“Hey.”

Tabitha blinked awake, and the scene before her gradually came into focus. Pink-blossoming trees. The stone curve of the triumphal arch that formed the entryway to Washington Square Park. And a cop, looking at her with an expression of job-hardened concern. Beneath her head she felt the slumping waterproof fabric of her backpack.

“You okay, miss? Second time I’ve seen you out here this week.”

She sat up. Somehow she had believed that resting under a tree was passably normal, and unlike a park bench, she was not at risk to get pegged as a homeless person by the police. “Yeah, I’m fine. I just had ... exams.”

The cop did not look convinced. “You got any ID on you?”

She would have been within her rights to object, given that it was not against the law to sleep, but she knew she looked suspiciously like a minor. She rummaged in her backpack and produced her driver’s license. “Oh, twenty-two,” said the officer, not even flipping over the card to examine its authenticity. “I took you for a high-schooler.”

Nice work, Isaac, she thought.

“I go to NYU,” she said. The campus was directly behind her.

The cop launched into a lecture about safety and situational awareness and the dangers of which young women needed to be mindful, but it was brief. She nodded politely and gathered up her things as if preparing to leave. Once he moved on, she unzipped her backpack again and took out a tattered black three-subject notebook. She flipped it open to the dog-eared page.

Onto this page was taped a map of the park. The map itself was recent, taken from a tourist brochure produced by the New York City Department of Parks, but it was annotated with circles and arrows and her own scribbled marginal notes. Hangman’s Elm (alleged). First fountain location. Yellow fever victim burial ground, ~1825. Military parade ground area.

The map was half-covered in X’es where she had already searched. Before it lay many pages of maps of this city, filled in with X’es. After it, many pages of maps still blank.

As she examined the page, she heard the sweet, high strain of a violin drifting from some place on the other side of the park’s central fountain. Listening more closely, she caught a soulful male voice singing “Tiny Dancer” to the melody. She smiled to herself, her mind automatically latching on to the familiar lyrics, growing distracted from the task at hand. After all the years she and Sam had busked in parks and outside train stations, getting by on the money earned with his guitar and their two good voices, she had a soft spot for such performers. She reached into her open backpack and unwound a pair of dollar bills from the ever-growing wad of cash tucked at the bottom.

“Excuse me, can we take a look at your map?”

She looked up to see a pair of young women, not much older than herself, dressed in faded ball caps and identical, new-looking I <3 New York T-shirts. One had a camera on a strap around her neck.

“It’s pretty marked up, but sure.” She passed the notebook up to them, and they examined it with apparent confusion. “Looking for something in particular?”

“The Triangle Shirtwaist building. Where there was that big fire in the early 1900s.”

“Oh, that’s right over there.” Tabitha pointed toward the park’s northeast corner. “There’s a plaque on the side. You’ll see it once you cross that street and walk to the end of the block.”

The woman holding the notebook handed it back to her. “Thanks. We’re here with a couple of other friends, but they want to go shopping and we want to see the historic stuff. They kept the guidebook.”

Tabitha held a hand over her eyes to shield them against the light. “Have you been to Columbus Park? It’s Chinatown now, but it used to be a neighborhood called the Five Points. In the 1800s it was full of slums and gangs and crime. The book How the Other Half Lives was written about it.”

One of the young women looked at the other. “That was the place in Gangs of New York. The Leo DiCaprio movie.”

It was hard for Tabitha not to roll her eyes at the mention of the film. All the years of history in that place, all the real human suffering and groundbreaking photojournalism to document it, and all anyone seemed to remember was DiCaprio. But she said, “Yes, that’s the area. It used to be all tenements, and a really dangerous place to live. Where the park is now—in 1852, a fire tore through a row of houses on that block and killed a dozen people. A guy named Sam Sullivan died there, and his whole family—his mom and sisters. And then slumlords just rebuilt the tenements, but even smaller and shabbier than before. It’s very moving just to sit there and think about it. About how those people lived and died.”

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Both women looked uneasy. “Thanks,” said the one who had looked at the notebook. “We’ll check that out.”

The pair wandered off, and Tabitha got up and walked in the opposite direction, stopping to drop her donation into the busker's violin case. She felt a little awkward about the reaction her Five Points lecture had brought, but they were, after all, on their way to see a building with a different tragic history. For that matter, the very park on which they stood was built upon a cemetery, and beneath their feet lay the bones of thousands upon thousands of people. Most of those people had long since gone to Heaven, or perhaps Hell, according to the complex arithmetic of their lives and the orientation of their souls. Not many had remained in between, trapped in a sort of terrestrial eternity.

