Arcadia Falls

33


Sally and I spend Christmas morning on a Jet Blue flight to Fort Lauderdale, eating blue corn chips and watching a Will Ferrell movie called Stranger Than Fiction that turns out to be ten times better than I’d expected. Sally and I both cry buckets at the end, upsetting the stewardess and the elderly woman sitting next to us. I could tell them we’re crying for much more than Will Ferrell’s fate, but I realize that if I tried to account for all we’ve been through it would be less believable than the fanciful events of the movie.
Even getting these last-minute tickets seems highly improbable, but when I called Max and Sylvia Rosenthal and asked if we could spend the holidays with them, the e-mail confirmation for the tickets arrived in my inbox twenty minutes later. I hated to think what they cost, so I didn’t think about it.
The atmosphere at Boca West proves conducive to not thinking. The neon-colored impatiens that grow waist high and hibiscus blooms the size of dinner plates make the whole place look like a Disney cartoon. Sally and I spend our days at the pool with Max or shopping in the air-conditioned malls with Sylvia. We eat out every night at a cheerful array of chain restaurants. It’s hard to believe, in this mild climate, that places like Arcadia Falls even exist.
But I know that this particular paradise comes with a price. On our last day, Sylvia suggests she take Sally school shopping alone while I have a chat with Max. I grimly sit down at the poolside table usually reserved for Max’s cronies from his days working on Wall Street. The guys are absent today, no doubt alerted to the conference Max and I are to have.
I’ve always admired Max. He put himself through college on the GI Bill and rose through the ranks of Morgan Stanley on the strength of his uncanny math abilities and chutzpah. He’s as slim as he was the day he got out of the army and has a full head of white hair. He still plays a round of golf every day to keep fit and a game of bridge to keep his mind sharp. When I look at him, I see how Jude might have aged.
“You should have told us that Jude left you with so little. We had no idea. Sylvia thought you sold up in Great Neck because you never liked it there.”
“I didn’t want you to think badly of Jude,” I tell him. “He would have hated for you to know that he mismanaged the money.”
Max nods, his shrewd brown eyes acknowledging the truth of what I’ve said, but then he raises one finger and shakes it at me. “Still, he would have hated more to see you and Sally going without.”
“We haven’t been starving,” I say. Feeling the first prickles of anger needling my skin, I take a deep breath. “We had enough after I sold the house to move upstate, and I want to teach—”
“Sure, teaching’s fine, but let’s face it, you coulda picked a better place to do it. Three deaths in the first semester. I went to some rough schools growing up in the Bronx, but that’s meshuga. Anyways—” He waves a bronzed hand, his Columbia University ring glinting in the bright sunlight. “That’s all over now, thank God. Sylvia and I would like to give you the money to move back to Great Neck. Let Sally finish out high school there. I’m sure you can find someplace to teach on Long Island, if that’s what you want.”
“That’s very generous of you, Max, but I have to finish out the year,” I surprise myself by saying. I hadn’t realized until this moment that I need to go back—at least for the next semester. “I have a contract,” I add.
“Of course, that’s the honorable thing to do. But after that. And, of course, we’ve got a college fund for Sally. She’s a bright kid. With her art skills, she could work in advertising.”
I bite back the urge to say, Or she could be an artist. Conceding that advertising is a worthwhile career is a big step for Max Rosenthal.
“Is it all right if I take the semester to think about it?” I ask, smiling with as much charm as I can muster. “I have to talk to Sally.”
“Of course, sweetheart.” He leans forward and pats my knee. “But if I know my granddaughter, she’ll be happy to be back in the vicinity of a good mall.”
Sally does seem to enjoy being cosseted and fawned over by her grandparents. We arrive back in upstate New York with two more suitcases than we took with us. I don’t mention right away the offer of moving back to Great Neck. I’d like her to finish off the year at Arcadia with as much commitment as possible. If she knows she’s leaving I’m afraid she won’t take her classes seriously enough.
She does, though. The new drawing teacher, Emanuel Ruiz, a young graduate of The School of Visual Arts, is rigorous, talented, and incredibly good looking. At first I think Sally’s devotion to the class is due to his looks, but soon I realize that he challenges her in ways she’s never been before. Her figure drawings transform from cartoons to lifelike portraits and she branches out into landscape, an area she’s always avoided.
