Here Today

by Ann M. Martin

  “Can I go visit Doris in New York?”

  “What?” Mr. Dingman tossed the papers aside and removed his glasses. “What?” he said again.

  “Can I go to New York? To visit Doris?”

  “By yourself? Of course not.”

  “Please, Dad. I really want to. I need to see Doris.” Ellie didn’t add that she also needed to escape from Spectacle.

  “But Ellie, you can’t travel to New York alone.”

  “Then let’s all go. Vacation is coming up. The first week of March.”

  Mr. Dingman paused, cleared his throat, and said, “It’s a nice idea, Ellie, but … we can’t afford it.”

  Ellie had been thinking about this conversation all afternoon, and she was prepared. “Wouldn’t you like to know what Doris is doing?” she asked. “She has a whole life down there in New York City.”

  Mr. Dingman’s eyes darted briefly to the darkness outside the window before he said, “We still can’t afford to go.”

  “So let me visit her by myself.”

  “Ellie! Absolutely not,” said Mr. Dingman. “That’s the end of this discussion.”

  Ellie had other ideas, and they involved telling a lot of lies, but she didn’t care. She was desperate.

  The last day of school before vacation was a Friday. On Wednesday afternoon that week, Ellie sat on Holly’s stoop, running the tip of her rubber boot through the slush that had accumulated on the Majors’ front walk. “Holly?” she said. “On Monday, do you think you could take care of Albert and Marie all day? I’ll pay you three dollars.”

  “What?” said Holly. “Why? What are you going to be doing?”

  “I just feel like I need a little break. All I do is go to school, do my homework, take care of the house, take care of Albert and Marie. I’d like one day when I could just, you know, spend the whole day reading in the bathtub. Without being bothered. You could invite them over to your house to make fudge or something.”

  “Well, all right. But what if they get bored and want to go home?”

  “Huh.” Ellie hadn’t thought of that. “Okay, then,” she said after a moment. “I know. There are special programs going on at the library all week, because of vacation. Do you think your mom could drop you and Albert and Marie off at the library on her way to work Monday morning? And pick you up at the end of the day? She would understand if you said I needed a break, wouldn’t she?”

  “I guess so.”

  “And she’d like the idea of your spending the day at the library. Very educational.”

  “What is going on at the library?”

  “I don’t remember exactly,” said Ellie. “But I’ll find out. Everything sounded like fun.”

  That night, Ellie sat at the kitchen table, her math homework spread in front of her. She tried hard to concentrate on the questions about angles and degrees. But her mind kept straying to her closet and the things hidden at the back of it: her packed suitcase and her broken piggy bank, which was actually a Siamese cat bank. Despite the fact that the bank had once been a present from Holly, Ellie had smashed it with a hammer and removed all her money from it—wads of crumpled dollar bills, which she now knew were enough to buy a round-trip ticket to New York City.

  Ellie’s lies had been told, her plans were in place.

  On Friday afternoon, the students in Ellie’s class were restless. A single hour lay between them and nine days of freedom. Earlier, Ellie had been not just restless, but panicked: Holly had not come to school. Ellie had spoken to her on the phone the night before—but she had not appeared at the bus stop in the morning. What had happened? Was she sick? What if she couldn’t take Albert and Marie on Monday? Worse, what if Holly’s mother suspected something?

  At lunch, Ellie had used her ice-cream dime to call Holly from the pay phone in the school lobby.

  “What’s the matter? Are you all right?” she had squeaked when Holly answered the phone.

  “I just have a cold,” said Holly. “I already feel better.”

  Ellie breathed a sigh of relief. “Okay. I’ll come see you after school.”

  Now it was almost the end of the day, and Ellie’s classmates were fidgeting and wiggling and whispering.

  “Okay, kids,” said Mr. Pierce as he closed his copy of the sixth-grade math book, the one with the answers to the problems written in red ink. “I know it’s hard to concentrate. I have an idea. Put your books away and let’s talk about what we’re going to do over vacation. We’ll go row by row, starting with you.” He pointed to Maggie. “This will be an exercise in public speaking,” he added. “When it’s your turn, please stand by your desk, speak clearly, and keep your comments brief and to the point.”

