Tonight the Streets Are Ours (29 page)

“Can I just ask you one more question?” Arden says.

Bianca waves her hand as if to say
Go for it
.

Arden clears her throat and asks what she’s been wondering about ever since she first read this story, weeks and weeks ago. “Why did you do it? Why did you stay with Leo and see Peter on the side? Why not just break up with Leo? Or just
not
hook up with Peter?”

Bianca looks wrecked. “Knowing what I know now, seeing how it tore their family apart, I wouldn’t do it. Obviously. But at the time … I cared about them both, in very different ways. I’d known Leo for much longer, because we went to school together. We had a lot in common. He was on the football team, and I’m a cheerleader, you know, so we already shared a whole friend group, anyway. And he’s just honestly, truly,
nice
. The sort of guy who will accompany you to the hair salon, wait around for your whole appointment, and then take you home again, or who will make chicken noodle soup when you’re sick and spoon-feed it to you no matter how germy you are. A sweet person, you know what I mean?

“And then I met Peter, and he … he was different. He wasn’t like anyone else I knew. He was sexy, and romantic, and artistic, and I wanted him. And he wanted me, too, which was … very flattering. I didn’t know if I should give up on somebody who I had this strong relationship with for somebody who seemed appealing from a distance. I didn’t know what to choose. So I just
didn’t
choose, which turned out to be the stupidest choice of all.”

Arden has always trusted that Bianca and Peter are soul mates, just the way Peter said. But seeing the way Bianca’s face softens when she talks about Leo, she’s not sure anymore.

The waiter brings the check, and Arden senses that wherever Bianca is going from here, it does not include her. Which is rational, of course. They are not friends. Bianca knows nothing about her. And, as it turns out, she doesn’t know very much about Bianca, either.

Bianca puts some cash on the table and stands up. The conversation is over.

“Thanks for brunch,” Arden says.

“Thanks for listening to me,” says Bianca.

And they go their separate ways.

Going home for the first time

Arden walks slowly down a crowded street, trying to figure out what to do from here. She is surrounded by more people than she’d find at an Allegany High sporting event, yet she is completely, irrevocably alone. Bianca has gone, she doesn’t ever want to see Peter again, her phone is dead, her car is dead, and for all she knows, Lindsey is dead, too. She feels so
lost
.

When Arden was a little girl, her mother instructed her that if they ever got separated—in the supermarket or at a fair—she should tell an official but otherwise just sit there and wait, because her mother would come find her.

Arden doesn’t think that this plan would work now that she’s seventeen and lost in New York City. And anyway, she’s done enough sitting and waiting to last her a lifetime. So she does something that she had vowed never to do. She stops walking, sticks out her arm—just like she saw Peter do at five o’clock this morning—and hails a taxi.

“Where you going?” the driver asks.

“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.”

“So do it,” Arden says. “Come back with me.”

“Sweetheart, it’s not so simple.” Arden’s mother brings over a plate of pancakes, but neither of them takes a bite. She sits on the armchair across from Arden, curling her feet up under her. Arden does not recognize any of the furniture in this apartment—which makes sense, since her mother is just subletting it. Nothing in here is her mother’s style; Arden sees no flowers, no inspirational quotes, no eyelets, no gingham—just a lot of black-and-white photos and boxy furniture. It feels like a stranger lives here, not her mother at all.

“I read your letter,” Arden says.

“Thank you.” Her mother blinks. “I wasn’t sure, since you didn’t say anything … I thought maybe you just threw it away.”

“I did,” Arden says. “But I read it, too.”

“And what did you think?” her mother asks.

“It made me wish you hadn’t felt like you needed to do all that stuff for us. You
didn’t
need to. The night you left—I didn’t need you to make that dress from scratch, Mom. I never asked you to do that. You didn’t need to make Roman some fancy mac and cheese. You know he’d just eat a bowl of cereal and be every bit as happy. I wish you’d done less for us and stuck around. We don’t need you to be a perfect mom sometimes if it means you’re a nonexistent mom the rest of the time. We just need you
there
.”

“I understand that,” her mother says. “I’m trying to figure out how I can learn to be a just-okay mom. I really am.”

“I didn’t get it at first,” Arden says. “Your letter didn’t make any sense, why you’d do all these things for us that we didn’t need, and then complain about having to do so much. But there’s something you said in there, about feeling like if people need you, then that must mean that you really matter. And I guess … that makes sense to me now.”

