Chapter 28

After a sleepless night, I escape to the city that never sleeps. Vince accused me of running away, but he’s only half right. I’m running away from him, from my family, but toward my old life. It may not have been perfect, but it wasn’t shrouded in pain, and that’s all I want. A moment, a place, that’s mine.

The brakes of the train hiss, and I follow the morning New Jersey Transit crowd out the doors to the platform in Penn Station. I fire off a few I’m in town, what are you up to? texts to some of my old friends. No one but Alma responds, my roommate from Columbia. I’m working late tonight.

Call out, I message back, to which she replies with the side-eye emoji.

Come on, I could always count on you for day drinking, I text before purchasing a new Metro card since I lost mine ages ago. While I wait for the downtown line, I use social media to check in on people I used to hang out with. Unfortunately, unlike the gross, humid underground air, a lot has changed. Geoff moved to Los Angeles to work for Jay-Z’s music service. He even got to meet Beyoncé. Tasha married her boyfriend, got pregnant, and is living in Syracuse. And Alma, the ultimate commitment-phobe, apparently has a live-in girlfriend.

Sorry, Alma finally texts back. A sweating face and champagne bottle follow. Maybe we can catch up another day! Have fun!

I’d been hoping I’d be able to rediscover my old life, footloose and fancy free, broke and bone-weary. Even though it wasn’t much different from my current life, at least I was living in the greatest city in the world.

I could try again, move back here. I have a little bit of money saved. I could find a job, hopefully not in the service industry. I could…

I sigh. The thought of getting my life together is daunting. Months ago, I thought I had a chance. I had a plan, sort of, but that burned up with the embers of my family.

So, with nothing to lose now, I open my phone, finally reading the message from Professor Row.

Cassandra,

I’m happy to hear from you but so sorry you’re going through such a difficult time. I find that when the world seems to be out of control, I focus on my work. It rights me, gives me a purpose, a sense of self. It sounds the same for you as well.

Regarding your idea for a manuscript, it is intriguing. I’d love to hear more about it. I have always adored your voice, and it would be my pleasure to read more of it.

As you know, job openings in journalism are few and far between, and I don’t know of any internships right now. Of course, I will keep my ears open for anything. In the meantime, work on your book. It seems to me that is what is in your heart.

Please keep me updated on it!

The tiny bit of hope I held is extinguished, and I breathe out a curse, deleting the email thread. I can’t think about the book right now or how my one talent is almost impossible to make any money from.

So much for moving to New York.

I need a new place, a cheap place like Nebraska or a tiny boat on the ocean. But more immediately, I need to drown my sorrows at my favorite bar.

After hopping onto the train car, I catch some guy staring at me and scowl at him before moving closer to the door, but it’s a long ride to Brooklyn, and I eventually bite the bullet, taking a seat opposite him. He continues to leer at me. How easily I forgot about the subway creeps when I didn’t have to deal with them every day.

When the train stops at Grand Avenue, I hop off, almost smiling to myself at the familiarity of it. The smell—that weird smell you can only find in the city, as if the concrete is sweating. The whir of bicyclists as they pass, the voices of people all around, the honks and beeps of cars, it’s all the same. But Bushwick looks quite a bit different. It’s gentrified, more than when I left. I pass my old apartment building, which is cleaned up, new windows, a tiny garden where the patch of dirt used to be, and no Dominican flag hanging out of the third-floor window.

I hum disappointedly to myself as I resume the walk to my old haunt, a dive bar where Marissa and I always hung out. Marissa’s brother owned the bar where you could order a shot of cheap tequila and a beer for five bucks and the jukebox in the corner only played Gloria Estefan. Marissa was an artist, made a small living from selling abstract art to rich, hip couples in Tribeca, but she also dealt on the side, and if there was ever a time I needed a smoke, it is now. I turn the corner off Knickerbocker to where Mis Tíos used to be.

My mouth gapes open at the storefront in its place. The sign reads Branch in big wooden letters above a smaller plank that declares it’s an olive oil and vinegar shop. I reach for the long bronze handle and open the thick glass doors. The scents of fresh bread and herbs waft over me.

A petite blonde with pale skin smiles at me from behind the counter. “Hi, how can I help you?”

“How long has this place been open?” I ask, pointing to the floor.

She squints in thought. “Um, a little over a year. This your first time here? Can I interest you in a sample of anything?”

“No,” I say as she hurries around the counter with her arm out as if to escort me over to the large glass apothecary jars of dark vinegar. My tone stops her. “Do you know what happened to Felix? The guy who used to own the bar here?”

“Sorry, no.” She sweeps her hand over to a bottle of olive oil. “But we have a new blood-orange-infused oil, if you’re interested.”

I roll my eyes. “I don’t want any fucking artisanal olive oil.”

I pivot around and head back out the door to the girl wishing me a nice day. I don’t even have Marissa’s number to text her. We always connected in person, and for the first time since I moved away, I understand acutely how alone I am.

When I lived here, I had social media, but I also had friends who I didn’t need to meet through a screen. I had honest-to-goodness relationships. When I moved home, I shut down, shut off.

My brother was right.

I didn’t even try.

I was disillusioned and gave up. It was easier that way, to live behind a screen and avoid sharing my failure every time I had to explain my situation to someone new.

After not sleeping last night, I’m completely strung out, and it suddenly hits me. I need to sit down. There’s a place called VINO around the corner, and I take a seat at the bar, ordering a glass of red wine. The bartender talks to me about the vineyard it’s from in California, but I don’t really listen. I can only repeat “uh-huh” over and over as I contemplate the disaster that is my life.

