We look at each other on the sidewalk, which is not an easy thing to do in New York. People have to bump and maneuver and sigh around us. Sidestepping our little moment.
“Intense,” I say for a third time, grinning and squinting from the way the sun sometimes hits a window and becomes a burst of blinding light. “Intense,” I say, and this time I do mean crazy, but I also mean wonderful.
“Thanks for asking about her,” Bernardo says as we walk, slipping an arm over my shoulders and pulling me close before we both realize it’s too hot and humid to be stuck together like that for too long.
“I used to sort of think I could have that with my sister. That closeness. But I think we have too many weird things between us now,” I say. I wasn’t thinking about Arizona, but now I can’t help it. It’s that word—mine. It makes me think of the way we used to hold hands on subway rides with my father, when he left us in the hospital day care on summer days when he couldn’t find a babysitter. We’d read books to each other in the corner of the room and not give anyone else the time of day. It reminds me of Roxanne too, and the way she ate breakfast at our house before school instead of hers. That the three of us could fit in one bed and I didn’t feel younger or smaller or anything.
“Weird things?” Bernardo says.
He told me so much and it feels like I should tell him something real, so I tell him my one big secret.
“Like, this one ex-stepmom, Natasha? I still hang out with her. A lot. All the time. My sister would kill me,” I say. It feels new to say it out loud.
“Is she great?” he asks. Bernardo asks perfect questions.
“She is the greatest. She’s family. Except not. She’s family and she’s also the terrible thing I’m doing to my family. It’s strange.”
“It sounds like you need her,” Bernardo says. His glasses are getting a little foggy from the thickness of the air, and I take them off so I can rub them down for him. Make things clear again.
“I don’t know what I need,” I say.
“What about all the other stepmoms? There were a few, right?”
“What about them?” I say. It’s hard to explain how Tess and Janie and the other girlfriends are all variations on a theme, or else wildly inappropriate deviations. My dad’s love life is a long, complicated pattern that I still haven’t completely worked out.
We’re making turns every single street, bringing us farther east, then farther north. The farther away from the center we go, the fewer people there are, until it’s almost possible to imagine a moment alone.
“What are they all doing these days?” Bernardo says. “Or I guess, do you think about them? Or what were they like? I don’t know what I’m asking.”
“I think about them,” I say. I don’t know how to answer the rest of it. “I think about seeing them. I think about what if they’d stayed with us.”
“Like, alternate lives?” Bernardo says. He’s trying to put words to something that I’ve never even thought through. A little place in my mind I’ve been avoiding. “Like how you are with Natasha?”
Something about the way he phrases it hits me weirdly. Not the wrong way exactly, but askew.
“Natasha isn’t an alternate life,” I say, “she’s part of my actual life.”
“Totally. Of course. I’m sorry. I meant . . . maybe you don’t want to have to leave them all behind.”
There’s this complex at the top of the East Village, Stuyvesant Town, and we’ve somehow found our way there, by accident. Dad dated a woman for a few months who lived here, so I know the playgrounds and the funny little car-less labyrinth inside. I lead him in. There’s nowhere to actually go in there—no cafés or pretty views or anything—but it’s a funny pocket of Manhattan that I haven’t seen for five or six years probably.
It’s comforting, that I still know my way.
“I guess I would like them to be more than . . . apparitions. Or blips. Or whatever. At one time or another I really tried to make each of them feel like an actual mom, you know? Or at least like an aunt.”
“Maybe someday you’ll meet them again,” Bernardo says. He adjusts his glasses and we leave Stuyvesant Town as quickly as we came. Back out on the street I’m happy not to have grown up there, no matter how cute and village-y and cozy it seems. I like the wildness of the rest of New York better.
“I guess I have no idea what’s going to happen next,” I say, “even if it seems like I do.”
Bernardo pulls me in again, and we walk like that, his arm around me, our skin sticking together from the heat and sweat.
Sweating together makes me think of being naked together, and that’s not the worst thing to think about while we look at the sky and the buildings and the city and each other.
“You make things make sense,” I say on the sidewalk, looking up at someone’s rooftop, filled with bushes and potted plants and all the things we New Yorkers do to make the city look more like the country, to have the best of both worlds.
fifteen