Inside

TWO

New York, 2002

SHE WAS NEW to the city at a time when having been there before meant something. She was late to the event. She didn’t know anyone, hadn’t lost anyone, wasn’t part of the history. This was all okay with her.

It was January. She found an apartment on the Lower East Side through a guy she met in her acting class. Larry’s grandmother had lived in the apartment for decades, keeping the rent low; now she was in a nursing home, adrift in an Alzheimer’s haze, only occasionally convinced she would soon move back home. The family, having cleared the apartment of its doilied furniture and ancient knickknacks, sublet it to Anne at what even she, new to New York, could tell was an insane bargain. This was because Larry hoped to have sex with her. She took the apartment and dropped the class.

Sometimes he came by, supposedly to pick up his grandmother’s mail or check on the faucets. “I never see you anymore,” he’d say, barely dampening the complaint in his voice.

“I’m so busy,” she’d say, never specifying at what.

Larry worked in commercials. He was the husband strolling through the house in the real-estate ad, the man grimacing with hemorrhoid pain before exhaling in relief. In between these shoots he took classes and auditioned for plays. “Keeping busy’s important,” he told Anne. “An unstructured life is a terrible thing.”

She politely agreed, then left as soon as possible, abandoning him in her apartment. She knew he wouldn’t disturb anything or rifle through her things — he was a transparently honest person, which was one reason he wasn’t a very successful actor — and also that he wouldn’t find anything of interest if he did.

She was not, in fact, busy at all. If her life was unstructured, at least it was terrible in ways she enjoyed. She had saved enough money to tide her over while she looked for work, and she believed that something perfect would come along — without knowing what it might be — and that before it did she shouldn’t accept substitutes. Her confidence in the universe’s generosity was mystical, and no less strong for not having been confirmed. She spent her days in coffee shops on Houston Street, reading Stanislavsky and scanning ads for casting calls. People at auditions kept shaking their heads and saying, “This part isn’t right for you, but trust me, it’s only a matter of time,” and she believed them. She heard the phrase so often that she came to see a matter of time as a literal, physical thing she could wrap around herself like a blanket, comforting and soft.

Finally she took a job at a temp agency in Midtown, mostly because she thought waitressing was a cliché. She did data entry in the off-hours, leaving the days free for auditions. In the waiting areas she always saw the same people, who became the closest thing to friends she had, although she knew they really weren’t, that they would resent anyone who broke through. She was cast as a fairy in a Midsummer that, being post 9/11, obliged her to wear a turban and carry a hand grenade. Even though the production was awful, she felt the lights on her face and knew the audience in the darkness was watching her, and her blood boiled like a kettle, dying to be poured.

The play closed after ten days, and her nights were free. Larry had stopped coming around. One evening she saw him inside a bar on Avenue A, holding hands with a woman across a tiny table, his eyes glassy with triumph. She didn’t care about him, of course, but a physical ache rippled across her skin. She went to a poetry reading that night at the New School. The reader was middle-aged and Irish, with ghostly, blue-green eyes. Each poem concerned the dissolution of his marriage and his resulting loss of faith in the world, which he thought had already been lost. This was the worst part, his poems seemed to say: you believed your cynicism would save you from hurt, only to discover a secret, uncherished vulnerability in your soul. Anne sat in the front row, bought his book afterward, and told him that his work spoke to her as little else did. “You’ve made me feel less alone,” she said.

They went out for a drink. The poet was rambling, sweet, and tender, and wept while describing his mother, who had died when he was a child. He didn’t ask Anne any questions about her life, but she didn’t mind. Acting was about listening, one of her teachers had told her: you focused on the other person in the scene and let them dictate to you. You reacted. Even more than that, you let them change you. So there was no need to decide in advance how to say your line. It was all response. This is what she did that night; by listening, she became — or pretended to become — the only woman in the world who understood him. Two days’ growth of salt-and-pepper beard grazed her cheek when they kissed; on his breath was the sour smell of red wine. At her apartment, he lay in bed and ranted about the man who was fucking his wife. The next morning he apologized if he’d talked too much.

“Not at all,” she said. “It was exactly what I needed.” What she needed was the bruise and crash of another body against her own, a collision that made her feel real. She’d wanted to be manhandled, not listened to, or cared for, or even seen.

“You pretty women are such goddamn nightmares,” a drunk told her one night in a dim bar on Fiftieth Street, where she’d stopped by after a day of temping. She had let him buy her a drink, then turned him down for dinner because she didn’t like the smell of his cologne, and now he was mad. “You’re all the same. Hollow at the core.”

“I’m not hollow,” she said, smiling sweetly. Her core was molten, radioactive. She knew that beneath the surface she was diseased, rotten, incinerating herself from the inside. But that wasn’t the same thing as being hollow. Not the same thing at all.

