The Careful Undressing of Love

by Corey Ann Haydu

  He is smiling the smallest bit at the way she holds a lemon.

  I’m seeing a different history in these old pictures. The story of me and Cruz.

  I finally, finally look at him. Something in my heart bursts and there it is. The feeling. The Yes. Love.

  Then we see a flash. Cameras. The garden is no longer ours.

  24.

  “I brought doughnuts,” Delilah says Saturday morning. She is on my stoop at five in the morning the day of the Seven-Year Anniversary, just as she’s been every other year since my father died.

  Five a.m. on the day of the Bombing was the last time I saw my father. He used to kiss me every morning before he left for the gym and work, and I’d whine at him for rubbing his stubbly face against my smooth one before the sun was even up.

  “But I love you!” he’d always say with a big, toothy grin and a mean tickle.

  “It’s too early for love!” I’d say.

  “Never,” he’d say. It was a script said every single morning for so many years, but he always sounded serious on that final word.

  Now Delilah’s on my stoop, like she is every year at this time, and she’s got maple-bacon doughnuts from the place off the G train that my father told us had to be a secret we kept forever so they didn’t get too famous.

  “This is what life’s all about,” he’d say when he bit into one.

  These are some of my favorite memories, because they’re all mine. My mom hates doughnuts, so Dad would only take me and Delilah. No one else from the street knew anything about the place.

  “We should bring one home for Angelika,” I said once, and my father laughed, wrinkled his nose, and winked. The doughnuts were only for us.

  The memory is only for us, too, so there’s no one around to twist it up or turn it upside down or rewrite it as a cautionary tale. Angelika and Betty and Dolly don’t know about twenty-four-hour doughnuts. The History of the Affected won’t ever know. On the website, my father’s favorite food is listed as steak, but Delilah and I know it was doughnuts and we’ll never tell.

  “You’re here,” I say now, taking the doughnut from Delilah, who has already taken a huge bite of hers.

  “I couldn’t wait,” she says, like she does every year. “It was calling to me. It told me I had to take a bite.”

  I throw myself on her. My arms fit around her neck and I feel hers go around my middle and we both hold on so tight there’s no space between us. I’m ecstatic to have this Delilah—the one who knows the one secret memory I have of my father, the one who will buy me a doughnut in the middle of the night if it will help ease the pain of the world’s worst anniversary. That’s the Delilah I squeeze. That’s the Delilah whose shoulder I cry on.

  “I didn’t think you’d be here,” I say, “but I came downstairs anyway.” She doesn’t say anything, but she rubs my back and lets me stay pressed against her until I’ve cried enough tears and squeezed her enough times.

  “I always forget how delicious these things are,” she says. I finally take a bite and it makes me smile. Salty and sweet and indulgent and ridiculous, everything my father was.

  “I thought you’d maybe forgotten about them altogether,” I say.

  She takes another bite of doughnut.

  The sidewalk is empty. I fall back in love with Devonairre Street, standing there with my best friend in the universe, looking at the lit-up lamps leading a path to the garden, where the yellow lemons hanging from the lemon tree are almost bright enough to light up the night, too.

  This is my home.

  “To be honest, Lorna,” Delilah says, and the peace is broken because her voice is New Delilah voice, and she looks up at the sky, which is where she now looks whenever she is thinking of Jack and Curses. “I thought maybe you’d forgotten. About today. About your dad. About the things that have happened.”

  I look left and right like Angelika must be somewhere nearby, for her words to be making their way out of Delilah’s mouth. She’s not here, though.

  Sometimes my nose fills with the scent of the dusty, ruined air, even though there’s no other smell like it and it’s been gone for years. Sometimes the Minute of Silence feels like it may never end and my throat closes halfway through and I watch the clock, wondering whether I’ll breathe again.

  I haven’t forgotten the day of the Bombing.

  And if Delilah were Delilah, she’d know that.

