I could do a lot, it turns out, once I set my mind to it. After a long conversation with Dad about “moving on” and “letting go of the past”—aka, him confessing he’s not sure he’ll ever move back to the house, even if he ends up working back in New York—I’ve eBayed most of the furniture and sorted my stuff. Because, let’s face it, if he’s working up to selling the house someday, that’s going to be hard enough. Not that he’s talking about that. Yet. But being away has made it easier to imagine and easier for me to be ruthless in sorting out what to keep and what to get rid of. Babci’s working her way through the kitchen, and Mindy’s home from camp just in time for attic duty.
“Do you want me to do it?” she asks.
“No. It’s okay.” I pull the box open and let the lavender wash over me. There’s a plastic folder of photos on top, and I lift it out of the cardboard. I remember this box. Remember packing it after Mom died. Her red cashmere hat and scarf. A silk bag full of jewelry. Her old ratty black cardigan. Her pocket English/Polish dictionary that never had the English words she was looking for to express what she could say so perfectly in Polish. I take everything out and then place it carefully back inside.
“I’m, um, going to take this one to Rhode Island.”
Mindy nods and shoves me another box when I point to it. It’s filled with Nancy Drew books. Nostalgic but in a different way. In fact, the rest of the boxes we tackle until Babci calls aren’t that bad.
“Girls, you eat before I go?” she yells from the bottom of the pull-down ladder.
I glance at my watch. 3:40. “Yeah. We’ll be right down.” I look to Mindy, who’s piling broken cardboard into a box. “I’m starving. Come on.”
We shove the trash down the ladder ahead of us and then down the stairs to the dining room.
“Don’t forget. We’re going out with Dan tonight,” Mindy says as we walk into the kitchen.
Dan, it turns out, is from Teaneck, a hop, skip, and a jump up the Garden State Parkway. They’ve been home two days, and Mindy’s invited me out with them both nights, although I begged off. I don’t want to be a third wheel. But tonight he meets Liz, so best friend duty calls.
“I know. I know. And I will get the spiders out of my hair and be on my best behavior, I swear.”
“I’m just saying save room for Theresa’s,” Mindy says. Which is a fair warning, especially considering the amount of food Babci’s got laid across the counter. “Are we feeding the neighbors, Babci?”
“If I make, it can stay in the fridge a few days. And Zosia, she won’t cook while I’m gone.” She scowls at me and then at Mindy, as though my disinterest in cooking is partly her fault, too.
“You’re going home for a day. How much do you think I can eat?” I ask. Babci’s going back to Queens tonight to help with her annual church picnic. Usually I help, too, but not this year with everything going on at the house.
Babci shakes her head harder. “Two days. And you are too thin.”
Mindy pops a meatball into her mouth. “That’s just love, love, love. Best diet on the planet.”
“Shut up, up, up. Japanese food is very healthy.”
“Well, true. You never see a fat Japanese chick. But that’s not the reason you’re suddenly an A-cup.”
“Oh my God. Can we please not talk about my bra size?” I laugh and pick up a pile of dusty cardboard. “Make yourself useful and help me drag this stuff to the curb.”
“Uh-uh. I’m eating meatballs.” As if to prove it, she takes another one.
“It will wait, Zosia. Have a meatball.” Babci picks one up and I let her put it into my mouth, but I don’t drop the pile in my arms.
So my mouth is full and I’m covered in attic dirt when the doorbell rings. My fingers can barely reach the handle from underneath the boxes, but I manage to twist it open.
And there’s Finn.
He’s not supposed to be here for four more days. He was going to fly back with me on the seventeenth, but when I had to change my ticket because of the house sale, there weren’t any seats. Against everything I wanted, I’d said, “It’s okay. Just keep the ticket like it is.” Not that the airlines were making it possible for him to do anything else.
But here he is.
He’s so tan and his teeth are so bright against his skin that I freeze for a good five seconds before I drop the boxes and fly at him. His arms crush me to his chest, and he buries his face in my hair. He picks me up and my legs wrap around his waist and we both hold on as tight as we can. It feels like ages before his arms loosen and my feet hit the ground, and I realize we’re standing in the doorway giving Babci and Mindy and, from the looks of it, Mrs. Tuttle across the street, an eyeful.