Toward the end of February, she got back to her building around six in the afternoon. She had been cast, through the intervention of the Irish poet, in a play about the potato famine. In rehearsals she had to roll around moaning in hunger in a chilly basement, and after every session she was exhausted and aching and, indeed, starving.

There was a bad smell inside the front door. The landlord, wanting to make life unpleasant for those in the rent-stabilized apartments, had suspended superintendent services. Nothing was cleaned, there were no functioning lightbulbs in the stairwell, there was no one to call in case of an emergency. In the corner, just below the mailboxes, was a pile of what Anne took to be discarded clothes until she realized, with a start, that it was a person.

Whoever it was shifted slightly beneath a brown wool blanket and a green army coat that were somehow twisted together in a kind of shelter. Outside it was damp and blustery, the kind of freezing cold that slips through zippers and buttons to get at your skin, even into your muscles. She let him be.

The next day, though, he was still there. The grandmothers in the building — almost all the apartments were rented by little old ladies — had clustered anxiously on the landings, whispering. Of course the super wouldn’t answer his phone or buzzer, so one of the old ladies had called the police. “They laughed in my face, those rat bastards,” she said. “Said they had more important things to do.” Other tenants, probably nervous about their own status in the building or the country, slipped past without so much as a glance.

Anne, theoretically, should have done the same thing. She was living in an illegal sublet with no proof that she belonged there, and only Larry’s fear of confrontation kept him from kicking her out. But she could handle him. She jumped right into the conversation.

Soon the intruder in the lobby had drawn the residents together, like survivors of a storm. For the next two days, as Anne went into and out of the building, she would meet her neighbors’ eyes with a shrug and a smile, and they’d shrug and smile back.

In all this time the guy beneath the blanket didn’t show his face, though the smell of urine started wafting up the stairwell. When the tenants met now, they scrunched their noses in distaste and hurried into their apartments as quickly as possible, disgusted and afraid.

Finally, Mrs. Bondarchuk, the one who had called the police, clutched Anne’s arm outside her door and drew her into the kitchen. “You’ve got to do something.”

“Me? What about the super? Or the cops?”

Mrs. Bondarchuk shot her a scornful look. “You don’t think they have other things to do?”

“Sure, but what am I supposed to do?”

Mrs. Bondarchuk was a tiny Ukrainian lady, barely five feet tall, but her wrinkled face was powerfully insistent. Her short hair was dyed a lurid, unconvincing red. Until recently, she had refused to acknowledge Anne’s presence, but her new friendliness came at a price. “You go talk to them,” she said firmly. “You’re a young person.” The logic of this was self-evident to her. “You go talk.”

“All right,” Anne said. “Fine.”

She went downstairs and stood next to the pile without any idea what sort of creature was hidden beneath it. “Excuse me,” she finally said.

There was neither answer nor movement in the pile, and the smell was rank. It had been four days.

“I’m sorry, but you can’t stay here. You have to leave.”

No answer. Was he asleep? Passed out on drugs?

“I know it’s cold out,” she said. “But there are places, right? I mean, shelters. They’ll feed you, and give you a shower and stuff. You have options.”

As she said it, she remembered someone speaking those last three words to her, You have options, when she was very young, and the way a voice had risen up inside her, silent but stubborn, that said, No, I don’t.

The pile, however, said nothing. Defeated, she turned on her heel and went back to her apartment.

What put the situation over the edge was the shit. She left for rehearsal and when she came back, three hours later, a few pages of the New York Times Arts section were neatly folded into quarters in the opposite corner of the entryway. The smell was unmistakable.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “Are you kidding me?”

Taking a deep breath and holding it, she grabbed one edge of the wool blanket and pulled. Whoever was underneath — both underneath and inside and twisted around, it seemed — pulled back, and for a minute it was like a tug of war. Anne wanted to give up, because holding this filthy blanket was grossing her out, but then the other person gave in and she reeled backward, almost stumbling flat on her ass, and when the blanket dropped from her hand, she saw to her shock that it was a girl. Blond, teenage, stocky, her round cheeks constellated with pimples.

“I need some food,” the girl said, then burrowed into the green army coat and pulled her knees up to her chin, wrapping her arm around them. It was as if she were anchoring herself to the floor, folding herself into a packet as neat and small as the newspaper. She smelled like mold and garbage, like something discarded and left to rot.

“I’m hungry,” the girl insisted. Then, as if reading Anne’s mind, she added, “And I stink. Can I use your shower? I feel kind of disgusting.”

She was so matter-of-fact, so unapologetic, that Anne was speechless. She had been picturing a man, older, maybe a vet, somewhat or completely out of his mind, homeless for a long time. A teenage runaway — a girl who could shit in a building and then curl up asleep next to it — had never occurred to her.

“If I bring you upstairs and let you shower,” she said, “will you go to one of the shelters? I’ll help you get there.”

The girl gazed at her, the expression in her eyes impossible to read. “I’m starving,” she said.

“I have some food,” Anne said. “Okay?”

