IT WAS STRANGE that nothing calamitous happened when Saina and Grayson first broke up.
She’d expected the Los Angeles basin to split apart like a giant glacier, calving pink stucco islands studded with palm trees that would float off across the Pacific. She’d expected an epic fire in New York City. A crosstown conflagration that would swallow entire neighborhoods, leaving behind a crisped and broken Manhattan. An earthquake, a tsunami, another flood or terrorist attack—something, anything, to commemorate their cleaving. But instead, nothing. Just a mild winter and a glorious spring and fewer murders in the five boroughs.
It wasn’t vanity.
Everyone thought that their breakups should cause time to stop and birds to drop out of the sky. It’s just that with Saina’s, it actually happened.
In first grade she’d spent an entire art period building a papier-maché rocketship for Adam Garcia, who told Kelly Park that he liked Saina. But when she tried to present her handiwork to him, he laughed and said that it was a joke. As her heart broke, the Challenger exploded right in front of them on the classroom television screen.
Three months later, Adam saw a corner of her notebook where she’d written SW + AG. He said he thought she was gross. She cried.
Then Chernobyl.
Saina had sworn off boys after that, avoiding the potential nuclear disaster of spin the bottle and ignoring the famine that was sure to come if she confessed her crush on her best friend’s older brother. In tenth grade she’d developed a giant, embarrassing crush on her art teacher, who had praised her teenage insights and given her his favorite art books and stared a beat too long at her cutoffs. She imagined a bohemian life for the two of them that was interrupted by heartbreak when she saw him kissing the Spanish teacher in the school parking lot. That night, as she lay awake into morning, the walls of the house jumped up and slammed down into the earth with a crack and roar. It was heartbreak that measured 6.7 on the Richter scale and felled an entire apartment building in the San Fernando Valley. She limited herself to a string of amusing dalliances for the rest of high school, but after the first breakup with a college boyfriend who went on to launch an empire of pinup porn stars, September 11. After the second, with a sweet and lovely Canadian who studied the structure of snowflakes, Hurricane Katrina.
Saina knew it was gross. She felt guilty for ever having made that first connection, for thinking that her minuscule personal heartbreak had anything to do with the Challenger or Chernobyl. But we can only ever see the world through our own half-blind eyes, set in our own stupid heads, backed by our own self-obsessed brains, and from that vantage point, it just didn’t make any sense that nothing fell apart after Grayson left. If Saina was being completely honest with herself, half the motivation for her retreat to the country was a fear of some calamitous terror strike that was sure to follow that first, worst breakup with the man she thought she was going to marry.
Instead, she’d walked into the Catskills and met Leo.
It was the first warm day of spring. She had headed towards town aimlessly, looking for the kind of escape that could be found only in a solitary walk through a crowd. Except that there were no crowds in Helios. At four o’clock its only street was nearly deserted and the shopkeepers were occupying themselves by sweeping sidewalks and gossiping in doorways. Neither of the street’s restaurants was scheduled to open for another couple of hours, but the door of one swung open on a lazy hinge. Taking a chance, Saina pushed in, tiptoeing through the wood-paneled vestibule. All of the chairs were stacked on top of the tables, and a mop and bucket sat abandoned in the middle of the ceramic-tile floor. The lamps were switched off, but the late afternoon sun sent a hazy, dust-filled shaft of light across the men on either side of the copper bar, making the two of them look like a Caravaggio.
Behind the bar, a dirty blond with a red beard held a glass up to her. “Afternoon drinking. Nothing like it.” His voice echoed across the empty room.
She grinned. “Morning drinking. Even better.”
And then the other guy, the one who would turn out to be Leo, leaned back and laughed, parting his pink lips, showing every single one of his pretty teeth, leaving his smooth throat open and vulnerable.
That, she thought, looks like a healthy diversion.
Saina had chosen a house on the outskirts of Helios because the town was small (population: 1,214) and isolated (three miles off of County Road 19) and she thought that she didn’t want to see or talk to anyone ever again.
Actually, that wasn’t quite right.
It was more like she’d seen it all as bucolic set dressing for her inevitable comeback. This was the magazine story she really wanted—not some exegesis on failure penned by Billy, but a tribute to her rebirth.