“My dad knew a few guys who were in the IRA,” Paul says. “How long were you in?”
“Two years.” She blinks slowly, wearily. “It wears on you after a while. Finally, I married Declan and took him home with me. A nice, quiet life was all we wanted. A kid, decent jobs, and peace. And we had them.”
Eric mentioned Kate has a daughter, and I wonder if she’s alive. If she’s anything like Kate, it wouldn’t surprise me. The sunlight through the windows illuminates the dampness in her eyes. “I remember enough to make IEDs. I wanted to forget the details, but maybe there was a reason I couldn’t.”
She smiles at Louis. “Louis understood. There was no end to the punishment we could inflict on each other. This death for that death. Tit for tat. That’s why the two of us, and Dex, tried so hard at StuyTown. I knew—I thought—that if enough people committed to being peaceful and equitable, we could make it work.”
“We did.” Julie says. “You and Louis are why we’re alive. We just need to take it back.”
Louis dips his head. “First we need food. And, as Jorge said, heat.”
“I was thinking about masonry heaters,” Artie says. He pushes his glasses up his nose. “They’re more common in Europe. It’s a large hearth made of brick or stone. The flue is a kind of maze that stores heat in the thermal mass—in this case, the brick—which it then radiates for hours. One hot fire can warm you all day.”
“We had a rocket stove in Brooklyn,” I say, and brace myself for my next word. “Eric said some people use that same principle to make heaters.”
“I remember that.” Paul stares at the wall, deep in thought. “It sounded kind of like what Artie’s saying. Instead of coming out the top like a stove burner, the heat goes into a long bench made out of cob or brick and vents at the other end.”
“Sounds similar,” Artie says. “Can you walk me through the rocket stove plans so I can get an idea?”
Paul and I nod. Artie runs a hand through his hair until it stands on end like a mad scientist. “I think we can make it work. This place may be too big, though. What about that hotel down the way?”
Louis motions at the dimming sky outside the windows. “We’ll check it out tomorrow, but this is good so far.”
I glance at Jorge, who watches me with an almost imperceptible smile. There’s so much love in that smile, in his eyes, that I take his hand in mine. No matter how many Walts and Teddys may come, there are still good people in the world. Four of them have a bull’s-eye on their backs, and the rest of us likely will soon. But I’d rather be with them than anywhere else.
54
I wake to Indy sitting cross-legged on the floor beside my pallet, eyes closed. Rooftop epiphanies are all fine and good, but they don’t make it easier to rise from bed after the two hours of sleep my old friend insomnia permits. “What are you doing?” I ask.
“Meditating,” she says.
Paul grunts from his and Leo’s cushions. “Meditating, my ass. She was staring at you to wake you up.”
I poke her midsection, and she opens her eyes with a laugh. “It works. I used to do it to Eli. We have to go on our Special Lady Mission and look for food.”
“I don’t want to know what that’s about.” Paul rolls over with a groan that wakes Leo. “Can we make mattresses a thing to find, too?”
The weight of another day presses on my chest. The whisper of the questions that run through my mind in a loop, of which the bleakest is: What will you do once you’ve killed Walt? Right now, the missions are food, shelter, heat, Walt. I almost dread the part when it’s finished, and I’ll have all the time in the world to figure out how to live the rest of my life alone.
“Sylvie.” Indy waves a hand by my face. “Are you okay?”
“No.” I close my eyes against burgeoning tears and rub my forehead. They must be so tired of this. I know I am. “Sorry.”
I jump from bed, grab my messenger bag, and start down the hall, where Artie stands with a clipboard. “Morning, Sylvie,” he says. “Breakfast is in the lounge. We’re about to check out The Standard.”
I nod as I blow past. In the bathroom, I splash cold water on my face. Cold water is all we have. I’d do anything for a steamy hot shower, one where I could run the water for fifteen minutes and cry without anyone hearing me or seeing my puffy face.
I dig my nails into my hands and peer at my dim reflection in the mirror. My stomach growls. I haven’t been hungry, but days of not eating have hit all at once. I brush my teeth and step into the hall to find Indy and Paul loitering awkwardly.