“Oh my God. What are you doing here? How did you get here?” At least that’s what I mean to say. It comes out muffled through meatball, and I have to finish chewing before I try again. “Come in. You should come in.”
He grins, and his eyes flit to my head and the pink feather boa around my neck. “I, um, hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
“Nope. You’re just in time.” I keep my grip tight on his hand and turn to Mindy and Babci. Mindy’s trying not to laugh, but I can’t read Babci’s expression at all. Which sobers me just a little. Because in lieu of a mother, Babci’s the closest I’ve got, and I really, really want her to like him.
“Um, you know Mindy and this is my babci. Babci, Finn.”
“Miło mi pana.” He extends his hand.
Babci takes it and smiles. “Nice to meet you as well.”
Wow. Finn barely learned basic Japanese, and Babci saves her best English for when she’s pissed. But he’s speaking Polish with the right inflection and she’s smiling. Granted, it’s one exchange, but one more than I expected from either of them.
Thank God Mindy jumps in. “How was your, um, flight?” For all they know about each other, Mindy and Finn have never exchanged a word. To her, he’s still the guy we both had a crush on in high school. The guy we wondered what we’d do if…
“Long. I had a five-hour layover in Seattle. Twenty-one hours, I think?”
Mindy screws up her face a little. “Okay, please tell me you’re not going to bail on me tonight.” Her eyes dart to Finn. “Sorry. I know you’re exhausted. And I won’t make you stay long, but I need you to run interference with Liz at least. And probably come to Theresa’s. Appetizers? Maybe?”
“I slept on the plane. I could probably make a whole dinner,” Finn says.
When his thumb slides up underneath the frayed hem of my shorts behind our backs, I’m not sure I’ll make it through a whole dinner. But I smile and nod. Mindy’s been my best friend for a lot longer than Finn’s been my boyfriend. But good Lord…I squeeze his fingers to make him stop. “Min. Swear. I wouldn’t miss Dan the Man for the world.”
“Actually, Dan the Man is going to be at my house in two hours, which means you guys need to be there in less than that. So I should go.”
“And I go. Blanche’s nephew will come in five minutes.” Babci slips into Polish. “Zosia, should I feel comfortable with this?”
With Finn. Here. Alone with me. Absolutely not. I answer in Polish. “It’s fine. I don’t need a chaperone.”
Babci smiles a little. “Need and want are two different things.”
Yes, yes, they are. And that is never more apparent than twenty minutes later when Finn and I are alone in the kitchen. The way we’re kissing is all need. And the way he lifts me up onto the kitchen counter is all want. So is the way most of our buttons are undone when we finally come up for air.
“Jesus, I missed you.” He’s still raining kisses on my neck.
“I missed you, too. Is that why you came home early?” I walk my fingers over his chest.
His lips trace the V of my tank top. “Maybe.”
“What kind of answer is that?”
“The answer you’re getting.” Which is total crap. Except he’s kissing me again and I end up losing my shirt and bra, and he’s on the verg
e of losing his jeans before he takes an actual step backward. Out of arm’s reach. “In about one more minute, it’s going to be really hard to remember, but I think you promised Mindy we were going somewhere with her.”
“Yeah. Dan.” I take a deep breath. “I guess we have to go, don’t we?”
“Looks that way.” His eyes are still bright with want. “You going to invite me in or am I confined to the kitchen?”
“I like you in the kitchen. Obviously.” I wiggle my eyebrows and jump off the counter, scooping my bra and tank top off the floor. “Come on. Bring your stuff and come upstairs.”
Finn pulls his bag up to my room, letting it thwack on the stairs. I came home from Tokyo with two huge suitcases and barely made the weight restriction. His looks like the kind you’d take on a long weekend.
I point to the bed. “Have a rest if you want. I, um, need a shower. I’ve been in the attic all day.” I bite my lip. “Or do you want to join me?”
