walked out of my apartment to find that a stone staircase had opened up in the middle of the sidewalk, leading down. Only the first few steps were visible. After that, the staircase disappeared into the darkness below the city. The stairs went on and on, and I walked for what felt like an eternity in the pitch-black, step, step, step, down and down and down, until I found myself standing on a beach. White sand, curving palms, mint waters. It had been here all along—this place, this past, waiting only for me to return. (In the dream I knew without having to know that I was Clairey again, a child.) Some distance from me, standing at the water’s edge, her ankles lapped by the gentle waves, was Alison. She was turned away from me, staring out. When I reached her, she looked down at me and smiled, and I smiled back. She raised a finger to her lips. Shh. Don’t tell. She tossed back her head and laughed.

I awoke drenched in sweat and full of self-recrimination—I hardly ever dreamed of Alison and I’d ruined it, expulsed myself from the dream prematurely. For the first time in months, I took out the photographs from the shoe box under my bed. I needed to tell her what had happened to me and how helpless I’d felt as I thanked Clive Richardson and walked away. All this time, he had been right here. How was it possible that I hadn’t known it, sensed it?

There she was, nut-brown from the sun and grinning at dinner with a giant red lobster on her plate. Singing at the beach barbecue. Smiling beside me beneath that faded blue umbrella. My, you a patient child. The photos felt volatile, as if they might burst into flame in my hands. There she was on a paddleboard, clinking glasses with my mother, listening to her Walkman in the shade. There she was leaning against a palm tree in her bikini, hands on hips, salt in her hair, looking off down the beach. My father had taken this picture. I remembered watching Alison pose for him. Now, looking at the photograph for the thousandth time, I saw something I’d never noticed before. Down the beach, so far in the background their bodies were nothing but tiny, blurred silhouettes, were Edwin Hastie and Clive Richardson.