by Sagine Jean
Everything about this girl is troubling and enigmatic, from the dogged way she moves through these tunnels to the way she seems to be tougher than anyone could bargain for.
Either way, I have no choice but to follow her . . . for now, at least.
We climb a set of stairs hidden on the right-hand side of the tunnels and I release a breath of air as we continue to walk and are not greeted by another surge of water.
I check my watch as we continue walking—it’s three a.m. We’ve been walking since about seven in the evening. About eight hours.
“Sydney,” I ask. “Do you really think your brother could have gone all this way? This deep underground?” My voice is soft, tentative.
“You don’t know Sammy. When he wants to stay hidden, he stays hidden. This isn’t the first time he’s done this,” she says, and I raise an eyebrow in bewilderment.
“Not in the subway, stupid. But he’s run away before. I took him to Coney Island once and he had a meltdown and hid under a concession table.”
“We’ve been here for hours. Some of the things we’ve gone through to get here, could Sammy have done it all by himself?”
She doesn’t say anything and I wonder if she’s heard, so I continue. “What if he went another way, what if someone already found him and he’s safe above ground somewhere?”
“Sammy’s not like that, he wouldn’t go off with a stranger. He’d probably run away and hide if someone that wasn’t me tried to help him. That’s why I have to be the one. That’s why I have to find him.”
“Even if you kill yourself in the process?” She doesn’t answer and I sigh. I’m trying my hardest not to scare her away. “So what if we find a door that leads to some manhole in Times Square? Will you just go back down and keep looking?”
She’s shaking, her teeth chattering, her tiny shoulders moving up and down. I put my navy blue jacket over her shoulder and she shrugs it off.
“No one told you to come chasing after me, you know. Like who told you to follow some crazy girl into the subway, anyway? Don’t you have, like, a family or something? Some wife who needs you to buy spare batteries or board up some windows?”
Through the flickering lights, the trickling water, and the impending darkness, I do the one thing that I can. I let out a laugh so loud it bounces off the walls of the narrow tunnels and echoes back to us.
“A wife?” I say, the word coming out with another torrent of chuckles. “What, you think I’m married?”
“What?” she says, annoyed. “Isn’t that a normal thing for men your age to do?”
“Sydney,” I say, my mouth hitching in a smile that’s impossible to shake. “Just how old do you think I am?” She pauses and suddenly looks unsure, her face twists into a slight scowl at being wrong.
I respond for her. “I’m nineteen.”
“Nineteen?” she exclaims. “You’re nineteen? How? You’re a cop.”
I laugh again, the surprise on her face is like a kid’s—so unassuming and completely earnest. “I’m the youngest person in my class to graduate—youngest kid in my precinct.”
“And all of New York, too, I bet.”
I shrug and she glares at me before shoving me hard in the shoulder.
“You’re only two years older than me, and you’ve been telling me what to do? What do you know?”
“I am an adult, technically. And can still get you in trouble for assaulting a police officer if you shove me again.”
“Well, I’m not going to call you Officer Tatum anymore.” She puts her hands on her hips and I snicker.
“Fine. Officer Tatum makes me sound like I have a wife, kids, and a mortgage.” She shoves me again. “What is that, your fourth time assaulting a police officer? Should I round that out to a couple years in jail and community service?”
“Don’t be a butt. Why are you such a young cop, anyway? Decided that college wasn’t for you or something?”
It takes me a moment to find the voice to answer. And when I speak I find the laughter in my voice completely gone. “My dad was a cop. It was the only thing that made sense to me.”
“Was?” she questions, probing, her eyebrows raised. I take such a sharp breath that she seems to immediately understand. “Sorry,” she says, “I didn’t mean to pry or whatever.”
We walk in the silence of the flickering lights, water beating down on our backs, the track curving toward somewhere unknown. We pass platforms and stations long since abandoned—even before the storm, with trash heaps of sawdust, empty cardboard boxes, and candy wrappers piled around corners. Cans of empty beans stand stacked, almost as if someone had sat here to drink them all. Though that’s not what startles me. What startles me are staircases that are much too dilapidated and boarded up to lead to the surface.
