Truly (New York Trilogy #1)

by Ruthie Knox

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “This is even more crowded than last time.” May scanned the cavernous space full of people waiting to board the Staten Island Ferry. “And even less exciting, since I’ve already done it once. Tell me again why we’re here?”

  “I think you were doing it wrong,” Ben said.

  “What does that even mean?”

  “New York,” he said. “You’ve been doing it wrong.”

  “That’s so arrogant,” she said. “Actually, that’s another thing I don’t like about New York—the arrogance. You guys are so sure it’s the best place on earth that when someone doesn’t agree, they must be doing it wrong. I mean, how ridiculous is that? New York is objectively messy and dirty and loud. There’s no way for me to be wrong about that.”

  “You don’t like it messy and dirty and loud?”

  “No.”

  “Funny,” he said. “That’s my favorite kind.”

  The wicked smile he gave her liquefied her underpants, but she didn’t let on. She’d been getting a grim sort of satisfaction from seeing his scowl deepen. The more she ran down the whole ferry experience, the darker the lines carved themselves around his mouth. If she kept being uncooperative, he’d probably snap at her again. And then …

  Then what?

  You’ll snap back.

  She thought maybe she would. It seemed essential—vital, even—that she let the conflict happen, and she make herself a part of it. She was tired of avoiding inconvenient truths.

  She wanted Ben, and he wanted her. Only chivalry had kept him from doing something about it last night. She would make damn sure he did something about it today. And in the meantime, she would prod him. She would test this new trust she’d found in the alleyway—this certainty that had dropped over her when she was tipsy and tired and frustrated that she knew what he was all about, and she saw him more clearly than he saw himself.

  There was nothing cruel in him. His anger didn’t speak for his true self. It spoke for the part of him that had been deprived. Starved.

  He was so hungry. She could feed him, if he would let her.

  “All I’m saying is, it sounds to me like you came here with an ideal in your head,” he told her. “You don’t like New York because it doesn’t match. But that’s not really fair to New York, you know? It deserves a shot on its own merits.”

  “So what are its merits?”

  “I’m going to show you,” he said.

  “On the ferry.”

  “Yeah, on the ferry.”

  “I can’t wait.” She tried to match the tone he used at his most sarcastic.

  “Shush.”

  The doors opened, and the crowd surged through them.

  Cattle, she thought as they made their way along the hallway and down the ramp, carried along with the stream of humanity. She turned to Ben and said, “Moo.”

  “Don’t be a brat.” He pulled her close by the arm, planted a quick, hard kiss on her mouth, and said under his breath, “Or you’ll pay for it later.”

  There was an exciting idea.

  Just as exciting, the way he was flirting with her this morning. When she’d sat near him at breakfast, eating pastry and drinking coffee, he’d asked her the crossword clues he didn’t know the answers to and cupped the back of her neck in his hand, a warm, lazy touch that thrilled her.

  I want you, he’d said. I want you naked and panting and wet.

  The words had been echoing around inside her body all morning, bouncing against her thighs, nudging her lungs. Filling her with a bright expectancy.

  Tonight.

  Tomorrow she would leave, and that would be that. But first she would get one night with sexy, angry, weird, frustrating, messy Ben.

  She couldn’t wait.

  Once they were on the boat, the crowd split into separate streams, with most people heading to the sides. The seats around the boat’s exterior faced the water, and tall windows offered the free view of the city that so many had come for.

  A small portion of the riders stayed in the middle of the boat, settling with iPods and magazines into seats that had no view. Local commuters, she supposed—the people the ferry was technically supposed to be for, before it had become one more stop on the New York tourist circuit.

  “Left or right?” May asked.

  “Follow the Swedish volleyball team.” Ben steered her along behind a group that did, in fact, seem to contain a disproportionately large number of tall blondes.

  The passengers who had chosen this side ignored the bench seats, gathering instead at the windows and talking excitedly among themselves. May found a clear spot and looked over the water.

  Ben took a position beside her, his clasped hands hanging out the open window as he leaned on his forearms.

  The last time she rode the ferry, she’d woken up on Saturday morning to an empty bed. Dan was already at practice, because Dan was always already at practice.

  It hadn’t been her best morning. She’d lay there beneath the fluffy white comforter, staring at the blank ceiling and feeling bleak and watery, like there was no point in anything.

  But she hadn’t allowed herself to accept that hollow feeling as her final state for the day. She’d gotten up, showered, and dressed. She’d packed her purse with water and a camera, planned her route to the terminal, and set out.

  Thinking back on that day now, what struck her most was the silence. Waiting in the crowd, riding the ferry, disembarking and waiting again, riding it back. She’d eaten lunch at a place that supposedly made Manhattan’s best ramen noodles, taken in a movie at an independent theater, rambled through Central Park. Aside from the waiter and the man who sold her the movie ticket, no one had spoken to her all day.

  Exhausted by the end of it, she’d bought a smoothie and trudged back to the train to New Jersey. She’d made her way to Dan’s house, where she sat at his glass-topped table with her laptop and sent her family an email full of cheerful bullshit.

