by Ruthie Knox
Beatrice was in Wisconsin.
The frizzy-haired woman tugged at Winston’s arm, “Give her some room, hon.” Rosemary found herself being ushered into an empty seat and handed a styrofoam cup, the straw coated in a bright pink smear of lipstick.
“It’s Coke. I think you need some sugar,” the woman said.
Rosemary sipped it. She didn’t care for soda, but she drank it until the woman took the cup out of her hand and she heard, belatedly, the sucking vacuum noise the straw had been making in the ice.
She couldn’t seem to make her eyes focus on Winston’s careworn face, or on the woman’s sharp features. Kal hung back, six feet away, silent. All of them watched her, waiting.
“Thank you,” she told the woman.
“I’m Allie.”
Allie. Allie was the name of Winston’s girlfriend.
This woman was Winston’s girlfriend. This was the woman he’d fallen in love with, texted Rosemary about in what passed for raptures for Winston. This was the Allie whose mother was an artist, whose family had gone through an adventure the previous fall that led them to New York and threw Allie and Winston together. Allie who sold vintage clothing and owned real estate. Allie who’d changed Winston’s life.
Rosemary looked at Winston for confirmation. He nodded, his expression caught somewhere between sheepish and proud. “Yes.”
She put out her hand, willing her fingers not to tremble. “Pleased to meet you.”
Allie pumped her hand up and down. “I’m very pleased to meet you, too, and also pleased you’re alive, because let me tell you, we’ve been living with the very real possibility that you weren’t, and the world without Rosemary in it is not a world I’m interested in living in, noooooo, thank you.” She paused, threw away the soda cup in a nearby rubbish bin, and returned to say, “I think that was kind of tactless. Sorry. It’s not your fault you were almost dead.”
“It’s quite all right.” Rosemary glanced at Kal. He was watching her, his expression unreadable but his eyes friendly.
I’m sorry, she told him telepathically.
He smiled.
Winston was speaking. Rosemary watched his mouth move, everything about him familiar, although he had a bounce and brightness to him she hadn’t seen in ages.
Love suited him.
When he stopped talking, she said, “I was going to phone you as soon as I made it out here. I suppose I can cross that off my list.”
He started speaking again.
She couldn’t seem to focus. Everything he said was the same thing, one version or another of, You’re taken care of. We’ll take care of you.
Her eyes were drawn back to Kal, and she wanted him with a sudden ferocity that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with what they’d been through together. She wanted to get into a yellow taxi with him beside her, and find a hotel where they could dim the lights, close the curtains, and sleep.
But she had obligations, as Winston’s presence made abundantly clear. She had to submit to being taken care of, at least for a while. Then it would be time to start putting the pieces of her plan back in order again.
Adventure awaited.
“So.” Rosemary made her voice as bright and cheerful as she could manage. “Where to next?”
Chapter 9
Every time Kal thought it might be about time for him to hit the road, Allie handed him something else to eat.
Chinese takeout, pizza boxes, and trays of cheesy rotini and ravioli crowded the coffee table in front of him. When Allie wasn’t leaping up to answer the door, she sat cross-legged next to him with Rosemary’s laptop open on her crossed legs and a brand-new smartphone attached by USB cord, emitting a stream-of-consciousness monologue about whatever tech magic she was working to get the data off Rosemary’s dead phone and asking him questions he couldn’t answer about where Rosemary stored her passwords, whether she had an Apple ID, whether she had any social media accounts that needed to be looked at.
Kal had no idea. He was just swimming along in the jet stream of the conversation, checking out the other fish. Not to mention the sweet-ass apartment in the Village where Rosemary would be staying.
Winston had bought it for the daughter, Beatrice, but apparently she never stayed here. Kal couldn’t figure out why. It had the marble lobby, the doorman, a good eight hundred square feet of space decked out to the nines. If someone had handed him this apartment when he’d been in college, he’d have been made.
