by Bec Linder
I rose from the table and helped her carry plates and serving platters back into the kitchen. The housekeeper had the weekends off, and my mother began loading the dishwasher, one plate at a time, in the particular order she insisted was the only way to make sure the dishes actually got cleaned. I handed her plates and coffee cups. After a few minutes of working in companionable silence, she said, “You seem distracted, dear.”
I thought for a moment before I replied. “I suppose I am,” I said. “I recently… Well. This is a sore subject for you, so maybe we shouldn’t talk about it.”
“This has to do with your adolescent misadventures?” she asked. “It is a sore subject, but if you need to unburden yourself about something, I’m always happy to listen.”
“Poor Mother,” I said. “We’ve all been a trial to you over the years, haven’t we? We should take you on a nice cruise to make up for it.”
“What a lovely idea,” she said. “I’ll look forward to it. Now, tell me what’s on your mind.”
“There was a girl I became friends with,” I said. “When I was… away. After I came home, we lost touch. I found her again recently, but she doesn’t want to talk to me.” There: that was the most watered-down version of events I could possibly come up with. I didn’t want to lie to my mother, but I also didn’t want to spill the entire complicated truth.
“Hmm,” my mother said. We had never talked much about what I did during the six months I was away, and I could see her processing this new information, fitting it in with whatever else she had pieced together. “What’s her name?”
I hesitated again. It was a common enough name, and I couldn’t see the harm in telling. “Beth,” I said. “Elizabeth.”
“She must be very dear to you,” my mother said.
I felt an unexpected lump in my throat, and fought hard against the swell of emotion. “She was,” I said. “She still is.”
“Why doesn’t she want to speak with you?” my mother asked.
“She said I abandoned her,” I said. “She called me the Ghost of Christmas Past.” I smiled wryly. “It didn’t make a whole lot of sense. She was pretty angry.”
“She sounds like she has a lot of personality,” my mother said.
I had to laugh at her polite euphemism. My mother was a master of the subtle put-down. She had been setting upstart Junior Leaguers in their places since before I was born. “That’s one way to put it,” I said. “Anyway, it’s nothing to worry about. A minor distraction. Everything with work is still going fine. I’m eating my vegetables and staying out of trouble.”
“I know you are,” my mother said. “But sometimes a young man needs a bit of trouble. Let this girl shake you up a bit.”
I smiled at her. “I intend to.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Beth
He was, of course, at work again on Saturday evening.
“I don’t believe this,” I said, holding my drink tray, staring across the crowded room at Max’s dark head, bent over his laptop.
“Believe it,” Trina said. “I don’t think he’s giving up. He’s, like, determined.”
“Fuck,” I said succinctly, and Trina gave me a startled glance. I didn’t swear much. The waitresses probably thought I was losing my mind. I certainly felt like I was. Maybe Max was a hallucination. A mirage. He couldn’t possibly be so pig-headed as to show up again, even after I swore at him on the sidewalk and told him to leave me alone for good.
And yet. There he was.
I reminded myself that I did, actually, want to know what he had to say to me, despite my unfortunate temper tantrum the night before.
“I’m going on break,” I told Trina. “Watch my tables for me, would you?”
“Sure thing, boss,” she said, snapping me a crisp salute.
I walked through the narrow hallway leading into the back of the club, through the locker room where the kitchen staff kept their things, and out the back door into the alley that ran behind the club. A few of the busboys were out there, smoking and talking to each other in Spanish, and they all twitched guiltily when I came through the door. “You need us?” one of them asked.
I shook my head. “I’m just getting some air.”
I walked to the end of the alley and stood there in the dark, bracketed between two buildings, watching the pedestrians walking along 9th Avenue, the energetic bustle of a Saturday night in the Meatpacking District. Anyone could have seen me standing there, but nobody glanced in my direction, and with my black coat and clothing, I felt camouflaged. Safe.
