Right as Rain

by Lindsey Stoddard

  “There it is,” Mom says. “152nd Street.”

  All the streets are one way, so we drive down 151st and back up 152nd, and we have to double-park the van because cars are squeezed all the way down both sides of the street with just inches between them. You wouldn’t even plant seeds in a vegetable garden that close. That’s why there were seven years and one month between Guthrie and me. Dad says you have to give things space to grow.

  “We’re supposed to buzz the super when we get here.” Mom unbuckles her seat belt. “Doesn’t that sound so urban? So cool? Let’s go buzz the super!”

  “I’ll stay with the van,” Dad says.

  “Suit yourself.” Mom swings open her door and a car honks and swerves and screeches past us. She gasps and yanks the door back.

  “Whew!” she says. “This city will keep you on your toes.” She’s trying to make her voice sound steady and bright and fine, but I can tell it scared her.

  The screeching tires.

  My heart is beating fast, and that terrible feeling of remembering is rising up from my gut.

  She opens her door again, slower this time, and I scoot across the seat and out onto 152nd Street. It feels good to be out of that van, reaching toward my Converse high-tops and stretching out my hamstrings.

  “Come on.” Mom nudges me. She already has a box in her arms.

  There are three steps that go up to the front door of the building, and on the sidewalk out front, four men sit around a folding table, slapping dominoes. A crowd gathers around them, two deep, watching and exclaiming in Spanish.

  “Perdón,” Mom says as she walks past, and a rush of heat flushes up my face in embarrassment because they actually speak Spanish and I just know stupid phrases like Tengo hambre and Quisiera un vaso de agua, por favor and my mom knows even less, and both of our accents sound like twigs getting caught up in a weed whacker.

  When they say Hola and Bienvenido back, it sounds like they’re singing.

  Mom hustles up the stairs past a girl who’s sitting on the top step, tying a pair of Nike Flyknit Racers. Her hair is buzzed short all over her head, like maybe she goes to the barbers we drove by on Broadway, and even though she’s skinny, she has muscles that pop out around her shoulders, and her calves are so strong I can see the muscles bulge from the front of her leg as she pulls her laces tight. She looks fast.

  “I’ll let you do the honors,” Mom says, dropping the box to the side of the door. “Buzz the super! I’ll grab more boxes.”

  The girl looks up from her laces and kind of smirks, and I feel embarrassed all over again because I’m pretty sure we sound really stupid, even in English.

  “You’re moving into thirty-one?” she asks.

  “Yeah,” I say. “My name’s R—”

  “Great,” she mumbles. Then she tugs a double knot in her sneaker and I see that same red, white, and blue flag printed on the back of her T-shirt. Dominican Republic, it reads.

  The way she says Great doesn’t sound like she really thinks it’s great. Not at all. And that’s a fact, because as soon as she says it my chest aches hard and I start missing Izzy and my house and Coach Scottie. And Guthrie.

  I press the black button that says Superintendent, and I can hear it ring. In a minute, the door makes a loud buzzing sound, and it takes me six seconds to realize that no one is coming to greet us and open the door, that a buzzer isn’t a doorbell and you’re supposed to push open the door when you hear that buzzing sound.

  But before I can figure out what to do, the buzzing sound stops and Mom reaches around me and presses Superintendent again. I hear the ringing and then the buzzing, and this time I quickly push the door open. The girl shakes her head and hops down the steps and strides long and even down the street, and all the dominoes men yell after her, “¡Corre como el viento!” And even though I don’t know what they’re saying, it must be something about how she’s flying, because she is.

  Chapter 8

  Apartment Thirty-One

  Our super’s name is Héctor, and when he introduces himself to us, he pronounces the H, but when he crosses the street to help us unload the van, the dominoes men call out to him, ¡Héctor! dropping the H and hammering the éc like a tomato plant stake driving against rocky soil.

  He nods in their direction and calls them ¡hermanos! and says something about el sol.

  Dad gets out of the van and shakes Héctor’s hand. “I’m Henry Andrews. Nice to meet you,” he says. His buttons are still off by one, so the left side of his shirt hangs one inch lower than the right side, and I wonder if Mom is going to say something again.

