Stalker Girl

by Rosemary Graham

  She followed the EXIT sign down to the end of the hall where the bathrooms were. The exit was a big, heavy door with a red handle that read:

  CAUTION. FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY.

  Opening this door will cause an alarm to sound.

  Carly ran through her options in her head: She could open the door, trigger the alarm, and run for it. How far would she get before Finn and Mike picked up the trail? What did she even know about what was behind the door? What if she couldn’t find her way out of the alley?

  Catty-corner to the exit was one more door, marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. It was open slightly. She peeked in to see a long, dimly lit staircase and cases of beer stacked along the wall at the bottom. She considered heading down, hiding in the basement until closing, and then mixing into the crowd when everyone left. She could ditch the hoodie, let her hair down.

  Before she could think this plan through, she heard the blip and fuzz of a walkie-talkie and saw someone heading up the stairs from the basement.

  The voice on the walkie-talkie asked, “You check the basement?”

  As the footsteps got closer, she heard her friend Finn say, “Yup.”

  She held her breath, pushed the emergency handle, and braced herself for the alarm. The door gave without a sound, opening onto an alley that smelled of cigarette smoke mixed with garbage mixed with something buttery and sweet.

  A guy in a stained white jacket and checked pants stood outside the kitchen of the restaurant next door, smoking a cigarette and speaking Spanish into a cell phone. Behind him she heard the clatter and bang of pots and pans and happy, accordion-heavy music.

  He kept talking on his phone as he looked Carly up and down.

  “Hi,” she said, smiling, trying not to look scared or guilty despite feeling very much of both. “Um, hola. Excuse me. Por favor. Can you tell me which way is out?”

  Bittersweet was about a third of the way down a long block. From where she stood, the shorter way to the end of the block looked dark, like maybe it was a dead end, like maybe she didn’t want to walk down it alone. It would take longer to get to the other, well-lit end, but it was a much less scary prospect.

  He shrugged, took another drag off his cigarette and said “Nada” into the phone.

  For a girl with a Puerto Rican best friend and a job in that best friend’s family’s restaurant, Carly had a pathetic command of Spanish. But she tried. “Dónde es la—la—” She had no idea how to say out or exit, so she said “puerta,” door.

  He stared at her and pointed to the door she just came out of, then turned his back, like he didn’t want anything to do with the crazy chica yelling at him in the alley.

  “No. No. Out of here.” He turned back around. She pointed down with both hands. And then up, to indicate over the building, toward the street. “How do I get out?!” She was practically shouting, in that obnoxious way people do when trying to communicate with someone who doesn’t speak their language. But she didn’t care how she looked, or sounded. She was desperate. Finn and Mike could burst through that exit any second.

  Her desperation must have come through, because the guy ended his conversation with a quick “Adiós,” closed his phone, and pointed down the alley toward the dark, short end.

  “Or you can go through here,” he said, nodding toward the kitchen.

  His English was perfect, like he was born and raised in New York. Not even a trace of an accent. Carly should have felt like an idiot, but she was too busy feeling like a criminal. A criminal about to get caught.

  “Some guy bothering you or something?”

  “Something like that,” she said as she stepped through the puerta.

  Carly looked around the shiny wood table at her parents, her ex-almost stepfather, and her lawyer. “Really. It didn’t have anything to do with wanting to be her. I just didn’t want to wait on line.”

  Susan took a deep, skeptical breath and said, “Okay. Let’s say we tell them that bit about you just wanting to get into the club to say a silent good-bye. How in the world do we explain what you did Friday night?”

  Carly wished she knew.

  23

  AFTER THE Bittersweet incident, Carly thought for sure she was done with what she could see perfectly clearly was crazy behavior. Getting chased into a dark alley by two large men for having gained entry to a club under false pretenses will do that.

  So she vowed to herself that it was the end.

  Four days. She had four days of normalcy. She finished her paper on the Triangle Fire. Wrote her essay for Denman. It was pretty good, too. She wrote about that first trip to Turkey and how it hooked her on archaeology.