  “I remember everything terrible.” I am trying not to fight with her because I can’t fight with Delilah on the Seven-Year Anniversary. “I remember every terrible thing. Don’t worry. I only forget the good days and the best memories.”

  I still have most of my doughnut left but I couldn’t eat now. I feel ill. I can’t stop smelling the remembered soot smell. It won’t leave my nose. My eyes burn, and that, too, is a remembered feeling. My eyes hurt for days after the Bombing—all of us walked around pink eyed and teary. Something in the air infected us—like we were all allergic to tragedy.

  Delilah puts her hand on my hand. “I don’t want to upset you. I want to save you.”

  “I don’t need saving.”

  Delilah’s eyes fill and her head drops. Soon the sun will come up and the day will begin in earnest, and what I hoped had changed between us will go back to normal, and we’ll be stuck in our new roles again. It’s a miserable kind of destiny.

  “You’ll see,” she says. “You’ll see and it will be too late and then you’ll be just like me.”

  She’s shaking a little and I rub her back.

  “Do you want to be like me?” she asks.

  “I—”

  “No. Trust me. You don’t.”

  Delilah moves off the stoop. On a regular anniversary day she’d come in for tea and to give my mother a hug. She’d walk us to the vigil in the park; she and Mrs. James would make us dinner while we were gone and leave it covered in foil on the counter, ready to be heated and consumed in front of something silly on TV.

  “Are you coming up?” I ask. “Please come up.” Delilah shakes her head. Her hair is hidden under a scarf again, her body draped in a long, loose gray dress. Her face is the only truly visible part of her anymore, but even her face is unfamiliar—hidden under unreadable expressions and a new kind of exhaustion.

  “He’ll die,” she says, “and you’ll live your whole life knowing you could have stopped it.”

  Delilah leans in to me. She smells like lavender and rosemary and sweat. Her breath is sweet from the doughnut but still a little raw from the morning. I’m sure mine is, too.

  “It gets worse every day.” She pauses, and in that pause is everything about our friendship—honesty and saying things that are awful and true and trusting each other and sharing a history and a street and a whole identity. “You’ll see,” she says before walking away.

  25.

  We are wearing black wool for the Seven-Year Memorial. We are in long skirts and tops with high necklines, like Angelika demanded.

  “Covering it up doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” Mom says.

  “What?”

  “Sex. Love. Bodies. It’s all still there, under the layers of wool and keys. Whether Angelika wants it to be or not.”

  My mother had sex last night, past midnight, and Roger snuck out after it was over. I wish I hadn’t heard, but I did.

  “I’m doing it for Delilah,” I say. I am doing it a little bit for me, too. That’s the secret I’m keeping from my mother.

  “It doesn’t mean we believe in anything,” she says on our way out the door.

  Mom holds her head high and I don’t have to ask—not today, not ever—if she thinks there’s even a tiny chance it could have been her fault. Dad insisted that everyone had secrets, but I don’t think Mom has them. She is solid and consistent and I can hear her every gasp and cry and grunt and heartbeat. There’s nothing to hide.

 
; I imitate her certainty and pull my shoulders back.

  The street is empty but there are faces in every window, watching us walk from the neighborhood to Prospect Park, calculating how many rituals we have upheld (not enough), how many failures we have enacted (too many). I wonder if Delilah has gone back to bed or if she’s watching us from her window, too. If she’s monitoring my face and my gait to see if she’s affected me at all, if she’s changed my mind.

  I pull my shoulders back harder, lift my chin more.

  “Is Roger meeting us there?” I ask. It’s the first time in a week I’ve been with my mother alone.

  “Not today,” Mom says. “I don’t want him to be part of all this.”

  “Part of what?” I ask. “This is our life.” We both exhale as soon as we turn the corner off Devonairre Street. We’re still being watched on other streets, I think, but less harshly.

