Elliot found me sitting in the dark on a bench outside my apartment complex that night, hours after the gig had ended. The night was muggy, the air as thick as my mood. Dad paced restlessly in the parking lot.
Elliot sat next to me, oblivious, despite my eyes following Dad back and forth. I probably looked as confused as I felt.
“What happened?” he asked softly.
“It feels like there are bees buzzing inside my head,” I said. I let my hair spill down around my face, shielding my peripheral vision so I couldn’t see Dad. But Elliot pushed my curls behind one ear.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“It means that I can’t think clearly. I’m constantly on alert, waiting to do something no one else understands. Or . . . see something.”
This would have been my moment to tell him about Dad, but since I hadn’t told Dr. Lee, I couldn’t start now. And besides, I could get rid of him any time I wanted to.
I stared at Dad meaningfully and blinked, but he just shoved his hands in his pockets and turned around to pace the opposite direction. Then he started whistling “Do Wah Diddy Diddy.” It wasn’t a song on The Playlist. I hated that song. I couldn’t keep the sting of that betrayal from my face.
Elliot glanced over his shoulder then back at me. “Do you see something, Syd?” he asked.
I tore my eyes from Dad’s retreating back. He was leaving. Good.
“No,” I said. I didn’t elaborate. “I’m sorry about today. About not showing up for the show. I had a shitty day. I quit my job.”
“What?” Elliot yelped. “Why?”
I shrugged. “I don’t need it anymore.”
His eyes narrowed. “You don’t sound like yourself.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I don’t like who that person was. Maybe I need to stop waiting for permission and start living for myself. Before it’s too late.”
Elliot sighed, but he didn’t respond. He didn’t have to. He knew how I felt. He’d been longing to be himself, fully and unapologetically, for as long as I’d known him. The band and the dyed hair were as close as he’d gotten, but it wasn’t enough. Elliot kept a tight lid on his Elliot-ness around everyone but me.
Which was a shame, because his Elliot-ness was perfect.
It was playing a dozen different instruments but never believing he’d be good enough to play even one professionally. He always pushed himself harder than anyone else so that he could be better than everyone, but he never believed he’d actually get there.
It was making me playlists meant to “broaden my musical horizons,” but when he played them for me, he talked so much and stopped each song so often to tell me why it was masterful that I couldn’t even hear the music.
He was never still, especially when he was playing, and he was nearly incapable of focus at any other time, but when he sat at the piano or had an instrument in his hands, he could be there for hours. His fingers moved with incredible grace as he played with complete, unaltered focus on the notes.
That focus was now entirely on me, as if I were a familiar song with a new arrangement, and he was trying to adjust to the chord change.
“Okay,” he said. “What do you need? What can I do?”
I leaned against him, quiet for a moment. “Would you be up for a trip to New York?” I asked finally.
I could feel his gaze on me, the questions he wanted to ask fighting one another for dominance. But there was only one answer.
“We’re going to find my dad.”
I left a note stuck to the inside of the front door as I left early the next morning. I didn’t want Mom to know I was gone until I’d had a chance to get away. And I wanted her to have the chance to worry about me, even if only for a minute, before she found it. I hoped she’d worry at least, and not just feel relieved.
I splurged on a car service that picked me up first, and then Elliot, before taking us to the train station.
I’d been to the city before. On school field trips to the Museum of Natural History and the Met, for singing competitions, and at Christmas every year, when we went to see the windows at Macy’s and Saks, and the tree at Rockefeller Center.
Mom and I had also gone to NYU’s open house in the fall, but she’d dismissed the idea of me attending school there before we even got off the train. She did take me for pizza and bought me a couple of books at the Strand, though.
But I’d never been to the city without adult supervision. I startled when I realized I was the adult, since I’d turned eighteen at the end of April.
I didn’t feel like an adult. Especially not with my stomach doing backflips while I purchased our tickets. Elliot had to take over when my trembling fingers hit the wrong buttons three times in a row.
“Syd, calm down. We’re only going for one night,” he said as I clutched my ticket in my sweaty fist.
“Actually . . . I kind of, um, booked the Airbnb for four nights.”
I bit my lip as I watched his face transform. Shock registered first, his mouth dropping open before he snapped it shut. The anger had set in. I didn’t lie to anyone often, but I never lied to Elliot.
“It’s just that it could take a while to find him,” I said in a rush. “And I can’t go back to my mom’s house yet. I can’t breathe there. You’ll stay with me, won’t you?”
Elliot considered me for a few seconds, but then he nodded. “Until my parents force me to come home. I’m still a minor. I can’t just disappear.”
