Page 49 of The Immortalists

Someone is at the door, but Klara doesn’t pause. She hung a Do Not Disturb sign on the knob. If it’s housekeeping, they’ll see it.

The living room table looks expensive, all glass and sharp corners, but it’s surprisingly light. She pushes it toward the wall and replaces it with a stool from the kitchen bar.

“Ma’am? Miss Gold?”

More knocking. Klara feels a flash of fear. She crosses to the kitchen and takes a swig of whiskey, then of gin. Dizziness comes on so suddenly that she has to bend over and drop her head to keep from vomiting.

“Miss Gold?” calls the voice, more loudly. “Klara?”

The rope hangs, waiting. Her old friend. She climbs onto the chair and ties her hair back.

One more look outside, at the stream of people and the lights. One more moment to hold Ruby and Raj in her mind; she’ll speak to them soon.

“Klara?” shouts the voice.

January 1st, 1991, just like the woman promised. Klara takes her hands, and they tumble through the dark, dark sky. They flutter crisply as leaves, so small in the infinite universe; they turn and flicker, turn again. Together, they illuminate the future, even from so far away.

• • •

Raj is right. She’s a star.

PART THREE

The Inquisition

1991–2006

Daniel

20.

Daniel saw Mira three times before they ever spoke: first in a study carrel at Regenstein Library, writing in a small red notebook, then at the student-run café in the basement of Cobb, striding out of the door with a coffee in hand. Her gait had an electricity that he felt as she brushed past him. He noticed it again a couple of weeks later, when he saw her running along the perimeter of Stagg Field, but it was not until May of 1987 that she approached him.

He sat in the dining commons, eating a pulled pork sandwich. (Gertie would have had a heart attack if she’d known he was eating pork. He’d even developed a taste for bacon, which he kept in the refrigerator of his Hyde Park apartment and which he swore she could smell on him whenever he returned to New York.) At three p.m., the space was nearly empty; Daniel ate at this time because his clerkship rotation ran from six a.m. to two thirty. He felt a gust of air as the front doors opened, another chill as he recognized the young woman in the frame. Her eyes whisked through the room, and then she began to walk toward Daniel. He pretended not to notice her until she stopped in front of his four-person table.

“Do you mind if I—?” She had a sturdy leather tote bag on one shoulder and an armful of books.

“No,” said Daniel, looking up as if he hadn’t noticed her until now before leaping into action. He cleared a squashed can of Coke and the snakeskin of a straw wrapper, as well as a red plastic basket filled with the detritus of his sandwich: blobs of pork fat and maroon sauce. “Of course not.”

“Thanks,” said the woman, in a businesslike tone. She sat down diagonally from Daniel, extracted a notebook and pencil case, and began to work.

Daniel was puzzled. It seemed she wanted nothing to do with him. Of course, she might have had other reasons for choosing this table: its distance from the buffet, or the fact that it was next to the windows, in a rare patch of Chicago sun.

He searched his backpack for a book and studied her out of the corner of his eye. She was petite but not thin, with a round face that tapered to a slender, shapely chin. She had elegant, furry brows and chestnut-colored eyes with surprisingly pale lashes. Her skin was olive toned and scattered with freckles. Straight brown hair hung to her collarbones.

The clock ticked toward three thirty, then four. At four fifteen, he cleared his throat. “What are you studying?”

The woman had a blue and silver Sony Walkman in her lap. She pulled off her headphones. “What’s that?”

“I was just wondering what you study.”

“Oh,” she said. “Art history. Jewish art.”

“Ah,” said Daniel, raising his eyebrows and smiling in what he hoped was an interested-seeming way, though the subject did not interest him very much.

“Ah. You disapprove.”

“Disapprove? God, no.” Daniel flushed. “You’re entitled to study whatever you like.”