The Wangs vs. the World(96)
“How much land do you think you can claim with this?” she asked, teasing.
He laughed, too, and sat down next to her. “All of it.”
“Hmm.”
Charles folded her into his arms, leaning the still-warms tufts of his hair—baby soft now and snowier every day—against her forehead. She inhaled his clean-laundry and fresh-earth smells, so familiar and good. Inside, Barbra felt loose, liquid. She leaned back and his arms locked, supporting her. As you grew older, there were fewer thrills in life but, despite everything that was happening all around, discovering that her lost ID had been in Charles’s possession all these decades was undoubtedly one of them.
“Did you really have this? For such a long time?”
He grinned in a way she hadn’t seen since before everything went bad.
“You dropped it one day. I pick it up to give back to you, but then I decide that I want to save it so that I can talk to you in the future.”
“But you never did.”
“I came to America.”
“But you said you hardly remembered me!”
“I remember all the important parts.”
He moved closer to her and placed the back of his hand against her cheek. She turned her head and caught his fingers in a kiss. They both closed their eyes and sat like that, almost but not entirely together. Barbra breathed in with her husband’s every exhale; he breathed out with her every inhale. It was quiet in Saina’s house, no helicopters or police sirens to cut through the stillness. She took hold of his hand and kissed the fingers again, altogether and then separately. He moved closer. They weren’t so old. Not yet. The familiar desire still rose within her as he let everything else fall away and focused, slack jawed, on her alone.
When was the last time they had been together like this, both of them completely present and desiring? They fell back together on the bed, but before she could pull off her nightgown, Charles stopped.
“You think I am very foolish for wanting to go.”
“Not foolish. No. But is it necessary for it to happen right now? We just got here. Wait a few days. Rest.” For a moment she felt desperate that he stay; they’d only just found each other again. “If you buy a ticket right now with that cash, they might think you’re a terrorist.”
“I cannot wait any more. I’ve waited already for fifty-six years. My children are starting to think that they need to take care of me. If I wait longer, they will be mushing my food and taking away my beer.”
Barbra didn’t want to, but she understood.
“Do you want to come as well?” Charles asked.
She considered for a moment, knowing what she had to say. “If you want me to come, I will go. But I think you don’t. I think you want to go by yourself.”
The moonlight was spreading. Now the shadow of the diamond windowpane angled over the bed. Charles looked at her in that silvery glow and slowly, slowly, pushed his finger up inside the fluttery sleeve of her nightgown and hooked the collar, tugging it off her shoulder.
εεδΈ
Helios, NY
EACH STAIR leading up to the third floor made its own sort of creak. Saina didn’t know them as well as she knew the second-floor stairs yet; those she ran up in a pattern of leaps and side steps, appreciating anew the narrow Uzbek carpet that she’d installed as a runner and congratulating herself when she reached the top without a sound. Not that it mattered when she was living in this house alone.
When she had come to Helios six months ago, Saina told herself that she bought this big place because it just made more sense. After a decade of accepting the distorted reality of three-million-dollar third-floor walk-ups in TriBeCa and SoHo, the idea that she might possess a hundred-year-old house with four bedrooms on twenty-one acres for a fraction of that price was not something that she could bypass. After all, she could redo this place and resell it—instead of making art, she could bring old farmhouses back to life. Or she could invite other people—writers and composers and scientists, even—to do residencies here, hire a good cook, and have intelligent, ebullient dinners at long tables in the garden that would lead to cross-disciplinary collaborations and long marriages. Or she could just restore this bucolic dream and keep it when she moved back to the city to reassume her rightful place.
Really, though, Saina bought an oversize property because she had to. A grand project meant that this was a pivot rather than a retreat, even if anyone who bothered to look could see the lie of that.
Or maybe she was psychic. A new home for the Wangs. Had she known when she was buying it that there were exactly enough rooms for her family? She had not! And yet now here they were.
Saina eased open the door to what had become Grace’s room. It was a three-quarter-size door and you had to duck as you entered, but the eaves shot up in the middle, giving it the feel of a rustic temple. Her little sister had all of the windows flung open, and a smattering of maple leaves dotted the coverlet, blown in from the ancient tree that stretched up and over the house. In half a second, Saina ran across the room and leapt on Grace, a warm, sleeping bundle.
“Gooooood morning, good morning, it’s time to greet the day!” she sang, wrapping her arms around Grace and squeezing her.
In response, Grace groaned and smiled, eyes still closed. “I can’t hear you. I’m asleep.”
“This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shiiiiiine!”