When You Reach Me (5 page)

Our apartment door was unlocked when I got home from school that Friday, which was strange. More than strange, actually—it had never happened before. But I figured Mom had probably just forgotten to lock it when she left for work that morning. It sounds stupid now that I say it, but that’s what I thought.

Once I was inside, though, I had this sudden fear that I wasn’t alone in the apartment. I dropped my knapsack in the hall and ran down to Sal’s. He came to the door but opened it just enough to squeeze his body into the crack.

“My door was unlocked,” I said. “Doesn’t that seem weird?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe you forgot to lock it?” He stayed there wedged into the doorway. Definitely not inviting me in.

“Yeah, probably.” I could hear the television behind him, blaring a commercial.

“Okay.” He looked up at the ceiling behind me.

I felt like an idiot. “Okay. See you later.”

I went back upstairs, made myself a bowl of Cheerios with an inch of sugar on top, and turned on the television. Mom walked in around six.

“You forgot to lock the door this morning,” I said.

“What? No, I didn’t.”

“Well, it wasn’t locked when I got home today.”

“It wasn’t?” She started walking from room to room, opening drawers and closet doors, and I followed her.

“It can’t be,” she said. “I would never forget to lock the door.”

Nothing seemed out of place. She got to the kitchen and stopped. “I guess I don’t specifically
remember
locking it, but I know I would never
not
lock it….”

She filled the spaghetti pot with water, and we talked about other stuff while she set the table and I peeled some carrots, but every once in a while she would interrupt herself to say, “How could I have forgotten to lock the door?”

We were halfway through dinner when she suddenly stood up and walked out of the apartment.

“Mom?”

I found her standing in the stairwell, peering into the nozzle of the fire hose. “I knew it,” she said. “I would never forget to lock the door. Never.”

The key was gone. We searched every room all over again but couldn’t find a single thing missing.

“It makes no sense,” Mom said, standing over her jewelry box and staring down at the gold bracelets that had belonged to her mother. “Why steal the key, unlock the door, and not take anything?”

That was Friday afternoon. I found your first note Monday morning.

Your first note was written in tiny words on a little square of stiff paper that felt like it had once gotten wet. I was packing my knapsack for school when I noticed it sticking out of my library book—which was about a village of squirrels, or maybe it was mice. I had not bothered to read it.

M,

This is hard. Harder than I expected, even with your help. But I have been practicing, and my preparations go well. I am coming to save your friend’s life, and my own.

I ask two favors.

First, you must write me a letter.

Second, please remember to mention the location of your house key.

The trip is a difficult one. I will not be myself when I reach you.

I was freaked. Mom was freaked. She took the morning off and had the locks changed, even though she said that “M” could be anyone, that this had nothing to do with our missing key, and that the note could have been stuck in that book by anyone, years ago probably, and we’d never know why.

“Isn’t it weird, though?” I said. “Our key was just stolen on Friday, and now on Monday we find a note asking where our key is?”

“It
is
weird,” Mom said. She put her hands on her hips. “But if you think about it, one thing really can’t have anything to do with the other. Someone
with
the key wouldn’t have to
ask
where the key is. It makes no sense.”

She was right, of course. It was backward. But somewhere in my head a tiny bell started ringing. I didn’t even notice it at first.

Our second week, Jimmy said we could start serving customers.

“But first you have to learn the V-cut,” he told us. “Very important.” Except he said “Velly important,” stretched his eyelids back with two fingers, and bowed down low—it was the classic fake-Chinese act. I had never seen a grown-up do it before. If Mom had been there, she would have whacked him on the head with a plastic tray.

“The V-what?” Colin said.

The V-cut was Jimmy’s special way of cutting the sandwich rolls. “Always a forty-five-degree angle,” he said. He was very serious about it, sawing down one side of the roll and then carefully sliding the knife out and inserting it in the other side.

