Restoration Heights

  Reddick, a young, white artist, lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a historically black Brooklyn neighborhood besieged by gentrification. He makes rent as an art handler in Manhattan and spends his free time playing basketball at the local Y. He is also the last person to see Hannah before she disappears.

  When Hannah’s fiancé, scion to a wealthy Upper East Side family, refuses to call the police, Reddick sets out to discover what happened to her. The search pulls him through a dramatic cross section of New York, taking him to the heart of a many-layered mystery that, in its unraveling, shakes Reddick’s convictions and lays bare the complex power dynamics of the city.

  In lyrical, addictive prose, Wil Medearis asks the question: In a metropolis that prides itself on its diversity and inclusivity, who has the final say over the future? Timely, page-turning and sweeping in vision, Restoration Heights is an exhilarating new entry in the canon of great New York novels.

  Restoration Heights

  A Novel

  Wil Medearis

  For my mother

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Acknowledgments

  “...perhaps, in the worst case, there is no comprehensive natural order in which everything hangs together—only disconnected forms of understanding.”

  Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos

  One

  You know Reddick. He’s that white guy on the subway, past thirty and showing it, jeans and boots splattered by work that was never intended to be permanent, that was tolerable enough while he waited for the big break that never came. Patience hardening in his bones like concrete. Resignation passing as stoicism. He stands in the door of the northbound G, third car from the front, eyes down, headphones on, clinging to a rhythm you can almost make out. From Bed-Stuy to Long Island City all the stops exit the opposite side, he is neither disturbed nor in the way, he has claimed a space, found a comfort that lies somewhere between habit and ritual. You barely notice him. These guys are all over the city.

  So is Harold, hustling for a swipe of your MetroCard. Middle-aged, black and sturdy, it isn’t obvious why he’s waiting outside the turnstiles as you exit, why he can’t drum up the fare. There is nothing in his face to explain his reliance on your charity. In the armor of his quilted sweatshirt, his tangerine hard hat—you expect to see men like Harold on the afternoon train, nylon cooler between his spread feet, slumped body wasted by the day’s work.

  He caught Reddick maybe eight or ten weeks ago, before the holidays—a wordless transaction, each man accustomed to his part, actions polished smooth as pearls by countless practice, by years of commuting. They were wearing the same boots. Reddick swiped him in again two days later, then three times the week after Thanksgiving, a series of small coincidences, their schedules momentarily in sync. The contact expanded with each instance—first a nod of recognition, then small talk, and finally gentle, shallow questions; two surfaces content to brush against one another, without expectations.

  A few weeks later they crossed paths on Nostrand Avenue—a final coincidence that each took for granted—and talked for half an hour, bound by their tiny plot to defraud the MTA, one fare at a time. That was when they finally traded names, offered sketches of their histories. Harold grew up in Bed-Stuy but moved into his mother’s house in Hunter’s Point when she passed. He worked construction, fortifying the army of gentrifiers pushing east into his old neighborhood, buttressing their territory with bland condo towers, conspicuous redoubts of murky brick and cheap metal looming among the old stone houses. Reddick worked freelance, moving crates and hanging other people’s art on other people’s walls, the time spent in his own studio withering from neglect. He usually blew off painting to play basketball. He rarely felt guilty about it anymore. A shared awareness of failure bridged the gap between their ages. Afterward their morning conversations became routine, even when someone else swiped Harold in, a few stolen moments, brief dispatches on the surface facts of their lives.

  * * *

  Reddick left early that Monday, to tell Harold about the girl in the alley. It was a longer story than they typically made time for. He had seen her on his way home from the bar, just after eleven, in front of his shabby building. Tapping at her phone, coiled on the hood of a dark sedan, she had been surrounded by snow—the uneven slate sidewalks encased in white, the stoops enveloped in buttery swells. He caught the scene catty-corner, framed by the towering skeleton of unfinished construction rising from the adjacent block—with the empty street, the half-buried car, she had seemed like the final survivor of some climate apocalypse. Her breath formed ribbons of condensation, fainter than the trails of her cigarette. When she looked up he saw the inebriation on her slack face—a house party refugee out to escape a crowd, to have a smoke. She watched him dig out his keys, wrestle with the frozen lock. It occurred to him that she might be locked out—he turned to offer the open door but she stared through him, oblivious to the gesture. He left her outside.

  He returned with garbage, a straining bag in each hand, clear plastic stretched around a bulk of dusky glass, of empty bottles. The girl had been reabsorbed by her phone. He carried the bags to the gated alley on the side of the building, set them down in a shallow trench to fumble for his keys. There was an unlocked door in the back of the alley that opened into the rear of the building; he didn’t use it because his apartment bordered the front stairwell. The key ring was caught on the lining of his jacket—he tugged viciously, the thread snapped, the keys tumbled through his numb fingers and thumped into the snow. He put the bags down and bent to pick them up.