“Are you okay?” he asks mid-Cabernet ramble. “You look…” He frowns, shaking his head like a bobblehead. “Knackered.”

He’s not far off. “I am most certainly not okay.”

“You need a chat?”

I eye him. “Don’t you have other customers to wait on?”

He laughs. I like the way his dark brown skin crinkles in the corners of his eyes. And I really like his English accent. “We just opened, it’s barely noon. The only other people here are the yoga birds in the corner.”

I turn to follow where he gestures. There’s a trio of women, all in overly expensive athleisure wear.

“So,” he says when I face him again. “Let’s have a chat.”

I down the rest of my wine in a few unladylike gulps and begin to describe the whole sad, sordid tale. I tell him how I used to live here, a few blocks away, and that I couldn’t find a job, so I became the NDA’s assistant. I explain how I eventually ran out of money and moved home to my parents’ basement and took a crappy job. I unleash everything about my brother and how my parents are divorcing, and how I hurt the one guy I actually loved.

And I drink three more glasses of wine.

He hands me tissue after tissue.

I’ve eaten almost every appetizer on the food menu and run up quite a tab by the time Cole, handsome English bartender guy, hands me a glass of water and tells me I should sober up and head home.

“I can’t go home,” I say.

“You can always go home.”

Like it’s so easy. He points to the water, and I down it, only to ask, “Can I try a glass of the 2006 Merlot?”

“Absolutely not,” he says sternly but then laughs in spite of himself. I really like his laugh and wonder if he’ll let me stay with him. I open my mouth to ask, but he shakes his head. “I’m cutting you off.”

“Hey.” I sway in my seat. “I thought we had a good thing going here.”

He holds on to my hand. “We do, love, which is why I need to tell you, you’re pissed, go home.”

“Pissed,” I repeat in an English accent, giggling.

I pucker my lips, trying to look cute, but he rejects me with a stiff, “No,” then hands me the receipt to sign. My signature is chicken scratch. Cole takes the thin paper back, watching me as I cross the strap of my purse over my body. “You don’t want to move away from home. That’s why you’re so upset, because you think you have to now. But nobody’s got a perfect life. Go home and get sorted. You’ll be good.”

His advice floats through my brain like a feather and lands somewhere in the back, right at the top of my spine. Where Vince often held me.

I aim two finger guns at him. “It’s been real, mate.”

He nods at me. “Take care.”

I plan on following his instructions and going home, but I make a quick pit stop at a liquor store and buy a small bottle of wine by the checkout. They stick it in a paper bag, and I drink out of it, like a true city caricature.

I slouch into a seat in the last subway car, raising the bottle above me as a woman sings a Whitney Houston song in the corner, hitting all the high notes. I flip the light on my cell phone and hold it in the air. It’s like our own personal subway concert, and I don’t know why no one else is enjoying it. She finishes, and I applaud her. The woman cuts me a nasty look. I smile at her. She rolls her eyes.

At Penn Station, I traipse off the platform, my legs like rubber. I stop for a slice of pizza and a can of beer. Drinking wine makes me thirsty.

Once I finish everything, I go to the bathroom, pinballing off the wall on my way. I laugh when I knock my head on the sink as I try to pull my pants up, but I stop when I notice the red mark on my forehead.

“What are you? Drunk or something?” I ask my reflection in the mirror, but there are marbles in my mouth. I don’t bother drying my hands and wipe the water off on my jeans. Out in the corridor, my vision blurs as I study the digital board for my track number. Someone in a rush bumps into me and says, “Watch it.”

I stumble, throwing them the finger.

The walk takes forever, and I slump against the wall to take a few breaks before I get to where I’m going. I move to the end of the platform as the train pulls up, and I bend sideways to a short woman in a pantsuit. “This is going to Middletown, right?”

She rears back and cringes at me. “Uh…yeah.”

I follow her to board the train and collapse into the first open seat I can find. I bumble around for my phone and blink at the time. It’s blurry. I get up to ask the person behind me for the time.

“Quarter to six,” the man answers, his head down over a book, his sandy hair artfully ruffled in waves. I tilt my own head, something familiar about him.

“Excuse me,” an older woman says to my left. She wants to sit in the seat next to me, so I spin around to make room for her. She scoots in and places shopping bags at her feet. I can’t help but sit up tall, craning my neck back to study the man behind me, but the train wrenches forward, and I rock in my seat.

“Sorry,” I apologize to the woman when I accidentally knock into her shoulder. She doesn’t respond, and I twist fully around. The man has on reading glasses like the ones my brother used to wear. He’s got on a big, clunky watch, his suit jacket in his lap and his sleeves rolled up enough to display muscular forearms. Everything about him is so familiar.

I shake my head to clear my eyes but it throws my body off-balance, and I bump into the older woman next to me again. “I’m sorry.”

“Be careful,” she snips.

I’m surrounded by mud, my limbs can’t trudge through it, my mind slogs along in it, my words and breath slowed down by it. “Ray?”

He doesn’t look up.

I lean over the back of the seat and touch his shoulder. “Raymond.”

The man looks up, his thin eyebrows angled down. His light-colored eyes obviously annoyed. “What?”

“You’re…” I immediately start to cry. I can’t help it.

I knew it wasn’t him. I knew it.

But I hoped.

“You’re not…” I choke, and the woman next to me says something I don’t understand. Tears stream down my face, and I can’t breathe. I need help, but I can’t force the words out to ask for it. I reach for the man.

I need help.

I can’t breathe.

I’m going to be sick.

He’s talking, I can see his mouth moving, but my ears are filled with a buzzing sound. I gag, my throat constricting again and again until I throw up.