Countdown City: The Last Policeman Book II (Last Policeman Trilogy) (30 page)

“Look at this! Right on time,” she said approvingly, glancing down at her watch. Susan unbuckled Emma and scooped her out so Alex could fold the Maclaren. “I like you people already.”

“Hi!” called Emma, climbing the tall steps with an exaggerated, marching stride, clinging to the banister. “I’m Emma.”

“Of course you are, dear! And a lovelier specimen of Emma I’ve never seen. Did you pick your name?”

“No!” Emma giggled. “My mama and dada picked it.”

“Good for them. My name is Andrea.”

Alex followed Emma, steadying her with a hand at the small of her back, while Susan lingered at the bottom, taking in the facade. The house at 56 Cranberry Street had steep concrete front steps, ascending from a little black wrought-iron gate to the oversized front door, which was painted in a rich and pleasing orangey red. Surrounding the stoop was a front garden, overgrown with azaleas, crab grass, and small flowering trees. The house itself was red brick, with wooden shutters framing neat lines of windows, three per floor. There were window boxes, growing what looked like herbs, in the windows of the first-floor apartment—Andrea’s apartment.

I bet it has pressed-tin ceilings
, thought Susan, and then—suddenly, fiercely—
I really want to live here
. She teased herself as she caught up with Emma and Alex at the top of the steps.

Down, girl. You wanna see the inside first?

“You folks move quickly, I’ll give you that,” said Andrea Scharfstein, shaking their hands briskly. “You called maybe five minutes after I wrote that ad. Or what am I supposed to say? After I ‘posted’ it. Anyway, ten minutes, at the most.” Andrea’s hand in Susan’s was dry and papery. She spoke quickly, with a voice that was thin and the slightest bit gravelly, like she was on the verge of a cough. Beneath the bushy mass of hair, her face was a map of small lines and spots—from her face and body, which was slight and stooped, Susan would have put Andrea at seventy or older. But there was a sharpness and snap about her movements, a vigor that defied her physical appearance.

“Well, follow me, this way, here we go,” Andrea said briskly, turning the handle of the big front door and leaning into it with a thin shoulder. Susan was fleetingly and pleasantly reminded of Willy Wonka leading the wide-eyed contest winners into his chocolate factory for the first time. “Grab that mug for me, Alex. Is it Alex? It is, yes? If I leave a mug out here with even a drop of tea in it, we’ll have ants in no time.”

Emma trotted fearlessly inside, a step ahead of Andrea, looking around in the dimly lit downstairs landing. “Is this your house?” she asked.

“It is,” answered Andrea, patting the girl on the head. “What do you think?”

“It’s really good.”

Andrea took Emma’s hand and helped her up the interior stairs to the second-floor landing.
I want to live here
, Susan thought again, almost defiantly, and this time she didn’t bother to chastise herself. Instead she glanced at Alex, who had paused beneath the one dusty light fixture, a cheap chandelier shedding haphazard illumination on the stairwell. Susan felt like she could read his mind—he was cataloging flaws, looking for reasons to reject this charming and quaint old house.
The stone of the stoop is slightly crumbling; the paint on the door is chipped and fading
.

Susan didn’t care. This was where she wanted to live.

The interior stairway led one flight up and ended at a small carpeted landing with a single door.

“It doesn’t say ‘number two’ on the door,” said Andrea. “I hope that doesn’t bother you. You’d have to be pretty stupid not to find your own apartment. You just come in, come up the stairs.” Susan laughed politely, and Andrea smiled gently at her. “It was one big house, of course, until I lost my husband, Howard. I suppose it’s possible I’m still resistant to the change.”

As Andrea cleared her throat noisily and led them inside, Susan wondered how long ago that change had occurred; how many other tenants had there been? There was something about Andrea that suggested the sturdy, independent spirit of a longtime widow. Following her bent back down the long front hallway of the apartment, Susan felt a wave of sympathy for this woman, smart and lively as she was, growing old and dying here alone.

The door opened onto a hallway that ran lengthwise down the entire apartment, and featured not one but two coat closets. The expansive hallway ended, on the Cranberry Street side, in a bright and cozy kitchen, with granite countertops and a decent, if not overwhelming, amount of pantry space. “So the kitchen’s not eat-in?” asked Alex, and shot a significant look over Andrea’s head, which Susan could easily translate:
not a lot of space for cooking…
.

Susan just smiled. The kitchen in their current apartment was so small, the refrigerator and oven couldn’t be used at the same time, because the doors banged into each other. She ran her fingers along the countertops and crouched to open and close the cupboards while Emma played don’t-step-on-the-crack on the hardwood floor. Above the stove a pair of windows faced onto Cranberry Street, filling the room with gorgeous midmorning sunlight that cast the floorboards in lustrous browns.

“Floor’s maybe a little uneven,” Alex noted, crouching to run his palms disapprovingly along the ground.

Andrea shrugged. “Yes, yes. Actually, Howard was meaning to redo the floors in the whole place, but somehow we never had time.” Alex nodded as he straightened. Susan glanced down; the floors looked A-OK to her.

“This building was first constructed in 1864, the same year as the Brooklyn Bridge. But it’s a solid old thing, and it’s got plenty of character. Much like myself.” She gave Alex a broad, almost vaudevillian wink, then brayed throaty laughter. Alex smiled politely and gave Susan another meaningful glance:
We’re sure we want this old loon as a landlord?
But Susan ignored him and laughed along with Andrea. Emma, too, squealed and hid her mouth behind her hands—at three and a half years old, she loved jokes, even when she had no idea what they were about.

