Page 133 of Boardroom Mask

“I can fix that.” Kir reaches over, takes both my hands, and sandwiches them between his. I let him hold them there, rubbing slowly, until feeling starts to prickle back into my fingertips.

Through the scratched plexiglass window, I can see the whole beach laid out below us. The dark sand, the white churn of the surf, the deserted lifeguard stands. A woman in a parka is walking near the waterline with a little girl in a red jacket. The girl is holding a balloon. It’s brightly red against a world that’s otherwise devoid of all color.

Kir sees them, too. We both watch as the girl lifts her arm high, maybe showing her mom, maybe just testing gravity, and the balloon rips free. It shoots upward, fast, tumbling and spinning, and the girl screams in delight as she jumps up and down pointing at it. The balloon rises past the boardwalk, past the shuttered concession stands, past us. Wind buffets its path until it zooms right outside our window. I get one last glimpse of bright red against gray sky, and then the clouds devour it.

Kir watches it disappear. His thumbs have stopped moving on my hands.

“You know, I was never one of those people who assumed they’d have kids one day,” he murmurs out of nowhere.

I look at him in surprise. He’s still staring out the window, at the space where the balloon was. This conversation came out of left field, but the way he says it, it’s obvious that this is something that has kept him up on many sleepless nights.

“Didn’t trust myself with it,” he continues. “Given my role model, you know.” A pause. “It’s hard to picture yourself raising a kid when the only example you had threw your mom’s body in an unmarked grave.”

I don’t say anything. I just let him talk, because he so rarely does this: opens up without being crowbarred.

“Being with you has changed something, though.” He finally looks at me. His gray eyes are quiet and clear. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.”

“Maybe,” I tease weakly. My throat feels dry.

“You’d be a good mother, Jillian.”

I thought I was cold before, but I was wrong.Now,I feel cold, cold, cold. Colder than any December day could ever make me. I turn my head toward the ocean. The woman and the girl are walking away now, getting smaller, their shapes blurring together against the wet sand. I focus on them because I cannot bear to focus on Kir right now. I can’t let him see what’s happening on my face, because what’s happening on my face would raise questions I am not equipped to answer.

Not today.

Probably not ever.

Not as long as there’s a folder of photos on my phone with a hospital bracelet wrapped around a pink, chubby little wrist.

“Hey.” His hand tightens on mine. “What did I say wrong?”

I shake my head. Then I keep shaking it while I blink hard, twice, three times, until my eyes are clear and my mouth can do what I need it to do.

Then I turn back to him, grab the front of his jacket with both fists, and kiss him. It’s floundering and desperate in a way that I hope he reads as passion and not as the thing it actually is, which is a dam holding back a flood that will destroy everything we both hold dear.

When I pull back, his forehead is against mine.

“Nothing,” I promise him. “You said everything right.”

He smiles. He believes me.

I smile back and pray he can’t feel me shaking.

53

KIR

“Will you still be there for me, once I’m yours to obtain? / Once my fruits are for taking and you flow through my veins?”

— “holy terrain” by FKA twigs

We’re driving home. Jillian is asleep against the passenger window with my jacket balled up between her cheek and the glass. Her breath keeps fogging a small circle on the window, then it fades, then it fogs again. Her boots are kicked off into the footwell and her socked feet are pulled up onto the seat beneath her.

She fell asleep somewhere around Bath Beach. She was telling me a story, but her sentences got further and further apart until they stopped altogether. I glanced over and she was out. Mouth open. Hair everywhere.

I turned the radio down and haven’t touched it since.

The highway curves along the water. The last of the daylight is a thin orange band on the horizon behind us, already losing to thedark. Manhattan is up ahead. I keep my speed even. No reason to rush. I could live in this moment forever.