This was the summer before 9/11. They still let cars on the Staten Island ferry back then. Forty-two at a time. It was my job that summer to count them as they rolled aboard and to help Andy, the deckhand whose breath smelled like the lavender air freshener he sprayed in his mouth after smoking in the bathroom, corral the drivers and their passengers upstairs to the seats to wait the thirty minutes while we crossed the Hudson.
Andy did most of the corralling since he was tall and kind of commanding if you didn’t know about the air freshener thing. Or hadn’t grown up attending his summer BBQs where he and my dad and the other guys from work would drunkenly carry each other on their shoulders in the pool and use pool noodles to joust, jabbing each other’s thick hairy bellies until someone toppled over with a splash that made us kids laugh hysterically and our mothers shout and jeer.
On the ferry though, Andy was all charming grins and polite instructions. “Right this way, ma’am. We saved the best seats for you.” No one listened to me when I tried the same because I was seventeen, Korean, and a girl.
I wasn’t supposed to be here. It was the summer before senior year, and my friends from school had snagged air-conditioned, unpaid internships at companies in the city. They were juggling trays of coffees and stacks of printed reports and sitting in on meetings where they mostly tugged at their collars and drifted into thoughts about their crushes or the looming SAT retakes in the fall. Meanwhile, my mom insisted I find something paying so I could start saving for college, and my dad managed to convince his boss to hire a seventeen-year-old with no experience. The contrast between their summer jobs and mine made me think of all those ties I’d bought my father from the school Christmas fairs growing up before I realized he wore a uniform to work.
“Ellie!” Andy still called me by my kid-name sometimes. I’d been going by Ellen since starting high school, seizing the chance to change my image when I left all my junior high friends behind for the most elite public school in the city, Stuyvesant. Ellen was mature. She was confident. She didn’t wear clothes she sewed herself, or write long anonymous love poems to boys she wasn’t sure she liked but was certain she loved. She studied just enough. She was on the debate and volleyball teams. She certainly didn’t write poetry.
“It’s Ellen,” I said, instantly hating how much like a bratty teenager I sounded.
“Sorry, Miss Ellen, your highness.” He bowed, then grinned, his yellowed teeth just a few shades lighter than the boat. “The boss wants to see you.” I rolled my eyes. “Don’t give him that attitude now. Some of us think it’s cute, but he might not agree.” Andy had been like this lately, borderline flirting, behavior I’d laugh about with my friends and dismiss as creepy, while also secretly relishing being pulled into the adult world by a man who should want better for me.
My father wanted me to meet him in the cockpit, which meant I wasn’t in trouble. He probably just wanted to show me off to the captain.
The first time I went up to the cockpit I was six. My father was a deckhand back then, and I was too young to know the vast rankings between his level and captain. The captain was friendly though, and even let me sit on his lap and steer the boat, his hands on the wheel just below mine. I remember how high above the water I was, how much faster we seemed to be going than it appeared when I stood down below. I remember Manhattan Island straight ahead, the twin towers like dual steel generals, leading the robot invasion.
I was marching up the stairs to the seating area with my head down, lost in my thoughts, when someone called my name.
“Ellen?”
I looked up. Charlie, who I sometimes talked to in 5th period English last year, stood on the other side of the stairs. She wore her signature camo hoodie despite the July temperature along with cargo shorts and dirty white chucks. Still, it took me a moment to register who she was because she’d buzzed off her long black hair.
“Oh hey. Sorry, I didn’t recognize you for a minute.”
She ran a hand over her scalp and shrugged. “Got into a fight with my mom.”
“So she shaved off your hair?” I gaped.
Charlie rolled her eyes. “No, I shaved off my hair. Because I knew it would piss her off. She signed me up for fucking math camp without even asking me. Like I don’t have anything better to do with my summer than spend six hours every day in a freezing classroom with some broke-ass TA who gives us busy work while he works on his dissertation.” She kicked at the railing for emphasis. “What about you? Where you headed?”
I lifted my uniform shirt up by the shoulders. “Can I help you find the restroom, ma’am?”
“No fucking way!” Charlie’s enthusiastic delight took me by surprise. “That’s so cool!”
