My fire escape plan hinges on one of these windows being open. I’m guessing she lives in a two-bedroom apartment. Her apartment is not a corner unit, so in addition to each bedroom having a window, maybe the living room does, too. I will have to figure out the rooms by peeking in.
“Forgot your key, girl?” a guy’s voice bellows over to me. I look around at the windows of the next building over. There’s a middle-aged guy leaning out of an open window a few floors above me. His coarse laughter echoes off the concrete surfaces. He has a baseball cap on, but no shirt. He seems harmless.
I give him a thumbs-up.
He responds with more echoey laughter. Then he leans back in and shuts the window. I scan more windows to see if anyone else is looking. If they are, I can’t see them. The hum of a thousand air conditioners grumbles like an agitated group of protesters. The air smells like dirty fried eggs mixed with a smoggy, industrial stench. Between the oppressive August heat and my nerves sparking like a malfunctioning electrical system, I have to keep wiping sweat from my face.
The first window has a cracked, crooked shade pulled down almost all the way. I peek into the room through the gap under the shade. This is a bedroom. There’s not much inside—a big dresser, a small nightstand, and a bed. I can tell it’s a grown-up’s bedroom by the empty walls and boring colors. I creep to the next window, which does not have its shade pulled down. Clearly this is a kid’s bedroom. The walls are covered with finger paintings, drawings in marker and crayon, and a jellyfish painted in watercolors. I recognize the jellyfish from our Marine Friends Day in arts and crafts. Momo loved her jellyfish so much. She was excited to go home and hang it on her wall.
There it is. Her jellyfish. In her room.
The window is halfway open with the screen down. I wedge my fingers into the slot at the bottom of the screen and pull up. The screen doesn’t budge. I pull harder. The screen skids up with a screech. I freeze for a minute. No one comes into the room. It hits me that I’m hunkered on a fire escape outside an apartment I’m about to break into. Is it technically breaking in if the window was already open, people have seen me, and I have reason to believe that a girl is in danger? Even if it is, this is an emergency. There’s no turning back now.
I drop my bag into her room. Then I duck through the window. I swing one leg over the window ledge, slowly lowering myself until my sneaker hits the hard, olive-green carpet in Momo’s room. I lean against the window ledge and pull my other leg in. I don’t hear anyone in the apartment, but it doesn’t feel empty. Almost like I can sense a presence here. I look around her room and brush my hands on my shorts, wiping away the grit from the window. The room is small, almost too small to be a bedroom. There’s a twin mattress on the floor with a flat pillow, a rumpled sheet, and a blanket shoved into a heap at the bottom. There are a few tattered stuffed animals on the floor next to her mattress. The filthy carpet looks like it’s never been vacuumed. A basic pine dresser sits against the opposite wall with a Hello Kitty lamp. I recognize the beaded jewelry and tiara on the dresser from arts and crafts.
My heart hammers as I slip into her mom’s bedroom, the living room, the kitchen, and the bathroom. No one is home. Yet there’s still that sensation of another presence here.
There’s a closet by the front door. I open it, checking behind boxes and winter coats and a bike. I check another closet in the hall. I check the closets in Momo’s room and her mom’s room. Everything looks normal.
Maybe Momo’s mom is traveling for work and she took Momo with her. But then why wouldn’t she call Momo out from camp? Or return the camp’s calls? If Momo’s mom is away and her boyfriend is supposed to be taking care of Momo, maybe Momo is at his apartment. Would the camp have his address? Or at least his name so I could try to find out where he lives? It’s like Momo has just . . . disappeared.
I inspect all the rooms one more time before I leave. I don’t want to be here too long in case someone comes home. I check under the couch in the living room and behind a huge recliner. And that’s when I see it.
A little trapdoor peeking out from behind a stack of boxes in the corner.
The boxes are heavy. I push and pull on the stack, but it doesn’t budge. I have to lift the boxes one at a time to move them. The first box is so heavy I am yanked down with the box as its weight pulls me to the floor. It lands with a dull thud. Once the other boxes are moved away, I can see that the trapdoor has a padlock on it.
My skin prickles with goose bumps.
I pull on the lock to make sure it’s actually locked. It is.
“Momo?” I whisper. “Are you in there?”
I listen. Nothing.
“Momo?” I say louder. “It’s Rosanna. Are you in there?”
I listen. Nothing.
But then:
A muffled voice. Like she’s trying to talk but can’t.
Oh my god oh my god oh my god.
Momo is in there.
Locked.
In.
There.
I scramble up and search around frantically for the key. I check the messy coffee table, the shelves, the side table between the couch and the recliner. The side table has a skinny drawer I didn’t even see the first time I looked. I open it. A tiny key on a SpongeBob key chain is there. I snatch the key, run to the trapdoor, and open the padlock. The door pops open to reveal a crawl space.
And Momo.
She is hunched right inside the door, drenched in sweat. It must be a hundred degrees in there. Her mouth is covered with duct tape. She launches herself at me, crying and making muffled sounds through the tape.
I carefully pull the tape from her face.
“Water,” she says, her voice cracked and hoarse.
“Okay, I’ll get you— How long were you in there?”
