The Steps Across the Water - Hardcover

ADAM GOPNIK grew up in Montreal. He is best known as a staff writer for the New Yorker, and as the author of Paris to the Moon, an account of five years he and his family spent in the French capital. He is also author of the children's book The King in the Window.

BRUCE MCCALL is a Canadian author and illustrator best known for his contributions to the New Yorker. He has also written sketches for Saturday Night Live. He lives in New York City. Visit him at www.brucemccall.com.

Chapter One
Across the Bridge
 
 
If Rose had been looking the other way when Oliver was talking to their father, she might never have seen the crystal staircase suddenly arch over the Central Park lake, and the two small figures looking carefully at Rose before skipping over the steps.
 
“Look!” she called out.
 
But by the time anyone did, the steps had already begun to recede, noiselessly, into the lake, shimmering for a moment, like an image going out of focus on a television set.
 
It wasn’t exactly a lake—just a pond, really—but it was right in the middle of Manhattan, the densest and most crowded borough in the city of New York.
 
Rose was trailing behind her brother, Oliver, and their father as they tossed a football back and forth on the great oval lawn.
 
It was a perfect fall Sunday in the park, high October, and a cool breeze cut through the sunny afternoon. Leaves and litter skimmed across the lawn. Gusts of wind caught Rose’s dress and teased it slightly upward, clutching it to her around the knees as she tramped through the leaves.
 
The sun cast long, golden, slanting shadows along the edge of the grass. Gone were the shouting summer crowds of softball players and barefoot Frisbee catchers. Only old couples sitting on park benches were left, and harried-looking students turning the pages of their books, which the wind tipped over. A few dogs pulled at their leashes on the walk that encircled the lawn, but their owners didn’t let them wander onto the grass.
 
Rose sighed. She wanted a dog so badly. But she could never have one, because her mother was allergic to dog dander. Even when they went to a pet store, her mom wept and sneezed.
 
Oliver and her dad threw passes back and forth in the long shadows, and encouraged each other with congratulations and shouts. A single pink helium balloon from a child’s birthday party floated away in the sky overhead.
 
All around the park the great towers of Manhattan loomed, crowding around as though they were giants on tiptoe, struggling to look down at the people at play. Looking east, Rose could even see the twelve stories of the apartment building where she lived. Looking south, she could see Belvedere Castle and the mysterious hills and paths of the Ramble that lay behind.
 
And that was when she saw it—a glass staircase sweeping up as suddenly as a rainbow, arcing across the lake at the end of the lawn. On the steps, two tiny figures in long overcoats, with one wreath of smoke around their heads, raced up and across the steps, taking quick, frightened looks backward.
 
“Look—there are steps across the water!” Rose exclaimed, pointing toward the lake.
 
Oliver and their father stopped playing catch.
 
“Where?” asked Oliver.
 
“Right there! Look! Right there!”
 
But the steps were gone by the time they turned around.
 
“That’s very nice, sweetie,” her dad said. Rose could tell by his tone of voice that he didn’t believe her.
 
“Dad!” she said. “I really saw something—glass steps going out across the water. And two children running across them.”
 
“Rose. You’re just looking for attention,” Oliver said.
 
“I am not. I saw them. They were real.”
 
“Rose,” Oliver said.
 
“Don’t ‘Rose’ me,” Rose said.
 
“Well then, stop making things up.”
 
“I didn’t!” Her bottom lip began to quiver.
 
“Oh, toughen up a bit, kiddo,” Oliver said.
 
Rose turned and started running away back down the path toward the park gate. They always treated her as if she was . . . little. Even a baby. Oliver teased her about being young, and small, and though she knew he didn’t really mean it in a cruel way, it was still incredibly annoying.
 
“Oliver!” warned their Dad, running after her. He tried to scoop her up. She resisted.
 
“Baby, Ollie didn’t mean . . .”
 
She looked out longingly at the people who were walking their dogs at the edge of the lawn. There were big dogs and little dogs, snarly dogs and yappy dogs, ugly dogs with long snouts and sharp ears, and beautiful dogs with soft ears and fluffy coats. Every dog had an owner at the end of its leash. It was as if there was a magical connection between them, Rose thought: each person would never be lonely as long as they had their dog, and each dog knew that he could never be lonely as long as he had his owner. . . . If she had a dog, at least he would believe her about the steps.
 
Now Oliver was there, too. He put his arm around her and drew her close and kissed her still plum and blooming cheek.
 
