by Jud Widing
But robotics have gotten so advanced, Nur considered, CupidTron would probably swallow.
Nur couldn’t help but grin at this, because she was the sort of person to grin at her own juvenile jokes, and not the sort of person to be ashamed about it.
She was, however, the sort of person to rewind the thing she’d just done and be ashamed about that. To wit: She had said “I still love you” to Hyun-Woo in English, and then fallen silent for what she hoped was a number of seconds that could be counted on one hand, and then grinned as though at a juvenile joke.
Equally mortifying was that Hyun-Woo had not filled those indeterminate seconds of silence with effusive reciprocations. He just stared at her as though she were speaking a language that he didn’t understand.
And with an eldritch shiver, she realized that she probably was.
CHAPTER 39
Nur had more to say – she and Deirdre really had prepared material before they staggered out the door – but she no longer felt it would find a receptive set of ears in Hyun-Woo. So she tabled it for now, because even if he’d get nothing out of hearing it, she’d still get something out of saying it. Just not right now. Now they really ought to be getting home.
There was no graceful way to make a forceful exit when one had invited oneself over in the first place, which was about as forceful an entrance as one could make under the good graces of the law. So Nur just nodded to Deirdre and said “alright let’s get out of here,” and thankfully Deirdre nodded back and said “yeah good idea.” And then they left.
They got halfway to the T station before Deirdre remembered that it wouldn’t be running, so they trekked back to Hyun-Woo’s apartment, hoping to glom onto the Wi-Fi from outside. Their hopes were in vain. So Nur gathered up her pride, then followed the CupidTron 4000’s lead and swallowed. The intercom buttons made satisfying clunk clunk noises and then there was no further auditory feedback which was very annoying, yes yes sure whatever, just won’t this moment please end.
It didn’t. The moment kept on rocking and rolling.
And rocking.
And rolling.
Nur punched the right buttons once again, and once again got nothing for her trouble.
…
Trouble, that was a word.
Nur had one of those ridesharing apps on her phone. As soon as they got Wi-Fi, they could call it up and some friendly stranger would come pick them up. Except it wasn’t as shady as that, except it probably was.
As soon as they got Wi-Fi.
She did the clunkity clunk clunk thing again. The intercom did the nothing again.
They could also have looked up the number for a traditional cab company.
Or walking directions back home. Boston was such a small city, after all.
But they had no data plans here.
They needed the motherloving Wi-Fi to get home.
From Cambridge.
Cambridge, where they had spent hardly any time. If they were back in Brookline, or Boston proper, they could walk up to the locked doors of any number of businesses and utilize their network. Literally every establishment they walked in to, restaurant or retail or public restroom, the first thing they did was inquire about Wi-Fi. On some of the smaller, more commercially populated avenues, they’d racked up so many network passwords they could walk up and down either side of the street and enjoy a nearly unbroken connection.
But they had never come up here, and when they had, it was always to see Hyun-Woo. And nothing else. They never wandered.
No! That wasn’t true!
“Hey!” Nur shouted at Deirdre, who was standing right next to her and didn’t appreciate being shouted at. “Sorry. But that night Hyun-Woo and I, um, well, you were just sort of floating around Cambridge, right?”
“…yeah? Are you asking if I got onto any Wi-Fi networks?”
“Yeah!”
“I didn’t.”
“Why not?!”
Deirdre’s mouth formed a word but no sound came out, which was the most effective way of conveying how bizarre a question that was. Her mouth formed more words, this time with sound behind them. “Because I wanted to see Cambridge, not my friend’s selfies?”
“That is a very fair point.”
“I was trying to live in the present, you know?”
“I do. I’m proud of you, with the caveat that a more…generic girl of your generation would have been much more helpful right now.”
Deirdre snorted. “My generation.”
“Alright, our generation.”
“Our problem is we aren’t generic enough, is what you’re saying.”
Nur gave an exaggerated sigh. “Pretty much.”
They smiled at each other.
Deirdre’s smile broke first. “So what do we do?”
“I guess…find a 24 hour store? That maybe has Wi-Fi? Or that could at least help us call a cab?”
“Alright.”
Remaining calm, they calmly descended the steps of Hyun-Woo’s apartment and walked calmly down the street, heads on a calm swivel for a 24 hour store that maybe had Wi-Fi or could at least help them call a cab. They didn’t talk because they were so calm as they listened to the calmness of the calm night while they calmed their way down the calmy calmy calm calm.
Nur kept her mouth shut tightly against the eternal whimper that had hollowed her out and was already tired of its shell.
This was very, very, very, exceptionally super very much bad. They had essentially blackmailed their relatives into giving them alcohol, promised they wouldn’t sneak out, only to do just that, and now they were stuck on the wrong side of the Charles and it was tomorrow.
We wouldn’t have done this if we hadn’t been drunk, Nur reaffirmed to herself for the umpteenth time. The thought was far less affirming than she’d hoped it would be, and fared worse and worse with each re-.
