The box contained a brand new pair of pink Nike running shoes. They were the right size and everything; of course my brother was smart enough to know what to get.
“You shouldn’t have, Aaron,” I said, marveling at them. They had that amazing plastic smell, unique to new sneakers.
“It’s your Sweet Sixteen,” my brother said.
Even though there were still patches of snow on the ground and I didn’t own anything in the way of winter running gear, I was dying to try the shoes on. Still, I knew once I put them on my feet, I couldn’t return them, and returning them for cash was already in my thoughts.
“We’re really far behind on rent,” I told my brother solemnly. “Almost seven hundred dollars behind, and there are only two weeks left in December.”
“Something will happen,” he assured me.
I knew nothing good was going to happen in the next two weeks to financially rescue us.
“Did you save the receipt when you bought these?” I asked. “I really can’t keep them. They’re worth too much.”
My brother shook his head. “No receipt. They’re yours.”
I couldn’t fall sleep that night. I tossed and turned, my head filled with concerns for the Chan family, wonderment about Felix, my parents’ whereabouts, and above all, how we were going to pay rent. At some point, I heard activity on the other side of my bedroom wall and reasoned that Mr. Chan must have gotten home with Feng.
I was sixteen. I had somehow always imagined that on this day, I would have a big party and a boyfriend would kiss me on the cheek right after I blew out the candles on a giant yellow cake with butter cream frosting. There would have been pink balloons filled with helium and a pile of presents that it would have taken me an hour to open.
Somehow, sixteen didn’t feel any different than fifteen, and fifteen had started to feel like… twenty-five.
“Hey, Gigi, I need to have a word with you.”
I was in the middle of ringing up a customer when I heard Jim’s voice the next day. It was a Saturday, our busiest day of the week, and only an hour after we opened. Jim was not exactly a comedian, but I had never heard him sound so stern before.
“Sure, Jim,” I said, closing my drawer and leaving Nastaja alone behind the counter.
Nastaja rolled her enormous eyes at me in sympathy. No one especially enjoyed dealing with Jim.
I followed Jim to the break room. Mark was already there, sitting down at the table where we all ate lunch. I hated the break room; it always either stank like sour milk or burned microwave popcorn, and sometimes that smell would linger in my pink denim jacket most of my walk home. There was a stack of print-outs of our daily sales reports on the table. Mark looked up at me with a frown and his eyes locked on me like a vampire’s would on prey.
That’s when I had a pretty good idea of exactly what was coming next.
“Your drawer was sixty bucks short last night at closing,” Jim said, cutting right to the chase. “Do you have anything you want to tell me?”
I shrugged and looked at the floor. I wanted to tell him that Mark was robbing him blind. I was so ashamed in that moment; ashamed to be accused of stealing, ashamed of myself that I hadn’t ratted on Mark when I had first caught him stealing paint. How naïve and dumb was I that I had allowed myself to believe that he only stole art supplies that he needed for school, and that he actually rang up the sales on pay days? Dianne had even told me, without any knowledge of what I’d seen Mark do, that she had heard Mark and his girlfriend had tons of money; Mark’s dad was a politician in New Jersey. I had always pictured Mark and Ines living in some run-down, unfinished loft space somewhere in Bushwick when I learned that they lived in Brooklyn. In actuality, they lived in a fancy building with a doorman in Clinton Hill.
I looked up and faced Jim but nothing came to my lips. My fate was already sealed. I didn’t have the nerve to tell him that Mark had obviously helped himself to money out of my drawer after I left early to pick Feng up from school. That was perhaps why Mark had been all too willing to fill in for me. I was meticulous about my drawer, right down to the penny. But Mark was the assistant manager. There was nothing I could claim at that point to redeem myself; anything I said was just going to make me look like a liar, and a babyish one, at that.
I had been stupid, stupid, stupid.
“I didn’t take money out of the drawer,” I said firmly.
We were locked in a stare-down for at least thirty seconds, me and Jim, both of us with our arms crossed over our chests until I finally redirected my piercing glare at Mark.
Mark immediately looked away and coughed nervously into his hand.
“You can empty out your locker and be on your way,” Jim told me.
It was obvious that he was going to stand there, right there in the break room, watching me until I took my pink denim jacket and canvas bag out of my locker and left the store.
“What about my pay?” I dared to ask. “Today’s pay day. You owe me for two weeks.”
I couldn’t believe the words were coming out of my mouth. I had never before in my whole life dared to be so demanding with an adult, but I had to ask. Without that six hundred bucks, my brother and I would definitely be out in the street. I could not believe I had worked so many hours in the last two weeks only for him to refuse to pay me.
“You’re lucky I’m not calling the cops,” Jim reprimanded me. “Take your things and get out of here before I pick up the phone.”
I grabbed my coat and bag out of my locker and kicked it shut, enjoying the WHAM it made when the door slammed against the wall and the combination lock jiggled. I could feel shame and anger boiling in the pit of my stomach, rising up my throat. It was the most humiliating moment of my life. If only that idiot store manager knew who I really was, knew how I had been raised, knew that I had spent the last two days trying to comfort a little boy terrified of his sister’s medical condition. If I had wanted to actually steal from Prekin, I surely would have been more creative in my efforts, and made sure that Jim never, ever found out.
