by Richard Peck
The elevator opened, and it was brighter inside. She let go of me. “Run for your life,” she said, and I lunged into the elevator.
As the doors closed, I saw her move toward the back apartment and the maid standing there. Flossie. I saw Flossie reach for her and pull her inside. Two panicked old women. You could smell their fear. The door banged shut, and the locks turned.
The elevator doors closed. And my hand came out to touch a button. It pushed PENTHOUSE.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Rolling Thunder
“COME STRAIGHT UP, one floor,” Tanya’s note had said, and so I did. It was either that or go wandering out there in the dark, finding my own way home. Alone again—the black, blank streets, the mole hole subway. Another Saturday without them. Anyway, I could feel Tanya from here, the tug of Tanya.
The old woman had said, “Run for your life.” And, really, wasn’t I? What kind of life did I have without them?
THE ELEVATOR DOOR opened, and I was already in the penthouse. It seemed to be one gigantic apartment—the whole top of the building. You could have a party just here in the entrance hall. You could invite half the Fabian’s people home and have a huge party.
But only one light was on, a naked bulb on a wall. No mirrors. Only faded squares where pictures had hung, or mirrors. The penthouse was vacant. I could feel the weight of room after room of emptiness where any little thing would echo and nobody lived.
I followed the thunder through a doorway with columns into another monster-sized room. The city lights flickered across the dust-curled floor through long windows. The penthouse seemed to be hanging in space—somewhere between the moon and New York City. I’d walked the whole length of the room, and I was standing in front of double doors now, with all that thunder just on the other side.
I waited with my hand touching the place where the doors met. I gave myself one last chance.
Then I pushed both doors open. It was a ballroom that looked onto a terrace and the night.
You couldn’t believe a room this big in a New York apartment. Like an airplane hangar with an acre of parquet floor. And nothing in it but a few rickety little chairs along the walls where there must have been hundreds once. Once upon a time.
No lights on at all. Three giant chandeliers hung down, but they’d been tied up in big cloth bags. The only light came through the long French doors. It was beginning to be daylight, finally. But I didn’t have time to think about that. I didn’t have that kind of time.
Because here they came, the three of them roaring around the room on roller skates. They saw me and screamed, and the screams bounced and bounced off the walls and echoed across the ripply floor. They were speed-skating right at me, gripping each other, touching the floor for balance, practically falling but never quite. When had any of us been roller-skating?
But they were. Here they came in their Fabian’s prom outfits. Tanya’s billowing skirts. Natalie’s peekaboo black bra and red satin dress. Makenzie in lace and leg warmers. But now, of course, they’d lost their stilty, strappy, stiletto heels and were wearing skates. Old-fashioned, lace-up skates. Dirty white leather.
It was great—fabulous. Tanya looked the most like a skater in her leotard under the skirts. But they were gray in this light. Even Natalie’s dress was grayish. I dropped my backpack, and they were practically running me down, dragging toes to stop, throwing sparks. They had their ways of stopping. Makenzie tripped on my backpack. They were all totally out of breath. Their hands came out for me to steady them. I felt their hands all over my bare arms, and their warmth.
“Where have you been?” Tanya said, squeezing my hand. They all wondered. “You’ve been, like, ages. Eons. Lifetimes.”
“I looked for you there,” I said, trying to explain. “I looked all over and along the whole bar before I—”
“Whatever. You’re here now.” They were catching their breath. Tanya had already caught hers. “And honestly, what are you doing in those ridiculous shoes? Get out of them. Makenzie, go find Kerry’s skates.
“They used to have skating parties,” Tanya said, “when Aunt Lily was a girl. There are skates all over her apartment, all sizes. Makenzie brought up a pair for you.”
Skidding and rolling back and forth, they aimed me at a little gold chair. Now I was supposed to get out of the torture shoes and put on these skates. My job was to get these skates on, not to think. Natalie stood back, still breathing hard, waiting for me, hooking her hair behind her ears. She stood there like a picture of a ballet dancer, resting. A painting.