On their journey they would sometimes stop to try the network of some random restaurant or store. In their run of legitimate network password acquisitions, they had been frequently amused to find that some stores made their password the same name as the network itself, or the name of the store. With calm calmocity they tried this trick on some particularly dull-looking stores’ networks, and eventually found that luck was on their side.
Unfortunately, it was bad luck.
After what felt like hours, because it was in fact hours, they came upon a gas station with an attendant in the square fluorescent heaven. Holding hands, because at some point they had been so calm that they grabbed each others’ hand without realizing it, the De Dernberg sisters slouched through the door and up to the counter.
“Excuse me,” Deirdre began, “but do you have Wi-Fi here?”
“No.”
“Oh.” She looked around her immediate surroundings for the cheapest item. She grabbed a pack of gum. The same brand of gum, Nur couldn’t help but notice, that Deirdre had stolen as her first act on American soil.
Deirdre shook the gum at the attendant. “If I buy this, can I use the Wi-Fi?”
“No.”
“…do you actually not have Wi-Fi, or is the Wi-Fi only for employees?”
“Both. Are you gonna buy the gum or not?”
Nur put a hand on Deirdre’s shoulder, and the shoulder shrugged it off immediately. “Look, my sister and I are in a little bit of trouble, and we need to call a cab home. Can you help us?”
The attendant, who looked old enough to have kids himself, sighed as dramatically as he could. “Sure, give me a minute.” They gave him sixteen, which he used to futz around behind the counter doing…something, whatever it was he had to be doing at…oh Christ, 2:14 AM now. Finally, the attendant mustered up his courage and heroically called a taxi cab. “It’ll be here in a minute,” he told them, but they wouldn’t be fool
ed. Time was relative, never more so than it was for this guy.
“Thank you,” the De Dernberg sisters replied in unison. And then they waited.
One minute later, at 3:27 AM, the cab arrived to pick them up. Delirious from exhaustion, headachy from the empty-tummy drinking she’d done, and still amused by the brand of gum to which Deirdre seemed drawn in any context, Nur half expected to be picked up by the same cabbie as drove them from the airport to Uncle Bernard’s on that first day. Boy, wouldn’t that have been something.
But it wasn’t anything, so it was nothing. It was a different cabbie she’d never seen before. What would it have meant if they had gotten the same cabbie? Nothing. Wouldn’t have been something, come to think of it. It’d have been funny, but it would have meant nothing.
These were the thoughts massaging Nur’s skull from the inside, as the gentle rocking and humming of the cab lulled her from the outside. Public transportation always made her sleepy. Well, all transportation did. She just liked to say ‘public’ because that made it sound like she didn’t get sleepy when she was the one driving. Which she did. But which she wasn’t now. So she could sleep.
Deirdre crashed just as hard, and the cabbie had to wake them both up when they pulled up outside Uncle Bernard’s. “We’re here,” he cooed to them, as though they had adopted him as one of their own. Weirdo.
Nur looked up the house and died.
Because the lights were in the living room.
Because the lights hadn’t been on in the living room when they left. Nur was absolutely, positively certain about that.
The cabbie said how much the ride was, and Nur put her credit card through the thing. He could charge a million dollars for all she cared; it wasn’t as though it would matter. She was a dead person, after all.
The dead woman turned to elbow her sister, to draw her attention to those awful incandescent bulbs burning behind the wretched curtains of despair, but there was no need. Deirdre had already seen, and she too was a dead person now.
United in death as they never were in life, the Departed De Dernbergs shuffled up the walk, tried the door, and found it unlocked.
As though it mattered, the late Nur pushed the door open slowly slowly slowly. The door scolded her with a flatulent creak she couldn’t recall it ever having made before. Nur closed her eyes against the oak’s reproach, and nuzzled the rest of the way into the overly lit room.
After exactly one of the gas station attendant’s minutes, Nur opened her eyes.
She saw Uncle Bernard and Aunt Amy sitting on the couch, stiff as statues. On the floor before them were two very familiar bags, fully packed, with plastic drag-handles extended.
“Your flight leaves at 11:30, so we should leave in a few hours. Your parents will pick you up from the airport.”
The corpses wept.
CHAPTER 40
Plenty obvious in hindsight, sure. When they snuck out, Uncle Bernard had been snoring, and Aunt Amy had been in the room with him. And everybody knew Aunt Amy couldn’t be in the same room as those oinky snores unless she was just as zonked out as he clearly was.
Flawless logic, save one rather obvious wrinkle: human beings take anywhere from fifteen to twenty minutes to fall asleep. Aunt Amy was in the room with Uncle Bernard, well on her way to slumber, but not yet there. She was awake, and sufficiently well-attuned to her house’s nocturnal complaints to recognize an atypical, descending creaking on the stairs. Even Bernard’s thunderous snores couldn’t smother the furtive foreign fanfare.
She flipped the covers back, padded over to the window, and watched with a heavy heart as Nur and Deirdre staggered down the street. Could she sprint down the stairs, whip open the door and summon them back? Probably not. Her knees ached in anticipation of such a high-impact course of action. The ostensibly obvious choice would be to rack the window open and call to them, but that would awaken Bernard. Which she didn’t want to do.
