“To a meeting? Oh, I mean, I don’t...”
“No,” he said. “To get Chinese food. It’s Pavlovian. If it’s Friday, and I don’t consume half my weight in fried egg paper, I have to be recalibrated. Doctor’s orders.”
“But it’s the middle of the night.”
He rose to his feet and grinned. “Well, Katherine, it’s a good thing we live in the greatest city in the world.”
We rode the 6 train downtown, which took so long we got off a stop early at Houston, walked up the station’s filthy steps, and wandered into a completely different world. Bars spilled out onto the sidewalk, voices slurred and loud. New York, all of a sudden, too close, too drunk, too strange. I’d gone out around here a hundred times, drank myself into a stranger’s lap more nights than I could possibly count, but it felt different now, with Tyler a half step ahead of me. It felt, suddenly, distant and foreign and for somebody else. There was a recklessness to it, a temporariness, that I could not remember wanting even a little bit at all.
Tyler guided me through the swarm, signaling with the crane of his neck and the dart of his eyes when we were about to turn, swerve, or push our way through a flock of NYU students. Finally, we arrived at Mott Street, and the crowds were gone. SoHo had turned into Chinatown, and the city had gone silent: shuttered grates, fire escapes, and darkened vertical signs I could not comprehend. Paper lanterns lined the long-past-midnight sky, flashes of tangerine, fuchsia, and rose.
Nothing appeared to be open, but Tyler kept walking anyway, one block, then another, then the next, until he was holding open an unmarked door. I ducked under his arm, then followed him upthe crowded stairs, down a narrow hall, and through another door until we were standing in a tiny dumpling shop. Fluorescent lights flickered, and two men in the corner ate quietly, undisturbed. A woman behind the counter lit up at once, signaling for us to have a seat.
Tyler chose a table by the window, then nodded at the open chair across from him. It wobbled as I slid into it, and the metal warmed the backs of my knees.
“You a regular here?” I asked.
“I lived down the street after college,” he said, already making little scratches on an order sheet with a too-small pencil. His forearm flexed, and the scenes on his skin came into focus, inch by inch: A chain-link fence, a winding road, a half dozen Technicolor characters I was fairly certain were pilgrims fromThe Canterbury Tales. “Before I got the job at the school uptown. Sometimes, I’d come here and write, usually in the middle of the night. My landlord told me about it. I don’t always sleep well, and...”
“I remember,” I said.
He nodded quietly and then—out of nowhere—proceeded to have a full-blown conversation innot Englishwith that octogenarian in an apron. She smiled at me, said a few more words to Tyler, then left us with a steaming pot of tea.
“Tyler McNally,” I said. “Tell me you did not just drag me to a Chinese restaurant on the opposite end of the island of Manhattan so you could show off your fluency in a foreign language.”
He poured me a cup of tea and grinned. “Katie Caruso. There’s not a thing on this earth I could do to impress you. I know that. Honestly, I just...”
I waited for him to finish, but he had fallen silent. His mouthtwitched as he tapped the pencil on the peeling Formica. Who was this boy? This man? But, in so many ways, I already knew the answer. Because he was exactly the Tyler I’d been getting to know that first summer—and then again after everything changed between him and Mikey. When it was just the two of us, silently counting the days in separate directions. Tyler, away from his old life. Me, toward his new one. There were weekend trains into the city, bookstores and bakeries and falling asleep on his shoulder to the rattle of the railcar, to the sensation of his fingertips silently learning the curve of my spine as we made our way home.
He was still fidgeting.
“After Mikey died,” he said. I jolted, and he winced. “I’m sorry, I—”
“I really don’t want to talk about it.”
“Me neither. I understand. It’s just—”
“Please, Tyler.” The muscles in my jaw ached. “I was so clear about this. I don’t want an apology. I don’t want an explanation. I don’t want anything other than to forget all that. To put what happened behind us.”
“All I wanted to say.” He pushed his teacup around as a basket of plump, steaming dumplings hit the table. “Is that there are very few places on this planet where I don’t feel like everything I’ve ever done is caving in on me. And I don’t know why, but this is one of them.”
I folded the corner of my napkin over twice, then raised my eyes to meet his again. “And so you brought me here because?”
“Because I think you and I are more alike than—Because I still...” He shrugged his shoulders and then exhaled. “There’s a part of me that thought maybe this place would feel safe for youtoo. Sorry if that’s really dumb. Fuck, it sounds really dumb, doesn’t it? I told you, I can’t miss my meeting, I...”
His eyes were so hazel and his eyelashes were so thick and his mouth was so unsure that I didn’t move or speak or smirk or anything. I was frozen, sitting there, taking him in.
He plopped a dumpling on my plate and said, “Also, the Mandarin.”
I hurled a chopstick at him.
And then we ate everything in front of us, ranked each dish from first to worst, discussed his semester abroad in Shanghai, and shared a cab uptown as night dripped into morning. By daybreak, I tiptoed through my apartment door, careful not to wake a snoozing Lola. Careful not to think too hard about the unmistakable flutter in my stomach or how quickly it had spread to the tips of my fingers and the tops of my toes.
13
Tyler
June, Eleven Years Ago