“Hi?” I ask.
Paul tugs at his T-shirt and boxers. Indy clasps her hands by her chest. “Um, we feel bad because we aren’t asking you how you feel. But you don’t like that stuff, and we don’t want to make it worse…”
Before I can respond, Paul sweeps me into a hug. He could use a shower, and he’s squeezing too tightly, but I wrap my arms around his solid torso. His presence is comforting, and so is his grief. He’s the closest thing I have to Eric, and the only one who fully understands the vacuum Eric’s absence has left in the world.
Smaller arms wrap around my waist. I smile tearfully down at Leo and then laugh at the sight of Paul’s hairy bare legs that end in stained white socks. “Paul, you’re hugging me in your underwear. And your socks are filthy.”
Indy cackles. Paul releases me, shaking his head. “What do you expect? I’ve been wearing them for days.” He points at Indy. “I tried to have a moment, like you said.”
I hold out my arms. “It was a good hug. Let’s try again.”
“Nope. You lost your hug privileges.”
“I lost hug privileges? What will I do? How do I go on?”
“Funny,” Paul says, though he smiles. “You’re the ones laughing while I’m trying to have a moment. Remember that. Hop on, Leo. Let’s brush teeth.”
Leo makes a running leap onto Paul’s back, and they trot down the hall. “Paul,” I call. He stops to view me over his shoulder. “It was the perfect kind of moment.”
Moments that end in laughter are the best kind, even if there are tears before. He winks before he gallops off with Leo. Indy stares after them, lips soft and slightly parted. Paul’s growing on her, the way he does once you get to know him. I knew he would, if they could be normal in the same room for over five seconds.
“Are you brushing your teeth?” I ask her.
“Huh?”
“Teeth. Brushing. You.”
“Oh. No, I already did.” She gives me her full attention. “Why are you smiling?”
“Because I don’t think anyone else could’ve coerced Paul into giving me a hug.”
“I didn’t make him do that.”
“Paul’s a great guy, though he likes to pretend he isn’t,” I say. “Don’t let that scare you away. You deserve a great one, even if you don’t believe it.” I pick up my messenger bag and walk toward breakfast. “Maybe he’ll hug you in his underwear. Jealous?”
“What? No!” she yells after me. But I think she just might be.
Indy, Julie, and I are on our Lady Mission. Chelsea Market was an assortment of gourmet restaurants and stores that took up the entire ground floor of the building, and it has only served to torture us with empty bakeries, a wide variety of non-existent delicious foods, and a looted chocolatier. My breakfast of a spoonful of peanut butter and twelve beans was not filling. I drank more water to stop the growling, though the swishing in my stomach makes me slightly ill.
Though many buildings stand within feet of the tracks, only a few connect, including one of luxury apartments. After two hours inside, my backpack contains numerous months’ worth of birth control pills along with various useful medications. Julie leans on the ledge of the outdoor terrace that has sweeping views of the river and the High Line. “We need to walk farther down for food.”
“I can’t,” I whine from my lounge chair. “I’m too hungry.” I’m being dramatic, but hiking flight after flight of stairs has used up any ener
gy our paltry breakfast provided.
Indy hoists herself up, grabs my sleeve, and yanks me to my feet. Once back on the High Line, we ignore the most obvious places, like ones with busted doors and windows. If the residents had money, they’re more likely to have been on someone’s post-apocalyptic looting list.
“What we need are the hidey holes,” I say as we walk. “The places that look unassuming.”
“Not much in Chelsea is unassuming these days,” Julie says. “I remember when this was a real neighborhood instead of a rich people’s playground. I love the High Line, but I wish everything wasn’t luxury condos.”
It began when I was young, but the past fifteen years brought about a change in New York City that made parts of it unrecognizable. Now, it’s changing again, though the direction it’s heading in remains to be seen.