“What do you think?” His eyes are all over me. I feel them like hands.
Okay, so that was a dumb question. “Yeah.” I finally make myself look away and grab my white yukata from the bed. “Um, make yourself at home. I’ll be quick.”
“I’ll be here.”
“You will, won’t you?” I squeeze my eyes shut. “Sorry. I just…I can’t believe you’re here. I mean, I didn’t expect you until Tuesday.”
“And maybe not even then?”
He’s got a trace of a smile and his eyes are still soft, but I flush. Because he’s dead on. Our last few days in Tokyo were amazing. But I still couldn’t shake the thought that our kiss at Narita was a real kiss goodbye. “I just…”
“Yeah. I know.” The smile widens as he shakes his head. The way he says it doesn’t make me feel bad. Or like I should protest. Not when he’s kissing me again like that. So slow and deep it turns my insides out.
It takes some kind of superhuman effort to push myself away from him, but somehow I end up in the shower. Alone. I turn the water to full cold until my mind slows down and the goosebumps on my skin have nothing to do with Finn.
He’s here. Lying on my bed. Quite possibly asleep, because no matter what he said to Mindy, he’s tired. But he’s here.
I haven’t let myself think about us much since I’ve been home. We’ve emailed and texted. Constantly. We’ve pretty much run the gamut from X-rated to sappy and back again. He promised he’d be on that plane. Swore he missed me. Did nothing to make me think otherwise. But there was that little sick feeling in the pit of my stomach when I thought about it too long. The echo in my head of his words from that night at the love hotel. This was never supposed to be anything. Even after it was already so clearly something.
It turned into more in the five days after he saw his father than in any of the eight weeks before. He was different, more open. More there. So why didn’t I trust it?
I’d asked Babci last night. “What if he doesn’t come?”
“Why wouldn’t he?” She hadn’t even bothered to look up from the dishes she was washing.
“It would be easy. We’ve already said goodbye.”
Then she had looked up. And answered me in English. “Everything you tell me about this boy. He is not easy for you. You are not easy for him. But you fall in love. I see how you smile at that phone when it is him. And that… that is not easy to find. And harder to forget.”
Indeed. Finn is asleep when I get out of the shower, but from the minute I wake him, we’re within easy reach of each other. Including through his shower, where we finish what we started in the kitchen. As we dress, he hooks the clasp on my necklace; I finish the buttons on his shirt. It feels amazing having him here. It feels right.
Even through the semi-awkward ten minutes with Liz, Mindy, and Dan in the middle of Mindy’s kitchen, Finn touches me, his hand on my waist, my arm. And now, back in the car, on my leg.
“Thank God that’s over with,” Mindy says, sliding across the backseat.
“It wasn’t so bad. She’s decent,” says Dan. A quick look in the rearview mirror shows his hand rests on her knee and he peers at her through his glasses with concern. I had a totally different picture of him in my head, even though Mindy emailed me an actual picture. In person, he’s shorter than I thought. And his black hair has blond roots, like Mindy’s. He has the same smile as in his picture, but he talks really fast so it’s fleeting.
“Easy for you to say. You don’t have to live with her,” Mindy says.
“Neither do you as of next week,” says Finn.
“Good point,” says Mindy. “Bring on NYU. Although it’s not exactly far, is it?”
“It’s all relative,” I say. “Besides, you’ve got free laundry an NJ Transit ride away. Might not be so bad.”
I back into a parking spot around the corner from Theresa’s, and Mindy catches my eye to give me one of her famous eye rolls. “Sure. Hey, I need to pop to an ATM on the way.”
“Yeah, me too,” says Finn. “I don’t think my yen is going to get us dinner.”
“I can buy. You know, considering you flew all this way,” I say.
“I was flying regardless.” He squeezes my bare knee below the hem of my skirt.
We pile out of the car onto the sidewalk. “But we can go get a table. Theresa’s is always crowded, especially on Fridays,” I say.
Finn’s arm slides around my shoulder, and he steers me around the corner toward the bank. “Five minutes won’t make a difference.”
