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ONE

“ W ake up!”

Eddie snaps into consciousness with a yelp, eyes wide to see Albert standing over him, panic in every crease on his ashen face.

“She’s not breathing!” Albert shouts. “Do you hear me? She’s not breathing! Get up!”

Eddie springs off the fainting couch and pulls on his jeans.

“I called 911.” Albert’s voice is shaking with worry. “The emergency crew is on the way. Now go pack a bag for Cookie. Change of clothes, her hand mirror, her lipstick. A beret. What am I forgetting?”

Eddie races to the little closet in the hallway where Cookie keeps a small faux-crocodile valise. Before he can extract it from the stacks of coats and shoes and boas and capes, a trio of EMTs comes crashing into the apartment.

“Move!” they shout as they sweep down the hall pushing a gurney, knocking knickknacks onto the floor and pushing him out of the way. “We don’t have much time!”

In moments, they sweep past again, with Cookie strapped atop the gurney now. Her head bounces like a doll’s as they bump across the floor, around the living room furniture, across the threshold, and out the front door.

“Her bag!” Albert shouts when the door slams shut behind them. “For Christ’s sake, what are you waiting for?”

Eddie finds the valise and stuffs in a polka-dot dressing gown, a pair of green-striped sateen pajamas, a blue marabou boa, and a giant floppy sunhat. Why a sunhat? He’s not thinking clearly. He reaches down for a pair of faux fur–lined mules, just in case—

—and there it is.

His phone.

He freezes for a moment, looking at the forgotten object, the foreign, ancient relic that’s been eclipsed a thousand times over since he last saw it. Has it been here all along? He taps the screen. Miraculously, it somehow still has sixty percent battery power. How can that be, if it’s been missing all this time?

No time to think about that now, no time to wonder. He slips it into his pocket and dashes into Cookie’s room. He grabs everything Albert mentioned, plus her back scratcher, a handful of bangles, and the photograph of Tallulah Bankhead. He reaches for the photograph of Bette Davis, but then remembers she and Tallulah don’t get along, so he grabs Dorothy Parker instead.

Albert’s in the kitchen, inspecting the little plastic containers of prescription pills on the kitchen counter. His face is ashen, panicked, so Eddie reaches over and sweeps the whole lineup of drugs into the valise.

“Let’s go,” Eddie says, leading Albert out the door, but just after he steps out into the hallway, he remembers something. “Wait!”

He runs back inside for two things, the Polaroid camera and Francis’s note. The first thing is easy to find, sitting right there on the fainting couch. He drops it into a tote bag—a Mostly Mozart bag from the New York Philharmonic—along with a couple more cartridges of film.

The second thing is not easy to find. In fact, he doesn’t find it at all. He searches his pockets, looks under the pillows on the fainting couch, scans the floor. Shit. He knows it’s here, somewhere, sitting among the books and figurines and cuckoo clocks and photographs. He’d never lose it for real. But he can’t search now. There’s no time. He has to go.

Eddie and Albert cascade down the stairs and race up the block to Sixth Avenue. They dive into a taxi to chase the ambulance.

“Not her,” Albert chants as the streets tick by. “Not her. Not her. Not her.”

Eddie grips the suitcase tightly on his lap, watching the city whiz by. He sees the Empire State Building gleaming in the morning sun, reminding him of his night with Francis. He should be relishing the memory today, replaying every movement and breath over in his mind, thinking intensely about what they said, what they did, how it felt, what it meant, when they’d see each other again.

But the jolt of this morning leaves no room for those thoughts. Eddie will lock last night away, like a jewel in a safe. All he needs to think of now is Cookie. He has to get to her. He was unkind to her the last time they spoke. They argued, and he left. And now, he may never have the chance to make it right.

Hurry, taxi driver. Hurry, hurry, hurry!