My eyes lifted to his, tears brimming at my lashes, threatening to spill. “What about my audition? What did you expect me to do if I got the part? How did you expect me to choose?”
“I love you, Avery. You love me. The phone booth and Christmas and Paris and Charles Dickens—it was all for this moment. The universe conspired to bring us back together and look at where we are. You have to see it?”
I did see it, but now it all looked completely different. What the hell had just happened?
“Look, I’m tired, and confused, and overwhelmed. And the last thing I want to do is hurt you.” I leaned over and kissed him hard. “I do love you, Gabe. This isn’t about that.” I twisted the ring off my finger, closed my fist around it, and handed it back to him. “I’m not saying no. And please believe there is a part of me that is screaming yes at the top of my lungs. But that other part just needs a little more time to think this all through. At least until after the audition’s over.”
He slipped the ring back into the box and snapped the lid shut. Though he was putting on a good show, the hurt reflected in his expression was undeniable and it struck me like a knife under my ribs. “I guess, take whatever time you need. I’ll give you your space. I’m not going anywhere.”
I raised my eyebrows and my lips drew into a line. “But actually, you are.”
“No, I’m asking you to come along with me. Won’t you? Please, Avery?” he pleaded.
Does he even realize what he’s asking?
I grabbed my coat and whispered, “The audition. I should go,” before kissing him once more and walking out of the apartment.
I barely slung the jacket over my shoulders as I pushed open the glass front door of the building into the night air with only one clear destination in mind—the one and only place I knew would have the answers I so desperately needed.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
I raced around the streets of Tribeca, trying to remember where the phone booth had been. I looked up the falafel place in the West Village where Lyla and I had ended up after visiting with Miss Tilly, and started ambling around from there. But the streets looked different basked in the city lights of New York at night, the darkness threading through the alleyways and narrow streets making me disoriented. I searched for anything recognizable, but it all seemed to have shifted once the sun fell behind the skyline.
I retraced my steps and practically spun myself in circles until I was weary, mentally and physically exhausted from the wallop of the past twenty-four hours. I was just about ready to abort the mission and come back the next morning, but I knew I’d never sleep. The phone booth had taken me to the past, pointed me to the present, and now I desperately needed it to tell me what I should do with my future, how to choose between the two things I loved most.
I looked around again, racking my brain for some mental cue or faint memory I could lean on for direction. And all of a sudden, across the block I spotted Benny’s Bagels and Bialys—I remembered the name because I thought to myself how much I loved the alliteration of it. I have to be close now.
I used Benny’s as a compass and turned down one more street, everything growing more and more familiar as I went. Excited at the sense of finally being on the right track, I picked up my pace and made it to the end of the block in record time, and um . . . there . . . was still . . . no phone booth.
I paused, completely mystified, and scanned the vicinity, certain it couldn’t be far, when across the street, I saw it—not the phone booth, but the absence of the phone booth, marked by the sad string of Christmas lights that once adorned its top that now lay in a pile on the sidewalk, a crusty tangle of cords, abandoned on the cracked concrete. I raced over to get a closer look. In the glow of the streetlamp above, a few exposed bolts and thick metal cords glittered next to the colorful plastic bulbs, the only indication that there had ever been a structure there at all.
“No, no, no,” I started to stammer, my mouth clearly understanding more quickly than my brain. The saliva evaporated from my tongue, and I could barely squeak out another utterance of denial.
I turned around, wildly searching for someone, anyone, to ask about the missing phone booth. Seconds later, I spotted an older man in a tweed newsboy cap watering bouquets of fresh flowers outside the bodega on the corner.
“Sir? ’Scuse me, sir?” I frantically waved my hands in his direction.
He set down his watering can and turned to me. “You okay, miss?”
“The phone booth that was here? Right here,” I said, pointing to the large divot in the sidewalk, the still-exposed metal wires looking particularly unsafe. “The one with the sad string of Christmas lights. What happened to it?”
He shook his head as he approached. “The city came and carted that thing away a few days ago. Damn shame too. It was the last phone booth in Manhattan. You know, I’ve owned this bodega since 1972, and I can’t tell you the number of people who came in needing change for that phone and ended up buying a pack of smokes or a candy bar. That phone booth’s brought me a heck of a lot of business over the years.”
“What do you mean they carted it away? Who did?! Where’d it go?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “The worker mentioned something about it going to a museum. Funny to think a phone booth would be considered a significant archaeological relic, but I guess, eventually all technology outlives its usefulness, right?”
“No. Not right. That phone booth was extremely useful. Necessary even,” I said, gesturing my hands in the direction of the empty space where the booth once stood.
“Oh, did you need to make a call?” He reached deep into his pocket. “You can borrow my phone. Here,” he said, offering it to me, until he noticed I had been clutching my own phone tightly in my grip. He eyed me, clearly confused by our entire exchange.
Just as he went to retract his jutted hand, I noticed the faint glimmer of something peeking out from inside his jacket. Was it a silver-bell pin? Was he another ghost or harbinger leading me to my fate? That had to be the explanation I was looking for. I motioned to his lapel. “What’s that?”
He looked down. “What’s what?”
“There, under your coat?”
He pulled his jacket to one side, revealing a shiny badge, the name LOU engraved on the silver plate. “My name tag?” he asked.
“Sorry, I thought it was . . . something else.”
Growing impatient with my short attention span and seemingly disconnected line of questioning, he asked, “Hey, lady, do you need a phone or not?”
Lou had no idea how loaded a question that actually was. “You know, I’m not sure,” I answered.