EVERYTHING WAS STILL. My head felt thick and sore and so did my body, but the room had stopped moving. Carmichael was gone; Joe was sitting on the bed next to me, smoking a cigarette. He was naked. I realized that I was naked, too.
The air smelled bad.
Joe looked down at me and said something about being sexy and seventeen.
“Bathroom,” I said. Croaked.
He pointed down the hallway with his cigarette.
I tried to stand up. My legs were wobbly. Somehow, I made it. I washed my hands and my face and then I looked in the mirror.
There was makeup smeared under my eyes. My hair was a tangled mess and my eyes were red. There was stubble burn on my cheeks and my chin and my breasts, and the hair between my legs was sticky and hard. My scalp was sore, as if my hair had been pulled hard.
My skin smelled of Joe’s cologne.
I splashed some water on my face and then took a towel from the rack on the wall and wrapped it around myself. Things were still dim around the edges, and on my way back to the bedroom I made a wrong turn and found myself staring at a human-sized cage made from chicken wire and splintering wood. It was filled with excited, darting things, all bright little eyes and pointed little ears and snaky little backs.
Paralyzed with horror, I couldn’t breathe.
“You like my ferrets?” Joe emerged from the bedroom, wearing only a pair of tight blue briefs.
“No.” The cage reeked of urine-soaked wood and rodent dirt. It was the source of the bad smell in the air. The mass of ferrets inside it writhed malevolently.
Joe opened the cage and pulled one of them out. It moved sinuously up his arm and curled around his neck. “You want to hold her?”
“No,” I said. I couldn’t stop shuddering. The ferret’s black eyes glittered at me from his shoulder.
“You want to know their names?” Joe pointed at each of the ferrets in turn and said, in a singsong voice, “Lust, Sloth, Gluttony, Envy, Anger, Greed, Pride; and this little darling here is Ingrid.” He reached up behind his head and stroked the ferret’s long body. Grinning, he said, “Here, hold her,” and put the ferret on my shoulder. Its tiny claws dug into my bare skin as it sniffed at my ear and I felt its fur bristle as it investigated the back of my neck.
Then it was in my hair. My mouth opened and I heard myself scream.
The noise was loud and shrill and broke through my daze. I beat at the hissing mass of fur with my hands, still screaming, and then there was a sudden sharp pain on the side of my hand. Joe was shouting, “Don’t hurt her! Don’t hurt her!” and he grabbed me and pushed me fiercely against the wall. He pinned me there with a forearm across my breastbone while he gently pulled strands of my hair away from the ferret. When she was free he lifted her back to his shoulder. She hissed at me again and he held me by the arm and slapped me, twice, hard.
“You stupid bitch. You fucking hurt her,” he said and let his arm fall.
My legs gave out and I slid down, crumpling in a heap at the base of the wall. Joe stalked into the bedroom, the ferret twined around his neck, and came back a moment later carrying my clothes.
He threw them at my face. “Here. Get dressed and get the fuck out of here.”
The ferret blinked at me from his shoulder.
I found my underwear in the pile and pulled them on. There were long smears of blood down the length of my thighs.
“It bit me,” I said. “My hand is bleeding.” I held it up.
“Get out of here,” Joe said again and shook his head in disgust. “Fucking pathetic.”
Outside, it was early morning. There was a thick fog clinging to the empty streets and the air was cool and damp in my lungs. I’d wrapped my bleeding hand in one of my Gypsy scarves and was clutching it to my chest. My tights had disappeared and my boots were rubbing painfully against my legs.
Every muscle in my body was tired or sore. My stomach hurt and my head was fuzzy.
Jack said it’s okay. Jack said we could.
No. Obviously that hadn’t been true. I had been calling for my brother; that’s why they’d said that. Because Jack would never.
The doorman in Lily’s building was asleep in a chair in the lobby. I rode the elevator up and let myself in. The apartment was dark. I tripped over Lily’s suitcases. So she hadn’t left yet.
I went to the bathroom and turned the bathtub faucet on, peeling the Gypsy costume off as I went and kicking it into the corner. There was rubbing alcohol in the cabinet; holding my hand over the sink, I poured some directly into the ferret bite. It burned. I hissed and swore.
“You’re back,” Jack said from the doorway.
