The Careful Undressing of Love Page 11

  Downstairs, Mom’s left the paper open to the horoscope section. Every single horoscope says some version of Be Careful or Live Your Life to the Fullest or All We Have Is Each Other. I flip through the rest of the paper, and the news is even worse. There might be Yet Another Bombing, we need answers for the Chicago Bombing, some say a psychic in Milwaukee knew it was coming. There are studies on how the History of the Affected is working in schools, and the results are inconclusive but compelling, an impossible combination. Politicians are advocating a daily Minute of Silence. If my father were around, he’d ask why we think silence helps anything. That would be one of those complications he loved. I think he’d be fascinated by the way things are today, and I miss him even more, wishing he could question it all.

  “Things will calm down,” Mom says when she comes into the kitchen after a shower. She makes tea. It’s vanilla. I’ve never had vanilla tea. Even the smallest things are changing. The tea smells like something I’d wear on my skin but I’m not sure I want to drink it.

  “The paper says nothing is calming down,” I say.

  We stopped getting the paper for two years after the Bombing. Almost every article was about the Victims, the mysterious suspects, the beauty of a country in recovery, the fear of it happening again, and profiles of people who were moving on, the way that human connection perseveres after tragedy. It was strange to read about the biggest thing that had ever happened to me through the eyes of someone else. Mom used to crumple the whole thing up and stomp on it when she got especially frustrated.

  We read a lot of books at breakfast over those two years.

  “Should we stop getting this thing again?” I ask.

  “When we move to California, we’ll stop,” she says. “We won’t even let them know where we live. Won’t that be sort of great?” I wonder if Mom’s picturing California a little like Mars.

  “We’d have to worry about earthquakes out there,” I say, trying to make it a joke even though she sounds a little serious.

  “We can survive an earthquake, Lorna.”

  I pretend not to hear. We could never leave the street. We are the street.

  Further into the paper there’s a long article on Jack Abbound and the Abbound family and their grief. There’s a picture of his mother and Michael and I suppose someone who is his father—pale and powerful.

  In the article they call Jack “a promising youth from one of Brooklyn’s most prominent families” and “a boy on the verge of something great, only to be taken down by wayward partying and a penchant for the wrong crowd.”

  I turn the page to where the article continues.

  There’s a photo, but it’s not of Jack and it’s not of his well-heeled family. It’s of us. Our backs are to the camera. Four girls in black wool dresses, three of us with hair all the way down our backs, Delilah in the middle, her hair making her taller. We stand in a straight line looking at the church.

  I see us, for a moment, the way other people see us. We look unusual and frightening. We look old-fashioned and misplaced. We look like outsiders in a city we’ve lived in our whole lives. We look all wrong.

  No wonder they hated us.

  For decades, the residents of Devonairre Street have experienced an unusual number of tragedies. The historical street is known for its public mourning and the storied rumors of a curse. The names of the street’s best-known residents are now recorded in the History of the Affected. The Ryder family, the Rodriguez family, the Partona family, the Chen family, and the Joneron family all are Affected families of the Times Square Bombing. According to demographer Dr. John Ganderton, the number of Affected families on one single street is statistically unlikely. “Often we see streets with high levels of firefighters or police officers Affected in a tragedy like the Bombing. Neighborhoods that house a great deal of municipal workers often experience disproportionate loss. The numbers in those cases can be more easily explained.”

  But Devonairre Street is no such neighborhood. “These numbers in this neighborhood are highly improbable,” Dr. Ganderton explained. “I would consider this a statistical anomaly.”

  Others, however, consider it concrete evidence of a curse. “We avoid those women,” a man on neighboring Belleford Street, who asked to remain unnamed, says. “Good thing they keep that long hair. Lets us know what we’re dealing with. That rich kid? I’d have told him to stay away, too. It’s a shame.”

  All the residents speak of Jack Abbound and the warnings they wish they’d issued him upon learning of the socialite son’s death.

