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“If you’ll excuse me,” Charlie said to Baxter. He cut around him and strode across the ballroom. In the corner, the string quintet played a Chopin song he’d loved as a teenager, back when his mother had demanded he study music. She’d been a professional opera singer who’d given up her career after Charlie’s father had dragged them to Chicago. Turns out, not many people enjoyed opera in the Midwest. His earliest memories involved her singing in the shower, her voice rising higher and higher until he’d been sure the windows would crack, just as they did in cartoons.
Charlie went upstairs to the attached restaurant, with its view overlooking the ballroom. There, the bartender hurried to stir him up a Dark and Stormy cocktail, his favorite. Charlie hated the way the bartender worked so diligently, as though he worried Charlie would yell at him for not making his cocktail quickly enough. Charlie thanked the bartender and tipped him well, then turned back to oversee the ballroom. But there before him was yet another donor, Marcia Lacey, who grabbed his bicep and gushed about the beautiful building.
“Can you imagine Manhattanites one hundred years from now?” she said. “They’re going to pass by and think about us, you know? They’re going to know that we changed the history of this city.”
Charlie wanted to protest. He wanted to tell her that nobody would think about them in the next few decades, that these people in the future would stride (or fly, what did he know?) past the building, thinking about their own schedules and their relationships and their future dreams. By then, the building would be planted into the texture of New York City. Perhaps people would love it in the same way they loved a tree or a bush. It was just there.
Over and over again throughout the next hour, Charlie was forced into conversations that alternated between utterly banal and infuriating. He was forced to stand in photographs with donors, to sit at tables with the Manhattan elite, and to eat snacks he didn’t want. And worst of all, he had no interest in drinking. After one Dark and Stormy, he realized fogging up his reality made him even more alienated from himself. He didn’t want to watch himself from a distance. He wanted to be front and center, watching his rage burn brighter.
And suddenly, he heard himself say: “I’m going to get out of the city for a while.”
He was in the ballroom again, talking to, of all people, Baxter Bailey. He wasn’t entirely sure how he’d gotten there; he couldn’t chart the course from the bar to the restaurant back to the ballroom. It was a blur of terrible conversations.
Baxter snapped his hand across Charlie’s shoulder and said, “You have another project cooking up, don’t you? I should have known that you wouldn’t linger for long without anything to do. You’re a worker. Like me. I like that in a man.”
Charlie didn’t care what Baxter thought. He locked eyes with him and gave a firm nod.
“I’ll be in touch,” Baxter said.
Charlie used Baxter’s assumption as fuel. He walked out of the ballroom, pressed his finger to the elevator button, and returned to his apartment. There, he changed out of his tuxedo, then threw jeans, sweatshirts, flannels, socks, and underwear into a large backpack, one he’d meant to use to hike the Himalayas. He and Sarah had been planning that for years.
When he left his apartment, he didn’t even bother to glance back at it. It held no semblance of him. It was an empty shell.
In the elevator on the way down to the garage level, Charlie looked for cabin rentals online. He imagined himself deep in the woods somewhere, with a wood-burning stove, a thick beard, and a red flannel shirt like a lumberjack. The whole nine yards. He imagined what Sarah would say about that: that he was milking his loneliness. Maybe he was. But it was better than living in a gorgeous apartment in the sky. He wanted to be amongst the trees again. He wanted to breathe real air.
By the time he reached his car (a Porsche, which he now felt was ostentatious), Charlie found the cabin. It was situated a few miles outside of a quaint village in New Jersey, shrouded with trees. Past reviewers said wildlife like rabbits, deer, skunks, and even beavers could be seen from the back window, cutting through the woods to get wherever they were going. It had been ages since Charlie had seen an animal besides a New York City rat.
Just his luck, in booking the cabin, he learned there was a keypad out front. This meant Charlie just had to insert the code, and the key would pop out. He didn’t have to speak to anyone.
As Charlie waited in the garage entrance, his hands at ten and two as street traffic cleared, his speaker system spoke to him.