“I’m back.” I kept my head down. My face was starting to bruise where Joe had hit me. If I turned that side of my face away from Jack, he’d see it in the mirror. If I turned it away from the mirror, it would be facing him.
“We tried to find you before we left.” He moved into the bathroom and closed the door. “Maris said you went off with Carmichael. Lily was thrilled.”
“I want to take a bath,” I said. “Can you leave me alone, please?”
Jack didn’t leave. “Did you go off with him?”
“I want to take a bath,” I said again.
Jack moved forward quickly and grabbed my shoulder, turning me around to face him. His hair was wild and there were deep bags under his eyes. He stared at me.
“What happened to your face?” His voice was emotionless.
I didn’t trust myself to speak. The bathroom was filling with steam that made my eyes water. “Same thing that happened to the rest of me,” I managed to say. “I got hit by a truck.”
We stared at each other for a long moment, and a memory drifted into my mind.
Does your brother do this?
“Some truck,” he said finally and let me go. “Do you want me to stay?”
I told him to go back to bed and sat in the bathtub for a long time, ignoring the sting of the hot water on my hand. Finally I climbed out, dried myself on one of Lily’s thick white towels, and went to bed. The sheets felt clean and smooth on my skin, and the pillowcase was cool under my head. I didn’t sleep.
A few hours later, I heard voices in the living room. Lily was leaving. Not long afterward the door opened and Jack slid into bed with me. I buried my face in the pillow. He didn’t try to touch me.
Jack said, “She’s gone.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I couldn’t read her last night. She was so drunk.” He halflaughed and said, “She said she loved me, do you believe that shit?”
“No,” I said.
I felt him shift.
“I don’t believe it either. You know why?”
I closed my eyes tight.
“Because you’re the only one who’s ever loved me,” he said. “That’s why. You’re the only one who’s ever loved me and Pm the only one who’s ever loved you.” His hand slipped under my neck and pulled me into the crook of his arm. I let myself be pulled. “That’s all there is. That’s all that’s true. Nothing else matters.”
For a long time I didn’t trust myself to say anything.
“Are you okay?” he said.
Does your brother do this?
Jack said we could.
But Jack would never.
“No,” I said. “Pm not.” My throat felt cracked and raw.
“You will be.” His voice was confident and sure. “You just have to move past it. Let it go.”
I wanted to scream.
“I was calling for you,” I said. “You should have been there. Where were you?”
I felt his arm tighten around me and then relax. “Smaller sister,” he said. “Pm here now.”
Jack’s cure for my ills was the same as it had always been: get good and drunk. But for the first time in my life I didn’t have much appetite for drinking. The smell of alcohol made me think of ferrets. Most things made me think of ferrets. I had nightmares about ferrets, moving over me in a furry gray wave, poking and prodding and biting me.
Two days passed and the nightmares got worse. My hand wasn’t healing the way it should; the initial sharp pain had dulled to a constant hot throb. The edges of the wound were inflamed. When I poured rubbing alcohol into it, it was like putting my hand in fire.
The television weathermen were predicting a heavy snowstorm coming in from the west; it would be the first one of the year. A night, a day, a night, another day passed, and no snow.
One night we sat on Lily’s roof terrace, wrapped in coats and scarves from her closet. Jack said, “It’s nice to be alone again, isn’t it?”
I didn’t answer. I cradled my wounded hand and stared out at the cold dreary city.
“She’ll go on more vacations,” he said. His breath made fog in the air. “Hell, I shouldn’t complain. We have everything we want.”
“We have everything she lets us have.”
Jack put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me close. “Why the dire thoughts, little sister?”
My gaze was fixed on the skyline. “Must be the storm coming.”
The street below us was empty. Maybe people were staying indoors, waiting for the snow.
Jack tried to make his breath form a ring and failed.
“No snow yet,” he said.
By nightfall, there was still no snow, but the sky hung low over the city, heavy with cloud cover. The meteorologists assured us that the snow was coming, it was only a matter of time. My sleep, when it came, was fitful. Jack slept next to me but it didn’t help.
When the sun came up on the third day, it was raining. After the rain stopped, Jack found a pair of ice skates in Lily’s closet and decided we’d go skating in the park. They were girl’s skates, with smooth white boots and clean laces. The blades were still sharp and they fit me perfectly.
