Very familiar.
He disappeared behind a display of novelty stamp and inkpad sets, out of my view, but I had already started wondering if, by some miracle, it was him.
Felix had been lurking around in the shadows of my thoughts since the night Jacinda and I had seen him in Brooklyn. I had waffled constantly between regret for not getting his phone number or his e-mail address, and relief, because if I had gotten his contact information, then it would only make sense that I would have arranged to spend time with him. And if I were to spend time with him, I wasn’t sure what would happen.
It was nearly twenty minutes before my eyes fell upon Felix again in the store. During those twenty minutes, I had paced the space behind the counter nonstop, wondering if he would say anything, or simply leave the store after browsing without even acknowledging me. He had made his way down to the lower level, and I almost had a heart attack when I saw his head, shaved closely again, his dark, dark hair cropped close to his skull as if it had been painted on, emerging from the stairwell. Our eyes met and it was painfully evident that I had been pretty much breathlessly awaiting the moment when we could acknowledge each other and pretend like we were surprised to see each other.
As if there was a chance he had stumbled upon the store out of a legitimate need for art supplies, and wasn’t totally trawling all of Soho for the store where I had mentioned I had a job.
Wait a minute, I realized, noticing that he was carrying several cans of spray paint. Maybe he was earnestly at Prekin to buy paint, and not just to chat me up.
My thoughts flashed toward my father’s story of being struck by lightning as a boy back in his home town. I wondered if he had felt anything like I did at that moment, breaking into a cold sweat and feeling my pulse race as Felix smiled on his way toward the counter.
“Hi,” I said, trying to be nonchalant and cool as he set his cans down on the counter in front of my register. The store was pretty dead, as it typically was before noon, and I couldn’t help but marvel that Felix had completely ignored Eliot, who was also working register.
“So, we meet again,” he said, smiling. “You look different, again.”
I had sort of become Jacinda’s hair dye guinea pig. Even though I knew that the crazier my hair looked, the more difficulty I would have finding work, I also knew that the crazier my hair looked, the less likely I was to be recognized as Grace Mathison. By mid-December, I had abandoned my lavender ends and had experimented with rainbow stripes, which had faded somewhat over my blond hair into kind of a pastel mess.
“Yeah,” I said, blushing. I tried to focus on ringing him up, wishing I could be flirtier or even just have the nerve to talk to him without my voice elevating by an octave. I was nervous. I hadn’t been so nervous the night we had stood under the street lamp outside the club in Brooklyn. “My friend, the one you met, is a hair dresser, and she likes to experiment on me.”
“What color is it, really?” he asked.
“Red,” I confessed.
“Ah, yes. The first time I saw you, it was red,” he said.
I blushed and focused on bagging his paint. He had bought six cans of spray paint in total, in various shades.
“Are you working on a project?” I asked.
“A project of sorts,” he replied. “I like to do murals, and there’s a brick wall in my neighborhood that has been begging me to decorate it.”
“Your total is fifty-three seventy-two,” I said, glancing at my register, a little afraid that I might forget to ask him to pay. My heart was beating so hard that I could sense my pulse in my wrists, and behind my knees. I could hear my own blood pumping through my ears.
Felix fumbled with his black leather wallet and handed me three twenty-dollar bills. I gave him change, but didn’t want our conversation to end just yet.
“Where is your neighborhood?” I asked him, immediately regretting that I had opted for such a personal question.
“Brighton Beach,” he said. “But I work not too far from here.”
I had no idea where Brighton Beach was, and I knew as soon as my shift ended that I was going to run over to the subway station on Bleecker St. to try to find it on the subway map.
“Where?” I asked, handing him his receipt.
“Blue Phoenix,” Felix said, his tone implying that I should recognize the name of the establishment. “It’s a pretty famous tattoo parlor on Avenue A. You should come by some time.”
“Sure,” I said, absolutely positive that I would never in my lifetime work up the nerve to drop by a boy’s place of employment, unannounced.
