Whole Latte Life (13 page)

“Maybe I should have brought her husband in from the start and let him handle this.”

“Why didn’t you?” Michael asks.

“I don’t know. Her note asked that I keep this secret, and we’ve always done little favors like that for each other.”

“Rachel, this is pretty big.”

“Oh, so were the others. I mean, you would think they were little, but they weren’t.”

They are on the eighty-sixth floor observatory of the Empire State Building, standing side by side above the city. The wind always blows this high up, but this wind has spring in it, and a little of the sunshine left to the May day while dusk falls.

“Like I took her daughters on day trips after she brought the new baby home. She had a hard time adjusting to Owen. And when my daughter was born,” Rachel smiles with the memory, “I was young and overwhelmed with being a new mother. The hardest thing was making supper, so Sara froze two weeks of dinners for me. I know, big deal, she cooked some dinners. But at the time, it saved my sanity.” She looks at him. “That’s why I’m waiting. Maybe I’m saving her sanity.”

The sun starts setting, leaving the streets below looking like silver ribbons. Building lights come on, twinkling like stars. Michael points out a few landmarks before asking Rachel what she keeps putting off herself. “It seems that by waiting for her, you believe she’ll come back. What if she doesn’t?” He takes her arm and steers her around a group of tourists passing too closely.

“I can’t even think about that. I feel bad that I knew something was off with her, but I let it go, thinking it was just a rough patch, maybe a little grief from losing her mom. So I owe her this much, this waiting. She’s my best friend, you know? Tom’s not too happy about this, but I’ll see what he says when he gets here.”

“That’ll be good. It’ll take the pressure off of you.”

“She’s worth it,” she says, stopping and looking out at the cityscape.

Michael knows Rachel worries constantly, checking her voicemail, trying Sara’s cell. He drops a quarter into a coin-operated viewer. “Take a look.”

“It’s pretty with the lights coming on in the skyscrapers.”

“Any guess what Manhattan’s very first skyscraper was, back in 1664?”

“Is this another wager?”

“Could be. Loser buys coffee?”

“You’re on.” Rachel considers the skyscrapers. “1664? Maybe a church?”

“Gotcha on this one. A two-story windmill. You’ll have to ante up.”

“A windmill.” The sky turns violet in the east behind the skyline. Rachel pans the viewer, and he figures she must want to turn it downward and scan the street, glancing over the pedestrians, keeping an eye out for that auburn head.

“Take your time,” he tells her, watching her press blowing strands of hair away from her face. “If the wind gets too much, we can go up to the hundred and second. I mean, if you want to. It’s more cramped there, but it’s enclosed.”

“No, I like it here.” Here, where Sara Beth is supposed to be, she doesn’t say. They walk the perimeter of the deck, seeing New York from all angles. He figures Rachel is hoping for a miracle, hoping to see her friend walk through the door, or hoping to turn the curve and see Sara Beth gazing out at Manhattan, waiting for her. The Empire State Building stands on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth. She is looking for that miracle on Thirty-fourth Street.

The sun sets further and Rachel slowly walks, holding her jacket closed in front of her.

“Come on,” he says from behind her, placing his hands gently on her waist. “You’re cold. We’ll go upstairs to warm up and check back here later.”

She puts her hands on his and pulls them around her waist, leaning back into him. “In a minute?” The twilight sky spreads before her. “This is so peaceful,” she says. “Why couldn’t this be all?”

A star breaks through the violet sky, twinkling in the darkening eastern horizon.

“See that star?” Rachel asks. “Every summer my parents rented a cottage at the beach. I’d have one week with my father, one with my mother. It was a pretty place with winding roads and little old cottages.”

He turns when he hears the elevator open, and she glances over her shoulder at him.

“I always brought Sara and on the first night, we’d walk down to the beach after dinner and sit on the boardwalk. When the sun set, we’d watch the big sky over Long Island Sound, searching for the very first star. Whoever spotted it first got the wish that year. The first wish was special, the one to come true.”

“Were you ever first?”

“Oh sure.” She keeps her eye on the lone star over Manhattan’s eastern sky. “I would squeeze my eyes shut and whisper Star light, star bright. First star I see tonight…We still do it, wish on stars every summer. It’s one of those things you hold on to.”

“You found it tonight.”

Rachel stares at that star and silently makes her wish.

Not that he’s noticing intentionally, but it twinkles a little brighter in the sky as the sun sets. Michael thinks it is part of some constellation, part of an ancient connection in the skies, old and lasting through time, still shining on Manhattan. He closes his eyes for a second before leading Rachel upstairs.

They go higher still to the enclosed observatory on the hundred and second floor where the only evidence of wind is its whistle reaching inside.

“There are some who say that this place is very close to heaven,” Michael says after a quick phone call checking up on his daughter.

“An Affair to Remember.” Rachel brushes a wisp of hair off her face. “Deborah Kerr?”

“I think she was right,” Michael answers.

The sky has grown dark now and it’s scary to look down. Rachel can’t imagine being any closer to the sky. Close to the stars, she feels connected to Sara Beth.

