“Subways are down,” he said. “It’s gonna be a long walk over the bridge.…”
Owen felt another pang of anxiety, though he was no longer sure if it was for the fact that his father wasn’t here to help or the idea that he might already be crossing the length of Brooklyn to get home. It seemed far more likely that he was sitting on the darkened boardwalk, lost in memories and oblivious to the whims of the electrical grid. Even so, there was something odd about being separated like this, on opposite ends of the same city, a whole network of roads and rivers, bridges and trains between them, but still unable to make it across the miles.
“You two be careful,” George called back to them, as he stepped into the stairwell behind the handyman. “I’ll be around if you need anything.”
The heavy door slammed shut behind them, and Lucy and Owen were left alone in the quiet hallway. Their gazes both landed on the gaping black hole of the empty elevator, and Lucy gave a little shrug.
“I kind of thought it’d be cooler on the outside,” she said, reaching back to twist her long brown hair into a loose ponytail, which quickly unraveled again.
Owen nodded. “And maybe a little brighter.”
“Well, at least we have our freedom,” she joked, and this made him smile.
“Right,” he said. “You know what they say about the inside of a cell.”
“What?”
He shrugged. “That it can drive a person mad.”
“I think that’s solitary confinement.”
“Oh,” he said. “I guess ours wasn’t solitary.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “It definitely wasn’t.”
He leaned against the wall near the open elevator. “So what now?”
“I don’t know,” she said, glancing at her watch. “My parents are in Europe, and it’s already late there. I’m sure they’re out to dinner or at a party or something. They probably have no idea this is even happening.…”
“I’m sure they do,” Owen said. “If it’s the whole city, this has got to be pretty big news. They let you stay home by yourself?”
“They travel way too much to worry about always finding someone,” she explained. “It was usually me and my brothers, anyway.”
“And now?”
“Just me,” she said. “But it’s not like I’m not old enough to be left alone.”
“How old is that?”
“Almost seventeen.”
“So sixteen,” he said with a grin, and she rolled her eyes.
“Quite the math whiz. Why, how old are you?”
“Actually seventeen.”
“So you’re gonna be a senior?”
“If we have school tomorrow,” he said, glancing around. “Which I sort of doubt.”
“I’m sure it’ll be fixed by then. How hard is it to flip a power switch?”
He laughed. “Quite the science whiz.”
“Funny,” she said, but the word was hollow. Her smile fell as she regarded him, and Owen found himself straightening under her gaze.
“What?”
“You’ll be okay on your own?”
“You think I need a babysitter?” he asked, but the joke landed heavily between them. He lifted his chin. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “And I’m sure my dad’ll find a way to get back here soon. He’s probably worried about the building.”
“He’s probably worried about you,” Lucy said, and something tightened in Owen’s chest, though he wasn’t sure why. “Just be careful, okay?”
He nodded. “I will.”
“If you need a flashlight, I think we might have extras.”
“I’m fine,” he said as they started walking down the hall. “But thanks.”
“It’s only gonna get darker,” she warned him, waving a hand around. “You’ll need—”
“I’m fine,” he said again.
When he opened the door to the stairwell, the sealed-in heat came at them in a fog of stale air. From somewhere above, they could hear muddled voices, and then the slamming of a door, the sound of it crashing down flight after flight until it reached them.
They stepped inside, where the little white emergency lights along the edges of the stairs gave off a faint glow, and for the first time, Owen could see her face clearly: the freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose, and the deep brown of her eyes, so dark they almost looked black. She climbed the first step so that she was even with him, their eyes level, and they stood there for a long moment without saying anything. Above her, there was the seemingly endless spiral of stairs leading up to the twenty-fourth floor. Behind him, there was the long descent to his empty apartment in the basement.
“Well,” she said eventually, her eyes shining in the reflection of the lights. “Thanks for making the time pass, Elevator Boy.”
“Yeah,” he said. “We’ll have to do it again the next time there’s a massive citywide blackout.”
“Deal,” she said, then turned to begin walking, her sandals loud against the concrete steps. Owen watched her go; her white sundress made her look like a ghost, like something out a dream, and he waited until she’d disappeared around the corner before he began to walk himself, moving slowly from one step to the next.
Two flights down, he paused to listen to her footsteps above him, which were growing fainter as she climbed away, and he thought again of the dismal apartment below, and the chaotic city outside, the sense of possibility in a night like this, where everything was new and unwritten, the whole world gone dark like some great and terrible magic trick. He stood very still, one hand on the railing, breathing in the warm air and listening, and then, before he could think better of it, he spun around and went flying back up the stairs.
He made it only three flights before he had to pause, breathing hard, and when he lifted his head again, she was there on the landing, peering down at him.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said, smiling up at her. “I just changed my mind about the flashlight.”