  “I told Angelika to prepare herself. Once I sell, pressure will be on for the others. We’ll live a nice, calm life. And we can have an enormous house on the water. We’ll be able to afford—well. Things will be great.”

  “Then what? You’ll leave Roger? You’ll leave your practice? I’ll do senior year somewhere else? None of it makes any sense.”

  “Roger’s talking to work about transferring to their West Coast office.” She doesn’t answer any other questions or give me any other solutions. “See? Easy. You like him. You’ll like him even more without all this pressure.”

  I wonder if she sees herself getting married, having a California tan, growing an avocado tree in the front yard.

  “I’m not going to California.”

  “God, Lorna, what do we have here? You can’t even go to school. Your best friend is . . . everyone is . . . We can’t leave the house. We can’t cut our hair. We can’t date. I don’t know why I didn’t listen to your father in the first place. It’s not a place for us. For anyone. What do you even love about living here, at this point?”

  I pretend it’s a rhetorical question so I don’t say anything about Cruz and Future Lorna and the view of the faraway Statue of Liberty and the smell of basil after it rains and Delilah with her doughnuts and the simplicity of turning the lights on at sunset to keep terrible things at bay.

  I hold my tongue so that I don’t say anything about the way it feels to know someone forever and realize you love them in spite of a million reasons not to.

  And I don’t say anything about rare Bistro steaks and the hope, the persistent hope that I have every day, that Betty or Dolly or someone else will remember something new about my father.

  Four months ago Betty recalled a day that he sat on the stoop and played a harmonica. She laughed, telling the story, because a few nonlocals stood and listened and dropped change at his feet, thinking he was a busker.

  I didn’t even know he played any instruments. I don’t remember him loving music and I don’t remember ever seeing a harmonica.

  But there it was, out of nowhere, a new fact about him, all these years later.

  I’ll stay here forever for the hope to get one bit of treasure every few years.

  One little secret.

  • • •

  Cruz, Mrs. Rodriguez, Maria, Ashley and her boys, and the Chens are standing by the trees that we always stand by. Isla never comes to the Memorials. Cruz and I aren’t given the choice, but the world is different for Isla Rodriguez. She’s at home watching daytime television and waiting to have her Minute of Silence in absolute peace.

  Cruz is wearing a suit that doesn’t fit.

  “I see your ankles,” I say, expecting him to laugh. We can make each other laugh even on days like today. He goes grim.

  “It was my dad’s suit.”

  I squint, trying to remember Alejandro Rodriguez in those pants, that jacket. I can almost imagine him. He was shorter than Cruz is now, and stouter, but with the same handsome jawline, the same alive eyes, the same dark curly hair. “I’m not doing it to be weird,” he says. “I don’t have another suit. And Mom freaked out at my jeans. So.”

  “So. Here we are,” I say, thinking it’s strange when someone is beautiful and sad all at once.

  I tell my mind to shut up about the things Delilah said.

  “It’s ten eleven,” someone says over the speakers, like they do at every Anniversary. No flowery speeches. No call for silence and thought. Just the announcement of the time and a crowd’s immediate response.

  We all hang our heads.

  It’s a little terrifying, a crowd of hundreds of people doing the same movement at the same time. It gives me a shiver.

  On the anniversaries, the Minute of Silence magically turns into ten minutes instead of one. It seems arbitrary. How much destruction happened in one minute, in ten, in twenty? Are we meant to stay silent for the length of time it took for everyone to die? I think we’d have to be silent all day, all week, in that case.

  It’s a long ten minutes and I let myself think of my dad for the whole time. I think about how every birthday he’d give me a book of poetry and said I’d understand it when I was older. I’m starting to understand some of the poems now, the ones about sex and love and the ways they are sometimes the same and sometimes not.

  I think about when he taught me to play basketball and how he lifted me into the air to dunk the ball whenever I got discouraged. I think about when he gave Mom a necklace with a tiny ruby heart hanging off the end, and that he got embarrassed when she gushed to everyone in the neighborhood about it.