It was meant to be a punishment, Tabitha knew, but most days it hadn’t felt that way. For more than three hundred years, half of which she had spent with Sam at her side, this life had seemed more like the distant borderlands of Heaven, thin on luxuries and conveniences but altogether fulfilling. Until a year ago. And then, at last, the day arrived when it was finally indistinguishable from Hell.

~ * ~

As evening began to fall, Tabitha stepped into the nicely kept public bathrooms of Washington Square Park and changed from her college-kid jeans and tee into an older, more broken-in set of clothes. She didn’t like the way the short dress attracted male attention, but it looked upscale enough that she could avoid all presumptions of homelessness, and in any case she still hated wearing pants—although she had conceded that an active daytime life in the city required them. Old habits died hard, and even after all these years, wearing pants still made her feel like she was dressing in drag.

She walked a few blocks to the self-storage lockers to secure her backpack, made her way to the subway, and took the train uptown. It was strange to imagine now that six months ago she had never set foot in this city and knew it mainly through Sam’s stories—all of which told of a New York of cobblestone streets and horse-drawn wagons, of violence and filth and alleys filled with drunken women and young men with knives tucked into their sleeves. He had told her of the cholera outbreak that killed his two brothers, the misery of tannery work under a sadistic manager, and, when he was feeling generous in remembering his previous life, the fleeting joys of a fresh pretzel eaten on the pier or the exhilaration of kissing a girl. He remembered the terror of the fire, and the strange detachment of watching from a distance as the firemen pulled his charred body from the wreckage of the tenement. The new Sam would have been a simple spark then—an ember drifting above the scene, inhabited by his old soul, unaware that a new body even awaited him. Tabitha had experienced the same thing, but the watery version of it: staring up from the bottom of the pond in her Massachusetts village to see her old body flopped just beneath the water’s surface like a rag doll, held in place by the ropes wound around the dunking stool. Her drowning, such an honest human death, had been the definitive evidence that she was not, in fact, the witch her peers had accused her of being. The trial by water had cleared her name, and turned her into something much worse.

She got off the train at the 86th Street station and walked the now-familiar route to a particular apartment building near Central Park. Such buildings, which catered to the super-wealthy and the well-known, all had doormen and codes and tight security; they were built to keep out all intruders, and to guard against every possible way a motivated outsider might get in.

Every way but hers.

Name the forms of water, the Searcher had said to her, when she found her at the bottom of the pond on that chill winter day.

Ice and vapor, and—well—water, Tabitha had said.

The solid, the gas, and the liquid, said the Searcher. Yes. And there’s one more form. The enchanted one. You.

It had made no sense to Tabitha. She could tell that her soul was free of her body. She remembered a brief flash of a moment after her drowning, when the space above her burst white and a form made of light appeared, reaching out to her, and she had scrambled away from it in terror. She did not want to take its hand. She would not succumb to its pull. Instead she swam hard against it, plunging herself deeper into the dark water. And it had worked. The light shrank and snapped away, leaving her to the cool formlessness of the watery space.

You rejected the Angel, the Searcher explained, but you aren’t damned. Take comfort in that. You chose Earth over Heaven, and so Earth it will be. But your body will be formed now of the element that consumed you. I suppose you could call it magic.

The idea had petrified her. She had been raised all her life to know of what this woman spoke, and she knew it was a kind of evil. I want to change my mind, Tabitha told her. I’ll go with the angel.

The Searcher sounded weary, and perhaps a little amused. Child, if your soul cried out for Heaven, it would have chosen Heaven. There’s no need to fear what you wanted, and no need to long for what you didn’t. We all end up in the place where we belong.

Sam said it much better, many years later, as they sat in a little booth at a smoky and jovial bar in Boston with his arm around her shoulders, taking stock of each new person who walked through the door. She remembered Sam’s leather vest, his floppy half-groomed hair, the way the cigarette smoldered between his fingers as he watched the carousing crowd. Let’s be honest, he said then. I was born to be an incubus.

The apartment building loomed thirty stories high, its roof a deep blue against the blackness of the night. Up on the rooftop patio of the penthouse, bright lights showcased the topiaries—leafy balls and spirals, plants from a dream world.

She snapped into a thousand droplets and splashed down to the sidewalk, then drew together again, a small puddle rolling toward the gray Emergency Exit door on the building’s side, with its tiny crannies that stood no chance against a sudden unlikely storm.