3
Upstairs, they spilled out into the darkened hallway—identical to the one thirteen floors below—both out of breath. Lucy had taken her sandals off somewhere around the eighteenth floor, and she let them dangle now from one hand as she used the other to feel her way along the wall, aware of Owen a few paces behind her, his footsteps light on the carpet. At the door to 24D, she fished the keys from the pocket of her dress, then fumbled with the lock as he leaned against the wall beside her, squinting.
“It’s not easy in the dark,” he said, but she didn’t respond. She’d been opening this door for nearly sixteen years. She knew the incremental movements by heart: the way the key stuck so that you had to jiggle it to the left and the noisy click of the bolt as it finally turned. She could have done this blindfolded. She could have done it in her sleep.
It wasn’t the dark. It was him.
As the lock finally gave and the door swung open, Lucy hesitated. She realized she’d never had a boy in her apartment before. At least not like this. Never alone. And certainly never in the dark.
There had always been friends of her brothers around, cleaning out the refrigerator and playing music so loud it thumped through the walls. But Lucy’s school was all-girls, so she’d never really had any guy friends of her own.
Of course, she’d never really had very many girl friends, either.
Last year, while making a rare and mandatory appearance as a chaperone at the winter formal, her mother had noticed that after a few obligatory dances, Lucy had disappeared into the hallway with a book. After that, she’d suddenly started paying attention to her daughter’s lack of a social life. If Lucy wasn’t hanging out with her brothers, she was usually just wandering the city by herself, neither of which were apparently productive uses of her time. And so she’d begrudgingly agreed to attend a basketball game, where a junior named Bernie, who went to their brother school, approached her at the snack booth to say that he liked her skirt. I
t was the exact same plaid skirt that every single other girl at the game was wearing, but he seemed nice enough, and she had nobody else to sit with, so she let him buy her a popcorn.
They started meeting behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art every day after school, doing their homework together just long enough to maintain the illusion that they weren’t only there to make out. But never once had he invited her over to his Fifth Avenue apartment, and never once had she considered inviting him back to hers. Theirs was a relationship built on neutral ground and impartial geography: park benches and stone fountains and picnic blankets. Bringing him into her home would have given the relationship a weight that it was never meant to bear, and it seemed to Lucy that there was no faster way to sink something. Especially something that would so easily sink on its own just two short months later, when Bernie met a different girl in a different plaid skirt at a different game.
But this was a unique situation, an emergency of sorts, and that changed everything. An ordinary afternoon had given way to an evening that felt hazy around the edges, tinged with recklessness and a kind of unfamiliar abandon. This was the first time she’d been left entirely on her own; no parents, no brothers, nobody at all. And now here she was, swinging the door wide open, a boy she barely knew waiting at her back.
From the front hallway, she could see all the way down past the kitchen and into the living room, where at this time of dusk, the windows were usually beginning to reflect the many lights of the city, a seemingly endless grid of yellow squares. But now it was empty, just a pale blue rectangle at the end of a long, black corridor.
Behind her, Owen cleared his throat. He was still standing just outside the door, apparently unsure whether or not he was being invited inside.
“So did you want to just grab the flashlight for me, or…?”
“No,” Lucy said, stepping aside. “Come on in.”
The fading light from the windows didn’t reach this far back into the apartment, so Lucy kept her hands outstretched as she moved tentatively into the kitchen. Owen had wandered into the living room, and she heard a scrape followed by a thud as he tripped over something.
“I’m okay,” he called out cheerfully.
“I’m so relieved,” she yelled back as she reached the pantry. On the bottom shelf, she found the enormous blue crate that held all the misfit items that never seemed to belong anywhere else. It was the one disorganized place in the whole apartment, a treasure trove of broken umbrellas and sunglasses and an assortment of pens from various hotels around the world. She rummaged through the debris until she found a single flashlight, and when she clicked it on, she was glad to discover that it worked.
Stepping out of the pantry, she swung the beam around the kitchen so that the light made shapes that lingered across the backs of her eyelids. In the living room, she found Owen standing at the window, his hands braced on the sill. When he twisted to face her, the cone of light fell directly across his face, and she lowered it again as he blinked.
“It’s so strange out there,” he said, jabbing his thumb behind him. “It seems so quiet without all the lights.”
Lucy moved to the window beside him, her nose inches from the glass. The sky was a deepening blue, and the checkerboard of windows, which were usually filled with glowing scenes of family dinners and flickering TVs, looked hunched and forsaken tonight. From where Lucy and Owen were standing, they could see dozens of buildings stretched across Seventy-Second Street, all of them made up of hundreds of windows, and behind them, thousands of people hidden deep within the folds of their own separate homes. It always made Lucy feel small, standing here on the edge of something so vast, but tonight was the first time it felt a little bit lonely, too, and she was suddenly grateful for Owen’s company.
“There was only one flashlight,” she said, and he glanced down at it. She waited for him to make some kind of joke about being afraid of the dark, and when he didn’t, when he simply remained silent instead, she added, “So maybe we should just stick together.”
