She sat cross-legged on the floor for a minute, trying to remember one of their most recent conversations. A couple weeks ago he’d taken a few bites out of a graham cracker and tried to persuade her that it resembled a person’s head, and then he’d made it into a talking man begging to be inside her stomach, and she’d giggled and opened her mouth wide and eaten the man entirely. Sometimes they talked about places they wanted to visit, a favorite topic. Sometimes they shared details about past lovers—lovers they’d known about back in the days when they’d been only friends, but then they hadn’t listened for quite the same details, or with quite the same attention.
He told her about a girl in Sweden, who didn’t seem to mean much, and another in Ireland—Deirdre was her name, and she made a stronger impression. Jonas grew so concentrated while recalling her. He didn’t talk about the way she looked or her temperament. He talked about her past. During the Troubles, when Deirdre was eighteen, she drove a bomb-laden car for the IRA from Belfast to some nearby town and parked it near a police station. She left the car and took a bus, and by the time she arrived home, she flipped on the news to find that the car bomb had detonated, killing several people.
“A terrorist? Your girlfriend was a terrorist?”
“One man’s terrorist . . .” Jonas began.
“But really,” Vic said. “People died.”
Jonas shook his head. “She had this . . . conviction, maturity. She was twelve years older than me, but it wasn’t her age; it was how committed she was to her decisions. Made me feel like a kid.”
“Didn’t she feel guilty?” The whole topic made Vic uneasy. She couldn’t tell if her unease was fueled by simple jealousy or something else, but she hoped Jonas would pronounce some judgment against this Deirdre to make her feel safer.
“Only difference between the statesman and the terrorist leader,” he said, “is that one is still in a position of weakness, while the other is part of the government. Sometimes it takes physical force to prevent an issue from vanishing.”
Jonas’s eyes had a faraway look that made Vic long to bring him back, so she climbed on top of him. “Okay. Physical force. So this issue. Doesn’t vanish,” she said, and began kissing him, pulling him away from those old-girlfriend memories and returning him to the moment with her.
Vic was the more experienced in the arena of lovemaking; they’d both always known that. She’d wondered if this might make Jonas jealous, but it seemed only to make him laugh. Once, after they’d rolled together on the bed, almost like children, for hours, he sprang up naked and knelt on the floor and bowed a few times and said, “Thank you to all your previous lovers, because everything they taught you, I am now gathering that fruit and it sustains my life.” She laughed and pulled him back to bed, wrapping her legs around him again.
Once not so long ago, he held her hand over his chest, spread her fingers out, and they lay there breathing together, matching each inhalation and exhalation, alert but as still as if they were jointly meditating. He seemed about to tell her something, even began speaking a word she couldn’t make out, but then he broke off. She didn’t press him because she figured it was about them. About the unexpected quality of this romance, its intensity and resonance. He’d already said some of that, once or twice. She smiled, thinking of it, and wished he were here right now, sprawled on her couch.
She was more circumspect than Jonas in expressing her emotions. Experience had taught her that what seemed real was too often revealed to be false. She’d learned that lesson early in high school, observing her friends who claimed to be “in love,” and her skepticism was only reinforced by her parents’ split, which Vic knew, even if neither her mother nor Mara did, had been a long time in coming. Maybe as a consequence, whenever Vic began to feel strong attachment, her throat invariably grew tight, making endearments reluctant to emerge and awkward when they did. It was as if vulnerability caused a physical reaction that left her close to inarticulate. Jonas never complained about her reticence; he never even mentioned it.
But maybe she’d been too guarded this time. She didn’t need, after all, to get caught up in considering the future, what would and wouldn’t be, what might change, as her mother had warned, because this moment was what existed now, and for this moment, it was good—better than good. Besides, this was Jonas. She trusted him, had trusted him even before. And now, when she was with him, she felt something that had been clenched within her opening, wide and wider, causing a delicious sensation, the sensation of possibility. Greater courage in the face of emotional exposure: maybe that was what Jonas could teach her, because in this arena, she was a virgin. So maybe next time she saw him—maybe tonight, in fact, in the midst of ravaging his sweet body—she would bypass her caution, put her hands on his heart, and let him know what depths she held inside.
