It’s never been so easy to drive into the city. Traffic was backed up heading into New Jersey and freedom, but almost no one was heading into the city. Too late to turn back.
“You shouldn’t go,” my ex-husband, Dennis, who still cared, told me. “Haven’t you seen the news?”
Yes, the mobs were surging up and down the avenues in Manhattan. The only stores still open were supermarkets and drug stores, protected by nervous National Guardspeople, who also rode the supply trucks that kept them open. Bonfires burned in intersections, fed by the spindly trees and sad looted merchandise that nobody wanted, not even poor people. It was even worse in Brooklyn, and in Queens the blue-collar folks had thrown up barricades and were engaged in pitched battles with mobs testing their neighborhoods. Others had fled to Long Island, which was only letting in middle-class people in cars. Staten Island was shut down completely. The mayor had fled to Washington weeks ago, where she pleaded with the Administration for aid, wandering the halls of Congress like a ghost.
“I know, but she asked for help.”
“Maybe it’s time for your sister to finally grow up,” Dennis retorted.
“It’s a bad time to finally grow up,” I quipped. I wished my brother Jeff and his family had bothered to take Laura with them to their Poconos retreat, but they said they didn’t want to drive from the West Side to the East Side, even before the riots began.
Neither Dennis or Jeff saw the faces of our long-dead parents in his dreams, saying for the thousandth time, “If only Laura would get better…if only…” They had given years off their lives to tend and support our youngest sister, who traveled from one mysterious illness to another. Any suggestion she might be exploiting their generosity was met with, “she’s a very hard worker, you know. She does a lot for us too!” Yes, she had been a waitress one summer in the Hamptons thirty years ago before succumbing to Stay Home Illness.
When they finally died, leaving her with a trust fund that I dutifully administered, Jeff was done. Laura got the money, I got the responsibility, and he got to wash his hands of the irritating business. Someday—not too many years off—I would die and I believed, see Mom and Dad in heaven. They might ask, why didn’t you rescue Laura when she needed you?
“I have no food in the house. There’s no pet food in the stores,” she texted.
“Buzzy is still around?” When I last seen Laura four years ago, the dog, which was the size and weight of two damp cotton balls, and resembled them, was already ancient. I wished it no harm. The way things were going in the country, it might outlive us all, like the shaggy Human Condition in the novel The Singapore Grip, the dog undaunted even by the Japanese invasion.
“Buzzy is all I have since Mom and Dad left me. Nobody else is around. Nobody cares.”
“How many years have I been telling you to come down here to Virginia?” I typed furiously. “If I come now, will you come back with me? You won’t change your mind at the last sec?”
“Please come and get me.” That was three days ago.
So now I was entering Hades. The Glock was in the glove compartment. The plan was to pull up in front of the building, Laura would come down with the dog and a suitcase, and we’d scram.
My phone app told me how to avoid the bonfires. It noted a police presence on 57th Street, which was reassuring. It was broad daylight, which was safer. Still, I knew better than to drive through Central Park to reach the East Side. The park had become a giant encampment of the dispossessed and the criminal. They roamed like vicious sheep over the roadways that linked the East and West Sides, using their mass to stop vehicles and rob or beat their occupants. I took 57th Street eastbound, which was mostly empty except for knots of heroin addicts dozing on the sidewalks, and was relieved when I crossed Fifth into what was marginally the better part of Gotham. A group of NYPD officers stood on a corner yellow taping a crime scene. Radio stations broadcast nationally syndicated talk shows, but the local stations were spotty. “Next up, interview with the chairman of The Manhattan People’s Collective, the new official government of the Chelsea and Greenwich Village areas.”
I pulled in front of the building. No doormen, I thought at first, an inconceivable prospect. But yes, one was lurking behind the darkened glass. No longer did they dare to stand outside to confront the unruly and ill intentioned. They had retreated behind the lines.
I called upstairs. No answer. Shit, she had answered two hours ago and said she was ready. I waited two minutes, in case she was in the bathroom, and called again. If she’s changed her mind, I will kill her this time. I swear.