“Not really,” I mumbled. She probably was imagining me using the radio or charting our course on some big map. “I just help with loading and unloading the cars mostly.”
“Really?” Charlie’s eyes drifted down the stairs, and a look came over her face that let me know the summer was about to become something I couldn’t have expected.
I told her I had to go, and she said she’d see me tomorrow. It was more than a friendly goodbye—it was a promise.
◆
Dad had indeed invited me up to the cockpit to brag about me, and how I was about to graduate from Stuy.
“Her SATs were so good, she doesn’t even need to retake ‘em,” he said to Captain Joel who only seemed to be half-listening as he steered.
“I might retake them,” I said.
“What?” Dad frowned at me. “You said you scored in the 90th percentile.”
“I know but a lot of kids retake it,” I explained. “It looks good on applications to take it twice.”
“She knows how all this stuff works,” Dad said to Captain Joel who nodded solemnly. “I just sign the checks,” he added with a hearty laugh that Captain Joel responded to with a glance and a half-smile. He looked at me.
“You’re not like your old man,” he said. “Or me. Guys like us back in the day, we went into the navy, never thought twice about our education. But you, you’re strategic about your future. That’s good.” He looked back up through the windshield. “That’s very good, Ellie.”
I didn’t bother to correct him on my name because my father was hustling me out of the cockpit to prepare for docking.
“We’ll talk about this SAT retake business with your mother later,” he said as we made our way down the stairs. He was breathing hard by the time we reached the seating area where passengers were gathering their belongings ahead of docking. “Just get downstairs where you’re supposed to be.”
“I’ll pay for it myself if I have to,” I said. “That’s what this job is all about, isn’t it?”
“This job is getting you started saving for college. Whatever college would take those dismal SAT scores that is. I didn’t know I’d raised such a perfectionist.” A flurry of static-y code burst from the radio on his hip, and he hurried off.
As I watched Andy pull open the gate to let the cars begin their parade off the ferry, I wondered what kind of parents didn’t want the absolute best for their kid. What kind would suggest I settle when I could be among the best and brightest.
After the cars had emptied out, I ran upstairs to see if Charlie had stuck around for some reason, maybe decided to ditch math camp to hang out with me. Of course, she hadn’t. I bought a soft pretzel as a consolation prize and ate most of it before the call for the next departure was announced. I tossed the remainder to a pigeon who took too long to pick it up and instantly lost his prize to several other pigeons. He should have known better.
◆
Charlie found me early the next morning and shared a bag of pocachips with me on a bench looking out onto the Brooklyn side of the boat. We were on the Andrew J. Barbari which had enclosed benches running down each side with big picture windows for tourists to snap photos until their cheeks cracked from all the smiling. It was raining so there weren’t as many tourists milling about. The Hudson below us was gray and choppy. I always thought of what this kid Kyle said when we rode the ferry on a third-grade trip to the Natural History Museum. We’d pressed our noses against the windows to peer down into the water, and I’d asked him what kind of fish swam in the river. He replied, “Nothing but diapers and dead bodies down there.” He must have heard that from his parents. I remember wondering why the dead bodies would be wearing diapers.
Charlie and I sprawled out, our feet up on the bench across from us, and Charlie bitched to me about math camp and her mother’s new morning yoga videos. She asked me how much my mom was on my case.
“She had slipped on the ice last winter and hit her head, and now she doesn’t remember stuff too good,” I said. “So she doesn’t even know what day it is half the time, let alone what tests I have coming up.” The short-term memory loss was supposed to be temporary, but I was still watching her wander from room to room in the house, trying to remember why she was there.
“That’s sad,” Charlie said.
I shrugged. “She doesn’t even remember my curfews. It’s working out pretty great for me.”
Charlie stared at me, and I realized the flippant joke hadn’t landed. I changed the subject to how Andy kept lifting his shirt to wipe the sweat from his brow and that his gross happy trail made me gag, even though he did have a faint six-pack too. Charlie laughed and wagged her finger in my face when she told me not to shit where I eat.
“Tall guys don’t always have big dicks,” she added.
“Ew,” I said, kicking her sneaker with my work boot. “He’s like an uncle to me. I don’t want to think about his dick.”
