was your homework on?”
“Fractions,” he said.
“Ah,” she said. “I liked taking fractions when I was a little girl.”
“I hate them.”
Fanya managed an anxious smile. “I think we need to do something to get out of here. We cannot stay in here. It is not good.”
“My dad’ll get somebody.”
“That could take a long time. We need to do something now. Don’t you have to get to school so you can see how well you did on your fractions homework?”
Colin nodded.
“And I have to get to work. So let’s figure this out.” Fanya studied where the doors met, worked a finger into the rubber lining. “I bet we could get these apart.”
“Uh, I don’t think you’re supposed to do that.”
“Maybe we are not between floors,” she said. “Maybe the hallway is right there and all we have to do is step off.”
“Maybe,” Colin said uncertainly.
She dug her fingers in and started to pull the door on the right side into the open position. The doors did not move.
Fanya said, “You look like a strong boy, even though you are little. You pull from the other side.”
Colin said nothing, but did as he was asked. He got his fingers into the now-larger gap and pulled hard on the left door. Even with both of them pulling, the doors parted only about half an inch.
“Okay, okay, stop,” Fanya said. They both released their grips on the doors and took a step back. “I do not think this is going to work.”
And then, as if by magic, the doors parted. Fanya and the boy stepped back, startled.
“Well,” Fanya said.
The woman and the boy were faced with a concrete block wall, and an opening.
From the floor of the car, and going nearly three feet up, was the gray cement wall of the elevator shaft. Above that, open space. Fanya and Colin were able to stare straight down the seventeenth-floor corridor.
“Success!” she shouted.
Fanya felt relieved not only that the doors had opened, but that there were not any men in black suits standing there in the hallway, waiting for her.
“I’m not going through there,” Colin said nervously, backing away farther.
Fanya smiled. “We just have to be quick.”
“No way,” he said.
She smiled sympathetically. “Think of it as a fraction. The doors are how far open?”
The boy looked at her. “Half?”
“Very good. So it is half-open, and half-closed. Half-open is good enough for us to get out. But I will try it first.” She grinned. “I just have to be fast.”
She set her purse on the elevator floor. “I used to be a gymnast in Russia,” she said. “When I was a girl.” She grimaced. “It was a long time ago. But some things you don’t forget. Climbing up three feet should not be so hard.”
Fanya put both hands on the grooved metal strip on the hallway level, hoisted herself up enough to get her knee onto it, then moved her entire body through the opening. She was on her knees in the hallway, her feet hanging over the edge inside the car before she stood triumphantly.
“What are you going to do now?” Colin asked, looking up at her. “Are you going to leave me here?”
Shit. She really couldn’t do that. She’d freed herself, could head to the university, but how would it look? “Visiting Professor Abandons Child in Stuck Elevator.” Would a callous act like that prompt the State Department to reject her request for asylum?
“No,” she said. “I will not do that. I will not leave you here.” She glanced down at the elevator floor. How stupid of her. She’d dropped her purse there. It would have made more sense to have tossed it out onto the hallway floor before making her escape.
“Colin,” she said, pointing. “Toss me my purse. Then we’ll see about getting you out, too.”
As Colin reached down to get it, Fanya dropped back down to her hands and knees to reach in to take it from him.
She leaned forward into the car. Colin picked up the purse and held it out for her. Fanya shifted slightly forward on her knees.
The elevator suddenly moved.
Down.
The roof of the car dropped toward Fanya’s neck. She didn’t have to glance upward to see what was coming. She saw the elevator floor dropping away from her. While physics had never been her area of expertise, she could figure this much out. If the car’s floor was heading down, the car’s ceiling would surely follow.
Without having to think about it, she began to withdraw her head from the elevator. She needed to get her entire body back into the hallway.
She was not quick enough.
The elevator continued on its way to ground level at a normal rate of speed. When the doors opened several seconds later, those who had been waiting—and not very patiently, at that—were greeted by the sight of a near catatonic, wide-eyed Colin, huddling in the corner as far away as possible from Fanya Petrov’s arm and hand, still gripping her purse, and the scientist’s decapitated head.
Barbara got to the Morning Star Café on Second Avenue, just above Fiftieth, before her daughter, Arla, got there. She took a booth near the window, facing the street, and said yes to a cup of coffee when the waiter stopped by. Barbara scanned the menu to pass the time, but knew she’d be getting a Virginia ham and cheddar omelette. Arla, she was betting, would have only coffee.
Barbara glanced at the photos on the wall. A lot of famous people had dropped by the Morning Star over the years. There were a couple of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who Barbara was pretty sure had lived in the neighborhood before his death in 2007. She’d seen him once, a couple of blocks north of here, but didn’t say anything, even though she was a fan. You were always seeing somebody famous in New York and were expected to be cool about it.
She’d checked the menu, scanned the walls. Fidgety. Getting out her phone seemed the next logical step. Barbara had mixed feelings about meeting with her daughter this morning. She had reason to believe Arla’d been seeing a therapist lately, although Arla had not come right out and admitted it when Barbara asked. But Barbara knew Arla had a multitude of issues she was struggling to come to terms with. There’d been an eating disorder for a while there, but that seemed to be under control. When Arla was in her midteens, she’d gone through a cutting period, marking her arms with a razor. That one really had Barbara worried, but that, too, had passed.
Barbara was aware that whatever the issue, Arla was inclined to trace it back to her mother. She was, after all, the root of all of Arla’s problems.
Well, fuck, Barbara thought. I was never exactly June Cleaver.
When Barbara found herself pregnant at eighteen, she was already working on a career in journalism. As a kid, inspired by watching reruns of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (she wasn’t old enough to have seen it when it first came on), Barbara wanted to be Mary Richards. She wanted to work in news. And Mary showed how an independent woman could make it, after all.
When she was barely seventeen, she had landed a reporting gig at the Staten Island Advance, winning over the editors by showing up day after day with unsolicited stories about interesting people in the borough. They were good. They saw that the kid could produce.