NEW YORK: 2:27 P.M.
MECCA: 10:27 P.M.
The first thing Mara needed was a subway map, because if she intended to get up very early, she should be clear beforehand on where exactly she was headed. It would be nice if she could have her father’s precise address, but she didn’t know that and didn’t know how to get it. She could ask neither her mother nor her father because the simple request would involve too many questions that she didn’t want to answer, not now. She planned to get in the general vicinity of her father’s new apartment, come aboveground, and call him on her cell phone. He would rush out to the street to meet her, and he would offer to make her pancakes or buy her a bagel, and over breakfast, he’d hear her out. Thankfully, she at least knew his cross streets. He’d given her the names in the one real exchange they’d had about his moving out, a conversation held at a neighborhood café where he’d taken her for a chocolate croissant. Until then, chocolate croissants had been her favorite; now just the sight of them nauseated her.
“We don’t know how long it will be for,” he’d said in response to her first question. “We’ll just see, and I don’t want you to worry, and of course I’m still your father,” he’d waved his hand, “and your mother is your mother, all that, you know. You’ll come and see me soon, I hope. And you know, little angel—you’re such a smart girl—you know nothing is your fault. Nothing is anyone’s fault, in fact. No one is to blame, and I’m not sure anyone ever is.” Then he’d covered her hand with his and stared into her eyes. “Do you understand?”
Mara had looked around uncomfortably. Customers were sitting at three other tables, but they all seemed fully involved in their own dialogues. The waitress, though, was clearly watching this little drama between Mara and her father. Casually combing her hair with the fingers of her left hand, she watched with knowing, though only mildly interested, eyes—probably happened every week, some guilty dad brought his kids in for chocolate croissants and the Talk, and here was another one, and maybe it would mean a good tip, because wasn’t there some connection between guilt and money that could end up benefiting everyone at moments like this, even observers who did nothing more than refresh the water?
“Sometimes what we want changes,” Mara’s father had said. “Now, that I know you can understand.” He ran a hand across his forehead as though wiping away invisible sweat. “Let’s see,” he said. “When you were four years old—here’s a good example—you wanted a blue hat. You wanted a blue straw hat more than anything in the world. That’s the exact expression you used with your mother and me. I think you must have seen a picture somewhere, or maybe you conjured it up in your own mind, but it was November, your birthday, and blue straw hats were hard to come by. Blue straw is an Easter hat, not one for Thanksgiving.” He chuckled, but Mara just watched him, silent. “Well, anyway, we searched everywhere. Finally we found one in a children’s clothing store in the Village. We had to ask—it wasn’t on display, but they had one leftover and sitting in the back room, and they brought it out and it was sky blue and your mother and I almost yelped with happiness. And now, where is that blue hat? Who knows? It doesn’t matter. I mean, it does, but you’ve changed and you
’ve grown and you wanted it then but you want other things now. And that’s as it should be. That’s healthy.”
Mara glanced away from her father, looking out the window. She did know where the blue hat was—stuck in the corner of the shelf inside her closet. And actually, she did still love it. But she knew she was being nitpicky, unwilling to concede anything to her father and intentionally refusing to absorb his argument when in fact it was true that she no longer wanted the blue hat with the desperation that her father had described, if she’d ever wanted it that way. She just kept it. She kept it fondly. But she would never wear it again.
After staring out the window long enough to make a point about how she wouldn’t be won over by some memory, some childhood story that demonstrated her parents’ previous attentiveness, she turned back to her father. “So, where do you live now?”
He chuckled a little again. Guilt, it turned out, made him tolerant of Mara’s belligerent tone. “Off Kingston, near St. John’s,” he’d said. “Across the bridge, in Brooklyn, but it’s still very close and you’ll come see my apartment soon and if you want, I can draw you a map right now.”
