Every day, he left the house with a backpack full of random books he’d picked up at the Salvation Army. He walked around on campus as if he belonged there, and he kept an eye on Anna.
She seemed different. She wore jeans, and her blouses were tucked in, sleeves rolled up, buttons unbuttoned. She no longer pulled her dark hair straight back in a tight headband. Now it waved around her face and cascaded down her back. She still had glasses, but the frames were more modern. She carried herself differently—shoulders less slumped, head held high.
One day, he was sitting with a Styrofoam cup of coffee on a bench in an academic building as though waiting for class to start. Anna really was waiting for a class to start, sitting on another bench. She seemed bored with the open textbook on her lap, twirling a curl around her fingertip as she read. When she checked the clock above his head, their eyes met. He smiled and gave a little wave.
She looked over both shoulders as if expecting to see someone behind her, then gave a tenuous wave in return. He saw her flinch when he got up and walked toward her.
“You’re in my Tuesday-Thursday chemistry class, right? Section four in McGovern?” he added, naming one of the largest lecture halls on campus.
“Me? Oh, um . . . no. I’m not taking chem.”
“Really? I guess I mixed you up with someone else. Sorry. I’m Jacob.”
“Anna.”
“Nice to meet you. What are you reading?”
“This? It’s for a class.” Keeping her place, she closed the book so that he could see the psychedelic cover.
“The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test . . . what’s it about?”
“Basically . . . drugs.”
“Drugs? Like, what, Tylenol?”
She flashed a smile that was both shy and sly. “Like acid. It’s for my Counterculture Lit class.”
“That might be the coolest class I’ve ever heard of.”
“It is. There are seats left. You should pick it up before drop/add cutoff.”
“Maybe next semester. I’ve got a full course load.”
They talked for a few minutes longer, until an adjacent classroom emptied into the corridor and it was time for her to go to class. Somehow he’d forgotten, until he was watching her walk away, why he was there.
That was the problem with Anna. With him.
His father had given him a chance to prove himself and work his way into the family business so that he, too, could earn easy money and respect. But at what cost?
He delved deeper into her life, digging around for the syllabus to every class she was taking. The next time he engineered running into her, it was after her Counterculture Lit class and not before. He knew it was her last one of the day. He struck up a conversation, asking what she was currently reading.
“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
“Loved that book,” he said.
“You read it?”
He had not. He’d never been much of a reader. But he’d rented the video from Blockbuster and watched it in preparation for this conversation.
“A few times,” he told her. “Great, right?”
A shadow crossed her face. “Disturbing. If I didn’t have to read it for class, I wouldn’t finish it.”
“Oh, well . . . I’m a psych major, so it’s right up my alley. What’s your major?”
“I’m undeclared. Still trying to figure out what I like, and what I want to do.”
“That should be pretty easy. What do you like?”
“What do you mean?”
“Got any hobbies?”
“No.”
“Pets?”
She seemed to wince. “No, I . . . no.”
“Special skills?”
She raised a dark eyebrow. “Like what?”
“Like . . . juggling plates?”
She smiled. But it faded when she asked him why he’d chosen to major in psych and he said, “Because I’m fascinated by the human brain. What makes people do what they do. Why they become who they are.”
She didn’t tell him that day about her mother, and the reason she never left the house. It would be a while before Anna opened up about that.
That day, he walked her back to her dorm and asked her out for coffee. She got so flustered he almost expected her to look over both shoulders again as if he might be talking to someone behind her. But she said yes.
As they parted, she stopped him with a question. “Where are you from?”
It caught him off guard. He’d prepared a cover story that had nothing to do with his real life. He was planning to say he came from somewhere upstate—Albany, maybe, or Utica.
But he heard himself say, “New York.”
“Really? Me, too. I guess that’s why your accent is familiar. I was thinking you were from somewhere else, like . . . I don’t know, Europe, maybe.”
“People say that all the time, but I’m as American as you are. You are American?”
“Of course.”
That was the truth, he knew.
He also knew by then that her name, the one she’d been born with, wasn’t Anna Toska any more than his was Jacob Grant. It was the alias Baba had told him to use, an American derivation and reversal of his real one, Granit Jakupi.
Caught up in his memories, he doesn’t realize he’s bypassed his destination until he reaches the corner. Backtracking, he finds a modern CVS pharmacy where he’d thought the restaurant should be, and momentarily wonders if he’s on the wrong block. But no, he recognizes the liquor store across the street where Baba often stopped to pick up a bottle of raki.
He shouldn’t be surprised that the restaurant has disappeared, like so many things he remembers from his youth. People, too.
Everyone he’d ever known and loved is dead, imprisoned, estranged, or in some cases, simply vanished. Back when Jacob was serving his own time, he’d heard the rumor that a cousin had testified against his own brother and father in exchange for immunity and a new identity.
Like Anna, who hadn’t been Anna until she’d entered the government’s WITSEC protection program with her family. She’d been young then—not too young to have forgotten her old name, her old life, the loved ones and home she’d been forced to leave behind forever.
She never told Jacob any of that, though. Five months, all those secrets, and she never told him the truth about who she really was.
Fair enough.
He never told her the truth about who he was, either.
She’d never known, even in the end, about his own underworld connection that would test his loyalty to his family—and annihilate hers.
Part Four
Nora
Nearly a week has passed since Nora found the binoculars and hid them in the shed with the metal box.
Jacob has yet to reappear. She’s been watching for him. Waiting for him.
She sits in the garden, chilly now in her sleeveless T-shirt and shorts as dusk pushes a fiery September sky toward the rooftops.
The girls are home, lamplight illuminating their bedrooms overhead. Piper’s shades are open and she’s clearly visible in the window. She’s sitting at her desk, ostensibly doing homework, but her head is bopping to music and she’s texting on her phone.
Stacey keeps her shades closed. Not just at night. Always.
Most mornings after the girls and Keith depart, Nora slips into Stacey’s shuttered room, raises the shade, and sits in the window, willing him to appear.