“That was a brilliant hire,” I tell Toby Potter, our new interim dean, over tea one day in March.
“I saw his work at the SVA Student Art Show last year. We were lucky to get him. I had to tell the board they could use my salary to pay him to be able to offer enough to get him here.”
“That was gallant of you,” I say.
“Not really. I knew they’d be too embarrassed to cut my salary, so I demanded raises for everyone else while I was at it.”
“Thanks for that,” I say, sipping my cup of Arcadia blend tea. “It’s come in handy.”
I’ve used the money to enroll Sally in a summer arts program at Parsons in Manhattan, my way of making up to her the months of rural shopping deprivation. I didn’t tell her—and I don’t tell Toby Potter—that I’ve got applications in at a dozen high schools on Long Island and in New York City. I feel disloyal thinking about leaving after all he’s done to rescue the Arcadia School, but I have to do what’s best for Sally.
Because even though Sally’s thriving in Emanuel Ruiz’s drawing class and doing well in most of her other classes, I’m afraid that the atmosphere at Arcadia is unhealthy. I feel it most at night alone in the cottage, reading through the notebooks Vera Beecher kept in her final years. Her dry accounts of students and teachers, supplies and projects, give me plenty of facts to supplement my thesis, but they’re not exactly inspiring. Although she strove to keep the school alive, her heart went out of it once Lily was gone. Late at night I sometimes go downstairs and sit in front of the fireplace, looking up at the shattered lilies on the tiled hearth. I think of how it hurts to find that the person you loved wasn’t who you thought they were and how that grief—the loss of the person you thought you loved—can be worse than death. I realize now that if Jude had lived I probably would have been furious at him for gambling all we had to start the hedge fund. We would have fought, but I like to think our marriage would have survived. But we never had a chance to find out. If Lily had lived, would Vera have forgiven her for her infidelity and for the child she had in secret? I would like to think that forgiveness would have allowed Vera to become a greater artist. Instead, she spent her life fossilized in that last moment of betrayal and anger.
It’s a fate I want to avoid for myself.
I try to hold on to the forgiveness I felt for Jude in the clove, but it comes and goes, mingled with regret and pain, as transient as the first signs of spring in this cold climate. I can see that Sally is struggling with the same feelings and that a great deal of her anger toward me is displaced anger toward Jude. Instead of making me feel better, though, it makes me sad that she doesn’t have a purer memory of her father.
At least that’s how I feel until the spring art show. It’s on a day in late April full of cold sunshine that coaxes the first green buds from the sycamores and snowdrops from the forest floor. The show is held in the parlor of Briar Lodge. The student work hangs on foam board partitions, Lily Eberhardt’s painted images looking out over the watercolors and pastels. I imagine she would be proud of the school she and Vera founded. She might smile at some of the more pretentious efforts, like Tori Pratt’s portrait of a headless mannequin standing in front of a rain-slicked window entitled Soliloquy in Blue, but I think she’d laugh at Hannah Weiss’s portrait of herself as the evil stepmother from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
“Last semester, Ms. Drake assigned us two self-portraits,” Hannah explains to me when I compliment her on the painting. “One showing how others see us, and one of how we see ourselves.”
“And this one is how other people see you?” I asked.
“That’s what I thought at first, because I thought my mother and stepfather saw me as selfish and ugly because I’m not patient enough with my little brothers. But then I realized it was really how I saw myself. This one is how I think they see me.” She points to the next painting on the wall. It’s a brightly colored cartoon of herself as Snow White surrounded by birds and forest creatures. After a minute I realize that all the characters in the picture—the deer, the rabbits, the robins and bluebirds—all have Hannah’s features.
“I like that,” I tell Hannah, laughing, “but I’d rather you saw yourself as Snow White than as a witch.”
“Oh no,” Hannah cries. “The witch is much, much cooler. Besides, Ms. Drake said not to be surprised if you kept changing your mind about which portrait is which. It’s not always easy to tell the difference between how you see yourself and how you think other people see you.”
Maybe that was Shelley’s problem, I think, leaving Hannah to look at the rest of the show. She worried so much that people would see her as the child of a crazy woman that she became crazy. I have to admit, though, that her assignment produced some interesting results. Clyde’s two portraits show him as a pasty computer geek eating Twinkies in the glow of a video game and then as Mr. Spock from the Star Trek series. The headless mannequin of Tori Pratt’s painting is her “how other people see me.” Her “how I see myself” is the same setting without the mannequin, just a pile of discarded clothes lying on the floor. Chloe has done a single painting of herself looking into a mirror. The twin images are identical except that the one in the mirror has aged about fifty years. I can’t blame Chloe for feeling older than she looks after the year she’s been through.