He turned back to the window and nodded. “Okay,” he agreed. “But it’s already getting warm in here. Want to go for a walk before it’s too dark?”
“Outside?”
“Well, this is a pretty big apartment, but…”
“I just meant… I mean, do you think it’s safe?”
“This is your city,” he said with a smile. “You tell me.”
“I guess it’s probably fine,” she said. “And it wouldn’t hurt to pick up some supplies.”
“Supplies?”
“Yeah, like water and stuff. I don’t know. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do in these types of situations?”
He dug around in his pocket and pulled out a few crumpled bills. “You can get as much water as you’d like,” he said. “I think a night like this calls for some ice cream.”
She rolled her eyes. “It’ll just melt,” she said, but he was undeterred.
“All the more reason to rescue it from such a sad fate…”
Before they left, they checked their cell phones, but neither had any reception, and Owen’s was nearly out of battery. Lucy used what little power was left on her laptop, which had been sitting unplugged on her bed all day, to try to send an e-mail to her parents, telling them everything was fine. But there was no connection, not that it probably mattered anyway; it was six hours later there, and if they weren’t still at some stuffy party, they were likely asleep.
Downstairs, Lucy and Owen burst out of the blazing heat of the stairwell into the lobby, which was nearly as humid. They almost ran over a beleaguered-looking nanny, who was paused with one hand on a stroller, steeling herself for the climb. A few other people were milling around near the mailroom, but it seemed as if most of the residents were either upstairs in their apartments or else still trying to find their way back home.
The handyman who’d helped rescue them was sitting at the front desk, his arm propped on his toolbox as he listened to a handheld radio, and he waved when he saw them. “How were the stairs?”
“Better than the elevator,” Owen said. “Any news?”
“No power until tomorrow at the earliest,” he reported, his mustache twitching. “They’re saying it goes all the way down to Delaware and all the way up into Canada.” He paused for a moment, then shook his head. “It must be quite a sight from up in space.”
“We’re going to pick up a few things,” Lucy said. “You need anything?”
The man was in the middle of requesting a six-pack of beer—which Lucy was about to tell him would be tricky to procure, given that they were both well under twenty-one—when Owen tapped her on the arm.
“Look,” he said, and she turned toward the front doors of the building, which faced out across Broadway. But instead of the usual herds of yellow taxis and black town cars and long city buses, she was shocked to see that the entire road was choked with people, the whole massive crowd moving uptown with a kind of plodding resolve.
Together, she and Owen stood in the doorway, their eyes wide as they watched the sea of bodies move past. Many of them were barefoot, their shoes tucked like footballs under their arms, and others had wrapped their shirts around their heads to try to keep cool. They wore suits and ties and dresses, and they carried briefcases and laptops, all of them taking part in the world’s strangest commute. There were no traffic lights to guide them, and no police in sight, though somewhere up the road, Lucy could see the faint throb of blue and red, unnaturally bright in the darkening sky.
“This is unbelievable,” she breathed, shaking her head. On the corner, one of the bars was jammed with people, many of them spilling out onto the sidewalks. Whether they’d given up on their way home or simply wandered outside to join in the camaraderie, there was a festive air to the gathering. High above them, perched on their balconies, people were using magazines for fans as they watched the scene unfolding below. Others hung out of their open windows, the apartments all dark behind them. It was like the whole cit
y had been turned inside out.
“Come on,” Owen said, and she followed him out to the corner, where a guy wearing a dusty construction vest was helping a man in a pin-striped suit direct traffic, holding up the throngs of people to let a few cars slip through the intersection, then motioning for those on foot to continue their long treks homeward.
Lucy and Owen kept to the sidewalk, and when they reached the little bodega on Seventy-Fourth Street, which sold everything from cans of soda and dog food to toilet paper and lottery tickets, she grabbed his arm and dragged him inside. There were only a few bottles of water left, and they lined them up in a row on the counter before going back to grab a lighter and some candles, plus extra batteries for the flashlight.
When Lucy pushed some money toward the man behind the register, he gave her what seemed like an unlikely amount of change.
“I don’t think…” she began, but he flashed her a toothy smile.
“Blackout discount,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Who knew?” Owen said with a laugh. “Think that applies to any of the ice-cream shops, too?”
The man nodded as he packed their items into two plastic bags. “I heard the place on Seventy-Seventh is giving it away for free. It’s all melting anyhow.”
Owen turned to Lucy. “I think I like this city better in the dark.”
Outside, they stood for a moment with the plastic bags hooked around their fingers. The last streaks of pink had been erased from the sky over the Hudson, and an inky black had settled over the street. As they walked uptown to join the line for free ice cream, there was still a feeling of celebration to the evening. The price of beer at the bar next door was plummeting as the kegs grew warmer, and on the other side of Broadway, a restaurant was serving a makeshift dinner by candlelight. A few kids ran past with purple glow sticks, and two mounted policemen steered their wary-eyed horses through the crowds, surveying the scene from above.