I breathe through the tightness in my chest. “Yes. Laurie’s my brother. He’s fifteen.”
“How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“Me too.” He breathes in and out, staring at his fingers curled around the glass of lemonade. “You didn’t bring him with you, though.”
“He’s doing summer school,” I say. “So I’m on my own most of the time.”
I worry that I’ve been too obvious. Or careless. You’re not supposed to tell strangers that you’re home alone. Am I that desperate for a friend? Uh. Yes, I am.
He sits up a little straighter, looking right at me. His eyes, that intriguing blue shade capturing my gaze, are more penetrating and less evasive. “And your parents?”
“My mom is a hospital administrator,” I say. “I guess her predecessor was a disaster, so she’s spending all hours trying to convince her staff that she’s not the devil incarnate. She’s not home a lot.”
He nods.
“How about yours?”
He doesn’t answer at first and then just says, “Not around.”
I quickly say, “Cool.” I don’t know what not around really means, but I don’t want to pry. Parents are tricky. It’s not like I’m looking to be friends with his mom or dad anyway.
I bite my lip, wanting to seal the deal before we head anywhere near deep, painful conversation. I’m looking for companionship; I don’t want to go mucking around in the past. I want the past dead and buried in Minnesota.
“So I came over because I have a favor to ask.” I’m ad-libbing now. I came over to chew him out, but now I’m back to wanting a friend. He’s my best and only candidate.
“What kind of favor?”
“You know the neighborhood pretty well?”
“Yes.”
Excellent. That’s exactly what I’d hoped for.
“I need your help,” I say.
He looks at me, suspicion dawning in his eyes.
“I swear it doesn’t involve hauling boxes.”
The doorbell rings. I tense up.
“Just leave them!” he yells.
“Who is it?” I whisper, as if robbers are waiting on the other side of the door.
“My groceries,” he says.
“You have your groceries delivered?” I’m up and crossing the room. “I’ve gotta see this.”
I fling open the door to find three bags of groceries lying at my feet. A delivery guy has already made his way towards the elevator, but he looks over his shoulder when he hears the door open.
He looks at me and frowns. “Huh. I thought you were a guy.”
I roll my eyes and grab the bags.
“Kitchen?” I ask, heading in that direction. I assume it’s in the same spot as our kitchen. Since he gets up to follow me, I assume my assumption is right.
He watches as I unpack his groceries. He takes the items that need refrigerating and puts them away.
“You know, if you want to avoid future accusations of rudeness, opening the door is a good start.” I hand him a carton of eggs.
“I’ll try to remember that,” he says.
“So here’s the deal,” I say. “I’m new here, and since you abandoned me with my bags and I’ve now helped you with your bags, you owe me.”
He looks like he wants to argue, but he doesn’t say anything.
I sigh, wanting to be likable instead of demanding. “I’m sorry I’m not good at this.”
“Good at what?” he asks.
“Asking for favors.”
“Why not?”
My throat closes up. I don’t want to talk about why not. I don’t want to think about why not.
“My people skills are lacking.”
“I’ve noticed that.”
Laughing, I brush my fingers over his arm when I hand him a bag of carrots. The moment I touch him, we both stop. I’m not sure what’s happened, but it’s like the air has been sucked out of the room and we’re just looking at each other. I don’t think either of us is breathing.
I turn away, digging into the other grocery bag. What the hell was that?
“What’s the favor?” His voice is soft. I can’t look at him, so I look at the box of Frosted Mini-Wheats in my hands.
“I don’t get it.”
“I’m sorry?” He takes the box from me, but I’m still not looking at him. I’m staring at the kitchen counter.
“Manhattan,” I say, embarrassed by my flushed face and my beating heart and my sucky navigation skills. “I know it’s supposed to be a grid or something, but I keep getting lost and, to be honest, it’s a little intimidating. I don’t want to be lost in New York.”
I turn to face him. When I meet his gaze, nothing has changed. The room is back to normal. I can breathe. Maybe I just imagined that moment.
“I need a tour guide,” I say.
He stares at me. “You want me to help you?”
“Teach me about Manhattan. I live here now. I need to figure the city out.”
I think I catch the jump of his pulse in the vein at his throat. “I . . .”
“We can start small. Just a walk around the neighborhood.”
He looks away.
I try to lighten my voice. “I promise if I’m an intolerable person, I’ll never bother you again. Not even to tell you how rude you are.”
“Can I get that in writing?”
My smile is tingly as I realize he’s going to say yes.
“What if I am?” he asks.
I fold up the empty grocery bag. “Sorry?”
“What if I am a ghost?” He leans against the counter, watching me. “Would you still want to take a walk with me?”
I puzzle over his question. Is it a joke? The words sound like they should be a joke, but his tone isn’t teasing or even happy.
“If you decide you hate me, I’ve promised not to bother you,” I say. “So how about if I decide you’re a ghost, you promise not to haunt me. Okay?”
He closes his eyes and mine water, making him blur before me. I rub my eyelids; when I open them, he’s watching me and I shiver under his intense gaze.
