‘I’m single,’ he said.
‘And I’m a total space nut. Maybe I’ll join you,’ said the object of Archie’s affections.
Jomo must have fallen asleep, because when he opened his eyes, Giselle was sitting in the armchair across from him.
His first, muddled thought was: Where is Jules?
Giselle followed his gaze as he scanned the room, and her face dropped.
He felt awful to see her in pain, but he didn’t move, uncertain whether to touch her arm or try to hug her, unsure what she would want him to do in this situation.
She must have left the hens’ weekend and driven up from Cape Cod. He imagined her on that drive, imagined how her friends had probably urged her to come here and find him after the phone break-up, to go after him, to fight for him – or to spit in his face and call him a coward.
But Giselle didn’t look angry. She was wearing a bikini top under her summer dress. Maybe she’d come straight from the beach, sand still on her feet, sunblock on her shoulders. Her face was bare – unusual for her – and she looked to Jomo, for the first time, as if she were ready to show him who she really was. On any other night of their relationship, this openness would have been the sign he’d been waiting for, proof that they could be happy together in the long run. But it was too late.
‘You’re in love with Juliet,’ she said to him.
He didn’t respond. He didn’t want to lie to her, but he still could not yet say the truth out loud. On the phone, all he’d said was that he couldn’t give her what she wanted, what she deserved – that he couldn’t make her happy.
‘All this time, I thought I was crazy for suspecting this,’ she said. ‘I hoped I was crazy. That I was imagining feelings that weren’t there.’
He knew he should reach out, take Giselle’s hand, console her somehow. Just a week ago they had slept naked, side by side, in his bed. Now they were becoming foreign to each other again, in love’s cooling wake. The invisible boundaries of self and other had gone back up between them, and they could both sense it.
‘I’m sorry.’ It was the only thing left for him to say. ‘I swear I didn’t mean to hurt you.’
Her jaw flexed, and he could see she was calling on all her courage to be there, to be facing him like this. Her nose was sunburned and her hair thick with ocean salt. She looked more beautiful than she ever had to him, but he knew this was because it was the last time something unspoken would pass between them.
She rubbed her face, and when she looked at him again, her expression was guarded. They were no longer together.
‘Where will you stay tonight?’ he asked her. ‘You shouldn’t drive back so late.’
‘Pippa is in the car outside. She drove me here. We’ll go back to the Cape, I guess. There is nothing here for me.’ She made a frustrated gesture at the harshness of her language. ‘I’m too emotional to speak English right now,’ she said.
Jomo nodded. He should say sorry again, and again, but that was not what Giselle had come all this way to hear. She had come in hope, he could tell. She would return in pieces.
She was about to leave when she stopped, turned back. ‘She’s still here, in case you’re wondering,’ she said. ‘I saw her drinking with Frederick Reese on my way in. Fraternizing with the enemy.’
Jomo startled awake. The armchair opposite him was empty.
His subconscious had not been able to resist drawing a few drops of blood from his psyche. The conversation with Giselle on the phone yesterday had gone nothing like the one he’d just dreamed. She had been furious. The last thing she’d said before hanging up on him was: ‘You have stolen my happiness from me. I hope you are miserable forever.’
He got up, his pulse racing, and scanned the room. He checked downstairs, but he couldn’t find Jules or Rowan or Mariam anywhere; they must have gone back to Kirkland House already. He climbed back up the staircase, his feet feeling as heavy as his heart.
The crowd at the afterparty had thinned, but the living room, where the DJ had been playing late-nineties techno for rather too long, was still full. He began to ease his way into the knotty core of dancing bodies. He wanted absolution for what he’d done to Giselle, and to drown out the dawning fear that Jules might never love him back.
The electronic beats faded. The DJ announced, with regret, that there’d been a noise complaint, so he would be altering course on the music front. His next choice of song dated them all, Jomo thought, as the first percussive eighties sounds of ‘Lady in Red’ came through the speakers.