But the rink was too crowded. The line at the rental counter looped all the way around the rink and people were standing four deep at the rink’s edge. I shook my head. So we walked around the park instead, buying hot chocolate from the snack bar by the zoo. Jack had a little flask that he’d found somewhere and taken to carrying, filled with vodka. He put a little into his cocoa and I slung the skates over my shoulder, tied by the laces. Jack watched me fumble with the knot. “We look like we’ve gone, anyway. Does your hand still hurt?”
The throbbing pain in my hand had become a familiar companion. The pain burned steadily at night, when Jack’s breathing was soft in sleep, and was still there when I woke up in the morning. I’d been keeping it to myself. It had to get better eventually. “It’s fine,” I said.
We walked toward the Ramble, where our stroll turned into a hike. The rain that had come instead of snow had made the steep hills treacherous. Last summer I’d liked the Ramble; if you ignored the dog walkers and the joggers and the distant sound of traffic, it was a little like walking in the woods on the Hill. In the summer, there was the rich green light and the low humming of insects in the air; there were the rough, unpaved paths looping back on themselves and making that part of the park seem larger than it really was. Sometimes it was hard to find the right path out of the woods.
But that afternoon, the leaves were off the trees, the buildings on Central Park West were all too visible through the bare branches, and the Ramble seemed stark and sinister, with its twisted switchback paths that came to sudden dead ends in pockets of marsh. After a few minutes it began to feel like a bad dream, as if we were trying to perform some simple task like crossing the street and couldn’t figure out how to do it. My hand ached, and the skates that I’d slung jauntily over my shoulder were banging heavily against my rib cage.
Jack took my good hand in his.
We turned a corner and found ourselves on a small stone ledge overlooking one of the marshy parts of the lake. In the summer it would have been buzzing with insects. Now it was empty and lifeless. The water was as smooth as glass. The clouds overhead drained the scenery of color. None of the other paths were visible from where we were standing.
My brother stared out over the water. He was wearing the leather jacket that Lily had bought for him. His hands were jammed in the pockets and his eyes were faraway.
“Jack,” I said.
He looked at me.
“Did you talk to Carmichael and Joe that night? Did you—did you say anything to them?”
“No,” he said. “I never even met Joe.” He shook his head. “Every time I look at your face, I want to kill them. You know that.”
I lifted a hand to the side of my face where it was still bruised and sore. I shivered.
“You know I could never stand for anyone else to touch you. Even in Erie. That Michael guy,” he said. “You know I’d do anything for you. I’d kill those guys, if you wanted me to. Even that.”
I shook my head.
His eyes snapped. “I would. I’d do it. You only have to say the word.”
I wondered. Joe and Carmichael were Lily’s friends. “It wouldn’t change anything,” I said.
When we got back, there was a postcard from Lily in the mailbox, an arty black-and-white shot of misty steps and bare trees against a winter sky. On the back, she’d written, “This is exactly what I needed. Hope the two of you are having as much fun as I am!”
“What do you want?” Jack asked me the next day, over coffee and rolls at the diner down the street. “What do you want, more than anything else in the world?”
The fingers of my right hand were stiff and uncooperative. I had trouble tearing open the packet of sugar for my coffee. “To leave New York,” I said, and it was true: what I wanted more than anything else in the world was to leave the city and never come back to it. Once, I had found the anonymity of the crowded city comforting. Now I felt as if I were constantly biting back screams that would force people to turn and stare at me, to acknowledge that I was there.
“Leave?” he said. “Why the hell would you want to leave?”
Because there is a searing pain in the only part of me that was ever truly mine. Because someday I’ll go to a bar and sit next to Carmichael, and you’ll sit across the table from me and smile. I said, “Because it’s expensive, and difficult, and we don’t have any money—”
He gave me a pained look. “Since when have we ever worried about money?”
I didn’t answer.
“You really want to give up everything we’ve worked for here,” he said, “everything we’ve managed to do, because of one bad night.”
One bad night, I thought. “Never mind, Jack,” I said.
“At least we’re not in goddamned Janesville,” Jack said. “You know what Crazy Mary used to say when something went wrong? She’d say, ‘We’ll fix it. We’ll figure out a way, Jacky. The greatest force in the universe is the power to think for yourself.’ And when I asked her what that meant, she’d say, ‘It means, at least we’re not in goddamned Janesville.’” The light in his eyes faded a little. “No worries, young sister. Things will end in happy places. They always do with us.”
