ERICA
Chapter playlist:
Getaway Car — Taylor Swift
Material Girl — Madonna
The knocking is what pulls me out of a heavy sleep.
It takes a second to place the sound at all.
My blanket is wound around my legs, and one arm is dead asleep underneath me.
Someone’s fist is going at the door like whatever’s on the other side can’t wait, like something’s gone wrong. I sit up with a sharp inhale. Jeremiah.
I’m halfway out of the cot, blanket still wrapped around my legs like a straitjacket, when Tanya sprints past me toward the door in bare feet. I’ve only ever seen her run this fast for free samples at Costco.
From the far pullout, Ginger doesn’t even open her eyes. “Tanya.” Her voice comes out muffled. “It is six in the morning.”
Tanya doesn’t slow down.
Zoe cracks one eyelid at me from the beanbag she insists is ergonomically superior to every bed she’s ever owned. “If that’s the FBI,” she says, “I am going to be really miffed.”
Tanya throws the door open before any of us can fully surface, and there’s a beat where none of us know what we’re looking at.
A very tall man in the hallway, rolling carry-on parked at an angle behind him, a garment bag over one shoulder, and a leather messenger bag crossed over his chest. Glasses.
A face already lit up like Christmas morning.
Dale.
He has just enough time to set the garment bag down, before Tanya jumps and throws her arms and legs around him.
“Sweet Cheeks,” he says into her hair, like it’s the only word he knows.
I blink at the two of them. Then at Suri, who’s surfaced enough to prop herself up on one elbow. Then at Zoe.
"Tanya," I say, still groggy. “Did you know he was coming?”
Tanya doesn’t answer. Tanya is busy.
"She knew," Zoe says. "She knew and didn't warn us."
“Tater Tot.” Dale says it into her hair. “I wub you.”
“I wub you more, Big Mac.”
“No, I wub YOU more, Sugar Plum Fairy.”
Oh, here we go.
“I wub you so, so much, Schmoopy.” She pulls back just far enough to look at him, still wrapped around him like a koala. “So much.”
“I wub you so much more, Honey Pot.” He kisses her nose. Then her forehead. Then, for good measure, the tip of her nose.
This is a lot of feelings for six a.m. on an empty stomach. I need coffee.
“McMuffin.” She says it like an accusation of love.
“Marshmallow.” He nuzzles his nose against hers now.
Somewhere, a Hallmark movie producer just felt a disturbance in the force.
“You said you’d call from the airport,” Tanya says, finally letting him breathe.
“I did call. You didn’t pick up.”
“That’s because I was asleep. And had my phone on silent so it wouldn’t wake anyone up.”
“That’s okay, Pop Tart.“ He sets her down but doesn’t break contact.
Well. I glance at Zoe. There goes any hope of going back to sleep.
He turns, and looks from one woman to the next like he just noticed he had an audience. There’s that lopsided grin of his in place, like his whole face is saying welp, here we all are. I never noticed it before, but he’s kind of Brendan Fraser-coded. Like a young Brendan Fraser with a dad bod.
His eyes catch on the loft for half a second, at the worktable, the monitors, the recording rig, the scale model of the Four Seasons, and then move on just as fast. His face splits into that goofy smile when it lands on me.
“Erica!” He opens his arms, and I get pulled into a hug that’s too squeezy for this early in the morning.
Zoe’s next. He gives her a hug and a cheek kiss and a “Wow! Look at you.”
“You remember Ginger,” I say, and watch him commit to a hug he clearly needs half a second to place. “Ginger! Of course.” And I know he’s trying hard to place where he’s met her before.
Tanya’s engagement party. But there were a lot of faces that night. He’s too polite to admit he doesn’t remember her, so he just holds the hug a beat longer than necessary.
"Good to see you again," he says, a little awkwardly.
Ginger pats his back twice, the way you’d pat a large dog that startled you. “You too.”
Tanya, undeterred, drags him further into the loft by the hand. “This is Suri. Suri, Dale. And this is Ivy.”
Suri gives a two-fingered wave without fully opening her eyes. Ivy, on the other hand, in her bougie silk pajama set, extends both hands to take Dale’s, and gives him a cheek kiss on each side of his face. Like they’re old friends or something.
Incidentally, Ivy is the only one of us with an actual apartment in this city. But she’s been camping on our floor for three days. For the bonding, she’d said when she rolled four full-sized suitcases into the loft.
Zoe catches my eye across the room. Dale saw everything, her eyebrows say. Everything.
I know! And after the lengths they took yesterday to keep Jeremiah out.