Now I realized I needed to go into the building. I holstered the Glock, pulled on a jacket to cover it and approached the building. Once this had been among the finest buildings on the block, if not the oldest. Very respectable, but too close to First Avenue to be really elite. The door was closed. I waved at the doorman inside. He shook his head. I pointed upward, as if to say, “I’m supposed to be here!” A homeless man in rags, naked to the waist, turned the corner and lighted on me, a possible source of money, if money still mattered.
Sometimes it’s helpful to be a white woman in late middle age. The doorman cautiously opened the door a crack, and I recognized the friendly Haitian doorman from five years ago when I had last visited. He looked frightened, if not of me personally, and his once-immaculate uniform was askew. “Katie VanDevere, remember? I’m here to get my sister.” I used my maiden name; Allen would have meant nothing to him. But the VanDevere family had lived here forty years now, even though we were much more ordinary than the grand name would suggest. Our father had made his money in dry cleaning, not beaver pelts.
Thank goodness the doorman, Herve, finally recognized me, and ushered me in, locking the door behind us.
“Hi Miss VanDevere, good to see you. You shouldn’t have come up here from North Carolina. No, Virginia? It’s the end of days here. I run to the subway every night and then I pray I can get back to the Bronx without having to shoot someone. I wish I could go to Virginia.”
“She’s not answering the phone, I’m going to go up and check.”
“Regular elevator is broken, I’m sorry. Most residents are gone. I keep coming because they keep paying me.”
So I walked up 15 flights with my bad knee. The apartment wasn’t locked, so after knocking briskly, I walked in. Buzzy ran up to me jumping and squeaking. A kitten could have dispatched him, so I paid him no attention. “Laura?” I called out.
The place was the usual crazy-person mess. Stale-smelling laundry in huge piles, which was normal for Laura even before the elevators broke (“I have no one to wash it for me!”) The pads thick with dog pee in the corners. The counter was covered in bottles of green and orange health juices and bottles of vitamin and other supplements. The dishwasher hadn’t worked in years. There was a big TV with the leftist news channel on silently in the background. “Trump Still Bad,” was the chyron, or something like it.
My sister was lying, sprawled on the bed in a T-shirt and sweatpants, her graying red hair arrayed around her head. A pill bottle, its cap ajar, stood on the night table next to her.
God-damn, if she’s killed herself and called me up here to witness it, I’ll kill her again, I swore.
I felt her pulse, which seemed normal enough. Her eyes opened as I called her name.
“Hey, are you coming with me or not?”
“Oh yes, I forgot,” she said.
“I just called you two hours ago to say I was getting close to the city. How do you forget in two hours?”
Of course she hadn’t packed, so while she watched me from the bed, I threw a bunch of clothes and underwear in a bag. “You’ve got something to carry Buzzy in?” She stumbled off the bed, found the fancy dog-bag and plaid coat, and some remaining cans of dog food. “You got a leash?” She threw about two dozen vitamin and other bottles into another shopping bag.
“Purse? Wallet? Laptop? Charger? Medicaid card?”
I asked her to lock the apartment, even though it might have been a good idea to invite a rampaging mob to clean out the junk. Or maybe the mob would think someone else had already scavenged it and just move on.
You’d think it would be easier going downstairs than upstairs, but not so with arthritic knees.
Five years ago, no bum would have dared linger in front of this awning, not even dared walk by, but now two of them were jiggling the doors of the SUV. Herve skulked inside the building, no doubt—we hadn’t even seen him to say goodbye on the exit. Maybe it was his break.
“Get owder hear!” I yelled at them, summoning what remained of my New York accent. Buzzy squeak-barked.
They sneered at me in their drug-induced haze and shambled off, muttering under their breath. I was glad I hadn’t had to escalate.
We clambered into the van and sped off. Miraculously, no one kept us from getting on the Mayor Eric Adams Drive, formerly the FDR Drive, and soon we were in a slow-moving but steady line of vehicles heading north and out of the city. The plan was to head into Westchester, cross the Tappan Zee, and somehow get into Pennsylvania before heading south to Scranton and York and into Maryland. Yes, it was a crazy roundabout route, but safest.
