Lost Us

Lost Us

No one could say if it was noon. The sun came down hard enough to make the water shine white. The gulls screamed above the fishing boats. A girl dropped a cone on the bricks and began to cry. People stood still because a man had stabbed a woman. He had done it right there in the open. No warning. Just walked up with his shoulders bent forward like he was stepping into a gust, then he was in front of her, and the knife came up, then down.

The woman gasped once, like she’d been caught in the rain, then dropped to her knees. The sound of it, her knees on the stone walkway, was too small, too ordinary. Blood fell fast from her chest and spread, as if the ground itself had begun leaking. The gulls came lower. The wind carried the smell inland, a mix of salt and copper, choking everyone who stood close.

Timothy was one of them. He saw the girl with the ice cream cone. Vanilla. The scoop had cracked, fallen sideways, slid down her arm, but she didn’t wipe it. She was watching the woman. Her eyes looked full of water, like bowls set outside in the rain. Timothy thought: This is not something for her to see. It wasn’t something for anyone.

Someone shouted for help. Phones came out. Sirens started in the distance, then closer. But the woman lay back on the stones, and the blood came quick enough that people stepped away, lifting their shoes. The man with the knife dropped it where he stood. He didn’t run. He didn’t look at anyone. He walked down the pier until he was gone from sight.

The ambulance came. The police came. It was all noise then, tires, radios, the bright squawk of gulls above it. Someone threw a white cloth over the woman. But her hand was still out, palm up, fingers curling toward nothing.

Timothy didn’t move until the paramedics lifted her, cloth and all, onto the gurney. The blood stayed. He looked at his shirt and saw sweat running down the front of it. His mouth was dry. His throat burned from the smell of copper.

When the crowd thinned, he walked to the seawall. He leaned there and breathed until the sweat dried on him. He put his hands in his pockets and found his wallet. Opened it. Inside, behind a Blockbuster card he hadn’t been able to throw away, was a photograph. His father, blue eyes, thick and curly black hair, smile so kind it hurt to look at. The photo had bubbled and wrinkled from years of being carried.

Timothy touched it to his lips. He prayed, quietly. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that.

That night, the air came in damp from the harbor. The windows sweated. Timothy sat at the table with a glass of water, not cold enough, not warm either, and he couldn’t swallow more than a sip at a time. He kept turning the glass in his hand.

His wife came in from the bedroom. She had pulled her hair back, like she did when she was finished with the day. She sat across from him.

“Tim,” she said.

He waited.

“What did he look like?”

Her voice was flat, not frightened, not curious. Just asking, like she wanted a fact, something to hold onto.

Timothy tried to remember the moment. He thought of the man walking down the pier afterward, his shoulders pitched forward. He thought of the knife hanging at his side, then clattering on the stones.

“Tall,” Timothy said. “Red shirt. Dark hair. Scar under his eye.”

She looked at him. “Which eye?”

“The left.” He thought. “Or maybe the right. But it was there.”

She nodded once. She kept her hands folded in her lap. She didn’t look at him again.

In the silence, Timothy reached for his wallet. He opened it under the table, where she couldn’t see. The Blockbuster card was still there, edges curled like an old cracker. Behind it, the photograph. His father. He studied the blue of the eyes, so clear even in the bubbled film. The black hair slicked to the side. The smile. Comfort.

He remembered his father holding him once at the fair. Cotton candy sticking to his fingers. A night ride on the Ferris wheel, where the lights below looked like spilled paint. That was the smile in the photo.

Timothy pressed the picture between his palms. He prayed again, the words small in his throat. He prayed for the woman. For the girl with the ice cream. For himself. He prayed that he had remembered the scar correctly.

His wife got up, poured herself a glass of water, drank it, then poured another. The faucet dripped after she turned it off. She didn’t speak again.

***

The arrest made the evening news. A man in handcuffs, head ducked as they put him into the back of a cruiser. He wore a gray T-shirt, jeans stiff with dirt. His face was square, hard. No scar.

Timothy sat in his chair with the sound low. His wife was in the kitchen. He called her in.

“That’s him?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Not the man I saw.”

“You said red shirt.”

“Red shirt, yes. Scar under the eye.”

“Tim, maybe you mixed it up. You were right there. You were shaken.”

He rubbed his temples. “I saw him.”

She didn’t answer. The news anchor went on, voice smooth and easy. The words didn’t match the pictures. Phrases like open-and-shut, eyewitnesses, and swift response. Timothy felt a knot forming in his stomach.

Later that night, he walked the neighborhood. A streetlamp flickered by the corner store. A man smoked outside, leaning against the wall.