The top of the bread was supposed to lift off in a perfect “V,” which was why Jimmy called it a V-cut. He gave us each a roll and watched while we tried it. Annemarie’s was perfect. Colin’s was passable. Mine was a disaster. When I lifted the top off, flaps of bread guts were hanging down, and Jimmy said it looked “unappealing.”

“You can use that for your own sandwich,” he said, making a face at my shredded roll. “Try again tomorrow.”

So Annemarie and Colin got to put on aprons, stand behind the counter, and help customers while I counted the bread order in the back and went to the A&P for napkins. Annemarie said later that Jimmy should talk, that
he
looked “unappealing” in his stretched-out white T-shirt with yellow underarm stains. That made me feel a little better, but not much.

As soon as Colin got his apron on, Jimmy started calling him “lady”—“Hey, lady, get some more mayo on there.” “Hey, lady, pass me those trays.” Colin just laughed, which is how Colin is.

Every day that week, I cut my roll as soon as I got to the store, and every day Jimmy shook his head no. Colin and Annemarie worked together behind the counter—Jimmy had started calling them the counter couple and making disgusting kissing noises at them when he walked by, which made Annemarie turn red, while Colin just smiled like a goofball.

Jimmy said that while I practiced my V-cut I could be in charge of hot chocolate. He used those Swiss Miss instant hot chocolate packets where you just add water. But no one ever ordered it. And I don’t think he really even looked at my rolls after the first couple of days. Anyway, they were only getting worse.

The first time I brought Annemarie home to our apartment after school, I wished for two things. First, I wished that the boys wouldn’t be in front of the garage. They’d just recently started saying things to me, different things, some of which included the words “sweet” and “baby.” Mom said this happened to girls after a certain age, and that what the boys wanted was a reaction, any kind of reaction.

“Don’t laugh, don’t call them jerks, don’t take off running,” she said. “Do nothing. Act as if they’re invisible.”

My second wish was that the laughing man would be gone, or asleep, or at least distracted by someone or something else when we walked by.

We got to Broadway. “Want to stop for a soda?” I said.

Annemarie shrugged. “No thanks.”

We started toward Amsterdam. I tried to follow Annemarie’s conversation but mostly just squinted to see down the block. By some miracle, the boys weren’t out in front of the garage. I offered up a silent thank you to the universe. And then we started across the street to my corner.

“Angel!” the laughing man called out. He was looking right at Annemarie, and I couldn’t help thinking that, depending on your idea of heaven, Annemarie might appear to be something like an angel. Her coat was pure white and went all the way down to her toes, even though it was only the middle of November and really not all that cold. How her dad kept that coat so clean is still a mystery to me.

“Angel!”

I laughed. I was trying to show Annemarie how absolutely downright
funny
it was to have a weird homeless guy here on my corner. My very own weird homeless guy!

“Ha. ‘Angel,’” I said. “That’s a new one.”

“Angel!” he called out again. And now he was
pointing
at her.

“Is he pointing at me?” Annemarie asked, slowing down.

“No,” I said, steering her as far from the laughing man as I could without pushing her into crosstown traffic.

Upstairs, a weird thing happened. After living there almost every day of my life, I saw our apartment as if it were the first time. I noticed all sorts of things that were usually invisible to me: the stuffing coming out of the sofa in two places, the burns from Mr. Nunzi’s cigarettes, the big flakes of paint hanging off the ceiling, and the black spot next to the radiator where dripping water had stained the wood floor.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

In the bathroom, I stared at the white tile hexagons on the floor and saw nothing but the crud in between them. I hid Moms twenty-year-old jar of Vaseline in the medicine cabinet that’s been painted so many times it won’t close anymore.

“I like your room,” Annemarie called to me when I came out of the bathroom. I turned slowly and looked into my room, wondering what horror I would see in it. But it actually looked okay: no curtains or carpeting, but normal stuff, a normal room with a friend sitting on the bed, which had just one pillow. I stepped in and closed the door behind me.

