In Her Skin(29)

I don’t see you Tuesday either. Or Wednesday.

I hear you coming and going, but by the time I run downstairs or into the hall you are behind a closed door, or being driven somewhere. It’s mostly just sleeping Slade and me, and I wonder why Slade never complains about how weird his job is. Then I realize that like me, Slade has no one but the girlfriend I hear him fighting with on his phone and the Lovecrafts. So he wants to serve the Lovecrafts and doesn’t care how strange their ideas are, because they are free with their love when someone fits in with their family.

I even begin to wish that Wolf will come, but of course he does not. I am deeply alone, and it is choking me.

When I finally catch up with you Thursday night, you seem angry. I play last Sunday’s dinner at the restaurant over in my head, but sneaking off and making a fake Tinder call wasn’t my idea, so I can’t figure out what I did wrong. I do know what I can do right, and it will be spectacular.

I wait until Friday night when the Lovecrafts are both out. Slade is already on duty, which I wasn’t counting on. Luckily, he’s absorbed, hunched over sexting his girlfriend at the Lovecrafts’ kitchen counter. I approach your bedroom door and knock twice, softly. You don’t answer, but I know you’re in there, so I press the door open. You lie on your bed, head over the edge of the far end, legs on the wall, hair streaming over the headphones on your ears. I lift one earphone, and you jump.

“Jesus, Vivi!” you sputter, squirming and righting yourself, and you are a pretty spider, scrambling. “What the hell?”

I lay my finger to my lips. My turn. “Shh.”

I toss your coat on the bed, along with a hat because I care.

You smile. No fear. Only interest. “Where are we going?”

“I have something to show you.” I turn my back and check over my shoulder to see if you’re following me to my room, and you are jamming your foot into an old Ugg boot, coat half hanging off. Game for anything. I smile to myself as I lift my window to a gust and climb onto my very handy fire escape. Your weight behind me makes the scaffolding shake, but I’m not scared, and I have yet to see you scared of anything.

On the ground, I face you, your features disappearing in my breath-bloom. “Are you okay with walking? It’s not far.”

“What direction?”

I point up Commonwealth Avenue, where we’ll cut through Newbury to Boylston, and you push past me, and I’m forced to jog to keep ahead of you. As we walk, I try my tricks for not feeling the nighttime cold, from jamming my arms close to my body to pressing my lips together to hitting my feet hard on the ground to get the blood back in. You, on the other hand, walk so loose and easy. Anyone watching could tell who’s the street kid from Florida and who’s the private-school girl from this cold, cold town. It takes us half the time I figured it would to walk to our destination underneath the red, block-letter STEINWAY sign and the musical curlicue S beside it.

“Isn’t it a little late at night to be shopping for pianos?” you yell over the wind.

I grab your wrist and pull you to the door, which is open on Friday nights because of the writers’ group that has classes in the building. We push through and make our way to the elevator. As we walk by the darkened piano showroom on the first floor, you say under your breath, “So we aren’t buying a piano.” The elevator has a metal gate inside that I have to drag hard to shut.

Your hand hovers near the buttons. “Going up?”

“Down,” I say.

You raise your eyebrows and hit the basement button, and the elevator lurches so hard we fall into each other, laughing. After a long time—forty feet underground, but I let you wonder—we hit the basement floor with a bang. I lead the way into the dark, nailed by the ammonia smell of rat droppings, feeling for the lightbulb socket hanging from a cord on the ceiling. I twist the bulb.

“What’s your plan now, mysterious?” you say, smiling as the light reveals the padlocked door in front of us.

I push the wooden crate Wolf and I use to reach the top rail over the door. The key takes a while to find in the dust. When I feel it, I jump down and get busy on the lock, pretending not to notice that you’re nodding, impressed. The key is stiff in the padlock, and I work it hard until it gives a satisfying pop. I ease the door open and flick on the row of light switches, one at a time, slow for effect, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. The lights come up and we are standing in front of a faded mural of ancient Romans or maybe Greeks—I never know—in togas. I take your elbow and turn you around.

“What is this?” you gasp.

“This is Steinert Hall,” I say, twirling around a pillar, white paint flaking under my hand. “It hasn’t been used since 1942.”

Your chin tips up the way mine was at the Pops. “That’s the same year as the Cocoanut Grove fire,” you murmur at the round ceiling.

“What fire?” I say.

“A nightclub fire. It happened that same year across town. People blamed a busboy who threw a match that lit a fake palm tree. It spread to the fabric on the ceiling.” You walk to the center of the hall and shade your eyes, gazing up at the balconies that encircle us. “Showered the people below in sparks. Most died from the fumes, actually. Or they were trampled at the revolving door. Four hundred and ninety-two in all.”

I whistle and it echoes through the space.