I handed him his bag, desperate for this to not be the last time I would see him.
“Merry Christmas,” I offered. “I mean, if I don’t see you again before then.”
“I don’t celebrate Christmas,” he said. “I’m Jewish.”
I was stupefied.
I am sure, even though I didn’t mean to do it, that I blinked emphatically and my jaw dropped open a little.
Felix was Jewish?
As in, didn’t love, or even believe in, Jesus?
“Oh,” I said, recovering. “Then, happy Hanukkah.”
“Thanks,” he said. That same dimpled smile that had touched my heart outside the club in Brooklyn spread across his face and he offered me a shy wave like the one he had given me on the A train the night we had first crossed paths. Before I knew it, he was out the door, and if my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me, he glanced over his shoulder quickly once, through the store’s large picture windows, to catch a parting glimpse of me.
All afternoon I berated myself for my stupidity in his presence. I hadn’t flirted well; I hadn’t even shown interest in him. I hadn’t asked what kind of a mural he was going to paint on that wall. I hadn’t asked for the cross street of his tattoo shop, and in my apoplectic nervousness, I had already forgotten the name of it. I had acted like such a moron that I was sure I would never see him again, and by the time my shift ended and I was walking home, I had convinced myself that he had definitely entered the store just to buy paint. He had probably been as surprised to see me there behind the counter as I had been to see him walking through the front door.
Then I oscillated into comforting myself. It didn’t matter that my flirtation with Felix had met an ugly and untimely end. If he was Jewish and not Christian, then I could hardly fall in love with him. I had spent my whole childhood dedicating my life to Jesus and couldn’t possibly take a boy seriously who didn’t believe in the same things I believed.
But then again, if God had abandoned me, then hadn’t Jesus, too? Maybe neither of them gave a hoot which boys I liked. As soon as I reminded myself that God and I were on the outs, then I began lamenting my behavior again. I had been a colossal idiot. There was no denying that I had a world-class crush on Felix, regardless of his faith. Honestly, I didn’t know that much about Jewish people other than that their Torah was basically the same as the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. I had seen “Fiddler On The Roof” once on the old-timey movie channel. On campus, I knew a handful of Jewish girls since Treadwell is a secular school. There was Ruth Halpern, who was roommates with Taylor Beauforte. I didn’t believe Ruth was especially religious, because she and Taylor had almost burned down the freshman dorm the year before I started school with Christmas lights in their room.
There was also Stacy Davidson, who I thoroughly hated because she was a terrible snob, but I didn’t know anything about her commitment to Judaism, either.
Ms. Zeigler, the French teacher, was an Orthodox Jew and always wore a long black skirt and flat shoes. But I hardly knew her well at all, since I took (and was failing) Spanish.
By the time I was almost home, I had convinced myself that our religious differences might not be such a big deal. I was open, at least, to learning more about Judaism, if it meant the possibility of having Felix as a boyfriend. But going about getting him to be my boyfriend? I didn’t know where to start.
My only hope at that point w
as to think of something downright brilliant to say, and then to visit Felix at work and stun him into liking me again.
My self-flagellation over the Felix failure was short-lived, however.
Because when I rounded the corner from Canal St. onto Baxter, I heard the howling of ambulance sirens and colored patterns of their lights reflecting off the shabby brick facades of our neighbors’ apartment buildings and the dirty snow on our curb. My life was about to change again… for the worse.
My first thought, selfishly, was that something bad had happened to my brother. But when I got closer to the crowd surrounding the ambulance, I remembered that it was very unlikely that my brother would have been down in the street. The crowd that had gathered toward the open back doors of the ambulance was mostly Chinese, including a lot of people from our building and shoppers from the stores on our street. The ambulance siren had silenced, but there was still a horrible howling, a wailing, and when I pushed my way gently through the crowd, I found its source.
