“It’s not real,” I say. He nods but his eyes shift around and I don’t think he believes me.
“Are you like Isla?” He wiggles his eyebrows. I want to say yes, because I can see he’s too scared of me to fool around with me, but I turn away from him without answering at all.
I float around my own apartment, from one grotesque encounter to the next, for what might be minutes or might be an hour.
“We should get out of here,” Cruz says when we finally cross paths again.
“There’s nowhere to go.” We tried once today and failed. We’re trapped. Cruz sinks back into his chair. I put on my sunglasses.
Delilah keeps tying bracelets onto hands of drunk girls and sleazy guys and she’s answering questions about us. I can hear her explaining things like lemons and Angelika and hubris and our dads. It’s terrible.
“Hey! Come drink with us!” I call out when I can’t stand any of it anymore.
Someone is asleep on our floor. A few couples are making out in the corner. I think beer’s been spilled on the couch because the smell of it won’t leave me alone. We’re going to have to kick people out soon.
“I’m not drinking,” Delilah says.
I pat the couch and wave my hands around. I want to get her away from the vultures and freaks. From the vampires and tragedy-lovers and fame-whores. I want to make her ours again.
“Your father wouldn’t approve of what you’re doing,” Delilah says, eyeing me and Cruz, threatening to finally, finally talk about what she saw us doing in the garden. But she’s wrong. If there’s anything he would approve of, it would be the way Cruz looks at me and the way my heart feels when he’s nearby.
“My dad wouldn’t approve of what you’re doing,” I say.
Delilah’s admirers listen with interest.
“I’m showing my respect for him. I’m saving lives. Angelika says—”
I get up; I have to get away from this person who used to be Delilah. Cruz follows.
“Cruz,” Delilah says, “I need your help over here.”
“With what?”
Delilah pauses. She’s about to start speaking in Polish, that’s how Angelika-like she’s becoming.
“I’ll be right back,” Cruz says, and he follows me up the ladder to my loft. It’s a place he never goes—my lofted room is where I disappear with Owen, and it’s where Delilah and I used to spend late nights, and it’s where Mom and I lie on the bed and she tells me secrets about her patients that I have to cross my heart and hope to die not to tell anyone. It’s the place where my great-grandmother stitched satin into gowns, draped lace into veils.
We won’t do anything. We’ll steal away for five minutes to not have to be Devonairre Street Kids or Affected or Cursed.
Still, I’m shaky climbing up the ladder, unable to stop thoughts of what else we could do up here, what I want to do up here. I am certain I can feel him shaking, too, the thing between us so strong it could knock us right off the ladder. I turn to smile at him—a secret, closed-mouth smile—but something stops me as I reach the last rung.
There is someone in my bed.
I see her long braids first, then her naked shoulder, her glasses left behind on my nightstand, her socks still pulled up her calves. And next to her glasses on the nightstand are the keys that should be around her neck, the ones Angelika scolded her for not wearing.
I’m so distracted by the discarded keys, it takes me a moment to register who is next to her: the girl from downstairs. Brown skin and messy black hair, flower tattoos blooming across her arms and her stomach. She has a bra on, and nothing else.
Charlotte and this girl. In my bed. Mostly naked. Touching.
And Cruz and me, trapped at the top of the ladder with no place to go.
28.
Charlotte and the girl leap away from each other, but there’s nothing left to hide.
Cruz covers his face with his hands. I do the opposite. My eyes stay so wide-open they start to ache in the corners.
“Charlotte!” Her name comes out strangled and like I’ve never said it before.
“It’s okay,” she says, but it isn’t. The girl finds her shirt and pulls it on. She hands Charlotte a shirt as well, and Charlotte shifts so her back is toward me while she puts it on. I think she wants to start the moment over and hopes when she turns back around we can press reset.
We can’t.
Cruz uncovers his face. He is blinking fast.
My mind leaves my body. My heart leaves, too. I am body and nothing else.
“This is Nisha,” Charlotte says. I stick out my hand because I don’t know what else to do, and Nisha does the same. We shake. It is ridiculous and too polite and it’s strange how in the craziest moments you reach for normal things like handshakes and formal introductions. Nisha’s hand is bony and strong. Her fingers are long.
“I’m Lorna.”
Nisha smiles like this is the funniest thing in the world. Meanwhile, I’m not sure my face is working at all. I touch the corners of my mouth, my chin, my eyebrows. All in place.
“I know who you are,” she says, that barely contained smile not shifting. “Everyone knows who you are. You’ve met me, too. But you Devonairre Street people—you’re all in your own world, aren’t you?” She shakes her head. I either think she’s fantastic or awful. I’m not sure. “We all know you, but you don’t need to know us.”
“I think I’d recognize you—” I try, but Nisha’s not having it.
“I’ve always been around,” she says, and I can feel the world shifting under me.
“I know you,” Cruz says. He looks less stunned than he did only a few seconds before, like he’s piecing something together. I’m not there yet. I’m waiting for Charlotte to apologize and tell me why she’s in bed with a girl, why she’s in bed with someone who isn’t Cruz, why she’s in my bed at all.
