Fractured (Not Quite a Billionaire #2) (21 page)

“So cool.” She’d tested the table that pulled down from the wall to one side of the window seat, forming a neat, if minuscule, desk. “Tiny home all the way. Upscale Cinderella. Could I maybe have this instead?”

Hemi had said, “These are staff quarters, although Inez doesn’t live in. But I may need to change that. So—no.”

Karen and I had looked at each other with our brows raised before Karen had said, “Oh.
Staff
quarters. Guess not, then.”

Hemi had moved on, then, to the mammoth, high-ceilinged living/dining room with its French doors that led out to a terrace and a view onto the park, and then we’d been back in the foyer to collect our suitcases, standing on the squares of black and white marble that, I could attest, were
very
cold against the skin.

It was all perfectly elegant, but also unquestionably masculine and ruthlessly spare, a place of hard lines and stark colors, of white walls, black leather, glass, and marble, without a single stray piece of paper, kicked-off shoe, or carelessly discarded recharging cord to humanize it. Part of that was probably the weekend-absent Inez, but I’d bet it was Hemi, too. I had to wonder what would happen when Karen wasn’t just sticking her knife in the jam jar, but was carrying her toast absentmindedly through the living room and dripping jam onto the sofa because she was reading.

Suddenly, I longed to be back in Hemi’s grandfather’s shabby little house on the hill above Katikati. Instead, I wrenched my mind back to the present and said, “Karen’s not changing schools. She’s happy there, she’s on scholarship, and it’s a great school. And there’s the subway.”

Hemi said, “No,” Karen said, “Right,” and I said nothing. I might not be a Buddhist, but the last thing I wanted to do was fight. My over-the-top reaction to Hemi’s apartment was like my initial over-the-top reaction to him: something that stemmed from my own fears, and that I needed to get under control.

Eventually, Hemi said, “When you’re ready, Charles will take you to your apartment.”

Hemi had told me the plan the night before. A moving company would transport whatever we wanted to keep to Hemi’s place, and then would make the rest…disappear.

While we did our sorting out, he’d be working. He’d told me that he’d never taken off more than a few days at a time since he’d first come to New York, and I was sure I was about to see much, much less of him once he began picking up the reins after three weeks away. Not exactly a reassuring thought.

“We’re really doing it?” Karen asked. At least she turned to me to ask the question and not Hemi.

I took a deep breath and said, “Yes. We are.”

By the time we got to the apartment and Charles was climbing the stairs to the fifth floor behind us with a stack of folded-flat cardboard boxes under each arm, I felt as if I were moving underwater, swimming through a zone of unreality.

Except that I couldn’t swim.

The only home I’d ever known looked shabbier than ever in contrast to everyplace we’d been over the past weeks, and was holding about a city block’s worth of stale, musty New-York-in-summer air. I went to the single window, tugged at the stubborn, yellowing shade, wrestled with the always-sticky sash, looked out across the air shaft at the brick wall of the building next door, and thought,
Why would this be hard to leave? You’re crazy.

When I turned around, Charles was crouching on the floor, beginning to assemble and tape boxes, and Karen was helping him.

“When you’re done,” Charles told me, “call me. I’ll drive you home and come back for the movers.”

Drive you home.

Home.

As always with Hemi, everything was moving on oiled wheels, and moving fast. Hemi had made me give him all the information on the apartment already, too, so he could pass it on to Josh. The management company, the utilities—it would all be “taken care of.”

“Thanks,” I said, wiping my palms on the shorts I’d worn against the heat of early July and the job ahead. “I really appreciate it.”

“It’s my job,” Charles said.

“Can I ask you…” I hesitated, but I needed to humanize this thing, somehow, the luxury of having other people attend to everything I’d always had to handle myself.

“Yes?” he asked.

“How long have you been working for Hemi?”

“Seven years in September.”

“Wow,” Karen said. “Either you really like driving, or you’re, like, really patient.” When he didn’t answer, Karen asked, “What did you do before?”

“I drove a cab.” When Karen kept looking at him expectantly, he added, “I drove Hemi quite a bit.”

“Huh,” Karen said. “That’s pretty cool that he hired you.”

“I thought so.”

“How come?” she asked. “I mean, why you?”

“Because I didn’t talk.” He pulled a black marker from his pocket and handed it to me. “So you can mark the boxes. Call me when you’re finishing up, so I’ll be waiting.” Then he left.

Hemi’s man.

Karen turned in a slow circle, looking at the precious five hundred square feet of rent control handed down from our mother, a tiny island of safety in the shark-infested waters of the New York City real estate market.

“It seems smaller,” she said. “Doesn’t it? Why is that?”

“It’s the contrast, that’s all.” I tried my best for brisk.
You’ve made your decision. Get it done.
“Obviously, the main thing we need to take is our clothes, so let’s start there. We’ll fill up the wardrobe boxes first.” I opened our single closet, in the living room, and said, “Only take what you really like. We’ll look at it as spring cleaning.”

We’d make a pile for donation, I decided. Hemi wasn’t going to be happy about my wearing anything old or out of style, but that didn’t mean somebody else couldn’t use them.

As I began to hang garments over the metal bar in the first of the wardrobe boxes, Karen said, “Betcha anything Hemi doesn’t allow wire hangers in his closets. That’s probably as big a crime as putting your knife in the jam. He’ll probably tell you which outfits you can keep, too.”