“Okay.”
Chapter 5
I DON’T KNOW HOW I can do this. There has to be a way out of it. I could pretend to fall violently ill. I could pretend my mother is due home. I could start a small fire.
But I want to do this. I like the way we are talking. I like the way I am having a conversation.
I still want to know why the curse is playing with me.
But in the meantime, I’ll play.
“How about the park?” I ask.
* * *
Nothing in real life has prepared me for this. The face-to-face. Yes, I had my mother, and even though I was invisible to her, I could talk with her all the time. But a conversation with a girl? I’ve never had one.
Instead I’ve had books. And television shows. And movies. And overheard conversations. Because of this, the rhythms and the patterns that everyone else takes for granted aren’t foreign to me. This give-and-take of words, this verbal dance of share-and-withhold, confide-and-compel, is something I can try to fall into. I have practiced for so long in my head, without even knowing I was practicing. Now I’m reaching for the words and the way to say them.
She has no idea how astonishing this conversation is to me. She has no idea what it’s like to be an outsider to the outside world . . . and then to suddenly be let inside.
I want to keep saying hello. Because it all feels like a hello.
* * *
In the elevator, we chat about the elevator. She’s already had a run-in with Smelly Guy from the sixth floor, but miraculously, she has yet to meet Irma from 2E, who likes to walk her cats three times a day. On leashes.
In the lobby, I try to keep us silent, so the doorman won’t think anything is wrong. He opens the door for her, and I press through quickly.
Elizabeth notices the crunch. “I think you’ve gotten overly familiar with my heels,” she says when we’re
outside. “Is there a feud going on between you and the doorman? Were you afraid he was going to lock you in?”
“They’re all out to get me,” I tell her. “Every single doorman in New York.”
“Why?”
Why? It’s a natural enough follow-up, the next logical step in the conversation. But I’m stuck without a next line.
“Um . . . because I once said something evil about a doorman’s mother?”
The words fall awkwardly into the air. It’s even more embarrassing to have my cheeks burn when I know they can be seen.
Elizabeth takes it in stride. “So how long have you lived here?” she asks.
Mercifully, an easy question to answer.
“All my life,” I say. “Same apartment. Same building. Same city.”
“Really?”
“For as long as I can remember, and back even further to when I can’t remember. Since the day I was born, really. Where are you from?”
“Minnesota.”
I love how she says it. Minn-uh-soh-tah.
“This must be quite a change,” I say, gesturing to the speeding cabs, the endless line of buildings, the barrage of people around us.
“It is.”
“Why did you leave?” I ask.
She looks away. “It’s a long story.”
I’m sure there’s a short version of the long story, but it doesn’t feel right for me to ask for it.
She asks, “Where do you go to school?”
I realize that she’s starting to get stares when she talks to me. Because nobody else can see who she’s talking to. And even in a city where it’s commonplace to find people talking on microscopic cell phones or mumbling dialogue to themselves, it’s still strange to see someone conversing with the air.
I quicken the pace. “Kellogg,” I say, making up a school name. She’s from Minnesota—she won’t know all the private schools in Manhattan. “It’s across town. Really small. You?”
“I’m going to Stuyvesant in the fall.”
“Oh, Stuy. That’s cool.”
“Stuy?”
“Yeah. That’s what everyone calls it.”
“Good to know.”
We’re at the park now. There are more people, and she’s getting more stares. I don’t think she sees them, though. Or she’s figured this is just the way city people are, rude and glaring. But that obliviousness isn’t going to last long.
In order for this to work, I’m going to have to do most of the talking. At least now, when other people are around. I keep my voice low, so it will blend in with all of the other voices.
“So, you want to know about the city?” I ask as we start on one of the paths. “It’s hard to tell you with any kind of perspective, because it’s not like I’ve ever lived anywhere else.” (In truth, I’ve never even been anywhere else. But I don’t tell her that.) “I think it has a slightly different language than the rest of the world. When you live in New York, you can’t help but know things only New Yorkers know. Most of it has to do with getting used to things. Like the subway. In most parts of the world, the idea that there are hundreds of miles of underground tubes with electrified rails careening cars back and forth—that would be science fiction. But here it’s just life. Every day you head down there. You know exactly where to stand on the platform. If you do it long enough, you start to recognize some faces. Even with millions of people, you start to gather a neighborhood around you. New Yorkers love the bigness—the skyscrapers, the freedom, the lights. But they also love it when they can carve out some smallness for themselves. When the guy at the corner store knows which newspaper you want. When the barista has your order ready before you open your mouth. When you start to recognize the people in your orbit, and you know that, say, if you’re waiting for the subway at eight fifteen on the dot, odds are the redhead with the red umbrella is going to be there too.”
Elizabeth arches her eyebrow. “Tell me more about this redhead with a red umbrella.”
