Chapter Text
I want it on the record that I have survived a great many hostile environments.
I have survived a boardroom full of men who had already voted to remove me. I have survived my mother's Christmas dinners. I have survived a cult, a kidnapping, three hostile takeovers, and an international press conference at which a reporter asked me, on live television, whether I personally planned to murder anyone that week.
I had not, however, until the second Friday of March, survived the lobby of 1147 Alder Street.
It was a perfectly ordinary building. Six floors of tired brick, a green awning, a buzzer panel with half the labels peeling off, a stoop with a view of a laundromat. It was precisely the sort of place that Kara Danvers would live: warm, slightly crooked, and smelling faintly of someone else's dinner. I'd been looking forward to seeing it for weeks.
I stepped through the glass door with a bag of potstickers in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other, and the doorman looked up.
He was a large, gray-haired man in a navy uniform, with a name tag that said DELGADO and a face like a closed door. He had been reading a paperback. He lowered it. He looked at me, and at the bag, and at me again.
"Kara Danvers," I said, with my most pleasant smile. "Third floor. She's expecting me."
"She's not in."
"I'm sorry?"
"She's not in," said Mr. Delgado, and picked his paperback back up.
It was, I'll admit, a very good performance. It would have convinced me completely, if I hadn't been on the phone with Kara eleven minutes earlier, while she shouted "I'm making the rice but it's on fire, don't come up yet, wait, come up, I need a, I'm fine!" over the sound of a smoke alarm.
I could hear it now, faintly, through the ceiling.
"She seems to be," I said, "in."
"Must be somebody else."
"A different somebody else making potstickers and setting off a smoke alarm in apartment 3B?"
Mr. Delgado turned a page.
"Could be," he said, "a lot of folks."
I should explain that I'm not naive.
I know what my name means. I've known it since I was a child, when other mothers pulled their children away from me in the supermarket, and I know it now, in the faces that go still when I give them my card. I'm a Luthor. People hear it, and they remember Lex, and they remember all the bad things that happened in this city, and I don't blame them.
But I'd also learned to read that look. I'd studied it for twenty-eight years, the way a sailor studies the sky, and I knew that Mr. Delgado's face wasn't quite it.
That was the thing that bothered me. It wasn't the flat, fearful you look, the one that says I have read the newspapers. It was something sharper, and more personal. Something I could only describe as protective.
He looked at me the way you'd look at a stranger holding a bag near a very expensive vase.
It took me twenty minutes to get upstairs.
The elevator, I was informed, was out of order. A sign taped to its door said so, in careful, slightly smudged handwriting. I looked at the sign. I looked at the elevator, which was, at that moment, holding a delivery man with a pizza box, who stepped out on the second floor, nodded at me politely, and said "Evening."
"I'll take the stairs," I said, to nobody.
"Good for the heart," said Mr. Delgado.
I took the stairs.
On the second landing, a door cracked open. A pair of eyes appeared in the gap. They belonged to a very old woman with a cardigan, a pair of round glasses, and a halo of white hair like dandelion fluff, who watched me climb the whole flight and said, when I drew level, "You're the Luthor."
"Lena," I said, and held out a hand. "Lena Luthor. It's a pleasure."
She looked at the hand.
"I taught third grade for forty-one years," she said. "I know a lot about children who've been told they can't be trusted. I know what that does to them." She looked up. "Do you want to tell me what your intentions are?"
"I'm sorry?"
"With Kara."
I blinked.
"We're friends," I said. "We've been friends for, we met a month ago. I'm bringing her dinner. She invited me."
"Mm."
"Is that a problem?"
"Is it a problem?" repeated the old woman, in the tone of a person turning over a particularly interesting rock. "No, dear. It's not a problem. It's just that she is a very special girl. And I have lived in this building for thirty-three years, and I've seen a lot of people come up those stairs." She patted my arm, with a quick, firm, grandmotherly pat that was very nearly a warning. "I'm Mrs. Okafor. I'm in 2C. I hear everything."
"Good to know."
"I hope it is," said Mrs. Okafor, and shut the door.
