Impatience rode on air thick with car fumes. A red-faced man with a thick beard barreled out of an electronics store shouting into his cell phone. Maybe a business deal that had gone sour. A bad breakup. Hard to tell. I stepped out of his way and nearly fell against a bus waiting at the stoplight. It wheezed loudly, spewing warm exhaust in my face.
When I finally reached the apartment, sweaty and tired, I sighed. But not with relief. Instead of taking the corporate suite ANC had offered me, I’d agreed to sublet this apartment for two months as a favor to my best friend from college, Janet, so she could move to Denver with her boyfriend. Our arrangement would save them $3,000 a month in unused rent and give me a chance to figure out where in NYC I wanted to live. Besides, Janet had assured me, it was near an all-night newsstand, a block away from the most heavenly tapas, and down the street from the “best cheese and beer shop in America.”
No good deed goes unpunished.
The 645-square-foot apartment in the heart of Chelsea was newly renovated but hardly deluxe. Perhaps the landlords hoped the floors looked like hardwood, but anyone with eyesight could see they were cheap vinyl. And the cabinets and shelves were made of flimsy pressboard, the kind that should’ve had a two-month expiration date. The apartment’s only redeeming feature was two big windows that let in a lot of natural light, even if the view wasn’t great—a close-up of the apartment building across the street.
Raymond, my friend from the night before, had plopped his hulking frame in the center of the concrete front steps and was wearing an orange T-shirt that read, “Safety First.”
“Tell him to stop leaving the gate open, damn it!” he yelled into his phone.
He nodded at me but didn’t move. “And he better not take the brand-new Black & Deckers off-site either!”
I squeezed past him, then unlocked the building’s front door and was immediately overpowered by a strong odor in the hallway. A rotten-egg stench I recognized as steamed broccoli, but intense, like someone was cooking an entire field of it.
I turned the key in the lock to my apartment, but the wooden door, swollen by the humidity, wouldn’t open. I slammed a shoulder on the door a couple of times until it finally budged. At this rate, by the time I moved out of this apartment in two months, my shoulders would be strong enough to earn me a place on the New York Jets.
I slumped into the couch. Instead of the familiar trio of palm trees that swayed outside my window in LA, my new view consisted of a brown brick apartment building. One particular window—framed in sagging yet colorful Christmas lights, even though it was August—caught my eye. A woman sat by the window, eating noodles in a hazy pool of light from a small lamp. Alone.
My cell chimed. I smiled when I saw Eric’s photo flash up on the screen.
“Hey,” I murmured. “I miss you.”
His voice was warm, thick with emotion. “Me too. It feels like forever since you left. I don’t sleep well without you.”
“Same.” I heard engines idling in the background. Voices shouting. “Where are you?”
“I’m up at the Warner fire.”
“The one near Sacramento?” Anxiety crept into my veins. That massive fire was so destructive it had been all over the national news today.
“Yeah. They called in our search-rescue team yesterday for what we thought would be a couple of days, but this fire is deadly. It’s like a war zone here.”
I padded across the room to turn on the AC unit. It whined, then groaned to life. “ANC reported that the fire has already destroyed three thousand homes. You okay?”
“I’m surviving on beef jerky and one-hour naps.”
“But you’re safe?”
I could feel his smile through the phone. “I’m safe.” His voice cracked. “But it looks like we’re gonna be here awhile. Ten days. Maybe longer.”
I didn’t hide my disappointment. “Ten days. How did your talk with FDNY go yesterday?”
“Not good. The fire chief put in a good word for me high up in the chain of command, but it’s still gonna take years to get trained and certified in search-rescue there. And the work they had hoped to give me training their fire teams in swift-water rescue hasn’t been approved. The chief says it’s stuck in a bunch of red tape and could be a year or more before it gets authorized.”
“A year,” I said softly. “But could you start some kind of work at FDNY before that? Once you get here?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
I heard something steal into his voice. Something I’d been hearing ever since he’d promised to join me in New York: sadness.
“All I’ve ever wanted, everything I dreamed about, only matters if you’re with me,” he had said when I’d told him about the ANC offer. Then, on a starlit night, he agreed to come with me to Manhattan. “This is me starting an adventure. With you.”
But the words we say don’t always mirror what we end up doing. Even if we are certain we mean them. The world shifts in ways we can’t predict. Dreams collide and break us apart.
Love is not always enough.
The impending government shutdown was keeping my dad so busy that all my calls to his cell went to voice mail. Even the call I placed at close to midnight a few nights ago went unanswered until the next morning. Eventually, he responded by texting me that he’d call me later in the day. Then he didn’t.
At least I didn’t have to worry that something had happened to him. I saw his image flash up periodically on the monitors in the ANC newsroom as he issued an occasional sound bite as the Senate majority leader or, earlier in the week, in a meeting with the president.
I didn’t keep tabs on my dad’s whereabouts otherwise, but apparently Stephanie did.
“Looks like you missed the dinner for the British prime minister at the White House last night?” she asked when I arrived at my desk the next morning.
I laughed. “Yep. Instead, I was here in Manhattan, being blasted by a playlist of Dean Martin’s greatest hits from the world’s largest speakers.”
“Loud neighbors, huh?” She turned her laptop around and pointed at the screen. “Is that your sister?”
I didn’t have a sister. And the woman standing next to my father didn’t look anything like me. But she was at least a decade younger than my sixty-two-year-old dad, with breezy golden hair that fell in tousled layers just below her shoulders. “Not sure who she is,” I said flatly, masking my curiosity.
In the decades my father had spent as a US senator from California, I’d never seen him take a date to a formal government event. My mother died nearly twenty-five years ago, and while I knew he had gone out with several women since then, none of them ever had staying power beyond a few dates.
“Rumor is that the defense secretary just resigned,” Mark interrupted, suddenly appearing at my side. “Kate, you got contacts with White House officials who could give us confirmation or detail?”
“I didn’t come here to cover—”
He raised his hands, signaling a time-out. “Anyone you can call?”
I frowned. Mark knew I’d covered breaking news in Los Angeles, which would hardly prepare me to have contacts at the White House. Maybe he thought I’d have them because of my dad’s political position. More likely, he was trying to make me look bad. “Not off the top of my head.”