Helen Cox - Sunrise in New York

‘Don’t remember you dishing out these philosophical nuggets when you were frying omelettes at the Crystal Cavern Buffet. When did you get so wise?’ I eyed Esther in mock suspicion.

‘Only about two months ago,’ she said. ‘Oh, and please, don’t remind me about that buffet job. People used to waste so much food, and dangle lengths of bacon into their mouths as if they were starving mongrels. Used to make me sick.’

‘People can be pretty disgusting. Especially in a place like Atlantic City,’ I said with a little shiver. Though ‘disgusting’ didn’t even come close to what I saw that night.

‘Hmm,’ Esther agreed, and then shifted her voice back into the business-like tone she’d used with Jack earlier when she was instructing him on what to buy at the store. ‘Right, Jack’s clearly gone shopping to Timbuktu. How anyone strings out a trip to a shop less than a block from the flat the way he does, I’ll never know. Why don’t you get a hot shower whilst you’re waiting? You can borrow my dressing gown and by the time you’ve got yourself sorted I’ll probably have a cup of hot chocolate ready for you. Assuming Faber hasn’t frozen outside in the blizzard.’

‘That all sounds incredible,’ I said, swooning at the very thought of feeling warm inside and out. ‘Except the part about Jack freezing to death, of course.’

Just then, Esther held out her hand. It was such a small gesture. She couldn’t have known what it meant to me. Looking at her hand, I noticed a scar I’d never seen before, just on the inside of the palm where the thumb and the forefinger meet. A dull, red line that marked out some past pain I didn’t know about. Tact may not have been my most obvious quality but I knew better than to ask about it. Instead, I put my hand in hers and she gave it a squeeze. The lower half of my face wobbled but I managed to keep it together this time. I’d cried a lifetime’s worth of tears in the last few days. Enough was enough.

‘Alright.’ Esther jumped up off the mattress, scuttled into the bedroom and returned with a cotton bathrobe in cornflower blue and the softest-looking towels I’d ever seen in my life. ‘Go and relax in the shower, and in the meantime I’ll hunt out some spare bedding for this thing,’ she said, tutting at the way Jack had arranged the cushions and reorganising them into what would, I had to admit, be a far more comfortable formation.

‘Thanks,’ I said, a little smile creeping across my face at how much Esther was enjoying the mothering aspect of this scenario. She smiled in return and rubbed my right arm.

Scooping up the yellow towels and the robe, I headed off to the shower, locked the door behind me and started when I caught my reflection in the mirror.

‘God damn it,’ I said, putting a hand on my heart as if to push it back into the correct position. Would I ever stop seeing a stranger with a blue bob in the mirror? It’s not that it didn’t suit me – it actually looked kinda cute, even if I did say so myself – but I’d had almost twenty-eight years of looking into a mirror and seeing a face framed with flowing brown locks. Before all this I was almost sensible-looking, when I wasn’t on stage. But since – what had Jimmy called it? – my makeover from the Cyndi Lauper school of beauty, I looked a lot more like the wacky idiot I probably was deep down.

I rested my hands either side of the sink and looked my reflection dead in the eye, trying to see past my weird disguise down to the person I really was. A pair of wary green eyes stared back at me. They had an emptiness to them, a despair.

I turned to the shower for a moment, switched on the faucet and sighed at the soft pattering sound the water made. A sound that meant refreshment and relief. That gentle burbling banished the awkward silence that’d been growing between me and my reflection.

I kicked off my shoes and was about to pull my sweater dress over my head when I paused and sighed again. This time, not out of relief. Lowering my arms, I turned, leaned on the sink and looked into the glass.

‘I’m real sorry for gettin’ you into this,’ I said to the woman in the mirror. ‘I’m sorry for so much that I’ve done to you. I haven’t exactly treated you right the last twenty-seven years. Fact is, all I’ve done is hurt you. By being ashamed of you.’ The woman’s eyes came over all watery. ‘But I’m going to change that,’ I said to her, quick as I could, before she turned on the waterworks. ‘It is going to change, Bonnie.’ The woman in the mirror flinched at the sound of me speaking her name out loud. ‘Something has to. You deserve better than what you’ve had.’

I put my hand over my mouth to smother a weak chuckle and I shook my head.

Neat. Talking to yourself in the mirror. That’s always a sign of spectacular mental health.

I looked down into the endless blackness of the plughole and then back up at my reflection, searching for something, any clue to who I really was and what my next step should be.

But the woman in the mirror was giving away nothing.

Maybe Esther was right. That somehow this was an opportunity disguised as a disaster, a wake-up call. Oh boy, it’d been that alright.

I could never go back to my old life in Atlantic City, and I wasn’t wanted back in Detroit. What I was meant to do now, I had no idea.

The next day at sundown I headed straight to the Starlight Diner as per Esther’s military instructions. She’d made it clear that straggling around Manhattan on your own after dark wasn’t a safe thing to be doing. Said she’d even been mugged once in broad daylight not three streets away from the diner. She’d no idea that I had bigger problems than being ambushed by some two-bit crook after the change in my pocket, but she meant well and, in spite of everything, it was sort of comforting to know she was looking out for me as best she could with the information I’d given her.

Though it was still cold, the snow had stopped falling long enough for me to busk under Washington Square Arch for the best part of the day. There, families had gathered to build snowmen and throw snowballs at each other. I’ll admit, given my own family circumstances, watching loving fathers roll around in the snow with their fresh-faced, moon-eyed daughters was about the last thing I needed. Still, it had been quite a lucrative session in terms of dollars in my guitar case, so I guess I shouldn’t complain. There are certain songs you can play in cities like New York that are bona fide crowd-pleasers, guaranteed to make people stump up a few more bucks for you. ‘Downtown’ by Petula Clark was one of them and ‘Tom’s Diner’ by Suzanne Vega was another. Anything that glorified the urban ant farm they had going on here was sure to boost donations to the Bonnie Brooks Reinvention Fund. I sang my heart out, on and off, for eight hours and made just shy of seventy bucks. Not too shabby for a day’s work.

By the time I reached the diner, it was nearing half past five. Esther’s shift didn’t finish till seven and Jack was in rehearsals for his next movie, some bubblegum action flick called Nowhere Left to Hide. The shoot was mostly happening in a studio lot, somewhere on the Upper East Side, instead of a studio in LA like I would’ve expected, but according to Jack rehearsals often overran and he couldn’t promise what time he’d get home. Thanks to a key shortage, I’d been directed to wait for Esther to finish her shift and walk back to the apartment with her.