“You stayed?” she asked as he took her pack.
It might’ve been exhaustion, but her eyes grew wet and trembled.
“You stayed,” she said again, quietly.
They sat in the food court to enjoy the best Dunkin’ Donuts had to offer.
“Welcome to America,” Apollo said as they unwrapped their egg and cheese sandwiches. He lifted his. “I’ll take you somewhere nicer soon.”
She pulled the sleeves of her shirt up slightly. “Fique tranquilo,” she said. She smiled. “I won’t keep doing that.”
Apollo went to the counter for a knife because the sandwich hadn’t been cut all the way through. He watched Emma raise the sandwich to her mouth to eat. He stayed by the counter to marvel that she’d returned. Around her wrist she wore a thin red string. Why did the sight of it make him stiffen? It had a sentimental appearance, the kind of thing some beautiful Brazilian boy tied around an American woman’s wrist because he could afford nothing more. She’d been gone a year. Why couldn’t she have fallen in love with someone else? Maybe she’d come back with fewer belongings because she was planning to return.
Thinking in this way, he came back to the table with a plastic knife and a belly full of anxiety. He pushed the egg and cheese sandwich around but had no appetite. Emma remained quiet as well, until she’d finished her whole meal. Then she raised her arm, the one with the red string, so he could see it clearly. The string had gone a bit stiff. It was dirty. It had been on her wrist a long time.
“When I got to Salvador, I stayed with a family in a neighborhood called Itapu?. There they have a lagoon called Lagoa do Abaete. You remember, at our dinner, you told me about the old married Satanists? I thought of you when I saw the lagoon because it’s supposed to be haunted. There was a washerwoman there who I came to know after my Portuguese got stronger. My host family tried to keep me away from the woman, they told me she was a witch, but I liked her. I wasn’t scared of her. She made me think of my mother, who she might be if she were still alive. Tough and funny, and she didn’t give a damn about other people’s opinion of her. I found myself sneaking out of their house just to sit by the lagoon with her while she did her washing. Before I left for Manaus, she told me to make three wishes for my life, and then after I did, she tied this string around my wrist.”
Emma turned her hand clockwise, then counterclockwise, watching the red fabric.
“I must let it come apart, she said, and when it fell off my wrist, those wishes would come true. I could not cut it off. Nao corta-la. I thought it was fun for a while, a little bit mystical, but this thing has been on my skin for more than six months! It looks ratty, but I want my wishes to come true. Don’t look at me like that! I guess I believe in magic.”
Apollo took her hand and pulled it toward him.
I am the god, Apollo, he thought. I am the god, Apollo.
He picked up the plastic knife on the table, and with one move he cut the red string off her wrist. It fell onto the plastic tabletop. Emma shivered. He held on to her hand.
“I promise you,” he said. “With me, all three of your wishes will come true.”
In this moment Emma Valentine faced a choice. She could see this moment as proof that Apollo Kagwa was an arrogant dick, or she could decide he was bold and worthy. He’d made his move, and now she must make her decision.
EARLY EVENING BY the time Apollo arrived at the two-story row house in Ridgewood, Queens. As he scuffed up the front stairs, he laughed at how, when he lived in the two-bedroom in Flushing with Lillian, these sorts of places—not apartments but actual homes—had seemed so high-toned. He’d ask her why they didn’t live in one, and she’d say, Those are for owning not renting. Even now that he and Emma had an apartment of their own—on the island of Manhattan—he couldn’t stop himself from admiring the row house, gawping at the second-floor windows, the rain gutter running along the roof. Apollo Kagwa, thirty-seven now, but he still felt like that little boy.
When Apollo rang the bell, he heard a woman calling from inside, and then the locks clicked and the curtains of the first-floor window slid aside a few inches so he could be seen there on the stoop by someone he couldn’t see. Then another voice, deeper, male, and the door stopped being unlocked. Apollo felt thrown back to the days when he’d been left waiting outside some nervous bookseller’s storefront, or all the times the owner of a private residence refused to let him in. I am the god, Apollo, he thought. I am the god, Apollo. These days the mantra came automatically, as commonplace as breathing. He took out his cellphone while he waited and sent Emma a text. He wondered if she’d already made it to the restaurant.
Will be late for dinner, but I’ll be there.
“Hold on!” a woman shouted from the other side. “I’m here!”
The door shook in its frame, locks clacked then clicked, then clacked back again.
“Come help,” the woman growled. “Don’t you see me?”
The curtain in the front window fluttered, another set of footsteps, heavier and faster. Two clicks, and the knob turned, the door opened. A man in his early thirties stood in the doorway, and behind him was a small, much older woman. White folks, they looked like a pair out of some old central European woodcut. Those gaunt, lined faces and stiff postures.
“It’s that easy!” the man said, shouting at her over his shoulder. He seemed too old to sound so childish.
The woman pulled at the man’s arm so he’d move.
“Mrs. Grabowski?” Apollo asked.
“You’re the book man?” she asked.
“I’m the book man.”
Apollo held out his card for her, but the man snatched it fast, then retreated into the house. Apollo decided to call the man Igor, no matter what his real name turned out to be. The old woman, Mrs. Grabowski, smiled tightly and waved Apollo in.
They entered a dining room where six cardboard boxes were laid out on the dining table. There was a sectional couch in the adjoining room, a large flatscreen television on a stand, and little else.
“You said your husband died,” Apollo began.
“Ex-husband,” Mrs. Grabowski said. She looked around the dining room. There was a dining table here, but no chairs. The off-white walls so dusty, they appeared gray. Black garbage bags were heaped in one corner of the dining room. One of them lay open, and a few dingy sport coats, weathered slacks, spilled out. Mr. Grabowski had succumbed to bachelorhood in his old age.
“My son and I have lived around the corner in recent years.”
“At least you stayed close,” Apollo said.