Stupid, she knows. So stupid. But stress can make you forget how to even breathe. Moving across the country, adjusting to an urban lifestyle, her first boyfriend, a new school, a different curriculum, making friends—not to mention worrying about 104 Glover’s bloody history and the escaped killer stalking her.
Now that that’s all in the past, she has to figure out where she wants to go to college, and whether she’ll be admitted, and how to fill out the common app and tweak her essay . . .
Planning for the future is supposed to be exciting, full of promise. Yet she’s sick of talking about it, sick of thinking about it.
Or maybe she’s just sick of the present.
Sick of Lennon.
She shakes her head, staring at the discarded deli bag in the grass.
“What?” he asks.
“So you just . . . what? Throw your garbage on the ground for someone else to pick up?”
“No, I don’t just throw my garbage on the ground.”
“Well, you did.”
“Who said I’m not going to pick it up?”
“It doesn’t seem like you are.”
“I am.”
“When?”
She’s itching to get up, grab the stupid bag, throw it into the can, and walk away. But she’s not going to clean up after him like he’s a spoiled emperor.
“Fine.” He stalks over to the bag, picks it up, and thrusts it into the can, knocking stuff off the top in the process.
He turns back and catches her pointed stare at the ground, now littered with other people’s trash. Growling something unintelligible, he picks it all up and tosses it before stalking back to the bench.
“Okay? Are you happy now?”
She considers the question.
Then she stands and shakes her head. “No. I’m not happy. Not at all. Not with you.”
Jacob
For weeks, Jacob has stayed away from Anna.
At first, it was out of necessity, in Emina’s absence after her father’s stroke. On the day she was due home, the old man was stricken again. He lingered for a few days before passing away.
Jacob had to pack up the boys and spend several days at the wake and funeral, and when he returned, he was forced to work long hours to catch up on all the jobs he’d postponed.
It was for the best—the frenzied ordeal had made it impossible for him to dwell on Anna, attempt to see her, or even dream about her in his deep, exhausted sleep. Having broken the pattern at last, he might have been able to stay away indefinitely, or even for good.
But last night, she’d visited him in a dream.
“She’s crazy, Jacob,” she told him, weeping.
She was talking about her mother, saying all the things she’d confessed to him that January after his father had assigned him the task of executing Anna and her family.
In life, as in the dream, Anna told him about her mother’s belief that 104 Glover had been cursed by the family whose portrait hung on the stair wall. Her mother was obsessed with their tragic story. Eventually, she was delusional, convinced that she was Margaret Williams, and Anna was Gertrude.
“The other day, I was about to walk down the stairs and I heard something behind me and it was my mother, Jacob. She barely gets out of bed most days, but she snuck up and she looked like she was about to push me down the steps. I’m afraid she’s trying to kill me. I have to get out of that house. I don’t trust her. I don’t trust anyone, except you.”
Those words drenched him in a cold sweat.
No, Anna. You can’t trust me, either. You can’t trust anyone . . .
“Kiss me, Jacob,” she whispered in the dream, glowing in moonlight, snow falling all around them. “Zemra ime.”
“‘Heart of mine.’ You’re speaking my language.”
“Yes. Please kiss me. It’s my birthday.”
“No, your birthday is October.”
“It’s my birthday,” she repeated, and the fat white snowflakes became golden autumn leaves, and the dream morphed into reality. “It’s my birthday.”
And so it is.
Today is Anna’s birthday.
He made his way back to 104 Glover this morning. Just this once, he promised himself. If it didn’t happen today—if he didn’t find her there, or find her alone at last—he would leave and never return.
She was there, though. And when she emerged, the familiar young man was waiting.
Jacob trailed them at a distance along Edgemont to a deli and then the park, just as he used to follow Anna so long ago.
Now he lounges on a bench on the opposite side of the fountain. In his mind’s eye, he can still see Anna lost in a book on a hot summer day, or deep in conversation with her friend Ellie. He sees Anna as she’d been, before college liberated her from shapeless clothing, slumped posture, bulky frame.
And he sees Ellie, in flannel and combat boots, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer in a brown paper bag.
On the day Anna was destined to die, his father warned him that if he was too weak to carry out his assignment, someone else would. Either way, she’d be lost to him, Baba said. But if he proved his loyalty to the family, they’d stand by him.
“Choose wisely, Granit. I’m watching. We’re all watching.”
Jacob made his choice, and he crept into the house to warn Anna. To save her. To take her away.
He was too late.
Days later, he returned home to confront his father. They were all there—Baba, the uncles, the cousins . . .
All there, welcoming him to the fold, telling him he’d passed their test of loyalty. Baba beamed with pride.
If they hadn’t carried out the execution, believing he’d failed them . . . then who had?
The answer was clear.
Ellie.
Anna had told him Ellie was shacking up with the low-life dealer who’d introduced her to crack cocaine and now wanted to be her pimp.
“She’s desperate, Jacob. I’m afraid for her. She’s at the point where she’ll do anything for a fix.”
Anything . . .
Anna shouldn’t have been afraid for her. She should have been afraid of her. Afraid that she’d use the hidden key into 104 Glover to rob the Toskas. Afraid that she’d kill them in their sleep.
Enraged, raw, he searched for Ellie in the days, weeks, months that followed. He was going to take her life because she’d stolen Anna’s. But she’d disappeared.
Jacob immersed himself in the family business until the feds took them all down, and it was over. Everyone he’d ever known, ever loved, was gone . . .
Until Anna came back.
Sitting on the bench, he pretends to nap, but his eyes are open behind his sunglasses. He sees her here, now, alive. Sees her with the stranger, smiling, eating, talking. Sees her scowling, smoking, arguing. Sees her stand, and walk away, alone.
The young man shouts after her, then he, too, gets to his feet. But he doesn’t go after her. He heads in the opposite direction, toward Jacob.
Jacob holds his breath, terrified that he knows, somehow . . .
But then he storms on past.
Now is Jacob’s chance. Anna is finally alone. He hurries after her. But as he passes the spot where she’d been sitting, something on the grass beneath the bench catches his eye. He halts in his tracks, staring in disbelief, and then bends to scoop it up.
Nora