Rosemary was forty minutes deep into a whispered argument with Winston in the kitchen, and Kal was getting itchy. It was a big apartment, but not big enough to keep their voices from drifting through the open doorway into the living area.
I respect that you had to make an independent decision, Rosemary said. I’m just not sure why you made that one.
What is it that you’d have had me do?
I don’t know, anything else?
That’s easy for you to say. You were in Nepal at the time.
Allie whistled, low and long. “Things are getting heated in there.”
“They know we can hear them, right?”
“I’ve been trying to figure that out.”
“How’re you leaning?”
“I’m leaning toward no.”
“Does it bug you?” he asked. She didn’t look bugged. She looked relaxed, her minidress falling off one shoulder, her fingers flying over the keyboard.
“Nah. I figure they’ve been fighting a long time, so they have lots of practice. If this is how they want to get after it, I’m okay with it.” She cocked her head as Rosemary nailed Winston with a particularly vicious bit of passive aggression. “Though I have to say, it’s weird that they’re so polite.”
“Right? They’re like those politics TV channels where they show the debates in Parliament.”
“Yes. Where it’s all, like, ‘I beg your pardon, Lord Featherington, but I have to defer, crumpets crumpets,’ and then the commentator’s like, ‘Damn, burn,’ and you can’t figure out where the insult was, but Lord Featherington’s stroking out with rage.”
She was funny. Kal thought he’d probably like Allie, if he could keep his attention on her for more than ten seconds at a time.
He glanced toward the doorway of the kitchen, willing Rosemary to come back. He needed to leave, but there was stuff he needed to say first, and just…to see her.
Allie handed him a carton of fried rice. “Eat this. It’s getting cold.”
He was about to say he wasn’t hungry, but it smelled good. So he ate the rice, wondering if his mom was missing him yet. She knew what time he was supposed to get in. He doubted she’d be worried. They were like house cats most of the time. They did their own thing, left the occasional dead bird of love on each other’s doormats.
“So are you guys, like, a couple?” Allie asked.
“Me and Rosemary?”
“Yeah.”
He shrugged.
“Yeah? That your final answer?”
Kal willed Rosemary to emerge from the kitchen.
She didn’t.
“I don’t know,” he told Allie. “It’s been a crazy few days.”
“Fine, don’t tell me, ponyboy. I’ll figure it out on my own. I have ways.” The laptop plinged, and she yanked the cord out of the USB slot. “Okay, her phone’s back up to speed. She’s not going to want to keep this back home, but as long as she’s here, she’s got a working cell with all her pictures and contacts and crap on it. You want her digits?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll text them to you. Hang on, let me put you in her contacts. What’s your number?”
Kal gave it to her, watched her tap his name and number into Rosemary’s new phone and send off her number to his text messages app with a little whoop noise.
The phone he’d lost in Nepal had been a temporary one he’d picked up in-country. The number he gave Allie was for the phone waiting for him back at home, the one he’d abandoned to gather up messages that he could del
ete with a swipe of his index finger without listening. Missed deadlines, missed appointments, missed opportunities, failure.
Rosemary came out of the kitchen in a rush, both hands pushing the hair off her forehead like maybe her hair had been trying to do something bad to her and she needed to get it under control. She plopped down beside Kal on the couch, releasing a cloud of airplane aromatherapy. “I suppose you heard every word of that.”
“Some of it.”
She sighed. “I apologize if it was awkward.”
“No worries.”
He wanted to say more, or touch her, something, but there were too many people, and she felt impossibly far away.
Allie closed the lid of Rosemary’s laptop, stacked the cellphone on top, and passed both over Kal’s body to Rosemary. “So this is your new phone, with all your stuff on it. The number will only work in the States.”
“What about my old number?” Rosemary asked.
