Our Crooked Hearts(62)

Lying on his futon by the window, street light coming in. Early February, each of us pretending we didn’t remember it was three months exactly since we’d met. “I know you don’t want me to say it.” His breath warm in my hair. “I know you’re not ready to hear it. But, Dana…”

I sat up, into the light. I’d gotten lucky, his place smelled like books and coffee and the must of wet laundry. And like him, a scent that had crept up on me, that made me equal parts restless and inflamed, oppressed and heady. Sometimes when Rob was sleeping and held on to me too tight, my brain said, Run run run. When he was awake he kept hold of me so lightly. Like I was a sparrow on a palm, a wild thing that might take off at the first sign of curling fingers.

Now I stepped swiftly from his bed. “You don’t know me that well.”

He sat up to look at me. At the blurred planes of me, he didn’t reach for his glasses. His face was in shadow, his torso lit pale as a piece of statuary. “I know you as well as you’ll let me. I want to know everything.”

“That’s a childish thing to say. Also, a lie. Nobody wants to know everything.”

His hair stood up like a wave in a surf video. “Fair. But I want to know more. I love—I love all the things that I know. Can I say that much?”

My body was hot and cold, stay and go, stalled in place by opposing pressures. “You know all the good stuff and almost none of the bad. I love things about you, too. Okay? I love enough things that I feel sick thinking what it’ll be like. When you know the bad things about me.”

When I said love his face sweetened. When I said it again, I knew I wasn’t going anywhere. At least not tonight.

“What could be so bad?” he said softly. Twenty-three years old but somehow younger than I was at nineteen. “Are you married? In the mob? Do you stand on the wrong side of the escalator? Did you kill someone?”

I laced my hands behind my neck, hoping he couldn’t hear the tremor in my throat. “I’m not doing this on purpose. It’s not an act, I’m not trying to be mysterious.”

He put his glasses on then and really looked at me. “I would never think that of you. I’m just asking you to trust me a little. To let me know you better.”

My grad student. My earnest man. He still liked to smooth my hair over the pillow when I was falling asleep.

“Okay,” I told him, and climbed back into bed.

“Okay?” he said, into my neck.

I breathed. “Yes.”



* * *



I brought Rob to meet Uncle Nestor. He showed up with a bottle of wine that was five bucks better than what we usually drank and taught everyone how to play cribbage. Fee had already met him a few times, and by the end of the night my uncle loved him, too.

In May I felt off, perforated, the world coming at me in incorrect ways. Food smelled oddly sweet, like a bad banana. I was waiting tables at a Greek restaurant in Lincoln Square, walking distance from Rob’s place. On a Thursday night in June, too hot, the gamey fug of saganaki sent me flying into the bathroom to vomit.

When I came out my least favorite waitress was waiting for me. Phoebe of the rat-black eyes, the coke-carved frame, the only girl on staff who spoke Greek so the owner let her get away with red murder.

“It’s Gabriel’s, isn’t it?” she said. Gabriel was a fifty-something line cook who liked to follow girls into the walk-in cooler. “If you’re nice I’ll give you a ride to Planned Parenthood.”

“Don’t fucking talk to me,” I said, shouldering past her.

“Excuse me?” Her lip went up. “Hey. Bitch.”

There was a ringing in my head, icy-thin and high as planets. It was star song. A memory from the night I first opened my hands to magic.

A book of matches was tucked into the pocket of my apron. I pinched one free, snapped it, spoke two star-bright syllables. Phoebe screamed as the sconce beside her head burst, raining glass pieces over her hair.

I ran the block to Walgreens, and peed on the stick in a bar bathroom. The light was so murky I had to turn and turn it before I could see the results. Then I wrapped the stick in toilet paper and shoved it deep into the trash.

Leaning my forehead against the damp wood of the doorframe, I listened to the jukebox whirring on the other side of the wall. Give me something, I thought, some clue. Through the door came the opening strains of “Stratford-on-Guy.”

I took a cab I couldn’t afford so I could get home quicker. From the street I saw Fee moving in the window. I took the stairs at a run and slipped halfway up the second flight, coming down hard on one knee. The jolt made me clutch at my stomach, thinking for the first time of what I carried. Not the idea of it, but the actual fiddlehead curl.

Fee was already crossing to the door when I opened it. She’d heard me fall.

“What happened?”

I held on to her like a failing swimmer. “Remember when we were kids and we knew one of us would die young? Like your mom did, when you were born, and she left my mom all alone?”

Her eyes were already wet. “I remember.”

“I’m pregnant.”

My best friend breathed in, not quite a gasp. She wrapped her arms around me tightly and held me in the green light.





CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX



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