I’m almost afraid to look at Sally’s painting. This is the project, I surmise, that she’s been hiding from me all year long. Is there something about how she sees herself that she thinks will upset me?
I see her standing in front of her paintings laughing at something with Haruko. Their heads block Sally’s portraits as I approach, but then Sally moves and I see one of them. It’s Sally standing alone in a desolate landscape underneath a lowering sky. She looks sad and pathetic and lonely. My heart contracts at the thought that this is how she sees herself. But then, when I get closer to the painting, I see that the label beneath it reads: HOW OTHER PEOPLE SEE ME—ALONE. I look to the right at its companion piece. It’s a group picture of Sally flanked by Jude and me. We both have our arms around Sally, but my face is level with hers, while Jude’s floats a little above and behind us. It’s from a photograph that Jude took of us on a trip to Florida a few years ago. He’d set up his camera with a timer and rushed to get into the shot. As a result, he had come out blurry in the photograph—and spectral in this painted version, as if his ghost were watching over Sally and me. Eyes blurring, I look down at the title of the painting: HOW I SEE MYSELF—LOVED.
“Do you like it?” Sally asks. “I wanted it to be a surprise.”
“I love it,” I tell her, slipping my arm around her waist. For once she doesn’t pull away at a public display of affection. She leans in and rests her head lightly on my shoulder for just a moment but long enough to make me feel as loved as the woman in that painting—secure in the embrace of her family.
That feeling of being loved makes me feel strong enough to do something I’ve been putting off. A few days after the art show I go into town to see Callum Reade. I go to the station because I’m afraid that if I meet him anywhere else I’ll fall straight into his arms—and I can’t do that. I think he must recognize my reasoning when he looks up from his desk and sees me standing in his doorway. The gladness in his eyes barely reaches his mouth before he reins it in.
“I was hoping you’d come before the end of the term,” he says. He waves to the chair in front of his desk, but I shake my head and stay in the doorway.
“I got a job offer at a school in Queens,” I blurt out. “And my in-laws have offered to help us get an apartment in Great Neck.”
“I see,” he says, bowing his head to retrieve something from his desk drawer. “Is that what you’re going to do?”
“I’m not sure,” I say, trying hard to resist the urge to run my hands through his hair. “I haven’t told Sally yet. I wanted her to finish out the term first, and then I’ll ask her what she wants. I want her to have a choice.”
He looks up, his green eyes flashing. “Don’t you get a choice?”
“This is my choice,” I answer.
The light goes out in his eyes. He bows his head again and looks at the piece of paper he’s holding. “Then I’d better give you this now.” He holds out a crumpled sheet of paper. I have to cross the room to take it from him. When I look down I see that it’s the adoption certificate that Beatrice Rhodes gave me.
“Where—?”
“We found it clutched in Shelley Drake’s hand,” he says. “That’s how badly she wanted it.”
I nod. “Being Lily’s granddaughter must have made her feel like she belonged here. Like she had a home.”
“I guess so. I got to wondering, though, why there were two Ivy St. Clares. So I did a little research at the Andes Historical Society—that’s where all the archives from St. Lucy’s went after the valley was inundated—and at the County Records Office. I found these.” He holds out two sheets of paper. “I think you’ll find them interesting.”
“What—?” I begin as I reach out to take the papers from him, but when he takes my hand in his I find I can’t say anything else.
“I’ll stay away until you tell me otherwise,” he says. “But I wonder if Sally would want you to make this sacrifice any more than you’d want her to sacrifice her happiness for you.” Then he lets go of my hand. With the two sheets of paper in hand, I leave before he can see the tears in my eyes.
Callum’s question haunts me on the drive back to school. I think of my grandmother sacrificing her career to raise my mother and then of my mother sacrificing her chance to go to art school so she could be secure. Would they have been happier if they had done what Lily did—sacrificing her own child to live the life of an artist with Vera? Could you lop off one half of yourself and expect the other half to thrive?
