CHAPTER 14

EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE

February 16, 2024

Tuesday could spot a fake when she saw one. How could she not when, technically, she was fake. Her government name wasn’t even Tuesday Rowe; it was Teodozji Roesky. When her mom, Roksana, named her, she couldn’t have anticipated that her brown-skinned baby would one day be a TV star—with a manager who’d demand a less “ethnically confusing” moniker.

Ezra Walker was also fake. It was painfully obvious that he wasn’t who he said he was. How could Ricki not see it?

Tuesday wasn’t having it. She was no longer in the business of allowing possibly dangerous men to hurt her or the people she loved. Ricki was vulnerable, well meaning, and real in a way that demanded protecting. And she just didn’t trust Ezra with her.

Thanks to a mix of regression therapy and self-actualization podcasts, Tuesday finally saw herself as a real person: no longer a puppet for her managers, a fantasy for her fans, or a punching bag for misogynistic tabloids. It had taken a lot of work, because she’d been indoctrinated at a young age to chase artificiality. In fact, every profile ever written about her was anchored in a very specific lie. That at five years old, she told Santa that for Christmas, she wanted to be a star.

Which was ridiculous. Tuesday never even believed in Santa. Roksana hadn’t allowed it; she’d be damned if some red-faced pyzaty porker would take the credit for the gifts she saved for all year with her coat check tips.

Tuesday did remember wanting to be like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’s Ashley Banks when she grew up. But what five-year-old is qualified to make career decisions? She’d also dreamed of becoming a horse. Or working at a grocery store. Tuesday used to watch the CTown Supermarket checkout lady, mesmerized, as she packed up all their groceries, making sure each item fit just right. It was like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, just with Eggos and Lunchables! But Tuesday’s mom didn’t drive from Harlem to Hollywood to pursue a career in supermarket sales for her baby girl. No, her mom decided that TV stardom was the plan.

Poverty was on the horizon, and Roksana Roesky was no dummy.

After Tuesday was hired as a spunky cutie-pie on Ready Freddy, nothing was ever real again. Birthday parties? Staged. Mommy-daughter picnics? Staged. At ten, she posed for a wholesome People pic with her on-set teacher, who was also dealing her amphetamines on the side. At fourteen, CosmoGirl interviewed her about the value of natural beauty, but by then, she’d already had a nose job, her first breast augmentation, and every errant hair lasered from her body. At sixteen, her prom date was an up-and-coming actor represented by her manager, who arranged the whole thing and promised the twenty-three-year-old “full access.” Even her short marriage to the closeted NBA player was one of her manager’s genius ideas. He felt her image needed rehabilitation after she’d started one club brawl too many.

No one ever asked why she was always fighting. Or why she was so angry. Tuesday starred in a hit show and dozens of TV movies and held down major cosmetics contracts. She should’ve been happy! And even after she exposed her sleazy manager for sexual harassment, no one cared. No one even believed her. She was punished; he wasn’t.

Whenever Tuesday heard people say “Well-behaved women rarely make history,” she wondered who they were talking about. She’d been a traumatized kid who stood up to one of the most powerful talent managers in the business. And that made history, all right, just not the good kind. She was suddenly unclean, unreliable, and unhirable: a lying Black slut making a fuss at the wrong time, years before the #MeToo movement might’ve made her a hero. The culture had relitigated Britney, Lindsay, and Paris. When would it be her turn?

That was what her memoir was for. If she’d ever finish writing the damned thing. Why was she overthinking it? No one was expecting “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” She simply had to tell her story. Set the record straight.

It certainly wasn’t about the money. Her advance from the publisher was negligible. But these days, Tuesday didn’t need much. She made a comfortable living off residuals and filmed commercials overseas sometimes. She had a few friends—her esthetician and the woman who did her lashes. But when she met Ricki, that was a platonic love at first sight. They were kindred spirits, each requiring the other to be nothing but exactly herself. And Ricki needed a friend as badly as Tuesday did.

The two had a lot in common, but one thing that Ricki was, and Tuesday wasn’t, was naive. She was dangerously smitten with this Ezra character. But clearly, he was hiding something. And Tuesday was determined to uncover the truth.

