No One Knows Us Here(29)

We spread a blanket down on the threadbare Persian rug in his living room and ate bowls of pasta sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by his aunt’s oil paintings and velvet curtains and flickering beeswax candles. We drank our wine from Czech crystal. We ripped the baguette apart with our hands and dipped it in olive oil. I told him I always ate like this, on the floor. When I used to babysit Wendy, that was what we’d do.

“What if it’s a mistake?” I asked Sam. It could be a huge mistake, letting my sister move in with me. I was afraid, I admitted. Afraid of making everything worse. She hated her grandmother, sure, but her grandmother was at least a proper adult. I wasn’t ready for this level of responsibility. I wasn’t cut out for it.

Sam said all the right things. He said I didn’t need to be a proper adult. I didn’t need to know what I was doing. All my sister wanted was to be with me.

We kissed then and I thought: We could grow old here. Me, Sam, and Wendy. We could open up the walls between these two apartments and stay here forever. It could be a happy ending for all of us, finding each other after losing so much. Sam could play the viola while spaghetti sauce simmered on the stove. And then—

I stopped myself from taking it any further, even in my head. I couldn’t believe how stupid the fantasy was. I had just met this guy. We hardly knew each other.

It seemed like we did, though. It seemed like we knew each other better than anyone.



When we finished eating, we each picked up a candlestick and wandered around his dark apartment, inspecting the paintings, the treasures from his aunt’s travels. Masks from Borneo. Lace from Venice. Painted plates from Mexico.

“What’s in here?” I asked, my hand on the doorknob of the second bedroom, the one next to Sam’s. I didn’t expect the knob to turn, but it did.

“Just my aunt’s things.”

I flicked on the light. The closet overflowed with clothes, fancy dresses and costumes that spanned the styles from the last three decades. A dress form in the corner wore what appeared to be a late nineteenth-century riding costume. Paintings—abstract ones, different from the landscapes and still lifes in the rest of the apartment—leaned against one wall.

“I never come in here,” Sam said.

I lifted a black shag wig from its Styrofoam head and placed it over Sam’s hair. I laughed so hard tears leaked out of my eyes and streamed down my cheeks. “You look like a member of KISS,” I said.

I picked up a lamp and looked around for a socket to plug it in. The cord was old, covered in cloth, but I stuck it in a socket, pulled the little chain by the bulb, and the bulb glowed with light. “It works!” I exclaimed needlessly, and directed the light to Sam, his expression still somber beneath that black wig.

“We shouldn’t touch anything,” he said, watching me riffle through a hatbox filled with silk gloves and clunky old costume jewelry. But then, a few minutes later, he held up a gold dress. “Try this on.”

The dress was shiny gold, in a scratchy woven fabric, like something a Barbie doll would wear. It came with a matching bolero jacket. I stood up and stripped down to my underwear and pulled it on, turning so Sam could zip me up in the back. “How do I look?”

He crowned me with a wig of cascading blonde curls. “Beautiful,” he said, and though I must have looked like I’d wandered off the set of an eighties soap opera, he seemed serious, like he meant it, and I tilted my head up so he could kiss me.

“We should go out. Like this,” I said. It was perfect. We could go wherever we wanted. I drew a mustache over Sam’s lip with an old eyeliner pencil I retrieved from an ancient makeup box and covered his eyes with oversize rhinestone sunglasses. A feathered mask obscured the entire top half of my face. “No one will recognize us. No one will know who we are.”

We went out to somewhere with thumping music, so loud we couldn’t talk, with a disco ball spinning, sending flashes of light over the dance floor. If there were Glasseyes, I didn’t see them, but I didn’t care. They couldn’t find me here, not in the gold dress, not with the blonde wig and the mask. Not with the rhinestone glasses and evil villain mustache. They were playing old songs, songs from the 1990s, my mother’s favorite dance songs. New Order and The Cure and OMD. We spun around on the dance floor, twirling around and around, and I closed my eyes and let him spin me in the middle of this crowd, all these people who didn’t know who we were and would never be able to describe us.

We made out in the taxi on our way home. In the elevator, Sam tried to pull off my wig. I said no, not yet. As soon as we stumbled inside, we ripped off the wigs, the clothes, our disguises. We fell onto the blanket we’d left in the middle of the living room floor. Bread crumbs pressed into our skin.

I wanted it to stay dark forever. I wanted the night to go on and on. Once the sun came up, it would all be over. We’d have to clean up and fold up the blankets, and nothing would be the same. I couldn’t ask him to wait for me—just wait, right here, freeze!—while I ran off with a billionaire.

As long as it was still dark outside, we could stay together. It would be a good time for the world to end. Right now. A zombie apocalypse, a plague. Something that made us—no, required us to—stay here, nail boards over the windows and hunker down until the crisis resolved. We could grow old in here. I knew we could.

“Sam?” I wanted to see if he was still awake. When he didn’t answer, I poked him with my finger. I shook him by the shoulders.