The Futures(89)

“Want breakfast?” I said, extending the bag toward him. He raised an eyebrow. “They messed up my order,” I lied. “I asked for sesame but they gave me an everything. So they did it over, but they gave me both.”

“Um. Okay. Thanks,” he said warily, taking the bag.

“You’re welcome,” I said. Then, before I lost my nerve: “Do you need any help?”

He tore off a bite of the bagel. “Help?”

“With whatever you’re working on. It looks like you’re slammed.”

He stared for a beat. “You’re joking, right?”

“Nope. Not joking. I’ve got time to pitch in.”

Then he laughed. “Well, yeah. Duh. They can’t staff you on anything. The investors would freak out.”

My stomach turned at the smell of the warm cream cheese.

“They told us not to talk about any live deals in front of you,” Roger continued. “It’s a liability. You’re going to be gone soon, anyway.”

“A liability?”

Roger’s expression softened. “Look,” he said quietly. “I’m not trying to be a dick. Do you want my advice? Just cash your checks and ride this out. Then you can move on to another firm. Start fresh. Somewhere else, they won’t even care.”

Down the hall, the other employees were arriving for the day. Roger rearranged his face back into its usual smug grin. “Thanks for the bagel, but just get out of here, okay?” he said under his breath. “I shouldn’t be talking to you.”

I went back to McGuigan’s that night, and the next, and the next. I drank Coke, and I watched whatever was on the TV—a Yankees game, Jeopardy!, the local news—killing time, waiting for the bar to quiet down enough for Maria to take a break. She was the only person I had talked to in months. I couldn’t lose her again.

That first night, I told her the whole story: Michael, the bribery, the trip to Las Vegas. The Julia part, too. I figured it was fine. The investigation was nearly finished, and the findings were going to be public soon enough. Maria stared at me, rapt.

“Have you heard from her since you broke up?” she asked at the end.

“Nope.”

“But you haven’t called her, either?”

“There’s nothing to say.” I jabbed at a melting ice cube with my straw. “She checked out a long time ago. I don’t think she was ever going to come back.”

“Why are you still here, then?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why stay? I mean, you must be miserable at Spire, right? And you always said you weren’t that crazy about New York. You could go somewhere totally different. Don’t you want to start over? Leave it all behind?”

But where would I go? How could I explain? I couldn’t leave, because for the first time, New York finally felt like home. Last year the city was a backdrop separate from my life, something I was only borrowing. But the shift had happened not long ago, when I realized that I had changed. That the city had been witness to different versions of myself. It gave me a new claim over this place. I had tried, failed, collapsed, but I was still here. The city was still here. The scale of the place had become newly comforting. It had a way of shrinking my pain to a bearable smallness. It was nothing compared to the towering skyscrapers or the teeming crowds. Any given day, in any given subway car, there were people who were happier than I, people who were sadder than I. People who had erred and people who had forgiven. I was mortal, imperfect, just like everyone else. It was good to be reminded of that.

But that mortality also made me old. I felt like I might vanish in a second. I realized—knowledge that arrived all at once—how much the world would continue to change after I was gone. Someday, people would look back on this era in the same way I had looked back on the settlers of the New World or the cowboys of the West in the slippery pages of my schoolbooks, strangers whose lives were distilled down to a few paragraphs and color illustrations. They would shake their heads, not believing that we could have known so little. It was nearly impossible to imagine the continuity. Then they would turn away from the past and continue their lives in a world transformed by technology or disease or war. By rising oceans or collapsing economies or by something that we—we soon-to-be relics—couldn’t even imagine.

But I wanted to. I wanted to imagine, and then to see. I clung to the time I’d been given. I didn’t want to leave.

On my fourth night in a row at McGuigan’s, Maria said, “I’m off early tonight. You want to get dinner? I can cook.”

A cat was purring atop the refrigerator when she opened the door to her studio apartment, up in the northern reaches of Morningside Heights. “Make yourself at home,” she said, turning on the stove with the click and hiss of gas igniting. She handed me a beer, and I wandered around. I liked her apartment right away. She had houseplants on the windowsill, a rag rug, a desk covered with textbooks and notes from law school, a refrigerator layered with family pictures and yellowed recipes. I stood at the other side of the room and watched Maria at the stove—apron tied around her waist, humming along to the radio—and I remembered the night I came home to Julia cooking in our tiny kitchen. How she had glowed from a happiness that I thought belonged to both of us. That was the worst part: I’d been misreading it all along. It was why I couldn’t bear to think about Julia, not even the good parts, because I couldn’t be sure that there ever were good parts.