She opened the door a crack, stuck her face in, and glanced around. The room was lit only by rows of candles in long glass jars, which lined the room’s two window ledges, a beautiful effect, really. On the floor lay a jumble of belongings: messenger bags, paperback books, thin summer sweaters, large leather satchels propped up against the baseboard, spilling books, lipsticks, pens and pencils, errant tissues made ghostly in the flickering light. In the far corner, she spotted Beth’s bag, its lacy edges outlined against the white wall. Closing the door behind her, she made her way across the room, grabbed the thing and its companions, then headed back out. Midway through the room, she saw them—the lovers or fighters or whoever they were—out of the corner of her eye. They were staring at her, frozen, backed up against the closet doors on the other side of the room, liked trapped animals. Slowly the faces swam into focus: a woman with wide, sleep-starved eyes and long dark hair. Caitlin Green and her awful husband. Of course, Sadie thought sourly, they’re just the sort of people to take over a room at a party, without regard for anyone else’s needs, and cause some sort of scene. She nodded in their direction, then turned her eyes back to the door. The hesitant glow of the candles suited Caitlin’s husband. He looked almost handsome, his hair mussed and falling over his face, the bones and hollows of his cheeks exaggerated by shadows, the sweatshirt no longer hiding his chest, which appeared broader without the heavy folds of cloth covering it. Sadie felt vaguely disappointed. How could a normal man have married the odious Caitlin Green?
“Mission accomplished,” she told Beth, grinning, when she emerged into the brightness of the loft’s main room.
“Oh my God, thank you,” said Beth, with an embarrassed smile. “I was thinking I should just leave it and pick it up tomorrow, but my keys are in there.”
“Let’s go find Lil and make our excuses,” said Sadie. “I’m starving.”
“Where’s Emily?” Beth shouted as they made their way back through the throng, which was growing by the minute. “Do you think she wants to come along?” But the crowd was so thick now they could barely make their way through it. These were strangers, surely, Sadie thought, for they were treating the loft as if it were a club: throwing cigarettes and beer bottles on the floor, saying “Where’s the booze in this place?” and “Whose crib is this?” Sadie grabbed Beth’s hand, so as not to lose her, for she could see Lil now, toward the front of the loft, sitting on the back of a sofa, blowing cigarette smoke through the bars of the front window—but she was blocked on all sides by the broad, T-shirted backs of sweaty men, laughing and gesticulating. “Excuse me,” Sadie said ineffectually. Behind her Beth murmured, “I hate this.”
And then, like a gift, a hand reached out from her left and pulled her through the wall of men. “Hey, hey, Sophie,” called the voice attached to the hand. And she turned, uncomfortably, to face it. “Sophie, hey.” She found herself peering into a pair of bloodshot eyes, framed by the black hood of a zip-up sweatshirt. Caitlin’s husband, holding a cigar—no, no, a giant joint, which he would probably call a “spliff”—in the hand not attached to her arm. Sadie’s mind raced. She whipped her head around so as not to lose sight of Beth.
“Sadie,” she said, her throat closing in on her. She did not want to speak to this person. “I’m afraid my name is Sadie.”
“Right, sorry,” the man said. “We haven’t been introduced, really. I’m Rob.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Rob,” she recited, by rote, shaking his hand.
“Listen, I’m sorry about before,” he said. “I hope I didn’t embarrass you.” She laughed forcibly.
“Oh, please, don’t worry at all. It’s fine. Very nice to meet you.” She gave him a little nod—what Emily called her “bow”—and turned to catch up with Beth. How had that man, the husband, managed to get to the middle of the room before she did? Because he’s a weasel, she thought. He tunneled his way out.
Eventually, she emerged by the loft’s front door, where Beth was shaking hands with Tom Satville—she had found another route out, clearly—who smiled at her with a familiarly odious mixture of condescension and attraction. “Hello, again,” she said, smiling in a forbidding way, so as to preclude any further conversation. “Lil, it’s time for us to make our excuses. This was lovely.”
