The Midnight Assignment

I

The rain hit the Bronx like it had a personal grudge. Claire Donovan watched it from the window of her office - a small room with a flickering fluorescent light, a desk that wobbled if you leaned on it wrong, and a corkboard covered in referral forms and attendance sheets that nobody ever filled out correctly.

Outside, the students were spilling out of the building in a stampede of wet coats and loud voices. She had kept them late - thirty minutes, no more - because Eddie Morales had gotten into another fight at the basketball court and she needed to hear his side of the story before she wrote up another referral.

"He stepped on my foot on purpose," Eddie had said, sitting across from her with his arms crossed and his jaw set. "I told him to watch where he was going. He told me to watch my mouth."

"And then you shoved him?"

"I pushed him. That's all."

"And then he shoved you back?"

"He called my mother a-"

"I heard what he called her," Claire said. "You don't have to repeat it."

Eddie's jaw tightened. He looked at the floor. Then he looked at her. "You're not gonna write me up?"

"Not today," she said. "But you're writing me a statement. Two pages. Typed, if you can manage it. And you're going to turn it in by tomorrow morning."

He nodded. "Okay."

"Okay," she said. "Go home, Eddie. And tomorrow, behave yourself."

He left. She sat alone in her office and listened to the rain. Then she packed her bag, locked the door, and walked out into the wet Bronx night.

Her apartment was on the second floor of a brick building three blocks from the school. Her mother, Rose, had the radio on when Claire let herself in - some old crooner singing about rain and rain and more rain. Rose was in the kitchen, kneading dough for bread. She looked up when Claire entered.

"I spoke to Dr. Finch today," Rose said.

Claire hung her coat on the hook by the door. "Who?"

"Dr. Finch. From the hospital. He has a young doctor - just back from the war, very respectable, and he's looking to settle down. I told him about you."

Claire walked to the fridge, pulled out a beer, and popped the cap against the edge of the sink. "Ma."

"He's thirty-three, Claire. Army veteran. Chief of Emergency Surgery. He has good hands - Finch said so himself. And he's not married to the job. Well, he is a little, but-"

"Ma, I'm not meeting him."

Rose put down the dough. "Why not? You're二十八-"

"I'm twenty-eight," Claire said in English. "And I don't need a matchmaker."

"You don't need a matchmaker, you need a man. There's a difference."

Claire opened the beer and drank it standing up. It was warm and slightly flat. "I'll deal with it."

"You always say that. And then what happens?"

Claire didn't answer. She took the beer to the table, sat down, and lit a cigarette. Rose went back to her dough. The radio kept singing about rain.

II

Claire met Vicky at a diner on Third Avenue the next afternoon. Vicky Russo worked at a jazz club in Greenwich Village - not as a dancer, not as a singer, just as a server who could hold a conversation with a drunk patron without getting punched. She was blonde, glamorous, and the kind of friend who told you the truth whether you wanted it or not.

"You look like hell," Vicky said when Claire sat down.

"Thank you. I look like I carry the emotional weight of three dozen troubled teenagers and my mother's expectations."

"Same thing." Vicky signaled the waiter. "What do you want?"

"Black coffee. And a slice of pie, if you're buying."

Vicky bought the pie. Claire drank the coffee. Then Claire told Vicky about the date - the doctor, the mother, the inevitability of it all.

Vicky listened. She didn't interrupt. When Claire finished, she set her cup down.

"Okay," she said. "First of all, you need to look like you give a damn. Second, you need to look like you don't give a damn. It's a delicate balance."

"I'm not going to look like anything. I'm going to show up, be polite for twenty minutes, and leave."

Vicky leaned forward. "Claire. Listen to me. You are a beautiful woman who has been pretending to be invisible for four years. You wear those grey suits and those boring blouses and you cut your hair short so nobody will look at you too long. Well, I'm not going to let you do that tonight."

She reached across the table and grabbed Claire's hand. "Let me help you, okay?"

Claire wanted to say no. She wanted to say a lot of things. But she looked at Vicky's face - determined, loyal, impossible to argue with - and she said, "Okay."

Vicky's apartment was above the jazz club. It was small, warm, and full of records. She went to a closet and came out with a dress.

Burgundy silk. The kind of dress that got noticed in a Bronx cafeteria but looked completely at home in a Manhattan lounge.