The crowd obediently settled down and paired off to slow dance, and Jomo found himself, all of a sudden, facing Jules.
They looked at each other. Then she put her arms around his neck, and they began to turn in a steady spiral.
He buried his nose in her hair, to make sure he wasn’t dreaming this, too. What was happening? It was impossible not to notice that they were dancing with each other not as friends, but as friends who should be lovers. Except for that night in the tent when they’d both thought they were about to be gored to death by bushpigs, they had never been in such close, sustained bodily contact.
She lifted her head and kissed him. Jomo was so stunned that he almost forgot to kiss her back. That was the last intelligible thought he had for some time.
He slowly resurfaced as the lights were being turned on. The afterparty was being shut down by the campus police, just like old times. He and Jules moved apart immediately, and went downstairs without touching. They retrieved their coats and snuck out the club’s secret back entrance, avoiding getting mired in conversation with classmates who were still milling about near the front door, unwilling to admit that the night was over.
Once they were alone again, walking back to Kirkland House along the quiet, cobbled streets, he took her hand. He was nervous for a moment that what had happened upstairs at the Spee had been nothing but a momentary madness on both their parts. But she clasped his hand tightly.
That gave him the courage to take a leap of faith.
‘I don’t want to alarm you,’ he said to her. ‘This isn’t a proposal or anything, obviously. But I would like to give you this.’ He took from his pocket the ring he’d been trying – and failing – to lose for months. The one he had found again after a long search of the grass by the side of the running path along the Charles River.
‘Your grandmother’s ring,’ she said, recognizing it. She gave him a quizzical look. ‘You’ve been carrying your family’s most precious heirloom around, just in case you bumped into someone you wanted to give it to?’ But she slid it onto one of the fingers on her right hand.
They both looked at the little musgravite gem shimmering beneath the streetlamp.
Was her acceptance of the ring proof she felt for him what it had taken him so long to find the nerve to admit he felt for her?
‘I need to ask you something,’ he said. ‘Where did you go for those months at the beginning of last year, when we lost contact? Was there someone else?’
She glanced at him with an expression he couldn’t decipher – as if she were not ready to reveal to him the extent of some long-held pain. ‘There has only ever been you,’ she said finally.
She hadn’t really answered his question, but he accepted that. If they were to be together (terrifying, wonderful possibility!) there would be plenty of time to share the few secrets they may have kept from each other in their many years as best friends. It could wait.
And anyway, it no longer mattered where she had been then. Right now, she was here beside him, her hand in his, the taste of her lip gloss still lingering in his mouth. He hadn’t dared yet to imagine what else might happen between them before dawn, in his single bed beneath the sloping ceiling eaves.
They entered the dark Kirkland courtyard – not a single lamp was still on in any of the surrounding rooms – and Jomo noticed someone slumped on the stone bench close to their entryway.
It was Frederick Reese. As they approached, Fred roused himself. �
�Don’t worry,’ he said to Jomo, with a leering smile, ‘my bodyguards aren’t hiding in the shadows. They think I’m still at the Spee.’ He threw his head back, looking up at the old Kirkland chimneys silhouetted against the sky. ‘You know, this place is the closest I’ve ever gotten to having a real home.’
Then he took out a hipflask and waved it around. ‘Nightcap?’
All Jomo could think about was getting upstairs with Jules. The light was already changing; soon it would be morning.
Yet Jules seemed to take pity on Fred in his sorrowful state, and she sat down beside him on the bench. She took a tiny sip from the flask and passed it right back to Fred, which saved Jomo from having to say no.
Fred downed whatever liquid remained in it. ‘So are you two a couple now?’ he said, suddenly lucid. ‘I saw you kissing on the dance floor. Or actually, Tiffany did. I think she’s still there. But I don’t believe a word she says anymore. Last week she told me she had a 4.0 GPA at college. And we all know that’s definitely fake news.’
