OTHER THAN WINTER
The entire city was full of dirty ice-whipped slush after the first hard freeze; it had only reluctantly warmed enough for snow. A whistling, iron-cold wind poured down both the Hudson and East Rivers, slicing between feathery falling flakes. Thanksgiving was over for what it was worth, Christmas lights blooming everywhere, and it was hard to believe anything other than winter had ever existed.
The bus was a blue-and-white metal beast wallowing up the slight incline of Pastis Hill on a cloud of diesel smoke; the subway was warmer but wasn’t worth the stairs involved for this part of the trip. Nat Drozdova’s throat ached, her nose was full, and her eyes watered. She could claim it was the cold or the persistent creeping fingers of car exhaust slithering from street level to irritate tender membranes.
Crying on the 2:00 P.M. downtown special was what Mom would call your silliness, Natchenka, now stop it.
It was standing-room only; the vehicle swayed and she was almost thrown onto a thin, sour-faced businessman who had forgotten to bring his tie back over his shoulder after lunch. He’d also had more than one martini if the simmering alcohol fume was any indication, and his wingtips were going to be slush-soaked by the time he got back to the office.
Well, everyone had problems in this world, as Uncle Leo grimly intoned at the slightest provocation. Nat wiped her cheeks, a sting of woolen glove-fingers against already abraded skin, and set her chin. A baby fretted somewhere along the bus’s flexing, swaying length; a crop of wet croupy coughs bloomed on either side. Nat hung on to the pole, trying not to bump the businessman again, and closed her eyes.
Just a moment, that’s all she wanted. A single breath’s worth of rest.
The darkness behind her lids was terrifying, so her eyes flew open again, filling her head with a regular Wednesday afternoon full of regular people. Except her surroundings lasted only a few seconds before melding into a familiar, pale pink hospice room holding softly beeping machines, the reek of disinfectant, and her mother’s gaunt face, now-graying hair neatly braided and resting against a sanitized pillowcase.
It was the light, Nat decided. An echo of fluorescent hospital tubes ran down the bus’s throat like streptococcal stripes, their pitiless glare showing every pockmark, every pimple, every stray hair, every scrape and scuff and loose thread.
Just like it showed Mom’s veins, blue and branching, or the papery skin under her chin.
I’m too young to look this way, Mom had said mournfully during her last visit, and Nat had to agree. She had to keep blinking; everything blurred because her eyes were full of brimming hot water yet again.
The bus crested Pastis; skyscraper valleys swallowed a wheeled aluminum tube-pill. Snow whirled past the windows as she counted the streets: Nieman, the funny curve of Totzer, the park blocks between Crane and Gallus a stone’s throw from Times Square full of wet green tinged with ice-pale lacework. If the contraption jerked again she’d be thrown onto two private-school boys with their shoulders and temples almost touching as they bent over a game, unaware of anything other than pixels on a handheld screen.
The stoplight went on with a soft chime, Nat was thankfully not tossed into the laps of strangers, and she began the laborious process of elbowing towards a door.
They were saying at least three inches of snow, but Nat rolled the air across her tongue the way Leo had taught her many winters ago and decided there was going to be more. Quite a bit more, in fact, and that was part of why she was downtown today, even though her shoes would fill with slushmelt and her calves would freeze almost solid.
It happened so fast, too. One moment she was sitting at her cubicle desk in Brooklyn, the phone jangling, coffee solidifying into syrup at the bottom of its pot, one of the salesmen whistling “Jingle Bells” and another in the depths of the office yelling about quarterly figures. Then she was outside, breathing deeply against the chill, the business card in her wallet weighing down her purse like a scoop of compressed matter dragging everything into the heart of a brand-new black hole.
Maybe they wouldn’t even notice she was gone. Christ knew she felt pleasantly invisible most days, except when Bob—his new toupee was the exact color of brown shoe polish—had a new idea and someone had to wrangle him out of it. Middle managers inevitably rose to the level of their incompetence, and he was a shining example who might even make corporate one of these days.
The bus finished disgorging fellow travelers and heaved away; Nat turned up the collar of her navy wool peacoat and set off too, her office flats crunching scattered deicer pellets. Gallus and Third was the address on the card—heavy ivory stock, deeply pressed letters blacker than ink should be, the corners crisp no matter how long it sat in Nat’s wallet, glaring at her each time she paid for coffee or groceries or anything else.
Did you see her yet? Do you have an appointment? The tremor in Mom’s voice, the impatience disguised as helplessness—Nat tilted her head back while matching the speed of sidewalk traffic, more to get the tears to crawl back into their holes than to gaze at skyscrapers, their tops lost in billowing white as the sky scattered tiny, frozen pellets struggling to turn into snow.
When her chin came back down to save her fool ass from skidding off deicer and into the street, the building was right there. She stopped for a moment, ignoring both the hiss of a man in a dun-colored trench coat who had to do some fancy footwork to get around her and a cacophony of horns from Gallus Street, where the slush was busy snarling end-of-lunch traffic with a side of fender benders and screaming out windows that should have been rolled up to keep the heat trapped.
People would waste even precious resources to yell obscenities out a window. It was a fact of human nature.
Tiny iceflakes swirled on the back of a whipping wind, and maybe it was only the vagaries of air moving between man-made concrete cliffs turning the white curtain into a tornado before neatly flicking it wide-open as a sheet to hit the other side of Gallus Street and the Vogge Mutual Building, a high thrusting needle with a granite-sheathed base. The Vogge had blinking multicolored lights in deference to the season; there was even a tree in its foyer, a multicolored migraine gleam through bright windows.
The Morrer-Pessel Memorial Tower, on the other hand, was an unornamented black-mirrored building, its walls curving like the architect hated even the idea of a straight line. It seemed to squat even though it challenged its neighbors for height, and the concrete forum-park set before it was always curiously free of beggars and buskers.
Maybe it was the statues. Whoever did the art installation had some weird ideas about human anatomy, and the host of copper and stone figures in various attitudes dotted around Pessel Square—as the sign between two forlorn, winter-naked bushes proclaimed it, with more hopefulness than declarative thunder—were tinged with frost, beginning to grow shaggy white winter coats as the snow decided to quit fucking around and get its afternoon work started.
Did you see her yet? Mom kept asking. Not hello, and forget how are you.
“I don’t want to,” Nat muttered. It was one thing to endure Mom’s disappointment each time, but if Nat got the brush-off here and trudged into Mom’s hospice room during visiting hours tomorrow to report not just a lack of appointment but a complete failure to even get in the door, what would happen?
Mom had already gone so far downhill over the past couple months. It was silly to think Maria Drozdova’s heart would finally break and the rest of her might not be far behind, wasn’t it?
Copyright © 2023 by Lilith Saintcrow
