“Huh,” he said, then paused. “So they didn’t get summers off, or . . . ?”
“They do their field work in the summer. Digs all over the place. They’re on one now, actually.” As they got older, it bothered Nora more, but she didn’t suppose that mattered much. Once her dad had told her he hoped he was lucky enough to die on a dig.Doing what I love, he’d said, and Nora—who’d been twelve at the time—had felt almost breathless with hurt.
“They never took you along?”
She shook her head. “It would’ve gotten in the way with their work, I think.”
Now that—thatwas straight out of her mom’s script.Nora, it’s simply not practical for me to come to Nonna’s with you this year. Nora, it wouldn’t be worth it for you to travel all the way to Greece, not with the schedule your father and I have planned.
“And anyway, I liked coming here. There were always people around.”
Beside her, Will laughed again, a soft, knowing sound. Probably he was thinking of all the kitten visits she didn’t get to come over for.
“Always,” he said, a trace of indulgent sarcasm in his voice.
She smiled over at him. “I think maybe my body knew this was an okay place to be sick? A safe place. My parents, they weren’t really . . . nurturers. They didn’t have time for that.”
She paused, caught herself tugging on the ends of her hair, an old habit that had been, in her younger years, a constant source of frustration to her mother, and also the reason for the infamous Ringo haircut she’d had for her first summer here. But she was probably being unfair to her parents. They still called her, still checked on her. They’d made sure she’d had what she needed, growing up. They were smart and interesting and worldly. They told her they loved her all the time, and she believed them.
But . . . they hadn’t been like Nonna. They had never been like Nonna. They had never taught her about the things they loved; they had never cooked with her or stayed up late to do old jigsaw puzzles with her or planted pots of vegetables with her. They had never asked her what she was reading or told her about what they were reading; they had never regaled her with long, winding stories about their lives, full of the names of people she’d never met and never would.
She shut her eyes against a wave of golden hour grief, the kind that had kept her company all through the winter.
“That’s probably not how sickness works, I know,” she added, when she felt like she could speak again.
The mattress shifted as he moved, lifting the leg he’d had on the floor up to stretch beside the one on the bed. “I only ever got sick during my residency when I had a run of days off, it seemed like. The body does all kinds of things, in response to stress.”
“Oh,” she rushed out, embarrassed by the comparison. “I don’t want to act like it was stressful, with my parents.”
Itwas, though. It was stressful to spend so much time alone. It was stressful that it wasn’t easy to make friends, that most of her socialization came from people who were way older than her. It was stressful to feel small and inconvenient, to feel like you spent nine months of your year looking forward to three, to come back at the end of them and feel like you had to get used to life all over again. It was still stressful, all these years later.
Will was quiet, and Nora felt a sinking sense of embarrassment, of disappointment. That had been a bad volley, and now it was poetry night, all over again: this was not something he wanted to talk to her about. To bond with her about. No matter that she thought they might have this in common.
“My parents, they were kind of like yours.”
She stilled, desperate not to move, or to speak, to do anything that would break this brand-new early-morning spell.
“Not about work, but about—” He broke off, ran a hand through his hair. When he spoke again, he rushed the words out, so quick that Nora couldn’t even be sure she heard him right. “About each other.”
“Each other?”
He cleared his throat, scratched at a spot on his chest. “Yeah. They were . . . they met pretty young, when they were teenagers. They were tied up in each other, always. Obsessed with each other. They never wanted to be apart.”
Nora swallowed, a sick feeling that had nothing to do with her sinus infection settling into her stomach. Another memory from poetry night:My dad passed when I was seventeen, my mom about a year later.
“That sounds intense,” she said. She wouldn’t say—wouldn’task—anything else.
He didn’t speak for a long time, and all Nora could do was lie there beside him, that not-balcony space between them feeling like floors and floors of distance. What would it be like, she wondered, to close it? To scoot her body across that space and lie right next to him, and tomeanto, this time? To not fall asleep on accident, but to say with her body that she could tell he’d said something painful, something honest?
“It was isolating,” he said, and then shrugged. “I had buddies from school, but then I—well, I had a lot of responsibilities at home that kept me pretty busy. I’m not even sure I ever learned how to be a good friend. And obviously, I didn’t have any . . .”
He trailed off and made a gesture toward the air around them, to the structure around them, and Nora had to swallow around the shock of sadness she felt, seeing him do that. Exactly what she’d been trying to get him to see about this place, and it was the hollowest sort of victory.
“Family,” she whispered, not even really meaning to. Once she realized she had uttered the word, she thought that would be the end of it, frankly. Mentioning his parents, that had been huge, she figured. There was no way he’d bring up—
“Donny and my mom,” he said, and Nora held her breath. Easy enough, what with the sinuses. “They’d stopped speaking, a long time before. Back when my parents first got together and then when my mom left home for good. I never met him until we came here, the once.”
She wanted to ask a hundred questions. She’d start with:What year, what month, what day?
