WALK-THROUGH
1
We don’t belong here.
That thought, quiet but insistent—like a best friend tugging on her sleeve, trying to pull her out of an embarrassing, maybe even dangerous, situation. Get out, hurry, before anyone notices.
Ana did her best to ignore it.
She looked out the huge living room window, where wintry green-and-white Central Park spread out beneath her. She could see all the way across Manhattan to the East River from this vacant, top-floor apartment.
Reid and the broker, Vera, were in the second bedroom. Vera—(was she a broker? It suddenly occurred to Ana they had no idea what the woman’s official job was)—could be heard delighting Reid with trivia about the building. Reid could be heard delighting Vera with videos of their almost-one-year-old daughter, Charlie.
Ana, not delighted, remained alone with her thoughts.
We don’t belong here.
We don’t belong here.
We—
Eventually, Vera and Reid came back into the living room. Vera explained how the same man who’d designed Central Park, Frederick Olmsted, had also designed the Deptford’s courtyard—something of a visual joke, but also an appeal to Olmsted’s vanity, because now tenants could reflect on his genius whether they looked inward or out.
Reid’s vanity also appeared piqued. Ana had never seen him hang on someone’s every word like this. He needs this, she thought.
“I can’t get over how green the courtyard is!” he exclaimed. “I mean, it’s January!”
“Hardy plants from the mother country,” Vera said—though, where was she from, Long Island? “Hey, show me another video of your little one! I can’t get over that noise she makes! She’s like a baby bird.”
“That’s what we call her!” Reid eagerly dug out his phone.
Ana excused herself with a tight smile. Wrapped up in their enthusiasm, Reid and Vera barely registered it. Although, Reid brushed a hand against Ana’s shoulders as she passed between them.
The second bedroom was just like the rest of the apartment: perfect.
This would obviously be Charlie’s room. If they lived here, Charlie would grow up looking down (… down … down) at the aforementioned courtyard.
At the center of the huge courtyard was a massive, wild-looking forest—it was shockingly green and vibrant. Hardy plants, indeed. In the middle of the foliage lay a flat, tamed rectangle of grass. From this high up, Ana got the so-called visual joke right away: all those wild trees were buildings, skyscrapers, and the flat grass was Central Park in miniature.
We don’t belong here.
From the other room, Vera cooed rapturously over another video.
What a bizarre woman. Twitchy. Off-putting. Ana sensed something like desperation in her, which was laughable because … why would anyone showing off a luxury apartment at the Deptford to a couple of lower-middle-class nobodies like Ana and Reid feel desperate? It’s not like anyone in the history of ever would say no, right?
Ana leaned her head against the cool glass of the window. She could almost feel the building swaying in the winter wind—but that had to be her imagination.
Technically, this floor, the top floor, was the eighteenth, but because of the duplexes and triplexes beneath them—the apartments inhabited by the movie stars, financial moguls, famous musicians, maybe even, God help us, some unholy combination of all three—they were something like twenty-five stories high. Maybe even thirty, it was impossible to really say.
Ana and Reid had entered the housing lottery for the Deptford Apartment as a joke when they first started looking for a place together a little over a decade ago. Why had they won it now? It was so fucking unfair.
You have to tell him.
That made her feel slightly nauseous. She closed her eyes.
When she opened them, she noticed a gnarled, twisted face staring back at her.
Across the courtyard, just above her line of sight, under the peaked gables of the roof.
A pug-nosed, leering creature with its stony mouth pulled into a comical pout.
When they’d been notified about their names coming up in the housing lottery yesterday, Ana googled the building, curious what insider info she could find. She came up surprisingly short. Plenty of surface appreciation, but, despite being one of New York’s most famous apartment buildings, no movies had ever been shot inside, no photographers had ever been allowed in for so much as a Vanity Fair spread, no tell-all books had hit the bestseller lists. No previous lottery winners had started so much as a blog. New York City seemed to enjoy keeping intimate details about the Deptford a secret.
Except for its gargoyles.
Copyright © 2023 by Nat Cassidy
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