"Try it on," Vicky said.

Claire hesitated. Then she took it and went into the bedroom.

In the mirror, she looked like someone she almost didn't know. The silk draped over her shoulders and fell to her knees. The color brought out the warmth in her skin. Her short dark hair looked sharper against the deep red.

Vicky appeared in the doorway. "There you are. Where have you been hiding?"

Claire turned sideways. The dress fit her like it had been made for her. "This is-"

"Exactly what you need," Vicky said.

III

The restaurant was a small Italian place in Greenwich Village, near the club where Vicky worked. It smelled of garlic and old wood and the kind of candlelight that makes everything feel a little more serious than it actually is.

Claire arrived ten minutes early. She sat by the window and smoked a cigarette and watched the rain splash against the street. She had a prepared exit strategy: twenty minutes, polite conversation, an excuse about an early morning, and then she would walk back to the subway and go home and pretend this had never happened.

The door opened.

Marcus Webb walked in.

Army uniform had been replaced by a dark suit, but the eyes were the same - sharp, assessing, the eyes of a man who had seen too much to be surprised by anything. He scanned the room the way he probably scanned an emergency ward - methodically, without hurry, missing nothing.

His eyes found hers.

He stopped. Then he walked toward her.

They had known each other since college. Three years ago, they had been engaged. She had ended it, sitting in this same neighborhood, in a coffee shop not far from here, telling him that she wasn't enough for a man with his trajectory. He had looked at her for a long time. Then he had said, quietly, "Okay."

And that had been that.

Now he was sitting across from her, looking at her like she was the most interesting thing in the room.

"Claire," he said.

"Marcus."

"You look-"

"Different?"

He smiled faintly. "You look exactly the same. Which is better."

She felt something shift in her chest. She ignored it.

They ordered dinner. They talked about safe things - the hospital, the school, the rain. But every sentence carried a current beneath it, a frequency that neither of them acknowledged but both of them felt. He asked about her students. She asked about his work. He said the war had changed him. She said she could tell. He said he hoped it was for the better. She didn't answer.

After dinner, they walked out into the wet streets. He offered to walk her home. She said she lived in the Bronx. He said he knew the way.

They walked. They talked. The city hummed around them - sirens, rain on pavement, the distant sound of a jazz trumpet from somewhere in the Village. At some point, they ended up in a bar near Greenwich Village. Claire said she would have one drink. It was a martini. Then another.

By the time Marcus took her back to her apartment building, she was standing very close to the wall and not entirely sure which way was up. He didn't take advantage. He did something worse - he took care of her. He brought her water. He turned down the lamp. He sat in the chair by the door and stayed until morning.

In the morning, she woke with a sore neck and the distinct impression that something had changed. But she couldn't quite figure out what.

IV

Marcus started appearing everywhere.

At the hospital, "coincidentally" when Claire was picking up a medical form for a student. At Vicky's club, drinking bourbon and asking about her. At the corner store where Claire bought her cigarettes. He never said what he wanted. But he kept showing up.

One night, he showed up at her mother's apartment in the Bronx unannounced. Rose answered in her robe.

Marcus said, "Good evening, Mrs. Donovan. Is Claire available?"

Rose blinked. Took him in - the suit, the posture, the way he stood like a man who was used to being obeyed. "She's upstairs."

Marcus went up. Claire opened the door in her sweater and slacks, hair unstyled. She looked at him the way you look at something you've been expecting and aren't ready to see.

He looked at her the way he had looked at her in the restaurant, in the bar, in the memory of her college apartment three years ago.

"Claire," he said. "I've been doing this assignment for two weeks. I think I'm ready to report that I've located the target. And I'd like to request permanent stationing."

She stared at him. Then she laughed - a short, surprised laugh she hadn't expected. "That's the weirdest proposal I've ever heard."

He smiled. "I'll take it. Yes or no?"

She looked at him - at the man who had walked across a rain-soaked city to sit in her hallway all night. At the man who had come back to her without making a speech or a grand gesture. At the man who said what he meant and meant what he said.

"Marcus," she said.

"Yes?"

"Next time, just ask me to dinner like a normal person."

He grinned. "I'll work on it."

By Z R ZHANG. Original work transformed from Chinese literary source. All rights reserved. Published under the dance category on CreationStamp.