“You hear about the stabbing?” the man asked. His voice carried. “They got him quick.”

Another man, younger, stepped out of the store with a six-pack. “Sure did. Justice done.”

Timothy slowed as he passed. He wanted to say, It wasn’t him. But his mouth wouldn’t work. He walked on.

At the harbor, the tide was low. The bloodstain had already washed out; only the stones were left dark and slick. He stood there, the gulls screaming overhead, their wings beating the night air.

He thought of the little girl again. Vanilla ice cream dripping down her arm, her eyes wide. He remembered her standing still, the cone tilted in her hand. He remembered her blinking slowly, as if she hadn’t yet decided whether to cry.

The man they arrested didn’t have a scar.

Timothy went home and lay beside his wife. He listened to her breathing, steady in the dark. He didn’t sleep.

***

The first clip aired two days later.

Timothy was at the kitchen table, toast in front of him, untouched. The TV flickered in the corner. His wife called from the hallway: “It’s on.”

He turned. Grainy video. A man in a green jacket stepped into the frame, knife flashing once in the sun. The crowd scattered. The woman fell to the ground.

“That’s not him,” Timothy said.

His wife stood behind him. “That’s not the man they arrested.”

“No.”

“And not the man you described.”

Timothy felt heat rise up his neck. “No.”

Their coffee went bitterly cold.

***

Another day passed. A second clip came out. Better quality. A different angle. This time, the man was clear: the one in custody. Same square jaw, same hard face. He moved quickly, the knife sure in his hand.

Timothy sat back. His wife said nothing. She turned the sound down.

“They said the first video was a mistake,” she told him.

“Then what did I see?” Timothy asked.

She put her hand on his shoulder. “Maybe it doesn’t matter.”

***

That evening, he scrolled through his phone. A new video surfaced, this one stranger. The woman was alive, speaking to the camera. Her voice thin, words trembling: “Please, if anyone can hear me, find the man who did this. Please.”

Timothy felt his hands shake. The glass of water on the table rattled.

His wife stood in the doorway. “Turn it off.”

He didn’t. He watched it again. The woman’s eyes seemed fixed on him, past him, through him.

***

Two nights later, another clip. His wife was already asleep. Timothy watched alone.

This time it was him: his own body, his own shirt, his own face. Knife rising, falling. The woman’s knees hit the stone.

He pressed pause. He leaned forward, inches from the screen. He studied the lines of his face, the shape of his shoulders. It was him. And not him. A tilt of the head wrong. A slackness in the jaw he didn’t recognize.

In the morning, the news said: Artificially generated. A fake. Nothing to fear.

But Timothy had seen himself.

***

The next clip, a week later, showed the scarred man. Red shirt. Scar under the eye. Exactly as Timothy had told his wife. He watched the man walk into frame, knife glinting. Watched him stab, turn, walk away.

He called for his wife. She came, hair tangled, eyes heavy with sleep.

“This is him,” Timothy said.

She looked. “Is it?”

“I told you. Red shirt. Scar.”

She shook her head slowly. “That man doesn’t look right.”

He studied the scar again. It seemed too neat. Too sharp, like it had been drawn. Watching him now, Timothy felt a hollowness open in his chest.

“That’s not the man,” he said.

***

Then the video changed again. The man in custody, the square face, the jeans stiff with dirt, but this time the victim wasn’t the woman. A different woman entirely. Someone Timothy had never seen.

Her hair long, her dress green. She fell the same way, knees first, then back on the stones.

Timothy shut the screen off. He sat in the dark until morning came, pale and gray through the blinds.

***

The house was quiet. The gulls outside were louder than the traffic. The smell of the harbor came through the cracks in the window. Timothy sat at the table with his wallet open.

Then he opened the computer. He typed his father’s name. He typed a prayer.

And then his father was there, on the screen. Looking at him.

“It’s alright,” his father said. “You don’t need to be perfect. No one remembers it all the way it was.”

Timothy leaned forward. The voice was steady. The words landed inside him like stones dropped in water.

“You did what you could,” his father said. “It isn’t your job to see everything right.”

Timothy nodded. He felt tears start to well up in his eyes. Comfort.

He leaned closer to the screen. His father’s dark brown eyes, hair the color of dry straw, combed back neatly. The smile was thin, one corner higher than the other, as though he were keeping something to himself.

Timothy nodded, tears sliding down his cheeks. He wanted to reach into the screen, hold on, never let go.

His father’s voice came steady: “It’s alright. You don’t need to be perfect. No one remembers it all the way it was.”

Timothy pressed the photo from his wallet to his lips. He shut his eyes and began to pray. The words slipped, scattered. He couldn’t remember how the prayer started.