Nothing. I call again, and again, but even as I do it, I know how futile it is. She hates the noises the phone makes and keeps it entirely silent, relying on a flashing screen as if she has a hearing issue. I knock and wait. Knock and wait.
Should I go down and wake the super? I imagine myself rousing some old guy who comes to the door with his hair all sticking up and then see myself with him at Sam’s door and Sam opening it with fury.
Maybe she just doesn’t want to be bothered, and I’m just being an idiot.
But those messages. I chew on my lip, pound one more time. “Sam!”
Nothing.
With a sigh, I head back downstairs, pulling up the taxi app as I enter the lobby.
But Josiah is waiting. I see the cab through the front doors. I should be annoyed that he got all protectively macho on me, but I wasn’t relishing the wait and really, really didn’t want to spend the money. I keep resolving not to accept rescue, but here I am, doing it again.
He opens the door. “Sorry. I know it’s paternalistic, but it’s really late. I didn’t want to think about you stranded way uptown.”
I slide in and close the door behind me. “It is paternalistic, but I’m grateful anyway.”
He smiles, and I’m glad he waited.
As we drive through the dark, lonely streets, I’m aware suddenly of a thread of music winding through my mind. I hum it under my breath, looking at the empty sidewalks, and I’m thinking of being onstage, the great performance chemistry we have, and the music gets louder. I hear his voice winding through my violin, and a whisper moves through the empty spaces in the composition I’ve been working so hard on. Urgently, I open my phone and make a few notes.
“Not to sound too pushy, and it sounds like you have a really full life and maybe even a family—”
“No family,” he says. “Just me.”
I half smile and let him see it. For a moment, there is just this space between us, smelling of a wild wood, of magic. “We should play together again soon,” I say. “I really feel like there might be something good here. Do you have time?”
“Maybe. Evenings are challenging, because of the band.”
“Afternoons? We have a music room. And a rooftop garden if the weather turns nice by some miracle.”
“All right.” He has an odd expression on his face.
“What’s wrong?”
“Not wrong,” he says, inclining his head. “I just keep thinking we’ve met somewhere. I can’t place it.”
“Me too. I thought that too. Maybe at a Faire?”
“I haven’t been to one since I left home.” Light edges his cheekbone, his lower lip, and a shimmer of attraction shines right through my walls.
For a minute, we only look at each other. Then, “I’ll send you a text when I can check my calendar.”
“Good.” The music winds through my mind, then repeats.
We pull up in front of my building. “Thanks, Josiah. I really appreciate your help.”
He simply salutes.
As I head up to the apartment, my mind swirls with the music, with the sound of his voice, a single element that brings something in the music alive. I’ve had it happen a handful of times before. Sometimes it’s not a person but a particular place, the mood of a room, or the way the light breaks somewhere. I spent months driving up to a certain rise in Santa Monica to feel the way the light hit the trees and the watery horizon in early evening. It gave me one of my best arrangements.
This time, it’s Josiah’s voice. That rumbling, that resonance. I let myself into the apartment, and I’m still humming, caught in the music that’s unreeling, something new layering in.
I forget completely about Sam or the painting, filled only with notes in colors, painting themselves over my imagination.
Chapter Sixteen
Sam
Asher is bent over me. “Sam, come on, honey; you need to wake up for me.”
I blink. “I thought that was a dream.”
“It’s all right. Can you sit up?”
I realize that my body is complete putty. “I don’t know. Even moving a finger seems like a lot.”
“We need to get you to a hospital.”
“Oh, no. I don’t need the hospital. I hate the hospital. And all those poor nurses and doctors, so sad . . .”
“I know. I’m going to try to help you up, okay?”
I’m already drifting off a little, but I can smell him as he bends in, and it brings me closer to the surface. He loops my arm around his shoulder and circles my torso with his arm, and then I’m upright, leaning into the solid strength of him. “Sam, stay with me, okay?”