More hope, dashed away.
“He didn’t die,” I say, so long after the proposed topic that my voice seems out of place—distant. Sydney doesn’t say anything, she just waits and listens. “My dad was a cop, that’s true. He didn’t retire, either. He was shot. Right in the leg. He didn’t do any therapy or anything, he just quit the force that same day he was released from the hospital, came home, and sat on the couch. He’s been there ever since.” I feel hollowed, naked, and empty. The words had left my lips without a sense of direction, and from there they’d just kept going. I have to bite my lip to keep from saying any more—about his drinking, his yelling, the awful, startling truth about everything, including myself.
I hadn’t meant to say this much. I hadn’t even meant to speak, but the words rose out of me the way the rain had seemed to fall from the sky this evening—expected, but still somehow surprising. I suddenly feel uncomfortable, my legs feel too long, my arms uneven, my heart irregular, this uniform much, much too big. I look to Sydney to see if I’ve made her just as awkward and unbalanced. She’s looking right at me, with eyes a mix of chocolate and honey ablaze with understanding and the need to say something that I can’t quite decipher.
She parts her lips as if to speak and I find my heart swelling, completely and utterly out of my control. I find I’m looking forward to what she has to say, whether in agreement or in simple acknowledgment of everything I said but shouldn’t have. Someone to finally get what it is that’s on my mind.
“Will,” she says, her voice a low whisper. I move closer to her. “We should find a way to get some sleep. It’ll be morning soon.”
I deflate, but I don’t let her see. I don’t show my hand, I don’t give away my weaknesses. I don’t even clear my throat in awkwardness. I turn my face into the hard mask I learned from the academy and nod briskly.
We don’t speak as we make a bed of cardboard and rain jackets against the hard, wet floor of one of the platforms. Beneath the flickering yellow emergency lights, I curl my hands beneath my head to sleep, facing away from Sydney. I’m exhausted. I’ve been up for almost twenty-four hours, but sleep doesn’t seem to come.
I want to say something to her—the citizen I accosted, the young woman I reprimanded, the girl I’ve been walking alongside for ten hours—but I still feel uneven, uncomfortable in my skin. She breaks the silence.
“My dad’s not dead either,” I hear her whisper from behind me, so soft it hardly seems real. “It feels like he is though.” She bellows out a deep sigh that shakes the space between us. “Sometimes I feel like he left me just like this station.”
“What? Abandoned?” I still don’t turn to face her.
“No. Under construction.”
I try to take in what that means, both for her and the space around us. Everything starts to make sense. “Under construction? What do you mean?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer and I can tell she won’t say more, so I change the subject.
“We must be under Second Avenue. This line has been under construction for as long as I can remember.”
“Yeah, so?” she asks.
“That means somewhere, at some point, there’s some sort of exit, whether it’s a manhole or
a construction ladder. There’s a way out.” I explain, but again she stays silent, our conversation from earlier seeming to echo back to us.
Because what this means for Sydney is that we won’t find her brother. I’ll drag her out if it means saving her life—it’s my duty, to her and to my badge. It means that her heart her father left broken won’t heal the way it’s supposed to. That the one person who is everything to her could be lost forever to this dark, empty tunnel.
“Will!” she shouts beside me and I finally turn toward her. She’s leaning up on her elbows, her eyes staring into the distance.
“Look!” she says. “Not at me, over there!” She points toward the right side of the platform, at the tracks. She jumps over me and runs toward the bumpy yellow edge of the platform. There are three different tracks on the right side, and it’s impossible to tell what she’s talking about, but then I see it, a flicker of something. Something flashy and purple.
Sydney jumps off the platform and races ahead. I follow, sprinting toward the flash of material, thinking that it might be our key to salvation.