I stood there for what seemed like a very long time, thinking about Max, about the past, about how much I had loved him once upon a time. Not so long ago, really. Both the blink of an eye and an eternal rotation of the universe.
Finally, a noise in the alleyway behind me returned me to the present. The busboys were heading back inside. One of them paused and held the door for me, and I shook off my reverie and followed them inside. It was time to get back to work.
For all that I felt like I had stood in the alleyway for hours, I had only been outside for a few minutes, and Max was right where I had left him, frowning intently at his computer. He had ditched the suit and was instead wearing a cream-colored cable-knit sweater that made him look like an Irish fisherman. The club had a dress code, but I would have been shocked if he cared.
Okay. Enough was enough. If I didn’t do something about this, he would keep showing up at the club every night until one of us died.
I marched up to his table and said, “How do I get you to stop coming here?”
He looked up at me with a slow smile that set my heart beating a little faster, damn him. “Have dinner with me tomorrow.”
“Fine,” I said. I was scheduled to work, but I could take the night off.
He blinked, looking a little taken aback. Good, I thought. Join the club. “Fine?”
“Sure,” I said. “One dinner, and then I’m done with you forever? Sounds like a bargain to me.”
His eyes narrowed. I knew that look, and it didn’t bode well for my peace of mind. “One dinner,” he said. “And then we’ll see.”
One meal. One night. It was nothing.
Famous last words.
* * *
Max and I first met on the sidewalk outside of a youth shelter in Midtown. I was sitting on a low retaining wall, smoking a cigarette that another kid had given me—more out of a desire to seem cool than any interest in the cigarette itself. Max strolled up to me, tall, lanky, hair flopping in his face, and asked me if I had a light.
That was how we met.
“I don’t smoke,” I said, despite the cigarette in my hand, giving him a slow once-over, taking his measure. His clothes were grubby, but well-made. Wealthy runaway? Shoplifter? “And neither should you. It’s bad for you.”
He grinned and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I don’t smoke, either,” he said. “I just wanted an excuse to talk to you.”
I blushed. I didn’t know how to talk to boys. They mystified me. Whenever one seemed like he might be flirting with me, I got nervous and flustered, afraid that it was just a joke, and that if I acted like I was interested, he would laugh and mock me.
“I’m Max,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Beth,” I said.
“Beth,” he repeated. “Elizabeth. I like it. That’s a lot of name for a small girl, though. I think I’m going to call you Bee.”
“You don’t just get to change my name because you feel like it,” I said, although I was secretly pleased. I liked the idea of being given a new name, re-christened into this life I had chosen for myself.
“I can do whatever I want,” Max said, outrageously cocky, still grinning, and I knew that if I didn’t walk away from him right then, there would be no going back.
I didn’t walk away.
“You’re staying in the shelter?” I asked.
He nodded. “I’ve been here a couple of weeks. I ran away from my foster home because I got ti
red of my foster dad using me as his punching bag. What about you?”
His forthrightness surprised me. Most street kids were reluctant to talk about their pasts. Everyone had their own sorrows, and it was considered tacky to ask someone too many questions about their past. Or any questions at all, really. But now that Max had told me his story, it would be rude of me to refuse to reciprocate. “My grandmother died,” I said. “She raised me. I didn’t want to go into foster care.”
“Smart choice,” Max said. “It sucks. Better to be on the streets. At least that way you can make your own choices, you know?”
I nodded. I knew.
I had been homeless for a month. My mother went to prison for the first time when I was six, and my grandmother raised me after that, through the turmoil of my mother’s periodic reappearances and failed attempts at sobriety. My grandmother was a warm-hearted, tough-minded woman, and I adored her beyond measure. When she died, shortly before the beginning of my junior year of high school, my mother was doing four years upstate, and there was nobody else to take me in. I’d heard enough horror stories about foster care that I decided homelessness would be a better option. I could bounce around the New York City shelter system for a year, until I turned eighteen and could apply for housing assistance. I was smart, resourceful, and—being seventeen—thought I was invulnerable. I had it all figured out.