I try, but there’s nothing but quiet if I close my eyes, and now that I’m not so afraid, I can go to sleep. “Don’t forget the notes,” I say. “I need my notes.”
“I need you to focus for a minute, Sam,” he says.
I’m suddenly, blurrily aware that there are other people in the room, bustling around. “We’re going to get you to the hospital,” a kind-sounding woman says.
“That’s okay. I think I’m just dehydrated.”
“I think it might be a little more than that,” she says, and I feel her hands on my neck.
It hurts. I bolt upright, banging one of the others in the head, which sets off a gong in my head. I fall back down, clutching my skull. “I don’t want to go to the hospital,” I cry. Or maybe I only think that, because I can’t really make words around this noise. It feels like someone is slamming my head with a sledgehammer.
“It’s gonna be okay, Sam,” Asher says, taking my hand, and I blearily surface to see his face, his glasses reflecting the light.
“Thank you,” I say, clinging to his fingers. “I have such a bad headache.”
“I know,” he says and presses his palm to my forehead. “Does that help or hurt?”
“Helps.” I suddenly think of the children. “Who’s with the boys?”
“Boys?”
“They were playing in the living room,” I say, eyes closed.
“Mmm. They’ll be okay on their own for a little while.”
My eyes fly open. “No! They’re too little! Call your sister. Your sister will do it.”
“Of course,” he says soothingly. “Try not to worry.”
“Okay.” I close my eyes. “Why can’t I remember where we got married?”
He says nothing, and I’m worried that he’s upset, but now my neck and my knees are joining in the pain fest, and I am swept into it, a steady, throbbing red wave. And then even that disappears, and I’m gone into the trees again.
The trees are transformed into a grove in Central Park, where I would take Willow when I was charged with babysitting. She made it into a fairy tale, all of it, the different trees, imbuing some of them with magical properties, the bridges and ponds where trolls lived. Our mother had taught both of us a vast number of the folk songs that influenced Billie’s writing so much, dozens and dozens of Child Ballads, many of them recorded by singers with flutelike voices. My mother’s voice was much more robust, more Janis and Aretha than Joni Mitchell, but Willow could match the sweet sopranos exactly when she was ten and eleven, and she would spin the ballads out like gossamer between the trees. I sang harmony, a passable alto, and imagined myself to be the queen of the grove, ordering soldiers out to defend the ramparts and serfs to gather food into the storehouses for the coming battles. It was a complicated world, built over years of wandering the same groves with my sister’s sweet voice weaving through it. Almost all of it ended up in the first game Asher and I created, the one that made us famous.
Willow. Where is Willow now? The thought hauls me out of the dream and dumps me into a cold, sterile room. I startle so violently that a hand falls on my arm. “Shh, Sam. Everything is okay.”
Asher. He’s still here. His hair is tousled in the way that I know means he’s been running his fingers through it. He looks very tired. “Willow is fine. She sends her love. They don’t want anyone else in here
right now because you might be contagious.”
“What’s wrong with me? Is it some weird flu?”
“No, no.” He brushes my hair back from my forehead. “It’s meningitis.”
I peer at him, struggling to focus. “That’s weird.”
“Rest, Aline Alice.”
I smile at the reference to our game character and grip his hand hard. “Don’t leave. I don’t want to be alone.”
“I promise you won’t be alone.”
“My head hurts so much.”
“I know.” I feel his mouth on my knuckles, and for some reason, it makes me want to cry.
“Where did we get married, Asher? I just can’t remember anything about it.” A detail surfaces. The river, shining with its little island. “Wait. Hudson, right?”
He swallows and strokes my forehead, a smile that seems somehow sad on his mouth. “Shh. Don’t worry about it right now. You need to rest.”
So I do.
