Can't Get There from Here

  “Don’t you have to work?” I asked.

  “I can take a personal day,” he said.

  I thought about it for a moment. “We should wait until later.”

  “Okay, the library’s open late tonight,” Anthony said. “I’ll be here until nine. What will you do between now and then?”

  “I’ll keep looking,” I said. “I’ll come back here later.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I looked for Tears in the park again. It was dark, and hard to see who was sleeping on the grass under blankets or in sleeping bags. They all looked like lumps of clay. I climbed over the iron fence and walked through the grassy area inside. Some of the lumps looked too big to be Tears, and it was too dark to tell if she was one of the smaller lumps. After a while I climbed back over the fence and checked in front of the Good Life and the vegan bakery. No sign of her. I headed toward the tunnel. She had to be somewhere around there.

  “Hey,” a voice said.

  A police car pulled up. Officer Johnson, the tall cop with the black mustache, leaned out the window. “Get out of here or I’ll bust you for loitering.”

  “I’m looking for my friend,” I said.

  “Sure you are.” Johnson smirked. “Any friend you can find.”

  “No, just one,” I said. “She has short black hair and big eyes.”

  Officer Johnson said something to the cop driving the car, then turned to me. “Some kid got run over by a truck a couple of hours ago. Driver said she wandered out into the middle of traffic. He hit the brakes but there was nothing he could do.”

  I felt my heart stop cold. “Is … she okay?”

  Johnson shook his head. “It don’t look good.”

  I started to run.

  “You kids never listen,” Officer Johnson yelled behind me. “I told ya a hundred times. Get off the damn street. But ya never listen.”

  I ran down the dark sidewalk toward the library. I had to tell Anthony.

  I bounded up the stairs, through the front door and past that metal detector thing. One of the ID women behind the front counter yelled, “Hey!” I went to the computer tables. People were sitting at almost every computer, but Anthony wasn’t there. I didn’t understand. He said he worked late tonight.

  “Hey, you!” It was Bobby. He must’ve heard the ID woman’s shout. “What do you want?”

  The people at the computers stopped what they were doing and watched Bobby and me circle the table.

  “Anthony said the library is open to the public and anyone can use it,” I said.

  “Yeah, they can use it,” Bobby said. “Not run around and make messes.”

  “I’m not making a mess,” I said. “I came to see Anthony.”

  “He ain’t here.”

  “Yes, he is.” It was Anthony, coming from the back. He must’ve seen that I was breathing hard and looked scared. “What’s wrong?”

  “Tears got hit by a truck.”

  “Wait here. I’ll be right back.” Anthony hurried toward his office. Bobby kept his eye on me. Like I was a wild animal that escaped from its cage.

  A few moments later Anthony came back, pulling on his brown coat and tying his scarf. “Let’s go.”

  We left the library. Anthony asked, “Which hospital is she in?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They didn’t tell you?”

  “All I know is what Officer Johnson said. She was hit by a truck and it looked bad.”

  Anthony stopped on the sidewalk, watching the headlights of the cars on the street. “Let’s go to the police station. They’ll know.”

  We headed for the station house. Anthony took long strides, and I had to walk fast and sometimes even jog to keep up with him. We turned a corner and saw the station house ahead. It was a low, square brick building with flagpoles jutting out from the second floor. The sidewalk in front of the station was brightly lit, and a row of police cars was parked at an angle in the street. Anthony pushed through the glass doors and I followed him into an open lobby filled with wooden benches and lined with doors. People sat on the benches. Women with babies sucking on pacifiers. Silent old men and women. A group of students with backpacks, huddled close together and talking quietly.

  Anthony went to a scuffed Plexiglas window with small holes punched through it. On the other side a police officer sat at a counter writing on a pad.

  “Excuse me,” Anthony said. “We’re trying to find out about a young woman who was hit by a truck a few hours ago.”

  “What do you want to know?” the officer asked.

