“No, not that. Well, maybe a little that. Mostly it’s strange not being the same.”
“I’m just me,” Nora said. “I’m here. I’m the same.” Now she was afraid she was going to cry.
Louisa shook her head. “I’m not saying it right. It’s like we used to want the same things and see the same things and now we don’t and it feels strange. Lonely almost. Almost like I’m doing something wrong because I don’t want the same thing as you.”
Oh, Nora thought. This part is going to be easy. She knelt on the floor in front of Louisa and took her hands. “It’s not your job to be anyone’s mirror,” she began.
WHERE HAD THE GIRLS GONE? Melody looked everywhere before she thought to check the bedroom. She opened the door slowly and saw them sitting on the bed. “Did you ask Jack if it was okay to be in here?” She stepped inside and, just like Nora and Louisa had, started looking around, interested.
“We were just about to come out,” Louisa said, blowing her nose and trying to collect herself. Melody saw that Louisa was crying.
“Oh, no.” She rushed over and knelt in front of them. “What happened? Oh my God, did something happen on the street? Did someone hurt you?”
“No,” Nora said. “Nothing’s wrong.”
“I want to know the truth!” Melody grabbed each of their hands and shook them a little. “If someone hurt you, you have to tell me. I don’t want you keeping things from me.”
Louisa started to laugh. “Mom. God. Nobody hurt us. We’re completely fine.”
“We were just talking about school,” Nora said.
Melody looked back and forth at both of their faces. Louisa was staring at her lap. “Is she telling the truth,” Melody asked Louisa. Louisa shrugged. Nora looked worried. Melody held Nora’s gaze, trying to spot any tiny sign of deception. “What’s going on in here? What are you not telling me?” Louisa fiddled with the tissue in her hand. Melody put a finger under Louisa’s chin and lifted it until Louisa looked her in the eye.
“We’re not leaving this bedroom until you two tell me what’s going on.”
CHAPTER THIRTY–THREE
You’re so beautiful,” Leo had said to Stephanie the first night they’d slept together in her dingy apartment on the ground floor of an even dingier building. It was late August and air-conditioning was a luxury she couldn’t afford. The box fan, which made an aggressive click with every full rotation, whirred and rattled in the bedroom window, muffling the sounds from the street: the teens across the way who hung out on the stoop blaring a car radio and arguing until sunrise; the bleating taxi horns three blocks over where traffic backed up from the entrance ramp to the Manhattan Bridge. But that night, the night Leo told her how fucked up he was, the cacophony that usually made her grind her teeth in frustration had seemed romantic, urban and wild, the perfect soundtrack for her lust.
“You’re so beautiful,” he’d said to her, as she slowly undressed in front of him and he watched, still and admiring on the edge of her unmade twin bed. His voice held such a rare note of wonderment that her throat tightened. And then he covered his face with his hands.
“Leo?” she whispered.
“I’m so fucked up,” he said into his palms.
Oh God, not now, Stephanie thought. Not a precoital unburdening, a completely unnecessary recitation of all the ways he was so fucked up. Hadn’t she seen him in action for years already? Didn’t she know his flaws? She looked down at the curve of his back, the thread of his spine, how his dark curls, on the long side then, rested against his almost feminine neck. His skin glowed in the moonlight, like the lustrous surface of a pearl.
He looked back up at her. “I’m really fucked up, Stephanie.”
She understood with complete lucidity what he was offering her in that moment—not a confession or a plea, but a warning. He was offering her an elegant escape. In those days, one of Leo’s gifts was an uncanny ability to predict how things would play out. His favorite expression was from a speech he’d heard some king of finance give once: If you want to predict a person’s behavior, identify his or her incentives. Leo wasn’t saying, I’m so fucked up, he was saying, I’m going to fuck this up. He knew something about his incentives that she didn’t.
But there he was, shirtless, on her bed. Leo, whom she’d been a little in love with for always, and all she cared about in that moment was the length of his body against hers.