“Do you have room in the toes?” Makenzie wondered. I did. She’d found the right size, but then, Makenzie had always been the best at finding things.
Tanya was on her knees, lacing up my skates for me, tight over my black stockings. Tanya . . . waiting on me? Tanya on her knees before me? I didn’t even believe it, but I felt her hands, like birds with rushing wings.
The skittery little chair went over backward when they pulled me to my feet. The skates went in all directions. My legs were trying to do the splits. But they wouldn’t let me fall. We moved together now, out onto the ballroom floor like a many-legged thing. All our sequins and satins in a flounce of skirts and peekaboo bra and lace. The glass jewels in our ears and hair flashed the room. And we were on wheels—rattle-trap old unoiled wheels with minds of their own.
“You know what we’re like, don’t you?” Tanya was saying. “We’re like Shannon’s cheerleaders.” And we were, all trying to make the same coordinated moves and never quite managing it.
Then we started with our scissor-strides, getting up speed. Our skirts strained over our knees. Now we were like elementary school kids at a skating party, playing dress-up. It was that last kids’ party of elementary school with all the games that will never work again.
We were the thunder, all around the room, and I felt their hands holding me, overlapping against my back. I didn’t have to be clingy, and I was keeping up. They held me. It was the four of us, and who could tell where one of us stopped and the others began? We skated in our clump, getting better at it, swooping with screams around the room, around and around as way out there through the long windows New York began to stir and wake. It was like skating to music, except we were the music.
“ONCE MORE AROUND,” Tanya called out finally. And so we made one last grand turn, circling for a landing. Our skirts brushed the little gold chairs. Our skates raised one final gauzy curtain of dust. I didn’t know if I was going to make it. I was wiped out. I couldn’t remember when this day started, or yesterday. I almost couldn’t remember anywhere but here. Anyone but them.
We dragged our toes and fell into each other. We stopped right where we were meant to. They’d made a little campsite in the enormous room by a pair of French doors onto the terrace. An empty bagel sack and cardboard coffee cups and drained juice bottles stood around. Plastic knives and empty cream cheese tubs. Like a picnic without the blanket, a penthouse picnic. Breakfast? They’d devoured it all, and where was mine? But they couldn’t wait.
Then we were settled on the floor in the remains of their breakfast. “We sent Makenzie back to a Starbucks,” Tanya said. And I didn’t think about where they got the money. Or if they could stick it all on Aunt Lily’s bill.
“WE WERE SIMPLY starved,” Natalie said. “I don’t know how Joanne does it.” We were unlacing our skates, yanking them off. Natalie barely made it before she leaned back against the paneled wall and fell gracefully to sleep. Her double lashes fringed her cheeks. An old white skate was still in one of her hands.
The dust settled, gold and now pink in the gray room. “Fairy dust,” Makenzie said, and put out her hand. In the next minute she was fast asleep, flat on her back with her arms thrown back, and the glasses still parked up in her spiked hair. And a little cream cheese in the corners of her mouth.
It was just the two of us now, Tanya and me. Like we’d put the children down for their naps. I was ready for mine. So ready. The tiredness, the exhau
stion was coming in waves. But slipping down into deep sleep didn’t feel all that safe. Somehow I couldn’t risk letting those waters close over my head.
I sat hugging my knees, braced against the door frame, one black-stockinged foot out on the terrace. A traffic copter thumped in the air, over there above Central Park. Tanya sat across from me, only a little slumped. She was trying to stay awake too, and succeeding of course. The daylight was finding all the lights in her hair. Her head was heavy, but she was keeping watch. Over me? I felt that gaze of hers that saw right through you to the next thing she wanted.
Were we waiting each other out? Seeing who’d nod off first?
“You and Alyssa at Fabian’s?” she said, one of her sudden questions, striking out of the blue. “How did that happen?”
“It just happened,” I said. “We were . . . there at the sinks.”
“It’s a small world,” Tanya said.
“Alyssa’s in a play on Broadway. She’s playing somebody’s daughter. She’d taken those two days off to audition. Then she graduated early when she got the part.”