Mrs. Chan was on her knees, her mouth gaping open in a horrible gap. She was rocking forward and backward, struggling to breathe through her sobs, as Feng stood next to her, immobile. His hand was on his mother’s shoulder but his eyes were frozen, unblinking, watching the actions of the paramedics.
Little Quian was on the ground. When I saw her skinny outstretched legs, all at once it became obvious what had happened. Her tiny light blue sneakers with the rainbows on their sides were several feet from her body, close to the edge of the crowd. She was lying in an enormous, thick pool of dark blood. The blood ran over the dark asphalt of our street and stained the gray snow that the plows had pushed up against the cars that had parked along the curb before the snow storm.
Police officers were questioning a cab driver. The driver was shaking, half-listening to them, mostly watching the paramedics tend to Quian. He was wearing a plaid flannel jacket, and later when I would try to remember what he looked like, all I would remember would be the reds and blues of that plaid.
Quian was hurt so badly that my brain wouldn’t even really allow me to understand where she had been injured. I couldn’t see what part of her was bleeding, she just looked broken everywhere. The paramedics finally positioned her bird-like neck in a brace and gently lifted her on a stretcher into the back of the ambulance. The entire process felt like it was happening in slow motion. The paramedics were urging Mrs. Chan to climb into the back of the ambulance to ride with Quian to the hospital. Feng climbed in and motioned for his mother to follow. She was unable to stand on her own, and the paramedics had to lift her by the elbows.
“Where are you taking her?” I asked, snapping out of my reverie and asking the paramedic who was about to close the ambulance doors in the back.
“NYU Downtown,” I was told.
The crowd dispersed so that the ambulance could make its way down the street, and then all that was left was the puddle and the ongoing interrogation of the cab driver. I thought of Mr. Chan, how he would be home from work soon and not have any idea of what had happened. I knew that he was a graduate student at a laboratory at a university somewhere, but at which school, I had no idea.
“I have to wait downstairs for Mr. Chan to come home,” I told my brother when I ran up to the apartment to drop off my canvas bag. “There’s been an accident. Quian was hit by a cab.”
This caught my brother’s attention and he sat up straight, alert in a way that he hadn’t been in two weeks.
“Is she OK?” he asked, his voice rich with genuine concern.
“No,” I said after a moment’s hesitation. “It looked really bad.”
My brother put his face in his hands and grew quiet. I saw his back start trembling and I ran over to him to hug him. Seeing my brother cry was as unnerving as seeing Daddy crying. Both were rare occurrences.
“I don’t understand why so many bad things are happening,” my brother whispered, his face red and eyes wet. “I’ve told God a million times now that I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
I sat down next to my brother on the couch and sighed. “I don’t think this has anything to do with God punishing you, Aaron. It was just an accident.”
“There are no accidents,” my brother snapped. “You know that’s what Daddy always says. When bad things happen it’s because God’s trying to send you a sign.”
I thought for a good long while before opening my mouth, because what I was about to say was so much of a reversal of how I had been raised to think of my dad’s gifts, that I felt almost like I was taking the name of the Lord in vain.
“Daddy’s not always right, Aaron,” I assured my brother. “He’s not God and he shouldn’t say things like that and put words in God’s mouth. If God was trying to send you a sign, he wouldn’t hurt a little girl like Quian, who’s never done anything bad in her whole life.”
I wasn’t telling my brother that to make him feel better; I had really started to question everything Daddy had ever taught me about God. In my heart, I felt like standing by my brother and rejecting my parents’ wealth and power was the right thing to do. I really couldn’t believe that God would punish our neighbors’ daughter because of anything my brother and I had done.
I waited down in front of our building in the freezing cold for Mr. Chan to come home. I didn’t want him to climb all the way up the six flights of stairs only to find an empty apartment and worry. Around seven o’clock I saw him round our corner and approach the building. He smiled happily when he saw me. He was carrying a bag of vegetables from the grocery store and it broke my heart that he had no idea what awful news I had in store for him.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Chan,” I said, breaking uncontrollably into a sob as soon as the words were pouring out of my mouth. “We have to go to the hospital. There was an accident, and Quian is hurt.”
