Out of the Cold (13 page)

“I sure did. And I heard what you said about a box of biscotti. I'm gonna hold you to it.”

I hurried up the street to meet her. I had a bag in one hand.

“That's the place,” Morgan said, pointing to a rundown, two-story brick house.

We climbed the rickety wooden steps and knocked on the door. No one answered. A man carrying two garbage bags appeared from around the side of the house. He glanced at us as he toted the bags to the curb. Then he disappeared around the side of the house again. He was back a minute later with a couple more bags. He paused and looked at us again.

“What's his problem?” Morgan said.

I knocked again, louder this time. Still no answer.

“The woman and the little girl must have gone out before I saw the man leave,” Morgan said.

“Maybe,” I said. I wished we'd started watching the street sooner.

“You girls looking for someone?” the man called to us from the curb.

“Someone needs a hobby,” Morgan muttered.

“Maybe he knows her.” I turned to the man. “We're looking for the woman who lives here.”

He gave me a strange look. “There's six women who live here,” he said. “Some guys, too. It's apartments. Knocking on that door”—he nodded at the front door—“won't do you any good.” When we didn't move, he shook his head. “You have to go inside,” he said, “and knock on the door of the person you're looking for.”

Morgan opened the outer door and we stepped into a cramped lobby.

“This place doesn't look big enough for six apartments,” Morgan said.

“They must be awfully small,” I agreed.

Morgan looked around the bleak foyer. “So, which one are we looking for?”

I looked at the six mailboxes on the wall beside the door. Each one had a name printed on a little card taped to the top of the box. I pulled my wallet out of my bag and fished out the thrift store receipt that Ben and I had found in one of Mr. Duffy's books. One of the mailbox name cards had been printed in what looked like the same slender, elegant handwriting as the telephone number on the back of the receipt. I pointed to it.

“That one,” I said. Mailbox number five. “Khan, R.”

Morgan looked at the three doors that led off the tiny foyer. “Door number one, door number two, or door number three?” she said.

“Mailbox five....” I said. “Let's try door three.”

Door number three opened onto a flight of stairs that led to the second floor of the house. At the top were two more doors—apartments five and six. I knocked on the door to five. At first I saw light behind the peephole in the door. Then the peephole went dark, like someone's eye was pressed up against it. When it finally went light again, I thought the door would open. But it didn't. I knocked another time.

“No one's home,” Morgan said. To my surprise, she actually sounded disappointed.

I knocked harder. The flimsy door rattled in its frame.

“Robyn, take a hint,” Morgan said. “We'll have to come back another time.”

The door opened an inch, startling Morgan, and a woman peeked out over the security chain.

“Hi,” I said. “Remember me? I saw you at the funeral. I know you were a friend of Mr. Duffy's. I knew him too.”

The woman looked at us. She shook her head and started to close the door. I pushed against it to keep it open.

“Please,” I said. “I just want to talk to you for a few minutes.”

“I must close the door before I can open it,” the woman said.

The door shut, and I heard the rattle of the security chain. A moment later the door opened again.

The woman inside was small and slender. She had a blanket wrapped around her shoulders for warmth. A small, dark-eyed girl peeked out from behind her.

“You may come in,” the woman said.

Morgan and I wiped our feet on the small mat outside the door before entering.

“How did you know where to find me?” the woman said.

Embarrassed, I explained that I had followed her. “But only because it's important,” I said. I explained how I knew Mr. Duffy and that I was trying to find out more about him. “I feel partly responsible for what happened,” I said.

The woman frowned. “You?” she said. “How are you responsible?”

I told her what had happened at the shelter, how Mr. Duffy had been banned just before one of the coldest nights of the year and how, because of that, he had frozen to death. The woman listened in silence. When I had finished, she said, “He was difficult to understand. How he acted, I mean. At first, he frightened me. But he never scared Yasmin. This is Yasmin.” She laid a hand on the head of the little girl who clung to her. “I am Aisha. It is a cold night. Please, let me make you some tea.”