I spent the rest of that night at Kara's kitchen table, with rice stuck to my sleeve and a potsticker in one hand, trying to work out what I'd walked into. Kara had been delighted. She'd flung the door open, in an apron that said KISS THE COOK (BUT NOT THE SMOKE ALARM), and hugged me so hard my feet left the floor. She had no idea. She chattered about her day, and the fire, and the rice, which was not, she insisted, technically ruined, only very toasted, and didn't seem to notice that, as she talked, every few minutes, somebody in the hall dropped something directly outside the door.
I counted four. A mop. A bucket. A very heavy umbrella. A lamp.
"Is somebody out there?" I asked.
"Oh, probably," said Kara, cheerfully, through a mouthful of rice. "It's a really, it's a really friendly building."
Over the following weeks, I made a spreadsheet.
I'm not proud of it. But I've always found that the best way to understand a problem is to put it in a grid, and by the end of March the problem had a name, in my private file, which was THE ALDER STREET HOSTILITY INDEX. It had columns. It had data points. It had a color-coded scale.
Mr. Delgado (lobby): Blocks me from the elevator. Reports Kara as "out" at an 80% rate when she's in. Has once been observed pretending to be asleep.
Mrs. Okafor (2C): Intimidating. Possibly excellent at interrogation. Has asked me my middle name, my blood type, and what I plan to do with my life.
The Pellegrinos (4A and 4B, who are, in fact, a married couple who live in two apartments connected by a hallway door): Cross-examine me whenever I enter. Stare, in unison. Whisper. They have, on at least two occasions, appeared to be taking notes.
Mr. Walt Haas (superintendent): Has "fixed" the buzzer four times. Every single time I arrive.
Theo (2D, age nine): Asked me, in the stairwell, if I was a villain.
I'd answered, as honestly as I could, "Not currently."
He'd looked at me with great solemnity, and written something down in a very small notebook.
The odd thing was that they weren't cruel.
I want to be fair about that. Nobody spat. Nobody called me names. If anything, I received an almost excessive quantity of small courtesies, held doors and offered coffee and a loaf of banana bread that appeared outside Kara's door one Saturday, with no note. They simply watched me. All of them, constantly, with a stern, wary, curiously tender attention, like a row of shopkeepers watching a child who has wandered a little too near the china.
And then there was the matter of Maggie.
"Kara's last friend was so nice," said Mrs. Pellegrino, in the laundry room, a Tuesday in April. She had a basket of towels. She was not, I noticed, doing any laundry. "Maggie. Detective Sawyer. Do you know her?"
"We've met," I said, carefully.
"Lovely woman."
"I'm sure."
"Used to carry my groceries." Mr. Pellegrino appeared at her shoulder, like a man materializing from a wall. "Never gave anyone any trouble. Never," and here he leaned in with a significant look "made her cry."
"I would never," I began.
"We're just saying," said Mrs. Pellegrino.
"A friend of a friend," said her husband, "can be a very dangerous thing."
"We like to look out for her."
"We all do."
"She's very precious."
"Very."
"I would never," I said, again, with some difficulty, "hurt Kara."
They exchanged a long look.
"Hm," said Mrs. Pellegrino.
"Hm," said Mr. Pellegrino.
They left, taking the entire empty basket with them.
It was not only Maggie. I was, over the following weeks, graded against the whole roster. "That tall young man with the camera, Mr. Olsen, brings donuts," Mrs. Okafor informed me, as though submitting a reference. "Always asks after my hip." "And the one with the computers," said Mr. Haas, who had materialized in the stairwell with a wrench, "fixed my router in four minutes, and wouldn't take a dime." "The big quiet gentleman who's sometimes green," added Mr. Pellegrino, and his wife kicked him, and he amended, "in certain lighting."
"They're all very nice," said Mrs. Pellegrino, with a meaningful look at me.
I understood, I think, for the first time, that I was not being interviewed for a neighbor. I was auditioning for a very large, very close family, and I did not know the part.
I started noticing the others after that.