  She was beginning to feel like she might be able to put it all behind her.

  And then Friday rolled around.

  Isabelle and her sister Nancy decided to go on a spa weekend, and Isabelle didn’t want Carly staying alone in the apartment. Normally she would have stayed at Val’s, but Val was visiting Cornell that weekend. Carly didn’t want to spend the weekend at Nick’s.

  She hadn’t recrossed the threshold between Nick’s studio and the rest of the loft since leaving in June. She knew that even a glimpse of the river or the sight of sun pouring through the floor-to-ceiling windows onto the hardwood floors would make going back to the hovel even more torturous. The loft was home. But it was no longer hers.

  And from what Jess had told her, it sounded like it was soon going to be Chantal’s.

  Nick had been urging Carly to come down and hang out ever since she got back from Stony Hollow. She still had a key. He told her she could come anytime, whether he was home or not. She could hang out, maybe do her homework. Whatever she wanted. When Isabelle made her plans for the spa weekend, he amped up his case. It would just be the three of them: Carly and Jess and him.

  “We’ll get a veggie special from Salvatore’s. Rent a movie.”

  When Carly didn’t jump at the invitation, Nick brought out the guilt.

  “You know, Carly, I think this would be good for Jess. She told me she’s worried about you. And with your mother’s depression, I’m worried about her. She needs her big sister.”

  How could she refuse?

  Carly was used to the strange feeling she’d get whenever she stepped off the train at Fourteenth Street now that it was no longer her station. But that Friday afternoon, with the prospect of a whole weekend at the loft ahead of her, it was worse. Her body felt like it was heading home, but her mind knew otherwise, and the confusion made her slightly dizzy.

  They passed the newsstand where her mother used to buy the Times from Saleem in the morning and the Post from Raj in the afternoon, but the face looking out now was a stranger’s. She’d never seen the man playing saxophone or the two transit cops who stood by the stairs, eyeing the crowd and talking about some Johnny Depp movie they both saw. Carly used to know all the buskers and cops, if not by name, then at least by sight. These people were strangers.

  Even with Jess’s hand in hers, she felt isolated and alone and cranky. As they headed from the subway stop to the loft, Carly found herself hating everyone she saw. Skinny women with blown-out hair clomping along on their skinny high heels. Overly groomed men in their casual designer clothes. Blinged-out gangsta wannabes.

  And their little dogs, too. Everyone seemed to have a little dog in a little designer dog bag.

  Black SUVs with tinted windows were double- and triple-parked along the street, their suited drivers out on the sidewalk, talking into cell phones or smoking cigarettes or checking out the women. Like the two tall, blonde ones bent over a map on the sidewalk ahead. They were arguing in a language Carly thought might be Swedish or maybe Norwegian, one of them jabbing the book with one finger, and pointing down the street with the other, saying, “Ja! Ja! Stella McCartney.”

  When they turned and started walking east, Carly thought it was funny. But Jess, smart, nice seven-year-old city girl that she was, ran after them to correct their mistake. Their destination, that holy shrine of fashion, was o
ne block west.

  Jess returned to her sister’s side aglow with the satisfaction of her good deed.

  “You know what your problem is, Jess? You’re too nice.”

  “That is not a problem. You can’t be too nice. That’s like being too good or too smart.”

  “You might want to reconsider that position when you’re a little older. I would have just let those two clomp all the way to the East River.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause I can’t stand those people.”

  “You don’t even know those people! You don’t even know their names, Carly. How can you know you don’t like them?”

  “Oh, I know. Trust me. And someday you’re going to, too.”

  “I hope not. I hope I’m not going to hate people I don’t even know. Why are you in such a bad mood?”

  “Me? ”

  “You should cheer up. It’s going to be fun tonight. Like a sleepover. Only it isn’t, because I live there—sort of—and you used to, and we’re related.”

  “Yeah, so what is it?”