“Hey!” Sydney screams as she trips over a rail, almost landing flat on her face before I catch her.
In my arms, she’s a panting, breathless thing, her eyes wide with excitement and fear.
“That was his purple jacket. That was Sammy. My Sammy!” she says.
“I’M TELLING YOU, THAT WAS HIM. I KNOW what I saw,” I tell Officer . . . Will. I tell Will. God, I’m on a first-name basis with a cop. What the hell is this subway doing to me? Well, according to Will, it’s making me crazy.
“I’m not saying you don’t.”
“You just don’t believe me.”
“Hey, I saw something, too, but that could have easily been a scrap of something blowing in the wind.”
I laugh. “What? You feel a breeze somewhere? In the middle of the frigging underground?” Will rolls his eyes, something that I’ve learned is his signature move. He’s like a kid in grown-up clothes—or the other way around. Or maybe just both. Always rolling his eyes or crossing his arms or not believing you when you tell him you saw your baby brother and not a ghost. Though I do have to admit, it is fun messing with him.
“Well, there’s nothing here,” he says. It might be fun messing with Will, but it’s not at all fun admitting when he’s right. And he might be. After we saw that flash of color, we ran to where we thought we saw it—the third track, but that track wasn’t even completed yet. It ended in a pile of iron and metal. No Sammy, no purple rain jacket in sight.
“So what, we’re just going to give up?”
“No. We need to get some sleep. It’s five in the morning. You can’t tell me you aren’t exhausted.” I’m not. At least I don’t feel it. There’s too much desperate energy inside me, a coil of nerves and feeling. But Will looks more than exhausted. He looks like a zombie. His hazel eyes are rimmed red and his pale peachy skin is taut and sallow. I wonder how I look. My dark skin usually doesn’t show any signs of fatigue, but I imagine that with all the humidity and rain, my hair’s a giant ball of hot mess. The more I think about it, I have been feeling kind of out of it lately. Maybe I am wrong—maybe I hadn’t seen Sammy. Maybe I’d missed some hidden right turn and I’m completely in the wrong direction. Maybe Sammy’s been found by some rescue team we hadn’t encountered and he’s warm under a blanket on the surface.
Maybe things are not as bad as they seem—at least that is what I try telling myself.
“Come on, Syd. Let’s try to sleep,” he says, and at the sound of “Syd,” I straighten up. No one calls me Syd—not ever. The only person who did left me and never looked back. I open my mouth to correct him—to yell or scream or tell him to back off—but it’s strangely nice. The way “Syd” rumbles in his throat in a way that’s both soothing and disquieting. And it’s more than that. I feel guilty. He did all this for me—risked his life to help me find Sammy.
I do as the officer says and lie down atop the cardboard, but this time we face each other.
He closes his eyes first and we fall asleep to the sound of dropping rain, flickering lights, and the steady hum of our breathing.
I wake up to shaking, the concrete floor humming beneath me, the light fixtures swaying to and fro. This has been happening for a while now—violent tremors shaking the entire underground due to the violence of Hurricane Angelica. I don’t even want to think about what’s going on up there. I don’t even want to think about my mother or Ezra or Kathy. It’s too much—especially when my mind is so focused on Sammy.
I check my phone, which is miraculously still charged, and see that it’s ten a.m., but time doesn’t seem to matter here. How can it, when the only thing here is darkness and water?
Of course Will is already up, squeezing excess water out of his dark blue shirt, his hair already perfectly smoothed back, looking tailored in sleek military precision. He’s sitting on a flattened cardboard box a few feet from his makeshift bed. He stops squeezing the water out of his jacket and places it beside himself so he can study something in his hands. Turning it over and over again between his fingers.
“What’s that?” I ask and he startles at my voice, hazel eyes flickering up to meet mine. For a moment, he doesn’t look like a cop. Not in his white T-shirt, not with his dirty boots and tired eyes. He looks his age, young and strangely cute.
My cheeks redden at the thought. God, I need to get a grip.