“Do you know what stood here before this building?”

“Wasn’t it always the Empire State Building?”

“This was actually the site of the first Waldorf Astoria. They tore it down and hauled it out to sea, and a year and a half later, in 1931, this building stood in its place.”

They walk a little and Rachel figures he’s done with the story, surprised when his voice eventually continues.

“Once the foundations were in, the construction crews framed and built this building a floor a week, every week.” Michael gazes out onto the city, speaking as though he worked there when it happened. “The exterior walls are made of limestone and granite, but it’s framed with steel.”

“A floor a week? That’s incredibly fast.”

“The architects and construction company treated it like an assembly line. When the different tradespeople completed their work on one floor, they moved up to the next and repeated the same job all over again while a different crew moved in behind them.” Michael glances at her. “You following?”

“I think so.”

“The work overlapped,” he explains, walking carefully around other tourists. “You know, electricians and plasterers worked on the lower floors, while up above them, workers put together the steel frame and got that floor ready for the electricians and plasterers behind them, while the roof was still only a drawing in the architect’s office. It was a tight operation. They even had a little railroad set up on each floor to bring the supplies where they were needed. So it’s an impressive building, but fourteen men were killed assembling this tinkertoy.”

“Maybe it isn’t the closest thing to heaven in New York. Maybe in a way, it is heaven. For those guys. They’re here.”

“Heaven in sixty thousand tons of steel, sixty miles of water pipe and three thousand five hundred miles of telephone and telegraph wire, with sixty-five hundred windows to look out from.”

“You know a little more than the average bear about this place.” With the skyline spread before her, she feels what Michael must feel so often from atop his horse, or emerging from the subway, or upon turning a corner and catching a glimpse of this landmark. “You said your grandfather was a mason. He worked on this building, didn’t he?”

“Side by side with Joe’s father. The two masons. And when you think that sixteen thousand people come to work here each day, and another thirty-five thousand come to either do business or just visit the building, well, it’s pretty damn amazing.”

“No wonder you’ve researched it. You’ve got a personal connection.”

“No research. I heard it all firsthand from my grandfather and later from Pop. You know, stories like having lunch out of a pail on the fifty-third floor beams, and the wind blowing construction debris from the upper floors. Stuff you never read about in encyclopedias.” Michael slips his hand into hers and they start to walk. “But that was a long time ago.” They turn to the elevators. “Careful,” he says as the doors open.

Stopping back on the lower deck to see if Sara Beth might be there, the wind touches Rachel’s eyes, her cheeks, blows her hair. She wants to feel it, to remember Michael’s New York heaven.

“What did you wish for?” he asks.

“I can’t tell. It won’t come true that way,” she says as he leans on the wall beside her.

“No, not tonight. When you were with Sara Beth at the beach. What was your wish when you were sixteen?”

“You know how they say this is the closest thing to heaven in New York? This building? Well, where I lived, the closest thing to heaven was that beach. So every summer my wish was that some day I could have my own little cottage at the shore.” She looks up at the stars. “My own little piece of heaven.”

“Ready?”

“I think so. Wait.” She takes a quick breath. “Yes. Yes, I’m ready,” Sara Beth answers.

“Don’t move now.”

“I won’t.” She sits on a stool in a Village boutique. It feels like she’s sitting at an easel, working on that oil painting. One color paints over another in oils, and color not only creates visual impact, it creates form. This is how you form yourself, adding another layer of color. It makes her think of the Matrioshka dolls she bought for her mother, the beautiful blue and gold painted dolls layered within, waiting to be discovered.

She watches every move in the mirror. Embroidered tunics are reflected behind her, racks of turquoise and yellow and red, and Pashmina scarves and skinny jeans. She longs to be some of the person who shops in a boutique like this. She used to, years ago. Just finding a little of that woman might be enough. The splash of fabric colors don’t take her attention from the boutique attendant, though. It’s the only way to gauge when the trigger will be pulled. Then comes the noise, just a pop really, and it’s done. And she doesn’t care what anyone says, it hurts when that gun shoots the post through. Both ears are twice pierced, gold studs in place.

“There’s liquid cleanser you can purchase at the register. Dip a cotton swab around the hole to keep it clean, and you should be fine. Give it a few weeks to heal.”

A few weeks. That’s all she thinks when she lingers in the boutique buying a scarf for each of her daughters. It’s hard to imagine being back in Connecticut, living some life that will, must, be different from the life she left. Maybe that’s it, though. Maybe she wants back
another
life she left long ago. Already she’s visually different and glad for it. But her ears sting, and her heart still stings, and her tears do too.

A ridiculously long line of people snakes along the sidewalk in front of her. She can’t imagine what the draw is, until she sees the restaurant. Serendipity’s. She walks past, turns on a side street, walks around the block and eventually takes a place at the end of the line. Two hours pass on her feet in a crowd where she might be anyone: Bohemian free spirit or business woman doing the weekend. Or a friend, meeting up with another. She sees that here, families and couples and friends, friends everywhere, who laugh and talk and take pictures.