“It was,” said Beth.
“You’re going to miss the band,” cried Lil. “They’re so good.”
“Next time,” said Sadie, hugging Lil.
As she and Beth stepped outside into the cooler air, Sadie remembered. “Shoot,” she said. “My manuscript. I left it on the bookshelf. I’ll just run in and get it.”
“I’ll wait here,” said Beth. “I can’t go back in there.” Sadie skipped in, waving at friends and acquaintances, as she pushed her way through them. “You’re back,” said Lil, with a tired smile. She was nestled in the corner of the couch by the window, alone, her feet tucked under her, like a little girl.
“I forgot my manuscript.” Sadie slipped off her sandals, stepped onto the couch, and reached her hand up on top of the tall bookshelf. From her perch, she saw the whole party—like a tableau—the swelling crowd, the little clusters of like-minded sorts within it, girls in bright dresses, their bare arms shimmering. Men bobbing their heads and laughing, handsome, their faces arranged in expressions of intelligence and concern. Their clothing was meant to be ironic—large-collared button-downs from the 1970s, slogan-splattered T-shirts from the 1980s—as though they were holding on to some bits of their childhood as armor against the brash and brutal era in which they’d become adults. The girls, too, wore puff-skirted dresses from the 1950s and 1960s. She felt an urge to draw some sort of attention to herself, to grab one of the glasses that littered the bookshelves and clink it, telling everyone here to… what? “Check, check,” came at her again, a deep baritone from the back of the loft. She looked over at the band and saw, some feet to their left, the door to the bedroom open. Out of it came a thin, dark-haired girl—Caitlin Green—and a moment later, a dark-haired man. The man’s hair was shot through with gray. Tuck Hayes. No, Sadie corrected herself, Tuck Roth-Hayes.
six
As a child, Sadie Peregrine hated Sunday afternoons, that languorous period when she was meant to start her homework—the homework she’d been avoiding all weekend—and when she began thinking about the tortures of the week that lay ahead. She much preferred Saturdays, at home with her quiet parents, going to matinees, eating Chinese food, or even Sunday mornings, when the entire Peregrine clan—her “immediate extended family,” as she thought of it—gathered around her parents’ table for breakfast. The best part though, was the early morning, before anyone arrived, when her mother slept in and she and her father had the house to themselves, to read the funny pages aloud and eat contraband doughnuts, before running out to the appetizing store on Lex for sable, whitefish, lox, cream cheese, bialys, bagels, and a half loaf of the thin-sliced black bread favored by Sadie’s grandmother, who lived alone in a sprawling apartment off Fifth, tended to by a silent maid named Gretchen, though for as long as Sadie could remember there’d been talk of moving her into the Hebrew Home in Riverdale, if only they could get the lady to agree, which didn’t seem likely. (“To the Bronx,” she rasped whenever confronted with this idea. “You want me to live in the Bronx? With old people?”)
They would arrive home, lugging brown sacks, and Sadie’s father would put on a pot of coffee—even then, the smell was delicious to her—and bring a cup up to Rose, along with the paper, then return to the kitchen, where he and Sadie would slice tomatoes and onions, wrap the bagels in foil, place them in the oven to warm, and set the dining room table with delicate, gold-rimmed china and thick, white cotton napkins. Sunday was Rose Peregrine’s day off. She emerged from the bedroom just before the first cousins arrived, clad in her weekend costume of wide-legged wool trousers and a dark cashmere sweater (winter), or wide-legged linen trousers and a pale silk sweater (summer). At exactly eleven, Peregrine after Peregrine arrived, interrupted by the occasional Goldschlag—usually, Sadie’s aunt Minnie, a stout, white-haired woman, her pale, watery eyes magnified by thick-rimmed glasses—come up from the depths of the Lower East Side, a neighborhood feared by the Peregrines, most of whom lived within blocks of Sadie’s parents (though in recent years a few had defected to the West Side and even, like Sadie, Brooklyn).