“Here, honey, you have a bat in the cave,” the guard said. She shoved a box of Kleenex toward me, allowing the thin paper to peep through the small window. I snagged a few tissues from the package, pulling one aside for the current bat situation and shoving the rest into my pocket either for finger warmth or a future runny nose. The guard retracted the box after I’d taken a handful, and noticing her shirt had ridden up as she maneuvered to give me the tissues, she quickly yanked down the bottom hem and proudly straightened out the shiny silver-bell broach pinned to her lapel.
“Oh, thank you,” I said, pausing for only a moment to blow my nose, barely missing a beat before continuing. “Then I got arrested for assaulting an officer when really all I did was wave a towel in his face.”
The guard pursed her lips at me disapprovingly and tsked, tsked like a disappointed parent chiding a toddler.
“I know, I know . . . not my finest hour. But then I was brought here and booked,” I said, holding up my ink-stained fingers.
“Phew, that’s some story,” she said, shaking her head in amazement.
“The thing that kills me is that I truly can’t make sense of any of it. I mean, this is Adam we’re talking about . . . my Adam. How in the span of only a few hours did my whole world completely and epically implode?”
My chest constricted as I struggled to hold my hurt and confusion at bay, worried that once I opened the emotional floodgates, I wouldn’t know how to close them up again.
The guard, with her chin resting firmly in her palm, sparkly ornament earrings dangling from her lobes, asked, “Honey, did you ever stop to think that when things seem to be falling apart, they may actually be falling into place?”
The guard’s fortune-cookie wisdom was doing little to assuage my desperation, and instead, my devastating thoughts continued to compete with one another for top billing. A flush of heat flooded up my neck until I nearly burst. “What . . . am I going . . . to do?” The sobs were now coming fast and furious.
“I can’t help you with any of”—she waved her finger around in the air—“that, but, here. I can give you this.” The woman shifted in her seat, the wheels squeaking under her weight, and she pulled an off-white business card from her shirt’s breast pocket and slid it under the tempered glass. “Walk up three and a half blocks toward the river, then turn right. There’s a phone booth on that corner. Right next to a bodega. Actually, they say it’s the very last phone booth in New York City. Lucky you.”
I patted my wet eyes with my sweatshirt sleeve and said, “Yeah, lucky me.”
The guard continued, “Call that number on the card. You won’t need any change. It’s toll-free.” She tapped the counter with her index finger to emphasize her point. “It’ll get you where you need to go.”
I took the card and scanned it, noting the scrawled number and no other information on it. “Should I ask for someone in particular? Is this the number of like a cab company or something? I told you I don’t have any money on me,” I repeated through chattering teeth.
Almost as if she hadn’t heard my question, the guard simply reached for her newspaper with renewed interest and said, “Good luck, honey. Sounds like you got a lot of ghosts to revisit. And remember, no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused.”
“Ghosts? Wait, what? What does that even mean?” But the woman had already turned her back to me and resumed reading her newspaper. I took a deep breath, the cold air burning my nostrils and clearing my brain with each long pull.
Get it together, Avery.
So, Adam was probably a felon. I didn’t have my phone or a coat. It was like twenty-five degrees outside. My hands and face were covered in booking ink, and I looked like a beaten-up raccoon. I was out of options and needed to get home. If this ridiculous quest turned out to be just as fruitless as my other attempts had been at getting a ride home, I decided I would head to the nearest subway station and take my chances at jumping the turnstile.
But in the meantime, tucking the card with the toll-free number into the sweatshirt’s front pocket, I tightened the drawstring of my hoodie to cinch my face into a tight O, lowered my head against the wind, and took off in the direction of the Hudson River to find the very last phone booth in Manhattan.
Chapter Five
A sad string of blinking colored Christmas lights was haphazardly scalloped along the top of the dilapidated phone booth, the cord disappearing somewhere down its rusty hinge and into the ground. I used my sleeve to try to pry open the door without touching its handle, but after fumbling with it due to cold fingers and frictionless fabric, I surrendered, grabbing for it barehanded and slamming my body weight forward to force the folding door in like an accordion. I tumbled inside, clearly having never actually used one of these things before. A phone booth? A relic. I couldn’t even remember the last time I saw one of these things around the city within the last decade. Two? I mean, people don’t even carry quarters around anymore, or any change for that matter.
Finally steadying myself after bouncing around the interior like a Ping-Pong ball, I checked to see how many people caught the embarrassing spectacle, but as usual, the city bustled around me without even the slightest display of interest.
I let out a sigh of relief and turned back to the phone. In spite of the fact that my skin crawled at the thought of all of the germs undoubtedly embedded into the receiver after years of use, I picked it up, reached into my pocket past my pile of tissues for the card the guard had given me, and pulled it into my line of sight. Drawing in a deep breath, I begrudgingly punched in the numbers with a rigid finger and waited.
The phone rang twice before an audible click registered on the line, followed by another pause of silence. I was sure the call had disconnected when all of a sudden, the quiet was interrupted.
“Good evening,” said a friendly but clear voice, “the address you are searching for is located at 1843 Worth Street, New York, New York. And remember, no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunities misused. Goodbye.”
The line went dead.
Wait, what? I had barely caught what she said and started to repeat aloud what I could remember of the address in an effort to not let it slip from my memory. But as hard as I tried to reiterate the information, I began mixing up the numbers. I picked up the receiver and punched in the number again, hoping it would reconnect me with the same operator and repeat the message. Thankfully, it did, and I listened to it a few times until it stuck. Though I had the address now firmly solidified in my brain, I hung up the phone more confused than ever.
The only thing I could think was that this was the address of a nearby cab company or taxi stand? It was a strange way to go about arranging a ride, but I was in no position to be particularly choosy or overly analytical. Cold, sore, and looking like a wild animal from a Nat Geo special, I just needed to get home and for this to all have been a horrible, god-awful, dumpster fire of a hellish nightmare that I would awaken from à la Dorothy back in Kansas after her foray to Oz.
I looked up at the signs marking the cross streets and then repeated the mystery address again and again to myself, sounding a lot like Dory from Finding Nemo. 1843 Worth Street, New York, New York. 1843 Worth Street, New York, New York. Okay, just a few more blocks from here. My hair slipped out from my loosening hood, and the wind cemented the strands to the moisture on my chapped cheeks. I batted at them with my forearm and blew a raspberry, desperately trying to get the pieces out of my mouth and wrangle them back under the drawstring. Dear God, I must have been a sight.