He reaches into a bag and brings out a manila envelope. It contains a passport and other documents in a new name. I hold it for a moment, then open the flap and look at the passport, American, in the name of Gertrude Fernsby, which makes me smile. It sounds like the name of an armchair detective, but the photo is mine, as is the driver’s license, which gives my home address in Eastchester. I stare at them for a moment, then nod.
This is how I will spare the apartment, spare the girls, spare my friends. I will flee before they can arrest me. “Thank you.”
He hugs me, and then I hurry back out into the rain. The sooner the better.
Chapter Forty-Two
Willow
As I go over the notes and bridges and arrangements over and over, I’m thinking about Gloria and the trouble she’s in, and I realize I haven’t talked to Sam about it yet either. First thing, when she wakes up the next time. She’s getting stronger, but it scares me how weak she is, like a character in a historical novel, Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, falling apart.
Except that it’s always been me, the younger sister, who’s held the center. Which is funny, because not only am I the younger sister, but I’m also small, not to mention blonde and wispy. People discount me. Manic pixie dream girl, as Sam always says, but I’m not. Nothing like that. By nature, I’m less like my lost mother and my delicately wired sister and much more like the sensible Gloria, who sees what needs doing and just does it.
The music loops back and back, looping around my mother and her longings. Her women and her men, her drugs. Why didn’t the music sustain her the way it has sustained me? For me, music has been at the center of everything my whole life, a solid core of love that I could count on no matter what else was happening. Not to bring in money, although I know I will never starve as long as I touch it, but a thing I can love and trust completely, more of a friend than any other thing in my life.
I wish my mother had trusted her gift.
It’s while I’m in the depths of these circling thoughts that Josiah arrives. He’s dressed nicely, in a pair of slacks and an oxford shirt beneath his camel coat, his hair combed out into a natural, dots of water crowning it like a halo.
He’s looked different every time I’ve seen him. This is the professor side, and I think of him in front of a classroom teaching—what? I haven’t asked yet.
Before I can, he closes the door behind him and turns, and I haven’t stepped back and nearly stumble in my haste to do so, and he catches my waist in one big hand. “Careful,” he says, that voice rumbling through my body, my neck and elbows and hands.
“Sorry,” I say a little breathlessly, stepping back and smoothing my blouse. “Come on in.”
I lead him back into the music room, and I realize I’ve forgotten to take his coat, and I can’t seem to get my shit together, because now the scent of his skin is mixed with the heady scent of rain, and lamplight is catching in those little diamonds in his hair, and I haven’t been so flustered by a man since . . . I don’t know when. “Can I take your coat?”
“Sure.” He sheds it. “I can—”
“No, it’s all right; I’ll hang it up in the hall.”
“Or I can do it.”
But I’ve already got it, holding it close, and I hurry out, bending my nose into the collar before I reach to hang it on the hook by the door.
I startle when he says, “I forgot my phone in my pocket.”
It’s dim in the hall, so he can’t see my blush, but I know he saw me smelling his coat. It’s so junior high. I don’t do this, get flustered around men. Not any of them.
And yet here I am, looking up at him like I don’t know the first thing about sex or men or how any of it works.
“It’s in my pocket,” he says, pointing behind me.
“Oh. Sorry.” I laugh and move out of the way; in fact I take myself all the way back to the music room because I’m both embarrassed and afraid I might start giggling to make it worse. I cover my mouth as he comes back in, looking up at him, and he’s inclining his head. “Something on your mind, Willow?”
I let myself laugh, then, laugh out the stress and the longing and the everything, and he lets me, rolling up his sleeves, opening his instrument case. He sits on the bench by my mother’s albums and waits for me.
Finally, I’m finished and wipe away laughter tears. “Whew. Sorry about that.”
“I don’t mind.” In the lamplight, his eyes are as dark as a lake, fathomless. Glittering.
I take a breath. Truth always wins. “You probably get this all the time, but you fluster me a little.”
His hands rest on the bass and the bow, and for a moment, he doesn’t say anything. “I’ve been flustered since I walked into the pub and saw you sitting there with Paige.”
“Oh.” A swell of happiness wells in my chest, and then I remember the reason I wanted him here in the first place. “But the music,” I say. “I’m afraid of . . . ruining that part.”
“Agreed,” he says and holds my gaze as he lifts his bow. “Let’s get to work.”
Something easy runs through my muscles, my throat. “Are you always so mellow?”
“Mostly. Not everyone likes it.”
“Really?”
A shrug. He skims the bow over the E string and makes a tuning adjustment. “Some people need drama.”
I laugh and roll my eyes. “Not me.” I pick up my violin and skim my bow over the strings, listening to him do the same, and we come into harmony. “Were you teaching today? You have that professorial look.”
“Yes, a seminar.”
“What do you teach?”
“Oh! Writing. I’m a poet. I thought I told you that already.”
A soft blue puff of light zaps me. “A poet. Can you write lyrics?”
He reaches down into the bag at his feet. “Yes.” He hesitates a moment, then hands over a piece of paper. “It’s a work in progress, but I started hearing it when I left and jotted some notes down. I was thinking of your mother, and your album, and the way you looked when you talked earlier.”
