Three Quarters Dead (9 page)

On this platform the tricky part was to keep people from pushing you onto the tracks. Some of these women were armed with handbags the size of Hummers. A train was charging in, a number 6. The tracks lit up.

If enough of a crowd got between us, I could just dart into a different car. It was dawning on me that Spence and I were headed for the same subway stop, Sixty-eighth Street–Hunter College. I began to edge away, but he slipped a hand under my elbow to keep us together. A perfect gentleman.

Then we were in the subway car, plastered against complete strangers. “What stop?” he mouthed through all the noise.

Why didn’t I say the stop after Sixty-eighth Street–Hunter College? Why didn’t I just stay on the train when he got off and then walk back or something? Because I didn’t know the stop after Sixty-eighth Street–Hunter College.

“Sixty-eighth Street–Hun—”

“Me too.” Spence nodded, and the train thundered on.

WE FOUGHT OUR way up out of the ground onto Lexington Avenue against a tidal wave of Hunter College students going the other way.

It was almost dark now up here on the street. “I’m fine,” I said.

“Where you heading?”

“Seventy-second Street,” I said. One of my rare true statements. But what direction should I—

“I’ll walk you to—”

“No, it’s okay,” I said.

“Then I’ll peel off at Sixty-ninth,” Spence said. “My family’s place is at One twenty-nine, up there on the corner.” We were walking past the big stone castle part of Hunter College. “Didn’t Tanya’s aunt Lily live on Seventy-second?” he said.

“. . . Somewhere around there,” I said.

I guess I could have told him I was going to see her. Pay her a call. But Tanya’s aunt Lily officially lived in Paris. She was a stylist, or had been. She wrote about fashion or something. She wasn’t in New York that much, and Spence might have known. Who knew what people knew? Besides, I didn’t want him walking me right up to her door. I couldn’t chance it.

Tanya’s aunt Lily had been there at the memorial service, from Paris. She must have been her great-aunt or something. She was an old lady, dressed all in black. A lot of people were that day, except hers was Paris black. She was the only woman at the service in a hat. With a big black brim.

Joanne had picked her up at JFK Airport and had taken her back there that night. I don’t even know why I knew that, or remembered. I was missing whole blocks of time.

“You going to be cool?” Spence was saying to me. We were at the light at Sixty-ninth.

“I’m going to be fine,” I said. “I’m practically there.”

“If you’re sure,” he said. “See you at school.”

I watched him cross Lexington Avenue, all the way up to the canopy of his building. Then I walked on toward Seventy-second Street and let the sidewalk crowds swallow me up.

That was the moment I was most alone. The sun was still bright on the windows of the penthouses, but it was evening on the street. When I turned into Seventy-second Street, I saw I’d have the doorman to deal with.

In movies New York doormen wear top hats and gold braid and open the doors of limos. In real life they wear parts of their uniforms and stand out by the curb, having an endless conversation with each other. With any luck I might just breeze into the door of Aunt Lily’s building. Whisk right in.

The canopy was dead ahead. And what was I heading for? Anything? Nothing? In two minutes would I be walking back the way I’d come, from one emptiness to another?

Trees grew in pots beside the front door. The doorman was there, blocking the way. Just my luck. A young guy. The night shift? He looked me over.

“Miss Garland’s apartment, please.”

He reached inside the door for the receiver of an old-time intercom telephone. “I don’t know if anybody’s up there,” he said. “But I’m part-time. And I just came on duty.”

He was poking a little metal button. Somewhere high above us a bell was ringing in Aunt Lily’s apartment. And echoing in my head.

And I thought, just for a moment: I’m on my own here. I can still back out. I can make this not happen.

“I’m her niece,” I said, for some reason.
Lie Number Three
or so. “She’s my aunt.”

But then he said, into the intercom phone, “Young lady to see you.”

I swallowed hard. I could feel my spine all the way down. The doorman jerked his head. “You can go on up.”

Who?
Who had said I could go on up?

I was crossing the dark-paneled lobby now, under the heavy beams. I was walking on eggs, not looking back for fear he’d change his mind. Forty-nine percent of me wanted to turn back. Run.

In the elevator I pushed 13, the button just below PH for penthouse. So if it was Aunt Lily up there, or her maid, I needed to have something ready to say—ready and rehearsed—another alibi. Unless—

The elevator door rolled back, and I stepped out into a shadowy space. It wasn’t very big, with Chinese wallpaper and dim lights behind parchment shades. Only a couple of doors because there were only two apartments on a floor, two huge and echoing apartments. I was turning to the door of Aunt Lily’s when the door to the back apartment opened. The door cracked and then creaked, and someone was there, behind it in dark shadow.

I only caught a glimpse. It was someone ancient and weird with eerie orange hair. She was wearing dark glasses in this gloom. And an apron. I flinched, made myself look again, and the door was closed.

I turned then, to the other one. I didn’t knock. I didn’t have to. The door was inching open, and before I could see, a scent drifted out to me. The scent of apple blossom.

IT WAS BRIGHTER inside. Light fell across the marble floor and washed over me. Not blinding, but I couldn’t see at first. I couldn’t focus.

I heard a little chortling, chuckling laugh or two, muffled behind hands. The laughter echoed out of some distant place. But they were right there, standing together in the mirrored entrance hall.

Tanya was.