  “I’m Héctor,” he says. “Welcome.” He cups his hand against the van’s back window and peers in. “This is all you have?”

  Dad shoots a look at Mom. “Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

  “We’re traveling light and starting fresh,” Mom cuts in. She shoots a look back at Dad and tugs at her own shirt and mouths, button. Dad pretends he doesn’t see and slides open the van door. “We ordered new furniture. It should arrive in a couple of hours,” she says.

  “I’ll get you some cards for a locksmith,” Héctor says. “You’ll need a new dead bolt too.” Then he stacks Clothes—Rain and Clothes—Maggie in his arms. I slide Garden out before Dad sees it, pressing Mom’s handwriting against my body and crossing the street, up the three steps, and through the doors that are propped open by thick newspapers folded and jammed in the hinges.

  Héctor goes out for another armful, and Mom drops the Towels box on the lobby floor with the others. I keep Garden tight against my chest and look at the long row of silver mailboxes next to the elevator.

  I find number thirty-one, which I don’t like because prime numbers feel so exclusive, and cold, and closed, like there’s no room.

  Mom puts her hands on my shoulders. “Our first city mailbox, Rain!”

  I nod and try not to think about Twelve Cloverfield Lane in Vermont.

  “I know you miss Izzy.” She squeezes my shoulder a little bit and then hugs me from behind. “And I know this timing is pretty rotten. But it’ll be a great adventure for all of us.”

  “It’s not just Izzy,” I say, looking right at #31 etched with Sharpie on the front of our mailbox. Some other family’s name—Muñoz—is written on the white tag, and I wonder if their mail is still inside.

  “I know,” she says, and squeezes my shoulder harder like she’s really sorry.

  My throat starts to burn, and I don’t want to cry in front of any new neighbors who live in nice, divisible numbers like thirty-two or forty-four and who might come in through the buzzing front doors any second, so I shake out of her hug and say, “Let’s bring these upstairs.”

  We slide all thirteen boxes into the elevator, and Héctor, my mom, and my dad squeeze in and press three. I take the stairs and race the elevator up. I can hear it chug through the floors, and I’m listening to coach Scottie’s hut hut hut! in my head. Guthrie’s guitar pick shifts in my pocket and rubs against my thigh as I pump my arms and fly over the steps two at a time. I win.

  When the elevator opens on the third floor, I’m breathing hard, but I reach in to pull out the Garden box. Héctor unlocks the apartment door, helps us slide the boxes in, and hands the keys to my mom.

  “Small key is for the mailbox,” he says. “Call me if you need anything.”

  “Gracias,” Mom says, and the hot flushes my cheeks again because his English is way better than her Spanish.

  “No problem.” He smiles and closes the door behind him.

  Now I know why people say they live in a shoe box in New York City. Our apartment is not much bigger than the box for a new pair of my size-seven Adidas Ultraboosts. That’s not exactly true, but if you lined the boxes up edge to edge, you’d only need sixteen to reach from one end of the living room to the other, and that’s a fact because I count my steps as I look around the empty rooms.

  There’s no place to hide Garden. There isn’t even a closet in the smaller bedroom, whi
ch I assume is mine, so I just keep carrying the box because I don’t want Dad to see it and have our first moments in apartment thirty-one be the same old argument about whether or not the Garden box should have come the 288 miles. Even though it’s mostly full of seeds and trowels, it’s awkward and starting to feel heavy.

  How anyone hides a secret in a New York City apartment is a big who-knows.

  “What the— They painted right over all the finishes.” Dad inspects a window, then walks into the bigger bedroom. “Right over the damn closet doors.” He marches back out.

  Mom pulls open a hall closet door and breaks the seal of white paint. “Feels like a fresh start to me,” she says.

  “It’s not a fresh start, it’s a sloppy job.”

  Mom shakes her head and grabs my elbow. “Put that down, Rain. Let’s look around.” I slide Garden against the wall, and I know it’s only a matter of time before Dad sees it. But at least it’s out of my arms.