Laura slumped against the seat, relieved. “Thank you,” she said. “I really appreciate it.”
“You’re welcome. You’ll feel better once you’re in a normal place.”
“I’ve arranged for video conferences with all my doctors while I’m away.”
“Good.” But I didn’t want to spend the next six hours discussing her favorite topic, her health.
“I was supposed to have surgery for the pectoris. But my doctor left town and the other doesn’t take Medicaid. And then my hair started falling out because of my sleep medication.” Her hair seemed a little thin, but nothing dramatic. I didn’t want to ask about her pectoris, whatever that was. She got the message, and asked, “How’s Dennis?”
“He’s fine. He comes over for dinner a few nights a month and then in return he takes me out to dinner a few nights. He’s still working at the treatment facility.”
“I don’t understand why you two got divorced. You still get along. If somebody was willing to take me out to dinner a few nights a month, I’d marry him.” And then a few minutes later, the lament, “I wish I had family. Nobody takes care of me.” It took all the willpower I had to not tell her, “You always think that family is staff, that family is about helping you. And what do you call what I’m doing now? Am I not family?”
Not to mention, Laura just is too self-absorbed to realize that when you have family members, then you have more responsibilities, not fewer. You have to nurse your husband’s mother when she moves into your small house because she is trying to save money and postponing the Medicaid nursing home stay. You have to rescue your daughter from the abusive boyfriend, and protect her for months while you hope the restraining order works. You spent hours helping your ex-stepson with his schoolwork. He’s now a sophomore at Tech, and he calls me “Mom.” I’m not complaining. But if you think of other people as staff, you don’t understand that family obligations work both ways. You give something, you get something. You give nothing, and there you are with a lot of social media friends sending you heart emojis but nothing else. And then fewer.
Over the Tappan Zee Bridge into Rockland County. We stop at a diner.
“I can’t eat most solid foods,” Laura warns. She plans to bring her green vitamin shake into the restaurant.
“I can, and I’m hungry, and I will.”
The diner was mostly empty. I scanned the menu, with its long lists of abundance. Whatever you wanted to eat, as long as it was Western civilization food, they had.
The waitress warned us that “a lot of the items aren’t available. Supply chain issues this week. And last week.”
“What do you recommend?”
“We got a nice pot roast. Chicken noodle soup. Broccoli and mashed potato OK?” This is all OK. The waitress turns to Laura, who quails at our gaze.
“I’ll take a cup of the chicken soup too, thank you. Can you give me a cup without too many noodles, and more broth? Do you have a low-salt version?”
By the time I’ve finished what is really a good meal under the circumstances, Laura has gone outside to walk Buzzy, and then she sits on the bench and breathes fresh air with Buzzy leashed, at her feet. She is feeding him chicken scraps. The excursion is already doing both of them good.
“Look, Katie, a kitten!”
A scrawny orange kitten, about Buzzy’s size, is watching Laura feed the dog. Its blue eyes are wide with wonder, or hunger, hope, or all three. It comes closer.
“I don’t think it has a mother around,” I said. I don’t like people much, but even I can feel sorry for an abandoned kitten.
Laura tosses a few scraps its way, and the kitten gobbles them up. She pours some water into Buzzy’s spare dish, and places the dish halfway between the two animals. Buzzy squeaks angrily at the taxation.
And you know, ten minutes we’re driving off with that damned kitten too, right? “Mraow! Mraow!” from the cat now in a cardboard box emptied of Laura’s blender parts. “Eek Eeek!” from the dog in its bag. Laura had said, “oh, we can’t leave the kitten behind!” So we asked the host in the diner whether he knew the kitten had a mother, and he said, “haven’t seen any other cats. Maybe it got thrown out of a car on the road there.” He pointed up towards the highway.
“Katie, they threw it out of a car!” She decided to name it Molly. If it turned out to be male, she said, it could become Milo.