The same thought I’d just had, and my hand stilled on the dresses I was shoving into the box. “Well, that’s no big deal,” I said, keeping my voice light. “Real hangers would be good.
Space
for real hangers would be good. And I told you, he was right about the jam. It’ll be our version of Buddhism. Let it go.”

“I think that’s
Frozen.”

“Whatever.”

The clothes took about half an hour, and then the closet and dresser were empty. Except for the box pushed all the way to the back.

When I bent over to pull it out, I got lightheaded, and I staggered some on my way to the coffee table.

“We’d better…” I said, then had to swallow. “We’ll go through this. It’s the only other thing, I guess, besides my laptop and some financial stuff and your medical records, and the winter things under the bed.”

“And our afghan,” Karen said, pulling it from the arm of the couch, folding it, and setting it on the coffee table.

I said, “I have a feeling that’s not going to look too good on Hemi’s couch.” The eyeball-assaulting mishmash of colors crocheted into old-fashioned granny squares wasn’t a thing of beauty, but…it had been there all my life.

“Then I’ll put it in my room,” Karen said. “And bring it out on Women’s Wednesday. We’d better still get to have that.”

“We’re going to have it,” I said. “Anyway, Hemi likes it himself, I think.”

“I’m betting we can’t eat popcorn in his living room, though.” Karen poked her fingers through the holes in the granny squares the way she’d always done. “He’s super cool, but he’s not exactly Mr. Laid Back, you know?”

“You think?” I tried to smile. “Hey. He loves me, and he loves you. And if I want to eat popcorn in the living room under the afghan, that’s what’s going to happen.”

Karen snorted. “Yeah, right. What are you going to do, arm-wrestle him into submission?”

“No,” I said. “I’m going to tell him it’s important to me, and he’s going to understand, because he wants me to be happy, and he wants you to be happy, too.”

“If you say so. I mean, I get that he loves you, but…”

This wasn’t exactly helping, so I moved on. “We’ll take Mom’s special vase, too.” A white Belleek piece from Ireland, the heavy ceramic formed into a basketweave pattern and decorated with painted shamrocks. Another treasure given to her by her grandmother, and of no great value. Karen had knocked it over once, in fact, when she’d been a gawky nine-year-old, all spidery arms and legs. It had split in two down the middle, but Mom had glued it painstakingly back together. The brown line was still there to see, though, a thin, wavy crack right between the shamrocks.

To somebody else, it might look like an old mended vase, not even good enough to donate. To me, it was a reminder of my mother hugging a weeping Karen and telling her, “You didn’t mean to. You’ll help me mend it, and it’ll be as good as new, you’ll see. A crack is just a place where something got loved extra-hard, and somebody made an effort to fix it.”

That cracked vase would look nothing but out of place on Hemi’s dining-room table or the marble sarcophagus, and it was nothing I could leave behind. Letting it go was good, but Hemi was right that some things, you had to hold on to. For now, I was lifting the lid off the cardboard box and doing my best to keep myself under control.

“It’s been a long time since we looked in here,” Karen said. “I used to want to ask, but…”

“Yeah,” I said. “I wasn’t too good about that.”

“Why? How could you be so tough? It was like you just moved on.”

It was true, and it wasn’t. When we’d come home from the funeral home on a gorgeous May day, I’d packed up my mother’s things, had thrown away the sheets and pillowcases on the double bed because I couldn’t bear to use them, had made it up again, and then had moved Karen and myself into the bedroom.

“Some things,” I said, “you just have to do, because there’s nobody else to do them, you have no choice, and you know they aren’t going to get any easier.” I didn’t want to think about that day anymore, so I reached into the box and picked up the item on top. Unfortunately, it was the tattered scrap of blue that had been Karen’s baby blanket. Blue, because her father had wanted a boy, and had thought that buying blue things would do it. He’d been a big believer that wishing could make it so, as stupid as that had seemed to me even at nine. The baby was already
made,
I’d said, and he’d said, “Nothing is set in stone. You’ve got to believe,” which was just
dumb.
Also unscientific.

“Want it?” I asked Karen.

“No,” she said. “Not really. I don’t remember it. I guess it’s been in the box too long.”

I tried to shove aside the memory of her in her travel-sized crib, tucked between this couch and the wall. Of her waking at five in the morning, aged two, shaking the bars, and saying, “Hope. Want
out. Out,”
in her insistent little voice, until I got up and brought her to sleep on the couch with me, one of her skinny monkey hands clutching her blue blanket, the other one latched onto my pajama sleeve.

I hadn’t needed a security blanket. I’d had Karen. My baby monkey, hanging on.

I set the scrap aside and lifted out a file folder, saying, “We’ll keep this, too, even though we probably don’t need it. Just for memories. For a record.”

Karen opened it. I didn’t look. I knew what it held. Our mother’s birth certificate, and her death certificate. Some letters from her parents that she’d saved. Nothing I needed to see.

While she was looking at the letters, I picked up her blanket, folded it small, and tucked it into the folds of the afghan. It might not mean anything to her, but I couldn’t throw it away like it was trash. It was our past.

The last thing, then. My mother’s photo album. I said, “We’re keeping this, too.”

Karen set it in her lap and said, “Want to look?”

“Not today. You go ahead.” Then I got up and packed the Belleek vase, looked through the cabinets, and thought,
What is there here that I can put into Hemi’s cupboards? What is there that he’d ever want to use? What is there that meets his standards?

Nothing.

I picked up the box again, shoved down the panic that was trying to paralyze me, and said, “I’ll go do the bathroom and under the bed. And I guess I’ll call Charles pretty soon. There’s not much else here that we’re going to need.”