Dale finally sets the messenger bag down by the door next to the carry-on, free of everything now except Tanya’s hand, and she takes full advantage, pulling him back outside before anyone can fully register what just happened.
She’s still in her pajamas, barefoot, and is walking hand-in-hand with him down the sidewalk like it’s the most normal thing in the world.
Zoe shuts the door behind them. The rest of us look at each other for a long beat.
Coffee. We need coffee.
I make it to the cupboard at the same time as Rue, and we end up reaching over each other for the last of the pastries, a sad, slightly stale danish that neither of us actually wants but both of us are, apparently, willing to fight for at six in the morning.
She wins. I settle for coffee, black, because whoever finished the creamer last night is a war criminal.
“So what’s the plan today?” Ivy asks. “Besides surviving whatever that was.”
“I have dress shopping,” I say. “The gala’s in three days and I still don’t have anything.”
“Ooh.” Rue, mouth full of danish. “Make sure you get one that knocks his socks off.”
“When do we get to meet this hockey player guy?” Ginger says, peeking into the mini fridge for last night’s leftovers.
“How about the tenth of never,” I say, and take another sip of my coffee like that settles it.
Suri’s already headed for the bathroom, toothbrush in hand. She is not a morning person.
My phone buzzes.
Jeremiah: I’m up and dreading today. If you’re still sleeping, reply when you wake up. I will have my phone in my hand all day. If I just woke you up, ignore and go back to sleep.
Me: im up. got an unexpected visitor just now
Jeremiah: Who? Do I need to throw hands?
Me: LOL no its just my friend’s fiance
Jeremiah: Hold up. If I'd known I could crash the girls’ fort, I'd have been there already
Me: No crashing the girls' fort. No boys allowed
I set the phone down before he can talk me out of it, which, knowing him, he’d probably try. But this loft is way too crowded as it is. No, Dale can’t stay here.
I go for my bag which is hanging off the back of a kitchen chair.
It’s an army-green thing tattered in all the right places.
A cross between a purse and a backpack. I got it at a yard sale a few years ago and even though it looks like it survived Vietnam, I can’t bring myself to replace it.
I dump half of it onto the counter before I find the Four Seasons card wedged behind a lip gloss and a pack of gum.
I turn it over in my fingers. Capucine de Montfleury never did check out.
I’m still holding it when Suri comes out of the bathroom, toothbrush still in her mouth, holding something up between two fingers like evidence.
“Whose is this?”
It takes me a second to place it.
“Is that a playing card?”
“It’s the jack of spades,” she says accusingly. “But look, it has a bird on it. Is someone playing pranks?”
On closer inspection, the playing card looks bespoke. The bird looks like one of those nineteenth century ink drawings under the word “Jackdaw” in an old-fashioned ornamental typeface.
“That’s mine, actually.” Zoe, not looking up from her monitors.
“Sorry. I found it on a windowsill over there. I remember thinking it was a weird thing to just be sitting there, but I pocketed it anyway. Then I forgot about it completely until I was getting in the shower last night and it fell out of my jeans.”
“Where’d it come from originally?” Ginger says, heating up chow mein in the microwave.
“No idea.” Zoe shrugs, entirely unbothered. “Maybe it was already here when we rented the place. People leave weird stuff behind all the time.”
I want that to be the whole explanation.
I want it badly enough that I almost let it be.
The loft was empty when we moved in. I remember walking through it myself, every corner, every closet.
But it’s a small thing, a card, easy enough to miss in a shadow or behind a baseboard for however many tenants came before us.
“Probably,” I say, and let it go.
Dale and Tanya are gone long enough that the sun’s fully up by the time they come back. Tanya is practically glowing. Dale, on the other hand, looks like a man who just found out the sky is a different color than he thought.
“Okay,” Tanya says, holding his hand so tight her knuckles have gone pale. “So. I told him. Everything.”
“What do you mean everything?” Ginger says cautiously.
“Like… everything, everything. Starting with the accountant job. The keycards. All of it.”
The room goes very, very quiet. I catch Zoe’s eyes over the rim of her coffee cup. Alarm bells go off in my head. What now, what now, what now? And I can feel the panic settling into my chest.
Dale doesn’t say anything right away. He just looks at me for a long while with an almost pitying expression.
“Your birthright,” he says finally. “Tanya told me the whole story. That’s… that’s a wild story, Erica.”
Nobody moves. I brace for whatever comes next. Probably not a lesson on letting bygones be bygones, or something more along the lines of what Jeremiah would say. Crime doesn’t pay. One of the first things he said to me.