I crawled into bed, and Philip turned to face me. His eyes were so dark and thoughtful. The first time we saw each other again, he picked me up at the BWI Airport, the closest Amtrak station to Annapolis-I took the train from Pittsburgh, eight long hours. When I got in the car, I couldn’t stop staring at his hands. I didn’t remember them. They were so perfectly shaped, not knob-knuckled or Yeti-hairy or spider-fingered. I watched everywhere his hands went-as they opened doors, shifted the car into park, drummed nervously on his knees when he searched for answers to my questions.
We stopped at a little park off the highway. There was only a picnic table and a parking lot, and I didn’t understand why this park was so special. ‘You’ll see,’ Philip said, getting out of the car. ‘We just have to wait.’
The air had a savage bite to it. We sat on top of the picnic table, the feeling seeping out of our legs and hands. Suddenly, there was a small, distant roar growing from the horizon. A spot emerged in the sky. ‘Lie down,’ Philip said. Suddenly, a plane was above us. United, it said on the side. It flew right over us, so low that I thought we might get caught in its propellers. We shaded our eyes. The wind was so strong, it felt like it could lift us into the air. When we sat back up, we accidentally bumped hands, except it wasn’t an accident, at least on my part. ‘Were you screaming?’ Philip asked. ‘I think you were screaming.’
‘I wasn’t.’ I patted my hair back down. I tried to be as poised as I could, as together as I had been during our phone conversations. Philip knew everything that had happened in my life, but in a tempered, elegant way. I didn’t want to ruin my chances. I was already starting to feel vulnerable.
‘It’s okay,’ Philip said. ‘I screamed the first time, too.’
Outside my old Brooklyn bedroom, a siren howled. The moon spilled in through the window, and I watched Philip close his eyes. His hand was still wrapped around mine. Often, I tried to get back the feeling of being underneath those airplanes, the loud noises they made, the big shadows they cast.
‘We’ve been together for a year,’ I murmured.
‘Mmm hmm,’ Philip said back.
‘Isn’t that scary to you?’
‘Mmmm.’
In two more minutes, he was asleep.
26
Philip had a computer in the spare room of our apartment, an old thing from his college days. It had dial-up Internet access, same as the computer that Stella and I used in Cobalt. A few weeks after moving in, I began to look up people on-line. First, Dr Hughes. Then some girls from the NYU biology department. I looked up Alex, who was still working at the genetics clinic, and I looked up Samantha, although she wasn’t lost to me. Samantha had her own web page, with her picture in the upper left-hand corner. She wore a blue blazer and a large smile, beckoning people to shoot her an email about any of the houses listed on her site.
And then, finally, I looked up the person I really wanted to find: Claire Ryan.
It hadn’t been easy to find her. Claire hadn’t contributed information to the Peninsula alumni website about her education, marriage or career, as many others had. She wasn’t listed on Classmates.com, and she didn’t appear to have a blog. I found plenty of other Claire Ryans, including lawyers, track stars, physicists, and a soprano in an ensemble musical group. I finally found her, though, in a Craigslist post: someone had found three kittens in a vacant lot. She was looking for good homes for them, preferably families that didn’t have dogs. The contact email was Claire’s first name and last name at something called Howell United, which I later found out was an environmental action group. When I clicked on the Craigslist ad’s accompanying picture, there was Claire, holding a squirming, orange kitten in her arms. The straight smile, the teal eyes, still beautiful. It was hard to tell if she was fat or thin.
She had posted on the Washington, DC Craigslist page. I couldn’t believe our close proximity, and I wrote her immediately. A few nail-biting days went by, but finally she wrote back. Not that you could gauge emotion from how someone wrote an email, but part of me had anticipated an ecstatic response, so I was startled when Claire seemed almost blasé that I’d found her. We decided to meet at her office near the Smithsonian after she finished work and take it from there.
I took the Metro into DC and got there way too early. Since I had a few hours to kill, I walked around the Mall, which was strangely empty, perhaps because it was a weekday and the middle of winter. My footsteps rang out on the marble floors of the Air and Space Museum. I bought a Bio-Dome habitat in the gift shop, which promised to house four separate species under one plastic shell. It even came with a little magnifying glass so that I could take in the action up close-the ants burrowing through tunnels, presumably. It reminded me of my father’s snow globes.