When I get home I read the two documents he’s given me and everything I thought I knew turns upside down. I spend the rest of the afternoon making phone calls and doing research online. I reread Lily’s journal far into the night. When I finish reading I look up from Lily’s journal and see the sky turning pink outside. It’s May 1—May Day. And even though I could have sworn that I’ve had enough of pagan celebrations, I decide there’s something I have to do.
I go to the dorm to wake up Sally. She’s bleary-eyed, but I hand her a travel mug full of hot cocoa and promise her doughnuts when we get where we’re going.
“And where’s that?” she mutters, stepping into the jeans I’ve picked up off the floor. Haruko snores gently in the other bed, oblivious to our talking.
“You’ll see,” I tell her. “A surprise.”
She falls back to sleep as soon as we’re in the car. I put a blanket over her and drive down to Route 28 and turn west. In Pine Hill, I stop at a bakery and buy bear claws, jelly doughnuts, French crullers, and two more cups of hot cocoa. The car fills with the aroma of chocolate and yeast and sugar—better than incense any day. The road spools out beneath us, like a ribbon extending into our futures. I feel like we could just keep going. What’s to stop us?
The dawn drive reminds me of when we left Great Neck last August, but I felt then as if we were fleeing the wreckage of our old lives and going to the one place that would have us. Now I feel the world is open to us. All we have to do is choose.
But I want Sally to be part of making the choice this time, and in order for her to do that she has to know everything. I feel in my sweatshirt pocket for the folded pieces of paper. They crinkle at my touch, brittle as fall leaves and as crackling with energy, as if they might spontaneously combust in my pocket.
When I pull off Route 28 Sally stirs and stretches. “What smells so good?”
“I told you there would be doughnuts,” I say, wafting the wax-paper bakery bag under her nose and then snatching it away. “But first there’s a hike.”
She groans, but gets out of the car good-naturedly enough. Even when she sees how steep the path is, she doesn’t complain.
What a good kid she’s turning out to be, Jude, I find myself whispering under my breath as I pant behind her on the steep trail. You’d be proud of her.
She gets to the top before me and I can hear her little cry of delight and surprise. At the top of the hill is a small stone chapel standing all by itself.
“It’s like something from a story. How did it get here?”
“It’s the chapel from the convent of St. Lucy’s. It was moved here when the valley was flooded,” I say, waving toward the view, which is just emerging out of the darkness. The sun has crested the ridge to the east, lighting up the high outcropping we stand on, but not the valley below yet. “A group of artists got together and saved it because of the paintings inside.”
Sally swings open the door, ignoring the view of the valley, and begins opening the shutters. I haven’t seen her this excited since Jude bought her a plastic playhouse on her fifth birthday. The pictures silence her though. She walks from frame to frame, following the story of the fifth-century Irish girl who probably wasn’t any older when she ran away from home than Sally is now. I fill in narrative details when needed, but mostly Lily and Mimi’s paintings tell the story with remarkable clarity.
“So she had to give up her baby and her daughter grew up without her! That’s awful!” Sally cries with the outrage of the young at unfairness and injustice.
“But look, they’re reunited later.” I gloss over the part about mother and daughter getting burned at the stake for preaching Christianity. “Here they are on a cloud ascending to heaven.”
Sally shakes her head, displeased. “You mean they find each other only to die? Ugh, what an awful story! Imagine if I’d grown up with strangers instead of you, Mom.” She leans against me for a moment and I squeeze her shoulder. Then she’s gone, kneeling in the corner, looking at the artist’s signatures. “Lily Eberhardt and Mimi Green,” she reads. “The same Lily who was one of the founders of Arcadia?”
“The same,” I say.
“Who’s Mimi Green?”
“She was one of the first artists who worked at Arcadia. She did the landscapes. They’re pretty, aren’t they?”
Sally takes a step back and stands in the middle of the room to get the full effect of the landscapes. The gently rolling green hills, the verdant valleys, the flashing river, and the thick forests that serve as backdrop harmonize so well with the figures in the foreground that they seem to fall away, like half-forgotten places slipping behind mist and cloud. But looked at closely, little details emerge: yellow jewelweed and blue cornflower growing in the meadows, foxes and rabbits hiding in the woods, red-winged blackbirds and yellow finches in the branches of the trees. It’s a paradise—but it’s also real: the East Branch valley before it was inundated, a little paradise on earth captured on the stone walls rescued from the flood.