  He hadn’t heard the footsteps until they were on top of him. He spun and raised his arms—a large, violent motion. It was the blonde. She didn’t acknowledge his overreaction, just stood, panting from her sprint, fogging the air between them. He swore and reached down for his keys and swore again.

  “You can’t just run at a stranger like that,” he said. “Not alone. Not at night.”

  “Sorry,” she responded, her voice so flat it was unclear if she knew what she was apologizing for.

  He was embarrassed and it irritated him. “Who knows what I might have done?”

  “You’re a nice guy.”

  “And you could tell that from over there?”

  “I’m good at people. At reading people, I mean.” Her eyes began to focus on his face, slowly, as if recovering a lost habit. “Only I thought you were someone else.”

  He stopped himself from pointing out her inconsistency. It didn’t matter, not in her current state. She had lapsed into a world of moment-to-moment truths.

  “Do you live here?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s like, a really great building.” Her voice was nasal and high, the ends of the words tapering into each other in a way that flouted the integrity of their borders, that threatened their meaning. It was the voice men do when performing a specific type of twentysomething white girl, a voic
e that didn’t quite fit her face. He wondered if she always talked that way. He wondered if she was doing it for him.

  He unlocked the gate. “It’s alright.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  He looked at her, and then into the alley. The darkness waited for them to give it shape. He stepped aside and followed her in.

  “We should, like, hang out,” she said.

  “Okay.” The gate rattled shut behind them, the lock clicked into place. The motion sensor triggered and the lights came on, revealing the narrow, dirty walls, the rows of cans, plastic and tin. Several bags had already been sorted and were heaped in a corner, crusted with snow. She continued talking without saying anything. He opened a bin beside her narrow hips.

  “So we should definitely hang out, then,” she repeated. Her phone began to flash—not just the device, but the case as well, garish and emphatic. She brought it unsteadily to her face and began to pluck at the screen. She was small, with a head that seemed slightly oversized, a narrow face with the high cheekbones and large eyes of an actress. Her lips were thin and never quite seemed to meet. Lifeless blond hair fell from her knit hat, the ends brushed her collarbones. She wore leggings beneath her skirt, long sleeves but no coat—she hadn’t intended to stay outside long. Her fingers shimmered with meaningless rings. He tried to imagine her sober, in the daylight, but couldn’t fix her into place. She seemed to slip between possibilities.

  “I have to send this text,” she said, concentrating. “But you could probably, like, kiss me when I’m done.”

  He looked to see if she was joking.

  She laughed with her entire body, bowing at the waist, taken with her own audacity. “I mean if you, like, want to. You know, whatever.”

  “How much have you had to drink tonight?”

  “Me? Look at you with all those bottles.”

  “Those are from last night. We had friends over to watch the game.”

  She wrinkled her nose at “game”—she found sports either dull or repugnant. “So you have a roommate?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is he home?” Her smile revealed her motivation—it was precisely the recklessness of her actions that seemed to thrill her. He was a prop, the ground she was stringing her high wire over.

  “No.”

  She returned to her phone. Both of his bags were in bins and they were standing, alone, closed doors on either side. It would be easy to let her wreck herself against him—more than easy, a relief. He stepped toward her and touched her arm.

  “I think you should go home.” He wasn’t certain he would say it until he heard the words.

  “Home?”

  “You’ve had a lot to drink.”

  “Yep.” She smiled. “Probably too much. But I earned it.”

  Her phone erupted again and she returned to it. He started to walk past her.

  “Wait.” She put her body between him and the gate. “You’re leaving?”

  “Yeah.” He looked over her head at the empty sidewalk, the empty street. “You should go home.”

  “That’s it, then?”

  She wore her petulance loosely, provoked by disappointment that barely seemed to reach her. It wouldn’t take her long to stumble upon another wild impulse.

  After a moment he sighed. “Look. I’ll get you a car.”

  “Ugh.”

  “If I get one will you take it?”

  “Maybe I should.”

  “The thing is, I would need my phone, which is upstairs, in my apartment.” He couldn’t take her up there—he didn’t trust his resolve if she decided he was worth one more shot. “Will you wait while I get it? Or can we use yours?”

  “Hold on.” She was interrupted by more gaudy flashes. This time it was a call. She trudged away from him to answer it, into the deep shadows at the rear of the alley. He felt her attention shift with inebriated finality. If he walked away now she wouldn’t notice, might not remember the encounter at all—but an obligation had formed, however much he resented it. If he could just get her back to the party he could find her friends, make her their problem. He waited near the gate.

  The back door opened, spilling amber light onto the pale snow. He could see an arm holding it, white skin, thick and masculine. She turned toward it and seemed to recognize the owner. She hung up and went inside. The door shut behind her. He stood in the alley alone for several minutes, but the night continued as if she never existed.

  * * *

  “If that had happened to me?” Harold said. “To a brother? I’d be in jail already.”

  Reddick had spun it for laughs—exaggerated his surprise, her intoxication, the absurdity of her unprovoked offer.

  “I was just trying to take out my garbage.”

  “You don’t know who she was or where she went?”