I thought of Lily’s apartment, a cold, charmless pocket in a tall building that was a hive of cold, charmless pockets, and said nothing.
Jack signaled to the waitress for more coffee. I said, “Did you know that ferrets are illegal in New York City?” I had learned this from a flier posted in the window of the local pet shop.
“No. So are mountain lions. So what?”
“Mountain lions are big, though. Why would ferrets be illegal? They’re like guinea pigs.”
“It’s too easy for them to survive here,” the waitress said as she poured our coffee. “Give them a month or so, we’d have ferrets instead of rats in the subways.”
I imagined it: standing in the subway with Jack, waiting for the No. 2 train. Winter. A flash of tawny pelt on the tracks. Rustling in the litter at the end of the platform. They’re everywhere, even crouched at the foot of the stairs. We’re surrounded.
The night Lily was due back, Jack and I lay side by side in bed, not touching.
“You fall off a horse, you get back on,” said Jack, who had never been on a horse in his life, to the ceiling.
Next to him in the darkness, sore and silent, I said nothing, and soon he fell asleep. I wasn’t really sleeping at all anymore, just dozing and dreaming thin pain-dreams that seemed real. Eventually I was aware of the pale winter sun coming through the window. I was alone in the bed. Lily was laughing in the living room.
When I saw her curled up like a spoiled Persian cat in the armchair, with her bronzed skin and her newly dyed brown hair, I realized that I hated her. Listening to her chatter set my teeth on edge. After spending a day with her friends in Paris, they had all decided “on a whim” to go off to Greece for the rest of her time abroad, and she’d had such a wonderful time and met so many wonderful people, and it had all been so rejuvenating, so incredibly fabulous—the food, and the music, and the beaches, and the parties, and the scenery! I sat there on the couch in the endless blur of her prattling, empty of everything except the throbbing in my arm and my seething rage.
Lily’s eyes widened when she saw the bruises on my face, which had faded to a dull yellow. She glanced quickly at Jack, who sat next to me on the couch with one of his arms flung across the back of it, his fingers barely touching the back of my neck. He was smiling but his eyes were grim.
“And you two,” she said, pulling up one trim leather pant leg so that she could unzip her high black boots. “You had a good time?”
“It was fine,” Jack said. “We didn’t do much.”
“As long as you enjoyed it.” Lily peeled away the cashmere socks underneath her boots to reveal tanned, pedicured feet. There was a silver ring on one of her toes.
Jack said, “Let’s go have dinner.” He stood up as he talked, went to the closet, and took out his black leather coat.
Lily stretched her legs out and gazed at her glossy, shellpink toenails. “Maybe.” She swung her legs up over the side of the armchair. “But first I want to take a nap. I cannot wait to sleep in my own bed.” In one motion, she sat up, swung her legs down to the floor, and stood up. She yawned prettily. “I’m exhausted. Can you try not to wake me up?”
Her bedroom door closed with a small, smug noise and Jack and I were left together in the silence that fell instantly over the rest of the apartment. He came to me and we stood together.
When Lily awoke, she expressed concern about my arm, which was swollen and angry-looking up to the elbow by then. I told her that I’d cut it opening a can of olives.
She told Jack to forget about dinner, to take me to the emergency room.
“Josie’s okay, aren’t you, Jo?” he said. I wasn’t; I could hardly bend my wrist, and I couldn’t move my fingers at all. But I nodded.
“I’ll take you tomorrow if it’s not better,” he told me. “Just not”—his eyes flicked to Lily—“now.”
When he was out of the room Lily sat down next to me and said, “What about your face?”
“Born with it. Nothing to be done.”
She gazed steadily at me for a moment. “Did Jack do it?”
“Jack would never hurt me,” I said.
“I know what he can be like,” she said evenly. “I know how he can get.”
“The difference between you and me, Lily, is that I don’t get off on it,” I said, instead of telling her that it was none of her goddamned business. I sounded so much like Jack that my stomach lurched.
She didn’t blush and she didn’t look away. Her dark eyes were serious, for once.
“You’re smarter than that, Josie,” was all she said.
That night, her first night back, she went out for a drink with Maris and came back late. I went to bed early and sank immediately into the familiar dream-haunted, fitful sleep. I was aware of Jack lying down next to me and getting up again, as restless as I was.