“Yeah, but he wants you to.”
Dad found us a few minutes before docking and instead of barking at me for slacking off, he looked tired and distracted as he introduced himself to Charlie.
“Hey, maybe we can show Charlie the cockpit sometime?” I asked him.
“Not today, okay?” He told Charlie it was nice to meet her and drifted off.
Charlie leveled her eyes with mine after he disappeared through a set of double doors. “Your dad is white. But you’re not hapa. You’re adopted.”
I wished my face wouldn’t heat up so quickly. I hadn’t realized she didn’t know that. “Yeah. So?”
“So nothing. I just didn’t realize.” She stared at me thoughtfully. “I woulda never guessed.”
I felt my face warm further, pleased at the backhanded compliment. “Well, I should get back downstairs. Lord knows Andy can’t count on his own.”
“Can I come with you?” Charlie was already on her feet, her chin on my shoulder, a grin spreading across her face, perhaps the first one I’d seen on her yet.
Charlie shadowed me around the deck and introduced herself to Andy who didn’t hide his delight in the presence of another pretty teenage girl. He showed her around the vehicle bay like he’d built it. She shimmied around cars just behind him, glancing back at me every so often to curl her lip or roll her eyes. She reminded me of my old friend Minnie from junior high. Minnie’s mom and my mom used to be best friends after they met at the same adoption agency. Then Minnie’s mom stole a receptionist job that my mom told her about and that was it for them. They tried not to let it get in the way of our friendship, but not really. My mom wasn’t quiet when she told my dad what happened, and whenever Minnie wore some new lip gloss or bangle bracelet, I felt like she’d stolen them from me. We drifted apart over the course of one school year. It was so easy, I told myself we must have only been friends because of our moms and that was a dumb reason anyway.
Charlie had the same swagger as Minnie, the same “fuck this” attitude, coupled with an angelic face—shiny dark eyes, plump cheeks, lips rusty and round. But Charlie’s lips were always chapped unlike Minnie’s, and the shaved head gave her the edge that Minnie always wanted but was never quite brave enough to commit to.
“So you just have to babysit these cars the whole way over? Not like they’re gonna go anywhere!” Charlie’s giggle startled me, or more the idea that she was even able to produce that sound.
“Of course not. Unless…the Hudson Loch Ness gets them!” Andy raised his hands into claws. Even Charlie snorted at how lame that joke was. Andy reddened and stood up from the car he’d been leaning against. “Sometimes I go chill up above. Help keep an eye on things. Some shady shit goes down on this boat, you know.”
“Oh, I know,” Charlie said, staring right at me, and I swear, I saw the next two weeks flash before my eyes like one of those flipbooks. Cars. Charlie. Cars. Charlie. Charlie. Charlie. Charlie.
◆
Charlie had a slim jim, so the mechanics of it was the easy part. The harder part was making sure we only took enough so that no one noticed right away, if ever. And the hardest part was distracting Andy. It wasn’t hard to figure out how to distract him. The hard part was doing it.
Charlie showed me how to use the slim jim in the dark part of a motel parking lot one night. Slide the flat metal strip into the door flush against the window, wiggle, pull, and click.
It was the first time we’d hung out on dry land. I told my parents I was going to my friend Laurie’s house to listen to music, but they were so caught up in 60 Minutes, I might as well have told them I was going to a rave.
I wore all black, even brought a knitted cap despite the muggy evening temperatures. Charlie laughed at me, still dressed in her green camo, though she’d put on wide-legged jeans instead of shorts, the tips of her chucks just barely peeking out from beneath the hems.
Charlie showed me how to look for the blinking light on the dashboard that indicated an alarm. We unlocked one car with power locks by jamming an unfurled coat hanger through the crack between the window and the seal to press the unlock button, but Charlie said it wasn’t worth it to get good at that since most cars with power locks had alarms too.
It wasn’t about stealing or breaking into the most luxurious car, anyway. It was about the satisfying click when it popped open. Snagging some gum or loose change from the console. Breathing hard on the rearview mirror then drawing a heart in the fog. Tracing a swirl in the dusty dashboard with our finger tips. My nails were a deep purple lately. Charlie’s were bare, smooth ovals the blush color of a late day sky.