“Oh. Right.” Elliot’s parents may have been more laid-back than Mom, but they weren’t going to love the idea of the two of us on our own in the city either. “What did you tell them you were doing tonight?”
He smirked. “I said I was staying at your house, of course. Did you tell your mom you were staying with me?”
I peeked at him out of the corner of my eye. “No. I just said, ‘I’m going to look for Dad. I’ll be back when I’ve found him.’”
Elliot stopped suddenly. A few surprised yelps and loud curses came from the people behind him. They surged around us, throwing annoyed glances over their shoulders.
“You didn’t tell her where you were going? You didn’t give her an itinerary of what you’d be doing at every moment? Who even are you?”
I shrugged, even though I could feel the nervous sweat prickling at my hairline. “Honestly? I’m not sure anymore.”
I might not have known how to track down my dad, or how long it could take, but if I had to use the entirety of my newly bloated savings account to do it, I would find him. I wasn’t going to let my anxiety—or my mom—stop me.
We couldn’t check into our Airbnb until three, but since neither Elliot nor I had much stuff, we decided to go straight to looking for Dad. I had a list of shelters, food banks, drop-in centers, safe havens, soup kitchens, and a handful of other places that provided services to the homeless, as well as a list of local emergency rooms and mental health units at hospitals.
But when I’d called the day before, the person at the DHS told me to start with the men’s intake center on Thirtieth Street, which was where every single homeless man in the city had to go to be registered before they could enter the shelter system.
We took the stairs down into the subway station. Sweat was already beading on my upper lip before I’d even swiped my MetroCard. The rush of stale air through the tunnel a minute later was only a relief because it signaled that a train was coming our way.
I could see that the train was crowded as it pulled in. But the car that stopped in front of us was suspiciously empty.
“The air-conditioning is probably broken,” Elliot said.
But as the doors opened, the cool air hit us, along with the acidic smell of urine, combined with the foul stench of body odor.
Elliot cursed, covering his nose.
I couldn’t help peering into the empty car to see the source of the smell. A middle-aged white man lay across the closest bench seat, his head resting on what looked like a plastic container of takeout food. His eyes were closed, his mouth open, and he wore a beanie over his dark hair, despite the heat. His gray T-shirt had multiple rings of dried sweat stains around the neck. A dark stain covered the crotch of his olive-green cargo pants. A stream of liquid ran the length of half the train.
Before the doors closed, Elliot grabbed my hand and pulled me into the crowded car next door, pushing a few people farther inside. That earned a few grumbles, but Elliot wasn’t fazed.
“Someone should help him,” I said, looking around.
“There are services for that,” Elliot said. “Right? I mean, we’re on our way to one of the places that provides them right now.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to show up to help him right now.”
He pushed his hair out of his eyes. “That guy needs more help than you can give him, Syd.”
“That guy could be my dad,” I snapped. “I’d want someone to help him if it were.”
“But that’s not your dad,” he said gently.
We were speaking quietly, but I could tell the people within earshot were listening. And that they thought I was being naïve. I just didn’t care.
“I’m not saying that he is my dad, I’m saying that’s what my dad could be like. You think that guy wants to be sleeping in a puddle of his own piss on the subway at eleven a.m.?”
Elliot rested a hand on my shoulder but kept the other firmly attached to the pole as the train lurched.
“You think as a little kid he said to his mom, ‘I want to be homeless when I grow up’?”
“Come on, don’t be like that,” Elliot said, wincing.
I knew I was being overly sensitive and that Elliot didn’t deserve this, but I was angry at everyone on that train for ignoring this man instead of helping him. They were just pissed they’d had to give up a seat in an air-conditioned subway car because a smelly homeless guy was sleeping in it.
When the doors opened, I stepped out and waited for a conductor to poke their head out of the little window so I could flag them down.
When I spotted one, he was a couple cars away.
“Hey! Hey, conductor guy!” I called, waving my hands over my head as I hustled past the stream of people walking toward me.
I reached him just as the doors were closing and he was putting up his window.
“Hey! There’s a guy one car down who looks like he could use help.”
The conductor curled his lip. “I know. The cops are waiting at the next stop to get him off.”
It took my brain a few seconds to catch up, but the train was already moving by the time it did.
“The cops?” I said just as Elliot reached me.
“I guess that’s what happens when you need help in this city,” he said. “You get arrested.”
We walked down Thirtieth Street to the intake center. I did a double take when I saw the building. It was a beautiful redbrick building and looked more like a school—a huge one—than a homeless shelter. But the fact that it was as large as it was, taking up the entire length of the block, just proved how much space was needed. And what a hard task I had ahead of me.