Not because he would be angry, as Nur and Deirdre might have suspected. Oh, he certainly would be angry, but not as angry as Amy. It would have surprised the girls to no end to discover which of their homestay relatives was possessed of the more volatile temper. No, Amy didn’t want to awaken Bernard for his own sake; because he would be hurt. Nur and Deirdre were his blood relatives, and he wanted desperately to have a good relationship with them. He wanted to have a good relationship with everyone in his family. He had chosen a life on the other side of the world, and he rarely if ever had cause to regret his decision. But Amy knew that there were times when he longed to feel closer to his kin. Contrary to what Nur and Deirdre suspected, Uncle Bernard wasn’t afraid of their parents. There was no monetary reason for his desire to remain in their good graces, or for changing his surname. Bernard De Dernberg was, quite simply, desperate to feel a part of his own family.
He made a deal with his nieces because he assumed a.) it would never get back to his brother in Seychelles, and b.) that it would encourage his nieces to feel closer to him. A shared secret and all that good stuff. Amy knew how much it meant to Bernard, that he was able to see eye to eye with the girls.
And there they went, betraying his trust. She was mad about it, you bet she was. She wanted nothing more than to punch through the window and shriek at the girls until they came scrambling back inside. But that would break Bernard’s heart, and despite outward appearances, his was a large heart easily broken.
Amy went downstairs and paced a bit, wondering what she could do. She didn’t know where they were going, and she couldn’t call them to find out. Which way had they gone? They stepped out of the house and turned right, but quickly hit an intersection. Had she been thinking, she would have rushed downstairs as quietly as possible, to try to see whether they’d gone left, right, or straight at the intersection. But she hadn’t been thinking, not about that at least, and so she didn’t. So she could hop in the car and have a 1/3 chance of driving in the right direction. Except by now they’d almost certainly hit another intersection, hadn’t they? So her chances further diminished. And so on, with each passing moment.
So she paced some more, because that was something she could do. Unfortunately, she wasn’t the only one on familiar terms with the house’s usual moans and groans.
Uncle Bernard came tromping down the stairs, wondering what was wrong. And Aunt Amy, not sure how to cover for the girls and not feeling particularly inclined to, told him. Deep in those flinty poker-player’s eyes, she watched his heart break in real time. Nobody else would have seen it, because nobody else knew Bernard the way she did. And how lucky they all were, to be spared a spectacle of such restrained agony.
Against her better judgment, she resented those girls. They were young, and drunk, and they didn’t know any better. But still. They should have.
And they would. Because this was what they called a ‘teachable moment’.
Bernard took some convincing. At first he was worried, as was Amy, beneath the simmering rage. But they were big girls, and Boston was a pretty safe city, and rage and concern could coexist quite easily. So they sat tight, confident that the girls would return, planning for that eventuality. Because that was something they could do.
Calling Bernard’s brother was a big step. Bringing him up to speed on the whole scenario would damage Bernard’s relationship with him, and with his nieces. He’d spent the better part of a year trying (and, Amy couldn’t bring herself to tell him, mostly failing) to strike the balance between what would endear him to his brother and what would endear him to his nieces. There was precious little overlap between those two categories, so it was a perilous high wire he was walking. Now here he was, pondering a deliberate leap into the yawning chasm below him, just to…teach the girls a lesson? Why should he suffer for their mistakes?
Well, Amy pointed out, they would be paying for their mistakes, far more than he would. His brother would very likely thank hi
m for having brought this to his attention. The whole ‘giving the girls beer’ thing wouldn’t be received with a great deal of gratitude, and no Bernard, you can’t just gloss over that fact, yes it would be their word against yours and yours would almost certainly win the day, but it was important to have integrity in moments such as these.
So Bernard dialed his brother at an unreasonable hour, and his brother picked up at a reasonable hour, and they spoke across the geographical gulf of temporal reason.
Bernard’s brother very tersely announced his intention to call the airline, and hung up, presumably to do just that. As per his instructions, Bernard and Amy gathered up the girls’ belongings, folded them, packed them up as neatly as they could, and dragged the suitcases down the stairs. With eerily punctuality, the phone rang just as they finished bringing the luggage into the living room. It was Bernard’s brother, calling back with the updated flight information. Nur and Deirdre were no longer leaving in August. They were leaving later that day.
Once again, Amy looked into Bernard’s eyes and saw the things he would never – could never – put into words. But they were things he would never have to. They had each other, and part of the beauty of having someone is getting them. Not in the sense of ‘comprehension’, that one suddenly understands one’s partner perfectly well. Quite the opposite, really. This getting is meant in the same sense that one gets exposed to an airborne disease. Getting somebody means you get all of them. The contradictions and the mysteries and the absurdities, you get all of the things that don’t make any goddamned sense and you say ah, right, because that’s the person you love and you’ll never fully understand them, you’ll never come close to understanding them, and the more one gets of someone the further away the mere concept of ‘understanding’ vanishes, because people don’t make any goddamned sense no matter how hard you try to bend them into a comprehensible set of drives and instincts and psychoses and interests, they’ll always surprise you if you let them.