The girl struggled heavily to her feet, gathering her coat around her. She looked sleepy, and willing, if not happy, to follow her upstairs. As they passed Mrs. Bondarchuk’s door, Anne knocked lightly to let her know what was happening — though she didn’t doubt that the old lady was already peering through the keyhole. You owe me one, she thought.

The girl stepped into the apartment as if it were hers. She was wearing dirty jeans, sneakers, and a blue sweater, and Anne had only a moment to guess at her age — fifteen, maybe sixteen? — before she went into the bathroom and closed the door, without asking directions or permission. After a minute, Anne heard the shower running.

“Okay,” she said out loud. She went into the kitchen and set out bread and peanut butter and jelly. Not caring much about food herself, she hardly ever cooked, and her cupboards held little beyond takeout menus and leftover packets of soy sauce. In the other apartments in the building, the little old ladies spent their days simmering soups and boiling potatoes, wanting to have something on hand in case their families stopped by (though they rarely did), always smelling up the hallways with their traditionally prepared recipes. Probably the girl wished one of them had taken her in.

Anne started to make a sandwich, then realized the girl would need clean clothes when she got out of the shower. She rummaged through her dresser for some rarely worn sweatpants and oversized T-shirts — the girl was much heavier than Anne. Then she went into the bathroom and said, “I’m putting some clothes on the toilet,” but she got no response from the shadow behind the shower curtain. Back in the living room, she waited. All these actions were unaccustomed. She never had houseguests; when men came over, she gave them what they wanted — time with her in bed — and never thought about whether they were hungry, or thirsty, or uncomfortable. If they needed a drink of water, they could get it themselves. If the girl was planning to steal from her, too bad, since Anne didn’t have anything worth stealing. There were advantages to living an unbuilt life.

A few minutes after the water stopped, the girl came out wearing the sweatpants and several T-shirts layered one over the other. Anne couldn’t help noticing that her breasts were enormous, pendulous, beneath the shirts. Her body looked like a woman’s, but her face was chubby, childlike, round. Eyeing the peanut butter, the girl sat down on the kitchen stool. She made herself a sandwich, ate it, then made herself another. Halfway through this one she said, “Milk?”

Anne shook her head, regret washing over her. Why had she let this person — this animal—into her apartment?

While the girl kept eating, Anne went into the bathroom and stuffed the reeking clothes into a plastic garbage bag, wincing when she saw that her shampoo, conditioner, exfoliating scrub, and lotion were all uncapped and messy. Those products were expensive, an investment in her looks.

“I’m going downstairs to put your stuff in the laundry,” she said. When she got back upstairs, the girl was fast asleep in her bed.

She slept poorly on her uncomfortable couch. She had never been one for good deeds. She wasn’t selfish — just self-contained. She liked to stay within her own borders. Yet in the morning, for some reason, she dragged herself to the deli and came back with orange juice and donuts. The girl looked like a donut eater. She sat sipping black coffee on the couch until the girl woke up around ten and wandered into the living room, apparently surprised to see Anne there.

“Don’t you have to go to work?” she said. She had a slight accent, not quite midwestern but broad, the consonants slurry and soft, like she was from the country.

“Not today.” Anne studied the girl’s slow, lumbering slide down onto the stool, noting how her face, creased from sleep, remained inert, as if frozen during a boring dream. The closest thing to an expression Anne had yet seen washed over the girl’s face at the sight of the donuts. She pulled the box toward her and started chewing on one, powdered sugar smudging the tip of her nose.

“What’s your name?”

Without a word, the girl picked up a second donut.

Anne stood up, snatched the donut out of her hand, and threw it, along with the rest of the box, into the garbage, then stood there with her arms folded, playing the disapproving mother.

The girl chewed, swallowed.

Get out, Anne thought.

“Hilary.”

If, at this point, the girl had said nothing more, Anne would have pinched her ear and marched her to the door, or called the police, anything to get her out of the apartment and her life.

But she said, “Are you an actress or model or something? You’re, like, gorgeous.”

Even while recognizing this as flattery, Anne found herself pleased. “I’m in the theater,” she said.

The girl grimaced. “I could never do that,” she said. “Too fat, too ugly.”

“You’re not,” Anne said mechanically. She had this conversation with other actresses almost every day, I’m so fat leading to No you’re not, you’re emaciated, I’m so ugly to No you’re not, you’re gorgeous. It was a call-and-response pattern, rhythmic and codified, like birdsong.

The girl accepted this insincerity and moved on. “Are you in a play right now?”

“In rehearsals. I play an Irish peasant woman during the potato famine. You know about the potato famine? I wind up prostituting myself in exchange for food for my family.”

“Prostituting yourself?” Hilary said, putting her elbows on the kitchen counter. Her large breasts rested on the counter like lumps of bread dough.

