The law offices of Genereux, Meyers, Ennis & Young were in a medium-size building in midtown. I had been here a lot when I was younger—back when I was thrilled to spend time, while my dad was working, in a conference room with a stack of papers, coloring diligently and telling anyone who passed by about the important work that I was doing. When I’d outgrown my coloring phase and moved into middle school, I’d still liked to go to the office—even just doing my homework while I waited for my dad felt somehow exciting. There was something about working in wood-paneled offices, with shelves and shelves of uniform law books all surrounding me, that made doing English or social studies homework seem somehow elevated.
But as we approached the building, and Matty pulled the door open for me, it was hitting me that it had been a while since I’d been there. The lobby was the same as ever—fairly stark, white marble, and a guard behind a desk reading the Post.
“Hi,” Matty said, giving a winning smile. “I’m here to pick up something from my mom’s office. Joy Lampitoc?” The guard just raised an eyebrow at him but didn’t say anything. “She said she would call,” Matty said after a pause, glancing at me, his expression clearly saying ruh-roh. My stomach clenched. Were we, now that we were on the verge of finally getting the keys, going to be stymied at the very last minute?
“Lemme check on that,” the guard said, closing the paper and turning away from us as he picked up the phone.
“Welcoming place,” Matty said quietly to me.
“Yeah,” I said, silently praying that this would all be resolved, and soon. Whatever her flaws, Joy really did seem on top of things—so hopefully this was just a failure to communicate. “I hope I don’t have to go through this every day this spring.”
Matty frowned at me. “Why would you?”
“Oh—I’m applying for an internship here,” I said, standing up a little straighter as I said it.
“Oh?” His expression hadn’t become less confused at this explanation.
I nodded. “It would be great to have on my CV. I’m hoping to get into Northwestern, prelaw. Double major in history and political science, then straight to Harvard Law.”
Matty looked taken aback by this. “Wow. That’s—quite a plan.”
“Thanks,” I said, giving him a smile, even though I wasn’t sure he entirely meant it as a compliment.
“Northwestern, then Harvard for law school,” he said slowly. “Isn’t that the same thing Stephen did?”
I flexed my toes in my unfamiliar boots and crossed my arms. This was hitting a little too close to what Kat had said in the subway. “Yeah,” I said, not liking at all the defensive tone that was coming into my voice. “So?”
“Nothing,” he said, holding both hands up. “You just impressed me with your acting tonight. With the Raptor,” he added, “not when you were trying to pretend your feet didn’t hurt. That was just awful.”
I laughed. “Shut up,” I said, then immediately wondered if I shouldn’t have. Had I just crossed some line?
But Matty just smiled. “You shut up,” he said. “It was bad.”
“What are you studying?” I asked, realizing belatedly—and ashamedly—that I didn’t know, because I had never asked. “At Columbia?”
“I’m not sure,” he said with a shrug. “I mean,” he added, when he must have seen my expression, “I know what classes I’m taking. But I’m not sure to what end yet.” He rocked back on his heels. “I want to cast as wide a net as possible—to see what I like. So I’m doing marketing and art history and medieval literature and psychology.”
“Wow. That makes—no logical sense at all.”
Matty grinned. “Exactly.”
“Okay,” the guard said, hanging up the phone and facing us again. “Go on up. Seventeenth floor.”
“Cheers,” Matty said. The guard buzzed open the automatic turnstile security entrance thing and we walked up to the elevator, which was waiting in the lobby. Matty pressed the button for floor seventeen, and then just as the doors started to close, I pressed the button for thirty-eight.
“I’m going go and say hi to my dad,” I said. “He’s working late, so he’ll still be in the office.” In the back of my mind, I was secretly hoping that once I was there, he’d realize that he could, in fact, take the hour or so off and come have dinner with me. It wouldn’t need to be something fancy like Josephine’s. Or I could even pick something up and bring it back to the office, and we could eat together. After what a stressful night it had been, the thought of getting to still have a win—getting to have dinner with my father after all—was too appealing to ignore. I was hoping that he wouldn’t be too mad about me coming in without permission. I could catch him up on my night—or an edited version of it. Somehow, I knew that he’d like that I’d spent time with Matty and Margaux.
The doors slid open on floor seventeen. “Meet you down in the lobby in ten?” Matty asked as he stepped out.
I nodded as the doors started to slide closed. “See you soon.” I figured that if my dad was free to take some time to hang out, I could just run down and get the key from Matty.
When the doors opened on floor thirty-eight, I stepped out, looking around. Even though it was a Friday night, the office was far from deserted. These kinds of hours were one of the things my parents had fought about, even though they tried to keep it from me. As if I wasn’t sitting on the top of the stairs, or in the bathroom with the vent that led to their bedroom, straining for every word. As if I couldn’t sense that something was wrong. It was a slap in the face, honestly, that they’d tried to keep me in the dark for so long even when we all knew it wasn’t working, a horrible farce with stilted lines that we were all performing at the dinner table and on holidays. It was like they were saying they thought so little of me—what I could pick up on, what I could understand. When they finally came out and told me, on vacation in a rented vacation condo in Colorado, there was a big part of it that was a relief. That at least we didn’t have to go on pretending any longer.
