Roomies

one

According to family legend, I was born on the floor of a taxi.

I’m the youngest of six, and apparently Mom went from I have a bit of a cramp, but let me finish making lunch to Hello, Holland Lina Bakker in the span of about forty minutes.

It’s always the first thing I think about when I climb into a cab. I note how I have to shimmy with effort across the tacky seat, how there are millions of neglected fingerprints and unidentifiable smudges clouding the windows and Plexiglas barrier—and how the floor of a cab is a really terrible place for a baby to meet the world.

I slam the taxi door behind me to block out the howling Brooklyn wind. Fiftieth Street station, Manhattan.

The driver’s eyes meet mine in the rearview mirror and I can imagine what he’s thinking: You want to take a cab to the subway in Manhattan? Lady, you could take the C train all the way there for three bucks.

Eighth Ave. and Forty-Ninth Street, I add, ignoring the clawing flush of awareness that I am absurd. Instead of taking the cab all the way home, I’m having the driver take me from Park Slope to a subway stop in Hell’s Kitchen, roughly two blocks from my building. It’s not that I’m particularly safety minded and don’t want this cabbie to know where I live.

It’s that it’s Monday, approximately eleven thirty, and Jack will be there.

At least, he should be. Since I first saw him busking at the Fiftieth Street station nearly six months ago, he’s been there every Monday night, along with Wednesday and Thursday mornings before work, and Friday at lunchtime. Tuesday he’s gone, and I’ve never seen him there on the weekend.

Mondays are my favorite, though, because there’s an intensity in the way he crouches over his guitar, cradling it, seducing it. Music that seems to have been trapped inside all weekend long is freed, broken only by the occasional metallic tumble of pocket change dropped into the open guitar case at his feet, or the roar of an approaching train.

I don’t know what he does in the hours he’s not there. I’m also fairly certain his name isn’t Jack, but I needed to call him something other than the busker, and giving him a name made my obsession seem less pathetic.

Sort of.

The cabbie is quiet; he isn’t even listening to talk radio or any of the other cacophonous car-filler every New Yorker gets used to. I blink away from my phone and the Instagram feed full of books and makeup tutorials, to the mess of sleet and slush on the roads. My cocktail buzz doesn’t seem to be evaporating as quickly as I’d hoped, and by the time we pull up to the curb and I pay the fare, I still have its giddy effervescence simmering in my blood.

I’ve never come to see Jack while drunk before, and it’s either a terrible or a fantastic idea. I guess we’re about to find out which.

Hitting the bottom of the stairs, I catch him tuning his guitar and stop a few feet away, studying him. With his head bowed, and in the beam of the streetlight shooting down the stairs, his light brown hair seems almost silver.

He’s suitably scruffy for our generation, but he looks clean, so I like to think he has a nice apartment and a regular, well-paying job, and does this because he loves it. He has the type of hair I can’t resist, neat and trimmed along the sides but wild and untamed on top. It looks soft, too, shiny under the lights and the kind of hair you want to curl a fist around. I don’t know what color his eyes are because he never looks up at anyone while he plays, but I like to imagine they’re brown or dark green, a color deep enough to get lost in.

I’ve never seen him arrive or leave, because I always walk past him, drop a dollar bill in his case, and keep moving. Then, covertly from the platform, I look over—as do many of us—to where he sits on his stool near the base of the stairs, his fingers flying up and down the neck of the instrument. His left hand pulls out the notes as if it’s as simple as breathing.

Breathing. As an aspiring writer, it’s my least favorite cliché, but it’s the only one that suits. I’ve never seen someone’s fingers move like that, as if he doesn’t even have to think about it. In some ways, it seems like he gives the guitar an actual human voice.

He looks up as I drop a bill into his case, squinting at me, and gives me a quiet Thanks very much.

He’s never done that before—looked up when someone dropped money in his case—and I’m caught completely off guard when our eyes meet.

Green, his are green. And he doesn’t immediately look away. The hold of his gaze is mesmerizing.

So instead of saying, Yeah, or Sure—or nothing at all, like any other New Yorker would—I blurt, Iloveyourmusicsomuch. A string of words breathlessly said as one.

I’m gifted with the humblest flicker of a smile, and my tipsy brain nearly shorts out. He does this thing where he chews on his bottom lip for a second before saying, Do you reckon so? Well, you’re very kind. I love to play it.

His accent is heavily Irish, and the sound of it makes my fingers tingle.

What’s your name?

