Tonight the Streets Are Ours

“One thirty-three Eldridge Street,” she tells him.

The whole ride there, Arden feels like she’s going to throw up—and not just because of the way the cabbie swerves back and forth across lanes of traffic and whips through yellow lights right when it seems he ought to be slowing down.

The driver drops her off at the address she gave him. It’s a five-story building with a bodega on the first floor, and unlike at Peter’s, there’s no doorman, just eight buzzers. One of them is labeled HUNTLEY, and suddenly this all feels too real.

Arden has never envisioned her mother living anywhere in particular in New York City. When she thought about her mom’s life now—which she tried really, really hard not to do—she pictured it taking place mostly in a vacuum, or maybe in the high-rise hotel where they’d stayed on their Just Like Me Doll trip.

But this is it. This is a plain brick building on a busy street with a fire escape outside the windows and her own last name on the buzzer.

Arden presses the button, and a moment later she hears her mother’s voice through the intercom. “Hello?”

“Mommy?” Arden says, the word coming out squeaky, as though through disuse. “It’s me.”

A long minute passes. Then Arden hears the slap-slap-slap of feet running down stairs, and her mother opens the door. And she looks exactly the same as she did the day she left, with the same pointy nose, hazel eyes, and brown hair as Arden’s own.

“Arden,” she says.

“I’m sorry,” Arden says. “I don’t know what I’m doing here.” And she starts to cry. Her mother holds out her arms, and Arden falls into them. “I don’t even know why I’m crying,” she blubbers into her mother’s shoulder.

Her mother rubs her back and holds her close. “I think we need pancakes,” she says after a while. “Can I make you some pancakes?”

And even though she just ate her weight in eggs and hash browns, Arden nods. “Yes,” she tells her mother. “Pancakes sound perfect.”





Arden finds out what love isn’t

“Did Dad tell you I was missing?” Arden asks once she’s settled on her mother’s couch, sipping a glass of juice, her phone plugged into a charger. She keeps staring at her mother. Three months is a long time.

“No.” Her mother stands at the counter, spooning pancake batter onto a frying pan. Her apartment is small. Much smaller than Peter’s, which had felt almost like a house—albeit a one-story house. It’s not hard for Arden and her mother to carry on a conversation even though one of them is technically in the kitchen and one is technically in the living room. “Are you missing?” her mother asks.

“Well, I haven’t spoken to Dad in more than twenty-four hours, so as far as he’s concerned, yes.”

Her mother checks her phone to make sure, then says, “He didn’t say anything to me.”

There’s a sour taste in Arden’s throat. “I guess he didn’t notice.” What does she have to do to get him to pay attention?

“I’m sure he noticed,” her mother says. She flips a pancake, and the batter sizzles and crackles. “I would guess that he didn’t tell me because he doesn’t want me to know that he lost you. But you need to call him, Arden. He’s got to be worried.”

Arden isn’t sure she believes this. “He’s not very good at taking care of us,” she says.

“He’s learning,” her mother says.

“I don’t want to call Dad,” Arden says. She feels her eyes fill with tears again and all she can manage to say through the tightness of her throat is, “I just want you to come home.”

Her mother looks up from the frying pan, her eyes glistening as well. “Part of me wants that, too.”