I shuffled around him, only to be stopped by my neighbor from across the hall.
“You have drinking problem?” she said in a thick eastern European accent.
She was barely five feet tall—either forty or seventy, I couldn’t tell—with wispy brown hair and thick, doughlike skin and bright-red lips. “What did you say?”
From a bag by her door, she withdrew two empty wine bottles. “I found these in your trash.”
“You’ve been going through my trash?”
“Not on purpose,” she said, her accent thickening. “I lost a receipt and went to the dumpster to look for it—”
My voice rose a notch. “You went through my trash.”
“If you’re drinking two bottles of wine by yourself, you have problem.”
“I didn’t drink two bottles by—wait. What I do is none of your business.”
“Neighbor upstairs has drinking problem. Years I put up with him being awake at all hours. Banging, stomping all night long. Vomit on the stairs.” She looked away. “I can’t take it.”
“What makes you think the wine bottles are mine?”
“Aren’t they?”
I stifled the urge to shout, even though shouting was what I had been hearing all day. “No. They were open bottles of wine in my friend’s fridge. I dumped them out and tossed the bottles. I can’t believe you went through my trash.”
She turned on her heel. “You’ll get over it,” she said, then disappeared into her apartment.
I sank into the couch and dove into the dumplings. Soggy. Pasty. Bland. Wasn’t New York supposed to be the “greatest food city in America,” and possibly on Earth?
I set down my fork and tried to make sense of the numbness, the sensation of being adrift in a vast and endless ocean that had engulfed me ever since Eric broke up with me. Sometimes I was relieved for him, knowing that he didn’t have to leave the team he captained and the work he loved to be in this hellhole with me. Other times, my thoughts burned with anger. Our love was not enough—I was not enough—for him to choose me.
It wasn’t hard to see my own fault in this. Why had I left behind everything I loved, everything I cared about, for this frustrating job? Why hadn’t I been content to stay where I was, doing what I knew how to do? I couldn’t see that I had gained anything by coming here. Only soul-crushing loss.
A text from Josh, my former cameraman at Channel Eleven in Los Angeles, swooped across my phone.
Hope you are living it up in the great metropolis.
I frowned and then replied, Hardly.
Probably already forgotten us at Channel Eleven . . .
I cracked a smile. I missed covering the news in Los Angeles. Not just because I knew practically every street and neighborhood in the city and was on a first-name basis with hundreds of contacts, from the head of the sanitation department to the chief of police, but also because I understood where I fit in. Here, I felt like I was balancing on a high wire, desperately trying to decode how things worked, knowing that it was a scary, lonely ride down if I fell.
Never. Miss you.
Admit it. You just miss my stash of Snickerdoodles
Upstairs, the neighbors were in the midst of a Sinatra marathon, and the familiar strains of “New York, New York” began to play at unimaginable volume. I set the soggy dumplings aside and gazed out the window and into the apartment window framed by Christmas lights across the street. The blinds were lifted again tonight, and the woman with a cloud of black hair sat at a table illuminated only by a small lamp. Silky red fabric draped around her small frame, her fingers fluttering like moths in the light. It took me a moment to realize what she was doing: sewing.
I watched her for a few minutes, haunted. Her loneliness mirroring my own.
Upstairs, Sinatra crooned about New York, wanting to be a part of it. But as I looked out at the sea of apartments across the way, thinking about how many people were cloistered in them with the rumble and screech of the city as a dizzying backdrop, I wondered why anyone would want to be a part of this.
I was about to close the vinyl shades when a huge boom split the air.
The lights flickered, then blinked off. In the darkness, the air conditioner did a slow groan and stalled.
I glanced out the window to see a pulsing orb of blue in the sky, casting the skyline in an eerie silhouette. Then suddenly the whole eastern side of the sky lit up and changed colors from pink to red, then eerie electric blue.
I heard shouting in the streets. Dogs barking.
My heart pounding, I flung open my apartment door and ran into the hallway, now plunged into darkness.
A bright light swept across my face, blinding me. “Who’s there?” a woman’s raspy voice called out.
“Kate Bradley. 1B.”
The woman lowered her flashlight, but the bright light had left spots in my eyes.
“Your neighbor. Cora,” she said, her voice sounding hollow in the dark. “We met . . . earlier. You think it’s terrorists?”
“Let’s go see what’s going on.”
Her voice shook. “It’s not safe walking around in the dark like this.”
“Let me help you.” I reached for her hand and found it, bony and trembling. As I walked with her to the door, I felt oddly protective of her, when less than an hour earlier I had been angry at her for her nosy assumptions about wine bottles in the trash.
Outside, the aqua glow lingered in the sky, and I smelled electricity in the air. The neighborhood, the entire city—except for the sky—was pitch black and blanketed by a low-frequency hum. A giant plume of smoke filled part of the skyline. Was it over Queens?
People surged into the streets shouting. Panicking. Traffic was snarled, and the din of honking cars only added to the chaos.
“What’s happening?” someone shouted.
“What do you think it is?” Cora whispered.
“Aliens!” a man shouted in the streets. “Call 911!”
At the busy intersection, a couple of drivers tried directing traffic themselves using flashlights but only added to the confusion.
“Cell phones aren’t working!” someone in the apartment across the street yelled.
“It’s terrorists!” a woman screamed as she sprinted down the street, hauling a large duffel bag.
Then, from behind me, I heard Raymond’s familiar voice boom, “It’s like every alien-invasion movie ever.”
I ran back inside, grabbed my phone and my running shoes, and went to work.
CHAPTER FOUR
Kenny Chang owned an electronics store a few blocks away that was looted as the power remained off. “They kicked out the window, then ran out of here with TVs. Computers,” he told me, visibly shaken, as I recorded him on my phone. “They were shouting ‘Christmastime.’ Like it was some kind of game.”
A few doors down from him, a young woman cried as she told me about the robbers who threw a rock through her first-floor apartment window—even though it was fortressed by steel bars—then reached through the bars and stole her son’s laptop from a table by the window. “Makes me lose faith in humanity.”
Just six streets over, a fire raged through the top of a six-story apartment building, sending up billowing black smoke before firefighters could get there, delayed by clogged city intersections and stoplights that weren’t working. “One minute we’re having a party. The next minute . . . this,” a woman named Angie said, her voice choked with tears.