When school’s out, I want to see something pretty. Mom and I tried to do it every day after Dad died. “Every day we’ll find one thing that’s beautiful,” she said, bringing home a Renoir postcard from one of the knockoff stands outside the Met. Those were the worst days, the ones when she brought home postcards, like we had to reach back a century to find something not awful in the world. On the best days we’d find something pretty inside our own apartment or out on the street. On the best days we’d be able to see beauty in a world without my father.
I go on a long walk and end up in the garden. It seems unlikely I can find beauty there today—places that Jack has been will be ugly for a long time, I think.
But I see it. My beautiful thing for the day.
Cruz on the bench.
My face must change. I can feel it blushing, but it does even more than that, shifts in some stark, recognizable way. I put on my sunglasses as fast as I can, but it’s not fast enough, because instead of saying hello, Cruz says, “You heard us talking this morning.”
I’m warm and shaky. I’m fluttery and hollow. Of course he can tell what I’m thinking about, what I’m trying not to think about.
After the Minute of Silence this morning, the principal came over the loudspeakers. “Thank you,” she said, as always, followed by, “There will be a second Minute of Silence to commemorate the Chicago Bombings at 4:36 this afternoon. We expect you to take it just as seriously as you take the one in the morning. We stand by our Chicago brothers and sisters. We wait for answers with them. We will learn the names of the Affected. We will know their stories and the stories of their families. Thank you.”
We’re not far from 4:36 now, and the five new names we learned are stuck in my head, which I guess they’re supposed to be. Next Tuesday we will learn five more, and five more the week after, and by next year they will be on our History of the Affected tests; they will be words on flash cards.
I used to think that people learning my name made me more real, made my grief more solid. After Jack’s funeral, I’m starting to doubt. We’re vocabulary words, we’re concepts, we’re like the state capitals or the pledge of allegiance or the Lord’s Prayer—words people can say without meaning anything at all.
I sit next to Cruz. Closer than I have to. He makes me feel real.
I look to make sure Angelika isn’t lurking, but I think I know deep down that she’s with Delilah. That she is always going to be with Delilah now.
“I didn’t hear much,” I say finally, and Cruz pushes my sunglasses from my face into my hair.
“What’d you think, about what Delilah said?” he whispers.
“I’m with . . . Owen.” I pause before his name because I forget it for a second. “I don’t think about you like that.” But even when I say it I’m thinking of the size of his arms and the shape of his curls and that we’re both quiet and strange when we’re sad or worried.
I think about how he knows me in an impossible way that no one else will ever know me.
I think about the moon—that it is always there but waxing and waning. That it is both predictable and shifting. I think love is something like that.
Like moons and tides.
Cruz moves closer to me.
“My mom has a boyfriend,” I say. “And she cut her hair.”
He nods.
“You and I don’t believe in the Curse,” I say. It did not used to be something we had to clarify. It was as obvious as not believing in the Easter Bunny. “Our dads didn’t believe in the Curse.” I pull my sunglasses back down. It’s a little like taking a shot from Jack’s flask—the volume of the world gets turned down, the edges seem less harsh.
Thinking the Curse is ridiculous was easier when Jack was alive.
Cruz looks at the bench. His dad’s name is on there somewhere. So is my dad’s.
“We can be sad about Jack without being terrified of everything?” I wanted to say it as a statement but it slips out as a question. I hate not being sure about things anymore. I look at my phone and it’s four thirty and we are moments away from the newest ritual, the next thing that’s supposed to make us feel stable and in control, but there’s chaos happening beneath the surface of my skin.
Nothing’s certain. I reach for my hair, then for my key, then for the edge of the bench. None of it steadies me. I am officially unsteady.
Cruz reaches for my glasses and pulls them right off my face. The sun is strong in a way it wasn’t a few minutes ago. It moved in the sky, and now we’re in sunlight instead of shade, without moving an inch.
The world is too bright and too harsh, and I have to squint.
Cruz kisses me.
When Owen kisses me, I know exactly how I feel. I feel good, in the simplest, best way. I feel sexy and eager; I always want more. I can get lost in it.