Chapter Seventeen
Gloria
While I wait for Willow to come home after checking on Sam, I sort through my belongings, trying to decide what to take and what to leave behind. I have to do it without detection, so I fetch a suitcase from the maid’s room, which is really only a storage room now, and start packing things into it. It’s too hard to imagine I’ll never see any of my beautiful things again, so I imagine I’m just packing for a long trip. A few months, around the world. I’ll need practical things and my favorite things and pictures and—
When I’ve done as much as I can bear, I tuck the suitcase into my closet. I’ll have to leave tomorrow, once I get directions from the lawyer. I curl up in the bed I love so much, with all my excellent pillows and the duvet I found on sale. Another woman might have wept. I forbid it and doze off.
Hectic dreams of being chased jerk me awake at four, still full dark in February. I pad down the hall in my slippers. Willow’s door is closed, so she made it home, and I hesitate, aching to see her. Very, very quietly, I turn the door handle and peek in. Light spills over her from the window, casting a bluish tint over her blonde hair. Her body is so slight she barely lifts the covers.
She is coming back here to live. The thought shatters something in me. I’ve missed her so much since she left home. Sam, too, but Sam is close, and Sam is prickly and aloof, and once she found Asher, she never seemed to need me.
I close the door softly and head for the kitchen. The apartment is so much fuller when Willow is here. I’m so very aware of her when she returns home, as if she is suddenly eleven or fourteen or seventeen and I am again in charge of making sure she is safe and fed and emotionally supported. I came too late to Sam’s life to be much of anything but a guardian to her, but Willow was only nine when her mother died, and even before that I’d stayed with them often, taking up the slack when Billie was training or touring.
Or in rehab. So many rounds of rehab.
Which is simply to say that Willow is largely my daughter. More of a daughter than I had a right to expect. I am the woman who has been present in her life, there to buy her first bras and tell her about menstruation and hold her when she cried over mean friends.
In the kitchen, I turn on the television to monitor the international news, and before I can get sucked into my worry, I pull my phone out of my pocket and send a text to Sam. Are you ok? Pls text me back ASAP.
Eloise must have heard me moving around, because she suddenly jumps up on the counter, her fluffy tail high. “It’s not breakfast time yet,” I say quietly, petting her. Her fur is silky soft, her yellow eyes half-slanted in love. The thought of not having her and Esme in my daily life sends a knife blade through my ribs. I bend my face into her neck. “Willow will take care of you, baby.”
There must be another way. I cannot bear to leave her either. “Perhaps a little tidbit.” As my water boils, I scatter a few cat treats on the floor. She leaps down with aplomb and applies herself, ears tucked slightly away from her face as if she doesn’t want to get them dirty.
A good Insta post, I think, pleased by the turn of phrase, and I take my phone out of my pocket to shoot the photo. The light is not great, too many shadows and a greenish cast to it all, but I can fix that. Cats are always a hit, on the internet in general and my feed in particular. My followers love cats and often tell me about their own.
It’s the best part of this surprise influencer business, the pleasure I find in the connections with strangers. Women, almost entirely, who want to believe their lives are still valuable and still have meaning, even if they’re seventy or eighty or, in some cases, ninety. I help them feel seen.
And in turn, it makes me feel seen myself. Being seen is a hard thing to give up when you’ve been mainly feted for your looks your entire life. That was what started the Insta feed—I found myself dancing around the kitchen to the Van Morrison song “Gloria,” and inside, I felt as sexy and slithery and . . . exhilarated as I ever had. That was always my theme song, G-L-O-R-I-A, Gloria, and the idea for the Instagram came from that. I liked Insta, followed my girls, quietly, and a bunch of houseplant influencers, and a couple of old-lady fashionistas.
But I didn’t want to be a fashionista. That wasn’t really my speed, and they were already doing it better than I ever could. What I wanted was to celebrate being seventy, which is what I was at the time. Seventy and G-L-O-R-ious. Seventy and happy and fully alive. I wanted to celebrate my everyday life, my plants and my cats and my teapots and my conservatory and this wonderful, amazing apartment and my beautiful friends. All of it.
