Matteo picks up the discarded folder. Sets it down again. For the first time all morning he looks less like a machine and more like the man I've known most of my life.
"Find her," he says.
I sit. Pull the acquisition papers toward me. Read the first paragraph and understand every word.
Funny, what clarity a direction brings.
Somewhere out there is Jennifer Sullivan. Sharp and soft and far too generous with her trust for someone who'd been given so many reasons not to be.
This time, if she lets me close enough to touch her, I intend to take my time.
8
JENNIFER
Hiding from your landlord is a skill nobody puts on a résumé, but if they did, mine would be impressive.
Three months of practice will do that to a person.
The key is routine disruption. Mr. Richards is a creature of habit, which worked against me at first because his habits and mine ran on the same schedule. My habit was leaving for work at eight fifteen every morning like a person with a job, which I was until I wasn’t. His habit is checking the mail at eight and watering the two sad little plants by the front entrance at eight ten, which makes the window between eight ten and eight twenty prime escape time if you take the back stairwell, cut through the laundry room, and don’t look guilty doing it.
I’ve gotten very good at not looking guilty.
The problem with today is that I’m not leaving for work. I’m leaving because I haven’t eaten since yesterday afternoon, when I finished the last of the crackers I’d been rationing with the kind of grim focus usually reserved for people stranded on mountains.
The five thousand from Vegas disappeared fast. Flight home. Bills no one could cover for me anymore. Rent. Groceries. Oneproblem after another until the money was gone, like it had never existed at all.
Now I have twenty dollars. The bodega on the corner does breakfast sandwiches for three fifty, which means I can get two and still have change, and the baby has been making her feelings about this situation very clear since around five this morning in the specific way that bypasses all reasonable thought, goes straight to the stomach, and says feed me right now or I will make your life miserable.
She. I’ve been saying she.
I don’t know that it’s a she. I haven’t been to a doctor since the test, because the test used my last fourteen dollars of that particular week, and doctors cost considerably more than that. But she feels like a she. Furious and hungry, badly timed, and already somehow the only thing that feels real in a life that has been coming apart for months.
She’s hungry.
Therefore, I’m going out.
I check the time on my phone. Eight eighteen. I'm cutting it close but the window is open, technically. I pull on my jacket, grab my purse with the twenty dollar bill folded inside it like a treasure map, and take the back stairs two at a time, because the back stairs are my best friend now, which tells you something about the current state of my social life.
The laundry room smells like dryer sheets and other people's clean clothes. I slip through it, past Mrs. Yuen's cart that's always parked in the same spot, out the side door, and into the alley.
Free.
I let out a breath.
The same one every morning for three months, half relief and half the exhaustion of someone who has turned sneaking out of her own building into a daily athletic event. Then I feelridiculous for it, because this is still my home, technically, for now, and I’m behaving like a fugitive in it. There’s something deeply undignified about that, which I try not to examine too closely because it leads to a spiral I don’t have time for before breakfast.
I round the front of the building and that’s when I see it.
The window, the one I always leave cracked because the radiator in my apartment sounds like a tiny man trapped inside it playing percussion, and that sliver of fresh air is the only thing keeping me from losing my mind entirely.
It's closed.
Locked from the inside.
That has never happened. In eight months of living here, that window has never been locked from the inside because I am always inside to lock it myself, and when I'm outside I leave it cracked, which I know is a whole thing for a city apartment but the tiny radiator man is relentless and a girl has to do what a girl has to do.
I stop walking.