“Smart aleck.” Her hair is a bit disheveled, and her lipstick wore off a long time ago, and she actually looks her age, the LED grow lights exaggerating the lines on her cheeks and around her eyes. “They’re going to be so pretty, wait and see. I ordered them all the way from China.”
I can’t bear to imagine her in jail. A Leonard Cohen song, “Suzanne,” pops into my head, about a lost woman who gives a man tea that comes all the way from China. I start to sing it.
It makes Gloria smile, which was my whole aim. “Is your sister settled?”
“Out cold.”
“Poor baby. This is hard on her need to be independent.”
I nod. “What happened to the paintings, G?”
She sighs, resting her wrists on the edge of the potting area. “The FBI took them.”
“Will they be enough to arrest you?”
“No. Not those,” she says. “Strangely,” she adds, brushing hair off her forehead, which leaves a streak of dirt behind, “I’ve been thinking of my mother. I can’t imagine what her life was like during the war.” She continues, “Six years, her parents dead, and all she had was her beauty and her wits. When I think of her, I’m just so sad that she didn’t get anything at all of the life she wanted.”
“But she made you and my mom really fierce, right? And then my mom had two fierce daughters, and you made us even more so.”
“Did I?”
“Of course! Imagine if you hadn’t been around, G? Who would have taken care of us? What would have happened?”
She nods thoughtfully. Goes back to scooping potting soil into small clay pots. I watch her free a seedling from a plastic tray and nestle it into the pot, carefully tapping down the soil around it. “See how gently I’m doing this? You see people smashing the dirt down really hard, but it just needs to be firm enough for the plant to stand upright. The roots need space to grow.”
“That makes sense.” I pause. “Are you scared?”
“Of course.”
I stare at her, unwilling to give up without a fight. “Isn’t there a statute of limitations on something like this?”
“There must not be. I googled it, but with international law, it’s murky. I mean, they’ve arrested Isaak and the woman in Amsterdam.” Delicately, she shakes excess dirt from the roots of a seedling, tucks it into a pot. “No more. I hate that you’re involved even a little bit.”
I touch her arm. “Come on; let’s get some supper. You might as well eat.”
We’re setting the table in the kitchen, that old red table that’s so homey and so ugly, when the bell rings. It’s Asher, who comes in with a spring in his step. I open the door to him and touch my lips with one finger to indicate silence. He nods.
It really is remarkable how much more of himself he is. Always a slightly chubby kid with pasty white skin, his only beauty in those days was his big, dark eyes, hidden behind thick glasses.
Now he’s just grown into his own aura or something. He’s still not thin, but he’s fit, solid looking, and his hair is a little long to give the curls some room to be themselves, and he wears glasses that complement his features—a nose that’s aggressive but not too much so, a great wide mouth with big white teeth. He dresses better, too, in hipsterish-but-not clothes that seem as relaxed and high quality as he is himself.
“What?” he asks.
“Nothing.”
“Is Sam here?”
“She’s sleeping, really hard. Do you want to eat?”
“Bloom’s?”
“No. Me.”
He laughs. “Of course.”
My phone buzzes against my butt, and I pull it out, see the name on the screen. “Go on into the kitchen,” I say. “I’ll be right there.”
He amiably heads through the hallway, because no one but us ever takes the servant hallway.
I answer the phone. It’s funny that he’s calling, not texting. “Hey, Josiah.”
“Hey. How’s your sister doing?”
“Good. I got her home, anyway.”
“That’s great.” A small pause. “I worked out some free time in my schedule, and I’m free tonight if that works for you.”
I look over my shoulder, toward my family, the women I love, who are both in crisis. And yet what would it hurt to play some music? I can’t do anything for either of them, frankly. What I can do is something for myself.
And really, we’re all in charge of our own happiness.
“It’s a little bit crazy here, but I’d really love it if you can come over. I might not have a ton of time, but—”
“We’ll do what we can,” he says in his calm way.
