Hot Little Hands

by Abigail Ulman

  —

  Gallagher is staring at his computer when I walk partway to where he is. “What?” he says.

  “Is it possible to get a drink that isn’t water?” I ask. “A juice or soda? Something with sugar or caffeine? I’m not feeling—”

  “No,” he says. “Sit down.”

  He’s going over some papers with Miller when he notices me watching them. “Keep looking over here and you’re going in that cell,” he says. I look away.

  —

  Five hours from now I’ll be on an airplane, drinking a beer and watching Wanderlust, feeling like Justin Theroux might be the most attractive man in the world, but probably just because he’s not wearing a uniform or carrying a gun.

  Half a day after that, I’ll be at the American consulate in Istanbul, talking to officers with walls for faces. Two days later I’ll be in a middle seat on a flight to Heathrow, having nightmares that I’m still locked inside a jail cell until I remember the half pill in my pocket, and take it to knock myself out.

  Six weeks from now, I’ll be camped out on the sofa bed at my parents’ place, surrounded by my suitcase and all my stuff, staying up late at night to talk to my American friends online. Telling them to come visit me and not believing them when they say they will. Asking Lars to forgive me so we can get the band back together. And when I finally tell them all the story of how I got deported, they’ll laugh at how scared I was for them to know. “What did you think we’d say?” my friend Amanda will ask. “Everyone knows the system’s broken.”

  Four months from now, I’ll get my period for the first time since being deported, because my body will have recovered from the stress. I’ll rent a room in a friend’s flat in Dalston. Luke will send me my computer and I’ll update my CV and apply for postdocs and teaching jobs. Nine months later, he and Lydia will get married at San Francisco City Hall, and they’ll text me the photos from the steps out front.

  Three years from now, I will still not be allowed back into the States. I’ll just be watching it from afar, like everybody else. And strangely, it will only be when I’m in yoga class, holding certain poses, that I’ll remember myself back there, in the Bay Area, as though the memories are somehow locked inside my muscles. Riding my bike up Guerrero Street. Walking into the café and seeing his face. Day-drinking margaritas in the park, not too far away from places where people get locked up and sent away all the time. Before I myself got turned around and kicked out. Before I came of age long after I had come of age. Before I took the journey back to where I started, and started again.

  But right now, still waiting in this room, in the transit zone, I lean my head onto Bobbi’s shoulder, and doze on and off for the hours until my flight. “I really don’t want to give you bedbugs,” I tell her, but she doesn’t shake me off, even when I start to drool.

  For my mum,

  with love and thanks.

  Thank you to the Stanford University Creative Writing program for bringing me to the States and teaching me so much once I arrived. Thank you to my extraordinary teachers and mentors: Tobias Wolff, Elizabeth Tallent, John L’Heureux, and Colm Tóibín.

  For their wisdom, faith, and perpetual good humor, thank you to everyone at Spiegel & Grau, especially Cindy Spiegel, Julie Grau, and Laura van der Veer. Enormous thanks, too, to my agents Peter Straus and Melanie Jackson, Mary Mount at Viking UK, and Ben Ball and Arwen Summers at Penguin Australia.

  I am grateful for the support of the MacDowell Colony, Tin House Writer’s Workshop, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ucross Foundation, and MacDowell again. I’m grateful, also, to the editors who have published my work in journals and anthologies.

  Thank you to my friends, readers, and hand-holders, and especially to these amazing people, who are all three of those things: Hassan Javed, Alexandra Teague, Suzanne Rivecca, Stacey Swann, Josh Tyree, Skip Horack, Jim Gavin, Stephanie Soileau, Nellie Bridge, Ryan Brown, Andrew Braddock, Craig Cox, and Fleur, Jase, and the Market Lane team xo.

  Finally, and most of all, thank you to my incredible family: Vivienne, Ross, Kate, Meg, Emily, Bren, PJ, Indigo, Jarrah, Pepper, Zeph, Woody, and D’Ange.

  And a special thank-you to my grandfather, who put us to bed on Friday nights when we were kids with the story of “How Saul Met the Beautiful Lucy.” It’s one of the first stories I ever knew, and it’s still one of my favorites.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABIGAIL ULMAN was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia. She has a Bachelor of Creative Arts from the University of Melbourne and was a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. Hot Little Hands is her first book.

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