Tim Murphy - Christodora

“Will you get me a coffee?”

“Of course. How do you want it?”

“Milk and sugar. Will you get me a cookie, too?”

She grinned slightly. “Of course. Late-night sweet tooth?”

“Thank you.” Bora smiled sleepily. “You saw him?” He nodded toward the front door.

“We were just in the elevator together. I’ve never seen him before.”

“Ninth floor,” Bora said. “Guys in and out, in and out, all the time.”

Milly merely raised her eyebrows and made a face as though to say, Hmm . She didn’t know what to say about Hector. She felt hurt by him, mainly. Four years before, she had intervened, at her mother’s urging, to get Hector into the building. She thought it would be lovely to have a longtime colleague and friend of her mother’s in the Christodora — one who, like her mother, had done so much in the fight against AIDS in the city. And once Hector moved in, she’d invited him down to dinner several times. But he rebuffed the offer repeatedly, mumbling excuses. In fact, when they saw each other coming in or out, he seemed as though he barely wanted to talk to her. He’d hurry away, murmuring a hello, his eyes averted, buried in his cell phone. Eventually, Milly started avoiding him, too.

“Drugs,” said Bora.

Milly nodded her head. “I’ve heard that.”

She stepped outside. The air was mild and had that delicious, mysterious moisture that the night holds in its wee hours. She walked a few blocks to the deli, passing along the way one of the regular neighborhood addicts—“the rockers,” as she thought of them — crouching in a doorway, blissfully comatose. She felt a bit wild, being out alone so late — an echo of the untethered thrill she’d felt in her flying dream. Arabic music met her in the bodega, its plaintive wail.

Omar, like Bora, sat behind the counter watching a soccer game on a tiny TV. He looked up when she came in. “Hello, pretty lady,” he said. He’d called her this for at least three years now. Milly couldn’t even remember when it had begun.

“Hi, Omar.” She asked him to fix Bora’s coffee, fetched her juice from the refrigerator, and picked up a black-and-white cookie for Bora.

“You can’t sleep again tonight?” he asked, handing back her change.

She rolled her eyes. “You know me too well. I just had a dream where I flew into the Chrysler Building and then I couldn’t get back to sleep.”

“In Egypt, we say allah ysallimik . You know what that means?”

Milly smiled. “No.”

“May God protect you.”

Milly said the phrase. Omar corrected her and she said it again.

“That’s closer,” he said. “There, so you don’t fly into any more buildings.” He smiled at her, an eyebrow raised flirtatiously.

She laughed. She could have stayed chatting with Omar, who had a kind face and darkly handsome eyes, but she felt it would be unseemly — not because it was too intimate, but because what sad soul visited with the bodega man at four A.M. because she couldn’t sleep?

“That’s sweet,” she said. “Thank you for the blessing. I’m gonna hold you to it!”

“Watch, you’ll see.” He wagged a finger after her. “It will work.”

Back in the lobby, she refused Bora’s offer to pay for the coffee and cookie. “I’m going to take my insomniac self back up to bed,” she said, as though by saying it she could make it happen.

She took exactly two sips of her juice in the elevator. She reentered her apartment with a slight sense of wonder, as though she were actually seeing it for the first time in a long time. She looked at the jumble of hats, coats, and shoes on the rack in the hallway — hers and Jared’s mixed in with Mateo’s tiny miniature additions, the windbreaker, the Nikes, the Yankees cap. In the living room, she considered her own color-field canvas hanging over the sofa, a small metal sculpture of Jared’s on a table nearby. Mateo’s pictures and crayons covered the coffee table. She had the feeling that she’d fled her home, this source of familiarity and love, out into the night because of some mild panic, but before anything bad could happen, she’d returned, slipped back into her life, and was relieved and grateful to find it the same, undisturbed. She stepped out of her shorts and laced her arm around Jared back in bed. How exactly did you say that blessing that Omar had said? she thought. Salaam alaikum? No, that wasn’t quite it. But before she could muse on it further, she drifted into sleep.

When she woke, shortly after nine, she found the sky blue and the bed empty, which was not alarming, as Jared woke early on Saturdays to walk across the bridge to Williamsburg, where he had a large studio in an old warehouse where he could drag huge pieces of metal across the floor and weld them. She sat up in bed, a morning shadow passing over her mind, and she remembered the episode of the night before: the exhilarating and then terrifying dream, the strange encounter in the elevator, the brief foray into the night, Omar, the hasty return. It all felt like a dream to her now, not just the dream itself — a memory of shadowy corridors with dread around one corner, then comfort around the next.

In the living room, she found Mateo on the floor in front of the TV, watching his new favorite cartoon, The Fairly OddParents , and eating dry Cheerios out of a plastic cup. He was still in his SpongeBob SquarePants pajamas, lying on his stomach and absently kicking his butt with his bare feet, his mop of curly black hair pushed up by one little fist, plus a throw pillow. A pile of his drawings and crayons were splayed out in front of him.

“Hi, buddy,” Milly called from the kitchen, pouring herself coffee that Jared had made. “Did you see Dad leave?”

“Yep,” he called, not twisting around. “He went over the bridge.”

She brought her coffee and the Saturday New York Times over to the couch by the TV. She ran her hand through his hair, which, with the exception of mixing paints and running into the water at Montauk the first time every summer, was just about her favorite thing in the world. “Do I get a morning kiss?”

“Yep.” He smooched loudly toward the TV to suggest it was for her.

“I meant for real.” She bent down and nuzzled his face and planted a kiss on his chubby cheek, which made him giggle and squirm and vaguely smile.

“Squinch over on the floor so there’s some room for my feet,” she said. He did so.

She curled up on the couch, her coffee on its armrest, and watched him absently, the newspaper ignored beside her. Later in the day, they would switch roles: Jared would take Mateo and she would go to her (considerably smaller) studio space in Chinatown and paint until she brought home a pizza for dinner. But for now, she was alone with the little boy who’d become her son, the initial hard years of adjustment over. She felt contented. They’d found a groove, the three of them.

“What are you looking at?” he asked her, not averting his eyes from the TV.

“Nothing.” She paused. “Shouldn’t we go for a haircut today?”

This was enough to break his gaze. “I don’t wanna haircut! I like my hair.”

“Because it’s so skater boy?” she teased him. He wanted to be a skater boy. It was inevitable. It was impossible to walk around with him in the neighborhood without him seeing the skater boys, so cool with their flat-brimmed baseball caps and baggy jeans and high-tops, and not hear him say, “That’s cool, I wanna do that.”

“You’ll break your neck if you do that,” Milly would say to him, tightening her grip on his hand as they walked through the park.

“No, I won’t,” he’d reply, his valor wounded. “You’re not cool.”