Miracle on 49th Street (14 page)

S
he didn't know if Mattie, who was slow-moving even when she thought she was going fast, would go back to the elevators and try to beat her to the lobby that way. But after just one day at the Sherry-Netherland, Molly knew you usually had to wait for an elevator to come, especially if you were on one of the high floors like they were.

Or maybe Mattie had gone right into Josh's suite, thinking that something had just happened in there.

Either way, Molly had time to get away.

She wasn't going to let them catch her, Molly had made her mind up about that. She wasn't mad at Mattie. Mattie hadn't done anything. Mattie had already become her second-best friend in the world, after Sam. But Molly didn't want Mattie putting her arms around her today and telling her that things were going to be all right. Or that things were going to get better, child. That's what she called Molly in her sweet way sometimes. Child. But Molly was tired of being treated like one. And she hardly ever felt like one. She was tired of adults telling her that things were going to get better. They had been telling her that since her mom first got sick. First they said her mom was going to get better. That's what their friends in London said. Then Barbara told her that when they first got to Boston so the specialists at Mass General could take care of Jen Parker. She's going to beat this thing, that's what everybody kept saying.

Until she didn't beat it.

So her mom didn't get better, after all.

Then it was
things
that were going to.

What things? Molly wanted to scream at them sometimes, at the top of her lungs.

Because they couldn't possibly mean the things she was never going to get to do with her mom. Or the things she was never going to get to share with her. They couldn't mean the trip to the stupid tree in Rockefeller Center they were never going to make when she was better, because she never got better.

Now she didn't want anybody telling her that this was some big misunderstanding, that things were going to get better with Josh Cameron, who only wanted to be with her until he could figure out a way not to be with her.

She didn't want any adult, not even Mattie, the best adult she'd ever met outside her mom, telling her that she hadn't really heard what she knew she'd just heard from the father she now realized she was never going to have.

Whether he was her real father or not.

Maybe he planned on sending her back to Europe for boarding school. Maybe that was far enough away for him. Maybe he knew that worked since her mom had gone that far to get away from him once.

It was what Molly wanted to do right now. Get away from him. He didn't want to be with her? Okay. She didn't want to be with him. She didn't want anybody, and she didn't need anybody, not even Mattie.

She didn't know how many flights she'd gone down, her mind moving about as fast as her legs. But she felt like she'd been running for a while. If Mattie had grabbed Josh, they could be in the elevator by now. Or even in the lobby waiting for her. When Molly jumped down to the latest landing, she went through the door there and looked at the number on the first door she came to.

Room 1011.

They been in 2111, she and Mattie.

She'd come down eleven flights. There was nobody in this hallway. Molly went halfway down it and pushed through the same double doors they had on their floor, the ones she'd seen the room service waiter come through. The service elevator was right there. Molly pushed the Down button and waited, bouncing impatiently on her toes. She didn't know where it opened up when it got to the ground floor, but there was no way it was at the small main lobby of the Sherry-Netherland.

When the doors opened, there was a room service waiter with a table in front of him and a messy tray on top of it. What was left of somebody's breakfast. The man had a white crewcut and a name tag that read “William.” He smiled at Molly.

“Hey, hon,” he said. “You don't want this one. The real elevator is right around the corner.”

Molly Parker, thinking fast, wanting to ride down with him and right now, hit him with what she hoped was her brightest, widest, friendliest smile.

“I bet my big brother I could beat him down,” she said. “And he always beats me at everything.”

“What's your name?”

“Molly.”

“Get in, Molly,” he said, holding his finger on what must have been the door-open button. “What you got riding on the bet?”

“A whole stinking dollar,” Molly said, making it sound like it was a fortune-and-a-half.

“We'll make this an express run,” he said, turning a key in a little lock in front of him. “Skip the rest of the floors on the way down.”

When they got to the bottom, it looked like they were in some basement.

“Is this the lobby level?” Molly said.

“Yeah, but over by the side door,” William said. “There's a little service entrance nobody really knows about, on Fifty-ninth Street. The door's right there.”

Perfect.

Molly sprinted for the door.

“Hey, where you going?” William shouted after her.

“Even if I beat him out of the buck,” Molly said, “I still owe him two.”

She went through the door and stood on the street, across from where she'd seen FAO Schwarz. Between her and the store, some kind of television show was being set up. Molly saw a banner that said “The NFL Today” being hung.

She took a deep breath. It was as bright and cold as yesterday had been. She was glad she'd put on her jacket before she'd left her suite, thinking she and Josh were going to go straight to breakfast.

Molly looked toward Fifth, over to her right. Madison, she knew by now, was left. If she walked over to the corner of Fifth, they'd spot her if they were standing in front of the hotel. She wasn't going that way. She started walking left, patting the wad of mad money in her pocket. Real mad money now. She walked fast toward Madison Avenue, which Josh had told her was one of the big expensive shopping streets in New York City. They had walked this way last night on their way to the restaurant, when Molly still thought she was in the middle of the best weekend of her entire life.

The life she'd had since her mom died, anyway.

She felt her pocket for her cell phone. Empty. She must have left it back in the hotel. In a little while, she'd get to a pay phone and call the room or Mattie's cell and tell her not to worry, that she was fine.

Then she'd call Sam, so the two of them could come up with a plan. That's what he called himself all the time. Sam, the man with the plan.