Her braids are frizzing and she reaches for her glasses. Once they’re on, she’s still a different Charlotte. She isn’t flustered, which doesn’t make sense. She isn’t drunk, either. I’m waiting for Charlotte to be Charlotte again, the way I’ve been waiting for the return of Delilah.
“We’ve been together a long time,” Nisha says. Charlotte looks down, but she doesn’t deny it.
“You can’t be together,” I say. “Charlotte and Cruz are together.” I look back and forth between the two of them, the golden couple of Devonairre Street, one of the main reasons I know the Curse isn’t real, the people I’ve built a whole sense of the world on.
Charlotte loves Cruz so we are all safe. Charlotte loves Cruz so I can love Cruz, too.
I don’t see much between them right now.
Charlotte is starry-eyed looking at Nisha. She touches her earlobe and the side of her neck. She’s saying I love you with her fingers.
I’ve never seen her touch those exact places on Cruz.
“Cruz doesn’t love me,” Charlotte says, but I think what she really means is I don’t love Cruz.
He sits so his feet hang on top of the ladder and shakes his head. I think he might climb down and leave me here alone. There’s a clatter downstairs and Isla’s laughter rings out followed by Delilah’s voice trying to quiet everyone down. I won’t remember anything about the party except for this, right now.
“I should go,” Nisha says. “You don’t need me here for this.” She wiggles into pants under the sheets and runs fingers through her hair. “You guys have never needed the rest of us, huh?” She shakes her head at me again. I want to remember her. I want to say I can recall shaking her hand before. I want to believe I pay attention to more than what is happening with the street. That I am better and more complicated and more normal than Angelika. But it wouldn’t be true. There’s a garden tattooed on her skin, and in a different life I’d ask what each bloom is, I’d search for peonies, I’d wonder at the way we both love flowers. I
n a different life, I’d know her and care about her and see the things that other people do on other streets.
But nothing else matters, when you’re a Devonairre Street Girl.
Nisha kisses Charlotte and Charlotte kisses her back. It’s the sweet kiss of people who have kissed a hundred times before. Cruz and I both look away. Somehow—even though we have all been part of one being for years, even though Cruz is supposed to be Charlotte’s boyfriend and Nisha is supposed to be a stranger—we’re the outsiders.
It is one of those impossible things.
Cruz has to get up for Nisha to get out, and I think he can’t decide whether to commit to the room or climb downstairs. He eventually lifts himself into the loft and Nisha lowers herself down and Charlotte watches her go.
I am seeing Charlotte in love for the first time.
“I did my best,” she says when Nisha’s all the way gone and Cruz is all the way in and I’m wondering what kind of math I have to do to recalculate the world around me.
“Your best to what? Be with me? Keep that girl a secret? Lie?” Cruz is finally getting mad. He isn’t raising his voice, that isn’t his way, but his ears are red and his body’s stiff.
“I did my best to protect you,” Charlotte says.
She doesn’t look nervous. She looks downright relieved that we know.
“Protect me?” Cruz says. “What the hell does that mean, protect me?” He is flushed and shaking.
For the first time, I think California sounds nice. Warm and breezy, palm-treed and bright. I let myself imagine being there for a breath. I imagine a Future Lorna with a suntan and a yoga mat and a loose, easy way of talking. Maybe that Lorna would play guitar or marry a struggling actor. It’s the only escape I have right now.
“You think we can’t all see the two of you?” Charlotte asks. She’s getting mad now, too, unhinged in some particular way that is also unfamiliar. “The way you look at each other? The way you think no one else could possibly understand you? You’re like a brother to me, Cruz. I didn’t know what else to do. Angelika didn’t know what else to do. We thought maybe if you were with me the two of you wouldn’t—”
I’m stuck on the idea that everyone notices the way we look at each other.
The way we’ve always looked at each other.
“We don’t believe in this shit. I mean, Jesus Christ, what have you been doing? What are you thinking?” I say, almost laughing but heroically managing to keep it in. The room spins a little, and I’m wishing I’d drunk less or more. I drank the exact wrong amount for this situation.
“You don’t believe,” Charlotte says. I squint, but it doesn’t help. Everything’s still all wrong. “I believe. I’ve always believed.”
Her eyes are steady. Her voice is steady. I want her to stumble and fumble and trip all over her words. I want there to be something uncertain about what she’s saying.
“We don’t believe,” I say again.
“You,” Charlotte repeats. “You don’t believe. And Cruz doesn’t believe. But I believe. Have my whole life. Isla believes. Delilah believes now, too.”
“Who are you?” Cruz explodes. They’ll be able to hear us downstairs but I’m glad he can yell. I can’t find my voice at all.
“I’m the person who’s been saving your life.” Charlotte stands up straighter, adjusts her glasses, making sure they’re squarely on her nose. “You should be thanking me. I did this for you. Nisha did this for you. I’m lucky to love a girl, I’m lucky to love Nisha, but you’re lucky, too. To have had me looking out for you. I knew I’d never love you. I knew you’d be safe with me.”
I try to remember the last time I saw them really kiss. I try to remember if Charlotte ever said they slept together. I try to unwind everything I thought I knew.