Three mortifying seconds pass before he answers with a surprised grin. Calvin. And yours?

This is a conversation. Holy shit, I’m having a conversation with the stranger I’ve had a crush on for months.

Holland, I say. Like the province in the Netherlands. Everyone thinks it’s synonymous with the Netherlands, but it’s not.

Oof.

Tonight, I’ve concluded two things about gin: it tastes like pinecones and is clearly the devil’s sauce.

Calvin smiles up at me, saying cheekily, "Holland. A province and a scholar," before he adds something quietly under his breath that I don’t quite make out. I can’t tell if the amused light in his eyes is because I’m an entertaining idiot, or because there’s a person directly behind me doing something awesome.

Having not been on a date in what feels like a millennium, I also don’t know where a conversation should go after this, so I bolt, practically sprinting the twenty feet to the platform. When I come to a halt, I dig in my purse with the practiced urgency of a woman who is used to pretending she has something critical she must obtain immediately.

The word he whispered—lovely—registers about thirty seconds too late.

He meant my name, I’m sure. I’m not saying that in a false-modesty kind of way. My best friend, Lulu, and I agree that, objectively, we’re middle-of-the-pack women in Manhattan—which is pretty great as soon as we leave New York. But Jack—Calvin—gets ogled by every manner of man and woman passing through the station—from the Madison Avenue trustafarians slumming it on the subway to the scrappy students from Bay Ridge; honestly, he could have his pick of bed partners if he ever took the time to look up at our faces.

To confirm my theory, a quick glance in my compact mirror reveals the clownish bleed of my mascara below my eyes and a particularly ghoulish lack of color in the bottom half of my face. I reach up and attempt to smooth the tangle of brown strands that every other moment of my life are straight and lifeless, but have presently escaped the confines of my ponytail and defy gravity around my head.

Lovely, at present, I am not.

Calvin’s music returns, and it fills the quiet station in this echoing, haunting way that actually makes me feel even drunker than I thought I was. Why did I come here tonight? Why did I speak to him? Now I have to realign all these things in my brain, like his name not being Jack and his eyes having a defined color. The knowledge that he is Irish just about makes me feel crazy enough to go climb on his lap.

Ugh. Crushes are the worst, but in hindsight a crush from afar seems so much easier than this. I should stick to making up stories in my head and watching from a distance like a reasonable creeper. Now I’ve broken the fourth wall and if he’s as friendly as his eyes tell me he is, he may notice me when I drop money in his case the next time, and I will be forced to interact smoothly or run in the opposite direction. I may be middle-of-the-pack when my mouth is closed, but as soon as I start talking to men, Lulu calls me Appalland, for how appallingly unappealing I become. Obviously, she’s not wrong. And now I’m sweating under my pink wool coat, my face is melting, and I’m hit with an almost uncontrollable urge to hike my tights up to my armpits because they have slowly crept down beneath my skirt and are starting to feel like form-fitting harem pants.

I should really go for it and just shimmy them up my waist, because other than one comatose gentleman sleeping on a nearby bench, it’s just me and Calvin down here, and he’s not paying attention to me anymore.

But then the sleeping gentleman rises, zombielike, and takes one shuffling step toward me. Subway stations are awful when they’re empty like this. They’re caves for the leches, the harassers, the flashers. It isn’t that late—not even midnight on a Monday—but I’ve clearly just missed a train.

I move to my left, farther down the platform, and pull out my phone to look busy. Alas, I should know that drunk and persistent men are often not swayed by the industrious presence of an iPhone, and the zombie comes closer.

I don’t know if it’s the tiny spike of fear in my chest or a draft passing through the station, but I’m hit with the cloying, briny smell of mucus; the sour rot of spilled soda sitting for months at the bottom of a trash bin.

He lifts a hand, pointing. You have my phone.

Turning, I give him a wide berth as I circle back toward the stairs and Calvin. My thumb hovers over Robert’s phone number.

He follows. "You. Come here. You have my phone."

Without bothering to look up, I say as calmly as possible, Get the hell away from me.

I push Robert’s name and hold the phone to my ear. It rings hollowly, one ring for every five of my pounding heartbeats.

Calvin’s music swells, aggressively now. Does he not see this person following me around the station? I have the absurd thought that it really is remarkable how deeply he gets in the zone while playing.

The man starts this shuffling, lurching run in my direction and the notes tearing out of Calvin’s guitar become a soundtrack for the lunatic chasing me down the platform. My tights keep me from running with any amount of speed or grace, but his clunky run speeds up, turns more fluid with confidence.