But they’d argued a lot about the hours he worked. My dad telling my mom that he was a partner in a New York firm, that it was an hour for him to come back and forth from Stanwich each day, and if he’d missed dinner with us anyway, it was just easiest to stay in the city so that he could keep working. My mom protesting that he was missing everything, missing things with me, and I’d had to grip my legs hard so I wouldn’t jump up, burst in, and promise that he wasn’t missing anything, that I was fine, that there was no point in fighting. And it was the worst kind of fight to overhear, since it was the kind that went around and around in circles, the facts of the case never changing. My dad’s work was in the city; my mom’s was in town. She couldn’t change that and neither could he. All they could do, it seemed, was have the same argument over and over again, sometimes dressed up in different clothes, but always the same thing underneath. Until, finally, they’d decided that they’d rather not have it at all anymore. And they’d both walked away.
As I walked into the office, I stopped short—shocked by how different it looked. The color scheme was different, the font on the sign with the partners’ names had been changed, and all the décor was new. Had it really been that long since I’d been here? I knew everything had gotten busier in the last few years—school, rehearsals, my dad’s work… but I wouldn’t have thought it had been that long.
I was hoping his office would be in the same place—back in the corner suite, with windows that looked out onto Fifty-Third. As I got closer, I could practically see it in my mind—what it had always looked like when he worked late on something. And even though it had been a while, I knew what to expect, because it never changed—all the lights in his office blazing, the opera he always played when he needed to keep his energy up. The scattered Coke cans spread out over his desk, the candy bars he would pretend that someone else had left there for some reason he couldn’t explain. I felt myself smile as I got closer. He was going to be so surprised to see me. And it had gotten almost impossible to surprise him, now that we didn’t live in the same house together, and everything always had to be so scheduled.
As I rounded the corner, I saw his assistant, Carla, looking frazzled, sitting behind her desk, the one just outside my dad’s office. She had three stacks of paper in front of her, and she was pulling pages from each of them and sorting them together. “Hello,” I said quietly, trying not to disturb her and make her lose track of whatever it was she was doing. But even so, she jumped and looked up at me, her annoyed expression turning confused for just a moment before she smiled.
“Stevie?” she asked, standing up. She shook her head. “Look at you! All grown up.”
“Oh,” I said, giving her a smile back. I never knew what to say to that. Thank you? “It’s so good to see you again.”
“Likewise. It’s been too long,” she said, giving my hand a pat.
“I was just going to say hello to my dad,” I said as I started to head around her desk.
“Oh, I’m sorry hon,” Carla said, sitting back down and glaring at the piles of paper. “He’s gone already, I’m afraid.”
I paused, blinking at her for a moment. “Gone?” I took a step around the corner and there, sure enough, was my dad’s office. But it was dark and quiet, the desk clean—no piles of paper, no soda cans, no Turandot. But maybe he was working at home, back in his apartment—
“Yeah, he took off around seven. Said he was going to have dinner with Joy.”
I staggered back a step. It felt like someone had just slapped me. “He did?” I finally managed.
“He’ll be sorry to have missed you.” Carla was back to sorting the papers, not looking up at me. “So are you in the city with friends? Seeing a show or something?”
I swallowed hard. I could feel my eyes brimming with hot tears, and my chest was tightening. It was getting harder to breathe. “Yeah,” I said with a tremendous effort that took absolutely every bit of my acting ability. “Yeah, something like that. Good to see you again, Carla.”
“You too, hon. Take care,” she called.
I turned to walk back to the elevators, my chin quivering wildly, out of control, the way it only ever did when I was crying for real, not stage tears. I kept my eyes on the dark-patterned carpet, trying to keep it together. I just needed to make it down the hall to the elevator. Then I just needed to make it down the elevator. It was how you eat a whale, after all.
But this technique was no longer working, as the reality of the situation crashed over me like a forty-foot wave. My dad had bailed on my birthday dinner. He’d lied to me about it, then gone to have dinner with Joy instead. And the worst part of it was that, deep down, I wasn’t actually as shocked by this as I should have been. It had been obvious for years now—that my dad had had other priorities. He had moved on, and I wasn’t nearly as important to him as his new family.
I pressed the button for the lobby through a haze of tears, then just prayed for the doors to close without anyone else getting on. I truly felt like I couldn’t endure this ride with a cheerful paralegal, no matter how well-meaning. As the doors finally, blessedly closed, I let myself fall apart, sobbing into my hands—big, ugly, openmouthed sobs, the kind that I would never have done onstage.
It was like all my excuses and rationalizations were collapsing before my eyes like a house of cards. This had been going on for years now. And I had just let it, happy to take crumbs, never asking for what I wanted or telling my dad how I felt. Because what if I did, what if I told him that I missed him and that he should have come to my play—and it backfired? I barely got to see him as it was, and that was without me getting mad at him.