I flash on his hands, flying over his bass, and the sound of his voice. “Right.” I swallow. “Come whenever. I’m here.” I give him the address.
“I remember.”
Because of the looming trouble, the meal with Gloria and Asher feels precious. Rain is pouring outside while we sit in the badly lit kitchen, eating soup and bread while Sam sleeps. It’s cozy, quiet, and I wish for music. “Why don’t you have a Bluetooth speaker in here?”
Gloria dabs her mouth. “Because I’m almost never in here, my love.”
Asher chuckles.
“Fair enough,” I say. “I’m going to get one.”
“Oh, you’re staying?” Asher asks, inclining his head.
I shrug lightly, looking through the window of the back door to the rooftop and the rain and the shadows of plants and the glow of fairy lights in the greenhouse. “I miss New York. I miss . . . this.”
“I thought you loved LA. You were out there for a while. I thought you’d end up staying.” He butters a slice of bread, not the good sourdough I sometimes got in LA but a genuinely decent french bread. “You always raved about the weather.”
“You can get tired of sunshine,” I say. “I need some storms and gray miserableness to think.”
Gloria laughs. “I know what you mean.”
“I don’t,” Asher says. “Stick around for another month, and you’ll see. It’s been miserable.”
“Yes, but soon it will be April,” Gloria says, “and that’s a lovely, lovely month here.” Her face looks abruptly, painfully sad.
I touch her hand. “It is.”
The wail cuts into the quiet like the cry of a banshee: “Willow!”
I bolt from the table.
Chapter Forty
Sam
When I awaken, my mouth is dry, head aching. At first I have no idea where I am; then I recognize the particular arrangement of windows with light coming in from the busy street below. My bedroom at my mom’s apartment.
I have to pee. This is the first time I’ve had to do anything on my own, really, and I consider using my phone to call Willow. No. The sooner I get my act together, the sooner I can get out of here.
What I forget sometimes is how great this room is. Windows along the south wall. A big, very soft bed that I have always loved, a bed for the princess and the pea, my mom said when she bought it. Teasing me. That couldn’t have been long before she died.
Don’t, I tell myself and roll off the bed, plant my feet on the old rug that covers bare wooden floors. From the direction of the kitchen or maybe the parlor, I hear voices, and it’s oddly comforting. It gives me courage to stand up and shuffle to the door, then out into the hall, and then, leaning on the wall, into the family bathroom, which is one of the most beautiful bathrooms I’ve ever seen. It’s getting pretty dated in some ways, but another skylight allows buckets of light to flow in, and the tub is gigantic, and there are built-in drawers beneath the linen cupboard. That cupboard in itself is a huge luxury.
It’s a relief to sit on the toilet. I close my eyes and rest there. Long enough to gather my resolve again. It’s better being up. My head is slightly less buzzy, but I do have a headache, and it seems like it must be time for medicine, though I have no idea what time it actually is.
Suddenly, I remember the empty picture frames and Willow’s hints that Gloria is in trouble,
and I realize that she never came back to tell me what’s going on.
Probably because I’ve been asleep all this time, to be fair. I’ll ask her about it now. I want to be included in whatever this is.
But as I wash my hands, I realize that I’m very dizzy. It feels less like the illness and more like the shakes I get when I’ve forgotten to eat. Which happens more often than I’d like to admit. How long has it been since I really ate something? I probably need food. Tea.
On shaky legs, I open the bathroom door and, holding on to the wall, shuffle back out. The hallway looks a million miles long, and I really am feeling extremely shaky. To avoid falling, I slide down, back against the wall, and muster up my voice: “Willow!”
It comes out as a croak.
I lean my head against the wall, remembering when I came home after living with my dad for the first time. He’d taken an apartment in the neighborhood so that I could walk back and forth to my same school, and I loved living with him. It was a small place, just a one-bedroom with a futon in the living room, where my dad slept, and a galley kitchen, where I made my own cereal before school, careful not to wake him up. Evenings, we cooked together, and I did my homework at the table while he wrote up interviews. He wasn’t famous then, but he had made a name for himself.
