Part one

The phone buzzed on the back seat at 11:52 p.m., at the red light on Queens Boulevard and 63rd Street, and the screen stayed lit long enough for me to read the message in the rearview mirror.

“Tomorrow 6 p.m. When she comes out of yoga.”

I’ve been driving a yellow cab in New York for twenty-two years. I don’t read other people’s messages. That’s a rule. You see everything in a cab: people crying, fighting, kissing, breaking up over the phone in Spanish because they think the driver doesn’t understand. You see everything and you keep nothing. The meter stops, the door slams, it’s over.

But that phone, I kept. And I didn’t sleep all night.

I should explain where that phone came from.

My name is Rafael Almonte. I’m forty-seven. I came from Santiago de los Caballeros at eighteen, with one suitcase and the address of a cousin in Washington Heights. I washed dishes, delivered pizzas, drove rental cars. In 2006, I bought my taxi medallion, the little metal plate bolted onto the hood, for a price that cost me fifteen years of debt and half my hair. Today it’s mine. So is the cab. My wife, Yolanda, says it’s the only thing in the world I love as much as our daughter.

She’s right. On the sun visor, I have a photo of Daniela on her graduation day, in a purple gown, laughing with her mouth wide open. Passengers see it every time I flip the visor down. A lot of them ask me questions. I always answer. I’m proud; that’s my weakness.

I work nights, five p.m. to five a.m. Around ten, I always stop at Doña Altagracia’s on Roosevelt Avenue, under the elevated tracks of the 7 train, for a plate of rice, red beans and chicken. Everybody in Corona knows that at ten o’clock, Rafael’s cab is parked outside Doña Altagracia’s.

That night, when I came back out, a man was waiting under the awning, out of the rain. Thirty, maybe a little older. Mets cap, clean jacket, a small scar above his left eyebrow. He raised his hand.

“You free? Woodside, please. Sorry, with this weather, I couldn’t get a car on the app.”

I almost never pick anyone up there. But it was raining, he was polite, and he said “please.”

His name was Chris; he told me right away. He worked in air-conditioning, out on Long Island. He was likable, in that easy way some men have when they ask questions and really listen to the answers.

At the first light, he saw the photo on the visor.

“That your daughter? She looks happy.”

And me, like an idiot, I talked.

I said she was twenty-four. That she was a physical therapy assistant at Elmhurst Hospital. That she’d had a hard year, a thing with a guy that ended badly, that she’d moved in with a friend in Astoria and changed her number, that she didn’t want to talk about it, that young people are like that. That she was doing better, thanks to yoga. Twice a week, at a little studio on Ditmars Boulevard, above a Greek bakery.

“Tuesdays and Thursdays,” I added. “Her mother says it saved her life.”

“That’s good,” said Chris. “It’s important, taking care of yourself.”

Then he asked if she was careful at night, going home, because Ditmars after six isn’t the same. I told him she came out at six on the dot, that it was still light, and that she took the train right there, at the last stop. I was glad a stranger was worried about my daughter. I even thanked him.

He gave me a good tip, in Woodside, outside a brick building on 61st Street. He wished me a good night. He said, “Take care of your daughter.”

At the time, I thought that was nice.

I saw the phone a little later, at the light on 63rd Street, when it buzzed. A black phone, slipped down between the seat and the door. I put it on the passenger seat to drop off at the Taxi and Limousine Commission’s lost and found the next day, like I’ve done a hundred times.

Then it buzzed again. And again.

I couldn’t open it. It was locked. But the messages came up on the black screen, one by one, sent by a contact saved as “Mikey.”

“U sure it’s the right studio?”

“She changed her number, her job, her address. How’d you find her?”

“Ok. Tomorrow I’m taking my uncle’s van.”

I drove until three with that phone beside me, like a passenger who didn’t talk. I picked up a couple in Jackson Heights, a nurse going to Elmhurst Hospital, three drunk students in Astoria. Every time it buzzed, I looked.

I told myself: this isn’t your business, Rafael. They’re just words, no names, no faces. Thousands of women do yoga in New York. What are you going to tell the police? That a passenger left his phone behind?

At two, I almost called Yolanda. Then I remembered she gets up at five-thirty for the hospital laundry, and that she’d tell me what she always tells me: “Rafael, you watch too many cop shows in that cab.” So I put the radio on, a bachata station, really loud, so I wouldn’t hear it buzzing anymore.

And still, something was bugging me. One sentence. “Take care of your daughter.”

At 4:58, I was parked outside my building on 104th Street, engine off. The light was just starting to pale the sky above the elevated tracks. I was about to go up and sleep.

The phone buzzed one last time.

“Is this her? Walked past the studio last Thursday.”

And underneath, a photo. A little thumbnail on the locked screen. I pressed on it with my thumb for a long time, and it got bigger.

A lit-up window, at night. Behind it, a row of women on mats. In the foreground, a young woman rolling up hers, in profile, her hair tied back, wearing a purple jacket that Yolanda and I had given her for Christmas and that she thought was too loud.

It was my daughter.