The night before they had not seen Boston at her best, but early the next day she welcomed them, awash with pale yellow sunshine beneath a blue sky, the air crisp, the light dazzling. On the broad black silence of the Charles the rowers rowed; along the esplanade the runners ran, in hats and earmuffs, in fleece and gloves and clouds of their own quick breath. The greedy stasis of Thanksgiving was behind them; busy Bostonians had returned to river life.
“Oh em gee”—Gwen bounded off the bus, scarf flying, and calling backward to Saskia—“this is unbelievable.” James had taken Julia and the girls to Cambridge to lead them through the leaf-strewn paths beneath the ivy-clad red brick of his glorious alma mater, but Gwen’s praise was in fact for a fire hydrant. She fell upon it with a cry of joy, a delightful reunion with this old friend known only from the quaint, unreal America she inhabited on television. She photographed it, and then crouched down beside it for Saskia to capture her looking at it. She measured its solid contours with her gloved hands. She would make one for the blog, she told them all. She giggled at the sign that offered instruction in case of SNOW EMERGENCY and asked her mother to take another picture of her with Saskia beneath it.
“Nathan’s just getting off the T, he’ll be here shortly. I’m not sure the Widener can compete after a hydrant and a sign. But there may be other signs in Harvard Yard. ‘No Smoking. Fire Exit.’ That sort of thing.”
Julia watched Gwen with anxious interest but Gwen merely grinned. “Fire hydrants are cool. I like Americana.”
Not rude, Julia noted, just conversational. Progress.
James led them toward a small ice cream shop. In the doorway Saskia paused, and she now gently poked her father’s shoulder.
“I’m leaving, Dad. I’m meeting people for lunch.”
“We’re people. We’re people right here. Three people, who all live in England and who pine for you across the ocean . . .”
She patted his head mildly. “Bye, Dad.”
“Have you got cash? Scarf? Batphone? Call me if you need a ride from anywhere.”
“You don’t have a car in this country, but thanks.” Saskia turned to Gwen. “When you go into Harvard Yard, don’t let him or Nathan tell you to rub John Harvard’s toe; the students pee on it. Kay, bye. Get the black raspberry.”
• • •
NATHAN WAS LATE, and they ordered without him. Gwen held out her cone of black raspberry to James, tentative, casual. James took it, tasted, considered with head cocked to one side, reviewed it favorably, returned it. He offered Gwen his own malted white chocolate. They agreed to swap and Julia watched in a state of rigid disbelief and fascination, breath held, as if willing a paused and watchful wild animal to approach a tidbit held on offered palm. This would have been unthinkable in London. It was Nathan’s absence, surely, or it was Boston, or it was the alignment of the planets. In her pocket her phone vibrated, and she excused herself from the table, handing Gwen her untouched frozen yogurt and stepping out into the noise and chill of Massachusetts Avenue.
“I’m so sorry, maidele,” Philip said, when Julia answered. She stood in the cold, numbed. “It wasn’t right. We couldn’t let him suffer.”
A hope extinguished. Each change had come like this. Gwen’s first day at secondary school. The rapid and murderous blight that afflicted the blowsy, salmon-pink roses that had always climbed their garden wall, flourishing over the years despite total ignorance and neglect. The transformation of their family’s beloved local curry house into a fluorescent-lit, linoleum-floored nail bar. Each wave swept Daniel further from his little girl, a stronger tide even than the accumulated minutes since she had last seen his face. And Julia could do nothing but stand on the shore and watch, hopelessly, as he receded, alone with the wounded little girl he left behind. Gwen’s longing for her father was why Julia would not get a new car, nor replace—of all the things about which to be sentimental—the unreliable microwave. Gwen had asked her not to. Through the glass she watched Gwen talking, gesticulating, eating the ice cream James had given her, opening up to him, possibly for the first time. And now she would have to be told and would suffer. It was on this duty that Julia fixed as she turned her face away from her family and into the biting wind, permitting herself only a short, silent weep before she returned to the café.