We removed our boots and shucked our coats. I was glad that I had worn a warm sweater. The two small rooms that made up the tiny apartment were chilly. As I looked around the sparsely furnished place and remembered how underdressed for the weather she, her husband, and their little girl had been, I realized that buying flowers to take to the funeral must have been a real sacrifice.

“Please, sit,” Aisha said, indicating a battered couch against one wall. She disappeared into the small room off the main room—the bathroom—to fill a kettle. She set the kettle on the small, battered stove and turned on a burner. While we waited for the water to boil, we found out a little more about Aisha and her husband Rashid.

They had recently immigrated from Pakistan, thinking that the move would offer more opportunities to Yasmin. They had been told before they left their home that they would have no trouble finding employment and had saved their money so that they would have enough to live on while they got settled. Rashid had been a civil engineer in Pakistan. Aisha had been a medical doctor. But neither had been able to find work in their field. Their qualifications weren't recognized. No one would hire Rashid because he didn't have any experience in this country. Before she could practice medicine again, Aisha would have to take new exams in order to qualify. And they couldn't afford that. As it was, she said, they had been in the country for nearly nine months and had used up almost all of their savings. It had taken Rashid nearly six months to find a job. He had worked in telemarketing for a few weeks, but hated it so much that Aisha had insisted he quit.

“Now he cleans offices at night,” she said. “He does not like it. He feels it demeans him. But what can we do?”

Everything had turned out to be much more expensive than they had expected. And they, like everyone else, had been surprised at how early winter had come this year and at how cold it had been so far.

“There are stores where you can buy warm winter clothing secondhand,” I said. “But they're clean and in good condition.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know. I have been to one. I bought a coat for Yasmin. But when Rashid found out that the store was operated by a charity, he made me take it back. He is very proud. He will not accept charity.”

I thought about the clothing that Mr. Duffy had bought and then returned. It was starting to make sense.

The kettle started to whistle and Aisha hurried to the stove to make the tea. She poured it into delicate glass teacups that she had set out on a tray. The tea was milky and smelled sweet and fragrant.

I set my bag on the table and pulled out a box.

“We brought some cupcakes,” I said. I'd been thinking of the little girl when I bought them. “Chocolate,” I said, smiling at Yasmin. “Do you like chocolate?”

Yasmin nodded and watched me open the box. Her eyes grew big as she approached to look at the sweets inside. She turned to her mother. Aisha said something to her softly. She took three small plates from the cupboard over the stove. She put one of the cupcakes on a plate and handed it to Yasmin. The little girl sat on a chair and peeled off the paper, then broke off the bottom of the cupcake and ate it in small bites between sips of extramilky tea, finally nibbling on the top half of the cupcake, which was covered with thick chocolate frosting.

Aisha insisted that Morgan and I each have a cupcake, but she didn't have one herself.

“About Mr. Duffy,” I said at last.

“He was kind to us,” Aisha said. “He tried to help us.”

“Tried?” Morgan said.

“We met him in the park during the summer. That is to say, Yasmin met him.” She looked fondly at her daughter. “She was playing. She ran across the park while I wasn't looking. All of a sudden, a big dog ran toward her and frightened her.”

I looked sympathetically at Yasmin. The same thing had happened to me when I was small, except that the big dog I had encountered had bitten me, giving me a severe case of canine-phobia.

“Then a man—Mr. Duffy—came and took the dog by the collar. He returned it to its owner, who had not been paying attention. The man who owned the dog was very rude to Mr. Duffy. He said that his dog was harmless, that it had as much right to be in the park as anyone else. Mr. Duffy tried to tell him that the dog had frightened Yasmin, but the man wouldn't listen. He called Mr. Duffy names. He was rude to him. That made me very angry.” Her eyes flashed. “When I told the man he should be more polite and he should take care of his dog, he became angry with me too. He called me names.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

Aisha took a sip of her tea. “I thanked Mr. Duffy for helping Yasmin. He was very quiet. He kept his head down. He wouldn't look at me. I think the man with the dog made him feel ashamed of his appearance. His face—” She glanced at Yasmin. “If you didn't know him, he could look very fierce. I think he didn't want to frighten Yasmin the way the dog did. He walked away. A few days later we saw him in the park again. It was still warm, and I had brought our lunch with us so that Yasmin and I could have a picnic.