“Yes,” Tanya said. “Alyssa’s quite a little actress.” We sat in the doorway, across from each other, like bookends or something. Really just the two of us now, a special . . . privilege.
“And so,” I said, “I don’t think she was going to have a—”
“Where was Spence?” Tanya asked—another lightning question. “Obviously not in the girls’ restroom. But where Alyssa is, Spence can’t be far away. Where was he, Kerry?”
Spence. Spence on the train into the city. Spence walking out of the VIP room. I tried to shrug. The only person standing between Tanya and Spence was Spence, Alyssa said, in my head. Did Tanya hear that? Tanya never knew what friendship was, Alyssa said. She died not knowing.
Something panicky was coming up my throat. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know about Spence. I don’t think he and Alyssa had anything going particular—”
“In some ways you remind me of me, Kerry,” Tanya said in a thoughtful voice. “Though I can’t remember being that naive, ever. Not sophomore year. Not ever. But it doesn’t matter now. We know where Spence will be tonight.”
TIME PASSED, AND Tanya let it. The terrace was thick and gritty with New York dirt. The first rays of the sun crept across it, and half of her face was bright, the other shadowed. That place on her forehead that was going to need Botox was darker now. Deeper?
One more second of silence, and I’d be asleep, no matter what. I was worn out with wondering what was real. “Why are we here, Tanya?” I asked her.
“The penthouse?” she said, like that’s what I’d meant. She looked past me back into the ballroom. It was like a cave in there now. She ran a hand through her hair. “Every time the market crashes on Wall Street, it’s too grand and expensive with too many rooms. People move out,” she said. “The old man who built the building back before the Great Depression—1929 or whenever—couldn’t sell the penthouse for ages. Aunt Lily’s parents had bought her apartment downstairs. She’d come up here to roller-skate with the old man’s granddaughters. It was like their own private skating rink. It was empty space for them. Like now.”
Jackie and Lee, I almost said. I came this close. I knew Aunt Lily’s friends were Jackie and Lee because—
“Jackie and Lee,” Tanya said. “And Lee grew up to marry a European prince. And Jackie grew up to marry a President of the United States and became Jackie Kennedy. They were the Bouvier sisters.”
They were friends of Aunt Lily’s, girlhood friends. The three of them. I knew that because the old woman downstairs had just told me.
And the old woman was Aunt Lily.
It was Aunt Lily, lurking in her own apartment, afraid to be there. Tanya was still looking at me, and through me, reading me. I looked a little above her gaze to that deepening place black on her forehead. Like a darkening star.
She touched it lightly with a finger. “That’s where I hit the tree,” she said.
“Aunt Lily is downstairs,” I said.
I just let go. The words jumped out of my mouth, quicker than an alibi.
Tanya’s gaze hardened, focused. You could begin to hear the traffic from down on Seventy-second Street. Rush hour in that world.
“Downstairs? Is she?” Tanya said, only a little interested. “She’d have gone back to Paris after the memorial service. But I can see why she came back. The old busybodies next door, Rhonda Randolph and Flossie. We ran the risk they’d stick their noses into things that didn’t concern them. But we had to be somewhere. How do you know this?”
It was one more of her quick questions, like a knife out of nowhere.
“She was there when I went for my things, my backpack, just now.”
Tanya nodded. “I sensed . . . somebody in the apartment tonight when we were down there getting our skates and things. Yes, and in the kitchen too when we went in there. Somebody just out of sight. Behind a door, down a hall. Somewhere. Somebody sneaking and creeping. Scuttling like an old crab.”
She glanced back across the ballroom to the other door, and my backpack.
I was weighing every word now. “Aren’t you afraid she’ll tell—”
“She’ll be holed up with Rhonda and Flossie,” Tanya said. “Adults have their peer groups too, Kerry. And what does it really matter? She’s, like, terrified, isn’t she?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Too terrified to do anything. Besides, what? Call the police? We didn’t break in. I had the keys. The doorman gave me the extra set they keep downstairs. The doormen think we’re great. They try to hit on us. So who’s Aunt Lily going to call? The exterminators? They’re just three senile, babbling old women down there. Alzheimer’s? It’s a real possibility. They’ve lived too long. Besides, she won’t even remember us later. We won’t make sense. She can’t explain us.”
