“What? Eat cake at eleven in the morning?”
“Yeah, the whole thing.”
We hugged on the porch. He smelled as he always did, like rain, moss. I only needed to get through ten seconds of his touch without crying, but I couldn’t make it. The generosity of this morning swooped down like a sudden gust of wind. I couldn’t stand against its power, forced into a bow. It felt unearned.
He pulled away, cradling the back of my head like it might tip backward. “What’s wrong?”
I shook my head.
“We’ll do it again, okay?”
I nodded.
He bounded down the steps toward his beat-up car. That little boy in the picture gripping the monkey bars with all his small strength. How could I have known? My mom once told me that there are questions in our lives that never get answered. I didn’t understand it then. But I understood it now.
That night, feeling alone in the final hours of my birthday, I carefully copied the novel about my parents and the longer, messier one about Amira into the same document, Frankensteining it into something senseless, ugly.
For weeks, I told the story to myself out loud while I showered, as I fell asleep, on the bus to work, until I didn’t need words to know it.Then one evening, I opened a blank document and rewrote everything from memory.
Perched on the edge of my bed, I read through it. The story ran toward me, bowlegged, a buoyant toddler learning what feet can do. I’d written an entirely new book.
I cried hard, sucking in breath like oxygen was scarce and I was stockpiling it for later. Not just because of all the bad things that had happened, but because I was moving away from the story in my mind and toward the one in my body. But folded inside these sobs was a loss so total it seemed only right that it’d rounded out a year piled up with losses. Story didn’t solve anything. It only offered the sensation of resolution. I sat staring down the barrel of more questions, at blank page after blank page at the bottom of this great document.
The Post-it note with “FORM” scrawled urgently on its surface had frayed and torn on my nightstand just like the idea of it had in my head.
I laughed, tired.
But staring at it the following day, I realized its meaning had been twisted up inside me: “Form” was also a verb, to build, to bring together. Maybe what I was after was the moment before “form,” the noun, arrived, the bits the container couldn’t contain, that stretch of land where human wants look strikingly similar before lines get drawn around them. How the wind sometimes sounds just like the ocean. How one place can be all places if you listen closely enough.
PART VIThey All Fall in Love at the End
Chapter 79
The gallery was chilly and spacious. I’d known, somewhat vaguely, that she was a big name now. I didn’t know how big until I saw all the people there to see her work.
I passed self-consciously under the white lights spilling onto every piece, fiddling with my flyaways. She must’ve been into Dalí lately—bright watery colors, surreal scenes that didn’t make immediate sense, a woman’s melting face, a commentary on extreme heat, maybe. I was more focused on finding her than on her work, though even in my heart I wouldn’t let this truth fully surface.
A tray came around with champagne. I grabbed a flute, surveyed the crowd: Women in linen pants. People laughing, tilting their heads back too far. Men standing close to the art. And then: her talking to an older couple in the far corner, a man with smooth dark skin hovering behind her. She laughed. It looked practiced now, not the wild thing I remembered.
Realizing my mistake, I started toward the door, but she saw me. She waited a breath before excusing herself from the couple and coming toward me, the man trailing her.
“Cat.” She smiled, dark red lips. She had the same lustrous bob, now with a fringe. Her soft arms were suddenly around me. I felt her smooth back under my fingertips. She was wearing a black halter dress with a long piece of fabric floating down the back.
Pulling away to look at me, “Has it been ages or has it been ages?”
“It’s been ages,” I parroted stupidly.
Her hand landed on the man’s chest. Who was this guy?
“This is my husband,” she said.
I forgot his name immediately. We shook hands. His were rough like a day laborer’s. Other than this, I failed to process anything about him. She didn’t explain to him who I was.
“I can’t believe this is all your work.”
She said, “I know, right,” and drifted toward the terrace. I took that as my cue to follow. Her husband stayed behind.
Southern California was at the tail end of a heat wave. I flapped my hand in front of my face, which just felt like someone breathing hot breath on my cheek. Tents crowded the sidewalk below. In the distance, the land was parched and cracked with drought.