  “Is she okay? Where is she?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Friends,” Anthony said.

  The police officer’s eyebrows rose slightly. He glanced at me and then back at Anthony. “Wait here.” He got up and disappeared through a door in the back. After a while the door opened and a skinny man wearing a brown suit came out. His eyes fixed on Anthony. “You asking about the kid who was hit by the truck?”

  Anthony nodded and the man in the brown suit gestured for him to come closer. I started to go with him, but Anthony put his hand on my shoulder to stop me, then went to the door alone. The man in the brown suit spoke quietly. Anthony listened and then said something I couldn’t hear. The man in the brown suit took out a pad of paper and a pen and wrote. Then he shook Anthony’s hand and went back inside. Anthony walked slowly toward me. His shoulders were hunched over and he was staring at the floor.

  “Let’s sit down,” he said.

  “No.” I knew what he was going to say. But it couldn’t be true. It just couldn’t. Not after Country Club and 2Moro and Rainbow.

  Anthony hung his head. “She wasn’t carrying any ID. They didn’t know who she was. I gave him her name and the town she comes from. He’s going to call her mom. Someone from her family has to come here to make a positive identification.”

  So that was it. My friends were all gone. My tribe. The only people in the world that I cared about, and the only people who cared about me. A month ago we were all together. Now there was no one left. Only me. All alone. That wet wind started to blow. Didn’t even occur to me to try and fight it. I stood there and cried.

  I felt a pair of arms go around me. Felt the soft, fuzzy cloth of Anthony’s brown coat against my face. Yes, he was one of the nice ones. But sooner or later he’d leave, too. Everyone left.

  “Come on, Maybe, let’s go.” I let him guide me out of the police station and back out into the cold dark.

  “Hungry?” Anthony asked.

  I shook my head and tasted the dirty tears that ran down into the corners of my mouth.

  “No, I didn’t think you would be,” Anthony said. “Sorry, it was a dumb question.”

  “It’s okay,” I said with a sniff.

  We started to walk. I don’t think either of us knew where we were going.

  “Perhaps the best way to look at this is that you’re lucky,” Anthony said. “For some reason you’ve been spared. You alone have been given another chance. It’s almost as if someone’s looking out for you, Maybe.”

  Looking out for me? I glanced upward. It was dark, but the lights of the city lit the low clouds in the sky above. Could it be? It was hard to believe. But maybe. You never knew. We walked for a while. Anthony didn’t say anything more. We turned a corner.

  “What’s this?” Anthony asked.

  I looked up. A long line of people stood on the sidewalk across the street. They were dressed up, smoking and talking. You could feel the excitement like they were all looking forward to something big. Then I realized what it was.

  “They’re waiting to get into a club.”

  “Where?” Anthony looked down the street.

  “Around the next corner. It’s called The Cradle.”

  “It must be huge to hold all these people.”

  “No, because half of them won’t get in.”

  Anthony and I walked along the sidewalk across the street from the crowd.

  “I’m going t
o try very hard not to say all the obvious things you’d expect from a middle-aged librarian,” Anthony said as he stared at the costumes and makeup. “I’m not going to ask which ones are male and which are female. I’m not going to ask how they can manage to go out at midnight and still get up for work in the morning. I’m not going to ask why some of them look so young or why—”

  I didn’t hear the rest because I spotted a ghost.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Tears?” I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, but I was sure it was her. I practically skipped across the street.

  Tears looked in my direction and her eyes got too big for her head. She was wearing a black leather jacket, a tight black skirt, and long black boots. Someone made her up to look more like twenty-one than twelve.

  “I can’t believe you’re alive!” I gushed. “We thought you got run over by a truck!”

  I thought she would smile or laugh, but she frowned. I slowed down then stopped on the sidewalk and lowered my voice. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Go away,” she whispered.

  “Why?”

  “He’s gonna see you and he’ll be really mad.”

  “Who? Jack?”

  “Who’s Jack?”