At the end of the night, she asked me when my birthday was. April. Hers was October.
“Eonni,” she called me. She laughed when I asked what it meant, not in a mean way. Like she found my ignorance endearing. “Older sister.”
The next morning, we leaned against the railing of the ramp that led to the upper deck, watching the last passengers scurry up the gang plank, a man in a business suit profusely sweating and a Filipina woman pushing a stroller with a white kid inside. Minnie and I used to talk about how messed up it was that when it was an Asian woman with a white kid she was assumed to be the help, but the other way around always meant adoption.
“You know we’re gonna have to hook up with Andy,” Charlie said.
“Wait, what?” I exclaimed, startling a trio of old women sitting nearby. “I am not having sex with Andy.”
“I didn’t say you had to, eonni. Just, like, fool around a little. Keep him busy. It’s all a game. None of it is real.” She wiggled her fingers in front of my eyes. “It’s not a big deal. Really. I’ll even go first today.”
As I followed her reluctantly down the ramp, I felt eyes on my back. Conscious of the slim jim which was stuffed down the side of my jeans and halfway up my ribcage, I glanced back. No one caught my eye, and I figured there were plenty of creeps all around watching girls like me and Charlie.
I hurried to catch up with Charlie. I watched her flirt with Andy who pretended to be busy flipping through an old newspaper someone had left on a bench. She danced around, acting ditzy and silly like she never did, but drawing him away from the car bay and towards the railing to look out into the water. Her hand behind his back gave me the thumbs up as she pointed to something on the water and asked him to look closer.
I wasn’t so sure, but then she turned so her back was on the railing and Andy was pressed up against her, his hands locked on the railing on either side of her. I didn’t want it to be for nothing, so I ran hunched over like we’d talked about to the dark middle of the bay. Either end was wide open, letting in the light, but the middle was shadowy, a place for hiding.
The first one took a minute because my hands were sweaty. Click. I carefully pulled the door open. A rosary hung from the rearview mirror. I didn’t touch that. I stuffed a couple quarters from an ashtray full of shining silver coins into my pocket. I shut the door like we’d practiced, silently closing it, then shoving it with my hip to latch it. I wondered what Charlie and Andy were doing. My curiosity took over after I unlocked the second one, and I didn’t bother to even open that car door. I hurried to the back deck where I’d left them. Charlie’s oval nails were lost in Andy’s hair. The toes of her chucks barely touched the ground. Her camo sweatshirt was crumpled on the floor.
◆
Dad asked about Charlie at dinner that night. How did I know her again?
“From school.”
“Stuy?”
“That’s the only school I go to.”
“Don’t get smart.”
“That’s why I’m there though.”
Dad glared at me over a forkful of steaming baked potato. He hadn’t had much of a sense of humor in weeks. He’d been working more overtime lately. After a double shift last week, he’d gotten into a minor fender bender, falling asleep at the wheel and drifting into a guardrail. Mom had emerged from her usual fog to freak out a bit and tell him he couldn’t do any more doubles, which he conceded for now.
“She know where she wants to go to school yet?” Dad continued.
“Nope.” Charlie and I didn’t talk about college or anything much beyond life this summer. Since Charlie was doing well enough to keep up with the math camp at Columbia which I’d heard was college-level calculus, I pictured her somewhere like Harvard or Yale. A brand name and rigor enough to tamp down her wildness. Wasn’t that what was supposed to happen next? Wasn’t that why we were doing this now, while we could?
“Thought I heard Andy mention her name in the office,” Dad said.
I forced my face not to change. I shoveled a forkful of limp freezer-bag vegetables into my mouth to give me a moment to think. “What’d he say?” I asked, finally.
“Just heard it in passing. He was talking to the other young guys. I try to stay out of their crass talk.”
I knew that wasn’t true. I knew that they were starting to leave him out of it. One of my first days on the job, I’d listened, cringing, as he called again and again after Andy and a couple of the other younger guys, asking them where they were going for lunch.
“Dunno. Could have been another Charlie. It’s a common name.”
