The streets were just as crowded at night as during the day. Instead of walking on soles, it felt like my bones had grown knots on the bottoms of my feet. My grandmother sagged on her right leg as she walked, as though she were dragging a wooden stump. My grandfather and mother were walking ahead of us. I felt obligated to stay in between. She’d said a lot of cruel things that week, but I couldn’t let my grandmother fall too far behind. I wanted more than anything to sit down on a bench and enjoy the city at night, forget about the path train back to Jersey and just breathe for a little while in the stillness of other people’s movement. But my family’s anxiety of not knowing which train took us back over the Hudson didn’t leave a lot of time for stillness. We walked, we walked, in circles, in squares.
I looked behind me to see how far my grandmother had fallen back. “You catch up with them,” she said. “I’ll get up there.” Yeah right, I thought. Everyone was worried that I’d get snatched off the streets. What about them? It wasn’t so much that I thought someone would hurt my grandmother, but what if she lost sight of us? We already couldn’t find our way. “I’d feel better if you walked in front of me,” my mom had told me the day before. My grandfather had said the same thing to Nana. They expected only bad from the city.
We walked down into a Penn Station subway, then into THE Penn Station, swerving through the empty ropes to wait for an agent to help us. “Let’s get this white guy up here,” my grandfather said, and the F-word rolled through my head unannounced. It did that a lot that week. But the black gentleman’s light was blinking for the next person in line, and I turned my head to indulge in a secret smile. “You’re going to go across the street, and it will be down the other side of the road,” he told us. But as we climbed back up the stairs, my grandfather and mother turned left. “He didn’t say to come out the station, turn left, then cross the street. He said simply to cross the street,” I fussed to my mom. “Well, Lauren, there’s not a subway on the other side of the street from there.”
I opened my mouth to say something else, but saw a young girl wearing pink, smudged lipstick talking to a police officer, hiccuping between cries. “That little girl’s lost,” my mother said. I nodded as people bustled around us. The scene played before me as if on a screen, only better. It was real. “Do you know where you last saw her?” the officer asked. The girl sniffed. “No.” On an impulse, I bowed my head and prayed for the little girl to find whoever it was she’d lost. Behind the officer, a woman sheathed in brown clothes with short hair rushed up behind them, her eyes scanning down the streets. “Tara?” The girl whipped around, and the woman sighed, wrapping her arms tightly around the lost one. As they broke apart, the woman began berating the girl in a foreign tongue. The light turned on the road, and the crowd began to move. I didn’t have time to register what had just happened, though I tried. A prayer had just been answered, yet I could barely feel my feet much less the emotions typically generated during such an occurrence. But then my lips curved upward, and I was sharing a private moment with God in the middle of this big city – happy, lost, and awed.