  “That guy we met here the last time,” I said.

  “Not him. Someone else.”

  I looked at her more closely. Her hair looked freshly washed. And her makeup didn’t have a single smear. Her jacket was so new you could smell the leather.

  “And my name’s not Tears no more,” she said. “It’s Lacey.”

  I felt a hand close on my arm and spin me around. It was the short, stocky man with the shaved head and the diamond earrings. The one who pushed me into the bar the last time I was at The Cradle. His long black leather coat hung open and he was wearing a black T-shirt underneath. “What do you want?”

  “I’m her friend,” I said.

  “She don’t got no friends unless I say so.” I felt his hand tighten on my arm, just like the last time. I wanted to tell him he needed a new act.

  “Nikki!” someone shouted. “Nikki!” It was Anthony. He rushed up to Tears and hugged her. “Oh, honey, I’m so happy I found you! What are you doing here? Your mom and I have been so worried. We thought we’d never see you again.”

  The short man with the diamond earrings let go of my arm. “Now what? Who are you?”

  “I’m her father,” Anthony said. “Who are you?”

  The short bald man’s forehead bunched up with confusion. “You can’t be her father.”

  “Why not?” Anthony asked loudly. “What are you? Some kind of racist?”

  The other people on line started to stare.

  “Keep it down,” said the man with the shaved head.

  “Her name is Nikki Frimer and she comes from West Virginia and I am her father.” Anthony hugged Tears again. What a performance! I had to give him credit for playing the part so well. Maybe he should have been an actor, not a librarian. “Nikki, hon, I know we’ve had our differences, but your mom and I got so scared when you ran away. I promise we’ll be more open-minded from now on. You don’t even have to live with us if you don’t want to. I spoke to Grammy Emma. She said Grandpa David is taking a new medicine and his Parkinson’s disease is much better. She said it would be no problem if you wanted to stay with them.”

  Tears’s eyes went about as wide as they could. She looked at me and I mouthed the words, “It’s true.”

  “Maybe she don’t want to go back to West Virginia,” said the man with the shaved head. “Maybe she want to stay here.”

  “Listen, I don’t know who you are, but my daughter happens to be thirteen years old,” Anthony said angrily. “Do you know what happens to men who take advantage of young girls?” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. “Perhaps you’d like to have the police explain it to you.”

  The man with the shaved head quickly raised his hands. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Okay, I see where you come from.”

  “And I see where you’re going.” Anthony pointed his cell phone down the street. “And if I were you, I’d get going very fast.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  We took the subway to Brooklyn and stayed in Anthony’s apartment that night. In his living room a TV sat in a black cabinet against the wall across from a blue couch and a wooden coffee table. The walls were lined with bookshelves and framed paintings. Deep yellow curtains hung over the windows. Hard to remember the last time I’d been in a room with curtains. Everything was neat and clean. Half a year in New York and this was my first time in a “normal” home.

  “You wait here,” Anthony said, and went down the hall.

  We waited. Tears was looking at something on one of the bookshelves. It was a small blue stone turtle with sparkling red eyes. The way the eye stones shimmered made me think that they might be valuable. Tears picked it up and studied it more closely. She gave me a questioning look.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s being nice to us.”

  “For now,” Tears said. “Just wait.”

  “No, I think he’s different.”

  She put the turtle down just as Anthony came back with two thick, fluffy light blue towels. “Here. These towels are for your shower.”

  Tears gave me an uncertain look. I wasn’t sure I felt like taking a shower, but I had a feeling that for Anthony it was the price of admission. I remembered he was kind of a clean freak, always washing his hands, and even wiping the phone after Tears used it. Tears was probably worried that if we took turns in the bathroom it would mean one of us would be alone with Anthony when the other was showering.

  “Come on,” I said. “We’ll take a shower together.”

  We went into the bathroom and locked the door. The bathroom was small and lined with green tiles. There was hardly enough room for us to undress without our elbows banging into each other. I reached over the tub and started the shower. Warm steam filled the bathroom. “Come on,” I said.