Anne nodded. In fact the prostitution was more implied than seen; she only had a few lines, but to make things interesting she had embroidered the character’s backstory. She’d spent so much time on this that she now felt the character had the tragic richness of a starring role. She was the center of the play, its crucial beating heart, but she was the only one who knew it. “Actually, if you wanted to be helpful, you could run some lines with me,” she said, feeling generous. “Then we can figure out the shelter situation.”

While she fished the script out of her bag, Hilary retrieved the donuts from the trash. She inhaled another one, drank some orange juice, then held out her hand for the pages. “Ready,” she said.

Hilary had a surprisingly clear voice and didn’t seem to tire of reading the lines over and over again. Once they started, Anne lowered herself into the character as if into a swimming pool: the water was cold at first, uncomfortable but bracing; then gradually, as the muscles warmed, the temperature turned out to be perfect, and the laps went by in strong, sure strokes, the body now fully engaged. She forgot everything else. It was only in these moments of concentration and release that she felt she could shed her own skin and slip free.

Suddenly it was noon.

“Shit,” Anne said, “I have to go. I’m supposed to meet the costume designer in fifteen minutes. Listen, Hilary.” It was the first time she’d called the girl by her name, but the effect was nil, the round face as inert as ever.

Then Hilary suddenly said, “The bathroom’s disgusting.”

“What?”

“I can clean it, while you’re at your meeting. The toilet, the bathtub, the floor. I can do all that.” Her voice was urgent and quick. She would neither plead nor act desperate, Anne could tell, but she would bargain.

In the days and months to come, she’d question her decision again and again. She couldn’t even remember what was going through her mind: it was as if she had blacked out and come to after the choice had been made. But the fact that she couldn’t explain it to herself was maybe as good a reason to do something as she’d ever had. Sometimes you needed to surprise yourself with randomness, to prove you have depths that even you can’t understand.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m not giving you a key, so you have to stay here. Eat whatever you want, not that you’ll find much food. I really don’t have any stuff for you to steal, but you still better not take anything. If I find anything gone when I come back, I’ll call the cops.”

“I don’t steal,” Hilary said.

“Sure you don’t. I’ll be back at five.”

When she left the apartment, she forgot about the girl completely — her name, her predicament, even her shit in the lobby. It wasn’t that she was naive or trusting; only that nothing was as real to her as herself.

After the meeting with the costume designer was rehearsal, and after that she had a drink with a guy who was putting together a production of Equus with a female cast, to be staged in a parking garage by the Manhattan Bridge. She walked home through Chinatown. On the steps of a church a man was selling shoes he’d collected from who knows where, lined up in obedient pairs as if they belonged to some invisible congregation. She picked out a pair of black pointy-toed heels with rhinestone clips. They smelled faintly of sweat and smoke or fire and the leather was creased, but they fit perfectly. As a child she had played dress-up in her mother’s clothes, dreaming of the day when she’d be a beautiful, grown-up lady, and the sensation of wearing someone else’s castoffs reminded her of this childhood pleasure. She handed the man a five, and he said, “God bless you, sweet thing.”

It was only as she pulled open the outer door that she remembered Hilary. She’d left a stranger alone in her apartment all day. She had to be insane.

But the apartment was quiet. Hilary was curled up on the couch beneath a blanket, her stocky body surprisingly compact, and seeing her asleep somehow changed everything. Anne had been planning to charge in and kick her out, but instead found herself slipping off her boots and setting her bag down quietly, so as not to disturb.

Then she thought, What the hell am I doing?

She turned on the lights and served herself a plate of noodles she’d picked up at Panda Kitchen, eating at the counter. When Hilary stirred, moving tectonically to an upright position, Anne wondered if she was on drugs.

“Could I have some?” Hilary said.

Anne didn’t eat much; she always had leftovers. “All right.”

Seeming to sense her mood, Hilary took some lo mein and carried her plate back to the couch. She was like an animal, observing unspoken, intuitive protocols of distance.

Anne, suddenly exhausted, put her plate in the sink and went into the bedroom, where the sheets had been changed. In the bathroom, the toothpaste blobs were gone from the sink, the bathtub was unstreaked, and everything smelled faintly of bleach. She crawled into bed and lay there listening for disruptive sounds — Hilary tossing or snoring or even breathing too loudly. Outside she heard traffic, horns, voices; but inside, nothing at all.

She didn’t kick her out the next day, or the day after that, and gradually they became strange, unlikely roommates. The shelter was never discussed. Hilary cleaned and sometimes cooked. She fixed the bedroom window that had gotten stuck, did the laundry, even swept the stairwells and changed the lightbulbs on the landings. Mrs. Bondarchuk, who didn’t realize where Hilary had come from, decided she was Anne’s cousin, and they didn’t correct her. The other old ladies in the building began saying hello to her and were friendlier to Anne as well, as if they had found her somehow alarming when she was on her own.

