After what feels like forever, LaRue returns with the news that she reached Charles and he’d authorized her to give me the key.
“There’s a letter, too, but he says he wants to be with you for that. He’ll meet with you Monday morning and go over all the details then. Can you be here at ten a.m.?”
“Okay.” I get to my feet and take the manila envelope she offers with a ring of keys jingling inside. Outside, I hear sirens coming closer and closer and the bleating of horns, the squealing of brakes. Hot, spoiled city noises.
I wish I were back at home, floating in my sister’s pool, listening to the hum of lawn mowers.
TWENTY-ONE
MARNIE
“This is it,” says the cab driver who is taking me to Blix’s building. We’ve been in stop-and-go traffic on a huge, busy avenue for quite a while, passing everything from ridiculously pricey boutiques to a giant natural-foods store, little restaurants and cafés with handwritten signs in the windows advertising matcha tea and kale smoothies. But after a while, he turns onto a leafy side street, and scoots over to the curb to let me out. I’m in front of a series of towering brownstones all jammed together and hovering near the street, with wide staircases leading up to the landings.
So this is where Blix lived. I take a deep breath and look down at the address, written on a piece of paper that LaRue Bennett gave me. Blix’s building appears a little worn out, frankly, with rusty-looking wind chimes hanging off the peaked roof over her door and some ragged Tibetan prayer flags clinging to the railing.
Next door, which is closer than you might think, an older woman is sitting on the stoop, drinking a can of Coke and watching me.
“Are you lost?” she calls out to me.
“Not really. I mean, I don’t think so! I think this is the place I’m looking for.”
She stands up. She must be in her sixties or seventies, but she’s wearing yoga pants and a sweatshirt that says FREE TIBET and red tennis shoes, and her gray hair is all nestled in curls around her face like anybody’s sweet old grandmother. “Are you Marnie, by any chance?”
“I am!”
“Oh, for goodness sakes. Marnie MacGraw! I’ve been expecting you. I’m Lola! Lola Dunleavy!” She comes sprinting down the cement steps and over to me and holds out her arms to hug me.
“Lola. Yes,” I say, dimly remembering Blix talking about her friend who lived next door.
“You are exactly who I pictured!” she says. Her eyes, in their nest of lines, are shiny. She grasps my hand and looks as if she might burst into tears. “You’re probably tired and just off the plane, so I should stop talking to you and let you get inside, but oh, honey! It was so sad, her passing, I still can’t get over it. Although I have to say she did it her own way. If you’ve got to pass, and evidently it was time, nobody does it with more flair than Blix Holliday.” She pauses for a moment and closes her eyes briefly and then lowers her voice, leans in. “So do you know everything that’s going on? I mean, did you get the lay of the land?” When she says lay of the land, her eyebrows go up into a little peak.
“I think so. I mean, I got the keys.” I drag my eyes away from her and reach inside my coat pocket.
“From the attorney’s office? Oh, good. I mean, I would have given them to you myself, but I guess we’re doing things all official now. Although”—she glances up toward the house, gestures at it like it might be overhearing us—“I don’t really know what exactly is going on. I mean, at the moment.”
“No,” I agree. No one seems to.
“So maybe I should leave you alone, and you can go in and figure things out? Or do you want company?”
“Well. I guess I’ll . . . just unlock the door . . . maybe . . . and go in?”
“Okay!” she says brightly. “And then, if you need anything later—well, you can always call me. I might be able to cast a little light if . . .”
“Sure.”
She follows me up the steps.
“Blix never did like to use the newer lock,” she says. “She didn’t like locks at all, actually. I was always coming over and finding the place wide open. One time the UPS guy came by—I think it was UPS—and he opened the door and called out her name, and she sings out, ‘It’s okay! Come in! I’m in the bathtub!’ That was our Blix.”
The door does not open when I turn the key. I look through the ring of keys I have, and start trying different ones. Some don’t go in at all, others go in but stay stuck in place. There’s a noise from inside, footsteps walking toward the door.
“Oh dear,” says Lola in a low voice. “So he is here. Now we’ve probably disturbed him.”
“Him?”
“You don’t know, do you?” She leans closer to me and cups her hand. “Noah is here.”
“Noah?”
Just then the door flies open, and damned if Noah isn’t standing right in front of me, looking from me to Lola with shock on his face, although it would be hard to guess who’s more shocked, me or him. I feel my knees wobbling just the slightest bit.
“Marnie? What the hell are you doing here, girl?” He’s smiling, his eyes crinkled up into little slits.
I cannot seem to find words, so I simply stare at him like he’s a mirage. He’s wearing jeans and a black sweatshirt and holding a bottle of beer and a guitar, of course.
This is going to ruin everything, everything. All of my recovery, all of it.
“I could ask you the same thing,” I manage to say. “What are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be in Africa?”
Just then Lola, who turns out not to be the bravest human on the planet, touches my arm and says softly that she might have something boiling over on the stove and she’ll be available later, in case I need her. I hear her saying, “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear” as she heads to her own house.
And then I look back at Noah, who is smiling at me like the proverbial cat who is about to swallow the canary.
“It’s so good to see you!” he says. “I’m afraid, though, that if you’ve come to see my Aunt Blix, you’re too late. But maybe you know that already.”
“I do,” I say softly, putting down my suitcase. “I was so sorry to hear.”
He is rambling on and on. Blah blah blah. He wants to know why I’m there and not in Burlingame, and I tell him that I’ve actually been living back in Jacksonville for a while now. (Which he could have known if he’d so much as even looked at my Facebook feed. I mean, who doesn’t do that with an ex? I would know everything about him if he ever bothered to post anything. The last time he posted it was to say that the African sun is hot. And that was right after he left.)
So he goes on and on, and I’m frankly having an out-of-body experience. How is it that just the day before, I was safe and in love and getting engaged again, and now I am standing on some steps in Brooklyn, looking into the face of Noah? Noah, whom I now realize I have missed—and still miss—with a desperation beyond all reason. Which is a horrifying thing to realize.
Meanwhile, he’s kept talking and now, from the way he’s staring at me, it’s apparent that he’s asked me a question that he’s waiting for the answer to. I review the last few seconds of the tape in my head and realize he wants to know why I am living in Jacksonville.
“Complicated reasons involving certain financial obligations of an overpriced apartment, I believe,” I say.
“But you had three months! I paid my portion of the rent for three months.”
“Yes, but as you may be aware, those months ran out.” I am smiling.
“Yes, and then you were supposed to find a roommate.”
“Well, I didn’t. Do you really want to stand here in the doorway and discuss the problematic roommate situation in Northern California, or may I come in?”
“Of course, of course!” he says, stepping aside and flattening himself against the wall so I can get past him. When I brush against him, several of my more alert cells notice that he’s something we all once liked. They have conveniently and traitorously forgotten that we are not Team Noah anymore. We are Team Jeremy.