But, a tiny voice in my head, one that sounded a lot like Kat’s, whispered. Would that really be worse than what you’re feeling right now?
I didn’t have an answer for that, but when the elevator passed the eleventh floor, I tried to compose myself. I wiped off my face, took one long, big breath, held it, and then let it out for twice as long.
I’d learned to do this sophomore year, during A Doll’s House, when, as Nora, I needed to get super emotional and then pretend to be super composed. And it was the same thing now. I could pull this back. I could shake this off. I could walk through the lobby and Matty would never know that anything was wrong.
The elevator doors opened and I stepped out. Matty was standing by the guard’s desk, but the second he saw me, his whole expression changed. “Oh my god, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said, making myself smile wide at him. His brows were furrowed, and judging by his expression, I had a feeling I was blotchy and puffy—not to mention that what was left of my eye makeup was probably all over my face. “Just allergies, I think.”
“Okay,” Matty said, clearly not buying this. “Was your dad there?”
“Gone for the night,” I said, trying to skim lightly over the words, like skipping a stone over the surface of the water. “His assistant said he was working from home.” I didn’t want Matty to ask any questions about why he wasn’t there—I didn’t think I could take it if his expression suddenly turned either pitying or angry on my behalf. “Any luck?”
He grinned at me and held up a set of keys on a leather key chain. “Got ’em.”
“No way,” I said, just looking at him for a moment before taking them. There had been enough blind alleys tonight that a piece of me had just resigned myself to the fact that I’d never get into Mallory’s apartment again. That I’d somehow have to arrange with someone to get my purse later, because the place had suddenly turned as inaccessible as Fort Knox. “Thanks so much,” I said, gripping onto the keys as tightly as I’d ever held anything. “I can’t believe we got them.”
“I’m making, like, eight copies of Mallory’s keys whenever she gets back,” Matty said. “Because knowing her, with a door like that, this is absolutely going to happen again.”
“I can just leave these in the apartment when I go, right?”
“Or maybe with the super? That way she can get them when she comes home. I can text her and let her know that’s where they’ll be.”
“The super,” I echoed. I suddenly flashed to Cary, and his sweet smile, and how he hadn’t been able to stop looking at Kat. “Can I use your phone again?” I called I CRUISE one more time, and like before, it went right to voice mail. I left yet another message, telling him that I’d gotten a spare set of keys anyway, and he didn’t need to bother his uncle.
I handed Matty back his phone. “I don’t know how you’ve been getting around all night without one,” he said.
“It hasn’t been that bad,” I said, almost meaning it.
He smiled at me, checked the time on his phone. “I’d go with you to Mallory’s, but…”
“You have to go back to the USSR.” Matty laughed. “I get it. Say hi to Alyssa and Archie. Thanks for coming all the way over here with me, and for—everything tonight.”
“You want to come?”
“It sounds fun, but I think I’m just going to go get my stuff.”
“Understandable.”
We looked at each other for a moment, like before in his dorm—but this time without the awkward pressure of expectations. Before, there was someone I hadn’t known. And now? It was Matty. Somehow, unexpectedly, and against all odds—my brother.
I reached out and gave him a hug, and he gave me one back, picking me up off my feet for a second before putting me down again. “Bye,” I said. “Thanks again for everything.”
“This isn’t goodbye,” Matty said, shaking his head like the notion was ridiculous. “You’re coming to Margaux’s later, right? Hang on—let me get you the address.” He pulled a receipt out of his wallet, borrowed a pencil from the guard, and scribbled down Margaux’s address for me. I took the folded paper and stuck it in my coat pocket. “I’ll see you there?”
I just smiled. “Bye, Matty. I’ll see you soon.”
He grinned back, then pushed open the door, wincing slightly against the cold, putting his head down against it as he fell into step with the thinned-out Midtown crowd.
A second later, I stepped outside myself and looked around. I was twenty blocks away from Mallory’s apartment. I could walk there, even though it really was getting colder. There were cabs with lights on flying by, and I realized all of a sudden that I could take one. I had my nineteen dollars in cash, but I no longer had to hoard it, because the rest of my money and my emergency credit card—along with our train tickets and my keys—were at Mallory’s, and now I could get back in there. And even if nineteen dollars wasn’t enough to get me twenty blocks, it would be enough to get me close.
And that was what I should do.
It made sense. It was what I’d been trying to do all night, after all. Get back to Mallory’s. Get my things. No longer be broke and stranded in New York.
And yet…
Knowing full well this was a bad idea, I walked to the curb and put my hand up when I saw a yellow cab, the SUV kind, with its white light on. It pulled over, and I got in, slamming the door behind me and taking my nineteen dollars in cash out of my pocket, prepared to watch the meter closely and stop the cab at around fifteen, so I’d have enough for the tip and for all the extra charges I’d never understood but that were always added on.
“Where to?” the cabbie asked, meeting my eyes in the rearview mirror. I looked at the clock on the TV screen playing Taxi TV. It was nine—which meant I could still make it.
And so, I leaned forward and said, “Josephine’s. In the Village.”