“What’s the exchange rate for yen anyway?” asks Dan.
“I think when I left it was something like eighty yen to the dollar,” says Finn.
“So five hundred yen is just short of five bucks?” Dan asks. They talk about the conversion and price compare all the way to the bank. Which kind of cracks me up because Finn’s really good at math and Dan isn’t, so Dan’s speculation about how much rent might be is wildly high. Even Mindy suggests he should give it up.
“You have enough trouble with the dollar, babe,” she says.
Babe? I mouth the word at her, and she gives me the finger behind Dan’s back.
“Sticks and stones, Min.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She turns to Finn with a little smirk on her face. “So what did you like best about Japan anyway?”
“You mean besides Zosia?” His answer is as easy as the smile that goes with it, and I flush with pleasure as much as surprise.
Mindy laughs. “Good answer.”
She says something else, but I’m distracted by the heat in my face and somewhere around my navel. So I’m not paying any attention when we get to Theresa’s. A bunch of people mill about out front, but Mindy goes through and we follow her through the path of tables and chairs.
“What are we doing? Did you reserve?” I ask.
She either doesn’t hear me, or it’s more likely she pretends not to. Because she pushes open the door in the back, and everyone inside shouts, “Surprise!”
I don’t get it at first. I admit that. It takes reading the “Happy 19th, Zosia” banner strung across the wall and Mindy’s hand on one elbow and Finn’s on the other leading me into the group of smiling faces. Babci. Dad. Eloise. Liz. A couple girls from the swim team. Even Amelia? What’s she doing here?
“Oh my God. Oh my God.” I must say it thirty times while I hug everyone.
Finn has long let go of my arm by the time I come back around to him and squeeze his waist. “You knew about this?”
“You could say that.”
“How come you didn’t tell me?”
He smiles a little. “It’s not much of a surprise then, is it?”
“Is that why you came back early?”
He doesn’t comment, and Amelia comes up, juggling a plate of food. “Hey. Nice party.”
“Thanks.” I reach over and squeeze her arm. “It’s nice of you to come.”
“My mom and I are on our way to Virginia to a wedding, and your dad said if we were in the area it would be fun to stop by.” She
nods in the direction of a tall blond woman who’s Amelia plus thirty years before her eyes rest on Finn. “I had you all wrong.”
“You probably didn’t.” His tone is cool. “How’s Akihiro?”
“You’d know better than I would.” So that’s how that ended then. I wonder if I should say something sympathetic, but Amelia doesn’t look that broken up about it.
“Sorry to hear that, although he isn’t really your type.” Finn’s trying not to smile. “There’s no way he’d keep up with you in real life.”
“I know, but it was hot while it lasted,” Amelia says. She grins, and I’m pretty sure I don’t even want to know what that means. She turns to me. “So what do you think of all this?”
“Yeah, Zo, what do you think?” Dad’s arm slips around my shoulder. We hugged a while ago, but it was amidst the clamoring.
Finn glides around me to talk to Eloise as I hit Dad on the arm. “I think you totally lied to me. You said you couldn’t come out till next week at the earliest.”
“I couldn’t, but I was persuaded otherwise.” He sighs. “And I have to be in San Francisco next week.”
“The truth comes out.” I hug his arm. “But thanks, Dad. This is great.”
Dad furrows his brow. “You’re thanking the wrong person, Zo.”
He and Amelia both look at Finn.
Finn.
Wow.
Amelia’s mouth moves so she must be saying something, but I stare at Finn. Who, judging by the expression on his face when he catches my eye, knows I know.
“You did this.” He nods but doesn’t say anything. “How? Why?”
“Your birthday’s a big deal.” He smiles a little. “Sorry it’s not on the day. I hope you don’t mind.”
I look around the room. Finn’s never talked to seventy percent of these people. Although apparently he has. “Did you…what did you do? How did you do it?”
“Email mostly. Except your Babci. I called her a couple times. She’s the one who booked the place.”
Swimming to Tokyo Page 24
