I nodded, accepting his offer. “Well, don’t leave me hanging,” I said. “What’syourfact?”
Brian stroked his thumb over the back of my knuckles, watching, as if he were certain I would vanish beneath his touch. “M&M’s stands for Mars and Murrie,” he said quietly. “My grandfather Carl’s pension came from Mars, and as a kid, I used to think that was amazing—that he got checks from outer space.” He took a fan of twenties out of his wallet and set it on top of the bill. “If you could go anywhere when you blink your eyes,” he asked, “where would you be?”
“Egypt.” The answer came as easily as my next heartbeat. “How about you?”
“Wherever you went, when you blinked,” Brian said.
I felt as if I had been transformed. When was the last time I had smiled, laughed, had a normal conversation? Waiting for my mother’s death was like a slow suffocation; I had been holding my breath for weeks. In this moment with Brian, I could escape. I wasn’t a girl whose mother was dying. I wasn’t a grad student whose future had been upended. I hadn’t left a relationship halfway across the globe.
I was just someone who needed to forget the real world for a little while.
In retrospect, I was probably not being fair to Wyattorto Brian. I was not thinking clearly. In fact, I was actively tryingnotto think.
We went back to the house he shared with his grandmother, who of course was not there. His room was painted in shades of gray and his sheets were charcoal. Then we were facing each other, naked, tangled at the ankles. His palms bracketed me, and I thought of his physicist’s ket, the quantum state of how a thing is. “I’ve never done this before,” Brian confessed. “Does that matter to you?”
“I have,” I told him. “Does that matter toyou?”
He smiled his sideways smile, then. “Well, one of us should know how to steer this thing,” he said, and he rose over me. His hair, like the feathers of a raven, fell onto my forehead as he kissed me.
When he arched like a bow I wrapped my arms and legs around him, as if he could carry me with him as he fell. It was too fast for me, though, and so I held on. I held him.
“Worth the wait?” I whispered.
He blushed all over his body. “No physicist worth a damn would run an experiment once and give his conclusions.”
I smiled. “Tell me more about this scientific method.”
“Lectures are overrated. I’m more of a hands-on researcher.”
I remember that night. His touch was so different that where it should have felt awkward, it was a revelation. When I should have cried, I cried out. Brian traced my body, mapping me as if I were a new constellation, and his destination depended on navigating by it. That giddy thrill of falling, I realized, was rivaled by the discovery of a soft place to land.
I knew Brian would say quantum mechanics didn’t support it, but I had jumped timelines.
I fell asleep with him curled around me, and dreamed of my mother and the tide pool exhibit she manned at the Boston aquarium.Hermit crabs,she used to say,are too soft to survive on their own. To protect themselves, they find a shell that fits. They’ll tuck themselves inside, for protection. They’ll carry it with them, wherever they go.
—
THE FIRST NIGHTBrian and I made love, I woke up in the middle of the night, slipped out of his bed, and wandered through the little house. I opened the medicine cabinets and read the pill bottles. I scanned the contents of the refrigerator. I picked up every photograph I could find, learning Brian’s history by seeing him in a T-ball uniform, in a prom photo, at graduation. I touched tiny knickknacks on shelves: glass fashioned into the shape of an acorn, a brass mortar and pestle, bookends made of a stone that glittered as if it were weeping.
I looked at the books, too.
There was a full set of Hardy Boys mysteries and Isaac Asimov novels.War and PeaceandAnna Karenina. Poems in their original Polish by Szymborska and Milosz.
There was one book bound in tattered green cloth, a worn collection of Polish fairy tales. The spine fell open to a horrific pen-and-ink drawing of Jedza, skeletal, clawed, living in a house made of the bones of children she had eaten. She stole babies from their mothers, put them in cages, planted them till they grew plump, devoured them. I read the story of a young boy who was told to lie down on a pan, so that she could roast him. He told her that he didn’t know how, and when she showed him by doing it herself, he stuffed the pan into the oven and ran away.
I thought of Brian’s grandmother, reading him these stories after his parents had died. Of her liberation from Bergen-Belsen, when she was too weak to stand for the American soldiers who came to her rescue. I imagined her in the shoe department at Saks, as timelines crossed.
I thought of my mother, lying so still that when I walked into her room at hospice, I had to rest my cheek on her chest to see if she was still breathing.
Then I went back to Brian’s bed and folded myself back into his arms before he even realized I’d ever gone.
In every fairy tale, the only way out is to keep running forward. To never look back.
—
BRIAN CATCHES UPto me as I turn the corner of Harvard Square where a long escalator leads underground to the T, like a passage to hell. He catches my arm, spinning me around. We are suspended in time at the point of JFK Street and Brattle, in front of the Curious George store, where I used to take Meret when she was little. I stubbornly refuse to look at Brian, staring instead at an enlarged cartoon image of the little monkey and the man in the yellow hat. “What was his name?” I say.
This throws Brian off. “What? Whose name?”