“You might want to count your stock of gold leaf,” I hissed on my way out of the break room.
I walked so fast away from the store I was practically running, almost barreling over tourists who were in my way. I didn’t know where to go or what to do. I was back at square one at job hunting, having to find a job immediately, knowing I was already six hundred dollars behind in my earnings for the month.
So, this is your compromise, huh, God? My job for Quian’s life? Some deal. You haven’t even really made good on your end yet. She doesn’t remember her parents. She can’t talk.
I was walking, walking, further east, reaching Avenue A and remembering that Felix had said that the tattoo parlor where he worked was somewhere around there. But I was in no mood to stalk boys. I knew I was going to burst out crying at any second.
I reached the highway – the FDR – and had to walk downtown three blocks to find a footbridge overpass to cross over to the East River Park on the other side. Yesterday’s strange, gloomy weather had turned to crystal clear skies and bitterly cold wind. Surely, more snow was on the way. As I sat down on a park bench facing the East River and the buildings of Brooklyn across the waves, I let all of the thoughts in my mind roll out across the water.
I tried to let my mind clear itself and unwind. There was no point in indulging in revenge fantasies, in clinging to anger, in replaying in my head the scenario that had just unfolded in the break room, imagining more sarcastic ways in which I could have told off Jim and Mark. None of it mattered. The only things that mattered were that Felix no longer knew where he could find me, and that I needed money for rent.
I let my mind drift out toward the water; the lapping of the waves lulling me into a state of complacency. My eyes wandered down to where the river curled around Brooklyn beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. All that water. I wondered where it went. And then I realized… it went to the beach. Felix had said his neighborhood was Brighton Beach. It w
as reasonable to assume that there was an actual beach there, right?
Before I knew it, without any real hope of actually running into Felix by traveling to his neighborhood, I was swinging my canvas bag over my shoulder and walking toward the subway line that would take me out to Brighton Beach. I probably should have immediately resumed my job hunt, going from store to store in the Flatiron District, but I was in no mental state to try to be charming or professional.
I took a quick glance at the subway map before boarding the train to at least get some kind of an idea of where I was going, and it looked like it was going to be a long ride. Sure enough, it did look like the F train would deliver me at the end of an island. I had never really thought about New York City being right by the ocean before.
I took out my sketch pad from my canvas bag and started drawing. Using a black ballpoint pen with the finest tip available, I started doing a series of line drawings where the entire illustration was just one long, unending line. It was difficult and required my complete concentration, but it took my mind off of Prekin. I barely noticed when the train emerged from underground tunnels and soared above ground on an elevated track, high above the arches of McDonald’s and level with the rooftops of big apartment buildings. I was pleasantly surprised when the car of my train filled with cold winter sunlight, and when I looked through the windows, I could see that people in this neighborhood kept the rooftops of their buildings immaculate, hung their laundry from drying lines and kept lawn chairs and picnic tables for rooftop entertaining.
By the time the train rolled to a slow, lazy stop at the end of the line, I had filled half of my notebook with delicate line portraits of True Heart, Jacinda, Dianne, Eliot, Jacinda’s friend Roy, and lastly, Felix. I had thought about drawing Mama and Daddy, but the sad truth was, I couldn’t remember the details of their faces closely enough to put them on paper. It had been almost two months since I’d even studied a picture of either of them.
The shoreline in Brighton Beach was not what I had been expecting, really. It was a beach, certainly, but it was December and fortunately not very windy. There was a long boardwalk with wooden benches, and in the distance I could see the ferris wheel and rickety wooden roller coasters of Coney Island. Behind me, enormous red-brick apartment buildings, at least forty stories each, dotted the coast like Legos. I wondered if Felix went home at night to one of those buildings. I imagined that this was a really nice place to live, right by the beach, with the smell of saltwater taffy in the air even during the dismal winter months.
I sat down on a wooden bench and drew the waves. Then I turned and drew the buildings behind me, again trying to keep my hand steady and the pen connected to the paper from start to finish. The sun was growing low in the sky and the tide was coming in. When I stood to brush off my legs and walk back to the subway, I was almost knocked over with the sensation of dread that I was going to have to go back to my apartment and tell my brother I had been fired. Even worse, I was completely out of money. All I had in the world was in our rent drawer; I had been entirely depending on Jim to pay me earlier that afternoon so that I could even buy lunch.
By the time I got back to the apartment, my stomach was rumbling. I was taken by surprise when I saw all of our lights on and Feng sitting on the couch with my brother reading a library book to him. I was so accustomed to arriving home to a sad, dark apartment and to my brother lying on the couch watching television, that this scene of normalcy was kind of shocking.
“Mr. Chan came by,” Aaron told me. “He asked if we could keep an eye on Feng until he gets home from the hospital later.”