  “We want the focus to be on my brother. We won’t be commenting on the curse,” Michael Abbound, brother of the deceased, said in a comment made the day after Jack Abbound’s untimely death.

  “We wish our son had made better choices,” Bert Abbound, the deceased’s father, said after the funeral. “We had high hopes for his future, for him finding his place in the city we love. He would have done the Abbound name proud. We aren’t interested in commenting on the unusual company he kept in the last few months of his life.”

  “Of course he died; she loved him,” Devonairre Street resident Angelika Koza said. She explained the logistics of the curse, saying the deaths always happen in the first five years of a girl loving a boy. “If a boy or a man hasn’t died within five years, I know he wasn’t ever truly loved,” she said. “I tried to stop it. I always try, whether the boy has a fancy name or not.”

  This boy did have a fancy name, though, and according to many friends and family, a bright future. His death occurred only a few hours after the Chicago Attacks, a fact that believers in the curse say is further proof of its legitimacy.

  “Too much coincidence for one street,” a waiter at the street’s famed Bistro said. And on that, at least, local Brooklynites and mathematicians can agree.

  The Abbound family asks that their privacy be respected during this difficult time.

  • • •

  I shut the paper when I finish reading and look to Mom to see if she read it before her shower.

  “I know, Lorna,” she says. “I don’t know how they even reached Angelika. Probably wandered the street looking for someone who would give them something juicy. You know how these reporters are.”

  My mother and I have appeared in three different major feature articles about Families of the Victims, and every time they captured us in some way that felt decidedly wrong. It’s what we hate about the History of the Affected. We have been “Lorna and Emily: Strong Survivors with Unusual Beliefs,” “Lorna and Emily: Struggling to Move Forward,” and “Lorna and Emily: Focused on Community in Their Time of Need.”

  We are not those Lornas and Emilys.

  Often we are Lorna and Emily: Not Doing the Dishes and Not Really Talking Much Either, or Lorna and Emily: Skeptical and Scared, or Lorna and Emily: Pissed at the World.

  Today we are Lorna and Emily: Trying New Tea and Wondering What Love Even Is.

  Jack Abbound wasn’t the Jack Abbound in the article. They didn’t mention his tattoos or his flask or how often he kissed Delilah or the lyrics to his favorite songs. They didn’t talk about the way he would have put his feet up on the chairs in my future kitchen, or how I would have grown to know the difference between his tired yawn and his bored yawn and his just-because yawn. It mentioned his bright future, but forgot to describe how he might have looked in a tux or what flavor cake he and Delilah would have had at their wedding.

  How he would have looked silly and too young.

  That they would have had honey cake.

  The article assumed he would have lived in one of his family’s angular buildings by the water, but I know he would have lived on our street, proving everyone wrong—his family, Angelika, maybe even me.

  “Hopefully Roger won’t see this,” Mom says.

  “That’s the name of the . . . person?” I don’t want to talk about the guy in Mom’s
life.

  Then I get a flash from last night at Julia’s. A champagne hiccup. My hip bone hitting a ceramic sink. A bride with flowers in her hair.

  I swallow it back.

  “He’s from Queens.” Being from Queens is shorthand for Roger might not know about the Curse.

  “They get the paper in Queens, I think,” I say. Mom’s face falls a little.

  “He’s not the kind of guy who would buy into this stuff.” She’s trying to convince herself more than me so I don’t bother saying anything. “He throws away the horoscope section. He thinks the unbreakable mirrors are a joke.”

  The mirror in our living room is decidedly breakable.

  I don’t want to know too much about Roger or the things he likes or doesn’t like or believes in or doesn’t believe in.

  “He says it’s important we all try to remember the way things were before. Too much changed in the way we all view the world, he says.”

  “I remember the way things were before.” I’m thinking of Dad’s wide hands and coffee breath and method of cutting sandwiches into strips instead of in halves.

  Mom tucks the paper into her purse, finishes her tea, and kisses my forehead.

  “I’ll be home late,” she says.

