What Every Girl (except me) Knows (17 page)

Each stone arch indicated what lay beyond it—LEXINGTON AVENUE, SUBWAY SHUTTLE, 42ND STREET, NORTH BALCONY, TRACKS 100
−
117. We spun around for a while, reading the arches that surrounded us, till Ian pointed.

“Let’s just get out of here so I can get my bearings,” Ian said. He started walking quickly toward one of the huge bowed openings, which led, hopefully, to the street we wanted. I had to quicken my steps to catch him. I could hardly keep up.

I had to reach out and take hold of Ian’s sleeve. Ian didn’t turn when he felt the tug of my pull on his shirt, but he slowed his pace.

I moved so near I could feel Ian deliberately lift his arm away slightly, and as usual he pulled his hand just out of reach.

Chapter 34

Ian stood for a moment in the street with me beside him. Outside we were immediately hit by the harsh sunshine and loud city noises. People were in even more of a hurry out here, and there were more of them, dodging in and out between the others, cutting ahead by jumping off the sidewalk and scooting faster to get in front of someone else. There was no time to stand still, no place to if you wanted.

“What’s the address again?” Ian said. He had to shout.

“Four thirty-five East Seventy-ninth Street.”

Ian and I both squinted up to see the street sign ahead, but neither of us could make it out.

“Let’s start walking this way,” I said, pointing. “And if the streets don’t start going up, we’ll know we should be walking the other way,” I suggested. New York was no place to look lost.

Without a better plan, Ian agreed. We pushed our way to the end of the block and read the sign: 41st Street. “Wrong way,” Ian said. “Let’s cut over the avenue here.” He stepped down off the curb when the light said WALK in white letters.

Ian had us cross over to 3rd Avenue and head east. We passed 41st, 42nd, 43rd, and 44th and things started to quiet down. The streets were wider and there were less people. I finally was able to unhunch my shoulders and relax the feeling of being potentially lost and swallowed up by the crowds.

“We’ll walk to First Avenue and get a cab from there,” Ian told me.

I was admiring Ian’s confidence in finding the right direction as I followed beside him down the wide city blocks. Then, there was a river. Right in front of us. It was out of reach by at least two concrete sidewalks, a walkway, yellow barriers, and nothing less than a highway called the FDR, but there it was.

“Look.” I pointed.

“So?” Ian looked.

“A river, here in New York City,” I said as if I couldn’t believe it. “I wonder if our mother walked here and saw this river.”

I thought of myself and the steep walls of the Wallkill, the poison ivy growing along its banks, how I loved to watch the quiet water traveling by. Maybe this is why. Maybe I saw this river as a baby, with my mother.

“We didn’t live anywhere near here,” Ian said coldly. “We’ve got forty blocks to go. You really didn’t think this through very well, did you?”

“Oh,” I said.

We walked about midway up the block, then stopped. “Why are we stopping?” I asked.

“We can’t walk there and back and be back in time for the train. I’m getting us a taxi, remember?” Ian snapped. He was obviously losing patience with me. “You would have been completely lost,” Ian said.

I wasn’t going to follow him anymore.

“Do you want to do this?” I said. “’Cause you’re acting really mean, like you don’t want to. So…I don’t think you should. You don’t have to go any farther. I can go by myself.”

Ian lowered his taxi-hailing arm. A few cars went by, a string of buses, and a lot of cabs before Ian answered me.

“You know, I do want to do this,” Ian said, softening his voice. “I guess…I guess…I’m a little nervous about it.”

I thought then, I thought for the very first time,
What if Ian has a list, too, a list of “things I need a mother for”? What if he has his own stash of Styrofoam marigold containers in his closet?
I supposed he did. Or something like that, something he never told me about.

Just then he spotted a cab on our side of the street and waved his hand at the driver. I opened the door of the cab and scooted over. Ian told the driver the address of where we wanted to go.

“Seventy-ninth Street,” Ian said, leaning forward toward the Plexiglas divider and speaking clearly. “Between York and First.”

“How did you know that?” I asked Ian. “Between York and First?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

The cab took off through the streets and the traffic. This part of New York was more residential. Here, children walked beside their mothers, people had dogs and bags of groceries. There were window boxes and flowers on the front stoops. There were trees. Just as I had imagined.

The numbers of the streets got higher—61st, 62nd, 63rd… We headed uptown. Ian was keeping his eye on the taxi meter, which was also getting higher. $5.30…$5.60…$5.90.

“You can let us off at Seventy-seventh—right here is fine.” Ian leaned close to the divider as he spoke to the driver again.

“Whatever you say, kid.” The driver swerved the taxi over to the curb to let us out. I was fishing inside my backpack for my money. I should have begun looking earlier, as the numbers of the streets got closer to 79th. I was frantic. I had barely unzipped the top when Ian brushed my efforts away.

“I got it,” he said. Ian handed the driver a five and two ones from his front pocket.
He’s taking care of me
, I thought, and we got out.

I wished I could say, when I stepped out of the cab, that this felt like home. “This is my neighborhood,” I might say. But it was as unfamiliar as could possibly be.

We had been let out at the corner, where a little grocery store stood. Fruit lay out on a shelf leaning right into the sidewalk. It was filled with all colors and shapes of things to eat. One big bucket of fresh flowers stood beside it on each side. Food hung from baskets hooked onto the awning above, peanuts and dried beans.

Did she shop here? I looked up at the street number—78th Street. Only a block from her apartment. Had I been here before?

“Well?” Ian paused on the sidewalk. “Let’s go.”

We turned the corner at 79th and kept walking until we were directly across from 435 East 79th Street. And we stopped. The entrance had a long green awning and printed on the awning just under the numbers was a name—THE YORK.

