The Last Flight(45)

She smiles. “No thanks necessary. You seem like someone who could use a break. I know a little something about that.”

Before I can say anything else, she passes through the swinging doors into the back and I’m left standing there, amazed at my good fortune.

*

It’s only seven in the morning, and the idea of going straight back to Eva’s and hiding out for the rest of the day makes me feel twitchy. So instead, I walk across campus and over to Telegraph Avenue. I stand outside the student union, watching people move through the intersection and toward wherever it is they’re going, unaware of how lucky they are to have the privilege of easy conversation with others. To debate, or laugh together at a joke. To share a meal, and maybe later, a pillow. And I feel the tug to be one of them, just for a little while.

I cross the street, keeping my head angled down and my hands shoved deep into Eva’s coat pockets. Around me, panhandlers ask for money, people try to hand me flyers advertising bands, but I shake my head and keep walking.

I catch flashes of my reflection in shop windows as I walk, and I stop in front of a clothing store and stare at myself. With my short blond hair poking out of the bottom of my cap and Eva’s coat, it’s like looking at a ghost. People swirl on the sidewalk behind me—laughing students, homeless people, aging hippies—but all I see are strangers I can never know. I will never have the freedom to sit down and open myself up to someone else, never be able to talk freely about my mother and Violet, about who I am and where I’m from. This is the life I have ahead of me. Always being alert. Aware. Holding the most important parts of myself back.

I wait for a large group of students heading back toward campus and join them, walking close enough to give myself the illusion that I’m a part of them. That I’m not stranded in this new life alone. I follow them across the busy street that borders campus, peeling off as they make their way into the student union. I can walk among them, but I will never be one of them again.

*

On my way back to the house, I stop off at a supermarket to pick up a few basics. I grab a hand basket and find the cheap staples my mother used to buy—off-brand bread and peanut butter, a large grape jelly. I skip her other favorites—rice, beans simmered in water with onion and garlic. I don’t want to be here long enough for leftovers.

In the checkout line, my eyes drift toward the magazine rack, and there it is on the cover of Stars Like Us magazine—a glossy tabloid somewhere between People and Us Weekly. “The Crash of Flight 477: Heartbreak as Families Try to Pick Up the Pieces.” And in the upper right corner, surrounded by others who were on the flight, is my picture. The caption reads Wife of philanthropist Rory Cook among the victims.

The photo had been taken at a gala at the Met a couple years ago. I was laughing at something someone had said off camera. But even though there’s a smile on my face, my eyes look empty. I understand better than most how secrets can live on your skin and how hard they are to hide, because the truth is always visible somehow.

I lay the magazine facedown on the conveyor belt and read the covers of the more scandalous tabloids. Rory hasn’t been covered like this since Maggie Moretti. “Rory Ravaged by Grief Seeks Solace in Mystery Woman” reads one, with a picture of Rory and a woman I’ve never seen before. With a jolt, I realize that someday, Rory will fall in love again, and a part of me feels guilty for walking away and leaving that trap open for someone else.

“How you doing today?” the checker asks as she begins scanning my groceries.

“Great, thanks,” I say, my voice quiet and strained, hoping to pay quickly before she takes too much notice of me. I hold my breath as she finishes and begins to bag everything, tossing the magazine in without a second glance. I remind myself that I don’t look like that woman anymore. Someone would have to study my features closely, the shape of my eyes, the freckle patterns across my cheeks, in order to see it. I look like Eva. I wear her clothes. Carry her purse. Live in her house. The woman on the cover of that magazine doesn’t exist anymore.

*

Back home again, I set the groceries down and dive into the magazine. A rolling unease passes through me as I look at the smiling faces of people who weren’t as lucky as I was. I force myself to imagine a picture of Eva, staring back at me from the page, the way she appears in my memory, frozen in time, determined, hopeful. And duplicitous.

It’s a four-page spread, with full-color photographs of the crash site. The article is almost all human interest, dissecting the victims’ lives, interviewing bereft loved ones. A newlywed couple embarking on their honeymoon. A family of six—the youngest only four years old—taking a long-awaited trip home. Two teachers on their way somewhere warmer for their annual February break. All of them lovely, vibrant souls extinguished in what was probably a long and terrifying descent into the ocean.

I save the feature about me and Rory for last. He’s sent them a picture from our wedding, staring into each other’s eyes, a background of twinkle lights and shadow. Among the victims was the wife of New York philanthropist Rory Cook, son of the late Senator Marjorie Cook. His wife, Claire, was traveling to Puerto Rico to assist with hurricane relief efforts. “Claire was a shining light in my life,” Cook said. “She was generous, funny, and kind. She made me a better man, and I will be forever changed by having loved her.”

I sit, trying to reconcile the words with the man I knew. Identity is a strange thing. Are we who we say we are, or do we become the person others see? Do they define us by what we choose to show them, or what they see despite our best attempts to conceal it? Rory’s words alongside a happy wedding photograph paint one picture, but the people reading this magazine can’t see what he was like before or after it was taken. And there are clues, if you know where to look. They’re there, in the way he grips my elbow, in the angle of his head, the way he leans forward and I lean back.