  “No idea. I just wanted to take her back to her friends.”

  “That was the right move. Nothing good would have happened if you kept talking to her.”

  “It feels like I avoided some kind of disaster.”

  “I remember when a white girl wouldn’t have walked down that street at night. Now they just following men into alleys?” He shook his head, rendered mute by the magnitude of this transformation. The alarm sounded—Harold’s train rumbling into the station below them. Reddick reached back and swiped him in. They slapped five across the turnstile.

  “My man,” Harold said. “If this is the kind of shit you get into I’m going to bring you out with me sometime.”

  Reddick left the station and made the huddled, hurried walk through frozen Long Island City to the Lockstone warehouse. He punched in and joined the rest of the art handlers as they prepared to load the truck for the Seward job, all of them still on morning time, smoking cigarettes off the open dock and sipping noisily from paper coffee cups, nibbling at bodega pastries. The warehouse floor was large and open as a chapel, the crates lined up like pews. He gave the crew the same take he did Harold, played it for comedy, until he got to the anonymous arm at the end, the way the door cracked the space open and consumed her.

  “Wait,” one of them asked, “you didn’t see who she left with?”

  “No. She was gone and I just went back up to my apartment.”

  “Dude, that’s really sketchy.”

  Another handler interrupted. “I hope that chick is alright.”

  Reddick frowned. “What do you mean? I didn’t leave her alone. I’m sure they just went back to that party.”

  The other handler shrugged. His name was Allen; he was thick-necked and short, an oil painter who made winding, precise abstractions, memories of a three-week mescaline binge he had during his final summer in Wisconsin. “Look, you don’t know that guy. You don’t know if she knew that guy. Don’t you remember that chick in Coney Island, from a couple years ago?”

  “Maybe?”

  “You should. It was all over the news. There was a whole hashtag thing about it. This drunk girl leaves a party with two dudes, tells her friends she’s going for a walk on the beach. They don’t know the guys but, you know, it’s a party, so everyone just assumes everyone else is cool and no one thinks anything of it when she leaves.”

  One of the crew flicked his cigarette off the dock. “I remember this.”

  Allen continued. “Yeah, it was bad, man. They tried tossing her into the fucking ocean when they were done, like idiots. A couple of Russians, dumb as shit. The chick was an NYU student—I think one of her roommates was from Coney Island or something, is why they were down there. Her body washed up the next morning, a little farther down the beach.”

  Reddick took a drink of his coffee, went back over the alleyway scene in his mind. Something about the way it ended had spooked him, but he hadn’t followed the sense to any grim conclusion.

  “Really fucking bad, man,” Allen repeated.

 
They stood quietly until one of the other handlers grunted, slapped Reddick’s shoulder. “She’s fine, dude. It’s Brooklyn, if you worry about every drunk white girl you run into you’ll be on Xanax by the end of the month. You’ll probably see her next weekend, and she won’t remember a thing.” The rest nodded, grateful for the scrap of optimism. He continued. “Adults can take care of themselves.”

  The group dispersed and began to load the truck, hauling the art into the back in crates and commercial bins, securing it with bungee cables. They packed blankets, hand tools, rolls of Tyvek and dollies, working until midmorning. After they finished Reddick lingered near the cab, itchy to leave, as Allen made one final pass over their inventory. They had spent the past week shoveling snow around the warehouse, a team of seven up to their knees in powder and ice, digging out two of Lockstone’s four loading docks, the client parking lot, the sidewalk around the sprawling facility. They were sore from the work and anxious to be away, on a job. Reddick eyed the cars parked across the street, imagined he saw a girl sitting on top of one of them, saw her disappear in his mind’s eye with a stranger. Piles of shoveled snow curled like waves around the bumpers, distant traffic throbbed like the sea.

  “Let’s do this.” Allen slapped the side of the truck, startling Reddick from his daydream. He opened the passenger door, then walked around to the driver’s side. “You’re not still thinking about that chick, are you?” he called through the cab.

  Reddick climbed onto the bench seat. “No,” he lied.

  Two

  The Seward family underwrote the New York art world—their name beside your favorite painting, revered by curators and directors, cited in provenances. They rehung the walls of their Upper East Side townhouse regularly, flaunting prized acquisitions or plucking favorites from the depths of their Lockstone vault, succumbing at times to the gravity of the neighboring Met by syncing a wall or room to a special exhibition—assuming that the relevant works weren’t on loan already. The breadth and depth of their collection allowed for quirks of hubris. The current installation was the largest Reddick had been part of in his six years at Lockstone. It was scheduled for the entire week and covered all five floors—a dozen paintings, a handful of smaller framed drawings, and a few assorted wall-hanging sculptures, plus crating and storing all the work that was currently on display. Five of the paintings were for the front gallery, two more for the dining room downstairs, the final five for three rooms on the second floor—including the parlor, which was set aside for the collection’s newest addition: a small, stern Richter whose acquisition had prompted this rearrangement. The fifth floor was left unplanned, to be improvised from the leftovers.