“Fremont. Claire put a deposit on a place.”
“You’re moving in together?”
“Yeah,” she said with a grin.
“Congrats.” Margo and Claire had been together for nearly three years, and I really should’ve been happy for them, but sitting at the table that Sunday morning, all I could find when I searched my heart was the feeling of being unmoored. Lost. I had come back to Oakland thinking that I could live as I had before, but that was no longer possible. “When are you moving out?” I asked, unable to keep the note of desperation out of my voice.
“In ten days.”
“That soon? You’re not giving me much notice.”
“But you’ve been gone so long, Nora. Claire and I expected to look for a while, but we just got lucky with this apartment. You should see it. Built-in bookshelves, crown molding, a backyard view. We knew lightning wasn’t going to strike twice.”
“That’s great,” I said. Quickly and savagely, I tore up credit-card offers, realtor mailers, a reminder for a doctor’s appointment I’d already missed, a subscription renewal for the New Yorker, a sympathy card from the headmaster at Bay Prep, an invitation to my friend Anissa’s housewarming party. And then, beneath the detritus of the life I wished I could have again, I found an envelope from Silverwood Music Center, with a note informing me that I’d been accepted for their summer festival. The curators wanted to include one of my pieces in an evening program featuring younger composers. “I just got into Silverwood,” I said, my voice rising with excitement.
“Mazel tov!” Margo said. “Congratulations to us both, then. We’re moving on to bigger and better things.”
It was the kind of break I would read about in the trades every fall, a gushing article celebrating the arrival of a fresh new talent in American music, but that’s all it ever was to me—a story, not something that actually happened, least of all to people like me. I wished I could’ve called my father to tell him the news—Can you believe it? I would’ve said. And I almost didn’t apply!—and now I was seized with pain at the thought that he hadn’t lived long enough to hear about this. I could have called my mother instead, but I knew that she was still upset with me. For years, we had been operating under a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy about my sex life, and our mutual violation of that agreement while I was home—she asked, I told—had given her yet another reason to be disappointed in me. Why couldn’t I be more like Salma, she moaned, find myself a nice Muslim doctor or engineer and marry him? Two days before, when I told her I was leaving town, she’d seemed relieved.
And I was, too. I was tired of fighting with my mother and fearful of where things were going with Jeremy. I had found solace with him, even moments of joy I hadn’t known before, but we were so different that it was bound not to last, and the incident with Fierro had clarified for me just how much separated us. I couldn’t get the fixed stare at the cabin window out of my mind. Whenever I tried to interpret the expression in Fierro’s eyes, I couldn’t decide whether it was disgust or desire, but both made me feel like I was nothing more than a body, or even a commodity. And trailing the memory of Fierro’s stare was always another one: the way Jeremy had stood over his friend’s beaten body, his chest heaving, his knuckles red with blood, the hint of a smile on his lips. It was the first time I had seen that side of him. “I’m sorry,” he said when he came to see me the next day at the restaurant. “I’m sorry about what happened.”
He leaned in to kiss me, but I pulled away from him. “Your friend was staring right at me,” I said, my voice shaking.
“Don’t be scared. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
Such bravado, I thought. A promise that could never be made, much less kept. We were standing under the awning of the Pantry. The busboy came out of the side door with a trash bag, which he swung into the dumpster. I waited until he had gone back inside before I spoke again. “I feel so violated.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
“Why did he follow you to the cabin?”
“I don’t know.” He leaned against the stucco wall, thinking for a long moment about the question. On his right eyebrow was a cut that was partially covered by a Band-Aid and along his left jaw was a bruise that was still raw and pink. “I think maybe he feels like I’ve moved on, or past him, somehow.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”
All at once the story poured out of him. Fierro had been going through a nasty divorce, he’d threatened his wife, smashed up her car, and got arrested. But Jeremy had bailed him out of the West Valley Detention Center and found him an anger-management group, which had helped—until it didn’t.
“My God,” I said. “And you go shooting guns with him. Guns, Jeremy. Guns. What will he do next?”
A white-haired woman with a cane walked out of the Pantry and we both moved aside to let her pass, but she must have heard the word guns because she continued staring at us as she crossed the parking lot. What a picture we must make, I thought, me in the dress I’d worn for my father’s funeral and him in a police uniform and with his face beaten up. As I pushed a strand of hair away from my face, he suddenly noticed the bruise on my wrist.
“I didn’t realize I’d grabbed you so hard.” He put his hand on my waist, trying again to draw me closer, but I resisted. “I’m sorry, baby. I was just trying to protect you.”
“I never asked you to protect me. I never asked for any of this.”
The sun was high in the sky and, though we stood in the shade of the awning, the heat reached us, making us both uncomfortable. The radio transmitter on Jeremy’s uniform buzzed and he listened to the dispatcher for a minute before turning down the volume and looking at me again. “I know you’re scared, Nora, and I know you’re upset. But don’t do this. Don’t blame me for something I didn’t do. I have no control over him. I couldn’t have known he’d show up at your place.”
“You think ignorance and innocence are the same thing? You say you didn’t know this would happen, but you’re the one who bailed him out. He would never have shown up at my house if it weren’t for you. You can’t bring this violence all the way to my doorstep and not expect me to be repulsed.”
The word made him flinch. He was quiet, his eyes hardening. “All this talk of innocence,” he said. “And you messed around with a married guy for months. What does that make you?”
I couldn’t believe he was using this against me. I should never have opened up to him, I thought, I had been a fool to make myself vulnerable like this. Anger brimmed inside me, threatening to spill at any moment. “This isn’t really working,” I said, trying hard to keep my voice even.
“Don’t say that,” he said, his tone different now. “We’re good together. Let’s talk about it tonight. I have to go back to work now.”
But I didn’t want to talk anymore. It seemed to me then that my relationship with Jeremy had been part of the impulse, born out of grief, to hold on to the past at all cost. A week after my father’s death, a well-intentioned friend had posted on my Facebook page an article filled with advice for mourners: don’t drink too much, don’t make big financial decisions, don’t jump into a relationship. As if grief were a business deal that could be successfully negotiated if one followed a few simple rules. I hadn’t been able to do it, clearly.