Tanya shrugged and turned her hand over. “Anyway, all that’s over now. That time is up. We won’t be going back down to the apartment again. We can . . . freshen up in one of the bathrooms up here, before we go.”
Go.
I should. Now. Run for my life, wherever that was. I’d said too much already. Tanya could get anything out of you. You’d answer her question, and her eyes would question your answer. And everything would go in a circle, with her at the center. To avoid her eyes, I looked down the slant of morning light falling across Natalie’s hand holding the skate. Her long black gloves were off.
Something was wrong with her hand. It wasn’t even hers. It was . . . withered and worse. It was shrunken and spotted, greenish. The fingernails were loose. It was almost a claw, oozing something that wasn’t blood.
Of course Tanya saw what I was seeing. She could see around corners, around all the corners in my mind.
“Touch her hand.”
“No, I don’t want to.” My hands curled around my knees and hugged them.
“Touch her,” Tanya said. “Share a little of your life with her. You won’t miss it, and it’s only to get her through till tonight. Think about someone else for once, Kerry. For once in your life.”
Touch her? Did they need me to—keep them alive? Was that what the roller-skating was about, the touching? I felt their arms around me as we’d pounded around the ballroom floor, around and around. Was I giving them enough life to get through to . . . the next thing Tanya wanted? Was that why I was here?
I uncurled a fist and reached down. It was always just easier to do it. Get it over with. It was always Tanya’s way or . . . no way.
On the second try I touched the awful hand that was beginning to rot. Natalie stirred in her sleep, sighed one of her sighs. Her hand slipped away into the folds of her satin skirt, scarlet-red again in the morning sunlight. Her throat above the dip of the dress and the black of the bra was flawless, swanlike. Natalie.
I didn’t want to look at Makenzie. I didn’t want to chance it. But she was stretched right there below my elbow. One of her leg-warmer legs was thrown out
across one of Natalie’s. I made myself look at her sleeping face. My heart thudded, but she was just the same, always the pixie’s child, and more of a child while she slept. Except for the glitter on her eyelids and the nightlife spikes of her hair.
Then I smelled it again. The smell of burning, an awful smell of burning flesh.
I’d be sick now, dry-heave sick if I didn’t move.
I turned back to Tanya, tried to get it together. “I have to go. I need to get home now.”
“How?” she said, looking out into the morning. In profile, she was perfect. Planes were coming in over the West Side, circling for LaGuardia, and she was watching them.
“I’ll . . . take a cab to Grand Central.”
I waited. For her approval?
“I’m afraid you haven’t got the money for a cab,” she said, almost to herself. “Breakfast.”
Breakfast? Oh. They’d used the money in my backpack for their breakfast. I pictured Makenzie’s hand, small and quick, rifling my backpack down in Aunt Lily’s dressing room. And then off to Starbucks.
“The subway then,” I said. “The number 6.”
“I’m afraid we needed all the money,” Tanya said, drowsy in the warming sun. “Like every cent, except for two dollar bills we’ll be needing in a little while.”
The morning narrowed then. Even the ballroom seemed to shrink. “I can walk. Not in those heels. In my flip—”
“All the way home?” Tanya’s brow arched high.
My ticket. “My ticket—”
“There was no point in keeping it.” She was still gazing out past the edge of the terrace, the parapet. Somehow I could picture the three of them out there, leaning into the night, throwing my ticket away. Somehow I saw it drifting down on Seventy-second Street like a falling leaf. An apple blossom.
I may have been grabbing my new chest, or clutching my throat or something, when Tanya looked back at me. The light was blinding behind her. But then, looking at her had always been like looking into the sun. “Don’t dramatize. Don’t be a drama queen.” She smiled. “Leave the stage work to Alyssa. This isn’t a hostage situation. You’re not being held for ransom by pirates of the Caribbean.”
