No One Knows Us Here(30)

He turned toward me, placed a hand on my hip.

“I can’t believe we just met,” I said.

“I know.”

“I feel like we’ve known each other forever.”

“Me too.”

We must have known each other in a past life, I told him. When you meet someone and feel that connection, like you know them and you’ve always known them, it’s because you do know them. You’ve known them for centuries. Like your souls are linked by threads, crisscrossed over millennia.

Sam blinked at me. “You believe that?”

“A lot of cultures believe in it. In reincarnation.”

“Do you believe it?”

I wanted to believe it, I told him. I wanted to believe it the way I wanted to believe in a lot of things, like Santa Claus.

He never believed in Santa Claus. His parents didn’t approve of lying to children, he told me, his voice fading, his eyelids drooping back closed.

I was glad, I decided, as I sank into sleep. Glad I’d been given the choice to believe in a magical man who lived at the North Pole and made toys with elves and rode in a sleigh with reindeer. What was the alternative? To believe in nothing? That Santa Claus was just some old dead saint? I’d rather believe in something beautiful, something greater than reality.



In the morning we bathed together in Sam’s claw-foot tub. Sam sat behind me, brushing my hair, careful not to drop it in the bubbles. We didn’t talk much, still bleary from sleep. We sipped coffee out of china teacups we’d found in a box in the extra bedroom.

“Finished,” he said, and I pulled my hair to the top of my head, twisting it around itself until it stuck together in a bun. I leaned back, resting against his chest, and he closed his arms around me, and my eyelids drifted down.

A terrible sound sent me jolting upright. Water splashed out of the tub and onto the tile floor. The sound of shattering glass, like a car crash, like a rock hurled through a window.

“What the—” Sam began to lift himself out of the tub, but I whirled around and stopped him, pressing him back down. The water churned as I propelled myself out of the tub, wrapping myself in the nearest piece of cloth, some sad old towel dangling from a hook. “It’s nothing,” I said. “It’s me—it’s my phone.”

The glass was still shattering, in a loop. The Mirror’s ringtone, coming from the bottom of my handbag on the floor of Sam’s bedroom.

When I got to the Mirror, it was glowing. I tapped the screen, and Alejandro’s voice emerged from the device. He’d sent me five messages, he said. Where was I?

A minute later, I returned to the bathroom. I was already dressed. Sam was still in the bath, leaning back, his face lifted, as if he were inspecting the ceiling. I knew this would be it, the end. I tried my best to sound normal, but I didn’t succeed. I sounded like a bad actor in a play. “I have to go,” I told him. “Work emergency.”

“See you tonight?” He gave me a strange look I couldn’t read, and I went over to him. I bent down and kissed him hard on the mouth.





CHAPTER 11


Fifteen minutes later, I was standing on the curb outside my building. A black SUV pulled up next to me, and I got in the passenger seat. “A little advance notice would have been nice,” I said.

“Good morning to you, too,” said Alejandro. He pulled out into the street and drove south, toward Burnside.

“My sister is coming this weekend. I can’t have random people driving up in black SUVs and whisking me off at the spur of the moment like this.”

Alejandro was wearing sunglasses despite the gloomy weather. The rain clouds hung heavily over the hills and into the city. With both hands on the steering wheel, he shrugged. “I did tell you. I told you I’d need to run some errands with you the last time I saw you. And I texted you yesterday. And this morning.”

I turned my head to watch the buildings blur by. What Alejandro said was true. I hadn’t exactly been keeping on top of my messages.

“Did you bring everything I told you to bring?” Alejandro asked.

“Yes,” I said to the scenery out the window.

“Your driver’s license and birth certificate? Social security card?”

“I told you I brought everything.”

“Just checking.”

We spent the next hour at the passport office on Hawthorne. Leo wanted me to apply for a passport, Alejandro explained, in case he decided to take me on one of his trips. This cheered me up somewhat, imagining where he would take me. I had visions of walking over stone bridges in Kyoto, or along the Seine. Climbing the Matterhorn. Drinking tea from a samovar.

“I’ve never really been anywhere,” I said.

After the passport office, Alejandro said we had one more stop. My stomach felt hollow. I hadn’t eaten anything this morning. I felt a pang, then, for Sam.

We took another ten-minute drive, and then Alejandro parked in front of a new-looking brick office building. “Here we are,” he said.

“Where?”

Alejandro didn’t answer. I followed him into the building, and we waited by a bank of elevators. “Are you going to tell me what we’re doing here?” I asked.

We rode the elevator down to the basement and stepped out into a long corridor. The walls were yellow. I hated it when people painted basement walls yellow, as if that would trick anyone into forgetting that they were underground, surrounded by nothing but dirt and tree roots and darkness.