I come home when it’s dark, and read some more. Watch some television. Go online. Again, typing is hard for me. But every now and then, I will painstakingly set out my sentences. This is the way I can participate in the language of living. I can talk to strangers. I can leave comments. I can volunteer my words when they are needed. Nobody has to know that on the other side of the wirescape, unseen hands are pressing the keys. Nobody has to know my central truth if I can offer them much smaller truths instead.
This is how the time passes. I don’t go to school. I don’t have any family. The landlord knows my mother is gone—I had to call the ambulance, I had to see her taken away—but he believes my father is still around. I will grant my father this: he has never disowned me. It’s just that he doesn’t want to have anything further to do with me. I don’t even know where he is. He is an email address to me. A cell phone number.
When my mother died, all the whys and hows returned. Grief gave them fuel. Uncertainty pointed me backward. For the first time in my life, without the buffer of her love, I felt truly cursed. I only had two choices, to follow her or to stay. Reluctantly, I stayed. I immersed myself in other people’s words, in the park, in weaving a nest for my future out of the loose strands that I had left in my life. After a while, I stopped wondering about the why. I stopped questioning the how. I stopped noticing the what. What remains is simply my life, and I lead it simply.
I am like a ghost who’s never died.
* * *
It starts with Ben’s old apartment, 3B. Two doors down from my apartment, 3D. Ben’s family left when I was twelve. Since then, the apartment has gone through three waves of tenants. The Cranes were a horrible couple who spent all their time saying horrible things to each other. They enjoyed their cruelty too much to get a divorce, but it wasn’t any fun to be around. The Tates had four kids, and it was the imminent arrival of the fifth that made them realize a two-bedroom apartment wasn’t going to work. And Sukie Maxwell was only planning on being in New York for a year, because she only had a year to design her client’s new Manhattan apartment before moving on to redecorate the same client’s house in France. She left so little of a mark on my universe that I didn’t even notice her moving out. It’s only when I see a set of movers carrying an old, worn sofa—a sofa that Sukie Maxwell would have never approved of—that I know she’s left our building and a new family is taking her place.
I walk past the movers and head out to the park without giving it much thought. Instead I focus on Ivan, my favorite dog walker, who is making his afternoon rounds with Tigger and Eeyore (a dachshund and a basset hound, respectively). From conversations he’s had with other dog walkers, I know that Ivan came to Manhattan from Russia three years ago, and is sharing a room on the Lower East Side with three other Russians he met online. This is not working out well, especially because Ivan is trying to woo Karen, the live-in nanny for the younger members of Tigger and Eeyore’s family. I’ve seen them too, in the park, and think that Karen and Ivan would make a good match, if only because he treats the dogs kindly and with a sense of humor, while she does the same with the children. But it is clearly out of the question for Ivan to stay over at the house of his employers, nor does he want to bring Karen home to meet his questionable roommates. It’s a stalemate, and sometimes I feel I’m as eager to see the resolution as Ivan is.
There seems to be some progress today, because about ten minutes after Ivan comes to the park, Karen follows with the children. They seem to be aware of each other, but with the children around, they’re hesitant. I follow as they head towards the statue of Alice in Wonderland, then get closer as the kids leave them to play. It’s just Tigger and Eeyore now, and neither Karen nor Ivan is making the first move.
I can’t help myself. I lean down, concentrate hard, and push the two dogs in different directions. Suddenly they are darting in circles, and Ivan and Karen are at the center of their leashes. They are flung together, and while at first there’s shock, it’s the kind of shock that ends with smiles and laughter. The dogs are barking maniacally; the kids are rushing over to see what’s happened. Ivan and Karen are pressing against each other, trying to disentangle themselves.
I’m smiling too. I have no idea what it would look like, to see me smile. But the feeling is there.
There’s no certainty that the little spark of the moment I’ve given to Ivan and Karen will become anything other than a moment. Still, I feel good as I head back to the apartment. I wait for Mrs. Wylie (4A) to come in, and I rush through the door behind her. Then we ride in the elevator together to the fourth floor, and I press three on the way back down. When I emerge from the elevator, there’s a girl in front of 3B, holding three bags from IKEA. As she fumbles for her door key, all three of them drop to the ground. I gingerly walk past her, then wait by my door—there’s no way for me to take my key out of its hiding place and open the door until she’s gone from the hall. I stand there watching as she scoops a pair of bookends and some cheap picture frames back into one of the bags. She is either cursing at herself or cursing at the bags—I can’t tell which. I am thinking about how Sukie Maxwell would have loathed IKEA objects in her perfect apartment, not really paying attention when this new girl looks straight at the space where I’m standing.
“Are you really going to just stand there?” she asks. “Is this fun for you?”
All the electricity in my body is suddenly alert, amped to a level of consciousness I’ve never felt before. I turn to look behind me, to see who’s there.
But there’s no one there.
“Yeah, you,” the girl says.
I cannot believe it.
She sees me.
chapter 2
I THOUGHT NEW YORK would be different. Yet here I am, sharp words zinging from my lips like poison darts. Same as every day back home. But this kid wasn’t asking for it. Not really. He didn’t make me drop the bags.
And, okay, he’s not a kid. He’s definitely around my age. Someone my mother would refer to as a “peer.” At least once every hour during our drive east, she reminded me to search them out, as if my “peers” are an endangered species who it’s my sole purpose to capture and catalog lest I perish as a result of my family’s migration to this strange territory.
But I’ve gotten into the habit of mentally adding ten years to my own age. I’m not infatuated with the notion of my own great maturity or anything, but I haven’t related to my so-called peers for a while. I assume this kid is “normal” sixteen, like all the rest of them, whereas I’m “life can, and probably will, totally screw you” sixteen.