It was a strange sort of education. I'd come out of the shower of a long weekend at Kara's, in her cardigan and my own bare feet, and find the hallway already occupied by a small crowd of neighbors, all of them pretending to look at a very interesting fire extinguisher. Alex Danvers, whom I'd come, over several months, to genuinely like, would stand on the stoop in the evenings with Mrs. Okafor and Mr. Delgado, and the three of them would be talking in low voices, and fall silent as I approached. Alex would give me a nod. A small, tight, complicated nod. I'd stand there and she'd say, "Hey, Lena," in a voice like someone speaking to a bomb she had recently, and with great effort, learned to love.
"Hello, Alex."
"Kara's upstairs."
"I know."
"Good." Pause. "Good."
"Is something wrong?"
"No!" said Alex, quickly. "No, nothing. Everything's fine. It's a, it's a great building. Very, very safe. Very safe building."
"Alex."
"I should go. I'm, I think I left the, I have a thing."
She left. Mrs. Okafor watched her go, and turned to me, with exactly the expression she'd worn to the first day of third grade in 1983, and said, "Nice to see you, dear. Come in out of the damp."
"That's," I said, "very kind."
"Oh, I'm always kind," said Mrs. Okafor, with a smile that could have cut glass.
There was one thing I couldn't explain.
It was what they said about Kara.
I didn't hear it all at once. It came in pieces, in elevators, in stairwells, across laundry baskets, in the wake of the weekly Alder Street Tenants Association meeting, which I was not invited to, and whose minutes, I'd begun to suspect, were largely about me. I'd catch a fragment, like a sentence drifting through an open window.
"She was so tired last week."
"I know, I put out the soup."
"She said she was fine. She always says she's fine."
"The ones who say it the most are the ones who aren't."
Kara would shuffle in at midnight, from something she called "a late night at the paper," looking like a kicked puppy. She'd have a scrape on her wrist, a bruise on her cheek, a smudge of ash on her sleeve that she could never quite explain. And yet, somehow, by the time I came the following Friday, she'd be better. She'd be glowing, in fact. And the whole building would be quietly, fiercely pleased.
I remember a Friday in May. I remember it, because it was the first time I'd heard what she'd said.
I'd come in early, on the quiet, with my key, a thing Kara had given me three weeks earlier, "just in case," and a very visible, very shy blush. I'd slipped into the hall. And in the stairwell above me, two floors up, a voice that I would have known anywhere was talking, in a soft, excited, bubbly tumble, to Mrs. Okafor.
"And then she just did it!" said Kara. "She just stayed! I'd been up for forty hours, I was, I was a mess, Mrs. O, and she didn't say a word. She just made me tea and she sat there and she let me talk. She didn't try to fix it. She just listened. She's," a catch in her voice, a laugh, a shiver "she's the first person I've ever met who looks at me and doesn't want me to be anything else."
A pause.
"Oh," said Mrs. Okafor, very quietly.
"I know. I know. I'm being so ridiculous."
"You're not."
"She's just, she's so good, Mrs. O. She doesn't think she is. She thinks she's a, she's convinced she's somehow dangerous, and she's, I've never met anyone so brave." A sniffle. "I wish she could see herself the way I see her."
I stood in the stairwell, with my keys in my hand, entirely still.
I did not hear what Mrs. Okafor said next. She said it very low. But I heard her footsteps go back down, and I heard her stop, one flight above me, on the landing, and I knew she'd realized I was there. She did not turn around. She stood for a long moment with her hand on the rail.
"Dear," she said, to the empty air, in the loudest, kindest, most deliberate voice. "Do come up. She's been talking about you all week."
And that was the first day I stopped counting.
It was a slow thaw. It didn't happen all at once.
It began, I think, with a Thursday in June, when the whole building lost power in a thunderstorm. It was a sudden, thick, violent storm, the sort that rolls in from the bay in a wall of wind, and just after nine the lights died on every floor. I was in the lobby. Kara was across town, covering a, a story, and wasn't answering her phone. I stood in the dark at the foot of the stairs, with a flashlight, and listened to the building, creaking and dripping and muttering to itself in the black.