Dad nodded slowly, and I knew he sensed he was being left out of yet another thing.
“Is Charlie a new boyfriend?” my mom asked. Dad and I both sighed.
◆
The next morning, Charlie told me it was my turn to distract Andy. It was proving difficult since he wouldn’t leave her alone, following her as she moved around the deck until she eventually said she was going to the bathroom.
I didn’t know how to be like her, and Andy seemed to have lost whatever flicker of interest he’d had in me. No matter what conversation I tried to start, he kept his answers short, glancing up at the ramp as if he could possibly miss Charlie’s return. If she came back and he wasn’t fully engrossed in me, she was going to be pissed.
While he fiddled with the wrapper of a protein bar he’d pulled from his jacket pocket, I reached out to touch his arm. He looked up, startled. I stepped closer to him.
“Ellie—”
I pressed myself against him, my cheek against his chest, my own heart beating wildly. I had no idea what I was doing.
“Ellie, what the—”
I could hear someone coming down the ramp. So I did the only thing I could think of. I burst into tears.
“Oh!” Andy sounded even more bewildered, but he stopped pulling away. One hand found its way to my upper back and began rubbing soothing circles. “Oh, hey, what’s wrong?”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a figure—Charlie—dart from the ramp to the shadows of the bay.
I pretended to be too overcome by tears to respond for a few moments. The ferry-shaped patch on Andy’s work jacket was scratchy against my cheek. Finally, I told him I’d gotten into a fight with my dad. I made up a story about staying out after curfew by just a few minutes and a big blow out fight and complained that he was too strict.
“He’s been in a shit mood for weeks now,” I said truthfully. “Always yelling at me for nothing.”
“Aw, now I’m sure he makes those rules because he cares,” Andy said. “He loves you.”
“Then why do I feel like I’m only worth something when he can brag to someone else about me?” I looked up at Andy, suddenly really looking for an answer.
Andy’s mouth opened and closed. He didn’t have the mind for deep questions. “I think he’s just been bummed lately. He tell you he got passed over for a promotion?”
I shook my head.
“I tried to tell him. It don’t matter he’s been here the longest. It’s about who likes you. It’s about potential. Not how long you’ll put up with wading through the same crap everyday.”
Over Andy’s shoulder, I saw Charlie emerge from the shadows. She held up a pair of fuzzy dice and grinned at me before sauntering up the ramp as the announcement came over the loudspeaker that we’d soon be docking.
Looking back, I can’t believe we got away with it for a whole week. That week felt like a year, the way summer weeks feel. Charlie continued to seduce Andy, and I continued to talk to him. I grew all of my small concerns into big ones. A rude cashier at the corner store became a racist. A rescheduled hang with one of my friends turned into a rumination on high school feminism. I wasn’t sure if the crying about my mom’s memory loss was really exaggerated though.
Charlie and I would meet up before the ferry docked to recap what had happened—how much loose change we had to add to our stash, Andy’s going for second base, how he was actually a decent listener, at least better than the high school boys whose eyes glazed over when they didn’t get a chance to talk for sixty seconds. I asked her if she felt gross about letting Andy touch her that way.
“It’s just physical,” she said, her face unreadable, and I didn’t press it.
Charlie kept a tally of the number of cars we broke into on the bottom of her shoe in red sharpie. 16. Charlie broke into more than I did. I was usually too afraid to do more than two at a time.
Before we parted ways that Friday, I asked her if she was around on the weekend. She nodded, told me to call her. But when I did, she said she had church all day Saturday, which I remembered was common among my Korean friends. I just didn’t think of Charlie as religious at all. I couldn’t even picture her wearing anything but her camo hoodie, which I assumed she didn’t wear to church. I wanted to ask if I could come, but even back then, I wasn’t that pathetic.
Mom wanted to go back-to-school shopping, and I indulged her even though the first day was still more than a month away. She so rarely initiated any outings these days, and it was heartening to see her putting on lipstick and brushing her hair. I helped her fasten a bracelet on her wrist and told her she looked really nice.
“So how are you liking working with your father?” she asked as we browsed the racks in the teenage section of Macy’s.