It was surprising how fast it took off. From the start, I made a point of responding to every commenter. If they took time to comment, it seemed the least I could do was communicate in return.
What next, eh, G-L-O? My digs in federal prison? A lump grows in my chest, and I pour a glass of water and drink it down to dislodge it. Through the window, I can see the lights on the other side of the river, the darkness between the two shores as murky as my future.
The voice from the phone call comes back to me: It’s time to run.
I pour my tea into a thick clay mug, letting it brew while I find my coat, and then I wander out to the rooftop, where all my lovely plants and bushes and trees are still hibernating. I’ve just begun to plan what tasks to perform for the spring awakening, what seedlings to start growing in the greenhouse. At the possibility that I might not be here to take care of them, I feel a physical pain. I’ll need to talk Willow into taking the job over.
But is that fair?
The air is still, not terribly cold, and I settle on a bench between two trees, with a view to the south and the buildings of Midtown. Time to run. My beloved town.
I didn’t recognize the voice, but the message came from Isaak, no matter whom he’d found to deliver it. It was our catchphrase, a warning he’d insisted I memorize. In those days, I’d found it exciting, and I had a plan fully ready for execution at any moment, complete with currency for various escape spots, a fake passport, and a bag packed and ready for departure. It felt like a movie.
It still feels like a movie, a film I saw long ago.
And it feels like yesterday.
And I’m transported, back in time, to a flat with doors open to the hot, bright day, where Isaak is standing in silhouette against the light, his chest bare as he paints.
The air was utterly still and hot, the fingers of a furnace pressing heavily on my body, which was nearly naked on the bed, my hair a tumble on my shoulders. Lassitude filled my limbs, a laziness born of jet lag and sex. It was late afternoon, and I’d landed this morning. I had four days, a luxurious stretch of time, and felt no need to do anything but lean on my arm and watch Isaak paint.
He was a vigorously physical man who hiked and swam in the ocean and kept himself fit a hundred ways, and it showed in the taut lines of his body. He was never the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, but there was something about his elegant movements or his scent or maybe just the way he looked at me that made every cell in
my body hum. I watched the muscles of his back move as he painted now, bending sideways to check the angle of something, cocking his head. His thick black hair caught the light, and even the back of his neck, darkly tanned from the hot Moroccan sun, gave me a sense of awareness. I never tired of looking at him.
He painted a dove. It had once stood on the balustrade overlooking the city, and he’d sketched it quickly in charcoal, from this angle and that, his fingers flying over newsprint. Those reference drawings now were taped to the wall, and the painting was nearly finished. He painted quickly, with lots of thick brushstrokes adding texture and depth, along the wings and the tail, on the rough wall, in the shape of the clouds.
“You should show your work,” I said.
“No. I have tried that route. It is not for me, scrabbling, hungry.” He wiped his brush with a cloth stained many colors. “The public only wants art that’s like all the other art it has seen.”
“That’s why you do reproductions?” A room off this bedroom was a studio, stacked with canvases, some freshly stretched and primed, some painted. One side of the room held his own paintings, the vivid captures of the city or women’s bodies or birds or the sea. All of them were filled with energy and passion and texture and vivid, intense colors. The others were imitations, or rather flawless reproductions, of mostly work of the Orientalists, which sold briskly to tourists.
“Among other things,” he said. He wiped his hands and came to stretch out beside me.
“Other things?”
His long brown hands were dappled with the ghosts of the colors he’d used today, and the finger that traced my ribs, the dip of my waist, the rise of my hip, was faintly green. I wondered if he would mark me, my skin. “I will tell you one day, but not now, hmm?” That finger slid toward the center of me as his lips met mine. I gave myself up to pleasure, the pleasure of being twenty-five, the pleasure of a man who could kiss for hours, the pleasure of his hands on my body, and then our connection, deep and strong and athletic.
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