“It is.”
Achmed looked dubious. “If you’re looking to make a buy, I know a safer place—”
“We’re fine, thanks,” Ingrid said.
“I don’t mean no offense.”
“None taken,” Simon said.
“You’re, uh, not going to give me a one-star rating because of this, are you?”
“You’re pure five stars, my man,” Simon said, opening the passenger door.
“We’d give you six if we could,” Ingrid added.
They slipped out of the Toyota. Simon wore gray sweats and sneakers. Ingrid was in jeans and a sweater. They both wore baseball caps, hers with the classic New York Yankees NY overlap, his with a golf club logo, a giveaway at a charity outing. Everything discreet, casual, trying to blend in, which wasn’t happening.
The four-level walk-up of decrepit brick wasn’t so much falling apart as flaking away, fraying at the seams like an old coat. The fire escape looked ready to give at the gentlest push, far more rust than metal, posing the question if burns were worse than tetanus. On the sidewalk, a much-mistreated mattress had been thrown atop black plastic trash bags, crushing them into misshapen masses. The front stoop looked as though it shed concrete dust. The metallic-gray door had some kind of ornate graffiti lettering spray-painted on it. Car parts and old tires were strewn across the tall weeds next door, all surrounded, for some odd reason, by a fresh chain-link fence topped with razor wire — as if anyone would ever want to steal any of that stuff. The building to the right, perhaps a once-proud brownstone, had plywood covering broken glass, giving it a look of loneliness and despair that shattered Simon’s heart anew.
Paige, his baby, had lived here.
Simon turned to look at Ingrid. She stared at the building too, a look of loss on her face. Her eyes gazed up, above the rooftops to the public-housing high-rises looming in the near distance.
“So now what?” Simon asked her.
Ingrid took in their surroundings. “We didn’t really think this through, did we?”
She stepped toward the graffiti-laden door, turned the knob without hesitation, and pushed hard. The door grinded open grudgingly. When they stepped into what one might generously dub a foyer, the stale, acrid odor, a mix of the musty and the rotting, encircled them. A bare light bulb, dangling from the ceiling with no fixture, provided a modicum of twenty-five-watt illumination.
She lived here, Simon thought. Paige lived in this place.
He thought about life choices, about bad decisions and forks in the road, and what moves, what sliding doors, had led Paige to this hell-spawned place. It was his fault, wasn’t it? Of course it had to be in some way. The butterfly effect. Change one thing, you change everything. The constant what-ifs — if only he could go back and change something. Paige had wanted to write. Suppose he had sent one of her essays to his friend at that local literary magazine, the one that worked off donations, and had gotten it published. Would she have focused more on her writing then? Paige had been denied early decision to Columbia. Should Simon have pushed his alma mater more, gotten more of his old friends to contact Admissions? Yvonne’s father-in-law had been on the board at Williams. She could have done something there, if he’d pushed it. And that was the big stuff, of course. Anything could have changed her course, right? Paige wanted a cat for her dorm room, but he didn’t get it for her. She had a fight with Merilee, her best friend in seventh grade, and he as a father had done nothing to patch it up. Paige liked American cheese on her turkey sandwich, not cheddar, but sometimes Simon forgot and used the wrong one.
You could drive yourself mad.
She’d been such a good girl too. The best daughter in the world. Paige hated to get in trouble and when she did, even for something minor, her eyes would fill with tears so that Simon couldn’t bear to scold her. But maybe he should have. Maybe that would have helped. It was just that she cried so damn easily, and it got under his skin because the truth, the truth he never had the courage to tell her, was that he cried easily too — too easily — pretending something was wrong with his contact lens or that he had nonexistent allergies or leaving the room altogether rather than admitting it. Maybe if he had, it would have made it easier for her and she could have found some kind of outlet or way to bond with her father who chose to keep up some kind of false machismo, some kind of idea that if her dad didn’t cry, maybe she’d feel safe, more protected. Instead it just made her more vulnerable in the end.
Ingrid had already started up the warped stairs. When she realized Simon was not with her, she turned and said, “You okay?”
He snapped out of it, nodded, followed her. “Third floor,” he said. “Apartment B.”
There were broken pieces of what might have once been a sofa on the first landing. Crushed beer cans and overflowing ashtrays were piled high. Simon peered down the hall as they made the turn for the next floor. A thin black man in a wifebeater tee and threadbare denim stood at the end of the hallway. The man had a white beard so thick and curly it looked as though he were eating a sheep.
On the third floor, there was yellow tape that read CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS forming an X in front of a heavy metal door with the letter B on it. Ingrid did not hesitate or slow down. She reached for the knob and tried to turn it.
The knob wouldn’t move.
She stepped back and gestured for Simon to give it a try. He did. He twisted the knob back and forth and pushed and pulled.
Locked.
The walls around them might very well be decaying to the point that maybe Simon could punch his fist through one and enter that way, but this locked door was not about to surrender.
“Hey.”
The simple word, spoken in a normal tone of voice, shattered the stale air like a gunshot. Simon and Ingrid jumped at the sound and turned. It was the thin black man with the sheep beard. Simon checked for an exit route. There was none except via the way they came, and that path was blocked now.
Slowly and without conscious thought, Simon took a step to slip in front of Ingrid, putting himself between her and the man.
For a moment no one spoke. The three of them just stood in that grimy corridor and didn’t move. Someone on the floor above them turned up music with a loud thumping bass and an angry vocalist.
Then the man said, “You’re looking for Paige.”
It wasn’t a question.
“You,” the man said, raising his hand and pointing a bony finger at Ingrid. “You’re her mother.”
“How did you know?” Ingrid asked.
“You look exactly like her. Or does she look like you?” He petted the sheep beard. “I always mix that up.”
“Do you know where Paige is?” Simon asked.
“Is that why you’re here? You’re looking for her?”
Ingrid took a step toward him. “Yes. Do you know where she is?”
He shook his head. “Sorry.”
“But you know Paige?”
“Yeah, I know her. I live right below them.”
“Is there somebody else who might know?” Simon asked.
“Somebody else?”
“Like a friend.”
The man smiled. “I’m her friend.”
“Maybe another friend then.”
“I don’t think so.” He gestured with the beard toward the door. “You trying to get in?”
Simon looked at Ingrid. Ingrid said, “Yeah, we were hoping to see...”
His eyes narrowed. “See what?”
“I don’t know, to tell you the truth,” Ingrid said.
“We’re just trying to find her,” Simon added.
The man stroked the sheep beard some more, pulling at the end as though to make it longer. “I can let you in,” he said.
He reached into his pocket and fished out a key.