Mr. Chan was so upset by my news that he was shaking. We walked to the corner and I realized I had no idea where the hospital that the paramedics had mentioned was located. There was no way I could ask Mr. Chan to follow me to the subway and wait for me to poke around on the map to find it. For all I knew, Quian might not have even made it; I could be leading a man to the worst news a father could ever have to face. I hailed a cab, knowing that spending twenty bucks on a ride further downtown was making my rent situation even more dire. But if ever there was a reason to spend money, getting a father to a hospital to see his daughter when she was in critical condition certainly qualified.
We rode in the back of the damp cab, all the while Mr. Chan asking me in his broken English what had happened. I did my best to explain that she had been hit by a cab, but since I hadn’t actually seen the accident, I couldn’t provide him with any other details. I also wasn’t sure he could really understand me, but I kept talking, because it made me feel better to be distracted.
We drove past the Federal Courthouse, where flashbulbs were popping from within a huge crowd of photographers gathered on the front stairs. It took me a moment to realize that the source of commotion was James Santangello, Juliette’s dad, who was exiting the courthouse with his team of lawyers. I thought wistfully about my friendship with Juliette and how drastically my life had changed in the last few months. I wondered if anything was ever going to be as simple and fun again as staying up late in our dorm room, eating microwave popcorn and watching old movies on TV. We had been doing exactly that just three months earlier, and it already felt like a century ago.
Luckily the cab driver knew just where to drop us off. The emergency room was crowded and disastrous, packed with people who were nauseous, clutching compresses to their foreheads, and frowning over clipboards as they filled out their medical history paperwork. An elderly woman was curled into a ball on a chair in the corner with her winter coat pulled over her entire body; only her legs stuffed into tan support hose and black orthopedic shoes could be seen beneath the blanket of blue corduroy. A very tough-looking guy, who appeared to be bleeding pretty profusely, was yelling at the head nurse through the
glass window separating the nursing staff from the general waiting room population, demanding to be seen. I could only guess what his problem was, and my best guess was gunshot wound.
I pointed to an empty blue vinyl chair. Mr. Chan sat down, and after waiting patiently for two minutes while the bleeding guy cussed out the nurse, my patience ran out.
“Excuse me, sir,” the nurse sternly told the cussing, bleeding guy. “I told you we will see you when a doctor becomes available. We have a triage system here, and there are a whole bunch of people whose needs are more urgent than yours, so kindly have a seat.”
“I’m bleedin’ here,” the guy insisted. “Do you not see that I am bleeding? Whose needs are more urgent than mine? I’m gonna sue this place, sue all y’all. That’s what I’m gonna do. Can I use your phone? I want to call a lawyer.”
“You cannot use my phone, sir. Please have a seat.”
The nurse reminded me of Jacinda. She was like a brick wall. Nothing was getting through her.
The guy was simply not going to have a seat. I should have been afraid of him – he was huge and obviously in some kind of serious trouble – but I wasn’t. I needed to know what was happening to Quian. I needed to have courage for Mr. Chan.
“Excuse me,” I said in a tiny voice.
The man ignored me.
“If you’re not gonna let me use your phone, then you gotta let me see a doctor. I’m bleeding all over this damn emergency room.”
“Excuse me,” I yelled.
He finally heard me and looked down at me, surprised that a tiny girl with a washed-out rainbow of hair was daring to address him.
“I’m here with the father of Quian Chan who was hit by a cab two hours ago. I need to know her status,” I said to the head nurse, ignoring the bleeding man who towered above me.
“Yeah, well I was here first, little girl, so why don’t you go have a seat,” the man said, stepping in front of me again.
I took a step to the side to avoid the blood pouring from beneath a compress on the man’s shoulder, and then pushed in front of him again.
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