“Willow!” I cry, but it is still such a small sound in the vastness of the apartment with its endless, creepy rooms and dark hallways. As a child, I absolutely refused to enter the servant hallway from the foyer—I was positive ghosts lived there.
Like the ghost of my mother, who sits down beside me now. I can’t really see her; I just feel her presence. Comforting. Infuriating. “Go away,” I say without energy, my eyes closed.
After my parents were first divorced, I lived alternately with my mother and father. My dad fell in love with a woman—not Brittney, his current wife, or the one before that, or maybe even the one before that—and it was suddenly quite difficult to care for me and do his job, so I was sent back to my mother full-time when I was six. I begged and cried and threw the only fits of my life, but I couldn’t change the outcome. I came back here, to Willow and my mother and the lonely, lonely rooms. Later, I lived with him again, off and on, whenever it was convenient, mainly.
Now I think, Where was Willow when I was with my dad?
How could I have never asked this question before?
As if the thought has conjured her, she’s suddenly beside me in the dark, cold hallway. “Sam, oh my God!” She presses her hand against my forehead. “You’re burning up. Let’s get you back to bed.”
I try to comply, but she’s as wispy as the ghost on my other side. And then there are solid, strong hands. Asher’s hands. “C’mon, Sam. Let me help you up.”
He tucks my arm around his neck, his arm around my waist, and he walks me back to my room, which isn’t nearly as far as I thought it was. “Don’t be mad at me, okay?” I say as he tucks me back under the covers.
“I’m not mad at you.” He presses his palm to my cheek. “It’s never that.”
Willow brings pills and a cup of water, and there’s something I want to ask her, but I can’t remember what. My mother sinks down on the bed beside me and curls her body around mine. She starts to sing softly, and I am swept away.
Chapter Forty-One
Gloria
A text comes in at eight fifteen p.m. It’s ready.
I text back. I’ll be there in 20 min
Willow is in the music room, working out the sequence of a series of notes and breaks. The music is her way of coping with the stress of everything. I’ve heard her working on the same phrases since she arrived. On the violin, on the piano, humming under her breath. It’s both melancholy and hopeful, though I could never tell you why, and I find myself humming along as I walk down the hallway.
I stop at Sam’s room and poke my head in. She’s asleep again, and Asher is reading in an overstuffed chair that used to be in the parlor. He lifts a hand, and I leave him to his watch. At the music room I wait at the door so that Willow can surface in her own time, and as I stand there, I see my mother playing the piano my father bought for her, a used and battered upright, and I see my sister curved over her guitar. Their bodies blur together, become a column of sound and time connecting the generations. Who was the first one, I wonder? The first to play a harp or sing a cantata in some medieval room? Or perhaps it stretches further, to the Romans or the Babylonians or a Neanderthal who discovered a rhythm on an animal stomach.
And into the future, I hope. I hope they will have children, my girls. Samantha, particularly, for although Willow is a nurturer, it is Sam who burns for a baby.
Is it wrong of me to wish children on them? I don’t know. Ambition and children are not always the best fit, not for women. I had to choose one or the other, and I chose my work. Billie was careless. She wanted music but let her body dictate the direction of life.
But where would my life be without these girls?
Probably a lot like Miriam’s, which is a lovely, good life. She has companionship and the satisfaction of her art and probably lovers now and then, though she doesn’t speak of it, never has.
But I think of Willow as a ten-year-old, all eyes and hair, playing her violin for a recital and bringing down the house. I think of Sam, so very, very angry at her mother, her father, her sister, because every time she settled into a stable life, some adult took it away from her.
Thank heaven for Asher. For Willow, even if Sam doesn’t really appreciate her the way she should.
In the music room, I listen for a moment. “I love this piece, Willow.”
She raises her head. “Thanks. I’ve been working on it for a couple of months, and it’s finally coming together.” Her hands fall to her lap. “I’m going to enter it into a competition, but it needs to be in by the day after tomorrow.”