“Hey, I’m sorry, Miss Tubs,” he said. He was really very fond of his little sister. Rose pulled away a little bit. But only a little.
 
Suddenly, a loud flutter of wings rose from the other end of the Great Lawn. They all turned. A flock of gray pigeons, hundreds of them, was flying from the trees on the east side of the Great Lawn, toward the West Side.
 
“What’s making them do that?” their father asked.
 
“There must be something chasing them!” Oliver answered. Rose couldn’t help but look up, too. She saw a single red-tailed hawk swooping down toward the terrified pigeons.
 
“It’s the hawk! It’s Pale Male!” Oliver said.
 
Rose remembered having read once about Pale Male, the famous hawk in New York City that lived high up on the balcony of an apartment building on expensive Fifth Avenue. For a while, the rich people who lived there tried to get rid of him: some people said it was because he was a nuisance, and others because he wasn’t paying any rent. But lots of children and other sane people signed a petition to let him stay in his nest, and he did. This was good for everyone but the pigeons in Central Park.
 
Oliver laughed. “Go, Pale Male!” he shouted.
 
The pigeons seemed to make it safely into the leaves. The hawk hovered above the lawn, circling it, and then suddenly zoomed right out of the sky toward the western trees. The terrified pigeons, with the same clatter and coo, all flew in a dark gray cloud back across the lawn.
 
“Go, pigeons!” Rose whispered to herself. Her heart held tight as she watched them all make it safely across the way.
 
“What happens to the baby pigeons? I’ve always wondered,” Rose asked their father, after she was sure the gray city birds were hidden in the trees.
 
“Rose, don’t you know that’s the oldest question in the book?” Oliver said, laughing. “The answer is . . .”
 
Their father’s cell phone sang out, and he picked it up. He seemed to spend half his life on his cell phone.
 
“Just a second, baby,” he said. “I’ll get right off.”
 
“Hey, Rosie,” Oliver said suddenly. “Look what I found.” And he pointed to a small dead mouse.
 
Rose made a face.
 
“No, it’s good for the hawk!” Oliver said gently. “Hawks are always hungry. And this one doesn’t have a mother to find him delicious tidbits. I read all about it. He’s a motherless hawk.”
 
“I don’t exactly feel sorry for him,” Rose said. “I mean, it’s sad when anyone doesn’t have a mother. But he’s making a lot of motherless pigeons.”
 
Oliver ignored her. “He’s hungry. We have to take care of him. Look—we just have to put it on something bright that he can see from high above so that he’ll notice the scrumptious smelly dead mouse carcass.”
 
Rose knew that he was trying to make her shudder, so she ignored him.
 
“I know!” he said. “My sock!” And without another word he untied one of his sneakers, pulled off his bright red athletic sock, and carefully laid the dead mouse upon it.
 
“Mom will be furious at you for using your sock as a mouse plate,” Rose whispered.
 
“I’ll tell her you took it to make a puppet with,” he said. She must’ve looked worried, because he added, “No, not really. I’ll think of something. But how can Pale Male miss that?” he said, pointing at the sock. “A delicious mouse on a red platter. Mmmmm!”
 
Rose still felt queasy, and she didn’t want to look at the dead mouse, of course; but she was impressed, as she often was, by her brother’s practical mind. For, only moments later, Pale Male the hawk did come swooping down, grabbed the mouse in his ferocious talons, and then flew away again, as Oliver jumped with pleasure. She did, too, though she looked as she jumped, to see if the steps across the water had reappeared.
 
 
“I did see something, Oliver,” she hissed a few minutes later, as they turned down a crowded street, the empty park and their lagging father behind them.
 
“Hey, Rosie, if you say you saw it, you saw it,” he said calmly. But Rose knew that he meant just the opposite.
 
“I did see it,” she said. “It was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in U Nork!” Her heart fell in her chest as she said it. Now he would really tease her.
 
She had meant to say “New York.” But Rose had a mild speech impediment, and often when she was excited, she switched around the first sounds of words. When she meant to say “good news,” it would come out as “nood gews.” And sometimes when she was trying to say “nice time,” it would come out as “tice nime.” And sometimes when she told people where she came from, instead of saying “New York,” she would say “U Nork.” This kind of thing seems very cute to older people when you are small, but becomes very annoying as you grow up. Her parents had taken her to the First Expert, who gave her exercises like saying sentences very slowly—but it would still happen. When the Second Expert’s exercises didn’t work either, he had taken her parents aside and whispered something about “speech impediments” and “traces of early trauma.”
 