The walkway widens and turns to boardwalk-like wood planks. On the right, bleacher seating descends into a small amphitheater, with a glass wall overlooking the street. Indy hops down the seats and peers out the glass, which offers a view of the Lexers that line Tenth Avenue. “It’s a good place to keep watch.”
I inspect the trees growing out of squares cut in the boardwalk. I don’t know what type they are, but they have browning leaves and no fruit hanging from their branches. “Would it have killed them to plant apple trees?” I ask.
“You are hungry,” Julie says.
Indy rejoins us on the main path. “She has her period.”
“Fun.”
“She’s normally cranky, anyway.”
I elbow Indy, but I smile. Though hungry and worried and exhausted, no tears threaten. Every time I hear a peep from the Eric part of my brain’s filing cabinet, I slam that drawer shut.
The path becomes concrete again. I point to the strips of garden that line either side. “Seriously, though, why not plant edible things? Blueberry bushes. Strawberry plants. Apple trees.”
“Lettuce,” Indy adds.
“You and your lettuce. Still waiting for that disgusting blue cheese, too?”
“You have zero taste,” Indy says. “It’s good.”
“She was willing to sleep with a nineteen-year-old for that cheese,” I tell Julie, then say to Indy, “I have some weird stuff growing between my toes that might taste similar.”
Indy makes a face. It’s true. A wash in chilly water and constant cold feet is not improving their well-being. I’m fairly certain I’ve acquired a case of athlete’s foot.
“You guys are cute,” Julie says. “Like sisters who fake fight.”
I watch our feet and don’t glance at Indy. No one could ever replace Grace in the same way, but Indy’s become my other best friend. I believe we have each other’s backs and we understand each other’s insanity—including when to let it slide and when to halt the dumbassery—but I’m not sure Indy feels the same. No matter how many years stand between me and the elementary school lunchroom, it would appear I’m only ever a second away from hiding in the bathroom with my book.
Indy rests an arm on my shoulders. “Adopted sisters, maybe. Sisters-in-law, definitely. We could never be blood-related. Her palate is too offensive.”
I kick her boot with mine. “At least I don’t trade sexual favors for moldy cheese. What will you give me for toe jam?”
She shoves me, laughing. Even her acknowledgment of our connection, with a joke to avoid the mush factor, makes her a perfect friend.
A block later, I lean over the railing to view down 19th Street. Surprise, surprise: zombies. We walk on. Construction abounds, and there’s nothing of note in the worksites until scaffolding appears on our right. The frame of a new structure, likely meant to become luxury somethings, is wedged between old tenement buildings. And, because this is the back side, the courtyard below is free of Lexers.
I point to a brick building that has no signs of forced entry. “Like that.”
“Like what?” Julie asks.
“This building. There could be stuff inside. We can climb down the scaffolding and get into all these houses from there.”
“You want to climb down scaffolding?” Indy asks.
I grip the railing and garner my courage. If I’m going to live thirty feet above the street on the High Line, I have to get used to heights. Besides, I’m tired of being the baby who backs away from the ledge. I reach across the gap and wrap my fingers around a horizontal metal pipe of scaffolding. Now I only have to get my feet onto the metal rungs of the vertical pipes to climb down.
I step to the top of the railing and move one foot to the rungs. I force the other to meet it, then hug the horizontal pole with both arms. I’m here, but I’m afraid to look down.
“Holy shit,” Indy says. “You did it.”
I don’t answer because I’m going to die. I take three deep breaths and venture a peek. Fuck, it’s high. The wind cools my sweaty neck as I carefully insert my feet into the rungs and move down one by one, holding so tightly my fingers hurt.
“There had better be food in these buildings,” I call.
Indy snickers before she follows me to the courtyard. What took me three minutes takes her five seconds, and Julie clambers down after. With the crowbar brought precisely for this reason, I crack the back window of the ground floor apartment. An arm reaches through the glass, followed by a woman’s snapping mouth. She might have been pretty once, but her nose is gone, leaving a crater in the center of her face.
“That’s promising,” Julie says.