There was only one way to do it. She’d pretend to be a city inspector and wheedle her way into Ezra Walker’s house on an evidence-gathering mission.

He’s left me no choice, thought Tuesday, adding the finishing touches to her makeup: an extremely light beat meant to complement the city inspector uniform she’d bought half-price at the New York Police Shop way out in Queens.

Tuesday already knew how to hustle her way into a house, and it didn’t involve holding anyone up at gunpoint or breaking through windows. Nothing nutty. Based on her turn as a teen burglar in the 2006 Lifetime holiday flick Season’s Thievings, she knew how to make a break-in the perfect victimless crime.

The first thing was to ascertain when Ezra wouldn’t be home. Not hard. For the past four days, she’d disguised herself in a massive puffer, a Yankees cap, and sunglasses and discreetly patrolled Ezra’s block to get the lay of the land. She’d discovered the following:

Every day, around 11:00 a.m., Ezra left the house carrying a mysterious bag of dog food. He came home around 3:00 p.m. and sometimes had a mammoth husky with him. Where does one go for that long in the middle of the workday? Did he work, even? And was that XXL-sized beast a domesticated dog or a fucking wolf? It looked like Falkor from The NeverEnding Story.

Even odder still, one time she followed him into a Walgreens and, from two aisles over, watched him walking slowly through the store. Staring at the endless options of shaving cream, toothpaste, and Hallmark cards, studying them but never buying anything. It made no sense.

Tuesday also discovered that, as was the case with so many owners of New York City brownstones, he lived on the top floors and rented the ground floor to tenants. She’d spotted the renter through the window—a young woman, maybe a college student? She was always home.

That was all the info Tuesday needed to charm her way inside. If the tenant was as young as she looked, there was a chance she wouldn’t recognize Tuesday. Then, if luck was on Tuesday’s side—and if she knew her Edwardian-era Harlem brownstones—there might be a servants’ stairwell in the back of the house that would lead upstairs. A secret passageway, as it were. Most likely, there’d be a door atop the stairwell leading to Ezra’s duplex, and it’d probably be locked. But she knew how to pick a lock, too. All it took was a credit card and patience.

Ezra Walker was going down.

“Hello, can I help you?”

It was 12:15 p.m., and Tuesday had just rung the doorbell at Ezra’s house. It was perfect. He wasn’t home, but the first-floor tenant was. She was an athletic-looking blonde wearing Columbia University joggers.

“I’m so sorry to bother you on this fine day,” Tuesday said with a bright smile. It was clear that the tenant had no idea who she was. “My name is Scarlett Johannesburg, and I’m with the New York City Department of Inspection. There was a hydrant leak in the area, and I’m looking at all the residential water… uh… systems on the block.”

“Ohhh, I hadn’t heard,” said the blonde.

Out of the corner of her eye, Tuesday watched the tenant quickly survey her jumpsuit, clipboard, and top-handle satchel of “tools.” She bought the whole thing.

“Yeah, I need to check the building’s sinks, tubs, and toilets for leaks. All your, um, faucet valve… miscellanea. I know it’s an inconvenience, but…”

“No, you’re fine! It’s just, my landlord isn’t here. I’m a renter.”

Tuesday riffled through the papers on her clipboard. “Hmm. Seems I don’t have any tenants listed, only the owner. Mr. Ezra Walker?”

“That’s right.”

“Cool, cool, cool. And your name is?”

“I’m Beck.” She smiled brightly, tipping her head to the side.

“Hi, Beck!” Tuesday smiled and tipped her head, too. When researching her role in Season’s Thievings, Tuesday learned that the way to earn a stranger’s confidence was to repeat their name. And mirror their body language. It bred a feeling of familiarity.

“Beck, if you don’t mind, I’ll just conduct a quick search of the building. Fifteen minutes, tops.”

A few beats later, Beck had let Tuesday into the house to issue a fake inspection of her apartment, which was decorated with an assortment of slightly faded hand-me-down furniture, probably from her parents’ second homes or summer estates. Beck’s family was most assuredly wealthy—how else did she live in a fancy brownstone as opposed to shitty student housing?

