down flesh before yanking free. Someone else screams and then the crowd parts and finally, finally, she is free. She runs back through the glass doors, through the terminal. There’s a cop coming out of the single-stall family bathroom, still fastening his belt and with a folded copy of the Post under one arm. He yells after her, and Aislyn knows she should stop. Her father has told her and told her: Only criminals run. And she scratched somebody, isn’t that assault? She’s a criminal now. They’ll take her to RIKERS ISLAND, which is a completely different and much worse island than her own. They will make her leave SI, they’ll force her onto a police boat, and they’ll never let her come back—
“But no one can make a city do anything it doesn’t want to,” says someone close by, in a puzzled tone, and Aislyn looks left to find a woman running beside her.
She’s so startled that she stumbles in midrun. The woman quickly puts out a hand to steady her, and they both jog to a halt. She’s a little surprised to find herself well outside the terminal, between two of the dozen-odd bus platforms that edge up to it. Passing strangers stare and she flinches away from their gazes, but the breeze has worked to break her out of the cycle of panic. She swallows, beginning to calm.
“There, there,” says the woman, who’s holding her shoulders now. She smiles comfortingly, and she’s comforting to look at: white-blond hair in a pixie cut surrounding a pale, gray-eyed face. She’s wearing sandals that clearly don’t impede her ability to sprint. Her white jeans are probably stylish; her white blouse definitely is. The woman speaks while Aislyn stares at her in breathless dumbness. “That’s better, isn’t it? Nothing scary here. No boats. No water. No illegal immigrants touching you. No peer pressure, trying to make you cross the harbor! I don’t blame you at all, by the way. Manhattan is very pretty, but he’s full of bees.”
The nonsense of this monologue breaks the remnants of Aislyn’s panic. Manhattan’s an it, isn’t it? Not a he. And… bees? She giggles despite herself.
But before she can process the words further, her phone starts ringing. She jumps violently. The woman pets her shoulder, incongruously—has been petting Aislyn since they met, as if determined to single-handedly replace the memory of all those strangers’ touches with just her own—but weirdly, this makes Aislyn feel better. She grabs her phone and sees MATTHEW HOULIHAN (DADDY).
“Where are you?” he asks, when she answers.
“Just out running errands,” she says. She’s never been good at lying, and her father is excellent at figuring out when she’s trying it, so she always makes sure there’s some truth in whatever she tells him. She did stop at the grocery store on the way to the ferry station, to buy garlic. “Got something at the grocery store, now shopping a little. Everything okay at work?”
It’s always better to get him focused on himself rather than her. He sighs and takes the bait. “Just getting sick of these immigrants,” he says. He’s always careful to use acceptable words when he’s on the job, rather than the words he says at home. That’s how cops mess up, he has explained to her. They don’t know how to keep home words at home and work words at work. “These people. Had to arrest a guy this morning—just sitting in his car, right? I figured he was dealing. Didn’t find anything, but he’s got no ID, right? So I run his tag and tell him we’re calling ICE. Just to shake him up, see. He was acting all smooth. He says he’s Puerto Rican, they’re citizens, calls me all kinds of shit, starts talking about getting on that Twitter to complain about profiling.” She can practically hear her father’s eye roll. “Damn straight I profiled him. Right into a cell, for assault.”
Making a conversation of his rants is a skill Aislyn has long since perfected. Pick a point in his last sentence, ask a question related to it, tune him out again. Only by doing this has she been able to make space for her own thoughts over the years. “Assault, Daddy? Are you okay?”
He sounds startled, and also pleased, which is good. “Oh—no, Apple. Don’t worry about your old man. If he had assaulted me, I’d have kicked his ass over his beany head. Nah, I just needed something to run him in on.” She