What was different was… Sicily.
My feet slowed until I was standing there in front of the dark, papered windows of the empty storefront next to the pub.
I didn’t know how I felt about Sicily being out there in the world. I felt… something. Like I could see past all the buildings, all the noise, to a wide horizon. What was that? Was this potential? Hope?
When I was six years old, I’d sat on a bus with Alex, just like that girl with her mom. Just torn from my mother, though she’d been pushing me away. On that ride into the city, I sat low in my seat, still smarting from the display I’d put on at the moment of separation. I was strung out, didn’t know where I’d end up. Only the clothes on my back.
The first of many times, barely the skin on my bones.
That bus ride had felt like such a long journey to a kid, but probably hadn’t been. When we’d arrived at the bungalow that day, Alex had showed me to my room, gracious but stiff, not showing even a hint of enthusiasm to have me there. Which had made sense to me in a way a gushing welcome wouldn’t have. When he left me in the bedroom he’d put together for me to get settled, I locked the door and crawled into the bed that Alex, this stranger, had said was mine. I couldn’t trust it. He had put a new, pristine-white comforter on that bed, and new sheets just for me, blue. The color of home, that specific blue.
For a moment, I thought of the curtains at the window of the room I shared with Joey, of his sleepy smile as he woke up and reached for me—
No. Joey, it had turned out, was no home for me.
That day, arriving at Alex’s house, I’d buried myself within the safety, the cleanliness, the flowery smells. In that word:mine. But I hadhad something before, too. Hadn’t she been mine, too? I had crawled into that bed, pulling the blankets up and over me, cocooned within, and falling dead asleep for something like sixteen hours. When I finally showed my face, I ate everything put in front of me, two big bowls of cereal and some toast—
And pocketed a butter knife, just in case.
A sharp cold gust sliced at my exposed neck. I was still out in the elements, drawn up next to the window of the empty storefront, my hands tucked into my armpits.
The distance between the child slipping the butter knife off the table and the little girl tonight on the train was a chasm I’d thought couldn’t be crossed. But now I wasn’t sure. I’d got something wrong.
Marisa had made it through, somehow. I was the one who still—
Who couldn’t—
I dropped my hands and turned back for the mouth of the alley.
“Hey, buddy?” I stepped gingerly across the ice. “They have a warming station a few blocks from here.”
My voice bounced off the bricks of the dead end and back.
“Or just come in to the pub for some coffee. Or a sandwich? Are you hungry?”
The wind howled past me. Threads of hair fallen from my ponytail lashed at my eyes. I brushed it away with stinging fingers.
“Sir?”
The bundle of clothes and rags did not react or shift. I couldn’t detect a chest rising.
Oh, no.
I would kick myself if one warm blanket the night before might have made the difference. If I’d got caught up in my little dramas and had cost someone everything.
The guy had burritoed himself up in a blue vinyl tarp—no, it wasn’t a tarp. A blanket? But a blanket was nothing against this wind.
I edged closer until I could reach in to peel back a corner of his covering. The weave of the blanket was coarser than expected, and stuck to the ice.
“Sir,” I whispered.
Somewhere in between the idea of tugging back the fabric and actually doing it, I had come to accept that it was too late for warming stations, for charity. I knew. I knew it was too late. The first sight of his skin, a sliver of neck, told me everything I needed to know. His skin was a terrible color, the cloudy gray of stone and death and the end, and his face—
I knew more and everything and nothing, standing there with a pinch of rough blue cloth in my fingers and the wind moaning over us, the both of us, here, together.
But it was not the air keening mournfully, through and around.
I stumbled backward. The low noise in my own throat rose up and up and up. I fumbled for my phone and was on the ice again, hands and knees, and scrabbling for the opening of the alley. Scraped hands, empty pocket, forgetting.