I read the scribblings, and they’re a play on my mother’s song “Write My Name Across the Sky,” an echo of love from the other side of the universe. It’s only two verses and clearly a rough draft, but it’s right enough to make tears rise. “I think we can work with this.” I don’t wipe the tears away as I lift the violin, allow my mother, my wish for her, my longing for her, to fill me up, and I pour that emotion into the mirror of her longing all those years ago.
And it’s good. It’s really, really fucking good.
Chapter Forty-Three
Sam
When I next awaken, the meds have taken hold, and I feel like myself again. Asher is asleep in the chair, covered with a blanket he must have taken from the foot of my bed. He’s kicked off his shoes, and his feet are propped up on the ottoman, and I don’t want to wake him, but even my teeth are floating. As quietly as possible, I swing my legs out of bed and wait to see how it feels to sit up.
Pretty good.
I stand. Wait. Still okay. No dizziness. I touch my head, and it feels like my fever is totally gone.
Good. I walk toward the door, carefully checking my status, and I feel pretty much like myself. Normal. Except—jeez. I’m starving.
“Sam!” Asher is at my side. Takes my arm firmly. “What are you doing? Why do you think I’m sleeping in your room? Because it’s comfortable? I can tell you it isn’t.”
“I’m seriously fine now.”
“Let’s just not test that too much, huh?” He opens the door and offers his arm, elbow out, so that I can walk beside him. The hallway is lit by a single gloomy light, but it’s better than the darkness earlier.
“I used to think a goblin lived in that closet,” I say, pointing.
“I remember. And ghosts in the servant hallway.”
I laugh a little. “I forgot you’d know all that.”
“You thought everything was haunted. Good thing you grew up and found a use
for that imagination.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” I don’t mention the fact that I’ve been sensing my mother. It seems like too much of an omen that I might die.
He leaves me at the door. “I’ll be here, so don’t get all brave if you have a problem.”
“I promise,” I say, but if I had a problem with the toilet, I’d rather dunk my head than have anybody help me, much less Asher.
Luckily, it’s not a problem. I wash my face and hands, drag a brush through my hair, and catch a whiff of my body. “Ugh. I think I need a shower.”
I look at myself in the mirror. Can I ask him to do that? Wait while I shower? My eyes stare back at me, and I see the lust in them, the longing I feel to push him into a position where he’d put his hands on me and then maybe remember—
Don’t be stupid, I say to my reflection. It’s entirely a mental exercise, because I will quickly be out of energy entirely. The shakiness I’m feeling is all about starvation.
I open the door. “I am so hungry I could eat that troll under the stairs.”
He grins, holds out his elbow again. “Let’s get you some food, then.”
The apartment is quiet. I didn’t look toward Gloria’s room, but Willow’s door is closed, so she must be asleep. “What time is it?”
“Just after two a.m.”
“Huh. I slept a long time.” In the kitchen, I head straight for the fridge, but Asher blocks me, points me to a kitchen chair. The harsh overhead light does neither one of us any favors, tinting his skin with a greenish tone. I’m glad I at least brushed my hair. “Did you eat earlier?”
“Yeah, Willow fed us all.”
“All?”
“Yeah, me and G and some guy who played some music with Willow.”
“And I slept through all of that?” Something snarky tries to push through, and I’m not quite successful in pushing it back. “What guy?”
He takes a pot out of the fridge and ladles soup out of it. “I don’t know. Josiah? Sounded good, though. I mean, really good.”
I roll my eyes. “She’s only been here five minutes, and already she has a new boyfriend.”
He crosses his arms over his chest. “Why are you always so mean about her?”
“I’m not.”
“Yeah, well, who made you this soup? Who went shopping so that you’d have your very special things?” He pops a cup of rice pudding on the table. “Who made sure that your bed was fresh and you had people around to take care of you?”
I look at him, feeling emotions rise all too quickly to the surface. “Sorry. You’re right. I don’t know why.”
“Maybe give it some thought while you’re recovering, huh?” He takes the bowl out of the microwave and sets it in front of me, then takes out a sandwich wrapped in the distinctive Bloom’s paper and plops it on a plate. I’m watching his hands, big and competent, and bend in to eat the soup.
Which is so amazing I make a little sound. “How does she do this?”
He meets my eyes, and I realize he’s not wearing his glasses, which means I can see those luxurious lashes and the slight tilt at the corners of his eyes and the fact that he has laugh lines. “Maybe tell her that tomorrow, huh?”
“I will. I promise.” I look away, worried that he’s going to see all the things I’m thinking on my face. We eat in silence. A siren goes by beneath the window, and then another. An accident on the West Side Highway, I think.
“A robbery on Ninth,” Asher says.
“An old man with a heart attack.”
“A fight at an after-hours joint.”
I smile. He meets my eyes and takes a bite of his sandwich. After a minute he says, “A woman with meningitis alone in her apartment.”
“I’m so lucky you came.”
He closes his eyes, and because he’s not wearing his glasses, I see the single tear at the corner of his left eye.