“When I saw him, I wanted to thank him for helping Yasmin. I invited him to share our lunch. At first he didn't want to. But when Yasmin offered him some food, he finally accepted. He ate with real pleasure.” She smiled proudly. “The next day we saw him again. He had a tin of preserved peaches with him. He wanted me to take it home, but I couldn't. Rashid would want to know where I had got it. If I told him that it was a gift from a stranger, he wouldn't let me keep it. Nor could I tell him that I had bought the peaches. He would want to know why I'd thrown away money on something like that. Mr. Duffy took the tin to a restaurant across the street from the park. When he came back, it was open and he had plastic spoons and we ate the peaches in the park—the whole tin! They were delicious.” She smiled at the memory.

“After that, we often saw him in the park or on the street,” she said. “He would sit on the street and people would give him money. I felt so sorry for him. But he always had something for us. For Yasmin. He liked to bring her cookies.” I remembered the ones he had tried to steal from the homeless shelter.

“And spices,” I said. “He gave you spices.”

“How did you know?” Aisha said.

I told a little white lie. I said that a clerk in a grocery store had told me.

Aisha nodded. “He also bought warm clothing for us from one of those thrift stores. But I had to make him take it back. Rashid would never accept it. Mr. Duffy didn't understand that. He kept bringing things for Yasmin, and always I had to ask him to return them. One time when we were out with Rashid, we saw him and Yasmin ran to talk to him. Rashid didn't like that. He was like the man in the park—he only saw what Mr. Duffy looked like. I argued with him later, but it didn't do any good. Rashid can be very stubborn.”

I took out the thrift store receipt with the phone number written on the back of it and the letter
F
next to it.

“Did you give him this number?” I said.

She nodded. “I know the woman who runs the laundromat. I do my laundry there every Friday.”

“Is that what the
F
means?” I said.

“I told him he could reach me there on Fridays. Or he could leave a message for me there, in case anything happened and he needed something. I worried about him, especially in the cold weather. But he never telephoned. He never asked for help.”

“Did Mr. Duffy ever talk about his personal life?” I said.

Aisha hesitated for a moment and then shook her head.

“Did you hear the young man who spoke at the funeral?” I said. She nodded. “He liked Mr. Duffy. And he thinks it's terrible that nobody knows anything about him. He thinks that unless he can tell Mr. Duffy's story—you know, let people know who he was before he ended up on the street, help them understand
how
he ended up on the street—that people will just go on thinking that homeless people aren't like the rest of us, that they deserve to be on the street because they're lazy or stupid or crazy.”

“Mr. Duffy was not stupid,” Aisha said. She sounded surprised that anyone would think such a thing. “He was very smart. I think he was a businessman before his life changed.”

“What makes you think that?”

“He knew a lot. And he read a lot. He liked to go to the library.”

“Did he ever talk about what kind of work he used to do?”

She shook her head.

“Did he ever tell you what happened to him, how he ended up on the street?”

She shook her head again.

“Sometimes he had terrible headaches,” she said. “He'd had a bad injury. I asked him what had happened to him, but he never told me. Sometimes he didn't remember things.”

Yasmin scampered back into the room. I hadn't even noticed that she had been gone. She tugged on her mother's tunic and said something softly that I couldn't understand. Then she pressed something into her mother's hand. Aisha sat silently for a moment, clutching whatever Yasmin had just given her, her eyes staring down at the threadbare carpet on the floor.

“I don't know where he came from,” she said at last, looking up to meet my eyes. “But one day he said to me, ‘Aisha, would
you
take me back?'”