The reality was, of course, nothing at all like I imagined. The city’s youth shelters were overcrowded, and each had a waiting list of several weeks. I ended up sleeping in parks and behind dumpsters in blind alleys. It was September, and the nights were still mild, but I knew it would get cold soon. I was hungry. I wasn’t very good at panhandling. I still looked too clean and well-fed, too much like a person who was cared for. The street kids I met didn’t want to have anything to do with me. I spent a lot of time in the public library and the museums, wandering around looking at art until closing time.
When I finally got into one of the shelters, it wasn’t much of an improvement. My bed was in a large dorm: noisy, no privacy. I tried to make friends, but failed dismally. “Go home to your mommy,” one girl hissed at me. “My sister needs that bed.” Someone stole my extra pair of socks. Someone else squirted half a bottle of ketchup into my shoes.
Max was my first ray of hope: the first person who had spoken to me beyond insults and commands. I didn’t realize how lonely I had been until he offered me the promise of conversation and human companionship. But I was suddenly desperate for more of it, and terrified that he would leave me. I tried to think of something to say, the perfect combination of words that would make him stay and talk to me. But nothing came to mind.
He scratched his head and looked at me, chin tipped to one side. “My brother’s panhandling at the subway station,” he said. “You want to go meet him?”
“Yes,” I said, clutching, greedy, worried that I would sound too eager. “Yeah. That sounds cool.”
We walked together, and Max told me a complicated story about how he had almost gotten arrested for stealing dog food. I didn’t quite understand whose dog it was, or why Max had been the one to steal the food, but it didn’t matter. He did a funny impression of the officer that had me laughing until my ribs hurt. By the time we reached the subway station, I was completely smitten.
There was no going back.
“There’s my brother,” Max said, pointing. The boy crouched on the sidewalk was very clearly not related to Max by blood. His brown skin and sharp nose made me think he was indigenous Central or South American. He looked very small huddled there in his oversized coat, but he stood up when he saw us, and he was taller than I expected. Not as tall as Max, but certainly much taller than me.
The boy loped over to us and bumped his shoulder against Max’s, close and familiar. “Who’s this?”
“Renzo, this is Bee,” Max said. “She’s staying at the shelter.”
Renzo shook my hand. He had a dry, firm grip, and he looked me over with a suspicion that I found far less unsettling than Max’s easy acceptance. Suspicion made sense. Renzo was cautious, and I appreciated that. “Max adopted you, huh?”
I glanced at Max, uncertain. Most street kids, deprived of safety and love, made their own families. People had street aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, and even grandparents. The kinship networks were elaborate and vital, and adoption was taken pretty seriously. I didn’t want to make any assumptions about what Max intended. “I’m—I don’t…”
“She’s cool,” Max said. “How was your take, Renzo? I made thirty bucks earlier. Let’s go get coffee.”
Renzo shrugged. “As long as you’re buying.”
We went to a Dunkin Donuts and sat in a corner with our backpacks at our feet, hands wrapped around our styrofoam cups of coffee. Renzo didn’t say much at first, watching me narrowly while Max told a series of increasingly outlandish stories, but the tense set of his shoulders gradually relaxed. He leaned forward, interrupting Max mid-sentence, and said, “How come you’re on the street?”
I told him the same thing I had told Max, about my grandmother and foster care.
“My dad kicked me out of the house because he caught me kissing a boy from school,” Renzo said, a little belligerent, like he expected me to react poorly.
“That’s shitty,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”
“Okay,” Renzo said to Max. “I like her. She can be our sister.”
It was as simple as that. My adoption served as my entrance into the street society that had so far been closed to me. Renzo had been on the streets for more than a year and had an extensive family tree stretching back several “generations,” and suddenly I was everyone’s cousin. The girls in my shelter dorm stopped picking on me. Kids who had previously ignored me would now nod at me when I passed them on the sidewalk and ask if I wanted to go panhandling with them.
