Chapter THREE

Mid-afternoon, and raining. New York City is thick with black umbrellas and dirty yellow taxicabs and sludge rushing down the streets from the downpour into the sleek, flat drains lining the curbs. Everyone hurrying somewhere, merging with one another on the cold wet streets. Merging, and dismissing, as only urbanites can.

If Ten House is a strip club then it won’t be open yet, so I sit in a Starbucks across the street and settle in to watch the diner. I don’t imagine Lily will come strolling by for a burger, but it’s the only connection I have for now, and there’s nowhere else I can think of going.

More police officers and utility workers come and go, a few nurses and EMT personnel from a nearby hospital, and other assorted workers looking for a quick, cheap meal. It’s not a place I can picture Lily ever eating in. Her mother raised her with a natural distrust for the cooking of others, especially when done so for money. She’d stop short of calling it poison, but in the rare events that required our presence in a restaurant, the food was carefully inspected. Smelled. Pushed around and turned over with a fork. Held up to the light. This odd relationship with food never transferred successfully onto me, but it had a profound effect on Lily. Bulimia. Anorexia. Depression. Severe weight fluctuations. Frequent, unhealthy bouts of promiscuity.

She’d stare sadly at me whenever I ate, her eyes dark but unflinching. Her mother hardly noticed either of our extremes. To this day my adoption is a profound mystery. Why does a woman who so obviously dislikes children adopt one like me? But in truth I never really knew the woman. She never learned to sign, and, although I learned to read lips, I rarely read hers. Maybe adoptees are simply immune to the adults in their lives.

Lily said my lack of emotion made me a hero to her. I pretended not to understand.

I sip on an espresso and stare at the diner above the rim of the tiny cup. I figure the cook from the diner for a six-to-four shift. I figure he also knows Lily, at least more than he says he does. She always befriended those with the least to offer. Unlike me, she craved people, craved the messy feelings they’re so eager to trade. All she ever felt in return was hurt.

After several more espressos, I see the cook emerge from the diner, minus the apron but otherwise looking the same as earlier, only more tired. He waddles along with a heavy, awkward gait, wearing a tattered coat and a black baseball cap, looking even more miserable outside in the cold. Whatever anger or emotions I have, deservedly or not, are on him now.

I can never not love Lily.

I follow the cook into a subway station on 41st Street, down a long flight of too-shallow steps and onto the red number seven train that leads back into Queens, nearly losing him in the time it takes to buy a metro card from an automated machine.

I wait inside of the train, one car behind the cook. People crowd around me in silent huffs, settling into the filthy orange seats with their knees pressed tightly together as the doors slide closed. I sweat and fidget in the crowded, overheated space. A policeman’s holstered gun rubs against my kidney. A small boy leans against my leg and falls asleep; his mother plays Scrabble on a tablet balanced on bruised knees. Everyone is wet and unhappy, looking to avoid one another with whatever they’ve got: newspapers, phones, iPods, anything but a reflection of their own tired lives. The train lurches into the dirty dark tunnel and pulls us under the East River.

No one on the train looks at one another. The lights flicker on and off. People wait blankly, as if the train is a time machine, as if the commute itself is some urban form of cryo-sleep, the trip slowly, unknowingly, draining their lives away.

And I realize, in that moment, that there is a constant cost to being in a city like this, slow, steady withdrawals made on your soul. Maybe that’s not true of everyone, but it is of me.

We emerge at the 74th station in Jackson Heights, a run-down Hispanic neighborhood just a few miles east of Manhattan, but a different world entirely. Half of the train car exits with me. Outside of the elevated station small boys hawk candy and tax-free cigarettes outside of the station. A lone hooker teeters by on heels, watching me and smiling. Garbage cans and dumpsters overflow with rotting trash, attended by camouflaged homeless picking through them, or sleeping against them. Indifferent policemen sit in their cruisers on the side of the road with the windows up, picking through wrinkled bags of food as if nothing short of open gunfire could budge them. Any one of them could be Rico or Jane, or identical copies, watching me, or not.

I follow about fifty feet behind the cook as he walks north into a housing area, through a cluster of identical red brick buildings all sprouted from the same socioeconomic seed. My longer stride easily keeps the distance between us constant. After a few more blocks, he turns into the walkway of a residential building and I break into a full run, still fast from my high school football days. Just as he’s entering the outer door to the building, I plow into his midsection and push him face-first against a concrete wall, hard enough to daze him. I yank his arm behind him and pull until he stops struggling.

The inner lobby is quiet, clean and empty. There’s a camera mounted high in a corner with painted-over wires, old and probably just for show.

I punch him in the kidney and find the apartment keys in his front pocket. He is greasy and sweating, on his knees and coughing blood onto the tiled floor. In the reflection of the glass door, I can see his lips and nose bleeding from the impact against the wall. I close my eyes and hold him down by the back of his neck for a few seconds. I think of Jane. And I think of Lily.

I yank him upright and hold him straight against the surface of the glass door. In his ear, I say: “Walk.”

The cook crosses the lobby floor toward the elevator, taking halting, unsteady steps and looking back at me over his shoulder. I move my fingers upward in the air, making the sign for stairs. He shrugs and looks back at me every few steps, as if hoping I’ll change my mind.

I don’t.

We walk up six flights. He curses and pants. The walls are concrete painted dark beige, the floors old industrial linoleum that become less worn as we ascend, damaged areas hammered down where the corners curled. The smell of bleach is strong, hanging in the air like cat urine. The cook stumbles a few times, and each time he falls, I push him further up the stairs.

We emerge on the sixth floor in a narrow hallway. I let him go several feet ahead of me, knowing he won’t run. For reasons I’ve never understood, I’ve always had a paralyzing effect on people. He motions toward a door at the end of the hallway and I nod, closing the distance and handing him the keys. He unlocks the door and opens it wide. I follow him inside, holding his body directly in front of me as I close the door behind me, and then pulling him against my chest and waiting inside the door. After half a minute, I don’t feel any music or other noise, so I let him go.

Inside, the apartment looks like a small one-bedroom. Clean and simple. Smells of soap and dirty laundry and turning fast food and beer and stale cigarette smoke. The place of someone who works a lot and lives little. No paintings or decorations. A tired, sad stop for someone with nowhere else to go. I can imagine a hundred previous tenants living here just like him, in just the same way.

The first door we pass is a small bathroom. I reach into his jacket pocket, find his phone and take it, and then nudge him into the bathroom. As he flushes the toilet and runs the water, I look around the rest of the apartment, but there’s not much to see. Few personal belongings. New Yorkers lead sad, solitary lives.

Several minutes later the cook walks into the kitchen and sits at a silver aluminum table sagging at the middle seam; the kind you find at picnics and fairs and public schools. He offers me a beer as I sit in a chair across from him. I start to write in my pad but he waves at me to stop.

“I told you what I know,” he says. His nose is swelling, obviously broken.

Lily, I write.

“Rachael,” he says, looking at my face for the first time.

She is my sister. Remember that. I turn the pad to him and he shrugs.

“She’s a waitress or something,” he says. “I don’t know. She comes in after shift sometimes for coffee.” He wipes the sweat from his face with a stained dishrag. “I don’t know her.”

Where else have you seen her?