by Anne Stuart
She reached up and kissed the words out of his mouth. “It sounds like heaven,” she said, meaning it. She would live with him in a break room at Macy’s, she would live with him on the streets. The Village was a dream come true.
He looked just slightly embarrassed—he wasn’t used to being the good guy, and she simply hugged him, moving forward again, the sounds of the crowds getting noisier as they drew closer. And then they were in Times Square, awash with people, the neon lights casting an orange glow over everyone, and there was even a billboard high up that advertised cigarettes and shot smoke out of a woman’s mouth. She was going to have a lot to get used to. At least these crowds weren’t the almost mob-like crush she’d experienced in the past. Future. WTF.
“Come on,” he said in her ear over the noise of the crowd. “Let’s get closer.”
Out of nowhere, a shadow seemed to pass over her, and she held back for a moment, confused. “I have a bad feeling about this,” Han Solo would have said in a mere twenty-five years, and she suddenly wanted to leave.
“Let’s go back to the store,” she said urgently.
“What?” He couldn’t hear her, and he was tugging her forward, the crowds pushing them, and there was no way she could fight against them. The mass of humanity had suddenly grown larger, carrying them along like a wave, and his hand caught hers, warm and safe.
The first bell of St. Patrick’s, just a few blocks away, began to toll, and his hand was torn away, crowds of merrymakers pushing between them. “Johnny!” she screamed, but it was swallowed up in the noise as the crowds surged between them. She could see him, taller than most, looking for her, and he was fighting the crowds, trying to push through them. She screamed again, as a sudden icy wind slammed against her lavender parka and the snow began to pelt down on her short-cropped hair. “Johnny!”
He yelled something at her, the expression on his face shocked, but he was too far away, and there was nothing she could do. “I love you,” she said, not even trying for a voice, mouthing the words, hoping he would understand.
But he was gone, the smell of weed mixed with the pelting snow, police everywhere with their tasers and body cams, and she was fighting, struggling to get back to him, when the giant ball started its descent beneath the starless sky, and she knew.
She was back, and he was gone.
Johnny fell back against a parked taxi, staring in shock as people all around him began the countdown. He’d been reaching for her, fighting to get back to her through the cheerfully oblivious merrymakers, and she’d begun to fade, as if she’d been miles, a lifetime away, surrounded in a bubble, the people around her dressed in garish clothes, the snow pelting down around her, and even Mollie was different, her hair, her clothes. She was screaming for him, but she didn’t seem to see him, and he saw her mouth move. “I love you,” she said, the silent words clear.
And then she was gone, like a balloon that had suddenly popped, and the air was mild, the sky was clear, and the ball had dropped.
“Happy New Year!” People around him screamed at each other, grabbing whoever was closest and kissing them. One woman grabbed him, but at the look on his face she quickly turned away, and he was alone, alone in a huge crowd of people. Alone.
Chapter 23
“You okay, miss?” She’d heard those words before, hadn’t she? Mollie looked up dazedly. The cop looked like a throwback—his broad Irish face above the sleek uniform almost familiar. But she didn’t know him. Maybe she’d run into his grandfather, or his great-grandfather, but she didn’t know this man.
“Fine,” she said briefly.
“You ought to be getting home now,” he said. “It’s almost four. Everyone’s in bed by now. You want me to see if I can find you a taxi?”
Slowly, she shook her head. “That’s all right.” Her voice sounded numb, affect-less. “I’m going to walk home. It’s not far.” Glancing up at the corner, she saw she’d somehow ended up at East End Drive and Fifty-Second Street. It would be a hike, and she didn’t give a flying fuck. It could take forever. Or she could simply turn right and walk straight into the East River.
No, she wasn’t going to do that. She didn’t have the energy. “I’m on Sixty-Third Street,” she added to the policeman. “Not far.” If you didn’t count the crosstown blocks.