West of Port Jervis, driving into Pennsylvania, it’s getting late. The motel I thought we could stay at has closed. Could we, I, make it to Scranton? The light is fading. I’m fading. The adrenalin just washed out of me. Laura doesn’t have a driver’s license anymore, and I won’t trust her behind my wheel. Then I remember that Jeff’s retreat is only about fifty miles from here. He and Adina won’t turn us away. They won’t be thrilled to see us, but they won’t turn us away. I try to call his cell phone, just to warn him, but no answer. Hopefully they’re not in the Bahamas. Jeff’s a hedge fund manager with a laptop that can go anywhere.
We exit 64 and head south, toward Honesdale. “Have a pill,” Laura offers me, “it’s good if you need to stay awake.” I eye it suspiciously but she promises me it will help. And so it does. An hour later, we’re pulling into Jeff’s driveway. The house is dark.
“Oh shit,” I said, for the hundredth time that day. We jump down from the trunk and ring the doorbell. I call Jeff again. He answers, to my relief. They’re in Boca, eating dinner. I hear the clinking of dishes and the conversation hum from adjoining tables. I can almost hear the hum of money. “Florida’s safe,” he tells me, “I’d get as far south as I could if I were you.”
“We are,” I say, explaining that I had needed to rescue Laura. Jeff isn’t sympathetic. “Your call,” But he disconnects the security system remotely and unlocks the door. Before we go in the house, we let the animals pee. I find a plastic bin and fill it with sand for the kitten from the back of the truck. Adina will have a fit if the cat pees on her Sumatran black walnut floors.
The house is stuffy, but we turn on the AC, and I change the sheets on two beds.
“My allergies are acting up!” Laura cries, “There’s vinyl in the house, I can tell.”
“Nonsense,” I reply, “Adina would never have something as declasse as vinyl in this house. But feel free to open your window.” Milo and Buzzy are tentatively exploring the kitchen. They seem to have reached a cross-species détente, acknowledging their mutual helplessness in the face of human catastrophe.
There’s a dead squirrel stinking up the mudroom, so I remove it.
In the morning, after 10, I trudge downstairs. Laura’s door is closed, so I assume she’s still sleeping. But no, I hear a man’s voice and hers, in the kitchen. I retrieve the Glock from the bedroom and creep down the stairs.
“Katie? It’s all right, come on down.”
Buzzy and Molly are eating breakfast and my sister’s sitting at the table with a derelict. He’s a gaunt, bearded middle-aged guy. I smell cigarettes and body odor. Laura’s drinking a green shake and he’s eating frozen waffles from my brother’s fridge.
“This is Scott. He’s been living in the garden shed. Scott, this is my sister Katie, who came to New York to rescue me yesterday.”
“Came to check out the house when I saw movement, just to make sure everything was ok,” Scott said, in a pleasantly surprising bass voice, as if Jeff had hired him as the caretaker. “Ma’am, you don’t need to shoot me. I mean no one any harm.”
“Please put that gun away, Katie.”
“You’re a good sister, Miss Katie. I wouldn’t go into New York these days. Haven’t been there since they discharged me from the Navy back in ’92.” He paused, “Honorable.” He picks up Molly and starts stroking her fur. Buzzy circles around his calves.
Scott has made coffee and heats up some waffles for me as well. He tells me his story. He’s a carpenter, works on several local crews when they need an extra set of hands. But he doesn’t work enough to rent an apartment, not even around here. “It’s really depressed. If it weren’t for the summer people, there wouldn’t be any work at all.” He was evicted several months ago from his apartment, and then remembered this little garden shed. “I helped put in these cabinets here,” he said proudly, pointing at the oak doors with the brass knobs.
“They’re very nice,” I acknowledge.
“I want to get away from here. I want to start over,” Scott says. “I’m going to stop drinking alone.”
And you know how this all ends, right? Me and Laura and Buzzy and Molly and Scott all in my truck heading south. I make Scott take a shower before we drove away. He brought a suitcase out from the garden shed with his clothes. He probably won’t strangle us, not on 95 South. I’m actually kind of relaxed, for the first time in days, or maybe weeks. Que sera sera and all that.
Scott can stay with Dennis for a few days; they can talk about the navy and whether Queen or Journey is the better band. Laura and Scott are laughing together and giving each other sly looks. I have a good feeling about this, but maybe it’s just what happens when you leave New York and you give life a chance.