"Nobody's going to the basement," said a voice, from above. It was Mr. Haas, the super, in a tone I'd never heard him use. "Not with the water. The sump pump's out."
"Is the generator,"
"Broken."
"Is anyone in the basement?"
A pause.
"Theo's mother does the laundry down there," said Mr. Haas, slowly. "She's got the baby."
I did not think.
I would like to say that I made a calculated decision. But there is a thing that happens in a very small moment, when a child is in danger, and the mind does not so much decide as remember what it is. I took the stairs down two at a time. I had a flashlight and a bad knee and nine inches of water to wade through, and a very large, very stuck, very heavy steel door at the end of the corridor, which I put my entire weight against, and shoved.
It took me eleven minutes.
By the end, I was soaked to the shoulders, shivering, with a baby in one arm and a woman in a sodden bathrobe clinging to the other, and a ring of flashlights waiting at the top of the stairs. Mr. Haas was there. Mr. Delgado was there. Mrs. Okafor, in her robe, with a blanket. They parted, like the Red Sea, to let us through, and nobody said anything. Theo's mother sobbed on a landing. A blanket went around my shoulders. A cup of something hot was pushed into my hands.
It was Mr. Delgado.
"Miss Luthor," he said.
It was the first time he had used my name.
"You didn't have to do that."
"Of course I did."
"No," he said, slowly. "You really didn't."
He looked at me for a long moment, with his big, tired, unreadable face. And then he nodded, once, and said, in a voice I had not heard him use before: "Elevator's working again. I fixed it this afternoon. Whenever you want it."
"It was broken?"
"It was," said Mr. Delgado, with a perfectly straight face, "never broken."
I started to laugh.
I couldn't help it. I stood in the lobby, soaking wet, with a baby's blanket around my shoulders, and I laughed until I cried, and a moment later, to my great astonishment, Mr. Delgado's mouth twitched, and then he was laughing, a deep helpless wheeze, and the whole crowd on the stairs joined in.
The next week, a casserole appeared at my door.
Not Kara's door. Mine. At the penthouse, forty blocks away, on a floor with a private elevator and two security desks. It was in a glass dish, wrapped in foil, with a note in a careful, round, retired-schoolteacher's hand.
Dear Lena,
I made too much. Eat something. You are too thin.
Mrs. O.
P.S. The Pellegrinos say they are sorry about the laundry room. They are not very good at apologizing. Neither am I. But we both mean it.
I stood in my kitchen, in my bare feet, in a very expensive silence, and read the note four times.
Then I ate the whole casserole, standing up, straight out of the dish, and it was, without any doubt, the best thing I'd had in months.
It was July when they started to like me.
I could feel it, a gentle warming in the air, as though a window had been opened. Mr. Delgado stood when I came in. Mrs. Okafor gave me a key to the roof, "for the stars, dear," and a recipe card for jollof rice. The Pellegrinos stopped taking notes. Theo, the nine-year-old, who had apparently concluded after careful study that I was "not a villain, probably," left a drawing under Kara's door, signed in green crayon.
It showed three people holding hands. A tall blonde. A short, round, clearly furious stick-figure with white hair. And a dark-haired woman in what appeared to be a very large pair of boots.
LENA (HERO), said the caption.
I framed it.
I also learned, over that long soft summer, what they said about us.
"She looks at you," said Mrs. Pellegrino, in the laundry room, in a tone of deep and satisfied conspiracy. She had a real basket of towels now, and had even begun to wash them. "Did you know that?"
"At me?"
"When you're not looking, dear. The way she looks. It's a thing to see."
"I'm sure it's,"
"And you," said Mr. Pellegrino, folding a fitted sheet with one hand, "when she's not looking. Same thing exactly."
"I don't,"
"You've got a face," said Mrs. Pellegrino. "We've all got eyes, dear. We aren't blind."
I did not say anything.
I could not quite say anything. I stood in a basement laundry room, in a borrowed cardigan, holding a bottle of detergent that Mrs. Okafor had pressed into my hands, with a helpless, hopeful, terrified feeling rising in my chest like a bubble.
