Till there was no time left at all.
On their very last day at 354 W. 73rd Street, two burly men took four hours to load the couches and the chairs, the beds and frames, the dressers and end tables, the shelves and the filing cabinets from the two Biedermann apartments, all in a hot, rainy mist that made it hard to see. And then the apartments were completely empty except for a few boxes they would have to cram in the van. The Biedermanns ate a dinner of calzones while sitting on the floor. Nine didn’t know where to sit, what to do with herself. Where was her coffee table? Where was her sock collection? She ran from room to room, chirping in confusion. Theo didn’t blame her. Without their books and shelves and tables and photographs, the walls looked dingy and bare; this could be any apartment anywhere. Not theirs, not anyone’s. Anonymous as a skeleton.
Mr. Biedermann said, “We’ll load up the rest of the boxes and then . . .” He trailed off, took another bite of calzone, chewed. “A home isn’t a place, you know. It’s not an apartment or a building. It’s not the stuff you have. Home is with your family. We’re going to be fine, even if it doesn’t feel that way right now.”
A million questions flooded Tess’s mind. Fine? FINE? What about school? What about the wandering elevator? What about Jaime? What about his grandmother and Mr. Perlmutter and the Morans and the Hornshaws and the Adeyemis and the Schwartzes? What about New York City, the city of the Morningstarrs?
More than that, what about fairness? What about justice? What about right and wrong? What about Grandpa?
What about us?
When Tess leashed Nine, Nine lunged for the door as if she couldn’t wait to get out of a place that was no longer theirs. The whole family got on the elevator, pressed the down button. It took them on a tour of the building, the doors opening on each floor, though they had only pressed the one button. In the lobby, they saw the Ms. Gomezes, the Hornshaws, the Adeyemis, the Yangs, and the Morans—some resigned, some fierce and determined, some blinking back tears. They saw Mr. Perlmutter, small and hunched in a wheelchair, a sweater around his shoulders, being pushed by a tired-looking man in his own worn cardigan. “Some of us have nowhere else to go,” Mr. Perlmutter had said.
So where was Mr. Perlmutter going to go?
“Well,” said Mr. Biedermann. “This is it.” He patted the cameo walls. “Good-bye, 354 W. 73rd. We’ll miss you.”
Mrs. Biedermann didn’t pat the tiles. Tess didn’t either, and didn’t, wouldn’t, say good-bye. To come this close and fail filled her with such a deep despair she could barely pick up her feet, as if gravity had suddenly become ten times more powerful. She and Theo trailed behind their parents, the luggage cart they were pushing as heavy as a city. They nearly ran over Cricket, who yelled, “Watch it! You almost ran over me!”
“Sorry, Cricket,” Tess said. “We didn’t see you behind the boxes.”
“Nobody sees me anymore,” said Cricket. And she shouldn’t have been hard to miss because of the Miss Marvel nightgown, the striped tights, and the clogs.
“I thought you were going incognito?” Tess said.
“Incognito is boring. Even Karl thinks so.” Cricket poked at the raccoon in the basket of her tricycle. The raccoon was wearing swim trunks and eating from a bag of Cheez Doodles. “I’m not incognito anymore, but everyone is too busy to notice. I told Dad that his face was as red as a riding hood this morning and he didn’t even tell me to bridle my honesty.” Cricket seemed genuinely disappointed by this turn of events. She played with the heart charm on her necklace, left, right, left and right.
A heart with an arrow thrust through it, the fletching just like the cuts of a key.
Ava Oneal’s words echoed in Tess’s head. I’m going home to find my heart. I hope you find yours.
“Cricket,” said Tess carefully, casually, “where did you get that necklace?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Cricket
Cricket gripped her necklace and backed her trike away from the Hairball Twins: beep-beep-beep. She didn’t want anyone looking at her necklace, because it was SINGULAR and it was HERS and also NONE OF ANYONE’S BEESWAX. The building had given her this necklace, and no matter how many times her mother told her that she’d have to learn, Cricket did not enjoy sharing, just like she didn’t enjoy being nice or quiet or any of the things her parents said little girls were supposed to be.
Little girls weren’t supposed to be spies, either.
But that was what she’d been doing for the last few weeks, spying on Mr. Stoop and Mr. Pinscher. It wasn’t difficult. They weren’t even trying to hide. People who thought they were the boss of everything never tried to hide what they were doing. They were too proud of themselves. (Obviously, Mr. Stoop and Mr. Pinscher didn’t have moms who told them not to be too proud of themselves, because people who were too proud of themselves ended up with no one to play with at recess. Mr. Stoop and Mr. Pinscher only had each other to play with, and Cricket assumed neither of them much liked the arrangement because who’d want to play with either of them? Yuck.) Anyway, Mr. Stoop and Mr. Pinscher thought they owned the place, so they took pieces of it whenever they wanted to, no matter who was watching. And Cricket was always watching. She watched them chisel tiles from the floors and the walls, remove light fixtures from the ceilings, pull doorknobs from the closets and storerooms, cut solar glass from one of the hallway windowpanes, carry off the wooden desk that had sat in the lobby for a million, jillion years. She followed them down to the basement and took notes as they picked through the residents’ belongings as if those belongings belonged to them, watched as they poked around the giant row of Lion batteries in the basement. (To Cricket’s irritation, the massive Lion batteries that kept the building powered were not shaped like lions as much as giant pain capsules with feet.) And she watched them as they returned to the dumbwaiter again and again, trying to pry it open, trying to get it to work. But they were too dumb to work the dumbwaiter. So dumb they didn’t know how dumb they were. The dumbest of dumb babies.
“Our shadow has returned, Mr. Pinscher,” said Mr. Stoop, just a couple of weeks before, when they were once again attempting to drill out the lock on the dumbwaiter.
“Uh-huh,” said Mr. Pinscher.
“And she has brought her little pet with her.”
“And her little notebook.”
“Should we be worried, Mr. Pinscher?”
Mr. Pinscher made a rude noise.
“What do you think, little girl?” said Mr. Stoop, stooping low to look Cricket in the eye, talking to her as if she were just another dumb baby. “Do you think we should worry about you?”
“Nope,” said Cricket, who was nobody’s dumb baby. “I’m just playing a little game.”
“What kind of game?”
“A game of pretend,” Cricket said.