When No One Is Watching(60)

She’s walking slowly, hesitantly, and I can see the surprise in her face when she makes out it’s me.

Surprise, but not disappointment.

She opens the door halfway and says, “Hi,” with a voice that sounds like a bruise.

“I just heard what happened,” I say. “To the garden. Are you okay?”

She pushes past me a little to look back and forth down the street, and she’s warm and smells like some kind of vanilla-laced pastry and cigarettes. Sweet and bitter. The scent lingers as she pulls back. “Come in.”

“Huh?”

“Come in,” she says with an edge of annoyance that reassures me.

She closes the door after me and locks both locks, then pads past me and moves through the hallway toward her apartment. I follow, the scent of cigarette smoke growing stronger the closer I get to the door.

When I get inside the apartment, she repeats her closing and locking routine, jerkily tugging at the doorknob afterward as if checking the sturdiness of the locks.

“You’re alone?”

“Yes. Drea isn’t answering my calls. Mr. Perkins isn’t answering either, even though the block party is only a couple days away. Ms. Candace tried to come in, but I—I couldn’t talk to her.” She plods to the kitchen table and picks up the cigarette that sits balanced on the edge of a white ceramic ashtray with Coney Island written in tiny starfish along the side.

Sydney smokes like the femme fatale pacing the hapless detective’s office in a noir film. She stares into the distance with unfocused pain in her eyes, lifting the cigarette to her mouth in a smooth arc and closing her lips around it, something that doesn’t seem practiced or contrived given her current state.

I’m reminded that even though they stink and cause cancer, a cigarette is sexy as hell in the right hands.

“Did you see the garden?” she asks on the exhale, then rolls her bottom lip with her teeth.

“Yeah.”

“How bad is it?”

“It’s bad.” I try to break this as gently as I can while not giving her even a smidgen of hope. “They ripped up all the plots and piled up all the wood and other stuff. The garden is gone.”

She sits down at the kitchen table—more like her legs give out and she slumps into the chair that was already pulled out. Tears well up in her eyes and her hand is shaking when she raises the cigarette this time.

“Sydney?”

She inhales and tears slip over her cheeks, suddenly, as if she’s been just holding them back this whole time. She doesn’t sob or make any sound, just sucks at that cigarette, then reaches for a napkin from the holder in the middle of the table and wipes roughly at her face as she sniffles.

“Fuck, I’m tired.”

“You’ve mentioned that.” I pull out a chair next to her at the table. “Tell me what’s going on, Sydney. Or if you don’t want to, just tell me what you need right now.”

She looks at me, her eyes still glossy and her expression something like stoic.

“Get the scotch out of that cabinet. Top shelf.” She doesn’t say please and I feel like that’s part of what she needs right now, too, so I just stand up and do it. I grab two glasses without her asking, then place them down and pour.

“Why did you really get fired? For real?” Her mouth trembles, but her hand is steady when she raises the cigarette again. “I know you weren’t telling me the whole truth. I’m used to accepting half-truths from men. But right now, with all of this mess going on, I need to know.”

I purse my lips and exhale hard through my nose, take the gulp of booze she didn’t.

Then I tell her the truth.

“They caught me trying to steal,” I say. “Because I got greedy. It wasn’t enough that I’d grifted a position people bust their asses for years to get. It didn’t matter that I was making more semihonest money than anyone in my family had ever made through any means, dishonest or otherwise. Once I had a little, I thought, ‘I can get more. And I’m gonna take it.’ Typical, if I’ve learned anything from you the last few days.”

“Completely typical. Except you were stupid enough to get caught.” She giggles and I wonder if she wasn’t already drinking before I got here.

“So you should know that my name isn’t Theodore, like you told Candace,” I say. “Well, it is. In Russian. Fyodor. Named after my dad, who was tangled up with stuff considerably more dangerous than white-collar crime. I went to live with him after I got into some trouble and had to drop out of high school, lay low. I worked construction with him, but also got tangled up with the stuff he was tangled up with. I guess this thing with Kim was my way of going straight.”

Sydney looks at me with wide eyes, the ash building up on the end of her cigarette. “Mafia?”

“Something like that, but a million times less interesting than the movies. I got out before I moved to New York, so I don’t know, maybe this is where all the cool mafia stuff happens.” People glamorize it, but it’d been just another job with no insurance and a low life expectancy when it came down to it. “Anyway, here I was at this fancy office. And I wasn’t stupid or anything. I fit in fine, and I started small. There was a group in my department who always wanted cocaine. And I told them I could get it for them. I’d take their money, buy a little of the good stuff, a little of the not-so-good stuff, and a little of the probably bad stuff. I made a profit, the cokeheads were just happy to have some coke, and all was well and good.”