“You be careful out there.” He headed back to his patrol car and his waiting partner. A woman, she saw. There were some good things about 2020.
She walked. The streets were deserted as they’d been in the 1940s, the snow had slowed, no more than an occasional spit of flurries, and it was fucking cold, but she was wearing the parka she’d bought that had been sitting, unworn, in her stuffed closet, and the custom leather boots on her feet were warm.
She kept walking. Cold wind slammed against her, whistling through the steel and granite canyons of the city, emanating from the stone buildings, and it matched her soul, cold and dead and empty.
It had been a vain hope that she’d find an empty lot on Sixty-Third Street. Her high-rise condo rose up into the night sky, and she recognized the doorman who was sitting inside. She was going to have to come up with holiday tips, she thought abstractedly. The people who did these jobs counted on it.
“Ms. Simcoe!” Luis greeted her with a big smile. “I didn’t know you were back! Happy New Year!” If he resented his lost tip, he didn’t show it. “Did you have a nice vacation?”
“It was...different,” she said. She was only marginally interested in what people thought she was doing—the last time she’d been here was weeks ago.
“I had my wife clear out your refrigerator in mid-December,” he said. “I guess you hadn’t realized you were gonna be gone that long. If you text me a list, I can have someone get you some stuff to tide you over until the rest of the stores open. There’s a bodega a few blocks away that’s got the basics.”
It took her a moment to rouse herself enough to answer. “No need, Luis,” she said wearily. “I’ll just go out later.” She unzipped her jacket, pausing a moment as she took in her signature look of black turtleneck and pants, and then she felt the wallet in the inside pocket. Pulling it out, she grabbed the hundred dollar bills she kept on hand and handed them to him. “Happy New Year.”
And she moved past him, into the sleek, glass-walled elevator, and rode up, up to the seventy-third floor.
The apartment smelled like a coffin—the dead air smell when you came home from a vacation and no one had been breathing in the closed-up space. It looked the same, square and soulless. Empty as her life without Johnny.
She couldn’t think about it.
For one point seven million dollars, she didn’t have a bedroom, she had an alcove, and she headed straight for it. Stripping off her clothes, she looked down at her demi bra and boy shorts, but she was too far gone to cry. Maybe she only cried in the last century—her eyes had been dry since Johnny had disappeared into the past. She was numb, unfeeling, the way she’d always been, and she knew that she would never cry again, not in this lifetime.
And then she saw it, the small bite mark on the slope of her left breast, from his mouth, from Johnny, and her howl of grief echoed through the tiny apartment. Dropping down on her bed, she sobbed, pulling the stiff, designer duvet over her head, so awash in bone-shaking loss that everything seemed to fade around her, but it wasn’t coming back, she knew it. It was over, she was back in the prison of her own making, and the Johnny she knew had to be dead by now. That brought another howl, and then all she could do was curl in on herself and weep, for the rest of her goddamned, miserable life.
On January third she pulled herself out of bed, operating on a kind of remote control. She showered, looking down at the mark on her breast that was beginning to fade, and she sank against the tile and wept again.
By the time she emerged, her short hair was spiky around her woebegone face, her eyes were swollen, and she wanted to punch the stranger who looked back at her. This wasn't her. She should have shoulder-length hair, life in
her eyes, not dull affect.
Rummaging in her closet, she emerged with the black wrap dress. She'd fallen in love with it, and never dared wear it. It was perfectly modest, but the overlapping neckline seemed to fascinate certain men, and the dress fit her curves a little too well. She had never wanted to ask for trouble.
Now she didn't give a fuck. She was going to report Philip Ronson for his groping, and then she was going to quit, go home and get in bed and never get out again.
It didn't work out that way. With her luck, Philip Ronson was the one to greet her in the momentarily empty front hall.
"Maddie, baby," he crooned, his eyes lighting up. "Back from your vacation and looking just fine, if I may say so. That's one sexy dress. Much nicer than those tent things that never show a gal’s figure. And may I say, you have one fine ass?"