  Ellie thought for a moment. Holly wasn’t here, and when Ellie walked out the door of Washington Irving Elementary, she wouldn’t see or hear from a single person in her class until school started again. She could say anything at all about her vacation plans.

  Ellie realized that her heart was not pounding, her hands were not sweating. In fact, she was almost sorry she was in the back row and would have to wait so long for her turn. She listened impatiently as classmate after classmate stood and talked about sleeping late, visiting grandparents, playing with brothers and sisters. When Tammy said grandly, “My parents said I could get a new record player,” Ellie had to stop herself from snorting.

  Finally, after what seemed like years, Mr. Pierce said, “Okay, Ellie. Your turn.”

  Ellie rose and said proudly, “I will be going to New York City, traveling there by myself.” She looked across the room and saw that although Tammy was still facing the blackboard, her back had stiffened. “My mother has an agent now and is in a Broadway play, so I’ll be going to the theater every night and eating dinner with other actresses and actors. Of course, I’ll also get to go to the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building and Central Park. I’ll be leaving on Monday, and I’ll be gone the rest of the week.”

  Ellie sat down again and looked smugly at the row of sparrows. She was staring at the back of Tammy’s head when Tammy turned around slowly, caught Ellie staring at her, reddened, and faced front again. Later, when school was finally over, Ellie sat cleaning out her desk while her classmates gathered their things and ran gleefully for the door. A shadow fell across Ellie, and she glanced up. Tammy stood over her. She offered Ellie a smile.

  “Are you really going to New York?” she asked.

  Ellie gazed around the room, trying to look perplexed, then murmured, “That was so weird. I thought I heard someone say something. But I guess it was nothing.” She stared at Tammy for a moment, as if looking through her. “Yup. Definitely nothing.”

  The first weekend of vacation passed slowly. The weather was chilly and gray and rainy, and Mr. Dingman, who had had fewer jobs than usual lately, seemed content to sit around the house for two days. He assured Ellie, though, that he would be starting a new job on Monday; that in fact he would have to leave early to get to the job site on time. Ellie was relieved, and hoped this also meant that he wouldn’t be home before dinner that night.

  On Monday morning Ellie awoke at five, even though her bus didn’t leave until close to one. She lay in bed and tried to recall everything she had learned about New York City. She’d needed a lot of information—such as where the bus station was and where Doris’s apartment was and the general layout of the streets. Ellie had visited the library and found maps of New York and books about Gotham, and had studied and read until she felt familiar with the area of New York encompassing the bus station, which she learned was called the Port Authority, and West 55th Street.

  At six, Ellie heard her father get up, and he left the house by six-thirty. Perfect. By nine, Ellie had sent Albert and Marie across the street to the Majors’, bag lunches in their hands as if they were going to school. A few minutes later she watched Selena back her Ford station wagon into the street, and she counted heads to make sure four people were in the car.

  As soon as the car had disappear
ed down Route 27, Ellie began rushing around her house. She cleaned. She made piles of sandwiches and left them in the refrigerator. She wrote notes reminding Marie and Albert and her father to take the garbage out, to bring the mail in, to feed Kiss (but to remember that Kiss was on a diet), and to keep her water bowl full. An image of Doris flying around the house on the Sunday after Thanksgiving came into Ellie’s head, but she erased it quickly.

  At eleven, Ellie called the Royal Taxi Company for a ride to the bus station, and by twelve-thirty she was standing at the ticket window, her suitcase at her feet, purchasing a round-trip ticket to New York City. She told the clerk that she would be traveling by herself but that she would be met in New York by her mother.

  “All right,” replied the clerk. “You’ll have a stop in Kingston, but don’t get off there. Stay in your seat. New York is another couple of hours from Kingston.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Ellie’s adventure began. The bus to Kingston arrived, and she took a seat directly behind the driver, thinking how nice it was to board a bus without all the other passengers staring at her and holding their noses. Ellie’s suitcase was stowed in the belly of the bus, and she felt light and free, nothing to keep track of except her book bag, and the money that was stuffed into her coat pockets.