Anne went to rehearsals, to work, and out for drinks, never once asking Hilary what she did during the day besides housework. After a while, she gave Hilary a set of keys and started leaving out some cash, twenty bucks at a time, for groceries. Now when she came home there was milk and bread and fruit. She didn’t know what else Hilary ate, but the girl had already grown even stockier; she was definitely getting enough food somewhere. Her complexion had cleared up; her hair, shampooed regularly, was shinier, lighter, and she sometimes wore it in two braids. She looked scrubbed and healthy, like a milkmaid, and this farmgirl impression was reinforced when Anne, backstage for an audition one day, stumbled on an unlocked wardrobe room and brought back some baggy overalls and plaid shirts that Hilary wore without complaining or even asking where they came from.

Neither of them asked the other any questions. Anne assumed Hilary had run away from home, and in her experience, kids who did that usually had good reasons. And though Hilary had marched right into Anne’s apartment, she seemed to have a second sense about invading her privacy otherwise. When Anne came home from work she often went straight into the bedroom, and Hilary never bothered her. The few clothes Hilary now owned were kept in a milk crate beside the couch, with the blanket she slept under folded on top. Sometimes days would pass without them exchanging a single word.

Anne stopped bringing men home, a little hiatus that was nice at first, giving her a feeling of astringent purity and asceticism. But she soon decided that if she could trust Hilary in the apartment during the day, then she could trust her there at night. So when she wanted to be with a man or felt it would be helpful to her career — a choice she made pragmatically, having never been foolish about sex — she went to his place instead. This eliminated married men from the realm of possibility, which was probably a good thing anyway. And she could control when the evening ended, just by leaving.

One night, she walked home along St. Mark’s Place through the throngs of kids who flocked to the city to buy T-shirts and records and festoon themselves with nose rings and tattoos. Two teenagers, blond Rastas, with a mangy, half-starved golden retriever on a leash, sat on a Mexican blanket on the sidewalk like they were having a picnic. Anne made the mistake of looking the thin, dirty girl in the eye. She was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, her fingernails painted green, and though her hair was greasy, her teeth were pearly and perfect; Anne guessed she hadn’t been gone from home for long. Somewhere people were looking for her, wondering why she’d left and where she’d gone.

“Hey,” the thin girl said, “can you give us some change? Please?”

Anne shook her head.

“Our dog’s really hungry.”

Anne kept walking as the girl kept talking, her voice rising to an angry squawk.

“What about a dollar?” she said. “What about fifty fucking cents?”

Anne didn’t look back. You couldn’t help everybody.

“I’m glad I don’t have a sister,” Hilary said.

She and Anne were sitting on the couch on a Thursday night, eating spaghetti and watching reality TV. Their latest routine, whenever Anne wasn’t rehearsing, was to have dinner together in the living room. Hilary herself had provided the television, which she claimed to have found on the street. After a month in the apartment, she was cleaner, calmer, and fatter. Anne sometimes thought of her as the cow, but not pejoratively; it had to do with the girl’s quietness, her large brown eyes, her shifting, bovine way of settling herself on the couch.

They were watching a show in which two sisters exchanged lives, each one now having to deal with the other’s annoying husband and children, thus learning to appreciate her own annoying husband and children.

“I have a brother,” Hilary said. “He’s twelve. He likes video games. I send him postcards sometimes.”

It might have been the longest Anne had ever heard her speak. “What’s his name?”

“Joshua.”

“Not Josh?”

Hilary shook her head. “We always use his full name. My parents are real religious. I’m from the country — well, not the country, exactly, just a small town. We live right in town, but there’s not much town there. Joshua wants to leave too. I write him postcards, like I said, but I don’t send them from here. I give them to people in the train station and ask them to mail them from wherever they’re going. That way nobody knows where I am.”

“You give them to strangers at the train station?”

“Older women, ones that are alone. They’re the nicest. I just say that I couldn’t find a mailbox, and would they mind dropping this postcard in the mail whenever they have time? They always say yes and don’t ask any questions.”

“You’re good at figuring people out,” Anne said.

The girl gave her a measured look. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

Through these casual Thursday-night disclosures, Anne learned that Hilary liked bananas and was allergic to coconut. That there wasn’t anything for her and her hometown friends to do at night except go to Walmart. That her father was dead and she’d grown up with her mother and stepfather, and that Joshua was actually her stepbrother. But beyond these random, basic facts, she didn’t share much. No sentence ever blossomed into anecdote, and she showed so little emotion, positive or negative, that Anne started to wonder if she was repressing some intense trauma. If she were a movie character, this would eventually burst loose in a flood of bad behavior. But life was longer than movies and a person never knew when the flood would finally come, or sometimes even how to recognize it when it did.