  Spent all day seeing the sights! New York is awesome—really feel like I’m getting to know it now! Miss you so much!

  XOXO,

  May

  After she hit SEND, the message had flown off into cyberspace with a little whooshing sound, and the already familiar aural experience of Dan’s empty house—the hum of the refrigerator, the tiny crashing noises of the ice maker—had begun to wear her down. The watery, hollow feeling returned, worse than before, because she had spent an entire day looking, listening, and waiting to feel some spark of connection to this place, these people, this heritage. But even at the World Trade Center site, she’d been an anthropologist, at best. A participant-observant faking belonging.

  Actually, it was worse than that. She’d felt glass-encased, as though everyone around her was part of this city, part of this world, and she was just gliding through it, untouchable and untouched.

  She’d felt as though she would never be able to belong here.

  “So what do you see?” Ben asked.

  “Water.” It was flat and deep blue, the islands plunked on top of it as if on display.

  “And?” He pointed across the water to the tall buildings.

  “Jersey City?”

  “Yep. And if you took a boat up that way, you’d be between Jersey and Manhattan, which makes it what river?”

  “The Hudson,” she said dutifully.

  “And out that way?”

  A garbled announcement came over the loudspeakers, barely audible over the boat’s rumbling diesel engine and the excited chatter of the three Japanese kids to their left.

  “Staten Island?”

  “Yeah, smart-ass, what else?”

  “Ellis Island, Statue of Liberty, Liberty Island, and—” She pointed toward the front of the boat. “—Governor’s Island, straight ahead.”

  “You did your homework last time.”

  “I’m a good student.”

  “I bet.”

  He smiled a little, and she smiled back.

  She didn
’t actually feel like needling him. Not if he would smile at her instead. His smile turned him into a different man—turned this ferry trip into something other than what it had been the first time. Probably it didn’t hurt that she was walking around in a cloud of mixed-up, anticipatory excitement, but she didn’t feel excluded this morning. She had her own bubble, with Ben.

  Maybe all she’d needed was a friend. An ally.

  Maybe she’d just been doing it wrong.

  The boat pulled away from the dock. It was a little too cold, the breeze off the water stiff, but it felt good against her face. She inhabited her own body today, as though the pinball and the dancing and those minutes up against a brick wall with Ben between her legs had somehow driven her soul into her fingertips and the balls of her feet, pushed her spirit along her nerve endings so that every step she took and every breath she sucked in testified to her aliveness.

  The cold steel of the hull pushed through her jeans at the knee, and the scratchy wool of her sweater rested against her neck. Beside her, Ben’s forearms balanced on the railing, and she looked at the dark hair and his scarred knuckles. Beneath them, blood and veins, muscle and bone.

  Alive. Real.

  “So what’s the lesson here, tour guide?”

  He shrugged and nudged her shoulder with his. “C’mere.” She stepped closer. He turned slightly, lining them up like sardines in a can, and she felt the faint pressure of his lips against her hair.

  “Did you know there was a bomb on the ferry once?” he asked.

  “That’s alarming.”

  “Yeah, but it was a long time ago. Back in the sixties, I think. And then later, some guy with a machete hacked up a bunch of passengers.”

  “Okay, that’s just gruesome.”

  “Sorry. I read an article about the ferry a couple years ago. There was an accident, and that gave them a reason to write about all these other big accidents. About ten years ago, the pilot conked out at the wheel and ran into the pier on the Staten Island side. A huge slab of concrete ripped the hull and killed something like a dozen people.”

  “I can’t imagine why you think this is good tour-guide info.”

  “They’ve been running this ferry a long time. Every hour or half hour, day in and day out. Bad shit’s bound to happen sooner or later.”

  “But I don’t need to hear about it. Tell me something pleasant.”

  “Pleasant, huh?” His palms rested on the inside of her arms. She closed her eyes for a moment, awash in the simple pleasure of being touched.

  “Did you know the ferry evacuated thousands of people on 9/11?” he asked. “They just came pouring from Lower Manhattan, trying to get off the island. And the boats went back and forth, back and forth, taking people to safety. Then the military took it over for a little while. They had tanks on here, if you can believe that.”

  Soldiers in uniform, guns and helmets, smoke and panic.

  They pulled closer to Ellis Island, and the Statue of Liberty came into clear view. The Swedish volleyball girls smiled and posed for pictures. May imagined the ferry crammed with people, coughing and afraid.

  “That’s not pleasant.”

  “There’s a reason I spend most of my time socializing with bees.”

  But she could hear the smile in his voice. He dropped one arm to wrap around her stomach, a band of steel beneath her breasts, and pointed with the other back toward Jersey City. “You know a lot of the Wall Street banks moved over there after 9/11? Most of those buildings are new, and the workers are over there now, even though the banks kept their Wall Street addresses.”

  She craned her head around to get a better look at his face, trying to figure out what he was thinking, but his expression didn’t give much away.

  “And then Ellis Island,” he said. “Did you go over there?”

  May shook her head.

  “The Delaware Indians used to get oysters there. Lenape, they’re called now.”

  “Oysters?”