“Trust me, you don’t want that number anymore. I’ve never been in an avalanche, but I was a runaway bride, and I feel like there’s some similarity in terms of the amount of shit that starts falling out of the sky right afterward—like, pianos and anvils, you know? You can wear yourself out dodging those missiles, or you can stop answering your old phone number and give out this one to the people you want calling you. I already gave it to Kal.”
She twisted her explosion of hair into a knot on top of her head. It stayed there, velcroed together by its own texture.
“Now, okay, so, you’re gonna open up your email at some point and freak out, because everything looks different. I upgraded you to a new email client that does this thing where it sorts all your incoming messages into different folders on the basis of priority. You’ve got green, blue, yellow, orange, and red. Red’s the highest priority.”
“I appreciate your help, but I’m fine. I don’t require a system to handle my correspondence.”
Allie breezed right past this remark. “The rule for email is, no more than five messages at a time, for no more than an hour, and then you close that shit up. If you’re going to do the red ones, just take them one at a time with a break for coffee or a cigarette, whatever floats your boat. The colors go down in order of priority—”
The longer Allie high-speed discharged information at her, the paler and farther away Rosemary looked. All around her mouth, she’d turned white.
“—and if you have any questions, just call me, I put my number in your phone. The main thing is, you don’t need to worry about more than you’re ready to worry about. If other people start pressuring you, you can just think, ‘Not my problem today.’ ”
Winston walked into the room from the kitchen, some of the starch gone from the crisp edges of his suit. “Rosemary?” he asked. “May I have a word?”
The white outline around Rosemary’s mouth turned faintly blue. Kal looked from her to Allie to Winston.
These were nice people, but someone needed to teach them when to shut the fuck up.
“Actually, you know what?” His voice came out loud, more forceful than he’d meant it to. “I think it’s time to give Rosemary a break.”
“I’m all right,” she said. Her fingers plucked at the knee of her travel pants.
He was squeezing her hand. He didn’t know how that had happened. “I know you’re all right, but we’ve been traveling for, shit, I don’t even know—thirty-six hours?” He looked squarely at Winston. “Something like that, anyway, longer if you count Lukla, and before that she was in the middle of climbing the highest mountain on earth when she got interrupted by an avalanche. It’s reasonable to think, you know, probably Rosemary could use a shower and some fucking rest.”
Kal wasn’t sure if this was some kind of pissing contest or what, but if it was, he was determined to win it. This guy was rich, and he seemed nice enough, and Rosemary had known him for a very long time.
On the other hand, he’d scooped her up at the airport and then picked a fight with her in the kitchen. Not cool.
Kal beamed the message to Winston via blank-stare telepathy.
Winston cleared his throat, glanced at his watch, and said, “Quite right.”
Two minutes later, Winston and Allie were heading out the door, with Allie throwing directions back over her shoulder for Rosemary to check the bedroom closet for clothes if she needed anything.
Rosemary gathered her hair at the nape of her neck, pulled it forward over her shoulder, and sank into the couch with her eyes closed. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure.”
They soaked in the quiet. Kal drifted, breathing in airplane aromatherapy. It would be ironic if it put him to sleep now, smelling it off Rosemary’s skin.
“Kal?”
“Yeah?”
“How far away is Wisconsin?”
“A couple days’ drive, probably. Maybe one really long day. Or you could fly. Be there in a few hours.”
She blew out a long breath. “It’s strange to be in New York.”
“Strange how?”
“It’s so big. There are so many cars, and everything seems really clean and…I don’t know, easy. The weather’s like summer, even though it’s only May. I feel like I’ve been on a different planet.”
“Alien.”
“Yes.”
Kal hadn’t noticed—not like she meant. But he imagined Rosemary hadn’t spent a lot of time feeling alien. She’d said she was wallpaper, and not in a good way, but at least wallpaper blended in. He’d never blended anywhere except in Jackson Heights. Everywhere else, he was the brown kid in a room full of white ones, or the Sherpa kid where there weren’t any other Sherpa people, or, in a group of Sherpa, the one whose dad wasn’t Sherpa, the American, Merlin’s kid.
