Page 72 of A Winter in New York

I’m breathless, my eyes nailed to the screen, unable to believe I might be about to see my mother.

“Yes,” I whisper.

“It’s our highlights reel.” Felipe leans back and squints to read the buttons on the machine. “Brought back some memories for me watching this yesterday, let me tell you.”

“Highlight reel,” I murmur, as if he’s speaking a completely different language. My heart is banging so hard I might not be able to hear the film.

“That’s got it,” he says, sitting back down as the screen flickers. “Give it a minute.”

I’m so nervous that my palms are sweating, terrified that the old player is going to chew the tape.

“Why is it taking so long?” I mutter, looking between Felipe and the screen.

“Just wait…” He bats his hand toward me. “It’s an old machine, takes a bit of time to get going.”

I grip the edge of the sofa when the screen fills with a still of the band’s logo and one of their tracks crackles from the speakers.

“Bit dusty,” Felipe says, but I don’t care, because the logo disappears and the band bursts onto the screen, a recording of a live performance to a packed, sweaty crowd. It’s a bit dark and the sound isn’t perfect, but it’s my living and breathing mother as I’ve never seen her before and I’m entranced. I watched her perform countless times across my life, but this…this is electric. She’s so young but so damn powerful, holding every single person in that club in the palm of her hand.

“She was a proper superstar, wasn’t she?” I whisper, swiping fat tears from my lashes so I can see.

“Dynamite,” Felipe says.

The performance ends and the film fades to black, then fades back in again to a Q and A with the band. They’re answering banal questions in the main, but it doesn’t matter to me because she’s chatting and laughing. Her voice is lost music to my ears, her laughter a bell calling me closer to the TV. I’m off the sofa now and kneeling in front of the screen, and I reach out to touch her face when she looks down the camera and laughs. It’s as if she’s looking directly at me, and I laugh and cry with sheer wonder because it feels as if she’s fleetingly here, as if by some miracle we can see each other for just this brief, tiny moment of connection.

“Mum,” I murmur, my mouth full of salty tears. I’m not just crying, I’m sobbing, hot therapeutic tears, my body shaking because the last few days have been so horrific and it feels as if she’s found a way to reach out and tell me I’m going to be okay. “I miss you so much,” I whisper, still touching the screen as it fades and credits roll.

Felipe puts his hand on my shoulder, and when I get to my feet he holds his arms out for me to stumble into.

“It’s okay, kiddo,” he says, patting my back. “It’s okay. I got ya.”

He steers me back to the sofa and passes me more tissues, patting my knee while I pull myself together.

“Sorry,” I gulp. “That was a real shock.”

“I’m sorry you lost your mother,” he says. “I know how wonderful she was.”

I hear emotion thicken his voice and try to raise a watery smile for his benefit, because he didn’t have to do this and Idon’t have words special enough to express what it means to me. I didn’t really know what to expect when I came here this morning. Not this. Not to feel as if my mother has reached through the ether between worlds to hold my hand and remind me exactly whose daughter I am.

“Can we watch it again?”

Felipe presses rewind, and we sit alongside each other and watch it twice more, then he ejects it and hands it to me.

“Keep it. I was there, it’s all in here.” He taps the side of his head as he buttons his coat. “Sometimes it’s the letting go of things that sets you free, Iris.”

I clutch the warm chunk of plastic as if it’s precious metal. This tape, the poster taken on the day my mother discovered she was pregnant…they’re gold dust for me. How strange that they’ve sat forgotten in this lock-up all these years, as if they were waiting for the exact moment to reveal themselves when I needed them most of all. I’m not a superstitious person as a rule—I’ll walk under ladders and much prefer grumpy orange cats to lucky black ones—but there’s an undeniable feeling of cosmic interference here, as if Felipe’s crackly old TV set was a temporary conduit between realms. I finish my coffee and realize I’m finally warm for the first time in days. I put my hand on my left thigh and it isn’t shaking anymore.

30.

I’ve deleted Adam’s texts andblocked his number. He’s become a phantom lurking in every shadow in recent weeks, but I came home from my morning with Felipe and knew exactly what I needed to do. Block. Ignore. Decide he’s dead to me and really believe it this time, because I didn’t claw myself away from him just to let him become my own personal Voldemort. I’m a New Yorker now. What happened to me in London does not define me here.

I’ve spent the weekend working, either downstairs in the noodle house or up here sprucing the place up for Christmas. I’ve draped my mother’s string of golden fir cones over the mirror and tacked warm white fairy lights around the window frame. It was a cold, crystal-clear London morning when we foraged for those fir cones, gilding our fingers with the gold paint afterward. They’ve faded significantly over the years, but they still lend Christmas cheer to this icy Monday morning. The breakfast radio weather guy seemed certain about imminent snow, but he’s had me fooled before so I’ll believe it when I see it.

Something spatters my window—a spray of small stones, I think—and I dash across the room to check the sidewalk, my heart in my mouth.

“Saw this outside the bodega and thought of you,” Gio shouts, shielding his eyes with his hand as he looks up. He’s standing beside a Christmas tree that comes up to his shoulder, his hand out supporting the top of the trunk. I shake my head, laughing as I throw my hands up in the air at him.

I run out on to the landing as he hauls it up the communal staircase, standing it up outside my front door with a flourish and a grin that makes him look about eighteen years old.

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