  “The Indians. Half of Ellis Island was built up with landfill. I imagine that was bad for the oysters. But a bunch of the shoreline of Manhattan is that way—just a lot of rocks and garbage dumped in place and built right on top of.”

  “They do that lots of places.”

  “Yep. And then millions of immigrants went through Ellis Island, scared half to death that they’d get turned away. Trying to answer all those questions right, so they could have some kind of future they’d dreamed of.” He frowned. “It’s a nasty place, if you think about it. But now it’s supposed to be this symbol of freedom. You’re supposed to get on the ferry and check the Statue of Liberty off your list, as if it’s a simple thing. Like you’re going to see the statue, and your heart will swell with pride, and you’ll take a picture and then go buy a doughnut from the concession stand, right?”

  “You are the single crabbiest person I’ve ever met.”

  He chuckled and buried his nose against her neck. “Yeah, but I’m right, aren’t I? You came on the ferry thinking you were supposed to feel something, and then you didn’t.”

  “Sort of.”

  “So I’m wrong?”

  “Not really.”

  May looked at the flowing green gown of the Statue of Liberty. Her proud crown and her sightless eyes. Her raised torch.

  I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

  She tried to see what Ben saw. The Lenape Indians and their oysters. The immigrants pouring through the golden door onto the island, an unwashed, undifferentiated collection of foods and folkways and lives. Their mishaps and adventures, triumphs and sorrows.

  The ferry going back and forth, day after day, year after year. On one trip, it carried a man with a machete. On another, it gave refugees from the terrorist attacks an escape from the unthinkable.

  It wasn’t simple or pretty. Possibly that was his point—that the whole city was dense with history, layered and pulsing with life.

  Alive. Real. The words kept coming back to her.

  She thought of herself, lacing on her sneakers for a day of solitary tourism. What had she thought she would find when she left the house, if not the connections, the emotions that were missing inside the confines of Dan’s bedroom?

  She’d resented the ferry because she hadn’t been able to walk aboard and block out everything she didn’t like about it—how loud it was, how obviously a spectacle. Ben was right that she hadn’t liked how her heart refused to leap into her throat at the sight of the country’s most famous national symbol.

  She’d resented New York because she couldn’t find any way to flatten it to suit her fantasies, just as she hadn’t been able to shoehorn Dan into the dreams she’d moved here to impose on him.

  This city—it wasn’t a simple place, or a familiar one. It wouldn’t change to suit her. But standing here with Ben, she wondered if it was possible that she could change. If she was already changing.

  I want you, May.

  She wanted him, too. Wanted more than him—she wanted to live in the world the way he did. Even thought it was harder. Because it was harder.

  Because it was real.

  She tucked herself against his body and blinked away tears. His other arm came up, wrapping her tight.

  They stayed like that for a long time, caught between the sound of the water and the throaty diesel hum of the engine. Caught between the sky and the painted metal hull of the boat, between the wind at her front and the warmth at her back.

  Suspended between the past and the future, May wondered what would happen to her tomorrow.

  She wondered if she would find, when it was time to go home, that she didn’t remember how to be the person she’d been before.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Ben spent the rest of the day showing May interesting things.

  She didn’t care one way or the other about the fort at Battery Park, but the Irish famine memorial enchanted her. She’d exclaimed over how small and pretty it was, like an Irish hillock transplanted to the city. They’d
climbed all over the top of it, studied the quotations along the sides and the information hidden in the tunnel underneath, and inspected the genuine Irish cottage at the top.

  Glowing with excitement, May pronounced it the coolest memorial she’d ever seen.

  “It’s my favorite,” he told her, and her eyes glistened as though he’d given her a gift of incalculable value.

  She didn’t care for Chinatown or the Diamond District, but she pronounced the lighting district marvelously outdated and insisted he buy a lightbulb, just to keep it in business.

  He fed her Mexican food and bought her a shot at the three-story tequila bar on Sixth Street.

  “Where’s the limes?” she’d asked when her drink came, and he’d told her that this was good tequila, so she had to sip it, like cognac.

  Her eyes got big. “I had cognac once,” she said. “It made my tongue numb.”

  Then she started telling him a story about an exchange student who’d lived with her family and the trip she’d made to France with Allie at the end of that visit, how they’d stayed with the French family for two weeks and eaten all kinds of mysterious foods, capped with a long meal at a country restaurant that May described course by course until he was salivating.

  For the food, for May. For the taste of cognac on her tongue.

  They hopped on the subway and took the 6 train to the 7 over to Queens. May talked almost all the way there, telling him rambling stories about her sister and the guy she was about to marry, an old friend of May’s named Matt, as well as someone named Keller who may or may not have been a dog. Mostly he let the words wash over him and watched her face, the pleasure she took in sharing something funny or quirky, the way she leaned closer when she got to a good part, smiling in anticipation of his enjoyment.

  They got off on the elevated platform at Court House Square, and May started peppering him with questions. “Are you looking for apartments here? Because I have to be honest, I’m starting to get worried about the apartment thing. I feel like maybe I’m getting in your way, and what happens if you don’t have one yet when Alec gets home? Do you—”