Jomo was about to deny it when Jules spoke.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We’re together.’
Manners were abandoned at that point, on Jomo’s part at least. He took Jules’s hand and gently pulled her up off the bench, not even bothering to say good night to Fred.
At the top of the stairwell, she told him she was quickly going to use the bathroom in the empty suite next door, the one where Jomo and Rowan had lived during their senior year. Not wanting to wake Mariam and Rowan’s girls the night before, she said, she’d discovered it was unlocked.
He left the door to their suite open, and in his room he smoothed out the sheets on his bed and lay down on it still in his clothes, breathlessly awaiting her return.
Maybe the swami had been right. Maybe Jules had always been waiting for him.
When she came through the door into his room, he understood with a sinking heart that she was much drunker than he’d realized. She stumbled toward the bed and collapsed into it, falling asleep beside him almost instantly.
Would she remember anything of what had happened – what had been said – the next day?
Outside, the wail of a siren seemed to be getting closer and closer, as if it too had been deceived or abandoned by its lover. He looked down at Jules. Her long hair was fanned out across his pillow, shining in the first light of dawn coming through the window.
His heart’s desire.
He bent closer, to kiss her forehead, and noticed that she was wheezing. But he didn’t start to panic until he saw the white foam at the corners of her mouth.
Before he could find his voice to shout for help there was a knock on the door.
‘Jomo,’ Mariam said in a low, urgent voice. ‘You’ve got to come out and see this. You won’t believe what’s happened.’
Epilogue: Mariam
Sunday afternoon of Reunion Weekend
(May 27, 2018)
In Boston’s South Station terminal, the giant screen looming above the passengers waiting for their trains showed the president of the United States sitting on the steps leading into Kirkland House, his head in his hands. A still figure of grief in the midst of the flurry and bustle surrounding him. His dark coat was outlined against the bright-yellow background of tape crisscrossing the perimeter, keeping the media at a distance for now.
In all the drama of the past hours, Mariam had not once thought of how he might be feeling. The president had lost his only child. It was not something anybody could in good conscience wish upon another parent, no matter how much she hated him.
She pulled Alexis, who was on her lap, closer against her body, resting her chin on her daughter’s head. The girls were alive. Rowan was alive. She was alive. They had somehow escaped unscathed.
The Mariam of the preceding days – years, even – seemed to exist in another plane of reality, one in which it was normal to worry about things like whether to chop blueberries in half before giving them to her kids, or obsess over how tired she felt doing housework, or have stupid conversations with God instead of with her flesh-and-blood husband.
The Mariam of the present had been cleansed of all these trivial concerns. Her mind had been wiped clear of everything except the fact that her children were okay. Nothing else mattered.
She looked over to where Rowan was dozing with Eva in his arms, in one of the uncomfortable metal chairs expressly designed to prevent loitering. Eva was asleep, too.
It had been a very long day for the girls, being awoken soon after dawn and rushed to the hospital in case of exposure, and periodically tested throughout the morning, until finally they’d all been cleared to leave the quarantine facility. Then she and Rowan had endured a round of questioning at Eloise’s residence, which had become the makeshift headquarters for the investigation into the murder of Fred Reese. Men in uniform had interrogated them in separate rooms while Eloise and Binx watched TV with the girls in their bedroom, giving them masses of sugary treats and also – for the first time Mariam could recall – cuddles.
When she’d gone upstairs, wiped out and worried about the girls being traumatized forever by what had happened overnight, she’d spied on them from the bedroom doorway for a few moments. Eloise had been doing a messy French braid in Alexis’s hair and Binx had been gently patting Eva back to sleep. Mariam had realized that she’d never really given Eloise a chance, before then, to forge her own relationship with her goddaughters without Mariam hovering around, stage-directing their interactions.
A pigeon flew from the train lines into the waiting area and began to peck at the crumbs around Mariam’s feet. Alexis threw more of her doughnut to the rabid bird.