As they spent more time together, Anne began to feel not like a mother — because she thought of mothers as old and asexual — but like an older sister. It made her sad that Hilary was all alone in the world. She was alone too, but that was different; she was twenty-two, attractive, an actress in New York. A runaway who slept in doorways was vulnerable, pathetic. She brooded about Hilary’s weight, burgeoning day by day. Somewhere she had found a shapeless, navy-blue sweatsuit; she wore it constantly, and it made her look like an aging football player gone to fat. Anne didn’t buy her any more donuts, and stocked the fridge with fruit and vegetables. When she got home at night, she often made a salad and forced Hilary to eat it. Not that there was much forcing involved; she only had to say, “Here,” and the girl would eat whatever was put in front of her.

Sometimes, after dinner, Anne would suggest going for a walk, and they’d put on their coats and window-shop around the East Village for an hour or two. They’d stop at Café Mogador for a cup of tea, eavesdropping on people flirting or breaking up or arguing about the war, then resume their walk. None of this activity seemed to take any of the weight off, though.

Anne also started thinking about the girl’s future, wondering about school, or jobs, or friends. She didn’t put much trust in convention, but she did believe in self-actualization — a word she had picked up from other actors. For her it meant that you alone decided what your true self should be. But Hilary never mentioned wanting to do anything or be anything. She never read a book, listened to music, or even talked about dreams. She seemed to live in an eternal present, never worrying about what came next.

In the middle of March, Anne was cast in a great part in a new play. She wasn’t the leading lady but the catalyst, the unhinged and sexualized stranger whose energy makes all the normal people disintegrate. “You’re so perfect for this I want to die,” the director said. Everything he loved made him want to die. But when she read the script, she knew exactly how he felt. She wanted to die too, preferably onstage.

It was a long play, with commensurately long rehearsals in Long Island City that started almost immediately. So Anne was suddenly home a lot less. When she returned late at night, she sometimes saw no more of Hilary than her blanketed, sleeping form on the couch.

Another thing: there was a man, a member of the crew and a friend of the director’s, a soft-spoken, scruffy carpenter. He was earnest and cute, with dark eyes and a surprisingly white, toothy smile. She often went home with him after rehearsals, and when she came back to her apartment after a day or two away it almost felt like she was entering a stranger’s home, where she was now the guest.

One weekend, the director got food poisoning and canceled the rehearsals. Anne had fallen so in love with her character, and the extra dimension it gave her own personality, that she felt almost jilted. Grumpily, she decided to spend the empty days catching up on the few basic tasks of her streamlined life: laundry, bills, nails. On Saturday morning Hilary wasn’t at home, and Anne wondered if she had followed her advice and found some kind of job. Anne came and went throughout the day, and when the girl still hadn’t reappeared she was unaccountably freaked out. She’d held a certain image of the apartment in her mind all those days and nights when she’d been gone, with Hilary there and the apartment somehow tended, waiting for her to come back. Realizing now that she had no idea of Hilary’s movements or whereabouts made her feel strangely unmoored.

Once her laundry was finished, she went to the bodega for milk. She was pulling a carton out of the fridge when she heard a familiar voice say, “I’m dying for some ice cream.”

Hilary was standing on the other side of the store, her blond braids snaking down her shoulder blades. There was a crowded aisle between them, and the girl had no idea she was there. Anne couldn’t see the guy she was talking to — a stack of cereal and toilet paper was blocking her view — but she heard him say, “You always want ice cream. You’re, like, obsessed with ice cream.”

“I’m not obsessed.”

“Are too.”

“Am not. Which do you want? I want chocolate chunk, cookie dough, or cherry cheesecake.”

“Three flavors, but you’re not obsessed?”

“Shut up!”

Hilary’s tone was gauzy and flirty, lithe with laughter. It sounded like a voice that belonged to a girl who moved quickly, showed some skin, fell in love. Not like the Hilary Anne knew at all.

She took a step closer, peering through the dry goods while staying hidden. The guy looked even younger than Hilary and was very thin, with pocked skin that contrasted sharply with his full, dark lips. His hair was sculpted into a miniature Mohawk, and his eyebrow and nose were pierced. His red hoodie was slipping off his slouched shoulders, and his jeans were sliding off his hips. There was barely enough of him to hang clothes on. She could crush him, Anne thought. He didn’t look like much, but neither did Hilary, in her shapeless blue sweatsuit. In this, they were a matched pair.

They finally settled on chocolate, and Anne followed them, leaving her own purchase behind, back to the apartment. She waited five minutes, then went inside.

Hilary glanced up, her expression blinkered, unrepentant. “This is Alan,” she said.

“Hey,” he said.

Anne said nothing, just sat down on the couch and watched them. She hoped this would make them so uncomfortable that the guy would leave, but it didn’t seem to. They stood at the counter eating ice cream and teasing each other, and Anne’s presence didn’t even seem to have registered. Their dialogue was like the worst play she’d ever seen.

“You’re a messy eater.”

“I am not.”

“You have chocolate on your chin.”

“So do you.”

“Where?”

“Right there.”