  “I don’t know. It’s too complicated.” Jess stayed quiet until they arrived at Nick’s building. Then, as Carly put her key into the outside lock, Jess said, “I wish we still lived here.”

  “Tell me about it. At least you’re here half the time.”

  When the lock buzzed, Jess pulled the door open. “I mean all of us. All the time. I don’t like doing half and half. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I don’t know which bed I’m in. Then I keep my eyes closed on purpose and try to figure it out from the sounds. If Mom’s snoring, or too close to me, it’s easy.”

  “That’s good. So you make a game out of it.” Carly pushed the button for the elevator and leaned against the wall while it clanged its way down to the lobby.

  “Yeah. I guess. It’s not the funnest game, though.”

  The studio was empty. Nick had left a note saying he’d be back soon. Jess ran to her room to play on her computer while Carly took her first cautious steps into her former home.

  Things looked pretty much the same in the big central room. Carly spent a few minutes staring out at the view before moving on to the kitchen.

  At first she couldn’t tell what was different. Then she noticed the shiny copper pots and pans hanging from a rack above the stove. A row of French cookbooks was lined up along the counter next to the stove. One of them, La Cuisine Végétarienne, lay faceup.

  She wasn’t planning to look in the room formerly known as her mother and Nick’s, but the door was wide open. She not only looked, but took a few steps into the room. The king-sized bed had a new, expensive-looking comforter: deep ruby red, with a pattern of gold circles and squares woven in. On top of that was a small mountain of red and gold throw pillows. A half-empty pump bottle of lotion sat on the nightstand on what used to be her mother’s side of the bed, along with a pile of books.

  Despite these signs of change, nothing prepared her for what she found when she opened the door to her room.

  Only the view was the same. The bed had been pushed back into a corner. A bunch of cardboard boxes—some open with rolls of paper sticking out, some sealed with packing tape—sat on top of the now-bare mattress. Several big plastic jugs, filled with what looked like paint, sat on the desk. Next to the desk, under the window where her bed used to be, was some kind of old-fashioned machine. It had wrought-iron legs and what looked like a steering wheel on one side. Next to the machine, lit by late-afternoon sun, was a long folding table covered with cards of assorted colors, arranged in a neat row. On each card was the same poem, but each version was in a different font and different color ink. She picked one up just as Nick walked into the room.

  “Here you are. I’m sorry I was out. I was going to—”

  “What is all this?”

  “Chantal had to move out of her studio.” Nick walked over to Carly and put a hand on her shoulder. “It happened pretty suddenly. They sold the building and offered everyone cash, and—”

  “Oh,” Carly said. Over Nick’s shoulder she saw a flock of geese heading upriver.

  “I’m sorry. I should have warned you.”

  “Why?” She shrugged and pretended not to care. “It’s your place. I can’t expect you to keep it like a museum. ‘Carly Finnegan slept here.’” She took a step toward the machine-thing. “You haven’t answered my question. What is this?”

  “It’s an antique letterpress.” He picked up one of the poems and held it up for her inspection. “You can simulate this with computers, but it doesn’t begin to compare to the real thing. Each letter is done individually—and backward. Here, feel it.”

  Carly ran her finger over the words. “Tie Your Heart at Night to Mine, Love.” The thick paper felt rough against her skin. Each letter formed its own indentation. “Mmm” was all she could manage to get out.

  “It’s a dying art.” Nick laid the poem down on the table and straightened the row. “This couple is driving Chantal crazy. It’s for their wedding. They wanted to see the poem in every font she had, in every possible combination of ink and paper. It’s incredibly labor-intensive. Each one of these letters is made with a lead slug, which she arranges by hand. Then she rolls each piece through one at a time.”

  “Uh-huh.” Carly had nothing against Chantal, but she just couldn’t join Nick in his indignation on her behalf. Was she living here? Or just working here? Where was she now? Was Chantal part of the pizza-and-sleepover plan?