“Good,” I say and mean it. I want her to have something to distract her. “Promise me you’ll get it in, will you?”
She frowns. “Why?”
“I need a promise, Willow. Cross your heart and hope to die.”
“But—”
“Promise.”
She nods, draws a cross over her heart. “I promise. A friend of mine is coming over in a little while to help me finish. You think that’s okay?”
“Why wouldn’t it be all right?”
“Well, because . . .” She gestures toward me. “You. Sam. Everything.”
“She’ll be okay. It will be good for her to not be completely in control of her entire world for five minutes.”
“What if she bolts?”
I shrug. “She bolts.”
“Well, that makes me feel like a bad sister. People are more important than music.”
“Don’t do that, Willow. Your goals are important too. Play the music. It’ll be fine.” If she’s busy, it will make my next steps that much easier. I cross the room and kiss her head. “Anyway, I have to go out for a while.”
“Now?”
“I won’t be long. Good night.”
The rain has stopped, leaving behind a crisp, fresh cold. Everyone complains about rain, but I love it and always have, and I focus clearly on where I am right now, in this minute. Walking in the neighborhood I’ve loved for twenty-five years. The shimmer of traffic lights on the street, flowers in the window of a bodega, a tiny man in a perfectly tailored suit and a cane making his way down the sidewalk one slow step at a time.
My world. With my phone camera, I shoot a dozen photos. Pressing them into my heart.
At the church, I head down the stairs to the basement, where Sandro awaits. “Hello,” he says as I enter. He looks so much better than he did when he first arrived, when he had been starved and beaten in his home city of San Salvador, then walked for more than three thousand miles with a ragtag group of teenagers to help find them asylum. As a priest, he had a better chance of shepherding at least a few of them through, and that was all that made it—three, plus Sandro himself.
He has a su
itably sober expression as I sit down, suddenly feeling the weight of everything fall on my shoulders, bending me over like an old, old woman.
“I’m so sorry,” he says in his soft accent.
I bury my face in my hands, willing all the sorrow to stay right where it is, below the surface. “It’s my own fault,” I say and raise my head. “No whining.”
He gazes at me with kindness and takes my hand, saying nothing. I think of Tuesday mornings here, when we feed sometimes hundreds of hungry people. He is such a calming, peaceful presence that it seems that every week we prepare everything much more smoothly than should be possible and feed far, far more than the ingredients would suggest. A small miracle.
“This man must have been very special to you,” he says, “to risk so much.”
I shake my head, look at the ceiling. “I was a little bit mad, maybe.”
“So it goes.” His gaze is always so clear and straight. “We fall in love. It’s what we do.”
“I suppose.” I take a breath. “I guess that’s one thing about the priesthood, huh? It spares you that, at least.”
“No, it does not,” and there is the faintest sorrow in his words. “And when one falls, we betray vows to God himself.”
“Where is she?” I ask quietly.
His smile is crooked, sad. “I don’t know. It seems she was not so serious as me. I left the priesthood, and she left the city.”
“No!” I’m aghast. “That hussy!”
He laughs, as I meant him to do. “She was not who I thought,” he admits.
“You’re not a priest?”
“Not anymore. Only a servant of God, where he needs me.”
“Why does everyone think—”
“I cannot convince them, so I let it stand. Even though I do not offer any of the sacraments or homilies or any other thing a priest does, they don’t believe me.”
“I think I just assumed.”
He nods. “Father Anselmo gave me shelter, and in return, I help him in whatever ways I can. I cannot return to San Salvador, and here, at least I can offer my service to the community.”
Of all the things I’ve heard or felt today, this one makes me ache more deeply than any other. He’s an exile because his land is being destroyed by gangs. I’m to be exiled because I was a foolish young woman. If he can bear it with grace, I can certainly do it myself. “Thank you for sharing that with me.”
Write My Name Across the Sky Page 24