Through the phone, I hear the tinny sound of Robert answering. "Hey, Buttercup."

Holy crap, Robert. I’m at the—

The man reaches out, his hand wrapping around the sleeve of my coat, jerking my phone away from my ear.

Robert!

"Holls? Robert yells. Honey, where are you?"

I grapple, trying to hold on because I have the sickening sense that I’m off balance. Dread sends a cold, sobering rush along my skin: the man is not helping me stay upright—he’s shoving me.

In the distance, I hear a deep shout: Hey!

My phone skitters along the concrete. "Holland?"

It happens so fast—and I guess things like this always happen fast; if they happened slowly I’d like to think I’d do something, anything—but one second I’m on the nubby yellow warning line, and the next I’m falling onto the tracks.

two

I’ve never been inside an ambulance before, and it’s just as mortifying to snort awake in front of two sober professionals as I’d imagine it would be. A female paramedic with a permanent furrow etched into her forehead stares down at me, expression severe. Monitors beep. When I look around, my head becomes a rocket ship, counting down to some manner of combustive event. My arm is sore—no, not just sore, screaming. A glance down tells me it’s already restrained in a sling.

With the distant roar of an oncoming train, I remember being pushed onto the tracks.

Someone pushed me onto the subway tracks!

My heart begins doing a chaotic version of kung fu in my chest and the panicked tempo is echoed by the various machines surrounding me. I sit up, struggling against the monumental wave of nausea, and croak, Did you catch him?

Whoa, whoa. With concern in her eyes, the paramedic—her name tag reads ROSSI—gently urges me back down. You’re okay. She nods at me with confidence. You’re okay.

And then she presses a card into my hand.

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

1-800-273-8255

I flip it over, wondering if the other side says,

Who to call when a drunk dude pushes you onto the tracks

Unfortunately, it does not.

I look back up at her, feeling my face heat in indignation. "I didn’t jump."

Rossi nods. It’s okay, Ms. Bakker. She misreads my mystified expression and adds, We got your name from your purse, which we recovered just off the platform.

He didn’t take my purse?

She presses her lips into a frown and I look around for backup. There are actually two paramedics here—the other is a scruffy Paramedic of the Month calendar-model type who is diligently charting something from where he stands just outside the ambulance. His name tag reads GONZALES. Beyond, a cop car is parked at the curb, and a pair of officers chat amiably near the open driver’s-side door. I can’t help but feel this isn’t the smoothest way to intervene in a potential suicide situation: I’ve just pig-snorted, my skirt is awkwardly bunched near my hips, the crotch of my tights is somewhere south of the equator, and my shirt is unbuttoned to make room for the adhesive cardiac monitors. A suicidal individual might suffer a touch of humiliation here.

Scooching my skirt down with as much grace as I can manage, I repeat, I didn’t jump.

Gonzales looks up from his paperwork and leans against the ambulance door. We found you there, sweetie.

I screw my eyes closed, growling at his condescension. This still doesn’t add up. Two paramedics just happened to be wandering through the subway right after I fell onto the tracks?

He gives me a tiny flicker of a smile. Anonymous caller. Said there was someone on the tracks. Didn’t mention anyone pushing her. Nine times out of ten it’s an attempt.

Anonymous caller.

CALVIN.

I see movement just outside the ambulance, at the curb. It’s dark out, but it’s definitely him, holy shit, and I see him just as he stands. Calvin meets my eyes for the briefest pulse before startling and jerking his face away. Without another look back, he turns to walk down Eighth Avenue.

Hey! I point. "Wait. Talk to him."

Gonzales and Rossi slowly turn.

Rossi makes no move to stand, and I stab my finger forward again. "That guy."

"He pushed you?" Gonzales asks.

No, I think he’s the one who called.

Rossi shakes her head; her wince is less sympathetic, more pitying. That guy walked up after we arrived on scene, said he didn’t know anything.

He lied. I struggle to sit up farther. Calvin!

He doesn’t stop. If anything, he speeds up, ducking behind a taxicab before jogging across the street.

He was there, I tell them, bewildered. Jesus, how much did I drink? It was me, that busker—Calvin—and a drunk man. The drunk guy was going for my phone, and shoved me off the platform.

Gonzales tilts his head, gesturing to the cops. In that case, you should file a police report.

I can’t help it—the rudeness just flies out of me: "You think?"

