Hurricane Girl by Marcy Dermansky

Author:Marcy Dermansky [Dermansky, Marcy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

Part

Four

Danny Yang had a swimming pool on the roof of his apartment building. Allison had not been expecting this, but she felt enormously lucky. It was a beautiful swimming pool. Allison was sure that she would not have moved in with the movie producer if he had not had a pool. She had a weakness for swimming pools the way some people need to pet every dog they see.

Danny Yang’s building was in Fort Lee, New Jersey, of all places, a place Allison had never considered a legitimate place to live. He lived in one of two luxury skyscrapers that towered over every other building in the area.

Allison could remember being in the car with her parents, sitting in the backseat on the way to New York City to see a Broadway show, and her father commenting on the construction. “Who,” he wanted to know, “would ever want to live there?”

The answer, it turned out, was Danny Yang.

Danny said it was only a fifteen-minute commute from the hospital.

And the pool, it was nice. It was really nice. A tiled lap pool with an incredible view of New York City from the roof.

Allison could see the Hudson River, the George Washington Bridge, the long row of trees lining the Henry Hudson Parkway all the way downtown to the Freedom Tower.

“Nice, huh?” Danny said.

“Yeah,” Allison said.

It was.

She felt strangely at peace.

This was not a ramshackle blue house in North Carolina two blocks away from the ocean. It was not a super-hip, modern house in Silver Lake. But it was pretty good.

The apartment itself was fine, new and modern and clean, but it was the pool on the roof that was the reason to live there. It was surprisingly quiet up on the roof. It was heavenly quiet. Almost nowhere was it as quiet as it was up on this roof. Allison felt as close to the clouds as she had ever been.

Two days after she had been released from the hospital, Danny had picked her up at her mother’s house and brought her over, telling her to bring a bathing suit.

“You still like to swim, don’t you?” he asked Allison as they drove.

Allison smiled.

They had taken beach trips together in college. Driving in his father’s BMW convertible down to the Jersey Shore. They would get drunk in bars in Asbury Park. Sometimes they would take Allison’s friend Lori.

“Of course I still like to swim,” Allison said. “It’s not like I woke up from a coma with no memory of who I used to be. I am still the same person.”

“I’m glad,” Danny said. “I almost never use the pool. I work too much.”

“That’s just wrong,” Allison said.

It was the end of August and strangely empty on the roof. There was one other woman at a round table beneath a beach umbrella, in shorts and a tank top, working on her computer. There was another woman in a lounge chair, reading an Emma Straub novel. And that was it.

“Ghost town,” Allison said.

“Everyone works, I guess,” Danny said.

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