“Angelika.” I don’t need to say anything else. My wallpapered walls—faded blue paisley from the days of a different Devonairre Street—are closing in on us. The whole building might collapse.
Charlotte shrugs.
“She asked me to make a sacrifice. So I made it,” Charlotte says. “Someday the Curse will end, and it will be because we’ve finally sacrificed enough.” This, too, is an Angelika sentence. The promise that if we do enough, if we sacrifice enough of ourselves, if we listen to every word she says, we’ll be free of the Curse.
I didn’t know anyone really believed it.
• • •
Eventually Charlotte goes downstairs and my apartment empties out and Cruz and I stay upstairs in silence, listening to the way the party escalates right before the ending and then zooms into silence and stillness.
Finally, we can hear only three voices: Delilah’s, Isla’s, and Charlotte’s.
That’s when we climb back down the ladder. The room smells like pine cleaning product and beer. It doesn’t smell like Devonairre Street at all.
The girls are quiet.
Delilah is still on the counter. Isla is curled up on the couch. Charlotte is lying on the floor.
“You all knew,” I say, because it can’t go unsaid for a moment longer.
They don’t agree or disagree.
“You all believe.” The words scratch my throat coming out, like they have claws.
Cruz takes my hand like he did on the street in Times Square. We are the photograph they took of us earlier today—holding hands alone on the street, walking through the things that hurt the most.
“We don’t believe,” he says. He looks at me to agree, to nod, to kiss his lips or squeeze his hand.
I don’t do any of that.
I can’t.
29.
Mom doesn’t come home from Roger’s, so the girls sleep in my loft with me, even Delilah smushed against me in bed and breathing on my shoulder like it’s the old days and we are young and hopeful about the next morning.
Roger’s not feeling well, I’m going to stay here, Mom texts when I am not sleeping at two in the morning.
I know you probably don’t mind. Be safe. Don’t let anyone walk home drunk, Mom texts at two thirty in the morning when I am still not sleeping.
Did today make you want to leave the street? Mom texts at three a.m. when I’m not sleeping and she’s not sleeping either, I guess.
Charlotte snores and Isla is so still I half wonder whether she’s dead and Cruz is in his own room, probably not sleeping either. I almost text him. I don’t text him.
I have to do something, though, so I get out of bed and say good-bye to dreaming Delilah and the rest of the girls. All this time I’ve been wanting to be close to them and now, at our very closest moment where we are sharing air and breath and beds and truth, I want to get away.
From the living room I look out over the street. The lamps are all lit up, including ours. Without Mom here to turn it off, it burns all night.
I wonder why we aren’t in more trouble, all of us, for the party, for missing curfew, for the assortment of random people walking our street, staring at our brownstones, wanting to know everything about us. I’ve felt free of the widows today, at least, as trapped as I’ve been by everything else. I guess if there’s anything they understand it’s Anniversaries. At three in the morning, though, the Anniversary is over. It’s the day after.
I don’t move from the window and it doesn’t take me long to spot Angelika. She isn’t on her stoop, but her face is in the window, in the crack between her ugly floral curtains. She’s watching. She’s probably been watching all night.
Or maybe she’s been waiting.
Maybe she’s been waiting for me to finally, finally go to her.
So I do.
• • •
She meets me on the stoop in her nightgown.
“Here you are,” she says with a smile like she’s known this would happen.
“I can’t sleep,” I say.
Angelika invites me in and it’
s been a while since I’ve been in her kitchen but not an inch of it has changed. There’s an enormous portrait of her husband on one wall and a cat clock on another, a gift from Charlotte when she was little. There are remnants of all of us—photographs on her refrigerator, a few messy crayon drawings of her that she must have framed and hung years ago, a lopsided green mug Delilah made her in art class that can’t hold water so holds pennies instead, a card I wrote her for her birthday a few years ago, still perched on the counter like it arrived in the mail yesterday.
“Tea?” she says, and I nod because I’m aching too much to speak.
There is love in this room.
“Who drew this one?” I point to a framed piece of construction paper on the wall—a stick figure drawing of a long white-haired Angelika sitting on a cloud.
“Cruz.”
I smile. I can’t help it.
“Cruz’s pictures were always the sweetest. The most fantastical. Clouds and rainbows and starlight and the world the way he must wish it is. Poor boy.”
“Maybe that’s the way the world seems to him.” Cruz’s optimism is something I love about him. To Angelika, it’s something to pity.
“He’s going to die.”
I lose my breath in a moment of belief. I recover and tell my heart to slow down. Angelika pours tea into teacups that look exactly like the ones Mom broke seven years ago. Delicate. Pretty. Too easy to destroy.
“You must be happy with Mom. She wants us to move. You’ll get rid of us and all our trouble.”
“That solves nothing. You can’t run away from the Curse. Moving? You can’t move. You’ll only love him more, being away. No. There won’t be any moving.”
“Mom’s pretty set on it.” I didn’t come here to talk to Angelika about California. She loads the tea with honey, so much I will barely be able to drink it, but I don’t say anything. I didn’t come here to talk about tea.
“And you?” Angelika asks. “What are you set on?”
“I don’t want to leave.”
The Careful Undressing of Love Page 20