I’m given another flicker of a smile; no doubt it’s because I don’t look the part of a ballsy back-talker with my saggy tights and unbuttoned shirt with pink polka dots.

Holland, we suspect your arm is broken. Gonzales climbs inside and adjusts a strap on my sling. And you may have a concussion. Our priority now is getting you down to Mount Sinai West. Is there anyone who can meet you there?

Yeah. I need to call Robert and Jeff—my uncles. I look up at Gonzales, remembering how my phone was in my hand one moment, and I was being flung onto the tracks the next. Did you also find my phone?

He winces and looks up at Rossi, who gives me her first—apologetic—grin. I hope you have their number memorized. She lifts up a Ziploc bag holding the shattered remains of my beloved device.

Once my head is checked (no concussion) and my right arm is casted (fractured ulna), I file a police report from my hospital bed. It’s only when I’m speaking to the two intensely intimidating officers that I register that I was avoiding making eye contact with the man grabbing me. I didn’t get a good look at his face, though I can quite accurately describe his smell.

The cops exchange a look before the taller one asks me, The guy got close enough to grab your jacket, yell at you, and shove you over onto the tracks, but you didn’t see his face?

I want to scream, Obviously you have never been a woman running away from a creepy dude before!, but instead let them move on. I can tell from their expressions that my lack of a physical description dissolves the credibility of my I-didn’t-jump story, and in the wake of this mild humiliation I decide it would seem even more suspicious if I knew the name of the busker at the subway and he still failed to stick around to help me out. So I don’t bother to mention Calvin by name, either, and they jot down my generic details with only the vaguest display of investment.

After they leave, I lie back, staring up at the blank gray ceiling. What a crazy night. I lift my good arm, squinting at my watch.

Morning.

Holy shit, it’s nearly three. How long was I down there?

Above the dull throb that painkillers don’t seem to dim, I keep seeing Calvin standing up from where he’d been waiting at the curb. It means something that he was still there when I came to, doesn’t it? But if he was the anonymous caller—and I assume he must have been because we all know the zombie didn’t have a phone—why didn’t Calvin tell the police that someone pushed me? And why lie and tell them he wasn’t a witness?

The telltale rushing click of dress shoes on linoleum crescendoes from the hallway, and I sit up, knowing what’s coming.

Robert bursts past the curtain, followed more smoothly by Jeff.

"What. The. Fuuuuuuuck. Robert stretches the last word into about seventeen syllables, and takes my face in his hands, leaning in, examining me. Do you realize how freaked out we’ve been?"

Sorry. I wince, feeling my chin wobble for the first time. My phone got knocked out of my hand.

Seeing my family’s panic makes the shock set in, and I start shaking wildly. Emotion rises like a salty tide in my chest. Robert leans in, pressing his lips to my cheek. Jeff steps closer, too, resting a gentle hand on my knee.

Although he isn’t related to me by blood, I’ve known Uncle Robert my entire life; he met my mother’s younger brother Jeff several years before I was born.

Uncle Jeff is the calm one; it’s the midwesterner in him. He is steady, and rational, and deliberate. He is, you may have guessed, in finance. Robert, by contrast, is motion and sound. He was born in Ghana, and moved here when he was eighteen to attend the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Jeff tells me that Robert had ten job offers when he finished, but he chose the position of youngest-ever concertmaster of the Des Moines Symphony because the two of them fell in love at first sight the weekend Robert was in town interviewing.

My uncles left Des Moines when I was sixteen and headed to Manhattan. By that point, Robert had been promoted out of the ensemble to become the conductor of the symphony. Moving off-Broadway, even as a musical director, was a big step down for him in pay and classical prestige, but musical theater is where Robert’s heart beats, and—maybe more importantly for them—it’s long been much easier for a dude to be happily married to a dude in New York than in Iowa. They have thrived here, and two years ago, Robert sat down and composed what would soon become the most popular production on Broadway, It Possessed Him.

Unwilling to live away from them for long, I came to Columbia for my MFA in creative writing, but have basically stalled out. Being a baby graduate with an MFA in New York makes me a mediocre guppy in an enormous school of brilliant fish. Without an idea for the Great American Novel or any aptitude for journalism, I was virtually unemployable.

Robert, my savior, got me a job in theater.

My official title is archivist—admittedly a strange role for a twenty-five-year-old with zero Broadway experience—and given that we already have a million photos of the production for the program, I’m keenly aware that this job was created solely as a favor to my uncle. Once or twice a week I’ll walk around, randomly taking pictures of sets, costumes, and backstage antics for the press agency to use on social media. Four nights a week, I work front of the house selling It Possessed Him T-shirts.