That’s when they told the Expert that Rose was adopted. Her parents, who had wanted a little sister for Oliver, had gone to Russia and found Rose in an orphanage. They brought her home with them when she was barely two. Rose could just recall the orphanage in Russia—a big white room with a cold breeze blowing through it, and many warm hands picking her up and putting her down, and another little boy . . . but Rose couldn’t remember anything more.
 
For the rest of the walk home from the park, Rose thought about being adopted. Something about the wind in the park, and the teasing, and the steps across the water made her feel the longing that came to her at times to know who her real parents were, and what strange things might be found outside her little world. She loved Oliver and her parents . . . but Oliver was always busy with his own friends, and her parents, well, they were parents.
 
Rose was lonely, and she wished she wasn’t.
 
Even at school, though she tried hard to be a good friend, she often had the feeling that no one at school really liked her. Except maybe little Ethan, and he was so moist-eyed and solemn that it was almost the same as not having a friend. Actually, little Ethan was kind of like a puppy, she thought, and the thought made her smile in a sad kind of way.
 
She didn’t say another word on the way home, even when Oliver grabbed her and kissed the top of her head and tried to get her to say “U Nork” again.
 
* * *
 
Rose was still very quiet later that evening when her family took the subway to Chinatown for dinner. It was Sunday night, and on Sundays they went down to Chinatown for Italian food. New York was like that: a Thai restaurant in a Dominican neighborhood, and Jewish pastrami sliced by Cambodian pastrami slicers.
 
Tonight, though, they had to wait in a long line outside The Arcade. While they waited, Oliver made Rose let him practice the “watch steal” on her. Oliver loved magic tricks. He was trying to learn how to do a watch steal—taking a watch from someone’s wrist without the person noticing. The trick was to hold both wrists and sort of dance with them, so that the person was distracted, then slip the watchband off. But since Rose knew exactly what Oliver was going to do when he grasped her wrists, it was hard for her to feign distraction and surprise when Oliver stole her watch.
 
Their father sighed. He hated waiting in lines outside restaurants. “It’s all the B and T people.”
 
“He means ‘bridge and tunnel’ people,” their mother explained to Rose. “All the out-of-town people who come into the city over bridges and through tunnels on a Sunday night.”
 
“Oliver, now you have to teach me a magic trick. Remember?” Rose said. Oliver always promised that if she let him do the watch steal, and pretended to be distracted, he would teach her something.
 
“Okay,” Oliver said. “I’ll teach you how to do a Mercury fold.” He always kept a deck of cards in the pocket of his leather jacket. (Rose wanted a leather jacket, too, but her mother said that it was too “tough girl,” and that she looked pretty in her violet wool coat.) And he showed her a very complicated way of secretly folding up a single card on the bottom of the deck with one hand, while clutching the rest of the deck with the other.
 
“See? That way, you can slip the folded card under somebody’s watch, or into someone’s pocket or something,” Oliver explained, “and they’ll be amazed.”
 
Rose tried practicing the Mercury fold while they waited in line. But the cards kept slipping from her hands. Folding the card secretly was too hard for her small fingers.
 
“It’s just practice, Rosie,” Oliver said kindly. “Okay, now let me try the watch-steal again. . . .” And she had to let him grab her wrists and pretend to be surprised when he undid the clasp of her Swatch watch and slipped it off.
 
“If you live in New York, the prices we pay, you should go right to the front of the line,” her father said moodily.
 
Rose knew that her father didn’t really mean this, but that he sort of meant it, and that it was also part of his slightly misguided sense of humor. He was always complaining about how expensive New York was to raise children in and how easy it’d be to move to the suburbs. Though her mother always objected, and she knew her father was only joking, it still made Rose’s heart jump with worry.
 
After dinner, which was delicious—Rose got to order her favorite, penne amatriciana—they decided to treat themselves to a taxi ride home, and that made Rose glad. Often the most intimate times her family had together in New York were when everyone piled into a taxi.
 
“Isn’t it funny,” Rose’s mother said, “that you never ever ride with the same taxi driver twice in New York? At least, I never have.”
 
Rose looked up as they crossed Twenty-third Street at First Avenue. The avenues of New York are straight, endless streets that run for hundreds of blocks, uptown and downtown, without a single swerve or curve or change. Every avenue was lined with brightly lit, two-story shops. Crossing Twenty-third Street, she saw a gym bright as day on the second floor of a building lined with wide glass windows. She could see all t...