He'd know a way to get her back to Boston without asking for any help from Josh Cameron. Who had to brace himself for the chance that she might be his daughter the way he braced himself when he was going to get run over sometimes on the basketball court.

For now, Molly just wanted to be on her own. Might as well. She was going to have to get used to that.

So what if she was on her own in New York City?

Her mom had done it when she came to see Josh play that stupid game.

So could she.

There had been more people on the street the night before. Probably because it was Saturday night. More people, more cars, more noise as she and Josh had walked to Sixty-third Street, the street numbers on Madison going up one by one. As busy as New York was, with the noise it made even on a Sunday morning, Molly thought the streets were very organized.

In downtown Boston, she sometimes felt like she was caught in some kind of maze.

She walked up into the Sixties now, not having a real plan, waiting to talk to her man with the plan.

She was still mad. Steaming. Done with him for good, she was sure of that. But as she walked along Madison Avenue, Molly couldn't help feeling something else: Excitement.

She knew she should be scared, alone in what was still a strange city for her. Very strange, even though she had seen only this small part of it, the hotel to the park to the Post House, and what turned out to be the biggest and best banana cream pie that she had ever eaten. The only people she knew in New York were back at the hotel: Josh, Mattie, L.J., the rest of the Celtics. She tried not to think about that, or worry about Mattie being worried. It was only going to be for a short time.

Eventually she'd figure out how to get to Boston. Molly didn't know how much that would cost. She didn't know how much a lot of things cost. She was sure a plane would cost more than a hundred dollars. Maybe a train cost less. There had to be some way to take a train back. Maybe that was the way to go.

Sam would tell her what to do. Or Mattie could help, as long as she promised not to tell Josh what she was doing.

He was probably more worried about his game against the Knicks than he was about her, anyway.

What had her mom told her, over and over? The only two things he cared about were basketball and himself. Now Molly had found this out the hard way.

Better now than later, she told herself.

She had survived losing her mom. If she could do that, losing a dad she'd only had for a couple of weeks, one who didn't want her, would be a snap.

Adults were right about one thing: You could do pretty much anything you set your mind to.

She finally stopped at a restaurant on Madison called the Gardenia, one with a counter in back. Molly went back there, sat down, picked up a menu. The man behind the counter asked her in what sounded like a European accent—Greek or Italian, Molly thought—if she was waiting for her parents.

Molly almost said, I wish.

Instead she said, “My nanny. As soon as church is over.”

Then she asked the man if she could have two eggs over easy with some home fries.

Breakfast for one now, not two.

She cleaned her plate, surprised at how hungry she was. When she finished, the man with the accent came over and asked if her nanny was late. Molly said church had probably run long today, and she'd wait for her outside. “Besides,” she said to the man, “I live just over on Fifth.”

Now she was in a movie. Not a happy-ending princess movie. Not “Annie.” She didn't know how this one would come out, just that she was making it all up as she went along.

She went back out to the sidewalk. Everybody was always telling her how brave she was, and strong. Molly didn't have to be told, or tell anybody herself. She had only been afraid of one thing in her life, truly: losing her mom. After that, nothing was going to scare her very much ever again.

She wasn't afraid to go exploring New York a little bit now.

The night before, she had asked Mattie, who had grown up in New York—“little uptown part of town called Harlem,” Mattie had told her—where the museum was that Sam had told her about, the one with the dinosaurs.

“Museum of Natural History,” Mattie said. “Just over there on the other side of the park.”

Molly, being the brave Molly, went over to the curb and stuck up her arm like she had lived in New York all her life, like this was the most natural thing in the world to do, hailing a taxicab. One pulled over right away, crossing about three lanes to do it. She jumped into the backseat and told the driver she'd like to go to the Museum of Natural History, please. Hoping he wouldn't ask for an actual address, that he was like one of the cabdrivers in London, who seemed to know anything.

“We'll go over to Fifth and then cut across at Seventy-ninth,” the driver said, in another accent Molly couldn't place. “That okay with you?”

Molly said that was just fine.

The museum was open. She paid her way in and found the dinosaur exhibit with no problem. It was as cool as Sam Bloom had said it would be. She stayed there a long time, sometimes having the room to herself, alone with the dinos. She couldn't help thinking how much her mom would have liked it here. Her mom liked anything having to do with nature, with the world, used to talk about how much she loved going on camping trips, being out in the woods by herself when she was Molly's age and in something called Outward Bound.

Her mom always knew the names of flowers, and birds, and trees.

Molly was sure she would have gotten a kick out of these old dinos.

She wandered around a little more, then was back on the street. She went over to the window where she'd bought her ticket and asked what this part of New York City was called. “Upper West Side,” she told Molly. “You from out of town?”

“Boston,” Molly said.

“Boston?” The woman made a face. “The Celtics are playing here tonight. I hate the Celtics.”

“Me too,” Molly said.

Well, not all of them.

She walked around the Upper West Side now, past old brownstone buildings, pretty brownstone buildings, some of them looking as if they belonged on Beacon Hill, on Mount Vernon Street or Louisburg Square. Pretty and classy and old. Eventually she ended up on Columbus Avenue, at a big modern-looking place called the Reebok Club. Like the sneakers. With a Reebok sneaker store attached to it. People kept going in and coming out of the club, on their way to exercise, Molly guessed, or just having finished exercising.