“I’ll be fine,” I said. “You guys just hang out up here a little longer and try to stay cool. Who knows? Maybe they’ll even have the elevators running by the time you have to go down.” I figured it didn’t hurt to be hopeful.
“I’m betting they won’t,” Josh said, not so hopeful.
I started heading to the door and then thought of something. “How are you going to get in touch with us down there?” I said. “If there’s some type of problem or something?”
“Some type bigger than this?” Meryl said.
It was a good point.
“I’ll tell you what, Emmy,” Josh said. “If there are any more problems, I’ll just scream really loud.”
“Good idea,” I said before leaving them alone, closing the door behind me as I went.
It was a very unhappy thing trying to walk down twenty-four high flights of stairs in a pair of strappy three-and-a-half-inch heels. I could feel them becoming a part of my feet: nail hitting heel, heel hitting calf. Around floor eleven, I decided to try a different tack, and take on the rest of the walk barefoot, especially after I saw a group of very blond sorority sisters from the University of Texas-Austin doing the exact same thing: whipping off their pumps, flipping them four flights below.
“Go for it,” one of them whispered to me, holding up her own sandals as evidence that I should. Her nails were bright pink—the exact same shade as the heels in her hand. I almost admired this. “It’s totally allowed in these situations.”
It was also apparently allowed to use the hotel blackout as an excuse to get rip-roaring drunk in the middle of the afternoon—not that I would normally be one to judge for making such a decision. I could have used a drink myself right about then, and maybe would have asked for one, except that one of the girls, the whisperer of shoe-advice, happened to drop and break her bottle of Amstel Light as I took my left shoe off and stepped, newly barefoot, right on top of it.
“Oh, my God!” she said. “You’re bleeding.”
“Yes,” I said, moving down a few more steps and trying to remove the several small slivers of beer glass wedged into my big toe, down the entire length of my sole. “Glass will do that.”
It felt like one of the sole pieces hadn’t come out—or at least a sliver of a piece hadn’t come out—my skin tightening around whatever was still caught inside. I stood up anyway, ready to hobble the rest of the way down alone, and try to figure out a way to warn Meryl and Josh not to step into the same thing.
“Can I help?” she said.
I shook my head. “You know what?” I said. “I think I’ll take it from here by myself.”
By the time I made it to the Grand Salon, the hotel was really starting to boil. The air on reserve had drowned in the massive space. I tried to search for my mother in the midst of the chaos. The hotel staff was weaving in and out of the several hundred folding chairs set up for the ceremony. They were holding tiny paper fans—the kind that little k
ids would carry around— putting one on each chair. The one I’d had when I was younger was bright pink, and as I remember, Josh used to make fun of me for trying to use it. “Don’t you know that the energy you use to fan yourself makes you hotter than just doing nothing at all?”
He was going to love having those here.
“Emmy! Thank God!”
I looked over to see my mom running toward me. She was in such a state—so preoccupied and consumed—that even when she reached me, she didn’t notice how I was standing on the ball of my foot. One blessing.
“Emmy,” she said again. “The Moynihan-Richardses are smoking a doobie with Bess in the back room.”
“Excuse me?”
She leaned in and whispered. “That’s apparently what they call marijuana these days.”
“We need to change the subject immediately,” I said.
She just looked at me. “They’re sending people home in the lobby. They’re just telling them not to get out of their cabs because in a half hour or so they’re saying the temperature’s going to be hovering around a hundred degrees in here. Dad’s standing there telling them to come in anyway. That we’ll make do. . . . It’s something of a blackout battle.”
“Has anyone thought about just doing this outside? Why don’t we just go across the street to Central Park?”
“Things are worse out there,” she said, shaking her head, already looking past me, looking around the room for what needed doing. “It’s a hundred degrees, and the sun’s coming down full steam. Not that I don’t think they should go through with it, even under these conditions. Of course I think they should go through with it, if that’s what they want to do. They’re the people who matter most today. No one else.”
I shook my head in total amazement.
“What?” she said.
“You just have this really incredible power to surprise me,” I said. “At the moments when I need you to most.”