I left the house as soon as I could. I’d be early for work but at least it would be comfortably warm in the airline terminal, and I could just sit around for a while, watching the planes take off until it was time to start my shift. I was halfway down the block, heading for the bus stop as I picked my way through the smashed-up cars parked all over the street, waiting for service at the repair shops, when a thought occurred to me—a small idea with a little bit of light around it that managed to float up through my anger. I hesitated for a moment, but then turned around and went back to my apartment.
I found two long extension cords, plugged them into each other, and then into my little heater, which I carried next door. I knocked on my neighbor’s door again—what was her name? Sassouma, I thought, or something like that—and again, when she answered, she had the baby in her arms.
“Here,” I said, offering her the heater. She shook her head, but I persisted. We had lived next door to each other for years and she had, occasionally, asked me for little bits of help, like reading something that came in the mail or filling out school forms, so I knew she wasn’t worried that I might want to extract money from her or something like that in return for the use of the heater. I had already figured out that what would concern her would be the cost of the extra electricity. These little electric heaters were helpful, but they were energy vampires, and when you’re on the kind of budget that people in this building no doubt lived on—myself included, though I was probably better off than most of my neighbors—things like that mattered a lot. “I’m going to work,” I said. “I don’t need it. And look.” I pointed to the extension cord, which was snaking out of my apartment, under my locked door. “My electricity,” I said. “I’ll make the landlord pay me back.” That, of course, was never going to happen, but Sassouma seemed to think I had it in me to work this miracle, and she finally took the heater from me, saying thank you, thank you.
I thought that doing something nice for someone else—something that would burnish my karma and make me feel like I really was managing well enough to be able to be generous to my neighbor—would make me feel better, and it did, but for just a little while. By the time I got to work, my unhappy mood had returned.
I bought a newspaper and a sandwich, and then settled myself into a seat near a gate that wasn’t currently in use. Nearby, nervous people were waiting for an outbound flight to Los Angeles. Even months after the terrorist attacks, a feeling of dread always seemed to hang over the airport, unless, of course, you were in The Endless Weekend, where as far as we were concerned, It had never happened, so I deliberately sat facing away from the anxious passengers, looking out the glass walls of the terminal. Spring was late in coming this year, and the afternoon was still dull and wintry. I watched the big planes taxi out on the runways and lift off into the hard sky, turning as they climbed over Jamaica Bay, headed either out over the ocean or inland, toward the far coast.
It did help a little to be warm, and then, when I started my shift at the bar, to be busy. Some nights everyone seemed to be drinking beer, and some nights I seemed to be on continuous cocktail duty. For whatever reason, this turned out to be a Jack Daniel’s night, which meant fewer quiet drinkers and contemplative travelers and many more raucous guys hooting and hollering at the TV screens. One of the cable channels was showing the rebroadcast of a British soccer game, and even that had its loud fans. As flights were announced and customers came and went, I just kept refilling the shot glasses. For the first time in what seemed like forever, I was surprised by how quickly the night went; when the manager showed up to cash out my register and help me close up, I hadn’t yet even glanced at a clock.
But the night’s frantic pace caught up with me once I was on the bus, and I felt exhausted. I dozed more deeply than usual as we traveled along the Grand Central Parkway and then turned onto the deserted residential streets, coming fully awake only when the bus driver called out, “Hey, bartender! Isn’t this your stop?”
I was still feeling a little blurry when I unlocked the front door of my building, but then the cold hit me. I had completely forgotten about the heat problem, but now it seemed to be icier inside than outdoors. At least there was a hand-lettered sign taped near the mailboxes explaining that the boiler needed parts and would be fixed by the day after tomorrow. I didn’t know if the landlord had left it or workmen from the city, but either way, it was a good-news, bad-news situation for me because, while at least I knew that someone was working on the problem, my electric heater, as I saw when I went upstairs, was still in my neighbors’ apartment. It was too late at night to ask for it back and besides, my supposedly rising stock of karma would surely plummet somewhere below zero if I did that. So, I went inside, kept my coat on, and tried to get my mind off how cold I was by watching TV.
A couple hundred cable channels—more?—and there was still nothing on that I seemed to be able to pay attention to. I didn’t feel like listening to Jack Shepherd tonight, or fooling around with the radio, so I picked up my laptop and wandered around the Internet for a while. Eventually, even that began to bore me. Maybe being cold was making me restless and unable to concentrate. Finally, I decided to go through my mail, which was piled on my coffee table; at least I could sort through the bills I had to pay and start on that chore. But almost the first thing I came across was a letter—or what looked like an actual letter, addressed to me in someone’s handwriting. I didn’t recognize the writing and there was no return address. That was peculiar enough, but the envelope, too, was unusuaclass="underline" it was a deep sapphire blue, a rich hue that didn’t look like anything you’d find in a greeting card store, for example, or anywhere else that I could think of.
Maybe because of that, I had a kind of creepy feeling about this strange piece of mail, but when I finally opened it, what was inside seemed pretty mundane: it was a flier, printed on blue paper the same rich color as the envelope, offering a “Free Psychic Reading by Ravenette, World-Renowned Psychic.” At the bottom, in the same handwriting as was on the envelope, the world-renowned psychic had penned me a decidedly melodramatic note—Dear Laurie: I hope you’ll come to see me. Live on the radio wasn’t the best place for me to tell you all that I see.
When the phone rang about twenty minutes later, I had a feeling I knew who was going to be on the line, and I was right.
“Laurie?” Jack Shepherd said. “Can I talk to you for a few minutes?”
“Are you ever really on the radio?” I asked him. “Or are all your shows taped repeats so you can spend your time on the phone with me?”
“Hey,” he said. “I’m just calling to say hello. I kind of enjoyed our chat last night. It was interesting.”
“Maybe for you.”
“Uh-oh,” Jack said. “You’re annoyed with me. I have to tell you though, I’m not sure why.”
“That Ravenette person,” I responded. “The so-called psychic. Did you give her my phone number or anything like that?”