“It’s fine. I don’t really see him much.” I paused. “Has he said anything about working with me?”
Mom shrugged in the way she did when she wasn’t sure if she didn’t know or had forgotten. Later, in the dressing room, I asked her to get me a size up in a pair of jeans. She returned empty-handed.
“Size five,” I said. “In the wide-legged jeans. Come on.” My voice was sharp, and when her face crumbled, I felt guilty and embarrassed. Another girl around my age stared openly at my weeping mother until her own mother bustled her back into the dressing room.
Late that night, I stood at the refrigerator, the light washing over my heavy eyes. I couldn’t sleep but I wasn’t hungry either. I was just itching to escape my own body, the body of someone who’d made her mother cry in the dressing room of Macy’s. I’d apologized three times, and my mom said it was all fine, but for dinner she just dug out three microwave meals from the bottom of the freezer, and as we ate, it felt like we were each in our own silent saran-wrapped packages too.
“Still hungry too?” My dad appeared on the other side of the fridge door, his glasses sitting low on his nose. “I swear that Stouffer’s Salisbury steak gets smaller every year.”
“Capitalism,” I said.
He made us grilled cheeses and we ate them standing at the counter.
“You don’t bring friends by anymore,” he said suddenly. “Is it because you’re a cool senior now or because of your mother?”
“I’m not a senior yet. We hang out around town. We have cars. Some people do anyway.”
“Oh, get over it,” he said lightly. “And you shouldn’t be embarrassed about your mother. She likes to host. Doctor says as much normalcy as possible will help her get better sooner.” He always talked like her recovery was inevitable, but I’d read about head injuries at the library. Not everyone bounced back from them.
“She probably doesn’t want to do anything nice for me or my friends after today.” I shoved the last of the sandwich in my mouth, working away at it with my teeth like the gooey mass was my guilt.
“Don’t be dramatic. You got frustrated. I get frustrated with the situation too. But let me tell you what the doctor said.” Again with the doctor like he was the final word on everything mom. “How did he put it? Oh, he said it’s like there are holes in Mom’s brain.” My face must have immediately filled with horror because he rushed on. “And the people in her life—us—we’re her stoppers. Like when there’s a leak, you plug it up. Or in the bathtub. We can stop the memories from leaking out.”
“I get it.”
“We’re her stoppers,” he repeated firmly, as he put our dishes and the pan in the sink to soak. “Now why don’t you see if your new friend Charlie wants to come over for dinner? You two seem to be getting pretty close.”
“I’ll ask,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t. Later as I lay in bed, shifting from reality to dream, I imagined holes appearing all over my body, and I wondered if someone would stopper them before everything in me leaked out.
◆
Monday morning, I didn’t need to distract Andy. He’d stayed out late the night before for his birthday and spent the first twenty minutes of the boat ride in the bathroom.
I kept an eye out while Charlie darted between cars, unlocking with almost recklessness. Later, with the Statue of Liberty cruising by in the background, she showed me one of her prizes: a tiny bobble head chihuahua figurine.
“I hate that dumb Taco Bell dog,” she said. “It’s racist.” With a flick of her wrist, she tossed the doll out the window. I couldn’t have stopped her, I told myself again and again afterwards. I couldn’t have stopped any of it.
As the boat slowed approaching the slip, Charlie groaned that she had a test that day at camp.
“I can’t believe I have to take a test in July,” Charlie said, her cherub face twisted in disgust. “You’re so lucky you don’t have an Asian mom.”
I didn’t respond, just grabbed onto the railing as the boat shuddered to a gentle stop.
“See ya tomorrow, eonni.” Charlie threw up a peace sign as she walked off. I watched her go, then had to push myself through the crowd to get downstairs. Andy was already there, pale-faced and dry-lipped. He reeked of vomit and lavender.
“Did Charlie leave?” he asked me as he unhooked the gate and pushed it open. He looked so pathetic, I wanted to make him feel a little better.
“Yeah, but she wanted me to tell you happy birthday,” I said. Charlie hadn’t even acknowledged Andy’s birthday when I told her why he was sick, just pumped her fist and said she hoped he would be a while.