And so on and so on. She was the audience, which she hated being. After a while she went into the bedroom and closed the door, her emotions feeding on themselves: she was upset because she was mad, and that made her even angrier. She took deep breaths and counted to a hundred, then left the apartment without a word and spent two hours at yoga. They were gone when she got back, their bowls washed and drying by the sink.

Even by herself, her apartment felt different, the air contaminated by someone else’s sexual energies, someone else’s flirt. What was happening?

She slept uneasily that night, waiting for Hilary to come back. Somehow she missed her reentry, but when she woke up at three in the morning, they were both in the living room — Hilary on the couch, Alan on the floor. He was sleeping on a pad made of blankets they must have scavenged, and his pillow was a bundled square of clothes.

She stood in the doorway watching them. The shadows were tinted blue from a neon sign across the street. Hilary turned over on the couch, her movements slow, labored, her body huge. She opened her eyes and looked right at Anne with no expression at all. Vacancy didn’t begin to describe it. Standing there in her tank top and pajama pants, the hair rising on her arms, Anne felt sticklike, insubstantial, and for the first time she could remember she wished she were bigger, stronger, heavier. Now she felt like the one who could be crushed. Without saying anything, Hilary closed her eyes and seemed to fall back asleep.

What would you say to the police? There’s someone in my apartment — no, it wasn’t a break-in, more of a slow slide-in. Or, I’m under attack by a fat teenage girl and her pimple-faced boyfriend? What was the crime here, exactly? She stewed over these questions in the night, cooked them to an angry boil. She decided that in the morning she’d tell Hilary the boy had to go, or else she’d call the police. A runaway is a runaway. Maybe Hilary’s face was on a milk carton somewhere. Maybe her parents would be thankful.

In the morning, in fact, the boy was gone. Anne made coffee and waited for Hilary to wake up, wondering what she was going to say. They had no language, the two of them, for the kind of conversation she needed to have. They’d never exchanged any confidences, romantic or otherwise, and it was too late now to establish that kind of base. She couldn’t ask Hilary who the boy was, because she’d never asked who Hilary was.

When Hilary finally woke up and saw Anne watching her, she didn’t look startled. Even in her sleep she seemed to have been preparing for the confrontation. Her languid cow’s eyes were ready. “Listen,” she said, “thanks for letting us stay.”

“Us?” Anne said.

“Me and Alan. We were desperate before. You’re really saving our asses.”

“I didn’t realize I was saving both your asses.”

“Yeah, well, for a while Alan was up in Syracuse working construction. But now he’s back.”

For the life of her, Anne couldn’t picture that scrawny punk lifting a hammer or a two-by-four. Surely he’d snag the tools on his eyebrow rings. As these thoughts piled up, she realized she had become just like her mother, and she could also blame Hilary for putting her on the wrong side of a generational divide. “You can’t both stay here,” she said.

Hilary nodded as if she’d been expecting this. “Okay, I figured. But can we stay until the baby comes?”

Until the baby comes. Anne had to repeat the words in her mind several times before they made any sense. “Jesus,” she said. “You’re pregnant.”

The looks passing across Hilary’s face — understanding, disgust, slight amusement — were subtle, brief, and controlled. “I’m not due for three months,” she said. “Alan’s going to get us a place by then. He knows some people squatting in Jersey City.”

Anne couldn’t think of what to say, despite knowing that her silence would be taken for acquiescence. She felt like an idiot.

“Don’t worry,” Hilary added kindly, as if to a child. “It’ll be okay.”

For the first time in ages, Anne didn’t know what to do; she wished she had a friend to ask for advice. She’d left home when she wasn’t much older than Hilary, and since then had kept herself aloof, especially from women, who tended to dive into confidences as if they were salvation. Being alone and being aloof were the same as being superior. But maybe this wasn’t the best system.

Out of respect or, more likely, a calculated desire not to provoke her, Alan didn’t return that morning. After breakfast, Anne said, “Let’s go for a walk,” and Hilary nodded.

They headed toward Tompkins Square Park, the spring wind lashing their faces, and Anne pulled her hat down over her ears. Despite the cool weather, all around the park people were having brunch, shopping, walking dogs. The girls wore frayed cords, the boys plaid shirts. From an open window came the smell of pot. In the park kids were playing kickball, and under an enormous elm tree Hare Krishnas were chanting and singing.

Hilary walked along beside her, matching her stride like a dog on a leash.

Now that Anne recognized the girl’s bulk for what it was, her every bodily sign seemed to broadcast pregnancy: hands resting on her stomach, her cheeks even broader, her calm eyes hoarding all internal energy. Things Anne hadn’t even realized were confusing suddenly made sense, which maddened and embarrassed her because actresses were supposed to be observant. So as they walked she asked Hilary every question she could think of. Where was she from, exactly? Why had she left home? Did her parents know where she was? Did they know she was pregnant? Was Alan from her hometown? When exactly was the baby due? How long had she been living on the street before ending up downstairs? What were her plans?