On the overhead screen, photos of Svetlana swam into Mariam’s view. Mariam could piece together from the scrolling headlines that conspiracy theories were already brewing and circulating about Fred Reese’s fiancée. That Svetlana had been the intended target of the poisoning, not Fred, because of her father’s defiance of those in power in Russia. Or that Svetlana herself was the prime suspect; that she was a mole, a Russian agent, trained to get as close to Fred as possible in order to do the deed, sending a warning to the president that his Russian overlords – who’d interfered to help him win the election – would make sure of his continued obedience.
All this seemed unlikely to Mariam. If Svetlana was a spy, she was too smart to blow her cover with a dramatic public murder. The whole Russian link, in fact, felt overdone – abetted by the media misreporting that Fred had been poisoned with Novichok, a nerve agent developed by the Soviets sometime in the seventies; the few instances of Novichok poisoning around the world had been traced back to Russian military intelligence officers.
But Mariam knew it wasn’t Novichok that had killed Fred and poisoned Jules.
She looked away from the screen. The passenger terminal was drafty and a chilly breeze blew in from the rows of exposed outdoor platforms. She had much happier memories of waiting for trains here in the past. Like the time in college when she and Rowan had gone to New York so that he could see his first Broadway musical. She remembered light pouring through the huge wall of windows on one side of the station, the smell of coffee, the feeling of being young and free.
But this afternoon there was no sun, and the warm weather of the weekend had turned into a punishing cold snap. They’d had to open their suitcases, right there in the middle of the concourse, to dig out the girls’ coats and their own heavy-duty winter jackets, which smelled of the winter past, of cramped subway journeys, bracing mornings at the local park and a thousand forgotten errands. Each summer, when Mariam packed away their winter coats, stuffing them into the linen closet, it seemed unimaginable that they would ever need them again. She would think ahead to the fall and vow, I will not be the same person then that I am now. And yet, every fall, she was disappointed to find that she was.
Why was she thinking about winter coats, of all things? She was still in shock, or aftershock. Her mind was searching for ways to soothe the terror that h
ad exploded within it. It still felt as if there was a rip in her world, like somebody had found a loose thread at the edge of her vision and tugged at it.
Alexis wriggled on her lap. Mariam was hugging her too tightly. She demanded her mother’s phone, and Mariam handed it over without hesitation.
The overhead screen drew Mariam’s eyes again. The news had not yet broken that Jules had been poisoned, she noted.
By habit, she felt for the silver cross at her neck. It was not there. In its place was the tiny lump of an asteroid. Slowly, a memory of the night before returned, overlaid with the fog of her hangover. She’d fastened her necklace with the cross around Rowan’s neck at some stage during the afterparty, and he’d pulled this necklace out of his pocket and fastened it around hers. A truce.
Mariam rolled her shoulders. She was stiff and sore from their bacchanalia of drink and dance before the crisis.
Rowan had woken up and was holding Eva just as tightly as she was holding Alexis. Too tightly. There were food crumbs all over his coat. His glasses were a little greasy. In airports or train stations, they had a family policy about meals – that anything goes – so they’d already shared a box of Krispy Kremes and a jumbo serving of fries. Comfort was key to surviving these liminal spaces, with all the ennui they held from so many strangers killing time together. And this afternoon Rowan and Mariam were seeking a deeper level of reassurance, both for the girls and for themselves.
She couldn’t see if, beneath his lapel, he was still wearing her silver cross. Nothing had been resolved in words the night before. They’d gone pre-verbal, letting their bodies figure it out. It was the best way. Maybe the only way.
The relief of having survived the night’s trials – all of them – had given Mariam a lilting sort of high. It wasn’t right to feel it, especially since one of her closest friends had almost died a few hours ago. But in times of great danger, parents are nothing if not traitorous to everyone in their lives except their children and each other. The circle of loyalties and care shrinks right down.
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