Page 85 of A Series of Rooms
JONAH
New York had never been Jonah’s dream.
But then, his future had always been something of a faceless monster; just fragments of ideas that refused to take shape.
He had gone from a lifetime of molding himself into a persona that would please his parents, directly into a place where any concept of a future at all wavered, even on the best days. Moving here had not been the result of years of dreaming and pining, like it had been for Liam, but the product of desperation. It was a place with a singular anchor to offer him safety, and Jonah had grabbed onto it with both hands.
He hadn’t come here seeking a dream. He had come seeking refuge.
In time, though, he had found himself folded into the city’s anonymous masses as if he belonged there.
A couple months in, Ellis got Jonah his first job. An old buddy of his who worked construction on Long Island was looking for day workers to demolish a house. Ellis was antsy after his abrupt departure from work, and Jonah needed to learn how to function like a person again, so he’d agreed to give it a try.
It had been ninety degrees on their first day, with the kind of humidity that had Jonah’s shirt clinging to his back before they even arrived on site. He had a bagged lunch in his fist, a too-big pair of Ellis’s steel-toed boots on his feet, and no clue what he was doing.
The guys on the crew were loud. Their fingers were thick and calloused from years of wear as they gripped Jonah’s hand, and he felt himself squeezing back firmly, strangely motivated to make a good impression.
His first task was to tear down a wall that separated two small bedrooms. Ellis grabbed a couple of large hammers from the kit and handed one to Jonah. The surprising weight of it pulled his arm down.
“You want the first strike?” Ellis asked.
“Anywhere?” Jonah asked.
“The wall would be ideal.”
Jonah fixed him with a flat expression and Ellis smirked back at him.
“Go nuts, kid.”
Jonah tested the weight of it in his hand, shifting it from one to the other and swinging it up to shoulder height. He took a deep breath and let it out, narrowing in on a spot on the wall where two long scratches in the paint happened to intersect.X marks the spot,he thought.
In the moments before he swung, he felt a tingle in his arms, running up into the muscles of his shoulders; a burst of adrenaline that ached for release. He stared at the center of the X on the wall and saw a flash of the faces that kept him up at night—Shepard’s, Dominic’s, his father’s.
Then he struck.
As the hammer crashed through drywall, Jonah let out a grunt that was half exertion, half rage. Before he could let himself think, he pulled back the hammer and slammed it into the wall again.
“How did that feel?” Ellis asked when Jonah stopped to catch his breath.
Despite himself, despite the sweat that clung to his eyelashes, his thumping heartbeat, and the ache that was already starting to pulsate in his shoulders, Jonah found that he was smiling.
“Fucking incredible.”
That night in bed, after a long shower, he could still feel his pulse in his arms and legs as the endorphins settled, the weight of the day pressing him down into the mattress. It was a silent epiphany, as he stared up at the ceiling. It was the first time in recent memory that Jonah had felt strong in his own body.
If Chicago was the place where Jonah had learned how to survive, New York was where he learned how to live.
On the weekends and odd evenings, he began volunteering at a meal center downtown. It was partly to fill his time, never letting his hands sit idle for too long, and partly to prove to himself that he could.
At first, he worried that there would be too much negative association between his volunteer work and the work he had done under Shepard’s Fold, but he refused to let that prevent him from doing good in the world.
That time in his life had been so lonely, so void of light in his memory. It couldn’t have been more different than Jonah’s experience in New York.
When he worked his shifts, he found himself making connections with the people who came through the line. He would sit with them and eat, sometimes, after the last meal was served, rotating through the regulars until he knew most of the crowd on a first-name basis.
Jonah listened to their stories and, in time, learned to share pieces of his own. When he did, he wasn’t met with pity or judgment, but a respect he seldom felt worthy of. It was hard to feel alone in a community like that.
It was during one such dinner shift in early October, well over a year since he first touched down in New York, that he encountered a ghost from his past.