“I’ll just wait in the kitchen, Ms. Johannesburg,” said Beck, who trailed Tuesday into a cute breakfast nook. “I’m studying for our psychopharmacology midterms. Exam life, ugh.”

“Education first, kiddo,” Tuesday called out to her, grateful that there was a carpet runner down the long hallway to mask the creakiness of the old wooden floorboards, so Beck couldn’t tell where she was in the house. A good thing, since she’d already tiptoed down the hall, past two huge bedrooms, to a discreet door in the back of the house.

The old servants’ stairwell. She didn’t have a lot of time now. She quickly looked over her shoulder, and there was no sign of Beck.

Tuesday slipped through the door, gently closing it behind her. The stairwell was old, dusty, a little cobwebby. She unlaced her boots, ripped them off, and tiptoed up in her socks. And there it was: the door to Ezra’s portion of the house. Of course, it was locked.

Preemptively grinning to herself triumphantly, she swiftly and easily picked the lock with the expired Amex she used as a sharp edge to trace her liquid liner. After a few targeted wiggles of the card, she heard a pop! and the door silently fell open.

It was the strangest home she’d ever seen.

The place had beautiful bones, for sure.

But there was nothing in there. It was just a collection of clean, sterile rooms, with a few nondescript chairs and a cheap pop-up outdoor table, the kind you find in the CVS seasonal aisle in summer. No art or photos on the wall, barely any personal effects. Did Ezra really live here? Did anyone? Moving fast, Tuesday lightly trotted up and down the stairs of the duplex, searching for clues, but there was barely any sign of life. A few expensive toiletries in the bathroom, a suitcase of clothes. And none of this did anything to quell her suspicion that Ezra was shady as hell.

Tuesday had told Beck she needed just fifteen minutes. She checked her phone and saw that she had seven minutes left. Now perspiring from nerves, she hustled up to the top floor to do one more sweep and realized that she’d missed a room.

Tuesday held her breath, pushing open the door.

Where the rest of the house was blankly impersonal, this room—this one room—was frozen somewhere in the past. Frozen many places in the past. Like the contents of an attic in an abandoned house, it was a jumble of old relics dating from the past century. A thick layer of dust had settled on everything. There were ancient journals piled onto an old-timey writing desk, rolled-up rugs. Suits from long-ago decades, a collection of hats. There were three televisions made from wood, with tall rabbit-ear antennas. Stacks upon stacks of records were piled up against one wall.

Nearby was a tangled jumble of old, beat-up dog collars. She wondered if he was into some BDSM shit. Tuesday peered closer at the collars. Dangling from each was a rusted tin tag engraved with a name. GROUCHO BARX. DROOLIUS CAESAR. JAMES EARL BONES.

Looking around, Tuesday realized what was unsettling. While all the pieces were outdated, they were all from different eras: A 1930s Victrola, a ’50s record player, a ’70s turntable for 45s, a 2000s stereo. A Walkman, a Discman, an iPod. A slide projector, an early cable TV box, a VCR. A typewriter, a word processor, a laptop. Various retro phones, ranging from 1920s top-handle rotaries to slim push-buttons from the ’90s. In a far corner was a box of ancient kitchen gadgets, midcentury blenders and toasters, and a clunky oversized 1980s-style microwave.

It was a collision of disparate times, giving Tuesday the uneasy feeling of being everywhere and nowhere at once.

And there, carefully piled on top of the writing desk, was a stack of papers. Holding in a cough from the dust, Tuesday rushed over to examine them. It was sheet music. The first paper was filled with musical notes scrawled in pencil. So was the next one. And the next, and the next. The farther she got into the stack, the older the pages became, yellowed, cracking, and the pencil marks faded with time. Tuesday couldn’t read sheet music, but even her untrained eye could tell that each sheet was different. But the handwriting was identical on every page. And each sheet had the same title—“UNFINISHED FOR HER”—followed by a date.

And the dates were impossible. The years spanned practically a century, but the month was always February. Even stranger, along the margins of every page were snippets of stream-of-consciousness thoughts that seemed to be hastily, frantically scrawled. Tuesday couldn’t make out what it all meant.