  Gears grinding, the bus pulled away from the curb and chugged along King Street. Harwell’s and La Duchesse Anne and the Starlight Diner and Washington Irving Elementary fell away as Ellie left Spectacle behind.

  For a while, Ellie simply looked out the window. The bus wound through small towns, through the countryside, along barren roads dotted only with auto parts stores and gas stations. She was just about to dig her new Nancy Drew mystery, The Password to Larkspur Lane, out of her book bag, when the woman sitting next to her said, “Are you traveling alone, dear?”

  Ellie knew she shouldn’t talk to strangers, but she didn’t really see how she could avoid it. For one thing, she would have to talk to a cab driver when she arrived in New York, and he (Ellie assumed all cab drivers were he’s) would be a stranger.

  And now here was her seatmate, a stranger, asking her a question. Ellie couldn’t very well ignore the woman, could she?

  “Yes,” said Ellie. Then, to be polite, she added, “Are you?”

  The woman laughed. “Well, I guess that’s a fair question. Yes. I’m traveling alone, too. I’m on my way to Kingston to visit my sister.”

  The woman was old, older than Miss Nelson or Miss Woods. And she was so frail, her skin so papery, that she looked as though she could vanish in a little puff of smoke at any moment.

  “I’m on my way to visit my mother,” said Ellie.

  “To visit her?”

  Ellie nodded. “She’s in New York City, getting established.”

  “Oh …”

  “As an actress,” added Ellie.

  “I see.” The woman looked as though she didn’t see at all, and also as though she might have a lot more questions.

  “Have you ever read a Nancy Drew book?” asked Ellie, who was in no mood to start explaining Doris.

  “Why, no, dear.”

  Ellie didn’t stop talking about Nancy Drew until the bus had pulled into Kingston.

  At the depot, Ellie helped the woman off of the bus, then returned to her seat. She was relieved when no one else sat next to her, and she spent the next two hours reading, napping, and poring over the one map of New York City that she had brought with her. She was silently rehearsing what she would say to the cab driver who would take her to Doris’s apartment, when to her left she saw rising above the horizon a collection of tall buildings. They appeared so suddenly that she gasped. As the bus drove on and the city loomed closer, Ellie could pick out familiar buildings, ones she had seen in the books at the library.

  Ellie was gawking out her window when the bus turned sharply to the right and, before she knew it, was trundling through a dim tunnel. After several minutes she saw a pinprick of light ahead, and when the bus emerged into the late afternoon, Ellie found herself in a canyon of bricks and cement and granite.

  “Gotham,” she said under her breath.

  The bus turned several corners, then drove inside a massive building and trailed through a labyrinth of dark passages until it squeaked to a halt and the driver opened the doors and stepped off the bus. Everyone else on the bus rose and started impatiently down the aisle. Ellie joined them. She reached for her suitcase as the driver unloaded it, and was startled when a man stepped in front of her to grab his suitcase first. Then she followed the other passengers through a doorway into a lighted area.

  What was this? A waiting room? Ellie had no idea. It was full of people, most of them in a hurry, the rest of them standing in long lines. She looked around and, at last, after spotting a sign that said EXIT, rode up an escalator like the one in Harwell’s. At the top, Ellie found herself in a room that was similar to the one below, but even larger and more crowded with bustling people. However, ahead of her she saw doorways and a sidewalk, and beyond that a street with cars and buses and yellow taxicabs. She could hear the blare of horns. Ellie lugged her suitcase to the doors and stepped outside.

  New York City spread before her.

  “Don’t gawk,” Ellie reminded herself. “Don’t look like a tourist. Look like you belong here.”

  But Ellie was sure she was gawking anyway, and she couldn’t help it. The city was just so … busy. She saw flashing signs and moving cars and hurrying people, and heard shouts and backfires and bells ringing, and smelled hot dogs and exhaust and something steamy and sour that she couldn’t identify. And so, for a moment, she stood on the sidewalk and turned in a tight circle, looking up, up, up until she was dizzy. All around her towered buildings taller than any in Spectacle. Ellie felt like a chipmunk on the forest floor.