Unruffled, undefensive, Hilary answered each question in turn. She was from a small town between Binghamton and Syracuse. Her mother worked in a grocery store. Her stepfather had sexually abused her and she had run away twice before. She went back because of Alan, who’d promised to protect her, and did. They’d come down to the city just before Christmas and stayed with Alan’s cousin in Brooklyn, where he had a one-bedroom apartment with two roommates, but he’d kicked them out after they had a fight. Then she found an NYU ID and key card on the street and managed to get inside a dorm, where she set up a bed in an unused storage room and passed through the hallways without any trouble, everybody assuming she was a student. Once she was settled, Alan went up to Syracuse to make some money so that when the baby came they’d be ready with an apartment and “stuff like that.” From that melting phrase Anne could tell Hilary was both sentimental about the baby and clueless about what it would involve. During Alan’s absence, Hilary got evicted from the room and had to stay out of shelters, because the security guard was probably calling out a description and “with that Amber alert and everything, it was such a drag,” which is why she’d ended up downstairs. She was sick and tired and just needed to, you know, lie down inside and be warm for a few days. By the time Alan got back she was at Anne’s.

“I told him I’d be all right, and I was,” she finished. “I can take care of myself, but he worries a lot about me.”

“You should’ve told me,” Anne said.

“About what?”

“Everything.”

The girl stared at her. “You didn’t ask,” she pointed out.

“Didn’t ask what? ‘Oh, by the way, are you pregnant?’ ‘Oh, are you on the lam from the police?’ ‘Oh, will some snotty punk kid show up in my kitchen one day?’ ”

The Hare Krishnas turned around at the sound of Anne’s raised voice, and she glared at them until they went back to their routine.

Hilary shook her head angrily. “Alan’s not snotty. Look, we’re both real clean. We don’t make a mess. I keep the place okay, right? I know you’ve done a lot. You didn’t have to let me stay. But, I swear, eventually we’ll have a place and money and stuff, and I’ll pay you back, whatever you want.” For the first time, she sounded like a teenager. And once again, she had the knack of saying the right thing at the right time. “Anyway, Anne? Aren’t you a runaway too?”

And of course she was right. But there was no way she could have known it. She was a magician, a diviner. Anne was so freaked out that she shut up and let them stay.

In the weeks to come, Anne told Hilary her own story, how she’d left her home in Montreal at the age of sixteen. She’d met a guy who drove her to Burlington, Vermont, where she got a job waiting tables at a coffee shop and rented a room from the guy’s sister, who thought she was a college student. From Burlington she went to Vancouver; she didn’t like it, but while she was there she fell in with some theater people and decided she wanted to act. She stayed for a year before moving on: Las Vegas, Denver, Chicago. She lived for a year with a guy she’d met in a park, where he was feeding the ducks. He offered her a room if she’d cook his meals, and after six months he told her he loved her, and she believed him. He was a gentleman, and he said he knew she’d been through hard times, that he wanted to treat her with the respect and delicacy she deserved. This was how he talked, using words like delicacy. In all the time she lived with him he never touched her. At the end of the year he proposed, and she said she didn’t think she was ready for marriage yet. He nodded and said he understood, but at midnight he came into her room, got into her bed, and ran his hands up and down her bare back. She sat up and said, “Please don’t do that,” trying to keep her voice high and childish, frail with youth.

“I know your real self,” he said. “I know what you want.”

She ran from the house in her pajamas. It was the first night since she left home that she stayed in a shelter, and she vowed it would be the only one. From then on she never lived with a man. She used them for food, jobs, and transportation, but wouldn’t live with them. When she got to New York, she paid cash for a room at a hostel until the apartment deal with Larry came through. She never counted on anyone but herself.

In the six years she’d been gone, she’d written to her parents three times. The first was to tell them she was fine and not to try to find her. The second was a Christmas card she’d sent from Las Vegas, a drunken, sentimental mistake. The third was just last year. She had woken up in the middle of the night with the eeriest feeling about her mother; it was like having a scary dream that you couldn’t really remember. She was shaking and sweating. She didn’t believe in premonitions or portents, but she was rattled enough to write. She didn’t give a return address, and wasn’t thinking about going home. Too much time had passed and she was a different person now, an adult of her own making. She simply wrote, Mom. I love you. Annie. It wasn’t what any mother would have wanted, but it was something, and it would have to be enough.

“So how come you left?” Hilary said. “I mean, in the first place.”

Anne shrugged.

“Did you ever go back?”

“No.”

The girl sat in the silence, patting her belly. Her eyes were drowsy, implacable.

“How did you know that I ran away?” Anne said.

Hilary lifted her hand and gestured around the apartment. “It’s empty,” she said. “On purpose empty.”

“I guess,” Anne said.

Hilary looked at her, and suddenly her eyes were sharp, gleaming. “Girls who look like you can have whatever they want,” she said. “You chose this.”

Anne held her gaze. “So did you,” she said.