  I didn’t get a chance to say anything about my picture in the paper, or the way the image looked: stark and strange and like we are who they say we are.

  • • •

  We don’t linger quite so long outside the doors before Cruz brings us into school today. It helps that two army recruiters are unashamedly staring at Isla while they finish their cigarettes. Or maybe they’ve read the paper and they’re staring at all of us. I’m too tired to worry about it or Isla or anything at all. I feel a little bad for them, anyway. They look downright bored. It’s a thankless job, these days, getting kids to join up. Recruiters spend most of their time trying to talk seventeen-year-olds out of engagements and into enlistment. Mom’s always saying, “You can’t get anyone to join an army when you don’t know who you’d be protecting the country from.” I try to imagine one of us joining the army, but I’m finding it impossible to conjure up any future at all.

  I look them right in the eyes before we get all the way inside. I don’t hate them, but I want them to know I see them seeing us.

  • • •

  I hang on to Owen at lunch. I wrap my arms around his neck and kiss the space where his T-shirt meets his skin. I do not think about Denver. I do not think about Cruz. I do not think.

  “You smell good,” I say. “You coming over later? My mom’s going to be out with the guy.”

  “Of course,” Owen says, and I try to look for worry under the words. Are you scared of me? I ask in my head, but I can’t find an answer on the surface of his skin. I shake off the kiss with Cruz and the things we said and felt in the garden; I lock away the moments in the bathroom at Julia’s and focus on Owen, who is a great kisser and a good boyfriend and a person who is safe and easy and uncomplicated. I kiss his mouth, which isn’t allowed in the cafeteria, and guys start whooping and Charlotte and Cruz are across the table from us and fidgeting with discomfort.

  “You’re having a good day, huh?” Owen says, which is so far from how I feel but I kiss him again to see if I could kiss it true.

  “That’s one brave man,” a guy behind us, Anton, says. He has the sad beginnings of a beard and wears the same shirt almost every day.

  “Who knew you read the paper, Anton?” Cruz says. He is straight backed and frowning. Charlotte nudges him to shut up.

  “It’s all fucked up, bro. I didn’t know that Jack guy but it’s pretty fucked up.”

  “Step back, man,” Cruz says. He’s leaning forward like he might stand up, but Charlotte’s pressing down on his knee. I put a leg over Owen’s thigh and feed him a French fry from my plate, like that proves something. I try not to look at Cruz.

  “I’m just saying.” We don’t know what it is Anton’s saying, exactly. But my heart’s pounding from the way things change slowly and all at once. We mostly keep to ourselves at school. And mostly people don’t look at us except right after the Minute of Silence, like they want to catch sight of something sad crossing our faces. Otherwise they’ve grown used to us and the way we exist as a single organism.

  That’s gone now, too.

  Anton turns around and more people might be whispering, but I don’t hear them because all I can hear is Isla entering the room. She has tall boots that make loud noises on the floor and her tangle of hair is swishing so wildly I swear it sounds like an ocean. She’s wearing an extra-short blue dress and a collection of five keys around her neck and dozens of Delilah’s bracelets. Her boobs are pushed up and out, and she smells like musk and the end of the day.

  Cruz looks uncomfortable but doesn’t say anything; he knows better. None of us say anything, but a lot of people are looking at the way she swings her hips—unpracticed, a little awkward, demanding attention.

  “What’d I miss?” Isla asks, grabbing Cruz’s sandwich from his plate and taking a hungry bite.

  “What’d we miss?” Charlotte says. For girls who look so different, we’ve always looked a little bit the same. But today Isla is Something Else. She rolls her eyes at Charlotte and touches her own hips like she’s making sure they’re there.

  They are.

  “Exactly what you’d expect,” I say. We don’t talk about the Jack article or the picture of the four of us girls. It goes unsaid.

  “It’s gonna be okay,” Owen says.

  “That sounds nice,” Isla says, “but it’s not actually going to be okay.”

