A Lily in the Light(7)
She jogged as fast as she could to all the places Lily liked: the playground, her preschool, the store on the corner that sold Warheads and Swedish Fish in plastic buckets, but the store was closed, the preschool gates shut and locked. Esme crunched through frozen grass to look inside the playground tubes, their colors muted in the glow of the streetlights. The plastic slides and tubes were cold enough to crack under the heat of her hands, but when she looked up the slides and under the rope decks and behind all the hiding places, Lily wasn’t there, not even on the rope net where Lily pretended to be a spider. The swings swung slightly in the October breeze. Esme was alone in the park. In the summer, the playground was full of kids running and screaming through sprinklers, chasing each other in soggy bathing suits, stringy hair clinging to their cheeks and plastic shoes slipping from wet feet as they ran, but now the playground was empty.
Tomorrow, the sidewalks would be packed with trick-or-treaters dangling plastic jack-o’-lanterns over costumed arms. It would be the neighborhood Esme knew again, where parents watched their kids climb stoops and ring bells and everyone knew which kid belonged with who, but tonight, no one was watching. Esme was alone in a way she couldn’t have imagined. She ran back to each place one more time, slowing down to look up dark driveways lined with trash bins and behind parked cars, hoping she’d spot Lily in her red coat and sparkling shoes, but every place was as empty as the playground.
She paused on the corner, not sure where to go next.
A bottle broke in the distance. It echoed between buildings. Every noise was amplified, even the silence of her unusually quiet neighborhood. There were no barking dogs, babies crying, car horns blaring down Queens Boulevard—only the smell of cold air and wood burning in someone’s fireplace. She looked down the row of bars and storefronts. The supermarket had taken its baskets of fruit and vegetables in for the night and locked them behind a gate. The bank and post office were closed and locked. Even Cerise’s church was locked, but the street was alive in a way she hadn’t seen before. Broken glass sparkled in the moonlight. People collected beneath a red-lit bar sign, shivering with cigarettes in hand. The tips glowed in the distance. She’d never been out this late, not without her parents, not without Nick. A car lingered at a stop sign, a thin plume of smoke rising from the idling tailpipe, and Esme was convinced the shadowy outline of the driver was watching her. An acorn fell and grazed Esme’s shoulder. She covered her mouth to stifle a scream and ran, her legs shooting out so forcefully she forgot to breathe until she remembered again, suddenly, and her breath rushed back in short, ragged bursts.
Lily would be home when she got there, nestled in blankets and sipping a thermos of hot milk, and she would feel silly for all the running and fear she’d felt. No way was Lily brave enough to stay out here no matter how mad she was. No way.
But when Esme rounded the corner to her building, her parents were outside, hastily wrapped in their coats and holding their arms across their chests to keep warm under the red-and-blue kaleidoscope of police lights. An officer was taking notes. Cerise was crying. How much time had passed? Esme was sweating and shivering from running in the cold. Her breath burned in her chest, and the ligament in her right knee was throbbing, but Esme froze. She held on to a parking meter, hoping it would calm her nerves like the barre did at the studio, but the chilled metal only made her colder.
Andre noticed her shaking in the streetlight and called her over. She tucked herself under her father’s arm, rocking from one foot to the other to keep warm, wondering how a night that had started like any other, with spaghetti and homework and arguing like they always did, could end with swirling lights sweeping over buildings, parked cars, her neighbors’ faces. Calling the police was something people did when they couldn’t do anything themselves. The sour taste crept back into her mouth.
We wouldn’t have had to call them, Esme thought, staring at a sliver of moon through the buildings with a bright star next to it, if I’d just told her about the orange thing. Yes, she now wished she’d said, it is a fish named Marley, and he can swim away and come back whenever he wants to, but only when the moon is full. If it isn’t, he has to wait and eat marsh grass and horseshoe crabs even with those crunchy shells and pointy tails until he can swim again. That’s what she’d tell Lily when she came back, what she should have told her already. That was the next part of the story.
“What was she wearing?” the officer asked. Cerise described Lily’s striped skirt, the pink sequined shoes, and corduroy coat until Lily sounded like a doll in a Mattel box and not a person.
Andre pulled her closer. The pressure broke through Esme’s thoughts, as swirling and jumbled as the red-and-blue lights, until all she could do was cry in the streetlight.
Chapter Two
The police started on the roof and spiraled down to the basement. They knocked on every door. They called the super and made him come all the way from Eighty-Third Street with keys because they wanted access to locked closets, the boiler room, and the maintenance office. Lights snapped on and off in the windows above. Heavy boots filed through the front door with German shepherds on leashes. Voices melted together into white noise so loud it felt like she’d been on a Tilt-A-Whirl, spinning and spinning as more cars pulled up with flashing lights. Officers blurred into outlines of noses and chins, nodding heads, moving legs. Esme felt like she was looking from her side of the stage to the other, lights blinding everything into shadowy shapes.