She’d refused, which she wished now she hadn’t, but she’d asked him to spell the names of the streets and he’d taken out a pen and written them down on a napkin: “Kingston” and “St. Johns,” and she’d put the napkin in her pocket, and he’d smiled as though something were settled between them, as though he’d accomplished what he’d set out to do, and soon after, they left the café. At home, she put the napkin under her pillow so she could sleep on those two words, as though she were bringing Kingston and St. Johns into this apartment, bringing her father home.
Her mother did not have any metro maps in the apartment. Her mother knew the metro system, and if she didn’t know something, she looked at the maps posted underground, in the stations themselves. Her mother never kept unnecessary paperwork in the house. Her father sometimes took days, even weeks, to read the New York Times, but her mother was religious about trying to throw away magazines and Vic’s and Mara’s graded school papers and notes scrawled on scraps of paper as soon as she could get away with it. Once, thinking about this, Mara decided it was because her mother worked with so many papers in her job, always editing one manuscript or another, that she needed to keep them to a minimum at home. But then she realized her father worked with the same number of papers, and stacks of paper didn’t bother him, even seemed to please him. So she stopped thinking about it.
Mara’s mother was in her room when Mara called through the door, “Mom? I’m going downstairs to see Aaron. Okay?”
Her mother opened the bedroom door. “Oh, honey,” she said. “I’ve been such bad company today. Yes, go see Aaron. Great. Good. Just come back up in time for dinner, okay?”
Mara wasn’t allowed to go many places by herself. Her parents or Vic or some other adult always accompanied her, even to the corner to buy something for school from the stationery store. “You’re too small,” her mother often said. “Someone could pick you up and walk away with you in a second.” So Aaron’s was about the only place Mara was allowed to go on her own, and that had probably made them better friends than they might have been. Now Mara walked down three flights instead of taking the elevator. She knew Aaron would be home on a Sunday afternoon, and she knew Aaron would have a subway map, or if he didn’t, he would still be able to tell her how to get to Kingston and St. Johns.
Aaron answered the door, and his mother was right behind him, saying, “Oh, hi, Mara, come on in.” Mara smiled and nodded but gave Aaron a quick, meaningful look so he would know she didn’t want to sit in the kitchen and eat a snack and chat with his mother. She wanted to go to his room fast so they could talk privately.
Aaron was twelve, a year older than Mara, and a genius about the New York City subway system. While other boys outgrew their fascination with trains by middle school, for Aaron it had become an obsession, an alternate reality. He still kept train tracks under his bed. His favorite clothes were those that bore the emblems of subway lines. And he knew the history of the metro system as well as he knew the shape of his own body. Given the slightest encouragement, he would reveal that the first underground line had opened in New York City in 1904, that they had sliced open the sidewalk in order to build the tunnel and then reconstructed it. “Like open-heart surgery,” he liked to say. He knew how much certain lines had cost, and he could recall off the top of his head subway crime statistics over the years. It was all organized in his mind like a computer, and to Mara it was so amazing that it made up for the fact that Aaron was a little bit nerdy and not in possession of much in the way of humor.
“What subway do I have to take to get from here into Brooklyn, to St. John’s and Kingston?” Mara asked as soon as Aaron closed the door to his bedroom.
“Hmm,” he said. For a few minutes, he studied a map of all the boroughs that took up one wall in his bedroom. “Here it is,” he said finally. “The Utica Avenue stop on the number 4 would be best, I think. Atlantic Center is a mix of trains. There may be other ways you could do it. The S-train, for example. Is this weekend or weekday? Is it before or after midnight?”
“Weekday. About 6 A.M.,” she said.
He turned away from the map and looked at her without speaking for a moment. “This isn’t theoretical, then?”
“What did you think, I wanted to know for a social studies test or something?” Mara asked, though not unkindly.
Aaron took off his glasses, cleaned both lenses on his T-shirt, and replaced them on his face. “What do you need to know for?”