  Charlotte pats the seat next to her. If we can get Isla to sit down, maybe we can stop them from looking at us. I try to imagine what it would be like to be Anton and his friends, watching our lives instead of living them.

  Isla doesn’t sit. She stands up straighter. She pulls her hair from behind her back to over her shoulder. “I’m not going to be some sad, untouchable girl.” She scans the cafeteria and I wonder what it is she’s looking for. She isn’t being quiet. I want to fade away, but she’s making it impossible. I hear giggles and a hush. “I can still have fun.”

  I put my hand high up on Owen’s thigh.

  Charlotte clings to Cruz.

  We all pretend we are not being watched.

  Except Isla. Isla smiles at everyone watching her. She watches them right back.

  16.

  On Saturday, Delilah starts knocking on doors.

  She comes to ours first, still decked out in gray wool, her hair covered in a red scarf I’d seen Jack wear around his neck. Her clothes are getting looser, her mouth tighter.

  “Looks good,” I say, but what she really looks is strange and unkempt and worried.

  “Come over at noon,” she says. I squint and try to really see her. I can’t.

  I nod.

  “I think we need to all come together,” Delilah says. “It’s an emergency.”

  “Emergency?”

  “You’ll be there?” Her face doesn’t change expressions and she’s not quite meeting my gaze. She’s lost weight, I’m sure of it. Her face looks slimmer than it did a week ago; the bones are more prominent, the angles of it all new.

  “Are you okay?” I ask, begging her to look at me full-on. “You don’t seem great. What can I do?”

  “I need everyone to come over at noon to talk,” she says. I want to shake new words out of her, different expressions. The night Jack died I saw her face shift a hundred times, and imagined her body in all new shapes, wrapped around Jack. Now she’s frozen in this one expression, and I’m having trouble remembering the way she looked when she kissed Jack or drank wine or rolled her eyes at honey cake. “You can help me tell everyone.”

  “Everyone like Isla, Cruz, and Charlotte?”

  “I’ll tell Cruz myself.” Delilah gives me a hea
vy look. “Your mom here? Maybe she’d help get the word out, too? I need to set up.”

  “Set up what?”

  “My place. Angelika’s over there already but I’m sure she needs help. She’s told all her ladies. But we haven’t gotten to the families at the end of the block. Maybe you can do that for me?”

  “Delilah,” I say, hoping that somehow hearing her name will turn her into Delilah again.

  It doesn’t.

  So I knock on doors. Because I don’t know what else to do.

  • • •

  No one is late. I wonder whether it was Delilah’s gaunt, serious face that scared people into punctuality or if Jack’s death and the Chicago Bombing and maybe even the looming seven-year anniversary are making people too nervous to relax into things like tardiness or dismissiveness. Everyone I talked to comes with tea and lemons. They pile the lemons on the coffee table in Delilah’s little living room.

  Delilah’s mother sits in an armchair and watches the fruits roll around, drop to the floor, light up the room with their insistent sunniness.

  Mrs. James has a wrinkle between her eyes and I can’t tell what she’s thinking but she looks older. She’s wool covered, too, and puffy faced. Everything that has always been in this room has vanished—books about healing after tragedy, prayer rugs, a yoga mat, a framed meditation that has to do with the power of letting go. All the things Angelika hates.

  Those artifacts have been replaced with photographs of Mr. James. I haven’t seen his face in years—Mrs. James and Delilah never listened to the rules about keeping the men’s memories alive by papering our homes with their images. But today he is everywhere—bald headed and squinty eyed with Delilah’s exact shade of dark brown skin and the smile she used to have.

  “I forgot what he looked like!” I say, and Mrs. James glares at me like I’ve cursed in a holy space.

  “Exactly,” Angelika says. She is busying herself by lighting little red candles all over the room. It’s an eclectic collection of tall dining candles and short tea candles and stumpy smelly candles. The scent is overpowering—a mix of different red-themed scents—Apple Orchard and Christmas Holly and Velvet Rose and Strawberry Pie.