  We got into the shower and started to wash. The water felt soothing, and we giggled and lathered shampoo into our hair and took turns rinsing it out. My hair was still a tangle of knots, but at least it would be clean. I washed off the dirt and Tears washed off her makeup, and then we weren’t street kids anymore. We were just a couple of happy, giggling girls.

  The hot water felt so good that we stayed until our fingers got wrinkly. Then we got out and dried ourselves with the soft, fluffy towels.

  “Now what?” Tears asked.

  “Do this.” I wrapped the towel around me and tucked it so it wouldn’t come loose. We went out into the hall and back to the living room. Anthony had pushed the coffee table out of the way and pulled a folding bed out of the couch.

  “Is this where you want us to sleep?” I asked.

  “No,” he answered. “I’ll sleep here. You two sleep in the bedroom. That bed’s bigger and softer than this.”

  Tears and me went back down the hall to the bedroom. Inside, the bed had been turned down. Two folded white T-shirts lay on the pale red blanket.

  Tears held one up. “What are these for?”

  “He probably left them for us to sleep in,” I said.

  Tears pulled the T-shirt on over her head, then locked the bedroom door. I didn’t argue. Even with Anthony you couldn’t be a hundred percent sure. That’s the way it was with grown-ups. You just never knew for sure. I crawled into the bed and Tears got in on the other side. My head sank into the pillow, and my body settled into the mattress. The sheets were soft and smooth. This bed was even more comfortable than the one at the Youth Housing Project.

  The room was lit by a small lamp on the night table on Tears’s side of the bed.

  “’Night, Maybe.” She yawned and started to reach for the lamp.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  “You’re afraid?”

  “Afraid I’ll fall asleep,” I said. The bed felt so good, so warm and c
omfortable. This was the second time in a week that I slept in a real bed. In my head I could hear Maggot complaining that soft, warm beds were just too middle class for him. But this was one part of being middle class that I could definitely get used to.

  THIRTY

  The next morning Anthony got us up early and took us to a diner for breakfast, only he left, saying he’d be back soon. A while passed and I was beginning to wonder if he’d ever come back when he drove up in a rented car. It took eight hours to drive to Hundred, West Virginia, and we listened to the radio the whole way. Tears and me sat in the backseat and told Anthony when to change the station. I don’t think we heard a single song Anthony liked; he said he was into opera, and you better believe we didn’t listen to any of that.

  Thanks to this awesome cool rental car thing called a GPS, Anthony drove right to the trailer park where Nikki’s grandparents lived. In green cut-out letters over the entrance to the park it said Daisy Acres. Inside were some of the biggest trailers I’d ever seen. A few looked as big as houses and had concrete driveways and aboveground pools. Some had bird feeders and basketball hoops, and even though it was January you could see where the gardens and flowerbeds were. A few of the lawns still had plastic reindeers or Nativity scenes from Christmas.

  Anthony parked the car in a driveway next to a white trailer with green trim and a red door. When we got out of the car, birds burst from a brown wooden bird feeder on a pole next to the driveway. Some small bushes in the yard were covered with burlap, and a wind chime near the front door made soft tinkling sounds.

  The red door opened and a small woman with rosy cheeks and gray hair hurried out wearing a long light blue coat. “Nikki!” she cried.

  In the backseat, Tears turned to me with those round eyes she made whenever she was surprised or scared. We’d had fun in the car, but now all of a sudden she looked nervous.

  “Go on,” I said in a low voice.

  Tears pressed a finger between her lips and began to gnaw on the nail.

  “She’s your grandma,” I said. “She won’t bite.”

  Tears slowly pushed open the door. In an instant she was swallowed up in a hug by her grandmother. “Oh, Nikki, Nikki!” she cried. “We thought you were dead. A policeman called from New York and said you’d been run over by a truck.”