“Wow, she was really good,” Sally says. “I’ve never heard of her. Did she go on to paint anything else?”
“She gave up painting,” I say, steering Sally out of the chapel and to the bench. I take out the lukewarm hot cocoas from the bag and hand Sally a cruller. “And she went back to using her real name. Mimi Green was a name she used for working at magazines because her real name was too … well, too ethnic.” I take out the adoption certificate that Callum found in the County Records Office and smooth it out on my lap. I point to the name on the line for adopting mother.
“Miriam Zielinski,” Sally reads. “That sounds familiar—”
“Zielinski means ‘green’ in Polish,” I tell her. “And Mimi’s a nickname for Miriam—”
“Wasn’t Grandma’s mother named Miriam? And wasn’t Zielinski her maiden name?”
“Yes. Her married name was Kay. I always thought that was a funny name for a Polish Jew, but I figured that my grandpa Jack’s father’s name had gotten changed from something long and unpronounceable when he landed at Ellis Island. I asked once, but Grandma Miriam pretended she hadn’t heard me and my mother said she never knew. But now I do.” I point to the name of the adopting father: John McKay. “He was Irish—or at least they gave him an Irish name at the convent when he was left there. He died when I was only five, so I don’t remember him much, but everyone said he adored Miriam, so I figure he didn’t mind blending in with her family in Brooklyn—”
Sally shakes the paper in front of my face, cutting me off. “But this says they adopted a baby girl whose birth mother was Lily Eberhardt!”
“Yes. You see, Miriam—your great-grandmother Miriam—was a friend of Lily’s. She was at St. Lucy’s when Lily had her baby—a baby she couldn’t tell anyone about. Lily left before her baby was adopted, but Mimi—Miriam—stayed. She had let on to Gertrude Sheldon, who was a patron of the convent—that Lily had had a baby and then Gertrude, who I think must have gotten pregnant in Europe only to lose that baby, wanted to adopt the baby.” I take out of my pocket the adoption form that poor Fleur Sheldon had found and then left at Dora and Ada’s house, the one that listed Gertrude Sheldon as the adopting mother of Lily’s baby. “What I think must have happened is that Mimi decided at the last minute that she couldn’t bear to see Lily’s baby go to Gertrude, who was, by all accounts a pretty awful woman.” I shudder, thinking of poor Fleur spending her holidays alone at Arcadia while her parents skied at Chamonix. Inside my pocket is the letter Callum had found in the St. Lucy’s archives.
Dear Sister Margaret, I am sending the infant we obtained from you back, as I have had the good fortune to conceive my own child. A sure sign of God’s grace, you will agree! You will understand, I am sure, that I can’t possibly attend to two children. At any rate, the infant’s personality is not suited to mine—it seems unusually leaden. I regret any inconvenience this has caused and enclose a check to be applied toward the needs of your orphans. Yours truly, Gertrude Elizabeth Sheldon
I imagine that Gertrude Sheldon wrote the same sort of note when she was forced to return a hat that didn’t “suit.” But I don’t show Sally this egregious example of inhumanity. I continue with Mimi and Jack’s story instead.
“So she convinced the nun to switch the babies and give another girl the name Ivy St. Clare. And she and Jack, who she met and fell in love with while she was working on that mural, took Lily’s child. They named her Margaret, in honor of the nun who ran the convent and helped them take the baby in secret, and that’s how your grandma Margie got her name. And how I got mine, for that matter. I always thought it was an odd name for a Jewish family. They moved back to Brooklyn and Mimi—or Miriam, as she called herself—gave up painting. I guess she thought that’s what she had to do because that’s what women did back then.”
I consider adding something like: Thank goodness women don’t have to make those choices now! But I don’t. Who knows what choices Sally will be faced with in the years to come? I hope she’ll draw and paint and work and fall in love and have children, but whether she’ll do those things all at once, or in some completely new and different order and combination that I can’t begin to imagine, only she will be able to decide. Right now, I only have one choice I need her to make.
“So Lily Eberhardt is—”
“My grandmother and your great-grandmother. Yes. But that’s not the only reason I brought you here. We’ve got a decision to make.”
I tell her our options. The job in Queens. Max’s offer of an apartment in Great Neck. Our options here. We hash it all out. When we’re done we’re covered in powdered sugar and the mist has cleared from the valley.