2/21/1932: More jumbled melodies.

2/16/1944: Haunted by disparate chords, adding up to nothing.

2/1/1952: February again. More mismatched sounds.

2/3/1972: Stalked by the wrong notes, again.

2/19/1984: Half-remembered, unreachable sounds.

2/11/2004: Up all night dreaming of dissonant chords. No rhyme, no reason.

2/9/2012: Music is stupid. I should’ve been an accountant.

But the top sheet read:

2/1/2024: She was there. In the garden. And I felt her there, in my bones, before I even saw her. I looked into her face and lost my composure. Like the atoms holding me together exploded outwards, in every direction. I fucking ran. But before I did… in the lightning-fast moment our eyes met… something miraculous happened. The notes in my brain started falling together. I could almost reach the melody, after all this time. But I’ll never reach her, not fully. And it’s my cross to forever bear.

Tuesday blinked, blank-faced. She was caught between confusion and a creeping sense of doom. If this was Ezra’s handwriting, he sounded like a madman. What the hell kind of trouble was Ricki in?

Tuesday whipped her phone out of her pocket and snapped as many photos as she could. And then she carefully put everything back in place and slipped out of the room, shutting the door behind her.

But not before noticing Ali’s portrait of Ricki propped in a far corner.

Moving quietly, heart thundering, she slipped back downstairs into the tenant’s apartment. Hoisting her tote of tools, she rushed to the front door.

“I’m off to the next house, Beck!” exclaimed Tuesday. “Good luck on your midterms!”

By the time she answered, Tuesday was long gone. And Beck never realized she’d been smoothly gamed by the winner of the Teen Choice Award for Choice TV Actress, Comedy, in 2008, 2009, and 2010—who, apparently, still had it.

Della needed a dose of beauty today. She was sitting on a bench outside of West Harlem Hospital’s main entrance. The wind breezed past her, carrying the scent of leather from the shoe repair shop across the street. Della could see the narrow old shop with razor-sharp clarity, thanks to the invention of progressive lenses. So many of the newer inventions were useless, like Crocs and natural deodorant, but progressive lenses were a game changer.

At least I lived long enough for my eyes to reap their benefits, she thought.

She noticed that bright, whimsical wildflowers were woven throughout the shoe repair shop’s wrought-iron gate. Even from that distance, she could tell they were Ricki’s flowers.

Ricki was still leaving her expensive, unsold arrangements at long-dead landmarks around town. But for the past few days, the flowers hadn’t stayed put at these lost historical sites. A curious thing started to happen. The bouquets were being discovered not only on Instagram, but with delight by local residents. Passersby began deconstructing her bouquets and then decorating the neighborhood with smaller clusters. Repurposed flower displays began ornamenting the exteriors of local statues, plazas, schools, churches, and public housing complexes. Then they posted pics of their handiwork on social media with #WildeThings.

My word, that girl’s making quite a mark, thought Della proudly. It felt good to know that her new granddaughter would be all right.

Della was waiting for her Lyft, sitting on the bench, accompanied by her new home aide, Naaz. As she’d later tell her deceased husband, Dr. Bennett, during their nightly chats (she couldn’t bring herself to call them prayers), Naaz was a hoot. A young, plucky Bangladeshi American woman with a Bay Ridge accent and a Lana Del Rey biceps tattoo, she’d been assigned to Della a few hours before. Naaz’s job was to keep her comfortable at home as she battled her bleak diagnosis.

Della’s Lyft pulled up, but she just wanted to sit outside for five more minutes. To feel the brisk, cool air against her skin. To watch life happening. Cars were honking. People were milling about, gathering the courage to visit their sick loved ones. Hospital staff rushed back from their lunch breaks at Sweetgreen, clutching biodegradable bags of twenty-dollar salad. Life was happening everywhere.

For eight years, she’d known this day would come.

Della was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2016. It wasn’t excruciating to live with, though the chemo was unpleasant, of course. And she lost her hair. But when it started growing back, she realized the short ’fro suited her. Dr. Bennett was with her then, and she was back in fighting shape within a year. She still swam three times a week and power-strolled with the Links Elder Steppers Walking Club. But the doctors had warned her that her cancer wasn’t gone; it was just at bay—and one day, it would, in fact, kill her.