“Nice to see you, Feng,” I said. I actually was glad to see the little boy, since clearly he was pulling my brother out of his miserable sad funk. But his presence meant another serving of dinner I was going to have to provide. And I really didn’t want to announce to an audience of two that I had been fired for a crime I hadn’t committed. My brother would never in a million years understand why I couldn’t just be honest with Jim about what had happened.
To my even greater surprise, my brother maneuvered himself off of the couch and hobbled into the kitchen to talk to me privately. Usually he only budged off the couch to go to the bathroom. He leaned against the kitchen counter and lowered his voice to barely above a whisper.
“Mr. Chan is freaking out,” he confided to me. “Quian’s hospital bill is already over ten thousand dollars and she’s going to have to be on a breathing respirator for a while. He looks exhausted, too. Do you think…”
He trailed off and I knew he was about to ask me something I probably wasn’t going to like.
“Would it be OK if we offer to let Feng stay here whenever the Chans need us to keep an eye on him? He’s a really nice kid.”
“Eric!” Feng called from the couch. “Finish the story!”
Our fridge contained one packet of beef-flavored ramen noodles and three ketchup packets. If Feng hadn’t been sitting in our living room, I would have given serious consideration to going to the food pantry at St. Patrick’s to ask for cans of soup. We were in that much trouble with rent. It pained me to think of all the times I had worked as a volunteer in my lifetime at soup kitchens, dumping heaps of mashed potatoes with a smile onto plates held by outstretched arms. What I wouldn’t have given for a huge serving of mashed potatoes with butter melting at its center that night. All I had eaten all day was a dry bagel from the street vendor that morning, and over the course of the day I had probably walked at least four miles.
When my brother wasn’t paying attention, I pinched a twenty from our rent drawer and went down to the street, where I bought minimal groceries and an extra roll of toilet paper. As the deli owner counted my change and handed me back four dollars and fourteen cents, I cursed Mark in my head. I hoped he was happy with himself and his crappy job at Prekin. He had taken away the only thing in my life that had given me and my brother any kind of stability.
Mr. Chan knocked on our door to fetch Feng around eleven o’clock, long after the boy had fallen asleep on our couch. I hadn’t had the heart to tell my brother that I had lost my job, and as he yawned and stretched out on the couch, I couldn’t find the words. I assured myself there was some way I could make everything right before I had to tell him what had happened.
The next morning I woke up at the crack of dawn, and it occurred to me that since I didn’t have to be at work, or really, anywhere by any particular time, I might as well get dressed and scope out The Grey Dog café to see if that reporter from Time really did want to meet me. I had made no mention to my brother about my letter to him, or the response in the newspaper. While my brother wanted to pretend that nothing related to my parents’ finances or the case involving him was real, I couldn’t ignore what was going on beyond the borders of our neighborhood forever. I was particularly worried about what might happen to my brother if he was expected in a court room somewhere and didn’t show up. I watched Law & Order sometimes at school. I knew you could go to jail for ignoring a summons.
The Grey Dog in the Village was really crowded. The line just for take-away coffee was nearly out the door. I stepped inside, very self-conscious, wondering if Anthony Michaels was there, if he knew what I looked like, if he’d been watching the door open and close all week to see if I’d take his bait. He certainly had a huge advantage over me in that all he had to do was turn on channel 224 on the local cable service to see what I looked like. I, on the other hand, had no idea who he might be in this crowd of people eating breakfast.
I joined the coffee line behind a girl with shiny brown hair wearing a heavy winter coat, talking on her cell phone, obviously on her way to a job. I surveyed the breakfast crowd. There was an older couple in their sixties sitting in the back, engrossed in conversation. There were two hipster-looking girls sitting next to them, having a lively discussion with hand gestures and eye-rolling. At the next table was a young couple. A baby was seated in the mother’s lap, acting fussy and smearing apricot jam everywhere. And at t
he next table was a man who looked to be in his forties with salt and pepper hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a goatee, staring right at me.
My glance in his direction lingered just long enough for him to point a finger at me and raise his eyebrows as if to question, “is it you?” without saying a word.
I held up one finger as if suggesting he should wait, not especially wanting to waste money on coffee now that I had established that he was, indeed, there to meet me. But the smell of the coffee was overwhelming me. I’d only eaten a little bit of white rice and two hot dogs for dinner the night before. The shiny, sugar-dusted scones and muffins behind the glass counter display looked so delicious, I thought I might pass out even just looking at them. Sadly, I doubted I had enough money to get a pastry and a coffee. It was one or the other, and the only money I had on me was the change from the deli the night before.
“Grace,” Mr. Michaels said as I sat down across from him with my coffee.
“Mr. Michaels, I presume,” I said, studying him.
He looked smart, but I anyone who wore wire-rimmed glasses looked smart to me. He also wore a very tasteful gray cashmere V-neck sweater over a black t-shirt, which made him look casual yet professional. Next to him, on his seat, was a stylish brown leather messenger bag. He was eating a thick, greasy omelet loaded down with white cheese and spinach. The smell of it made my stomach rumble so loudly that I shifted positions in my seat out of embarrassment.
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