I stand up and come around the table and pull him close. His forehead lands between my breasts, and his hands fall on my hips. I bend my face into his thick, beautiful hair, and it smells of him and sunshine and a memory of a picnic long ago in the Sheep Meadow at Central Park, with a basket packed by his mother, so lovingly, enough for me and Willow and Asher. Willow idly played her violin, and Asher and I lay side by side, and it seemed that maybe life would be just fine.
Now in the kitchen in the middle of the night, he says nothing, but his hands are tight on my sides, and I can feel the tension in his neck, his shoulders, as if he has to maintain iron control or he’ll shatter. I hold him and let him rest there, knowing he cannot bear to show me tears, even though I can feel them against my skin, soaking through my nightshirt. “I’m sorry, Asher,” I say, and I don’t mean for getting sick and calling him in the middle of the night.
I mean, Sorry for all the things I should have already said I was sorry for a million times. Sorry for the way I treated you, sorry for taking you for granted, sorry for pushing you away, sorry for the terrible, terrible, terrible things I said . . .
Gently, he pulls me into his lap, still keeping his head low. I rest my head against his shoulder, and we just sit there together, not talking. Not kissing. It’s all unsaid, the press of his forehead on my neck, the feeling of his ear against my fingers, his hand on my waist, mine around his shoulders.
“I was so afraid you’d die.”
“But I didn’t,” I say, and this time, I do kiss his forehead.
For a long minute, he allows it, and then he says, “You need to eat. Or you will never get well.”
Chapter Forty-Four
Gloria
From my bedroom, where I am attempting to compress my life into a suitcase I can roll away with me, I can hear the low murmurs of Willow and her friend working on their music. It brings bittersweet memories of Billie doing the same thing with one or another of her musician friends, sometimes a member of one of her bands. None of the bands stuck. They always started because they admired her work, her voice, her talent. They all devolved to wanting to prop her up on the stage like a Barbie doll, exploiting her looks instead of giving her space to grow fully into her own gifts.
Willow is tougher than Billie by far. Some of it is the luck of being further along the path of feminism, but a lot of it is the simple clarity Willow brings to her life. She thinks she’s confused, but she has always focused clearly and without angst on giving voice to the music within her. From the time she was small, she knew she was born to make music, and she has simply . . . done it.
I love that she’s back in New York, which is really her place. LA pretends to be a land of eccentrics, but it’s not. It’s a land of youth and vitality and sunshine, while New York is a land of brains and accomplishments. Too much about money these days, but that seems to be a disease that has infected the entire world.
I sort through panties and bras, T-shirts and slacks and socks. From my bureau, I take a photo of Billie and me when I was about ten, in Montreal with my mother, who took the train there just to hear her native language. In it, I’m too tall and too thin, with my hair pulled back into a braid. Billie is more serious, looking directly into the camera as if measuring the intention of the photographer. My mother sits beside us, extraordinarily beautiful even in her vast unhappiness. In this one photo, she’s smiling, her lips red and full, and she has a beret on her head. Billie and Willow both take after her in their small build, their birdlike bones. Samantha and I favor my father, and I at least inherited his red hair.
I take the photo out of the frame, take a picture with my phone, and tuck the original into my suitcase. There are four other photos, and I do the same with each: Miriam and I in Egypt on a camel, the Pyramids behind us; a black and white of the view from Isaak’s flat in Casablanca, with rooftops and palm trees; and one of Sam, Willow, and me at Coney Island not long after Billie died. They were both so desperately sad. All of us were. But that day, eating cotton candy and riding the Ferris wheel and trying to win at carnival games, we were happy.
Eventually, we all r
ecovered. More or less.
Winded, I sink onto the bed. I do not want to go. I do not want to go. The loss feels like it’s shredding something within me.
But life doesn’t care if you like something. It gives you choices. It’s up to you to decide which things are right for you. I cannot bear the thought of jail, and I do not want my youthful errors to cause any trouble for the girls.
When I finish the packing, I tuck my suitcase into my closet and head for my greenhouse, where I write instructions for Willow and a letter for Sam and practical details about finances. Miriam will handle getting the nude sold, and that should both finance my long-term travels and give Sam and Willow each a bit of a cushion, as well as making up for the harm I did my friends so many years ago.
At 3:00 a.m., after a few hours of sleep, I make my way silently out of the apartment, ride the elevator down for the last time, and slide by the new overnight man, who only lifts a hand as I walk by. We don’t know each other. I don’t come in and out at this time of day. “Do you need a cab?” he asks, not getting up.
“No, thank you.” I’ve already called one, and I see the yellow body waiting outside. “Penn Station,” I tell the driver. My train doesn’t leave for hours, but I couldn’t have left when everyone was awake, and besides, I wouldn’t put it past Balakrishna to have me watched. Less likely anyone would be paying attention in the middle of the night.
I hope I’m correct.
Chapter Forty-Five
Willow
In the morning, I carry my violin and a big mug of tea out to the greenhouse, where I won’t disturb Sam, though I’ve left the door propped open a little to both circulate some air for the plants and give myself access to the sweet freshness of morning. It’s going to be one of those lusciously soft almost-spring days. I can hear birds celebrating in the trees of the rooftop.
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