“Oh, by the way, in case you happen to care, the ceiling?” Andrea gestured upward with a thumb. “That’s pressed tin.”

If Susan had any doubts about the apartment, the thing that sold her on it, absolutely and irrevocably—what made her certain in the core of her being that she
had
to live at 56 Cranberry Street #2—was the bonus room.

At the opposite end of the apartment’s first floor from the kitchen, back down the long entrance hallway and through an arch framed by two funky old-fashioned sconces, was the living room, spacious and irregularly rectangular, with light flooding in from two big back windows. The center of the far wall bulged into the room like a semicircular column; it was an odd architectural detail, and at first Susan thought there might be a pillar behind it. Closer inspection revealed it to be an air shaft, separating 56 Cranberry Street from the house next door. It even had two decent-size windows, which let in yet more light.

“Very strange, I know,” said Andrea of the shaft, tapping on one of its windows with a big costume-jewelry gold ring she wore on her pinky. “It runs from the roof all the way down to the basement. You’ll see when we go upstairs, it cuts through the bathroom up there. Lots of light, though, lets in lots of light.”

“Cool,” said Susan, and Alex peered through one of the windows, craning his neck to look up and down the shaft.

“My best guess is, it was a dumbwaiter when this house was first built,” Andrea continued. “Run drinks from the kitchen up to the second floor, that sort of thing. One time a bird got in there somehow and couldn’t get out. Flapped around and made the most pitiful noises until it died. Awful. Just awful.”

Even Alex couldn’t criticize the living room, considering their current apartment didn’t even
have
one. While Andrea stood with hands on hips in the archway and Emma walked the room’s periphery, playing some complicated game of counting steps, Susan slipped next to him and squeezed his hand.

“What are you thinking?” she whispered.

Before he could respond, Andrea strode across the room and pulled open a door in the left rear corner—a small door, painted the same color as the wall, so innocuous that Susan hadn’t even realized it was there.

“Back here is this funny little room,” she said, gesturing them over for a look. “I call it the bonus room, because it’s sort of, you know, a bit of something extra. It’s what we would have called the ‘sewing room,’ when I was a child. Of course, when I was a child we were sewing sweaters for our pet dinosaurs.”

“Pet dinosaurs!” Emma shrieked, raising her hands to her mouth in exaggerated amazement.
“Whaaaat?!”

“This one, I like,” said Andrea, patting Emma on the head while Alex smiled.

Susan stepped into the bonus room. It was barely a room at all, really, more of an overgrown closet, with the one door and a single window, letting in a steady and unbroken stream of golden light.

This is it
, Susan thought, experiencing such a powerful wave of joy that she had to clamp her hands to her mouth to keep from whooping aloud.
This is it!

She’d had second thoughts galore since leaving her job last year. Second thoughts, third thoughts, and more—it seemed so audacious, so unrealistic, so selfish, after all this time to abandon her career and “go back to her painting.” But she had done it. She had worked up the nerve to tell Alex what she was considering and found him to be not only understanding, but incredibly supportive: “Of course,” he’d said. “If that’s what you want, we’ll make it work.” She’d given her notice and gone to Sam’s to supply herself with new brushes, new oils and pastels and turpentine. And then … somehow, the subsequent months had flown by, and Susan found one reason after another to put off starting. She’d gotten involved in a friend’s run for city council, spent a month going door to door with pamphlets, collecting signatures; Emma had been seriously ill for five days, ended up at New York-Presbyterian one harrowing night with an IV line; they’d gone to Alex’s parents for a week in July; and then of course she’d decided their apartment was too small, and they had to move.

Things kept interfering—or, as Susan knew very well, she
let
things keep interfering, so that she wouldn’t have to face this enormous life change she’d set up for herself. But now, in this room …

When she was at Legal Aid, counting the hours until she could go home, feeling like a fraud and a liar, her toes throbbing in her pinchy black work shoes, she would indulge flights of fancy in which she stood painting on a sunny midmorning, bathed in a shaft of sunlight and lost in a cloud of artistic effort. On such occasions it was just this kind of room in which she always imagined herself.

God
, Susan thought, tears welling in her eyes.
I don’t even think it was this
kind
of room. It was this exact room
.

“I didn’t even mention it in the ad,” said Andrea, as she and Alex ducked into the room and stood next to Susan. “I’d feel like a huckster, because you can hardly count it as a room. Good for storage, though. Or a nursery.”

“Or a studio,” Susan said softly.

“Oh? Are you an artist?”

“Well, it’s kind of a long story. I was—I mean, I am. But—”

“Yes,” interrupted Alex, throwing his arm over her shoulder. “She is.”

Emma was getting antsy, so Susan set her up in the center of the empty living room, producing from her oversized pocketbook a box of crayons, a stack of construction paper, and a small snack of dried fruit and cheese.

“Stay in this room, please,” said Alex, and Emma nodded without looking up, already deeply engaged in her coloring.

“My goodness, she’s a happy duck, isn’t she?” said Andrea as she led Susan and Alex up the narrow uncarpeted staircase to the second floor. “Howard and I never had any of our own, but I’ve always loved children. Even the miserable snot-nose types, but especially happy little ducks like yours.”

The second floor was really just two large rooms, a master bedroom and a second bedroom, separated by the staircase landing and a decent linen closet. The upstairs bathroom, where the air shaft ended in a small arced skylight, was large, with room for both a shower stall and a full jetted tub. At the sight of it, Alex whispered a mock-lascivious “hey now” into Susan’s neck, and she nudged him playfully. The master bedroom, like the kitchen downstairs, faced Cranberry Street and was similarly bathed in warm and generous light.