“Text from Timothy,” a woman’s computerized voice said. “It says: ‘Charlie, where are you? Baxter is saying something about another development somewhere. Outside the city? Remember, I can’t help you unless you clue me in a little on your plans!’”
But Charlie didn’t have the energy to text Timothy back. He hoped Timothy would consider this a well-earned vacation. He would still be paid handsomely; Charlie would even send him an enormous Christmas bonus.
But Charlie had no interest in sharing news of where he was with anyone. He wanted to hide himself away; he wanted to forget his own name.
“Text Timothy back,” he said to his device. “Timothy. Take December off. Go home. Be with your wife and children. In January, I’ll be in contact about the next step of your career. You don’t want to be an assistant for the rest of your life. I know that, and you know that.” He paused and slammed his foot on the gas to get out of the garage and drive out onto the street. Although he didn’t cut anyone off, another driver blared his horn— presumably because everyone in New York City was just in a bad mood all the time. “Remember to take the time to be with your family as much as you can,” Charlie added in his text to Timothy. “You don’t know how long you have.”
ChapterThree
Van named her baby Ethan. For the first week of Ethan’s life, Van, Charlotte, and Ethan lived in Charlotte’s apartment in Midtown. They hardly left, ordering groceries to the apartment door, taking shifts to care for the baby, and packing their bags for their big trip to White Plains. They’d decided to leave on December 2nd when Ethan was a full week old.
Although she never would have admitted it to Van, it didn’t surprise Charlotte that Grant hadn’t reached out since the birth. He was that sort of man, apt to run away from responsibility the minute things got tough. Van was doubled over with a mix of all-encompassing love for her baby and grief for her failed marriage, an onslaught of emotions that often kept her awake all hours of the night. Charlotte didn’t know what to do. As her daughter wept in her arms, she considered driving to wherever Grant was staying and knocking on his door until he answered. At that point, what? Would she scream at him? Threaten him? Demand he come back? Her fantasy always ended there.
One thing she had to do before they left the city was retrieve Van’s baby supplies from the apartment she’d shared with Grant. Because Van was too exhausted to go herself, Charlotte slotted the key into the door and crept through the apartment, feeling as though she’d broken in. Just as Van had told her, all of Ethan’s baby supplies were in the nursery. Before she loaded it in the trunk of her car downstairs, she went through the rest of the house, trying to imagine what had gone wrong in her daughter’s marriage. There was a photograph of the couple on their wedding day hanging on the wall. Another photograph of Van and Charlotte from that day was perched on the table by the window. There was a photograph of Van, her brother, and his daughters on the dresser in the bedroom. Van’s clothing still hung in the closet and was folded in drawers. It seemed that Grant had come by at some point and taken anything he wanted— a pair of keys sat on the kitchen table, glinting expectantly. This was more proof he wanted out for good.
“Coward,” Charlotte said to the keys. She felt crippled with a sense of dread.
But on the morning of December 2nd, Charlotte slotted the final suitcase into the back of her car and watched as Van clicked Ethan’s baby car seat into place. Her heart thrummed with expectation. If there was one thing she could count on, it was the Cherry Inn.
In the passenger seat, Van sipped her coffee and fiddled with the radio stations. Charlotte drove slowly through the garage nearest her apartment building and waited as the lever raised between the lot and the street, freeing her.
“Getting out of the city always makes me feel like an animal escaping the zoo,” she joked as she dropped the wheels from the curb and onto the road.
Van laughed, and the sound of it opened Charlotte’s heart. When she glanced at her daughter, she saw a young woman with large circles under her eyes and her hair unkempt. There was a small stain on the front of her shirt. But none of that mattered. Once they reached White Plains, everything would be easier. And Grandpa Hank’s love would smother them. With a newborn in tow, there was no such thing as too much love.
“I was trying to remember the last time I was in White Plains,” Van said. “It must have been fifteen or sixteen years ago?”
