A Winter in New York(75)

“Mum,” I murmur, my mouth full of salty tears. I’m not just crying, I’m sobbing, hot therapeutic tears, my body shaking because the last few days have been so horrific and it feels as if she’s found a way to reach out and tell me I’m going to be okay. “I miss you so much,” I whisper, still touching the screen as it fades and credits roll.

Felipe puts his hand on my shoulder, and when I get to my feet he holds his arms out for me to stumble into.

“It’s okay, kiddo,” he says, patting my back. “It’s okay. I got ya.”

He steers me back to the sofa and passes me more tissues, patting my knee while I pull myself together.

“Sorry,” I gulp. “That was a real shock.”

“I’m sorry you lost your mother,” he says. “I know how wonderful she was.”

I hear emotion thicken his voice and try to raise a watery smile for his benefit, because he didn’t have to do this and I don’t have words special enough to express what it means to me. I didn’t really know what to expect when I came here this morning. Not this. Not to feel as if my mother has reached through the ether between worlds to hold my hand and remind me exactly whose daughter I am.

“Can we watch it again?”

Felipe presses rewind, and we sit alongside each other and watch it twice more, then he ejects it and hands it to me.

“Keep it. I was there, it’s all in here.” He taps the side of his head as he buttons his coat. “Sometimes it’s the letting go of things that sets you free, Iris.”

I clutch the warm chunk of plastic as if it’s precious metal. This tape, the poster taken on the day my mother discovered she was pregnant…they’re gold dust for me. How strange that they’ve sat forgotten in this lock-up all these years, as if they were waiting for the exact moment to reveal themselves when I needed them most of all. I’m not a superstitious person as a rule—I’ll walk under ladders and much prefer grumpy orange cats to lucky black ones—but there’s an undeniable feeling of cosmic interference here, as if Felipe’s crackly old TV set was a temporary conduit between realms. I finish my coffee and realize I’m finally warm for the first time in days. I put my hand on my left thigh and it isn’t shaking anymore.





30.


I’VE DELETED ADAM’S TEXTS AND blocked his number. He’s become a phantom lurking in every shadow in recent weeks, but I came home from my morning with Felipe and knew exactly what I needed to do. Block. Ignore. Decide he’s dead to me and really believe it this time, because I didn’t claw myself away from him just to let him become my own personal Voldemort. I’m a New Yorker now. What happened to me in London does not define me here.

I’ve spent the weekend working, either downstairs in the noodle house or up here sprucing the place up for Christmas. I’ve draped my mother’s string of golden fir cones over the mirror and tacked warm white fairy lights around the window frame. It was a cold, crystal-clear London morning when we foraged for those fir cones, gilding our fingers with the gold paint afterward. They’ve faded significantly over the years, but they still lend Christmas cheer to this icy Monday morning. The breakfast radio weather guy seemed certain about imminent snow, but he’s had me fooled before so I’ll believe it when I see it.

Something spatters my window—a spray of small stones, I think—and I dash across the room to check the sidewalk, my heart in my mouth.

“Saw this outside the bodega and thought of you,” Gio shouts, shielding his eyes with his hand as he looks up. He’s standing beside a Christmas tree that comes up to his shoulder, his hand out supporting the top of the trunk. I shake my head, laughing as I throw my hands up in the air at him.

I run out on to the landing as he hauls it up the communal staircase, standing it up outside my front door with a flourish and a grin that makes him look about eighteen years old.

“I wasn’t planning on getting a tree,” I say.

“Yeah, you said,” he says. “But where will you hang your whisk if you don’t have a tree?”

I gesture toward the corner as he shuffles it into my apartment, and we both stand back to look at it once it’s in place.

“It looked smaller outside,” he concedes.

“You don’t say.”

“Maybe if we turn it around?” He has a quick go, but it’s so bushy that whichever way round it is the bottom branches flop over the arm of the sofa.

I slide behind it and sit down, parting the branches to look at Gio.

“I feel like I’m staking someone out,” I say.

He pushes the sofa along with me still sitting on it until it’s clear of the tree’s reach. It’s wedged up against the breakfast bar at the other end, but at least I won’t feel like I’m part of a nature documentary every time I sit down.

“Perfect fit,” he says.

I get up and stand beside him. “You know what? It is.”

This is the first real tree I’ve had in years. Adam had a small, sparse pre-lit plastic one from before we met, which he wouldn’t hear of replacing, a woebegone object that somehow managed to make the room even more dispiriting than usual. No baubles, and certainly no gifts piled beneath it.

“Lights?” Gio looks at me and I shake my head. The only string of lights I have is pinned around the window.