She jams her thin knife into the crater. The woman falls back with a crash. I clear the glass from the window, and we crawl in. The apartment walls are nicely painted, and the floors shiny, but the appliances are ancient and the whole place is dark. Even in an old building such as this, the rent next to the High Line wasn’t cheap.
Julie opens cabinets while Indy and I check the fridge. The smell of spoiled food is atrocious, though the body on the floor can’t be helping. A bottle of mustard and an unopened container of juice are the only things worth taking.
“Aha!” Julie holds up a bag of tortilla chips and a jar of salsa. She tucks them in her bag while I fantasize about the satisfying crunch of salty, oily chips between my teeth. It’s obscene how intensely I long for them, and I force myself to stop.
We scour the rest of the apartment in vain. Rather than break down doors, we take the rear fire escape to the next floor and the ones after, killing the two Lexers we find. Once we’ve searched all five floors, we’ve added half a bag of white flour, cornmeal, a can of chicken soup, and take-out packets of soy, duck, and Taco Bell hot sauce. I wanted to cry at the five boxes of macaroni and cheese, all of which had been chewed to death by rodents.
The next buildings are similar. For all our effort, we acquire the bottom of a bag of rice, a can of fruit cocktail coated in dust, a box of opened and hardened raisins, and a plethora of spices. We take it all.
Farther down, there are more houses and yards to search, but no way to get to them without a ladder. “How about one of those ladders that hooks to your window?” Indy asks. “We had one on the second floor of our house. My dad would hold fire drills.”
I imagine having a dad who held fire drills. Just having a dad would’ve been novel. I pull a little notebook from my bag and write ladder on the list, along with the location of the buildings. We’ve gone a half mile, and it’s time to head back now that the sky has grown darker and the wind chillier.
The plants make the High Line seem lush, but I’ve been around for two summers’ worth of gardens, and I doubt it would hold enough to sustain us long-term. In any event, the plan is to recover StuyTown from Walt. My private plan after that is to move to Central Park, once we’ve encouraged the residents to depose Teddy.
At Chelsea Market, Jorge catches us in the first office. “Artie got the water going on the first six floors of that hotel, and we can climb over from the tracks. But he wants us all to look before we decide.”
We exit the building into spitting rain. The Standard Hotel spans
the High Line thirty feet above our heads and stands eighteen stories high. On the side that faces the Whitney, two windowed concrete slabs are hinged in the center, like a book not quite fully open. On this side, one windowed slab is hinged to a slimmer slab of mainly concrete. A brownish, rectangular structure—almost like a designer shipping container—sits nestled at the base of that slimmer part, on level with the High Line. The smaller end of the rectangle is all window, with a view of the park.
Paul, Leo, and Chris knock on the glass from inside, and we wave before we pass beneath the span of the hotel. Just past the concrete support, on the Hudson River side of the hotel, Kate calls from a terrace tucked beneath the hotel’s bulk. Jorge guides us toward the park’s railing. Instead of a drop to the street, it’s a drop to gravel on a low roof, made accessible by a ladder propped against the tracks. A permanent metal ladder ascends to the adjacent higher roof, and another ladder is propped against the terrace.
“Careful on the ladders,” Kate calls. “If we like it, maybe we can make a walkway.”
We follow Jorge’s lead until we stand on the concrete terrace amid outdoor furniture and planters of dead foliage. The Hudson River flows only a block away, its garbage-free patches of water the same steely color as the sky.
“Any luck with food?” Kate asks, and she isn’t shocked at our depressing report. “We figured most places down there would be cleaned out. We’ll find more.”
We head through the terrace door into a long, wide hall with windows on both ends. It contains bathrooms, a kitchen, and a few tables. Chris and Casper pop out of the double doors that lead to the room we saw from the High Line. It was an events space, about sixty feet long by twenty feet wide, with walls of windows on the east and west ends to provide a view of both Hudson and High Line. The walls are tasteful paneling made of thin strips of golden-brown wood, with a wood ceiling and floor as well. It’s light inside, even though the day is gray.
The City Series (Book 3): Instauration Page 37