Men milled around outside the entrance, smoking and talking despite the big no loitering signs all over the place. Elliot and I drew glances from every person we passed.
We entered through the front doors and were confronted with several NYPD officers and metal detectors. The scent of urine burned my nostrils.
As I approached the desk at the entrance, the guy sitting there glanced up and started, surprised to see me.
“Hi. I’m Sydney Holman, and my dad is homeless. I need help finding him.”
The guy looked at me for a few long seconds. He didn’t look much older than I was, but I felt like a lost little girl looking for her daddy. I guess I was.
He picked up the phone. “I’ll call someone to come talk to you.”
I nodded, swallowing around the sudden lump in my throat. “Thank you,” I whispered.
A few minutes later, a tall Black woman pushed through the doors behind the metal detectors. She wore jeans and had a blazer over her T-shirt. Her long braids were pulled into a low ponytail.
“Hi,” she said. “How can I help you?”
“I’m trying to find my dad,” I said. My eyes welled as I pulled my phone out of my pocket and scrolled through the photos I’d taken of the wall at Grandma and Grandpa’s beach house. I found the most recent picture of my dad and showed it to the woman.
“He’s homeless?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Do you know if he’s staying here?”
I shook my head, dislodging a few tears. I wiped them away with the back of one hand. “Sorry, I didn’t expect to get this emotional.”
But my tears seemed to help my cause. The woman stuck out her hand for me to shake.
“It’s okay, I know how it is. I’m Desirae. I’m a caseworker here. Come with me and let’s see what we can do.”
Elliot said he’d stay outside, so I followed Desirae down the long hallway, through a locked metal door, and into a room packed with cubicles. She gestured for me to sit at the desk chair next to her, which she wheeled into her tiny cube.
“Okay, so I don’t want to get your hopes up because, right now, your dad is one of more than fifty thousand people without a home in the city of New York. If someone doesn’t want to be found in this city, they can easily disappear. But if he’s been living here for a long time, the chances are good that the HOME-STAT team has him on their by-name list. Let’s check, okay?”
I nodded, trying not to let my chin tremble. I had to clamp my lips together.
“What’s his name?”
I took a deep breath. “Richard Holman. He’s forty-one.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
She clicked around on her computer for a few minutes, clucking her tongue once and raising her eyebrows a few times before she finally printed something out for me.
“This is a list of the shelters he’s stayed in around the city over the last couple of years. Our outreach team has run into him a few times, and he’s given them his name, but he won’t agree to come inside. He only goes to the shelters when it’s snowing or below freezing, as far as I can tell.”
I didn’t need to look through the cloudy window behind us to see that it wasn’t anywhere near snowing. It was the middle of July.
My shoulders slumped, but I held back my tears. I had direction, at least. But I also knew from my four years on the newspaper that I should try to scrape away another layer. I could always ask one more set of questions and dig a little deeper. At school, that meant finding out that the funds the girls’ lacrosse team raised from their concessions went toward a pizza party after each game and not travel costs, as they’d claimed. Here, it might just put me a few steps closer to my father’s trail.
“The outreach team didn’t happen to mention where they’d found him, did they?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yes, but he’s been in three different places when they spoke to him. The first time, it was near Times Square, on Forty-First Street. The second time, he was in Grand Central during a blizzard. That night, they got him to a shelter, but he left before the snow melted. And just this past February, they talked to him outside of Penn Station. But he wouldn’t go inside then either.”
I nodded. “And can you tell me if he’s been hospitalized or in jail any time recently?”
Desirae frowned. “No, that’s beyond my scope. I think you might need a private investigator or a lawyer for that.”
I made a note of both in my phone. “Okay, thanks so much for your help.”
She reached over and placed her hand over mine on the chair arm. “Keep looking, okay? I know I sound skeptical, but New York isn’t as big a city as it seems. Good luck.”
I thanked her and walked back out to Elliot. He raised his eyebrows hopefully.
“I have a few leads. How do you feel about a visit to Times Square?”
He grimaced. “Unless we’re going to see a show, I’m not really in the mood for crowds and posing for photos with costumed characters. Why?”
“Too bad,” I said. “Because first we’re going to Grand Central, then to Times Square, then Penn Station.” Basically, the three most crowded, touristy places in New York.
Elliot’s face told me he thought this was the worst plan in the history of plans, but he managed to compose himself after a few seconds. “Sounds great!” he lied.
I wrapped my arms around his middle and squeezed. “Lunch is on me,” I said. “And dinner.”
Elliot squeezed me back. “Dinner is on you for the rest of the year,” he corrected me.
It was worth it to have him by my side.