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“Hey, you,” I answer.
“You can’t sleep?”
“No. ”
“What’s the matter?” she asks. She yawns on the other end of the line.
“Was just missing you is all. Been lying in bed staring at the ceiling for like an hour now. ”
“You’re silly. You saw me like six hours ago. ”
“I wish you were still here,” I say. She moans. I can hear her smile through the darkness. I roll to my side and hold the phone between my ear and the pillow.
“Well, I wish I was still there, too. ”
We talk for twenty minutes. The last half of the call is both of us just lying there listening to the other breathe. I feel better after having talked to Sarah, but I find it even harder to fall back asleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
FOR ONCE, SINCE WE ARRIVED IN OHIO, THINGS seem to slow for a time. School ends quietly and for winter break we have eleven days off. Sam and his mother spend most of it visiting his aunt in Illinois. Sarah stays home. We spend Christmas together. We kiss when the ball drops at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Despite the snow and the cold, or maybe even in retaliation against it, we go for long walks through the woods behind my house, holding hands, kissing, breathing in the chilly air beneath the low gray skies of winter. We spend more and more time together. Not a day passes during that whole break that we don’t see each other at least once.
We walk hand in hand beneath an umbrella of white from the snow piled atop the tree branches overhead. She has her camera with her and occasionally stops to take pictures. Most of the snow on the ground lies undisturbed aside from the tracks we have made on the walk out. We follow them back now, Bernie Kosar in the lead, darting in and out of the brambles, chasing rabbits into small groves and thickets of thorny bush, chasing squirrels up trees. Sarah wears a pair of black earmuffs. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose are red with the cold, making her eyes look bluer. I stare at her.
“What?” she asks, smiling.
“Just admiring the view. ”
She rolls her eyes at me. For the most part the woods are dense aside from sporadic clearings we continually stumble upon. I’m not sure how far in any one direction the woods extend, but in all of our walks we have yet to reach their end.
“I bet it’s beautiful here in the summer,” Sarah says. “We can probably picnic in the clearings. ”
An ache forms in my chest. Summer is still five months away and if Henri and I are here in May, we will have made it seven months in Ohio. That is very nearly the longest we have ever stayed in one place.
“Yeah,” I agree.
Sarah looks at me. “What?”
I look at her questioningly. “What do you mean, ‘what?’”
“That wasn’t very convincing,” she says. A mess of crows fly by overhead, squawking noisily.
“I just wish it was summer now. ”
“Me too. I can’t believe we have to go back to school tomorrow. ”
“Ugh, don’t remind me. ”
We enter another clearing, larger than the others, an almost perfect circle a hundred feet in diameter. Sarah lets go of my hand, runs into the middle of it, and drops into the snow, laughing. She rolls to her back and begins making a snow angel. I drop beside her and do the same. The tips of our fingers just barely touch while we make the wings. We get up.
“It’s like we’re holding wings,” she says.
“Is that possible?” I ask. “I mean, how would we fly if we’re holding wings?”
“Of course it’s possible. Angels can do anything. ”
Then she turns and nuzzles into me. Her cold face against my neck makes me squirm away from her.
“Ahh! Your face is like ice. ”
She laughs. “Come warm me up. ”
I take her in my arms and kiss her beneath the open sky, the trees surrounding us. There are no sounds save the birds and the occasional pack of snow falling from the nearby branches. Two cold faces pressed tightly together. Bernie Kosar comes trotting up, out of breath, tongue dangling, tail wagging. He barks and sits in the snow staring at us, his head cocked to the side.
“Bernie Kosar! Were you off chasing rabbits?” Sarah asks.
He barks twice and runs over and jumps up on her. He barks again and pushes off and then looks up expectantly. She grabs a stick from the ground, shakes the snow off it, and then hurls it into the trees. He races after it and disappears from sight. He emerges from the trees ten seconds later, but instead of returning to the clearing where he had exited it, he comes from the opposite side. Sarah and I both spin around to watch him.
“How’d he do that?” she asks.
“Don’t know,” I say. “He’s a peculiar dog. ”
“Did you hear that, Bernie Kosar? He just called you peculiar!”
He drops the stick at her feet. We walk towards home, holding hands, the day nearing dusk. Bernie Kosar trots beside us the whole way out, his head on a swivel as though ushering us along, keeping us safe from what may or may not lurk in the outer dark beyond our line of sight.
Five newspapers are stacked on the kitchen table, Henri at his computer, the overhead light on.
“Anything?” I ask out of habit, nothing more. There hasn’t been a promising story in months, which is a good thing, but I can’t help but always hope for something every time I ask.
“Actually, yes, I think so. ”
I perk up, then walk around the table and look over Henri’s shoulder at the computer screen. “What?”
“There was an earthquake in Argentina yesterday evening. A sixteen-year-old girl pulled an elderly man free from a pile of rubble in a tiny town near the coast. ”
“Number Nine?”
“Well, I certainly think she’s one of us. Whether she’s Number Nine or not remains to be seen. ”
“Why? There’s nothing really extraordinary about pulling a man from rubble. ”
“Look,” Henri says, and then scrolls to the top of the article. There is a picture of a large slab of concrete at least a foot thick, eight feet long and wide. “This is what she lifted to save him. It must weigh five tons. And look at this,” he says, and scrolls back to the bottom of the page. He highlights the very last sentence. It reads: “Sofia García could not be found for comment. ”
I read the sentence three times. “She couldn’t be found,” I say.
