Miracle on 49th Street

by Mike Lupica

  She didn’t know how many flights she’d gone down, her mind moving about as fast as her legs. But she felt like she’d been running for a while. If Mattie had grabbed Josh, they could be in the elevator by now. Or even in the lobby waiting for her. When Molly jumped down to the latest landing, she went through the door there and looked at the number on the first door she came to.

  Room 1011.

  They been in 2111, she and Mattie.

  She’d come down eleven flights. There was nobody in this hallway. Molly went halfway down it and pushed through the same double doors they had on their floor, the ones she’d seen the room service waiter come through. The service elevator was right there. Molly pushed the Down button and waited, bouncing impatiently on her toes. She didn’t know where it opened up when it got to the ground floor, but there was no way it was at the small main lobby of the Sherry-Netherland.

  When the doors opened, there was a room service waiter with a table in front of him and a messy tray on top of it. What was left of somebody’s breakfast. The man had a white crewcut and a name tag that read “William.” He smiled at Molly.

  “Hey, hon,” he said. “You don’t want this one. The real elevator is right around the corner.”

  Molly Parker, thinking fast, wanting to ride down with him and right now, hit him with what she hoped was her brightest, widest, friendliest smile.

  “I bet my big brother I could beat him down,” she said. “And he always beats me at everything.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Molly.”

  “Get in, Molly,” he said, holding his finger on what must have been the door-open button. “What you got riding on the bet?”

  “A whole stinking dollar,” Molly said, making it sound like it was a fortune-and-a-half.

  “We’ll make this an express run,” he said, turning a key in a little lock in front of him. “Skip the rest of the floors on the way down.”

  When they got to the bottom, it looked like they were in some basement.

  “Is this the lobby level?” Molly said.

  “Yeah, but over by the side door,” William said. “There’s a little service entrance nobody really knows about, on Fifty-ninth Street. The door’s right there.”

  Perfect.

  Molly sprinted for the door.

  “Hey, where you going?” William shouted after her.

  “Even if I beat him out of the buck,” Molly said, “I still owe him two.”

  She went through the door and stood on the street, across from where she’d seen FAO Schwarz. Between her and the store, some kind of television show was being set up. Molly saw a banner that said “The NFL Today” being hung.

  She took a deep breath. It was as bright and cold as yesterday had been. She was glad she’d put on her jacket before she’d left her suite, thinking she and Josh were going to go straight to breakfast.

  Molly looked toward Fifth, over to her right. Madison, she knew by now, was left. If she walked over to the corner of Fifth, they’d spot her if they were standing in front of the hotel. She wasn’t going that way. She started walking left, patting the wad of mad money in her pocket. Real mad money now. She walked fast toward Madison Avenue, which Josh had told her was one of the big expensive shopping streets in New York City. They had walked this way last night on their way to the restaurant, when Molly still thought she was in the middle of the best weekend of her entire life.

  The life she’d had since her mom died, anyway.

  She felt her pocket for her cell phone. Empty. She must have left it back in the hotel. In a little while, she’d get to a pay phone and call the room or Mattie’s cell and tell her not to worry, that she was fine.

  Then she’d call Sam, so the two of them could come up with a plan. That’s what he called himself all the time. Sam, the man with the plan.

  He’d know a way to get her back to Boston without asking for any help from Josh Cameron. Who had to brace himself for the chance that she might be his daughter the way he braced himself when he was going to get run over sometimes on the basketball court.

  For now, Molly just wanted to be on her own. Might as well. She was going to have to get used to that.

  So what if she was on her own in New York City?

  Her mom had done it when she came to see Josh play that stupid game.

  So could she.

  There had been more people on the street the night before. Probably because it was Saturday night. More people, more cars, more noise as she and Josh had walked to Sixty-third Street, the street numbers on Madison going up one by one. As busy as New York was, with the noise it made even on a Sunday morning, Molly thought the streets were very organized.

  In downtown Boston, she sometimes felt like she was caught in some kind of maze.

  She walked up into the Sixties now, not having a real plan, waiting to talk to her man with the plan.

  She was still mad. Steaming. Done with him for good, she was sure of that. But as she walked along Madison Avenue, Molly couldn’t help feeling something else: Excitement.

  She knew she should be scared, alone in what was still a strange city for her. Very strange, even though she had seen only this small part of it, the hotel to the park to the Post House, and what turned out to be the biggest and best banana cream pie that she had ever eaten. The only people she knew in New York were back at the hotel: Josh, Mattie, L.J., the rest of the Celtics. She tried not to think about that, or worry about Mattie being worried. It was only going to be for a short time.

  Eventually she’d figure out how to get to Boston. Molly didn’t know how much that would cost. She didn’t know how much a lot of things cost. She was sure a plane would cost more than a hundred dollars. Maybe a train cost less. There had to be some way to take a train back. Maybe that was the way to go.

  Sam would tell her what to do. Or Mattie could help, as long as she promised not to tell Josh what she was doing.

  He was probably more worried about his game against the Knicks than he was about her, anyway.

  What had her mom told her, over and over? The only two things he cared about were basketball and himself. Now Molly had found this out the hard way.

