Melody couldn’t believe the miracle of a handheld device that allowed her to track Nora’s and Louisa’s precise whereabouts as long as they had their phones. And they were teenagers; they always had their phones. As the map started to appear, she felt the familiar panicky palpitations until the tiny, blue pulsating circles and the word Found! popped up at the top of the screen, showing the girls exactly where they were supposed to be, at the SAT tutoring center uptown.
They’d been taking the weekend classes for over a month, and usually Melody tracked their morning progress from her kitchen table, watching the blue dots slowly glide north from Grand Central according to her meticulous directions: From the train station, they should take the Madison Avenue bus to Fifty-Ninth Street where they would disembark and walk west to the tutoring center on Sixty-Third just off Columbus. They were not to walk along the park side, but were supposed to walk on the south side of the street, passing by the parade of uniformed doormen, who would hear them scream for help if they were in trouble. They were strictly forbidden from entering Central Park or deviating from their route. Melody put the fear of God into them every week, filling their heads with stories of girls being snatched or lost, forced into prostitution or murdered and dumped in the river.
“The Upper West Side is not exactly Calcutta,” her husband, Walter, would gently argue. But she got scared. The thought of them wandering the city without her protecting their flank made her heart thud, her palms sweat. They were sweating now. When they’d all disembarked at Grand Central that morning, she hadn’t wanted to let them go. On a Saturday, the terminal was full with tourists checking guidebooks and train schedules and trying to find the Whispering Gallery. She’d kissed them good-bye and had watched until she could no longer see the backs of their heads—one blonde, the other brunette. They didn’t look like visitors; there was nothing tentative about how they moved through the crowd. They looked like they belonged to the city, which filled Melody with dread. She wanted them to belong to her, to stop getting older. They didn’t confide every last thought or desire or worry anymore; she didn’t know their hearts and minds the way she used to. Melody knew that letting them grow and go was the proper order of life. She wanted them to be strong and independent and happy—more than anything she wanted them to be happy—but that she no longer had a fix on their inner workings made her light-headed. If she couldn’t be sure how they were moving through the world, she could at least watch them move through the world, right there in the palm of her hand. She could at least have that.
“Leo’s never paying you back,” Walter had said as she was leaving for the train station. “You’re all dreaming, wasting your time.”
Though Melody feared he was right, she had to believe he wasn’t. They’d borrowed a lot of money to buy their house, a tiny but historic building on one of their town’s most beautiful streets, only to watch the economy collapse and property values sink. The fluctuating interest rate was about to rise on the mortgage they already couldn’t afford. With little equity in the house, they couldn’t refinance. College was approaching and they had next to nothing in the bank; she’d been counting on The Nest.
Out on the street, Melody watched people tug off their gloves and unwind scarves, lift their faces to the sun. She felt a tiny surge of satisfaction knowing that she could spend the entire afternoon indoors if she wanted. The main reason Melody loved the bar at the Hyatt was because she could access it through an underpopulated, nondescript hallway connecting the hotel to Grand Central. When it was time for lunch, she’d return to the terminal through her secret corridor and head downstairs to the Oyster Bar. She would spend hours in New York City and not have to step one sensibly shod foot onto pavement, could entirely avoid breathing the Manhattan air, which she always pictured as rife with gray particulate. During her and Walt’s brief stint living in Upper (upper) Manhattan where the twins were born, she’d waged a ferocious, losing battle with the city’s soot. No matter how many times she wiped the woodwork with a dampened cloth, the flecks of black would reappear, sometimes within hours. Minus any verifiable source, the residue was worrisome to her. It felt like a physical manifestation of the city’s decay, all the teeming masses being worn down to grimy, gray window dust.