“Sunday,” she says.
Today is Wednesday.
Momo was trapped in that crawl space for three days.
She throws her arms around me, clinging to me like she will never let go. She is trembling so hard against me that I am vibrating.
“I’m so glad I found you,” I say. Now we’re both crying. I try to calm down so I don’t scare her. I lift her up and take her to the kitchen. With my free hand, I find the cabinet with glasses and fill one with water from the sink. She is burning up. She is so hot and sweaty I can’t believe she even survived. “Drink this.” I help her hold the glass up to her mouth. She finishes the water in quick gulps.
I bring her to the bathroom.
“Leave the door open,” she says, getting on the toilet.
“I will. I’m staying right here.” I turn away to give her privacy. When she’s finished, I scoop her up and we go into her room. The window is still wide open. If anyone comes home, I will scream and take her out onto the fire escape. Momo clings to me as I take my phone out of my bag and call 911.
“Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?” the operator says.
“A girl has been trapped for three days. I just found her.” I give the address and apartment number.
Once the operator confirms that help is on the way, I carry Momo back into the kitchen as I answer the rest of her questions. The refrigerator is practically empty. I find a box of sugar cookies in a cabinet and give one to Momo. She gobbles it down. I wish I could give her something healthy to eat, but there’s nothing fresh in this kitchen. Only boxes of mac and cheese, SpaghettiOs, and other processed crap.
I take the box of cookies back into Momo’s room. We sit on her mattress. She eats another cookie, still clinging to me. We stay like that until I hear the first sounds of sirens in the distance. The sirens get louder. They are coming for us.
I hug Momo as she chews the last of her cookie, digging in the box for more.
“You’re safe now,” I tell her. “You’re safe.”
CHAPTER 22
SADIE
“HOW MAY I HELP YOU, sir?” the guy behind the counter at Florence Meat Market asks the man in front of me. I’m happy the man in front of
me is finally getting his turn. Standing in this line for five minutes has nearly pushed him over the edge. His impatient sighs and grumbling are old-man New Yorker code for get this line moving already.
“Do you have my turkey?” he demands.
“Which turkey is that?”
“Look, I ordered a turkey!”
“Okay. . . .”
“Seventeen-pound Butterball!”
“When did you place your order?”
“How should I know?”
I feel bad for the guy behind the counter. While he’s dealing with the escalating turkey situation, a woman behind the counter calls my number. I’m picking up an order for my mom. She’s been coming to this butcher on Jones Street since before I was born. In addition to Sunday family dinner, my mom decided that we needed to have dinner together tonight. She doesn’t like the way Marnix is reverting to his old tendencies, locking himself in his room and shutting everyone else out. She thinks tonight could be a catalyst for some big breakthrough for Marnix. Maybe there’s a chance that if she forces him to sit down for enough family dinners, he will do whatever she wants in a desperate attempt to make her chill.
But three hours later, chaos ensues.
The absurd thing is that we look like the perfect family at the dinner table. Anyone looking up into our window on the second floor would notice the meticulously set table, the lit white candlesticks at the center, the platters and bowls of food Mom spent the past two days preparing. They would assume we were talking about what we did today or sharing funny things that happened or maybe even planning our next family vacation. They would never suspect the reason Marnix is here. Or why Mom is so desperate to make everything appear normal.
Mom has spent the past twenty minutes rambling about her friend’s son. Apparently he’s finally dealing with his drinking problem.
“He goes to meetings every day,” Mom brags. “He is so determined to recover. It’s inspiring, don’t you think?” She looks at Marnix expectantly.
“What is your point?” he asks.
“Easy,” Dad says. This might be the first word he’s said since we sat down. When Mom gets on one of her rambles, Dad kind of blends into the background, letting her do all the work.
“Do we really need to hear some manufactured anecdote about a loser we don’t even know?” Marnix glares at Mom. “Say what you really want to say.”
Mom blots her lips with her linen napkin, carefully smoothing it back over her lap. “I am. I wanted to tell you this inspiring story about a boy who is actively in recovery. He’s made a choice to get better and he’s honoring that choice.”
“And what? I don’t want to get better?”
“Hiding out in your room all day isn’t helping.”
Marnix erupts in a noise somewhere between a bark and a laugh. “Unreal. You force me to come back here when I wanted to stay in Arizona. Then you—”
“That was a decision Dr. Peck made.”
“Please. You love that I’m back so you can monitor me up close. Like I’m some crazy person who needs to be locked up.”
Mom shakes her head. She’s barely touched her dinner. “You’re not crazy.”
“How would you know?”
“Because I know you.”
“Do you? You forced me to come back, but you’re afraid of why I’m here. You’re afraid to talk about anything real.”
Dad stares hard at Marnix, but keeps silent.
Mom looks at Dad. Dad doesn’t break his stare.
“You came home because Dr. Peck thought it was too soon to return to the environment where you got into trouble,” Mom insists.
“See? You won’t even address the reality that I tried to kill myself. You use these weak phrases like ‘where you got into trouble.’ How about where I swallowed a pile of Vicodin I scored from this kid down the hall because I didn’t want to be alive anymore?”