  Better now than later, she told herself.

  She had survived losing her mom. If she could do that, losing a dad she’d only had for a couple of weeks, one who didn’t want her, would be a snap.

  Adults were right about one thing: You could do pretty much anything you set your mind to.

  She finally stopped at a restaurant on Madison called the Gardenia, one with a counter in back. Molly went back there, sat down, picked up a menu. The man behind the counter asked her in what sounded like a European accent—Greek or Italian, Molly thought—if she was waiting for her parents.

  Molly almost said, I wish.

  Instead she said, “My nanny. As soon as church is over.”

  Then she asked the man if she could have two eggs over easy with some home fries.

  Breakfast for one now, not two.

  She cleaned her plate, surprised at how hungry she was. When she finished, the man with the accent came over and asked if her nanny was late. Molly said church had probably run long today, and she’d wait for her outside. “Besides,” she said to the man, “I live just over on Fifth.”

  Now she was in a movie. Not a happy-ending princess movie. Not “Annie.” She didn’t know how this one would come out, just that she was making it all up as she went along.

  She went back out to the sidewalk. Everybody was always telling her how brave she was, and strong. Molly didn’t have to be told, or tell anybody herself. She had only been afraid of one thing in her life, truly: losing her mom. After that, nothing was going to scare her very much ever again.

  She wasn’t afraid to go exploring New York a little bit now.

  The night before, she had asked Mattie, who had grown up in New York—“little uptown part of town called Harlem,” Mattie had told her—where the museum was that Sam had told her about, the one
with the dinosaurs.

  “Museum of Natural History,” Mattie said. “Just over there on the other side of the park.”

  Molly, being the brave Molly, went over to the curb and stuck up her arm like she had lived in New York all her life, like this was the most natural thing in the world to do, hailing a taxicab. One pulled over right away, crossing about three lanes to do it. She jumped into the backseat and told the driver she’d like to go to the Museum of Natural History, please. Hoping he wouldn’t ask for an actual address, that he was like one of the cabdrivers in London, who seemed to know anything.

  “We’ll go over to Fifth and then cut across at Seventy-ninth,” the driver said, in another accent Molly couldn’t place. “That okay with you?”

  Molly said that was just fine.

  The museum was open. She paid her way in and found the dinosaur exhibit with no problem. It was as cool as Sam Bloom had said it would be. She stayed there a long time, sometimes having the room to herself, alone with the dinos. She couldn’t help thinking how much her mom would have liked it here. Her mom liked anything having to do with nature, with the world, used to talk about how much she loved going on camping trips, being out in the woods by herself when she was Molly’s age and in something called Outward Bound.

  Her mom always knew the names of flowers, and birds, and trees.

  Molly was sure she would have gotten a kick out of these old dinos.

  She wandered around a little more, then was back on the street. She went over to the window where she’d bought her ticket and asked what this part of New York City was called. “Upper West Side,” she told Molly. “You from out of town?”

  “Boston,” Molly said.

  “Boston?” The woman made a face. “The Celtics are playing here tonight. I hate the Celtics.”

  “Me too,” Molly said.

  Well, not all of them.

  She walked around the Upper West Side now, past old brownstone buildings, pretty brownstone buildings, some of them looking as if they belonged on Beacon Hill, on Mount Vernon Street or Louisburg Square. Pretty and classy and old. Eventually she ended up on Columbus Avenue, at a big modern-looking place called the Reebok Club. Like the sneakers. With a Reebok sneaker store attached to it. People kept going in and coming out of the club, on their way to exercise, Molly guessed, or just having finished exercising.

  At the corner of West Sixty-fifth Street, Molly asked a young woman pretty enough to be a model, in some kind of black tights and a halter top, how long a walk it was from here to Rockefeller Center.

  “Well, it’s about fifteen blocks down,” the woman said. “Then a few blocks over.” She closed her eyes, nodding, as if she were doing some kind of math problem in her head. “Figure, like, a mile and a half. Pretty long walk for a little girl.”

  Molly wasn’t in the mood. “I’m not a little girl,” she said. “I’m twelve.”

  “Sorry,” the woman said. “My bad. I hated being called little when I was your age, too.” She hunched down now, so she and Molly were eye-to-eye. “But can I ask you something without you biting my head off? Should you be walking around by yourself? ’Cause if you’re asking where Rockefeller Center is, that means you’re probably not from around here.”

  “I’m meeting my…cousins here,” Molly said.

  Keep making it up.

  “They said they were going to take me down to Rockefeller Center, I just wanted to make sure I had the exact address. In case we walk when they get here.”

  “Cool,” the woman said. “Too bad it’s not a couple of weeks from now. You could see that big old tree when it goes up.”

  “Maybe we’ll come back,” Molly said.

  Then she walked for what felt like an hour, downtown and then toward the park, finally seeing that she was on Fifty-ninth Street, in front of a restaurant called Mickey Mantle’s. She wasn’t big on baseball, but even Molly knew who Mickey Mantle was.

  “Before he got hurt,” Sam told her once, “he was like a super-hero in baseball.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Molly had said.