“So you’re sure?” I ask, brushing the sugar off my hands.
“Yeah,” she says. “Come on. Let’s go home.”
I feel a little light-headed on the drive back, but that’s probably all the sugar I’ve consumed. Or the brightness of the morning sun we’re driving straight into. When we arrive in Arcadia Falls, the town looks fresh-washed, not like the decaying Catskills town I saw it as months ago at all.
“Hey, there’s Haruko and Hannah—they must be going to the used-record store that just opened in town. I told ’em we have a real turntable…. we still have it, don’t we?”
“Yes,” I say without hesitation. It’s another relic of Jude’s I hadn’t been able to give away. “Do you want to get out and catch up with them?”
“Yeah … if you don’t mind?”
“Not at all,” I say. “I have some errands to run in town. I’ll see you back on campus.”
I park and walk toward the Rip van Winkle Diner, my heart thudding in my chest. I try to put that down to the sugar, too, but I know it’s because I’m hoping to find Callum there so that I can tell him we’ve decided to stay. When I open the door to the diner, though, my heart suddenly feels as heavy as the lumps of dough in my stomach. He’s not there. It’s ridiculous, I know, to think he’d be sitting here waiting for me—as ridiculous as it is to think he’s been waiting for me all these months, but still I feel unaccountably let down by his absence. Too discouraged to stay and eat, I start to leave, but Doris Byrnes sees me and waves me in.
“Are you looking for Sheriff Reade?” she asks.
I consider trying to deny it, but she’s looking at me as if she can see right through me. I remember Callum telling me that Dymphna Byrnes was a bit of a witch and I have the feeling that her cousin has just as much uncanny power.
“Yes,” I say. “Do you know where he is?”
“He’ll be working on that house,” she says.
“The blue Queen Anne on Maple Street?” I ask, as if there’s any doubt which house she’s talking about.
She nods, but is distracted by someone calling for a coffee refill. I leave before anyone can notice how flushed I am. The people Callum fixed the house up for must have hired him to do more work on it, I tell myself as I turn onto Maple Street and spot the blue house. Daffodils line the front path and the lilac bush in the front yard is leafing out—there will be lilacs in a few weeks. I walk up onto the porch under the watchful enigmatic gaze of the Greek goddess who has been returned to her carved acanthus bower in the gable. Her face has been completely restored now, but she still looks like she’s keeping a secret. The front door is open. Music comes from a radio playing inside, something mournful and Irish that suddenly erupts into a hard rock beat.
It’s no use knocking with that music blaring—and the owners are probably not here if Callum’s playing the radio so loud—so I go in. The house smells like fresh-sawn wood and lemon furniture oil. The hardwood floors in the foyer and living room gleam in the sunlight pouring through the freshly washed windows. The house looks newly scrubbed, as if waiting for something, but there’s no furniture in the living room and my steps echo in the foyer as if the whole place is empty. Only the statue of the wood nymph stands in the living room. Her face, which has been finished now, looks oddly familiar. I stare at it for a few minutes, trying to decide who she looks like until I realize that she has the same face as the painting over Ivy St. Clare’s desk. It’s Lily’s face, but it’s also mine. Callum had seen the resemblance before I had.
I follow the radio music, recognizing beneath the hard rock beat the familiar strains of “Amazing Grace,” into the kitchen. Callum is standing on a stepladder wiping clean an empty cabinet. He turns when he hears me come in, but he doesn’t step down. He gazes at me as if there’s a story written on my skin he’s trying to read.
“I thought you were getting this place ready for some couple from the city?” I ask, surprised myself that this is what I choose to ask him first.
He drops the cleaning cloth on the counter and steps down from the ladder. I take a step forward and catch the scent of lemon from the oil on the cloth that’s now on his hands. Cherrywood. Lemon. And something else I can’t name. Him.
“You and your Sally, you’re the couple from the city. I thought this place would be perfect for you. I can give you a pretty good price on it … that is, if you’re staying.”
For answer, I step closer and rest my hand on his chest. I feel his heart beating beneath the thin fabric of his T-shirt and smell the warm musk of his skin beneath the cherry and lemon scents on his clothes. The roughness of his cheek brushes against the top of my head as I lay it on his chest. His arms come up around me. I feel as if I’m fitting myself into a mold I’ve been shaped from. I feel as if I’ve come home.