So this building has a name. Everything should have a name
, I thought. Her building was named The York. My mother’s name was Arlene.

“Wouldn’t it be wild if she just walked out right this instant?” I said as we stood safely on the opposite side of the street.

“Yeah, I guess that would be wild,” Ian said. He didn’t laugh, and I hadn’t meant it to be funny.

A long time ago, well, maybe not so long ago, when I was around eight years old, I had this whole fantasy. She, my mother, was still alive somewhere. It was just that she couldn’t handle things and she needed to get away, even from us, her own kids. So my dad arranged this whole thing. He arranged for her to appear to have died, but really she was just escaping. She was living somewhere else, as someone else. She needed a little break. Every mom deserves a break sometime.

So I had this fantasy and at some point I almost started believing it, every detail. I imagined what she did for a job while she was hiding out—she worked in a florist shop, putting together beautiful bouquets of flowers. She changed her name—she was Nicole Freedman. She grew her hair long and wore loose-fitting clothing. She lived in a sun-filled apartment above the florist shop. She slept on a pullout corduroy couch.

I imagined that she had even fooled her own parents. The funeral was a farce to throw everyone off, so they wouldn’t come looking for her, so she could be free—all put together by my dad. For her. That’s what she
needed
and he loved her that much. He was a hero.

But the best part of the whole story was that someday she was going to come back. Come back for me. She’d be there when I need her most, and that year I really needed her. I was in third grade. I was so lonely and everything was so sad. It was the year Beth Moore’s mother wouldn’t let me come to her house anymore.

I did a lot of waiting for her to return. If there was ever a right time, it was then. I needed her that year, real bad. But she didn’t come and by the time I was nine, I vowed I would never wait for anyone again.

So when I said to my brother, “Wouldn’t it be wild…?” it wasn’t so wild. It’s just that I had stopped waiting and stopped believing and now here I was. And all I wanted was to know the truth.

Chapter 35

“Wait, I just want to look from here for a while,” Ian said.

So we looked out across the wide street to the building named The York, and for a long while Ian didn’t say anything. It was a very tall apartment building, maybe thirteen stories or so, and made of a whitish brick. Every other window had a metal balcony that didn’t look big enough for anyone to stand on.

I quickly lost interest in just staring at the building; obviously nothing important was going to happen to me from there. I looked over to my brother. He stood still, eyes fixed on one spot. If I were to see anything or learn anything, it was going to have to come from him. I tried to see my brother very carefully, as if for the first time, as if he had some magic power; as if he were a portal to memory that I was going to miss if I wasn’t attentive enough.

“Okay, ready?” Ian said. He was apparently done.

He wasn’t yet offering any insights, so I nodded and we walked up to the corner to cross the street. Someone was standing in front of the building. There was a doorman, just as there had been that morning, and this one guarded the door. He was young, with a ponytail and a gray uniform. He paced back and forth and then disappeared inside the building.

“Ian,” I said as we neared the entrance. “Is that the same doorman?”

Ian looked, considered the possibility, and then said firmly, “No, our guy was old.”

“Well, this doorman’s not just going to let us in.”

A lady with a miniature dog came up the street before us and approached the building. The doorman stepped out in greeting and opened the large glass door for her.

“We have to tell him why we are here,” I said.

“Like it’s that simple,” Ian said.

A little boy and his father walked out. The little boy wore a navy jacket and tie and carried a fancy, leather schoolbag.

“I’ll just tell him the truth,” I said. I didn’t wait for Ian’s approval. I walked steadily up to the man wearing the gray jacket with gold buttons and a ponytail.

“Excuse me,” I said. “We used to live in this building, a long time ago. Would it be all right if we just looked around inside—I mean, just inside the lobby here.”

Ian had come up behind me. We could see in through the glass doors. We could see the lobby, the two potted plants, the mail chute, the doorman’s station, and the two elevators by the far wall.

The young doorman looked back inside, as if trying to figure out what we might want to see inside, or what we might do damage to if we were lying. It would be his responsibility if we did something wrong and he had been the one to let us in.

Why would anyone want to just innocently look at the lobby of a building they used to live in? But then again, why not?

“I don’t know,” the doorman said.

Ian and I were still, and waited like two small children.

“Just real quick,” I said.

“Just right in the lobby?” Ian added.

“It’s not allowed,” the doorman told us.

“Please,” I said.

There was a great pause right then. I don’t know exactly how much time passed.

“Well, don’t take long.” The doorman moved aside, not quite giving permission, but allowing us in.

Ian and I both agreed, and we stepped inside the building.

The lobby was big for a New York apartment building, bigger than my grandparents’ lobby. It had a fancy carpeted section where two brand-new upholstered chairs and a table stood empty. The floor by the elevators and the stairwell looked as if it had been newly tiled.

“Nothing looks familiar,” Ian said and shook his head. “Nothing.”

“You’re not trying,” I said to Ian. “Walk around a little.” Ian didn’t say anything. He moved toward the mail chute. He walked over the tiles and back to the carpet. He shrugged.

“Nothing.” Ian dropped into one of the soft, deep chairs. I took the other one. My hands rested high on the arms of the chair, lifted like wings. So this was it? Chrome and glass, a poshly decorated New York apartment-building lobby was going to be the beginning and the end all in one? No, it couldn’t!

My heart began pounding as soon as the possibility of an idea reached my lips; my eyes smarted with tears, though I didn’t feel sad.

“We have to go in the elevator,” I said suddenly. “We have to ride up and then ride down again and come out just like we did that day.”

Ian leaned forward to see me past his chair. “What?”

“We have to,” I said.