But for the time being, she was alive. Which was a gift. It gave her space to think about what she wanted.

When she was first diagnosed, an obscene new president had just been elected, and she was worried about her and Dr. Bennett staying in Georgia. She knew that the POTUS’s wild-eyed hate speech had the potential to rustle up the evils that knitted the country together. A mob of delusional yahoo yokels could turn their woefully misplaced rage into violence at any moment. And she refused to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Especially if her time was limited.

She wanted to move to Harlem. It was a place she’d always romanticized, for many reasons, secret and close to her heart, not the least of which was the first picture show she ever saw, Swing!, back when she was barely eleven. The movie was about Mandy, a woman in Birmingham, Alabama, who quits her job cooking for a white family and flees to Harlem to be a cabaret singer. To Della, a serious, poised girl raised by a poorly paid domestic worker grandmother in the Deep South, it was a cage-rattling, Edenic fantasy.

Atlanta was wonderful, and she’d loved her life there. But the tides were turning. And in her remaining years, she wanted to taste Mandy’s freedom.

Dr. Bennett didn’t share her fears. He wasn’t frightened of much and couldn’t imagine some fool in the White House dictating where he lived. But he loved Della with every ounce of his stubborn, endearingly bossy body. And he owed it to her to help her realize this dream. Lord knew she’d supported his whims for the past seventy years, from being the receptionist at his first practice to throwing the Atlanta Neurology Coalition’s spring gala every year.

Dr. Bennett arranged for her to move into her dream brownstone. And then he died.

Why did he get to pass so quickly? thought Della, the wind whipping her cheeks. One fatal heart attack in his sleep, and he was gone. She didn’t know which was more preferable—knowing that your body was winding down, or disappearing in a flash. It must be nice to just be taken. Without stewing over it, obsessing, and preparing. Forever wondering when.

Now Della had a “when.”

She continued to have visions of beloved, long-dead friends and family members when she was on the edge of sleep. Or if her eyes unfocused a bit while she was reading. Still no Dr. Bennett, as much as it broke her heart. God, what she wouldn’t give to see him. She needed him now.

But Della knew that a heavenly hand controlled who she encountered, and she needed to trust its divine timing. Because the night before, she’d had a warm, welcoming vision that she couldn’t have imagined on her own. In her dreams, she was holding all seven of her miscarried babies. The ones her “inhospitable” womb couldn’t house. She cuddled each of them close, stroking their velvety, powder-soft new skin, and they nestled into the crook of her arm. And then, for the first time, she wasn’t sad about having lost them. She’d be seeing them soon. They were happy. And waiting for her.

Today, Della’s doctor told her that most terminal patients started seeing the people they’d loved and lost when it was almost their time to go. It eased the transition. She knew she’d see Dr. Bennett soon. Sometimes, she wondered if Nana would appear to her. She supposed not. In life, Nana had been ice cold and had expressed nothing but relief when Della married and moved to Atlanta. No reason to think that she’d be a calming guide into the afterlife.

Della also doubted that her parents would show up in her dreams. Her father was a mystery: no name, no photograph, no nothing. She did have an idea of what her mother looked like, since Nana had a photograph of her. But she never knew her. When she thought of her mother, which was rarely, all she felt was a resentment that had hardened like a callus. A grudge. Besides, the doctor had said people that she loved would reveal themselves to her.

She wished that she had control over when she died. That she could schedule it on the calendar, the way women these days scheduled C-sections. Della was a planner. Living each day, never knowing if it would be her last? That felt torturous, inhumane. So she decided not to share her prognosis with anyone. She’d just add this to the list of secrets she kept close to her heart. There was no reason for Ricki to grieve her before she was gone. Or Su, or any of her friends. It was her business, and in six months, maybe a year, she would die.

Or maybe before then. Who could know?

She coughed hard into her elbow and then shut her eyes, allowing the brisk air to sweep across her skin. She had no regrets. From now until her final day, she’d breathe.