  She didn’t know how long she might have stood there, on the sidewalk outside the Port Authority, but someone bumped into her from behind (and didn’t bother to say “excuse me”), and she remembered what she had to do.

  Clutching her suitcase with one hand, and a five-dollar bill with the other, Ellie stepped to the curb, saw a yellow cab about to drive by her and, just as if she were in a movie, she put one arm in the air and called, “Taxi!”

  The taxi swerved toward Ellie, so that she had to jump aside. When it stopped, she opened the back door, shoved her suitcase onto the seat, climbed in after it, and gave the driver Doris’s address as she had rehearsed it on the bus.

  The driver said nothing, just jerked the cab back out into the traffic. Ellie was riveted to her window. She gripped the armrest and stared outside as more shops and people and cars and baby carriages and dogs on leashes than she could imagine whizzed by. She watched the street signs, too, and was relieved to see that the numbers were rising. Very soon they were passing 53rd Street. Then the driver turned off the busy avenue and into a quieter neighborhood. Here were fewer stores and more trees, and row after row of low buildings, all connected, each with a short flight of steps leading from the sidewalk up to a doorway.

  “Here you go,” the driver said suddenly, pulling up next to one of the flights of steps.

  Ellie paid the driver. As the cab sped away she stood on the sidewalk, looking for the Buick. When she couldn’t find it, she turned and gazed up the steps at the number painted over the doorway. Doris’s address.

  Ellie was standing outside Doris’s New York City apartment.

  The steps to Doris’s apartment building were made of some kind of brown stone and were crumbling. Ellie climbed them carefully. When she reached the top she tried the door, unsure what to expect. She had never been to an apartment building before. The door opened, and Ellie entered a vestibule. Another door was before her, and beyond that was a flight of stairs leading upward. On one wall of the vestibule was a column of buttons, and next to each was a slip of paper with a name and number printed on it. The newest-looking piece of paper read DORIS DAY—3B.

  Ellie looked at the buttons. She looked at the door
before her. Maybe the buttons were doorbells. Ellie pressed the one by Doris’s name. She heard nothing. She waited for several moments. She pressed the button again. Nothing. She looked at the cracks running down the dirty walls of the vestibule, at some grease marks on the glass doors, at dust and a wad of hair and lint in a corner. Ellie became aware of a familiar but unpleasant odor, which eventually she decided might be urine.

  She considered pressing the button again, but instead reached out and tried the door ahead of her. It opened, and Ellie, surprised, grabbed her suitcase and walked inside.

  3B, she thought. Where was 3B? She could see two doors, one at the foot of the stairs, one across the hall from it. Ellie peered at them. One said 1A and the other 1B.

  “Oh,” Ellie said aloud, and began to climb the stairs. The stairs were dark. She passed two lightbulbs that had burned out. At the second floor, she stopped and looked down the hallway, which was dingy and smelled vaguely of cooking oil and food—scorched coffee, roasted potatoes, and the pungent, swampy odor of old fried fish. When she reached the third floor she walked quickly to the door marked 3B and looked for a bell. She didn’t see one, though, so she rapped on the door.

  The hallway was silent.

  Ellie rapped again.

  Nothing.

  “Doris?” called Ellie. “Doris?”

  Ellie set her suitcase down.

  She knocked once more, called “Doris?” once more, then sat on her suitcase. She looked at her watch. Almost 5:15. Doris must be acting in her Broadway show. Ellie wished she knew which show it was so she could find it and surprise Doris when it was over. Ellie sat for five minutes, then looked at her watch again.

  Back in Spectacle, Holly’s mother would probably be picking up Holly and Marie and Albert at the library. Or maybe she had already picked them up. Ellie hoped her father would be home by the time Albert and Marie got back. If no one was there to greet her brother and sister, Holly’s mother might be worried. Well, that hardly mattered, Ellie realized. When Ellie didn’t show up in a reasonable amount of time, everyone would be worried. What would happen? Probably the grown-ups would talk to Holly, ask her if Ellie had said anything about what she wanted to do on her day off. Holly would think hard, remember Ellie saying something about taking a bath. Everyone would try to recall the last time they had seen Ellie. Finally, someone might suggest calling the police.