I did, sometimes, but I spent most of my time with Max and Renzo. We did everything together. They had both entered the shelter at the same time, and when their thirty days were up, I surrendered my bed and went with them to camp in Central Park. We found a dried-up culvert, sheltered from the elements, and Renzo covered one end with a tarp and some scrap plywood to act as a wind break. It wasn’t glamorous, but I felt safe there, sleeping at the back of the culvert with Renzo and Max up front near the opening, protecting me.
The nights got cold sooner than I expected, and my pile of blankets wasn’t warm enough. I spent a few miserable sleepless nights before I said anything about it, and Max and Renzo both frowned at me like I had utterly betrayed their trust.
“You should have told us,” Max said.
“We should have thought of it,” Renzo said. “You need a sleeping bag.”
“Aren’t those expensive?” I asked.
“They are,” Max said, and grinned. “But we aren’t going to buy one.”
Renzo and I were never any good at stealing, but Max was an expert. He would go downtown right at rush hour and pick the pockets of Wall Street types as they left work. He shoplifted like it was his pre-ordained fate: food, medical supplies, expensive sneakers that he hawked on street corners, even special women’s vitamins that he insisted I take. “They’re good for your bones,” he said, and would stare at me expectantly until I gave in and swallowed the enormous pill. So when he told me that he would get me a sleeping bag, I didn’t ask any questions, and he came back to camp that evening with a brand-new sleeping bag, tag still dangling from one corner of the stuff-sack.
“I don’t know how you do this,” I said, clutching the sleeping bag to my chest, moved almost to tears by the thought of how warm I would be that night.
“Magic,” Max said.
“Stupidity,” Renzo said.
“It’s not stupid at all,” Max said. “I’m very careful.”
“You’re going to get arrested one of these days,” Renzo said.
“Probably,” Max said, and grinned. “But they’ll let me go. I’m too charming to go t
o prison.”
Renzo was my brother from the first moment we met, but Max never was. He couldn’t have been. We were lovers before I knew what that word meant, holding hands while we crouched on the sidewalk with our cardboard “HUNGRY” signs, trading uncertain kisses at night while Renzo snored in his sleeping bag five feet away. As winter closed in, we zipped our sleeping bags together most nights, sharing body heat and breath. I lost my virginity to him one cold December night in a crummy squat on the Lower East Side. He was everything to me: my beating heart, my true love.
Then he disappeared.
Nobody knew anything about it: not me, not Renzo, not any of our street relatives or friends. Max disappeared without a trace, between one day and the next.
We searched. We asked everyone we knew, and they all spread the word. We never learned anything. We didn’t know Max’s last name, and we didn’t trust the authorities enough to go to them for help. It was like Max had been plucked from the sidewalk and lifted straight up into the air. He was gone. He wasn’t coming back.
I mourned him. Renzo and I both did, for months. We entertained each other by inventing stories about what Max was doing. He had joined a circus and become a lion tamer. He was sailing the Red Sea as a pirate. After a while, we started to believe our own stories, no matter how far-fetched. It was better to think of Max herding goats in Hawaii than to dwell on the probable truth that he was dead.
Homelessness was a strange liminal state. The future receded out of sight, hidden by the day-to-day concerns of food, shelter, staying warm. It was hard to stay focused on my original goals when I spent so much mental and physical energy tending to my most fundamental needs. I wanted an apartment and a job. I wanted to go to college. But those things seemed like impossible fantasies. Life was the street: scrabbling, begging, fighting tooth and nail just to make it to the next day.
In the end, it was Max who saved me. Every night that we slept together, zipped together in our sleeping bags, we traded stories of what we would do when we got out. We would have a big house, and all the food we wanted. We would sail around the world. We would climb Mt. Everest. I didn’t want to let him down, dead or not, wherever he was in the world or outside of it. I wanted to to have a good life. I wanted to do all of the things we had talked about.