"She's happy," said Mrs. Pellegrino, in a much gentler voice. She reached out and patted my hand. "That's what we noticed, first. Before anything. She came home one night in the spring, and she was whistling. In the stairwell. At two in the morning. And I said to Marco, there's someone."
"And then we saw you," said Mr. Pellegrino.
"And we thought, well."
"Oh, no," said Mrs. Pellegrino, with a happy, tearful sigh. "Not a Luthor. But there it is."
We went on our first date on the first Friday in August.
It was not, strictly speaking, a surprise. It had been something we'd both been circling for months, in a series of shy, glancing, increasingly desperate approaches. But it was a very particular kind of Friday, hot and golden and blue, and when I came up the front steps of 1147 Alder Street at six o'clock, in a green dress and a pair of heels, with a bouquet of white roses and a nervousness that could have powered a small city, the lobby was full.
I mean it was full. There was Mr. Delgado, in his dress uniform. There was Mrs. Okafor, in a church hat. There were the Pellegrinos. There was Theo, in a clip-on tie. There was Mr. Haas, with a toolbox, standing at the foot of the stairs, apparently doing nothing in particular.
"Miss Luthor," said Mr. Delgado.
"Mr. Delgado."
"Kara," said Mrs. Okafor, up the stairs, in a voice that carried to the roof, "she's here!"
There was a thump. A crash. A muffled shout of "I'm COMING, I'm, don't LOOK, I'm not READY!" and the building held its breath.
And then Kara came down the stairs.
I've tried, many times, to describe it. I'm not very good at it. She wore a blue dress, soft and simple, with her hair down, and no glasses, and a pair of earrings I'd given her on her birthday. She'd put on a little lipstick. She'd stopped, halfway down the last flight, with one hand on the rail, and was staring at me with her eyes very wide and her cheeks going pink, and I heard, from somewhere to my left, Mrs. Okafor let out a long, soft, delighted sigh.
"Hi," said Kara.
"Hi."
"You look,"
"So do you."
"I was going to say nice," said Kara. "But that's not, that's a very small word."
"Is it?"
"It's tiny." She came down the last stairs, slowly, and stopped about eleven inches away. "You look like, I don't know. Like the first time it's warm in spring."
I opened my mouth.
I closed it.
I held out the roses.
"Oh," said Kara, and her whole face lit.
Behind me, there was a faint sound, like a very large number of people trying very hard not to squeal.
"Have her home by midnight," said Mrs. Okafor, at the door.
"We'll be late."
"Then have her home by one."
"Mrs. O!"
"I'm just saying," said Mrs. Okafor, with great dignity. She reached out, and straightened the collar of my jacket, and looked up at me with very bright, very shrewd, very kind eyes. "You take care of that girl."
"I will," I said.
"I know."
"I'll always,"
"I know you will, dear," said Mrs. Okafor, quietly. "That's why we let you in."
I opened my mouth to ask her what she meant.
But Kara had my hand, and was tugging me toward the door, and the glass was catching the last of the gold, and the whole lobby was calling out good wishes in a happy, overlapping, ridiculous chorus, and I let myself be pulled.
We were halfway down the front steps when something came drifting down out of the sky.
It was small. It was blue. It fluttered, like a leaf, through the warm evening air, turning over and over, and Mr. Haas, who was standing at the bottom of the steps with his toolbox, stuck out one hand without looking and caught it.
It was a sock.
He put it in his pocket.
"Evening," said Mr. Haas, pleasantly, to nobody in particular.
I looked at the sock. I looked at Mr. Haas. I looked up at the building, at the blank, bright, afternoon windows of the third floor, where a curtain, just for a moment, twitched.
"Did that man just catch a sock?" I said.
"What?" said Kara, brightly. "No. No, he didn't. It's a, it was a leaf."
"It was blue."
"It was a blue leaf. Very rare. Come on, we're going to be late!"
And she dragged me down the street, laughing, her hand warm in mine, and the whole building waved us off from the windows. And somewhere in the back of my head, very faintly, a very small, very quiet, very analytical voice said:
That's data.