When Mom got home, we walked Annemarie back to her building. Luckily, the laughing man was under his mailbox by that time. I wanted Mom to be surprised when Annemarie’s doorman called me Miss Miranda, but she just smiled at him.

I could tell that Annemarie’s dad was charmed by Mom—people always like her. He offered us some kind of powdered-sugar dough balls he had in the kitchen, and Mom ate two of them while I said no thank you, that I hadn’t had my dinner yet, which made Mom laugh and cough up powdered sugar, which made Annemarie’s dad laugh. I looked at the sugar on the front of her T-shirt and thought that if she had the slightest idea what she looked like, she wouldn’t be laughing at all.

The sandwich rolls are delivered to Jimmy’s store early in the morning, before he gets there. I still see the tall paper bag leaning against his locked door on my way to school every day I haven’t put one foot inside Jimmy’s place since December, but I look for that bag out of habit, and when I see it, I always think I can smell the bread inside, which I know is just a memory.

Last November, I counted Jimmy’s bread delivery at lunch every day, pulling the rolls out by twos and dropping them into the previous day’s empty bag as I went. I remember finding your second note about halfway down, on a Monday.

Same weird tiny handwriting, same crispy paper. But this one started with my name.

Miranda:

Your letter must tell a story—a true story. You cannot begin now, as most of it has not yet taken place. And even afterward, there is no hurry. But do not wait so long that your memory fades. I require as much detail as you can provide. The trip is a difficult one, and I must ask my favors while my mind is sound.

A postscript: I know you have shared my first note. I ask you not to share the others. Please. I do not ask this for myself.

I read the note over and over. But I have to tell you that I had no idea what any of it meant, until later. And I have to tell you something else, too: I was scared. You scared the hell out of me.

“You counting those rolls or memorizing them?” Jimmy was behind the counter, running a hunk of ham back and forth in the electric slicer really fast, the way he liked to.

I stuffed the note in my pocket and started counting bread again, but I’d lost my place and I had to start all over.

A few minutes later, a delivery truck pulled up in front of the store and Jimmy went out to talk to the driver.

“Hey,” Colin said as soon as the door had closed behind Jimmy, “let’s find out what’s in the Fred Flintstone bank.”

“No way,” Annemarie said. “You’re crazy.”

“You’re the lookout,” I told her, following Colin into the back room. He had the bank in his hands already. He shook it, but it made almost no noise.

“You
guys,”
Annemarie said.
“Don’t.”

“We’re just looking at it!” I called back. “Hurry,” I said to Colin. He was trying to get the rubber stopper out of the bottom of the bank.

“Let me try,” I whispered.

“No,” he said, “I’ve got it.” And the stopper was in his hand.

We bumped foreheads trying to see into the hole at the same time, and then left our heads pressed together, which was something I hadn’t expected to do. I couldn’t quite see Colin’s face from this perspective, but I felt him smile.

“Cool,” he said. “It’s full of two-dollar bills!”

He was right. The bank was practically stuffed with two-dollar bills, folded into little triangle shapes, with the “2’s” showing on the sides.

“You guys, he’s
coming.”
Annemarie sounded panicked. We pulled our heads apart and Colin shoved the rubber stopper back in. I was out front by the time Jimmy held the door open for the delivery guy, who had a stack of sodas loaded onto a hand truck.

“Hey, lady!” Jimmy called. “I need you. This is man’s work.”

“Sorry.” Colin came strolling out of the back in his apron. “Bathroom break.”

Annemarie smiled at me while Colin and Jimmy were busy loading the soda into the big refrigerated case by the door.

“You’re nuts,” she said. “You know that, right?”

I could still feel the spot where Colin’s head had pressed up against mine. “I know. It was kind of stupid.”

We walked back to school with Colin between us. He was zigzagging and bumping his shoulders against ours, saying, “Boing! Five points. Boing! Ten points,” while we both laughed like idiots.