  We don’t even have to move our feet to see the whole apartment. There’s a kitchen that opens up over a new, shiny marble counter to a living room with three big windows that look out across an alley to the back of another tall, brick building. There are two bedrooms and one bathroom, which is one bedroom and one bathroom less than our house in Vermont.

  Dad is opening all the living room windows. He sticks his head out of the last one and looks left and right. “Where is that coming from?”

  “What?” Mom asks.

  “You don’t hear that?”

  “Obviously not, Henry, if I asked What?”

  I step between them. “Music,” I say. The lyrics are in Spanish, and it’s impossible to tell where it’s coming from because the beat is bouncing around the alley, back and forth between our building and the one across.

  “Three thirty on a Thursday afternoon and there’s a party?”

  “I doubt it’s a party,” Mom says.

  “So it’s just always like this, then? No special occasion?”

  “Henry.”

  “Maggie.”

  Before their voices can climb up and up into a six-story fight, I ask if I can put my stuff in my room. Mom says of course and that she’ll give me a hand. She picks up Clothes—Rain, and I take School supplies—Rain to the smaller bedroom. The room is a perfect square with one window looking out toward the music-bouncing alley, and a silver radiator that sticks out from the wall.

  “We can make a closet for you in no time,” Mom says, inspecting the walls. “Maybe buy you one of those armoires, or make something urban and cool with a shower curtain rod here in the corner.”

  I rip the tape off the box holding my school supplies.

  “Bed could go here.” She points next to the window. “Maybe a desk over here, so you can do your homework. And maybe—”

  “That’s it, Mom,” I say. “Just a bed and desk. Nothing else will fit.” And that’s a fact because even if I get a twin bed, which is smaller than the bed I left behind, it will cover almost half the width of the room. Already this apartment is starting to feel like the front of the moving van.

  She pats my shoulder. “It’s going to be so cozy.”

  I nod and try not to let her see the tears filling my eyes, but she’s already hustling off to the kitchen and starting to peel the tape off more boxes.

  Out my bedroom window, rust-colored fire escape ladders zigzag up the building across the alley and they remind me of the ladder we lean up to the tree house in the woods behind Izzy’s backyard. I grab my notebook and a pen from my School supplies box, sit on the floor against the far wall, and start writing.

  Dear Izzy,

  I tell her how tall the buildings are and how different an apartment is than a house, and about the ladders that rise up and up at perfect forty-five-degree angles right in front of the rectangular windows, and how I already miss our tree house sleepovers. Even though I’m only writing about rusty old ladders on the side of a big building where hundreds of people live, writing to Izzy makes me feel better, and I almost forget about the 288 miles.

  I start to sketch a picture of a building in the corner of the page. I swipe little lines for the rungs of the fire escape ladder, and it’s hard to believe all these people live on top of each other, and beneath, and side by side, stacked up and up and up.

  Through a window on the third floor, in a room right across the alley from my bedroom, I can see a woman standing at the sink, washing dishes. In the next window over, a man paces the room and talks on his cell phone, and I wonder if they are in the same apartment, or maybe they live in side-by-side apartments and don’t even know that the other exists. You would think washing dishes six feet from someone else and not even being aware of him is impossible, but from this angle I can see how two people might live side by side and never know each other.

  Mom’s voice calls from the kitchen. “The music’s kind of festive! It’s like they knew we were moving in.”

  “Yeah, what a welcome,” Dad says. He slams closed a window.

  I press the pen harder and make the fire escape outside my bedroom window darker, the angles sharper.

  “I like it open,” Mom says. “Let the neighborhood in!”

  He pulls down another window.

  And before he closes the third one, there’s a knock at the door.

  “I’ll get it,” I say, and put down my pen. I wonder if it’s someone with home-baked cookies for us like we delivered to the Morrisons when they first moved to Cloverfield Lane.

  It’s only nine steps from my bedroom to the front door, but it seems longer walking between Mom and Dad.