“My dad,” Mara said. “That’s where he’s living now.”
Aaron nodded knowingly. Aaron knew all about Mara’s parents—or at least, as much as Mara knew. His own father, a surgeon, had lived apart from his mother as long as Aaron could remember, so Aaron considered that normal, and that was why Mara knew she could tell him about her parents and have someone to talk with who would be matter-of-fact about what felt to her like an earthquake.
“I could tell you how to get there,” Aaron said. “I could give you a few ways. But your dad will show you.”
“I’m not going with my dad,” Mara said.
Aaron sat down on his bed. “Your mom?” he asked.
“No, and not Vic, either. I’m going alone.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow. I’m going to see my dad and tell him how it is, and I’m going to . . .” Mara broke off, suddenly thinking she might cry and knowing Aaron could hear that possibility in her voice.
Aaron stood up awkwardly. “You want a glass of water?” he asked as he headed for the door, and he didn’t wait for an answer. When he returned a minute later, Mara was fine; she didn’t need the water and didn’t even want to take it, but Aaron held it out.
“Thanks,” she said.
“What time are we going?” he asked.
“We?”
He nodded.
“What about school?”
“Yes,” he said. “What about school?”
She smiled. She almost wanted to hug Aaron. “I’m going to be late for school,” she said. “I’m figuring my mom will understand.”
“And I guess you and your dad are going to want to talk without me, but maybe I can sit in the kitchen or something. Does he have a kitchen?”
“Yes. Probably. I mean, I don’t know, but doesn’t everyone have a kitchen?”
“Okay,” Aaron said. “I’ll set my alarm and meet you outside your door.”
“What’ll you tell your mom?’
Aaron tipped his head. “I’ll tell her I’m meeting a friend early at school to study. She’ll be so happy I have a friend that she won’t ask more.” He took the water glass from her and set it on his window ledge. He stood in front of the piano they kept in his room and banged a couple keys. “Hey,” he said, “what time do you have to be home?”
“Dinnertime.”
“Okay, so . . . you want to watch The French Connection b
efore dinner?”
She didn’t because she’d already seen it with him twice. But she knew he loved watching New York subway scenes in movies, and he especially loved The French Connection with the hit man trying to escape on the subway car, and Mara figured she owed him. Besides, she could pretend; she knew how to do that. She could pretend to enjoy it again. So she nodded, “Yeah, sure,” and managed to grin as she followed him to the corner of the living room where they kept the DVD player, and he found the movie and they sank together onto the couch, Aaron looking as full of anticipation as if it were the first time, his expression alone enough to make Mara’s grin real.
NEW YORK: 2:33 P.M.
MECCA: 10:33 P.M.
Before submerging into the subway station, Carol fumbled in her pocket to pull out her cell phone, hoping for a missed call from Jonas. Instead she found a text from Lorenzo: “Dinner 2nite? Seafood? Bizness only, if u insist.” The message made her smile, though only briefly. Lorenzo was a source of guilt right now. They’d met six months ago when she, musing over the ways her life could or should change now that Jonas had long since moved out, had applied for a job as a teacher at an upscale pottery studio Lorenzo owned, one connected to a Manhattan spa. He’d been complimentary, and then interested, and then romantic, and she’d lost her head. It had been the first time in a long time, something she’d rarely permitted herself when Jonas was younger. For a few weeks, she’d been the one out of touch and so hadn’t been paying attention to her son just when, her intuition now suggested, she should have been. Mothering was a lifetime, full-time job.
“Maybe. Let’s talk later,” she texted back. She had no desire to tell him about her Jonas-related fears. So far their relationship had been carefree, almost child-like. She couldn’t imagine Lorenzo as a partner in the problems of real life. She returned her cell phone to her pocket, took a last look into the pale sky that hovered above the city, and then headed down the subway steps, littered with discarded MetroCards like golden autumn leaves, memories from trips taken, time gone by.
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