Tanya with highlights in her blond hair and her hand on her hip and her eyebrows arched. I’d know her anywhere. It wasn’t a picture of her. Or a holograph or whatever. Or a memory. Or something made out of mist. It was Tanya. The best-looking girl in school because she could make you think so.

And there beside her, Natalie—perfect Natalie. Actually the prettiest when you came right down to it. Natalie with the violet eyes and the natural darkness beneath them. And the double lashes. And on Tanya’s other side—Makenzie, smiling her slightly sassy smile, with her arms crossed before her. Full of life, all three, and realer than anything that had happened to me for weeks. There they were, dressed for a Saturday at the mall.

I was hyperventilating, but Tanya cut right through that. She looked me up and down. “Flip-flops? In town? Honestly, Kerry. And what is that tied around your waist, something from American Apparel? And your
backpack?
”

“Honestly,” Natalie echoed. “What next? Tank tops?” And Makenzie only smiled because she could probably remember being me.

Then all I could see was the crystal chandelier on the ceiling of Aunt Lily’s entrance hall. My eyes swam, though I thought I’d cried all my tears.

Then all of us, all four, were swimming, drifting like seaweed in turquoise waters among the fish and crabs and rams of all the astrological signs, a zodiac sea mirrored like the walls of Aunt Lily’s entrance hall. A mirrored sea, veined in gold, scattered with silver shells, and in every shell a pearl.

I woke up—came to on the white sofa in Aunt Lily’s living room. It was a room out of a dream anyway, with murals on every wall, of French clowns—diamond shapes on their costumes and ribbons crisscrossing up their legs. And ladies in masks being helped out of gondolas in Venice. The landscape of a dream, and peeling a little with the years. A little out of date.

Every light was on. I struggled up among the sofa pillows and looked around. All the painted people on the walls were jostling each other like the subway crowds.

And
they
were still there, close enough to touch. Makenzie sat curled in a kidney-shaped love seat just her size. She’d always had somewhat rebellious hair—haystacky, and her glasses were propped up there where they always were.

Natalie sat in a French-looking chair with gold arms. Every little move she made was always worth watching. Her hands tucking her long black hair behind her ears was an event. Always had been. Tanya sat forward in another French chair.

“Kerry,” she said. “Get a grip. You’re scattered. And don’t faint again. You drooled.”

“What time is it?” I said.

That seemed to be good for a laugh. Makenzie chortled behind her hand. Natalie rolled her violet eyes.

“What does it matter?” Tanya asked.

It didn’t, I supposed. But I never wear a watch, and I wondered. After all, I’d been out like a light, long enough for them to carry me in here. I’d felt their hands on me, even when I was out like a light. Their hands, making contact.

“Time doesn’t matter, Kerry,” Tanya said. “Let’s get that straight. Stay right here in the moment with me.
Here
is what matters. Where’s your phone? Don’t tell us you didn’t bring it.”

I looked around for my backpack, and my head was splitting open.

“Makenzie, get it out of her bag.” Tanya snapped her fingers.

Makenzie sprang off the love seat and went for wherever my backpack was. When she came back with my phone, Tanya took it and flipped it open.

“How old is this thing?” she said. “Honestly. It looks like that one somebody left at the shrine. And what did you pay for it? Thirty-nine ninety-five?”

But while she was trash-talking my loser phone, she was punching in a number she knew by heart.

She’d just texted me this morning, so where was her phone? It seemed an age ago, not that time mattered. “Where’s yours?”

“Good question,” Tanya said. “I think the contract got canceled. It figures. You were the last call, and now it’s dead as a doornail. I threw it out. I’m good at getting rid of anything I can’t use. But then we couldn’t order in lunch. Aunt Lily canceled her landline because she’s in Paris so much. She can be so uptight about money. You know old people.”

“And as a matter of fact, we’re starving,” Natalie said. “I personally could never be anorexic. I don’t know how Joanne does it.”

“There’s nothing in this entire apartment but Bloody Mary mix, cans of Slim-Fast,” Tanya said, “and—”

“Cocktail olives,” Makenzie said, “which we ate. We have to keep up our strength.”

So now Tanya was on my phone, ordering.

“No anchovies on mine,” I said as in a dream. “I hate anchovies.”

“Anchovies?” Tanya stared. “Kerry, I’m not ordering in pizza from, like, Yonkers. This is New York. I’m ordering actual food. Continental cuisine from Orsay on Lexington. They’ve been sending meals over to Aunt Lily for forever. I can put everything on her bill.”

Oh,
I thought.

“No snails,” Makenzie was calling out. “No frogs or frog parts. I’m English.”

My head had been pounding, splitting. Now it rang. All of this was happening. You could see it. You could hear every word. But how?

“Nothing with clams,” Natalie was calling out. “You know about me and clams.”

But the room was beginning to tilt and turn, and their voices wavered up from the bottom of a well somewhere. A deep, deep well. The costume people painted on the walls made jerky little moves. The prisms on all the lamps tinkled. All I had to do was close my eyes, and I was back at the memorial service, a memory that came and went and wasn’t real. Like a black-and-white movie you don’t want to rent.

IT HAD BEEN held at school because they needed an auditorium that big. A Saturday right at the end of April. The stage was decorated in branching blossoms, sprays of dogwood and pear and quince and Japanese cherry. Everything but apple blossom.