This kiss with Cruz is a hard and true kiss. Lips. Tongues. My hands in the softness of his hair, his hands on my shoulders, the bench holding us up. I am alert. I am not lost at all. I am right here in the garden, desperate and awkward and unsure.
I can’t breathe.
We keep kissing and I think I might pass out from the endlessness of it. I thought kissing was an escape, but I’m still right here, aware of honking cars and my hair slipping into my eyes, getting caught between our lips, aware of Cruz’s nose hitting mine and the creak of the bench when we try to move closer together.
When he finally pulls away, I leap up from the bench like the kiss was gravity. My knees buckle and I stumble a little. I don’t have balance or breath or any of the things a person needs.
I grab my glasses back from him and throw them over my face so that I can breathe again.
I look at the time. It is 4:36. It is the first second Minute of Silence. It is the beginning of a new time.
“We should—” Cruz starts, but I put my finger to the lips he just kissed. I can’t not do the thing I’m supposed to do. This is a part of our life now, whether we like it or not.
The street goes quiet. Cars pull over. Someone who didn’t get the memo honks, a long sustained note, then they screech to a stop, too, the sound of remembering.
Someone’s TV is on, and someone’s water is running, I’m sure of it. When everything’s quiet, you can hear more clearly. Cruz and I are breathing hard.
In Chicago someone has been in bed for a week and is starting to smell like they’re rotting a little. In Chicago someone is calculating the number of seconds they’ve been without the person they love. In Chicago someone is capturing bits of bone and flesh in test tubes, trying to name victims that everyone already knows are dead. In Chicago they are at the very beginning of the things I know so well.
We’re at the beginning, too, I think, standing in the shadow of the thing we shouldn’t have done.
“I’m sorry” is the first thing I say at 4:37, when we are allowed to move on from the tragedy half a country away. In Chicago they are still stuck, of course, and I feel guilty for the moving forward.
Cruz touches my hair and I think maybe he’s not so sorry.
“Mom says people do crazy things after a big loss,” I say.
“So this is about Jack,” Cruz says.
“I’m with Owen,” I say again, but it’s even less convincing now.
“Are you afraid of being with someone you love?” My heart stops in the garden. All I can think of is lemons and lamb and The List of names. I don’t want to look at Cruz. I look at my bracelet-covered wrists.
I want to be Lorna who says, “No, I’m not afraid of anything!” but I am not that Lorna. I am Lorna who already lost the idea of one beautiful future. I don’t want to take the risk to imagine another.
“Owen’s wonderful,” I say.
I’m not afraid of the Curse. But I am maybe a little afraid of love and the way it changes everything.
“So is Charlotte.” Cruz sounds defeated, though, like he doesn’t want it to be true.
We’re supposed to talk about it more, the thing that happened, the things that are happening. But I’m trying hard to decide kissing Cruz doesn’t mean anything. That’s the easier choice, and I am desperate for ease.
Dolly and Betty appear at the entrance to the garden. Betty clears her throat and there’s no more room for Cruz and me to talk about anything. I take one big step away from him. The space feels easier.
I’ve always been LornaCruzCharlotteDelilahIsla, and I liked the way the future looked, all of us staying that way forever. I imagined texting Cruz the kinds of secrets someone in their twenties or forties or seventies might have. I imagined a Shared Birthday at twenty-one with big bottles of champagne and at thirty with Delilah and Jack’s kids hanging on to them, eating honey cake for the first time. But that’s already gone. We’re all these brand-new people, and on a street filled with tradition and old widows and long histories, that seems impossible. I’ve never been brand-new.
“You know, you’d look good with short hair, too, I bet,” Cruz says like he lives inside my mind. I reach for my hair. I’m scared kissing him has made it vanish. It’s still there. Long and fine and silvery and tangled at the ends.
Betty and Dolly wave hello like it’s a warning. They pick basil leaves and mint leaves and they water the whole lot. It smells fresh and foreboding.
Cruz and I say good-bye the Devonairre Street way, with our hands clasped for one second.
Grab, grasp, gone.