It wasn’t the same as being out of place. He had a place—a home, a family, circuits of places he liked to go and things he liked to do. It was just that everywhere he went, something marked him as different. “The thing about being alien is, it gives you good insight into things,” he said. “From the outside.”
“I’m not sure I have the capacity for insight just now.” She turned her body toward him, tucking her legs up beneath her. Her eyes were heavy-lidded. She yawned, as if on cue.
“You’ll get there.” He turned from the waist, dropping his shoulder into the back of the couch to bring their heads closer together.
They passed a few minutes, quiet.
He liked how she felt in the quiet. Like he could be around her, her energy over there, his over here, and neither one of them rippling over to mess up the other. Just themselves, together.
She had her eyes closed now, and her breath had sped up and dropped deeper into her chest the way it did when someone was right on the cusp of falling asleep. Her hair slipped from behind her ear and covered part of her cheek. Her eyebrows were a shade lighter than her hair, close to white. Her skin looked soft.
Kal thought about how she’d smiled on the airplane when he teased her.
How every muscle in her face relaxed after she came, and the contrast made him remember how alert she was most of the time, how tight her control was.
She didn’t give herself a lot of room to just be.
Maybe nobody had ever wanted that from her. Just to see her like this, at rest, relaxed. Winston didn’t seem like a guy who would’ve wanted that.
Kal reached out and pushed Rosemary’s hair back behind her ear. He kissed her cheekbone where high-elevation sunburn had left the skin pink and a little chapped. Then he kissed the spot by her ear where the light picked up tiny, downy hairs.
She smiled with her eyes closed. “What are you doing?”
“Kissing you.” He kissed the bridge of her nose and the space just above the corner of her lip. Then her chin. The arch of her white eyebrow.
“Why?”
“You have to know everything, princess?”
When he kissed her mouth, her lips were soft, receptive. “Yes.”
Kal put his hand on her shoulder, his thumb
against her neck. He could feel her heartbeat, slow and strong. He kissed her deeper, just to feel it speed up, to feel the life in her and the rough slide of her tongue against his, to hear the sound of them breathing in the empty apartment.
It felt good kissing Rosemary. He tried to think of something that felt better, but nothing came to mind.
They kissed and nudged their bodies closer together, brought their arms and hands into it, stroking. By some kind of mutual agreement, they didn’t let it get hot. This was tired kissing. Good-night kissing. Slow, easy, warm, sliding, breathe-a-little-hard kissing. It made him hot, and tight, but not in a bad way.
It was goodbye kissing, maybe.
Kal didn’t want that, but Rosemary might.
The thought messed with his game. He pulled away. “Am I going to see you again?”
She tilted her head. Her lips were red and wet. “Do you have to know everything?”
“Not usually.”
“Why don’t we just see what happens?”
“Sure.”
The question had broken whatever spell the silence had granted them, and Kal knew in the awkward seconds afterward that it was time for him to take off. She was thinking her Rosemary thoughts—wanting to get in the shower, wanting to call her kid—and this time she didn’t want his Kal thoughts anywhere in the vicinity.
He stood. “My mom’s going to be wondering where I’m at.”
“Of course. I’ve kept you longer than I should have.”
“It’s okay.” He found his ratty Patagonia fleece on a wooden hanger in the closet by the front door. It looked absurd, all alone in there, dirty and ancient. Kal put it on. He tried to think of a good way to ask her what he had to ask her next, but there wasn’t one. “Did you happen to get any cash at the airport?”
“You need money for a taxi.”
“I wish I could say no. But…yeah.”
“I did stop at the exchange window. Just a minute.” She stood to search through her pockets, unzipping them one by one, while Kal tried not to feel like a gigolo. Or a thief. “Here you are.” She extended a handful of twenties. “Will this do?”
Kal plucked one out of the wad and left the rest. He’d take the train home. There was no rush. “This is enough.”