“It’s a baseball,” he says, handing me the small white ball. I turn it over in my fingers, studying the bumpy red stitches.
“A baseball? Do you think it belonged to one of the workers down here?”
Will shakes his head. “Why would they bring a baseball down here? This isn’t the kind of place you play a game of catch in.”
“What are you getting at?”
Will looks at me for a moment before scratching his head. “I don’t know. I just wonder who could have left it here. This isn’t an active station. Who’s been here before?”
I let out a loud laugh, and just as I expect, he rolls his eyes. “Now who’s the one being crazy?”
He snorts. “Still you, I’m just speculating. You were ready to chase a ghost through a mountain of metal.”
I laugh back at him, and the pressure that has been inside my chest since we’ve been down here eases a bit. We smile at each other, ridiculous and grinning, trapped in this maze of tunnel. God, I can’t believe I’d ever thought he had a wife and kids. It’s so obvious now, everything about him, from the dimple in his cheek to the way his eyes crinkle when he smiles, just screams young. Too young.
We start our morning by walking, splitting granola bars and raisins between the two of us. We talk comfortably, as though something about last night—everything about last night—made us friends somehow.
“Pass me the ball,” I say with a smile, referencing the ratty baseball he’s been passing between his hands.
“You play?” he asks as we continue walking. He surprises me by throwing it fast to the side, but my reflexes are faster and I catch it before it falls into a puddle on the ground.
“When I was a kid—not so much now. I still love baseball, though. Ezra and I were supposed to go to a Mets game in the fall, but, well, that’s not gonna happen.” Especially since we’re trapped down here. Especially since we’re broken up.
The mere mention of this name is enough to get me upset and wound up.
“Who’s Ezra?” Will inquires as we walk, and I pass the ball back to him, trying my best not to make a face. I’m not in the mood to talk about Ezra anymore. I wish I’d never even brought it up.
“Just some guy,” I say, and I see Will raise an eyebrow beside me.
Instead, we talk about our friends, school, and the police academy, passing the ball between us as we move along.
We talk about what it’s like to have a father and yet feel fatherless without going into too much detail. We say nothing about circumstance—only feelings. The crushing weight of your own
disappointment, the constant quest for approval, the bumpy, jagged scars on your heart that never seem to really go away.
“So he left you. Is that why you’re the one who’s got to look out for Sammy?”
“No. I mean, yes. That’s partly it. I mean, my mom is a nurse and she has to take double shifts to keep up with our rent,” I say, repeating the exact line she’s always given me, my voice numb and not interested at all in talking more about her. Though, it always feels like a lie. I always wonder if she works more on purpose just so she can avoid us. Just because she’s not sure if she can handle being a mother to Sammy. “But Sammy, he . . . he’s got some issues.”
Will nods as though he knew all along. Because what kind of kid would go running through the subway system? What other kid wouldn’t make a noise about losing the only adult with them? Still, I’m angry. I don’t want him assuming anything about my brother.
“Well, they’re not issues, exactly,” I say, and Will just nods again. “It’s just the way he is. The way he’s built. It’s almost like a personality trait.” Almost, I say to myself. Just almost.
“I knew a girl with Asperger’s. At the academy. She’d walk through the halls taking every left turn whenever she felt agitated.”
I stop and swivel to look at him, my anger rising for a reason I can’t exactly pinpoint. “Don’t tell me some fake academy story thinking you can relate to me. Sammy’s my brother. No one else knows what it’s like. You don’t know what it’s like.” I don’t want to yell at him like this, but I can’t help it. I can’t help but feel destructive and angry. I wish Sammy was here. Oh God, all I want is to find him. To hold him in my arms and give him the kind of hug that only I’m allowed to give him.
I storm away from Will, yelling that I’m off to pee so he doesn’t follow me. I find a quiet corner and take a deep breath, trying to soothe my nerves and thanking God my diet’s so fiber-poor that I don’t need to go number two yet.