But unfortunately, I can’t imagine dealing with the wild bustle of intermission or holding my gigantic camera with only one good arm, and it punches an additional gust of guilt deep into my belly.

I am so useless.

I pull one of the pillows out from under my head and let loose a few screams into it.

What’s going on, Buttercup? Robert pulls the pillow away. Do you need more medicine?

"I need more purpose."

He laughs to dismiss this, bending to kiss my forehead. Jeff’s gentle hand slips into one of mine in quiet solidarity. But Jeff—sweet, sensible, number-crunching Jeff—has found a love for throwing clay in the past year. At least he has the passion for pottery pushing him forward through the tedium of a Wall Street workday. I have nothing but my love for books other people have written, and the anticipation of seeing Calvin play guitar a few days a week at the Fiftieth Street station. After tonight’s stunt, I’m not even sure I’ll feel that anymore. The next time I see him, I’ll be less inclined to swoon, and more inclined to get up in his face and ask why he allowed me to be thrown under the proverbial bus. Or train, as it were.

Maybe I’ll go back to Des Moines while this fracture heals and take some time to think about what I really want to do with my degrees, because when it comes to liberal arts, one useless degree plus another useless degree equals zero jobs.

I look up at my uncles. Did you call Mom and Dad?

Jeff nods. They asked if they should come out.

I laugh despite my dark mood. I’m sure that without even seeing the extent of my injuries, Jeff told them not to worry. My parents hate the urban bluster of New York so much that even if I were broken in half, in traction, it would still be better for everyone if they stayed in Iowa. Certainly it would be less stressful for me.

Finally, Jeff eases down on the mattress next to me and glances up at Robert.

I notice that Jeff licks his lips before he asks something difficult. I wonder whether he knows he does it. So, what happened, Hollsy?

You mean, why did I end up on the C line tracks?

Robert gives me a knowing look. Yes. And since I’m confident the little suicide intervention advice we were just given in the waiting room was unnecessary, maybe you can tell us how you fell.

A guy cornered me. He wanted my phone and when I got too close to the tracks, he shoved me over.

Robert’s jaw drops. That’s what was happening when you called?

Jeff’s cheeks go brilliant red. Did you file a—

Police report? Yeah, I tell him. But he was wearing a hoodie, and you know how making eye contact with crazies only encourages them, so I couldn’t say much other than that he was white, probably in his thirties, bearded, and drunk.

Jeff laughs dryly. Sounds like most of Brooklyn on a Friday night.

I turn my eyes to Robert. A train had just left, so there weren’t any other witnesses.

Not even Jack? Both uncles know about my subway crush.

I shake my head. His name is Calvin. Answering the question that forms in their eyes, I say, I’d had a couple cocktails and asked him.

Robert grins down at me. Liquid courage.

Liquid idiocy.

His eyes narrow. But you’re telling me Calvin didn’t see anything?

That’s what he told the paramedics, but I think he was the one who called them.

Robert slides a sturdy arm around me, helping me up. Well, you’ve been cleared to leave. He kisses the side of my head and utters six perfect words: You’re coming home with us tonight.

three

I’m lucky enough to live alone in Manhattan—an absurd rarity, and owed entirely to the generosity of my uncles. Robert, for the job, of course, and Jeff because he makes a crap ton of money and pays a pretty big chunk of my rent. But as much as I love living in my little apartment, I’ll admit I’m glad to not be there tonight. Going home with a broken arm to my small but lovely space would only remind me that I am a useless, phoneless, privileged heap of bones who is so pitiful she let a drunk dude harass her and push her off a subway platform. Being at Jeff and Robert’s is cushy, but at least here I can scrounge up minimal value: after some sleep, I am the board game companion Jeff wishes he would find in Robert. I am the absurd singer-along Robert always wants in his company. And even with one arm, I am the cook that neither of them will ever be.

Jeff takes Tuesday off to make sure I’m okay, and when we’re all up and moving, around noon, I whip up a decent eggs Benedict for the three of us. Even with only one good arm I manage a better outcome than either of them would have. Robert fell in love with the dish sometime back in the nineties, and as soon as I was competent with a blender and frying pan he informed me that it needed to be my specialty because there is Hollandaise sauce on it. Get it? Get it? he always adds.

Jeff and I still groan every