  “I meant to clear this off before you got here.” He walked to the bed and picked up one of the boxes.

  “It’s okay, Nick. I’ll sleep in Jess’s room.”

  “No. No. We can clear this stuff off.” He picked up another box and carried it to the corner where he’d started to stack them.

  “Really. It’s okay.” It wasn’t okay, but moving the boxes from the bed to the floor wasn’t going to make it okay. Nothing she could think of—short of traveling back in time—was going to make anything okay. But she let Nick make himself feel better by clearing off the bed that wasn’t hers anymore. She stood at the table in front of the window and watched a tour boat circle the lit-up Statue of Liberty.

  A piece of paper from one of the boxes fell to the floor at her feet. She reached down to pick it up. She was barely looking at the thing, but two words leapt out: Monroe and Gallery.

  It was a listing of November openings printed out from artdealers.org. Chantal—or someone—had circled a few of the others with a thick red marker, but not the one that caught Carly’s eye.

  Monroe Gallery

  Esperanza Williams:

  New Works

  Opening Reception November 30th, 7:00 p.m.

  This young Canadian painter’s work has been called “haunting and disturbing,” as well as “quirky and whimsical.” These new paintings will defy those who insist on labels. Through February 10.

  It was strange to think about, but if that piece of paper hadn’t fallen at her feet at that moment, she probably wouldn’t be sitting around the Babcock & Whitman, Attorneys-at-Law, Specialists in Criminal Defense table with four sets of eyes focused so intently on her.

  A couple hours after the gallery listings fell at her feet, Carly found herself standing on the steps of the apartment building across the street from the Monroe Gallery. One large spot-lit painting hung in the gallery’s window. In front of that, a small crowd milled around on the sidewalk, talking, smoking, and giving each other the once-over, trying to figure out who mattered, whose names would appear in write-ups of the event. Each time a cab (or in one case a Town Car) pulled up to the curb, all eyes would be on the passenger door, waiting to see who emerged.

  She’d left the apartment saying she needed a little time to herself. She knew it was going to be hard going back to the loft. And she knew “her” room was never going to be hers anymore. But seeing it taken over like that was a lot harder than she’d anticipated. She assured Nick that she was fine. A brisk walk in the cold would do her good. Maybe s
he’d give Val a call. Things weren’t exactly back to how they used to be between them. How could they be when Carly was hiding so much? But this topic was safe. Val knew how hard it had been to move away from Nick’s, how upset she’d been when he and her mother broke up. Val would know what to say.

  But Val’s phone must have been off. Carly tried three times, and each time it went straight to voice mail.

  So Carly walked. In the direction of the Monroe Gallery. She told herself she was just going to pass by. Maybe look in the windows and check out the art. See how big a crowd they got for their openings. For curiosity’s sake.

  But that’s not what happened. Instead of passing by, she planted herself on the steps of a small apartment building across the street from the brownstone and gallery for a good five or ten minutes, staring up at the second-floor windows, where lights were going on and off and shadows were flitting across rooms. According to that Times piece she’d read, the Deen brownstone had six thousand square feet of living space in the four floors above the gallery. That would be a lot of space anywhere, but in New York City it was downright palatial. As far as Carly knew—and she knew pretty much everything in the public record—Taylor didn’t have any siblings. So for each member of this family of three, there was the equivalent of a good-sized apartment’s worth of square footage.

  She wondered which of the windows were Taylor’s. For some reason—maybe because it was thirty degrees out and she’d left without a hat or gloves—she pictured a huge room with a stone fireplace complete with roaring fire. Was Taylor in there now? Did that hand, pulling that curtain closed, belong to her?

  A few people who lived in the building passed by on their way in or out. Most ignored Carly. Some gave her long, hard stares as they passed her on the steps. When an old woman pushing a shopping cart piled high with clanking bottles and cans down the sidewalk stopped to tell her, “They got free soup at Saint Mark’s Church tonight,” she decided she wouldn’t ignore this obvious IM from the universe.