Mom’s eyes swell with tears. I want to reach out to her, but I am paralyzed. I didn’t know how Marnix tried to kill himself. Mom wouldn’t tell me when I asked her. The image of my brother alone and hopeless in his dorm room, swallowing pills, is excruciating.
Marnix isn’t done. “You still can’t face reality. What did you do when I hid out in my room all those times? Nothing. You did nothing then, and there’s nothing you can do now. You’re useless.”
“Enough!” Dad slams his hand down on the table, rattling the silverware and making the candle flames jump. “You do not talk to your mother that way.”
“So the way you talk to her is better? You guys live in this insulated bubble. Tourists take pictures of this building all the time. They would smile at me when I left for school like they admired me for living on this fairy-tale corner in the West Village. What a joke. You guys have this fantasy lifestyle people would kill for, but there are plenty of other kids around here who are a lot like me. You don’t have the first clue.” Marnix glares at Mom. “You try so hard to make everything look perfect . . . and for what? Who are you trying to impress? Who are you trying to convince? Is it that if you make everything look perfect enough, your kids will actually be perfect?”
“I never expected you to be perfect,” Mom says. She wipes tears off her cheek.
“But you never expected me to be flawed, either. Pretending everything is okay isn’t going to make me better.”
“You have to make a choice to get better. You’re already making progress. Dr. Peck says—”
“This isn’t about Dr. Peck. This is about you. You never even asked me why.”
“Why what?”
“Why I tried to kill myself. Don’t you want to know?”
“I . . . of course I do. If you want to talk about it. You need to heal on your own schedule.”
“Part of the healing process involves talking about the problem.”
“You went through a rough patch. That happens to all of us. But you’re getting better now. Your . . . issue is in the past.”
“How would you know?” Marnix shoves his chair back from the table. He gets up and leans against the back of his chair, his savage eyes seizing Mom like a riptide, dragging her farther from shore. “You don’t know anything about me. Not the real me. Because you’re afraid to find out who I really am. That’s why you let me hide out in my room all those years, right? That’s why you never asked what was wrong. You were afraid of why I was so angry.”
“That’s not true.”
“You didn’t want to hear the truth.”
“So tell me now.”
Marnix shakes his head, walking away from her. From all of us. “It’s too late now, Mom.” We hear his door slam. Music comes on. And just like that, I’m sixteen again. Afraid of my older brother.
“It was horrible,” I tell Austin later that night in my room. I could lie on my bed with him like this for hours. Austin on his back; me halfway on top of him with my cheek pressed against his chest, my arm slung over his stomach, one leg bent over his. We fit together like we were made for each other. “You should have seen my mom’s face. She was totally devastated.”
“What did your dad say?” Austin asks.
“Nothing. He goes into these weird silences when Marnix gets upset now. They used to get into scary shouting matches before Marnix left for college. My dad was always yelling at him. But ever since he’s come home, it’s like my dad’s afraid to damage him any more than he’s already damaged. Like one wrong word will push him over the edge again.”
“Sounds like Marnix wants them to stop avoiding the real issue. Whatever it is.”
“That’s exactly what he said at dinner.” I prop myself up on my elbows, looking down at Austin in the warm glow of the lamplight. “Enough about me. Did you see those apartments today?”
“Horrible and horrible. They both had sleeping nooks where the bed was crammed into such a small space, the only way to get in and out of it was to crawl in from the bottom. Not happening.”
“You’ll find your place soon.”
Austin slid
es his hand up my arm. I get all tingly like I always do when he touches me. “Our place.”
“Hmm?”
“My place will be our place. I’m not only considering what I want. I’m thinking about what you want, too. I want you to feel comfortable coming over . . . and staying over.” His intense look is clear. He wants me in his bed. All night.
An image of us tangled in his bed in his apartment with no roommates makes my face burn.
I wonder when it’s going to happen. Our first time. Will it be a night Austin plans with a romantic dinner and walk along the river? Or will it happen without warning when we least expect it?
Austin smiles at me like he is perfectly at peace in this moment. Just by looking at me with so much affection, he makes me believe that being with me is the one thing he wants most in this world. I smile back at him. I don’t need a mirror to tell me we have the same expression. We are the same in so many ways. We understand each other on a level no one else can. That’s the thing about soul mates. Our connection transcends the world as we know it. There is another plane of human existence, and we reach that mysterious realm whenever we are together.
Forgiving him was the right thing to do. We can be together exactly how we want to be, for real. Nothing can stop us now.
CHAPTER 23
DARCY
THE BRIGHT SIDE OF HITTING rock bottom is that things can only get better.
That was the fleeting thought I had when I woke up with the worst hangover of my life Wednesday morning. It was so bad I had to call out sick from work for the first time. My boss was concerned. Ever since I started working at Java Stop, I’ve been the girl who requests doubles and eagerly switches shifts with anyone who asks. That’s why I am now the happy owner of six tickets to a burlesque show at the Slipper Room. This guy I work with went away a couple weeks ago and I took all his shifts. He was so desperate for me to cover him that he offered the tickets upfront. He had no idea I would have taken the extra shifts anyway.