“No.”
Confusion spread over his patrician face. "No? No, what?"
"No, you may not say that. No, I'd prefer if you didn't talk to me at all."
She started to walk away, but Philip made the very grave mistake of grabbing her, grabbing her ass. "Come on, baby..."
What was good for Benny Marelli was equally suited for Philip Ronson. She brought her knee up, using all the force and rage from the many times she'd smiled and done nothing about men like him. He didn't make a sound, just a high-pitched whistling noise as she calmly stepped over his writhing body and headed back to the door.
“You’ll pay...” Came the strangled gasp from the man in the fetal position.
"So will you." Her energy lasted down forty-three floors in the elevator, but it vanished once she made it out onto the slushy sidewalks. She barely made it home without crying, and even the memory of Phillip’s wheeze of pain couldn’t put the smile back on her face.
“She’s coming back,” Rosa said stubbornly. “I know she is. You just gotta have faith.”
Johnny didn’t bother to look up. He didn’t talk much these days, but he figured Rosa deserved the truth, and her little pal Nancy had already gone for lunch. Might as well deal with it.
“You didn’t see her leave,” he said grimly. “You don’t know how she left. She’s gone for good.”
“You don’t know how she left either.” Rosa voice was stubborn. Her bruises had faded, turning a pale mustard color, and the swollen eye was almost back to normal. She’d healed. He was another matter.
“I saw enough,” he said, his voice expressionless.
“And now you hate her,” Rosa supplied, full of annoyance.
“No.”
That startled her. “Why not? You said she left you.”
He thought about it for a moment—hell, it was all he could think about, and it was eating him alive. Her face, her eyes, begging for help, her hands, reaching for her, and he hadn’t been able to get to her. “I don’t think she wanted to go,” he said finally.
“But...”
“But nothing.” He shut Rosa off. “She’s gone, and she’s not coming back. The end. We move on.”
“Really? You don’t look like you’re doing a very good job of that. What if she comes back? Are you gonna treat her like dirt?”
“She’s not coming back,” he said again, the ugly truth burning into his bones.
“But if she does?” Rosa pushed it, and normally, he would have lashed out, but he couldn’t even summon the energy to do that.
His eyes met Rosa’s dark ones. “If she comes back, I’ll hold onto her so tightly she’ll never get away.”
“Sounds wonderful to me, but some women wouldn’t like it. I’m not sure Mollie would.”
His own half laugh surprised him. “No, she wouldn’t. I’ll just see that she doesn’t get lost again.”
“You think that’s it—she’s lost?”
Johnny thought about it, looking for a trace of light, but there was nothing.
“I think we all are,” he said.
Mollie was hungry. She’d been ignoring it for days, moving from the bed to the bathroom and back again, ignoring the phone, ignoring the texts of the cell phone she’d found in her pocket and quickly let run out of battery power. She wondered briefly if the police were going to show up and charge her with assault, and she hadn’t cared, but no one had bothered her. No one in this life cared enough to check on her. She had no life here. She had no life anywhere.
She lost track of the days—she could have been back a week or a month, and none of it mattered. But now she was hungry.
And she smelled. She’d been lying in the fetal position for God knew how long, and she didn’t give a damn, but her stomach was finally telling her enough was enough, so she sat up, in the torn-apart bed, and surveyed the barren landscape that was her life.
She had to get up, shower, and find something to eat. She had to fire up her computer and see if she could find an obituary for one John Larsen of Long Island. Without her, he’d marry the right kind of woman, even though he’d vowed that was the last thing he wanted. He’d end up in a McMansion on Long Island with a trophy wife...
Who was she kidding? Not Johnny. With her or without her, he was going to go his own way. He was no more made for the cookie-cutter ’50s than she was, and suddenly there was a painful spark of life inside her. He’d live life on his own terms, and she needed to find out how that had been, however painful it might be. Hell, she was already so saturated with sorrow that it could hardly be worse—she might even be saintly enough to be happy he’d found someone else to love.
