“Knew it the moment I saw you.” Anna asked how that was possible. “A man can smell a woman’s sadness.”
“And you smelled mine.” Anna was offended by the word “smell.” As if sadness could be covered up with roses. As if despair might be washed off with soap.
“Yes.”
“And took advantage of it.” Anna was perturbed and fascinated and something else, though she couldn’t pin it down. Guilty? Found out? Caught in the red-handed act? Something like that.
Archie corrected her. “And responded to it.”
“There’s a difference?”
“You’re not sad?”
This time it was Anna’s turn. “Irrelevant,” she lied. She shifted in bed. Neither spoke for a minute or two. “What do you like about me?”
Archie laughed. “So it’s that kind of talk we’re having, eh?” Anna shook her head and Archie softened. “You’re complicated. You can’t be cracked.”
Like a safe. Except I’m not. “Thanks. I guess.”
“You’re welcome.” They settled onto their backs, each looking up at the ceiling. “Why’d you say yes?”
Now it was Anna’s turn to laugh. “What else would I have said?”
THE INTERREGIO PULLED INTO the station at Frick at 10:56. It was an eight-minute wait before the S-Bahn to Mumpf passed through. The Benzes herded out of the car, descended beneath the station to change platforms, and then huddled around an empty bench while they waited for their connection. The barometric pressure had dropped. The weather was changing. Everyone felt weary and it wasn’t even lunchtime.
A month before, a mass grave of dinosaur bones was unearthed in Frick. An amateur paleontologist found them. He discovered over one hundred entirely intact skeletons. Fossils of plateosauri two hundred million years old. Some days, Anna envied the dinosaurs their extinction. A comet did not veer from its trajectory. A beautiful disaster that was fated to happen did.
The eight minutes passed quickly and by five past eleven the Benzes were on the S-Bahn headed directly to Mumpf.
THE HAND-ART SHOP WAS filled with pretty colors and soft yarns and everything smelled like lavender and cinnamon, cardamom and mace. Lovely, Anna thought. And it was. Lovely and soothing. Tranquilizing. She spent forty minutes in the shop, picking up skeins of exotic wool and touching each of them longingly to her cheek before returning them to their shelves, all beneath the magnanimous gaze of the shop mistress. The tactile experience consoled her and the dread that had blackened Anna’s mood began to lift. In the end, she chose skeins of hand painted silk, of alpaca, and of cashmere—luxury threads she knew Ursula would adore but never purchase for herself. Anna left the knitting shop gratified that, for once, Ursula would be exactly pleased with what Anna offered her.
She could take the number 33 bus directly to the Hauptbahnhof; that was Anna’s plan. The bus stop is on the eastern end of Neumarkt. So when she left the knitting shop Anna bore a stiff, immediate right. But she was laden with packages and she wasn’t paying attention to where she was going and she’d pulled her winter hat right down to her eyes. Therefore, Anna did not notice the man standing in the middle of the sidewalk, whose own face was buried in the crease of a Zürich city map. And he, so absorbed by the two-dimensional zigzaggery of cross streets on the thin, unwieldy paper, did not see Anna bearing down upon him.
Synchronicity often masquerades as coincidence. As right-place-right-time-ness. As an and-then-suddenly kind of incident. In this case, it was a combination of all three that when balled together knotted themselves into a cliché as saccharine as a kitten in a floppy yellow bow. The trite expectedness of it was one of the proofs Anna clung to for ballast in the aftermath. See? How could it not have been true? Things like that don’t only happen in movies.
She hadn’t been paying attention.
She hadn’t been paying attention and she ran into the man.