  When I click the lock and pull open the door, the front-stoop Nike Flyknit Racers girl is standing there. She’s still wearing her running shorts, and now a navy blue sweatshirt that’s zipped up halfway, the hood pulled over her head.

  “My dad said to give these to you.” She holds out two business cards and doesn’t even come close to eye contact. I know that eye contact comes from the cerebellum, which is the most ancient part of the brain, because my mom told me. She says it probably traces back to hunting, and our ability to hone in on a target. So maybe it’s good that Nike Flyknit girl isn’t looking right at me.

  I take the cards she’s holding out. They’re for hardware stores on Broadway. “OK,” I say.

  Then she looks up and right past me, like I’m in the way, and she studies our small, empty apartment.

  My mom comes up behind me and puts her hands on my shoulders. “You must be Héctor’s daughter,” she says, and reaches out.

  The girl shakes my mom’s hand.

  “I’m Maggie, and this is Rain. And that’s Henry.” Mom points, and Dad waves from the living room, where he’s crouched down, inspecting the brand-new but uneven floorboards.

  The girl is still peering past us. Then she mutters, “It looks different.” She says it with a clenched jaw and no smile, and she still hasn’t looked up to meet our eyes.

  Then my mom starts in about how our furniture arrives today, and as soon as we have some places to sit, she’d love to have her back up for lunch someday, and how she and I are probably about the same age and we’re both runners, so maybe we could go for a jog together sometime.

  For the first time since she knocked on our door, the girl looks at me. Right at me. And I can’t help but think of a spear cutting through the air at its prey.

  “You’re a runner?” she stabs.

  “Yeah,” I answer.

  “You race?” She narrows her eyes.

  I nod.

  “Great,” she says. But this time she doesn’t say it like she doesn’t mean it. She says it with a growing smirk, like it’s going to be so great when she smokes past me and leaves me in the dust.

  We’ll see about that.

  Then Mom says, “I don’t think I caught your name.”

  “Frankie.”

  “Well, Frankie,” she says. “Tell your dad thanks for the locksmith recommendations.”

  I hold up the cards and kind
of fan them in my fingers, and try to smile at her.

  She nods and turns, and in a flash she’s jumping over all six stairs, absorbing the shock with slightly bent knees at each landing, all the way down to her basement super’s apartment.

  It takes two hours and thirty-seven minutes from the time Frankie hands me the business cards for a locksmith to come install a new dead bolt on our front door, two men to deliver two bed frames and mattresses, and three other men to squeeze a couch and then a recliner chair into the elevator, and to remove the legs from a desk to fit it through my bedroom door and reattach them on the other side.

  Once all the furniture is in, I count that we’ll need four shims to stick under two legs of the couch and two legs of my desk, and that’s a fact, because Dad taught me about uneven flooring in older buildings.

  My new bed doesn’t have any inches of foam on top and, it doesn’t remember my body when I roll from one side to the other. And even though it’s brand-new and 288 miles from my old one, I still wake up at exactly 10:43, I still hear him whisper, and my heart still speeds up to 110 beats per minute, which is really fast for a runner at rest.

  I need a favor.

  And before I can roll back over and try to find a spot that remembers me, my dad’s voice breaks through the music tinging in the alley.

  “Jesus, Maggie! I thought I told you—”

  He found the Garden box.

  “Henry, you can’t just sit around and—”

  “Actually, I can. I can do whatever I need. Just like you are. Except my needs aren’t affecting the whole family.”

  “You think that staying in the bedroom all day isn’t affecting Rain?”

  “No. I think moving to a new state is.”

  “Henry—”

  “Where do you expect me to use a trowel anyway?” He drops it back in the box and it lands with a clunk. “This city is paved solid from river to dirty river.”

  I reach for my jeans on the floor and find Guthrie’s pick in the pocket. I hold it in my fingers and imagine his fingers holding it too, and strumming it against the strings of his guitar. Then I slide it into my pillowcase until morning, and wonder if anyone is looking in our windows like I’m peering in across the alley. There’s a light on in the kitchen across the way and the woman I saw earlier is sipping from a mug at the small table, and one window over the glow of a TV screen strobes across the man’s face.