Tires screech. People scream. Taylor Burntwood hurls himself across the street. In a flurry of tweed and jeans, Taylor is lying on top of Ella. Their movement is abruptly halted at the street curb, between two parked cars.
Five minutes earlier, Ella Leigh had been crossing Madison Avenue, on the way to a lunch meeting with her editor. She was balancing a latte in her left hand, a leather handbag in her right, and a cell phone on her shoulder. Her asymmetrical magenta skirt fluttered behind her like a mammoth butterfly in the steel Manhattan jungle, her brown tweed blazer tailored to make her look professional: she was the picture of city girl perfection. The morning was gray and coldly humid underneath the towering mirrored buildings. The yellow cab had spun onto the bustling street with little control and high speed. Taylor was on the corner of Madison, waiting to cross. When the world stopped in a nanosecond of shock -- Taylor missed the memo. He rushes across the street as the cab came plowing, and grabs Ella from behind by the waist. He pushes her out of the way; and his own weight followed. They roll to the curb.
The cab roars by, and the witnesses fast-forward into action to compensate for the lost New York minute. A circle quickly gathers around Taylor and Ella.
“Are you okay?”
“Jesus Christ!”
“Somebody call an ambulance!”
Taylor props himself up with one arm, shaking his head. He’s been called a knight in shining armor on more than one occasion; but this would take the cake. It is too cliché, saving a girl from being run over by a menacing vehicle. But he is still feeling pretty good about himself inside.
Taylor stands up brushing off his dark denim jeans, prepared for the praise to be handed in with pats on the back and doting glances. Instead, he is barely the focus. He quickly fades into the growing crowd as the people close in on Ella. Ella is still lying face up on the curb, her long-lashed eyes closed and a thin stream of blood trickling from behind her long dark hair. Her soft placid face paled even more in contrast to the dark wet asphalt. Her head is resting at an odd angle against the curb. The scarlet blood runs a river along the curb and drips thickly into the gutter a few feet from the toe of her heels, still strapped around her ankles.
“Nobody move her!”
“Is she dead?”
“Oh My God, Oh My God!”
Taylor quickly backs himself out of the crowd in horror. He rushes into a small side street lined by brownstones. He smoothes his shaggy dirty blonde hair. Rolling up the sleeves of his black dress shirt, he realizes that he broke skin on his elbows. He shakes his clouded head and discovers that he is still gripping onto the woman’s leather handbag. Taylor glances around quickly and sees a landlord taking in empty garbage cans, a man hosing the sidewalk, and a few kids sitting on the steps of an apartment building. Deciding the coast is clear, he sits down at an empty bus stop bench.
The handbag is Gucci. Taylor doesn’t know what prompts him to open it; he’s not the snooping type. He is an upstanding citizen, a successful Harvard graduate, and a devastatingly gorgeous male at twenty seven. He’s from a family of WASPs, mostly from the New England area. Law-abiding aside, Taylor reaches into the bag, hands grazing over notebooks and pens, and pulls out a wallet. Is this what he’s looking for?
It feels right. He opens the black leather wallet, and an ID falls out. Corners of pink Post-It notes are sticking out, small ones and regular sized ones. He picks up the ID and examines: a picture of the same beautiful girl, now lying on the street, with lovely brown eyes smiling shyly for the camera. Her address matches this small street. 942 Atlas Street, Apartment 4B. He looks up.
942 Atlas Street stares back at him, a brownstone with Victorian windows. He looks both ways on the quiet street, and quickly crosses. He fumbles in her bag for keys, and retrieves a simple set of two keys on a silver key ring. Taylor unlocks the front door, and climbs four flights up.
At the head of the stairs is 4A. He looks down the hall to his right, and spots 4B. The door light is out. Approaching the door, he cautiously looks for unexpected guests. He stops and laughs at himself, realizing he is an unexpected guest. As he tries the key on the front door, he feels the sting of acidic blood from his skinless elbows. He winces, pushing forward.
Her apartment is dark; a large window facing the door filters in dim daylight through gauzy mint colored curtains. The silence is deafening, and Taylor’s pulse is racing. He has never done anything like this before. He couldn’t believe how much he is getting away with. In the distance there were sirens. Taylor becomes enamored with the quaint apartment. The front entryway leads into a living room and kitchen separated by a counter. The walls are washed in pale sage green. Flowers are everywhere: large bouquets of mauve sweet peas poised in tall glass vases, small crimson wild flower bunches sitting in empty jam jars, long stems of sunny daffodils looming out of tiny pots. They cover every surface possible; they hang from the ceiling. The soft scent of sweet peas permeated through the air. Taylor steps up to the walls, absent of framed pictures or artwork but wealthy with marked up manuscripts. Pages and pages of loose manuscripts are secured to the walls with pushpins. Each pushpin looks like a blank eye staring at Taylor as he walks by them slowly. Pink Post-it notes stick at every angle all over the pages, the walls, and the tables. Ella’s computer screen looks like a blooming pink sunflower, dense stacks of pink Post-its overlapping.
Taylor read a pink Post-It written in black ink: Do everything at once. Yoga, writing, fucking, painting, teaching. The Post-it stuck off of a half typed page on Marc Jacob’s spring line four months ago. Taylor’s brow furred, and he turned to Ella’s desk. A pink Post-it stuck at the very top of her screen said: This is not debris: each of the items means something.
His cell phone rings in his left pocket. Taylor snaps back into reality.
“Where are you honey?” His fiancée Jessica’s voice is distorted with background noise. She is already at the restaurant in lower Manhattan where they had arranged to have lunch.
“Oh I’m on my way,” Taylor replies, staring out Ella’s window. The street below is unchanged.
“You’re half an hour late!” Jessica exclaims crossly.
“I’m sorry sweetheart, there was an accident.” Taylor turns away from the window and starts towards the door.
“Are you alright?” Jessica’s voice quickly switches to concern, like the good theater actress that she is.
“I’m fine, just delayed. I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Taylor assures her, then snaps his phone closed, slipping it into his pocket. He pauses for a moment, in the center of Ella’s living room. He looks around the tranquil apartment, the suffocating stillness swirling around him. Taylor takes a deep breath and fingers the keys of the apartment nestled deep in his pocket, his pulse throbbing. He picks up her handbag for further exploration later, in the privacy of his own apartment. He heads out the door, with one glance backwards. It won’t be his last.