Or maybe she wouldn’t find him at all—that was the most painful of all. Maybe he’d never lived, maybe he’d been some kind of fever dream or psychotic delusion that vanished when reality returned. She yanked up her shirt and looked at the mark on her breast. It was almost gone, another stab to the heart. But it was there, and illusions didn’t leave love bites. He’d been real.
She showered, hoping the water would wash some life into her. She brushed her teeth three times, she drank four glasses of New York’s nasty tap water, and she pulled on her clothes. Everything was black, and plain—just right for someone in mourning. Stepping over the mountain of letters, flyers, magazines and newspapers that almost blocked her door, she went in search of sustenance and any trace of John Larsen.
Hilsen’s, the coffee shop on Sixty-Third Street, was still open, as it had been for almost ninety years, founded by Sarah Hilsen’s great-grandfather, and they still served the best eggs and bacon this side of Vermont. She usually avoided their sludge-like coffee, but today, she treated it like the ambrosia it was, strong enough to strip paint, black like her soul, as she flipped on her MacBook Air and began the search.
Or she would have, if the damned thing hadn’t immediately given her the spinning beach ball of death. Slamming down the lid, she found she wasn’t hungry after all, the coffee was hitting her stomach like a buzz saw, and she was starting to cry again.
“You okay, honey?” It was Sarah in all her mountainous glory, a coffee pot in one hand, a concerned expression on her face. “Haven’t seen you around here in a long time. You doing okay?”
The memory came to her out of nowhere—count backward from a hundred by sevens and your mind is so busy you can’t cry. Ninety-three, eighty-six, seventy-nine.
“I’m fine,” she said automatically, forcing a smile. “I’ve had the flu.” At least that would explain the red-rimmed eyes that had greeted her when she looked in the mirror—if she could just keep from crying now. Seventy-two, sixty-three, fifty-six... No, that was too easy.
“Well, you take care of yourself. You need anything, just let me know. I can even have one of my boys bring you a meal if you don’t feel up to going out,” Sarah said kindly, reminding Mollie that despite the urban rage, New York still had the best people in the world.
She looked out into the bleak, mid-winter weather. In fact, it wasn’t that bleak—it was cold, but the sky was a sharp, almost painful blue. “Thanks,” she said. “I think a walk might do me some good.”
“Don’t overdo it,” Sara
h warned. “It’s cold out there.”
There were times when Mollie thought she’d never get warm again. Even with her apartment heat turned up and the duvet clutched around her, she’d been achingly cold. An icy day in Manhattan wouldn’t be any different.
She’d overestimated her nonexistent energy. By the time she reached the park, she was ready to drop, and it was another two blocks before an entrance. Someone was asleep on one of the benches, covered with newspapers, but another one was empty except for the pigeon shit, and she sat down, trying to catch her breath.
She needed to shake this. You were supposed to accept the things you couldn’t change and be smart enough to recognize when something was hopeless. She knew it was hopeless—she just wasn’t going to accept it. Not now, not ever.
She should do something. Go to Macy’s and face her demons, though they were hardly that. Remind herself that that world was long gone and never coming back.
She could take a taxi up Park Avenue to the place where Irene Davis’s mother had lived—that huge mansion with the dangerous parapet. At least Benny Morelli would be long dead. Even with the best in police corruption, she couldn’t be certain he wouldn’t get free again and come after her.
But Johnny wouldn’t have let him. Ninety-three, eighty-six...
“Mind if I sit down?”
She was ready to scream with rage at whoever dared intrude but thank God it wasn’t some creep on the make. The man was fairly ordinary looking—maybe in his fifties or sixties, with a full white beard. He looked like a street corner Santa Claus, and Mollie was not amused.
“It’s public property,” she said grudgingly. Leave me alone. Don’t talk to me, don’t look at me...