He was sitting on the edge of my bed when we heard Lily’s key in the lock. It was only after he went to greet her that I realized that he was wearing only his underwear. I wondered what she would think, and why I didn’t care.
No noises came through the wall that night. All I heard were voices, Lily’s and Jack’s, rising and falling and rising again. More than once I was pulled out of a half-sleep by Jack’s angry voice, but I couldn’t ever make out the words. Then Lily, quiet and sibilant, hushing him, calming him.
Finally I woke with a start to find my room filled with bright light and swirling cigarette smoke. Jack was sitting next to me, propped up against the white headboard. There was a cigarette in his hand and a highball glass full of butts on the table next to him. His gaze was fixed blankly on the wall but the set of his mouth was angry.
“We have to leave.” His voice was toneless. “She wants us out.”
Still not fully awake, I asked, “When did this happen?”
“Last night,” he said in the same cheerless monotone. “She said she decided while she was away. She’s going to her parents’ house in Maine Saturday morning. She wants us gone by then.”
“Is that what you were fighting about last night?”
“I let her win. Told her she was right, after all.” Then he turned to look at me, and his green eyes were as cold and expressionless as his voice. “You always hated her, didn’t you?”
I shrugged. I didn’t care.
“I’ve always hated her, too,” he said. “From the moment I saw her.”
On Friday, Lily made herself scarce. Jack brooded, and smoked, and drank. Once I said, “Something will come up. It always does,” and he said, “Sure it will.”
“We’ll go to California. Like you said when we first got here.”
“Maybe.”
“Or anywhere else you want.”
Slowly, he turned his head and looked at me.
“Josie,” he said. “Little sister. Quit trying to make me feel better.”
She came home that night, holding two shopping bags in each hand. A blood-colored scarf edged in black embroidery was wrapped jauntily around her neck. The scarf blazed against her new dark hair. One of the bags held a bottle of champagne, already chilled, and a bottle of pear brandy. “A going-away party,” she said gaily, “for all three of us, and if we don’t all set off with hangovers tomorrow I’ll turn in my Holly Hostess badge and join a leper colony.” She dropped the bags on the island in the kitchen and looked around. Her eyes skipped nervously over my brother, who was standing in a corner of the kitchen, watching her sullenly.
“I went to see my decorator today,” she said, starting to dig around in the shopping bags. She pulled out plastic bags of tomatoes and garlic and boxes of pasta. “I think I’m going to have this place redone, get rid of all this damn white. André has some beautiful tapestries in his show room. I’m thinking reds and purples, maybe some indigo.” She gave us a dazzling smile. “Doesn’t that sound gorgeous? You’ll have to come back for a visit when it’s done.”
Jack pointed at the two bottles on the counter. “What are we supposed to do with these?”
“First, open them,” she said. “Then, drink them.”
“Chick drinks,” Jack said as Lily poured generous shots of brandy into three wine glasses and topped them off with champagne.
Now he looked at her intently. She didn’t seem to notice.
“A festive drink for a festive evening.” She handed us our glasses with a flourish. “Voilà. Mimosa à la Lily. Now, what should we drink to?”
Jack said, “Whatever you want.”
“To the future, then,” she said, and we drank.
Once you’ve decided to tell the truth, it’s hard not to qualify it. The facts are the easy part. The sky is blue. Fire is hot. He hit her. The problem is that it’s so often tempting to qualify those facts: It sounds worse than it was. It sounds terrible when I say it like that. Or there’s the other way out: rationalization as absolution. It was awful, I shouldn’t have done it. I wasn’t thinking. You have to understand how I was feeling, what I’d been through.
Either way: I didn’t do it. But I didn’t stop him.
We were drunk. Something different.
Lily and I were each stretched out on one of her two white couches, laughing. I told myself that it was all a sham, that I was only acting cheerful, but the truth was that this was the last night that I would ever spend in Lily’s apartment. We would leave the next morning; I didn’t know where we would go, but it would be somewhere else. That was enough for now.
Jack brooded in the background. Once, while Lily was in the bathroom, he came to me and let his head drop into my lap, whining, “I hate her. I hate her. I hate her.” He sounded like a child. I wondered why leaving Lily was so different than leaving Raeburn or Becka had been, but she came back into the room before I could ask him.