  “There’s things you gotta know, Mols,” he said. “Mickey Mantle is one of them.”

  There was a clock inside Mickey Mantle’s. It was after three now. Would Josh have left for the game yet? Molly wasn’t sure. She knew he liked to get there early in Boston sometimes, but didn’t know if that applied when he was on the road.

  Didn’t know and didn’t care.

  She decided to walk down Sixth Avenue instead of Fifth. When she saw a pay phone at the corner of Fifty-fifth and Sixth, she used some of the change she’d kept from breakfast, called information, got the number of the Sherry-Netherland, and asked for Mattie Charles’s room.

  “Is that Mathilda Charles?” the woman said.

  “Mathilda?” Molly said, and almost laughed at Mattie’s full name, never having heard it before.

  It was the first time she’d felt like laughing all day.

  “Yes,” Molly said. “Please ring Mathilda’s room.” And giggled.

  No answer.

  She finally heard the voice mail click on, and when the voice on it finished her instructions, Molly said, “Mattie? It’s me. Molly. Don’t worry. I’ll meet you back there after he leaves for the game, probably. Bye.”

  She hung up. Kept walking downtown on the left side of Sixth until she came to a place she’d heard about, Radio City Music Hall, looking big enough to take up nearly a whole block. Plastered all over the front, behind glass windows, were posters for the Radio City Christmas show, some of them showing pictures of the famous Rockettes, dressed up in what looked like Santa’s-helper clothes, kicking their legs high.

  The “world-famous” Rockettes, in the “world-famous” Christmas Spectacular.

  They couldn’t wait for Christmas in New York, that was for sure.

  I can, Molly thought.

  She couldn’t think of one good reason why she wanted Christmas to come at all this year.

  CHAPTER 21

  She heard the skating rink at Rockefeller Center before she saw it. Heard the loud music—like elevator music, Molly thought—coming from somewhere below the street.

  To her right as she came around the corner was another entrance to the NBC building, the one Josh had said was at “30 Rock.” Only at this entrance it was called the GE Building, with this message over the doors: “Wisdom and Knowledge Shall Be the Stability of Thy Times.”

  Molly didn’t know what GE stood for, but they could speak for themselves. She had all the knowledge she needed for one day, thank you.

  She walked to the railing and looked down. There was the place where her mom had come to meet Josh Cameron. Before she knew what he was really like. Or before he turned into the kind of person she didn’t want Molly to know. Of course, that was before Molly the brave one—or maybe it should be Molly the stubborn one, or just Molly the stupid one—had to find out for herself.

  It was exactly the same as when you were little and found out you burned your hand by touching a hot stove, she thought.

  The rink was much smaller than she expected. There was a little observation deck down to her right with tables and chairs. On the same level as the rink was a restaurant called the Sea Grill. Directly across from her was a sign that said that a man named John D. Rockefeller had built this whole place.

  More knowledge and wisdom.

  She didn’t feel like skating today. She wasn’t sure she wanted to skate ever again. If she really thought about it, she wasn’t even sure why she was here. Maybe she just had to see for herself the place her mom had wanted so much for her to see, even without the big tree in place yet.

  There was a man in some kind of security uniform, with a security hat on his head, walking past her with a cup of coffee, heading for the GE Building. Molly asked him where the tree went when they finally put it up. He pointed at the sidewalk underneath her feet. “Right about there, little girl,” he said. “Few feet to your left, over by that star they drew into the s
idewalk, makin’ it look like one fell right out the sky.”

  “How big is it really?” Molly said.

  The man pointed with his cup at all the skyscrapers around them.

  “When I close my eyes sometimes, I picture it bein’ as big as all them,” he said.

  Molly closed her eyes now, and imagined the biggest tree in the universe, reaching for the sky.

  Reach for the sky, her mom had always told her, in everything you do. Then Jen Parker would laugh—her mom had that great big loud laugh—and remind Molly to make sure that when she did, she wasn’t always walking around with her head in the clouds.

  “Because I could trip?” Molly asked her one time when they were packing up to leave London.

  Molly, eyes still closed, remembered her clothes all over the bed that day, one big suitcase already full, another one open in the middle of all the clothes. Remembered the cloud that seemed to cross her mom’s face when Molly asked the question.

  “’Cause you could trip,” she said. “Like I did.”

  I did have my head in the clouds, Molly thought, with Josh Cameron. And this time I was the one who got tripped up.

  Never again.

  Forget about tripping. If you didn’t count on anybody, they couldn’t let you down, and they couldn’t knock you down.

  She leaned over the railing and looked down at the skaters. Next to her was a dad, waving to a girl about Molly’s size down on the ice, the girl waving up at him the way Molly had waved at Josh at Wollman…

  There was a big clock with old-fashioned Roman numerals above John D. Rockefeller’s name. It was four o’clock by now. Josh was probably getting ready to leave the hotel for the game. She’d wait here a little while longer, maybe go get herself a hot chocolate down below, and then head back up Fifth Avenue toward the hotel. She was getting good at figuring out where she was in New York after just one morning and afternoon on her own. But anybody could have figured out how to get to the Sherry-Netherland. It was a straight shot up Fifth for ten blocks.