I shrug. “It’s not like I know all that much about her. She just tries to be at the subway at eight fifteen on the dot. She’s probably thirty—maybe a little older. She’s always reading magazines—The New Yorker, Harper’s, that kind. Smart. One day it was pouring and she had this bright red umbrella. I probably only saw it once, but it made an impression, so now I always associate her with this bright red umbrella. You know how you do that? Create talismans for strangers, or for people you’ve just met? Like, he’s the one with the gap in his teeth. Or she’s the one who carries that purple bag. She’s the redhead with the red umbrella. Everything else is just speculation.”
“And do you speculate often?”
It’s like she’s asking me if I breathe often. “All the time!” I say, perhaps a little too emphatically. “I mean, there are so many lives around us. How can you not speculate?”
I can tell she’s into this game. She points to a portly man on a bench, eating a donut. “How about him?”
“Gastroenterologist. His second wife just left him. He snores.”
“Her?” She indicates a skanky teen girl listening to blaring headphones as she scowls at her phone.
“Russian spy. Deep, deep, deep cover. She looks up CIA agents’ favorite bands on Facebook and reports back to the Mother Country.”
“That frat boy over there?”
“Poet laureate of the state of Wyoming, best known for his paeans to love between cowboys and their horses.”
“The love that dare not speak its mane?”
“You know his work!”
She nods her head to gesture a little to the left. “That woman with four children?”
“Broadway actress. Researching the role of a woman with four children. Discovering a lot because her lesbian lover won’t even let her have a pet.”
“What about that girl?”
Tricky. She’s pointing at herself.
“That girl? She looks like she’s new to town. But it doesn’t scare her. It excites her. She wants to see it all. And, yeah, she’s also part of the Minnesota mafia. They get into gang wars over cheese.”
“That’s Wisconsin.”
“I mean, they get into gang wars over which of the twin cities was born first.”
“Wow. Hearing you is like looking in a mirror.”
The woman with four children is glaring at us now, as if her mommy radar is tuned in to girls who talk too loudly to themselves in public places.
“Here, I have something to show you,” I say, and run ahead.
We’ve hit the path that leads past the band shell, right to Bethesda Terrace. Trees that have lived for hundreds of years guard our steps, point us forward. It is one of my favorite places in the city, where nature draws a canopy over all the city thoughts, leaving you with a deep sense of leaves and light, people passing through and the world staying still. I run, and she follows. I jump down the steps to Bethesda Fountain, and she is right beside me. The angel statue greets us, magnificent in her peace, stately on her perch. The water of the fountain bows to her as musicians ring her with melodies. Behind her, lovers row their boats. Beyond them, trees run wild.
Elizabeth’s never been here before. That much is clear in her expression. I have seen this look in people, this gasp of wonder. I want to tell her that this is only the first time, that there is going to be a second time and a third time and a fourth. That she will come here day after day, year after year. Because that is what I have done. And the feeling of being here, of being at the vortex of the city, doesn’t diminish.
“This is amazing,” she says.
“Yeah, isn’t it?” a guy about two feet away from her says. He assumes she’s talking to him. And from the way he’s looking at her, I can tell he wants the conversation to continue.
“There’s more,” I tell her. I reach for her hand and then remember, no, I shouldn’t try that. I shouldn’t do that. Her hand will just be floating ridiculously in the air, for everyone to see.
I lead her away from the tourists and the m
usicians and the presiding angel. I take her over a wooden bridge, into the woods, into the silence. We reach the Rambles, where the park resists landscape and becomes a rough-and-tumble twist of secret paths. In fifty steps, you can retreat from the city, the world.
Elizabeth notices the change.
“Is this where all the serial killers hang out?” she asks.
“Only on Wednesdays,” I tell her. “We’re safe.”
The trees close in, but because they do, I feel we can be more open. I don’t have to worry as much about the way it appears to anyone but us.
“So while I easily picked out your connection to the Minnesota mob,” I say, “I have to imagine my speculations missed a thing or two. Care to fill me in?”
“Oh, I’m just a simple girl,” she says with a sarcastic smile, “who just happens to complicate everything she touches. I’m like Midas, only whatever I touch turns to drama. Or at least that’s what my quote-friends-unquote back quote-home-unquote would say. I’ve never had Thai food, and only realized embarrassingly late in life that ‘Thai’ is pronounced ‘Tie.’ When I was in fifth grade, I was temporarily obsessed with tattoos, to the point that they had to hide all my Magic Markers. I was in choir for three years in order to be with my quote-friends-unquote, but I never sang a single note. I got really good at lip synching, though. This makes Laurie jealous, because if anyone should be the drag queen of the family, it’s him. Only I don’t think he actually likes drag. I don’t think I’ve ever asked him.”
We’ve arrived at a hidden bench. It has a brass plaque on it. DEDICATED TO GRACE AND ARNOLD GOLBER IN HONOR OF THEIR GENEROSITY.
I think Elizabeth’s going to sit down, but instead she simply stops to read the plaque, then hikes a little farther before stopping to look at me.
“I think that fills you in,” she says. “Now, do I get to speculate about you too?”
“Sure, go ahead.”
She takes a long, hard look at me. It’s unnerving. I am not used to this kind of scrutiny. I don’t know what expression to make, what posture to take.
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