Within fifteen minutes all of the cars were gone except one. Andy told me that happened from time to time—a passenger who didn’t usually drive went into auto-pilot and got all the way out of the terminal before they remembered the two-ton possession they’d left behind. The boat had to wait for them to return, throwing off the schedule and causing delays for everyone else.
My dad was the one who brought the passenger down. She was an older woman, rouge-cheeked and frazzled, clutching a big leather purse to her chest like a life preserver. She had forgotten, she explained, because she usually took taxis, but today she was driving because she had appointments to look at apartments all over the city for her kid who was graduating college. I noted her big dangly pearl earrings when she said that. She promised she was usually sharper than this.
“It’s all right,” my dad told her, his voice as gentle as if he were soothing a toddler. “You made a mistake. We all make mistakes.”
“My mind is somewhere else today because my dog is sick,” she continued.
My heart dropped through my feet, through the deck, into the river where that chihuahua figurine was floating among the dead bodies and diapers.
I had a moment of hope when I saw her pull a key fob from her purse to unlock the door. I still don’t know why Charlie went after a car with automatic locks. Maybe she saw the figurine in the windshield and couldn’t help herself.
A frown flickered across the woman’s face when the lock didn’t click. She pressed it again, a third time, then a fourth. She tried the door and it popped open.
“I never…” she mumbled. She paused at the door, ducking her head in. I tried to imagine what was running through her mind. What was supposed to be where, where it might be now, had it fallen, no, was she wrong, no, how does a thing disappear, it doesn’t, it gets taken, the car was unlocked, someone must have…
The woman was already flustered, which must have been why she reacted with such furor. Or maybe she was just one of those people. “SOMEONE’S BEEN IN HERE!” The kind of screech that would send a flock of pigeons soaring into the air if this were a sitcom. Of course, no one was laughing.
I don’t know what to make of the fact that my father’s eyes shifted immediately to me.
I could see Andy struggling with what was least likely to get him fired and decided to say that he had been sick in the bathroom most of the trip and hadn’t seen anything. Now all eyes slid to me.
“She knows something!” the woman said. “She looks sneaky.”
I wanted someone to call out her racism for me but, of course, no one did. I thought in that moment that Charlie would have. That she would have told the woman she was being racist and that the dog figurine was racist too and come clean about the whole thing in her defense of me.
But when we spoke on the phone that night, the reality became clear.
“Shit. Shit, shit, shit! What did you say?”
“I told them I didn’t know anything. She didn’t believe me. She filed a report and was talking about pressing charges. Dad said she may be satisfied if they fire me and Andy.”
“That rich white bitch. They love to fire people.” There was no admission of guilt on her part, no acceptance of blame or offer to turn herself in. I broached the subject anyway.
“I can’t turn myself in,” she said laboriously, as if she were explaining a homework assignment. “I’m a minor. They’ll involve my mom.”
My mom has been a tight-lipped mannequin all evening. I’d tried to joke that of course this was something she remembered, and she looked at me like I was a creature, a stranger, anyone but her own daughter. I told Charlie that my mom was pissed at me already.
“You don’t get it,” she said. “It’s worse for me.”
“Because you have a tiger mom?”
“No, Ellen. Because it’s just the two of us. This would break her heart. I’m her best friend.”
I felt like Charlie’s small fist with her pink nails had punched me in the chest. What about all the shit she talked about her mother? How could they be best friends? But Charlie wasn’t lying, I could tell that much. “Okay. I guess I don’t get it.”
In the kitchen, Dad was cooking an omelet on the stove. I asked where Mom was.
“She’s lying down. She has a headache.”
“It was me. I broke into the car. You should fire me, not Andy.”
He put down his spatula. “Why? Why would you do that?”
I shrugged. “I was bored.”
“It was just you?” His eyes narrowed behind his glasses.
I nodded.
He sighed. “You have so much going for you, Ellen. School, college coming up. You really want to throw away everything we’ve worked for, for a so-called friend?”
“We?” I spat out the word like it was a bug in my soup. “We? I worked for it.”
“We all sacrificed to get you to where you are now.”