  We’ve never been allowed much joy on our street. Angelika thinks we don’t deserve it, and maybe sometimes we believe her.

  My mom always wore the ruby, but she tucked it under her shirts to be safe.

  I peek at her. She’s not wearing it today, and I don’t know what that means.

  “Thank you,” the speaker says when ten minutes are up. We raise our heads in unison.

  The park is crowded with family members of people who died. Every year Cruz and I try to recognize them. We know some of their names from the History of the Affected and we know some of their stories from the speeches they give at the different memorials, and some we recognize simply by the particular black dress they wear every year.

  There are reporters everywhere, and I don’t want them to recognize me so I slide my sunglasses on, forgetting that will make me more recognizable.

  Cruz and I grab hands the Devonairre Street way and look over our shoulders to see who’s watching us.

  Mrs. Chen and Ashley tilt their chins and cross their arms. The covered-up clothing isn’t enough apparently. What they really want is for me to be locked up in a tower, unable to get to anyone at all.

  The school wants the same thing “for now.” They have provided us with online learning material, and it’s so dry and stale it is the educational equivalent of a cracker.

  Maria inserts herself between Cruz and me, pretending to talk to me but it’s clear what her real goal is.

  “How are you doing today, Lorna?” Maria asks, but she’s not even looking at my face for an answer. Which is good, because I’m wondering whether Cruz and I are going to kiss again, and when.

  Ashley and Mrs. Chen circle Cruz, chattering full force at him. His mother joins in, too, putting her strong hands on his even stronger shoulders.

  “You missing your father?” they say. “Has school been hard? Have you heard they’re planting a tree in Jack’s honor? Did you hear Scorpios are meant to spend time alone this month? How’s Charlotte, is she coming today? Are you going to help us plant more lemon trees? Have you noticed all the photographers lurking around the street? Are you eating rosemary every day?”

  A violinist plays a funereal song they play every year and I miss having Cruz next to me. We do the Memorials together. It is the time every year when we are closest. I try to scoot past Maria and the other ladies, but they shift and maneu
ver around me, making it impossible. I look to my mother, but she’s in her own world. She’s stepped away from the Devonairre Street crowd. She has her eyes closed, and she nods along with the melody like she’s memorizing the exact way it sounds and feels.

  I think she’s hanging on to the memory of this, preparing herself to never come to a Memorial again.

  We stand in a straight line, listening to the music, me on one end and Cruz at the other and both of us leaning back and forth to find each other’s gaze.

  Angelika said, “Love is a thing that is or isn’t.”

  She also said, “Love is a permanent state; there is no going back.”

  And, “Love is falling because there is a moment before you touch the ground, when there is still hope.”

  She has a lot to say about love, about luf, but she’s never told us what we’re meant to do in that moment before we’ve fully fallen. She calls it permanent and unstoppable but asks us to stop it. She calls it true or false, but finds us when we’re caught in between.

  I can’t get the image out of my head of me hovering above the ground, wanting to stop myself but unable to fight gravity.

  Falling in love sounds violent, when you get right down to it.

  The song ends and I start to feel sick, picturing my father in that same moment. The falling. Seven years ago. Right before he hit the ground, wondering what he could do to stop it.

  Nothing, I think. He couldn’t do anything at all.

  • • •

  They’ve made the park pretty for us. There’s that, at least. Along with the lone sad violin, they’ve brought in bunches of flowers and rows and rows of wooden chairs for us to sit in. The mayor is here and a stage and a large screen with the names of our loved ones projected across its surface.

  We wait for my father’s eyes. They call out the names of the Victims, and I could practically recite them myself, they are that familiar. My mother finally moves toward me and Cruz sneaks closer to me as well. We avoid the cheap wooden seats. We stand tall with our arms crossed over our chests in case the wool doesn’t offer us the protection Angelika promises it will.