Arden thinks about Lindsey’s cold words last night, claiming that she didn’t need anything from Arden, not even the Disney vacation. And maybe that’s true. Maybe Lindsey could have gotten through her whole life without Arden ever lifting a finger to help her, without ever even running into Arden that day in the woods when they were little girls. But Arden believes with a deep certainty that it doesn’t matter whether Lindsey ever
needed
her, because having Arden has made Lindsey’s life better. And it works both ways, because having Lindsey has made Arden’s life better, too.

“Here’s what I want to know,” Arden says. “All that stuff you always told me—about how some people are gardeners, and how kindness is my power, and how charity will do more for you than selfishness—was that all wrong?”

“No,” her mother says. “Not wrong. All of that
does
matter. Other people matter hugely. But you have to matter to yourself, too. There has to be a balance. I’m still figuring out that balance, myself. But I know this one thing: sacrificing everything that you care about in order to make another person happy
is not love
. It’s not really that some people are gardeners and some people are flowers, Arden. It’s that we both must be both, each in our own time.”

Arden considers this and at last takes a bite of pancake. It tastes exactly the way it’s supposed to.

“Has moving here helped?” Arden asks after she’s swallowed. “I mean, are you happy now?”

“I think it’s given me some perspective,” her mother replies. “It’s been good for me. But I miss you so much. You know I had never been apart from you for longer than one night since you were born. So being away for months has been … well, it’s been really hard.”

Arden had never measured these things before, but she realizes now that her mother is right—the only times she’d been away from her mom for longer than the length of a school day was when she started having sleepovers at friends’ houses. Roman can’t even claim that: he still refuses to sleep over anywhere. Even more now, Arden sees the similarity to her situation with Lindsey. She
did
need to leave Lindsey. But now she needs to find her again. And hope that they can rebuild from here.

“Are you ever going to come home?” Arden asks her mother.

Her mother takes a deep breath. “Do you want to know honestly?”

“Yes.” After her night with Peter, Arden has decided that she prefers hard truths over pretty lies.

“I don’t know. Your father and I are in communication, as you’re aware. We’re working through things, together and individually. I may come home. We may separate on a more permanent basis. But
if
that happens, we will work out a joint custody agreement that’s as fair as possible to everyone. You and Roman will always be my children and I’ll always be your mother. Like it or not, kid, you’re stuck with me.”

“Joint custody,” Arden repeats. “So would we, like, come to New York every weekend?” She looks around the apartment. “Where would we even sleep? And we should get a say in this. What if we don’t
want
to come to New York that often? Would you move back closer to us?”

“Arden. You’re getting ahead of yourself. Like I said, that might not even happen. What you need to do right now is tell your dad where you are, before he calls the police. Which maybe he already has.”

Arden sighs and goes to get her phone from the charger. On her way across the room, her mother stops her and envelops her in a hug.

“I didn’t know if you would ever be willing to talk to me,” Arden’s mother says quietly. “Thank you for coming here.”

That is not why Arden came to New York, but she doesn’t tell her mother that, because the reason she came here is not relevant anymore.

Arden turns her phone on and it goes crazy registering all the messages and phone calls she’s missed over the past twelve hours. Four texts from Chris asking, with increasing degrees of annoyance, when she is going to be free to hang out. A text from Roman asking if she can pick him up from his hockey game. A text from her father also asking if she can pick up Roman, followed by a text from her father asking her to please call him, followed by a text in all caps saying
WHERE ARE YOU?
, followed by three missed calls and voice mails. Nothing from Lindsey, which could mean she is still mad and waiting for Arden to call her first, or could mean her phone died in the night, or could mean she is unconscious in an alley somewhere.

Arden skips over the texts and just telephones her father. He answers immediately. “Arden! Where have you been? Are you okay?” The panic in his voice is evident, and amazing because it sounds exactly like
he cares
.

Arden can’t help the smile spreading across her face, or the laughter in her voice as she says, “I’m fine, Daddy.”

“Don’t you laugh, young lady. It is not a joking matter for you to run off like this. Where are you? And don’t say you’re at the Matsons’, because I already spoke with them, and I
know
you and Lindsey aren’t there.”

“I’m with Mom,” Arden says. “In New York.”

“You went to
New York
without telling me?” he shouts.

“Please don’t yell at me.”

“I have every right to yell at you, Arden, because you scared the
hell
out of me. What would I do if anything had happened to you? What made you think you could run off to a different
state
without checking with me first? I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately, I really don’t. You used to be a good kid. And now you’re sneaking around, using drugs, going hundreds of miles away and lying about it—I feel like I don’t even know who you are anymore.”