“You mean money? I’ll pay you back for it. Eighteen years of food and clothes. The adoption fees. I’ll pay you back when I get my big promotion at a fancy grown-up job in an office.”
My dad froze. Smoke rose from the pan. “For twenty-three years, I’ve gotten people who work in offices like that across the river,” he said. “Last week, a guy in a suit and tie threw his soda cup at the trash and missed. The ice went everywhere. He watched me clean it up with a smile on his face. That’s who you’re so proud to become, Ellen?” The humiliation of that moment radiated from him.
“Don’t you see?” I said, knowing that, even after all this time, he would never see the space I occupied in the world. “I’m neither of you.”
The smell of burnt eggs was my only response. I left the kitchen through the back door and sat on the steps for a long time, listening for sounds from other homes on our street. But everyone had central air so the windows were shut tight and all our families remained the best and worst of what we could imagine.
◆
The woman didn’t end up pressing charges. I wrote her a contrite apology letter and donated my summer’s earnings to an animal hospital. Andy was moved from car loading to garbage duty. He ignored me when the school year started and I rode the ferry again. I watched him haul full trash bags across the deck and wondered how I could feel sorry for a grown man who’d had a week-long affair with a teenage girl.
The house was quiet. Mom still wandered about, trying to remember. Dad went back to working doubles and drank too much coffee. He grew irritable to the point where we watched TV during dinner and only talked about sterile, mundane topics like construction around the island and when the humidity would finally die down.
I saw Charlie in the halls at school on occasion. Her hair was growing out again. The wavy dark strands softened her whole face.
Then on a cool, clear morning in September, two planes crashed into the Twin Towers, blocks from Stuyvesant.
When the South tower fell, the building shook. I grabbed onto the arms of strangers who grabbed back at me as we thundered down the stairs and out into the dark, confusing world downtown had become.
The panic in the ferry terminal was as thick as the smoke that forced us to cover our mouths and noses with handkerchiefs, collars, hands. Panic choked me further when I saw the crowd of hundreds struggling to push forward to board, but I eventually streamed onto the waiting ferry.
The ride was a blur of sobbing, sooty faces, screams when the second tower fell. I closed my eyes as others rushed to the windows. The image of the first one crumbling would stay with me forever; that was enough.
In the terminal, I waited by the employee parking spaces, knowing that my dad would use his credentials to bypass the passenger pick-up area where the crowds were. Sure enough, a half-hour later, his gray Toyota with the one drooping headlight pulled up. Both my mom and dad got out of the car and ran to me and I ran to them and we all couldn’t stop laughing with relief, and I felt like we could ride that laughter, thin as it was, through the final stretch of months until I was gone for good.
As we joined the line of cars trying to escape the terminal, I spotted Charlie standing at the curb of the passenger pick-up at the edge of the crowd. She wore her gym uniform, her bare arms wrapped around her slim torso. They were pale and coarse with dark hair.
“Wait.” I hopped out of the car before my parents could say anything and ran to Charlie. She looked up, her eyes wide with the same shock that everyone around us wore.
“You need a ride home?” I asked.
Charlie shook her head. “My mom’s here.” She pointed to a black sedan a few yards up the entrance ramp.
“Can you believe all this?” I said, not wanting to leave her.
Charlie shook her head. “They’re saying there are other attacks all over the country.”
The black sedan crawled closer. A woman was faint through the glare on the windshield.
“Does she know about what happened this summer?” The question slipped out.
“What?”
“Does she know about me?”
Charlie stared at me. “People are dead, Ellen. Christ.”
“Mi Cha!” Charlie’s mother had gotten out of the car. She was wrapped in a blue shawl. Above that, Charlie’s face but older. I felt foolish for not realizing that Charlie wasn’t her real name.
She moved past me toward her mother. As I watched her walk away, I wondered for the millionth time what it was like to belong so confidently to another. To return to a person who felt like home.
Her mother’s arms came up as she approached, lifting the shawl into blue, cascading waves. I turned away before they embraced.
Cars were banned on the ferry after that, even after the terror alert level moved down from red. It was just too much of a risk. On the occasion I rode the ferry into the city on weekends with friends or my mom, I hurried past the former car bay, not wanting to look into that yawning empty hole.