Lili glances up. Amina stands in the doorway, dressed like she’s also gone running. Her hair is in a high ponytail and her cheeks are flushed and healthy. Lili wonders if it’s a sign of conversations between her friends; of how this thing she’s done has started to live beyond her, outside the pain of her rib cage, and now exists in the world: a topic of discussion without her—about her—an issue out of her hands.
“Hi,” Lili whispers. She draws her knees into her chest, holding herself a bit closer. Something tightens—like a flinch of sadness, like a crumble of pity—in Amina’s expression. Lili looks away, staring out the window. She doesn’t want that, pity, itchy and intolerable, but more than that:empathy. Care, concern—undeserved, by her. She wants to scratch her own skin off; she wants to keep sleeping.
Amina sits down beside her. “You’re coming with us,” she says, firm, determined. “To the South of France, with Jamie and me. We’re flying out tonight, first to Paris. You need to get out of this city.”
And she just—she just doesn’t have the strength anymore to refuse to lean on people; to refuse to take what they say they want to give her.
“Okay,” Lili whispers.
A small frown—disbelief—rears before Amina smooths it away, fast. “I know you don’t want to hear this bullshit,” she says, a bit softer. “But it will be okay. At some point, somehow. It will get better.”
Lili nods, absently. Jackie comes in, handing her a mug of tea. Lili tries a small smile of thanks; Amina says she’ll pack for her, and Jackie offers to help.
From her bedroom, she hears the roll of her small carry-on suitcase, shoved back into her closet earlier that summer, the trip to Marin that never was, and the stilted pull of her dresser drawers. “It’ll be hot,” Amina says to Jackie. “She just needs light things, some swimsuits. We’re staying near the sea—where’s her passport? Oh, and email her farm manager, yeah? Tell her she has to take some time off. Say it’s an emergency.” In their bathroom, Jackie packs Lili’s toiletries, toothbrush, hairbrush, what she’d brought back home on Saturday—
Through their open doors, she hears Amina on the phone with James: “Hey, can you go ahead and book that third set of tickets?”
Logistics, taken care of. The sense of tiptoes around her, accommodating her. That hollowness persists. Distance between her skin that people touch and her inside of it.
You’re wrong,she thinks, recalling Amina’s words.It won’t get better.
It will just change.
Hours and miles stretch between them in the sky. Curled up in the plane seat, she stares out the window at the orange sunset, darkening clouds. Her gaze is tired and soft.
Stale air in the cabin, flick of magazines, tap of nails on screens picking movies; the snick of plastic, airplane meals unwrapped, hiss of ginger ale snapped open by flight attendants. The slant of late evening light moves across the cabin: glowing, luminous, falling over the rows of seats, catching James’s blond hair. There are several different languages in the cabin, overheard. Foreign newspapers, different passports. Oncoming tides of Europe, and she remembers, distantly—she’s never been.
“Want any food?” Amina asks, resting her hand on Lili’s knee. “Something to drink?”
She shakes her head. She’d taken one of Jackie’s Ambiens, swiped off her mom, and keeps waiting for it to kick in.
Leaning over her, Amina asks the flight attendant for hummus and pita chips, a salad. The exchange of a credit card, beep of a chip reader, before Amina presses a fresh water bottle into Lili’s hand.
“Thanks,” she whispers.
As meal service rolls past, James looks at Lili. “Want to watch a movie?” he asks.
“Okay,” she replies. James hands her one of his earbuds.
He chooses some faint blur of a film. Foreign words, subtitles. Normally, she would have teased him—Jamie, who watches an arthouse film on a flight?—but then she sees, as the credits transition over the opening shots, how he’d chosen a film without anything like romance, or levity, or lightness: something serious, war, distant countries, last year’s international Oscar buzz; moments of dark comedy, wry humor, generational sadness.
Beside her, Amina flips throughNuméro. Here, too, she would have usually made a joke, teasing her friend with affection:Did you stake out at Casa Magazines for that, Ami?
Instead, Lili half-watches the film, cradled between her friends, and says nothing. The fact that he knows now, that Michael has almost certainly told him, settles over her in a lucid, gloomy way. She floats in it, unsettled, distant. Little hitches of time, jumps of forgetting, dislocation; a lull absorbed in the film, before a shard of reality pokes through. She feels disoriented, between the white noise of the plane engine, the sedate in-flight announcement ding, the hushed hum of the flight crew.
The cabin lights start to dim. An artificial night, caught between time zones.
Lili closes her eyes.
Instability is a given in economics.
Lili understands that. She knows the methods by which central banks attempt to weather markets’ tendency towards instability; she’s studied how governments and federal reserves plan—rigorously, continually—to prevent surprise, minimize upset, maintain stability.
She did not plan this.
Lili rips open the plastic around the cigarette pack, discarding it in a trash bin as she steps out onto the street. It’s early evening, and their rented apartment is on Rue du Perche.We’re right near the galleries,Amina said, when the taxi dropped them off in the Marais.You should go to some of the exhibits while I’m in meetings, see what’s on, yeah?
As soon as they arrived—lugging suitcases into the ancient, tiny elevator, airport sweat mingling with fragrant lilac in the courtyard, confusion of time zones; throwing windows open to let in fresh air, soft heat of evening, confirming their dinner reservation—Lili went downstairs to the tabac, a small shop beside the pharmacy. Using her fumbled childhood French, she’d bought a pack of cigarettes. The tiny shop also sold stamps, lottery tickets, phone chargers; she’d got a small lighter, too.