Lily told us a story about a friend of hers who had been cheated by every tour guide and shopkeeper in Athens. By the third time the friend paid fifty dollars for a ten-minute cab ride, I was laughing, and so was Lily. Next to me on the couch I felt Jack grow more and more rigid until finally he said, “For the love of Christ, would the two of you please shut up.”
Lily fixed him with a pitying gaze and said, “So very, very grouchy.”
In response, Jack jumped to his feet and threw his full glass of champagne at Lily’s pure white wall, leaving an ugly wet splotch.
Lily’s eyes widened and she laughed. Her laugh was high and uneasy. I laughed, too—I couldn’t help it. His gesture was so melodramatic and self-indulgent and I was giddy with alcohol and fever and nervous tension. When Jack walked around to the back of the couch and stepped on the stem of the glass, it snapped with a noise like a tree branch breaking and I giggled again.
“Fuck both of you,” he said.
Lily beamed up at him drunkenly. “But darling, you already have.”
Time froze. Across the room Jack was looking at Lily with new eyes, ablaze with green fire. I felt as though one of the walls of the room had collapsed, like the bombed buildings in war photos, with the inhabitants’ lives exposed: this is how they lived, this is what they ate, this is how they loved.
Her eyes glittering, she looked at Jack, who was standing between the couch and the wall, then at me. “I’m right, aren’t I?” She clapped her hands and laughed wildly. “I knew it. I knew it! Carmichael had his suspicions, and I knew, of course I knew, but I didn’t know.”
“Lily,” Jack said. His voice was low and dangerous.
She jumped to her feet. Her eyes shone. “Oh, I’m not judging. I think it’s kind of romantic. A little sick, maybe, but who isn’t a little sick sometimes?”
“Lily,” I said. I thought that I should probably put myself between her and Jack, but I couldn’t make my feet move, and in addition to the alcohol and the fever and the fear, there was a burgeoning excitement in me that was a little terrifying. I saw Jack move toward her.
Lily kept talking.
“How long?” she said. She had raised herself up and was half sitting, half standing, with one knee bent under her and her body twisted around to face Jack over the high plush back of the couch. It was a childish, gleeful pose, as if she were too excited to sit all the way down. “I bet you were kids when you started. It’s like one of those British novels. Kids in those books are always fucking each other. Was it like that?”
I saw my brother reach over the back of the couch and put his hands on Lily’s shoulders. He told me later that he only meant to push her down, to make her shut up, but then she said, “To tell you the truth, those books always kind of turned me on,” and Jack’s hands moved so quickly that I saw only a blur. One hand went over her eyes and the other over her mouth, and with a mighty jerk he pulled her by her head over the back of the couch. Her dark red lips opened to cry out once, and then I couldn’t see her anymore.
Jack had one of the heavy glass vases from the side table in his hand and I saw his arm move downward fast, once, twice, three times. By the time I made it to the other side of the couch Lily was lying crumpled on the floor. Her blood was mixing with the water on the floor and there were pale blue lilies and deep red liquid everywhere. It was too late.
We put her in the coat closet. Neither of us could think with her lying there like that. Then we cleaned up the blood and the glass, changed our clothes, and threw the ones we had been wearing into the incinerator. The clothes that we put on were our old clothes from Janesville, which I had been keeping in plastic bags on my closet floor. Just in case.
We did all of this silently, speaking only when it was absolutely necessary. It was like cleaning the house in the old days, after a week of tearing it apart: see what has to be done, do it.
Her foot—I see it—got her?—no, wait—
Jack and I worked as if we were one person.
When it was done, we collapsed onto Lily’s big bed and slept in the same clothes we’d worn when we’d fled our father together. We slept holding hands.
When I woke up the next morning, my hand felt like it was on fire. Jack asked me if I thought I’d better see a doctor.
I was too tired to dissemble. “I don’t know,” I said.
He held my hot hand and felt gently around the wound. “It looks bad. Should I take you to a doctor?” he asked again. I was having trouble standing, so we went to the emergency room. The waiting room had the same hard plastic chairs as the bus station we’d waited in during the long trip to New York. It all began to seem unreal, the chairs and the waiting and the dead girl at home in the closet. My mind drifted and I let myself imagine that we were still on that trip. We still had all the long months in the city ahead of us. There was still time.