The Careful Undressing of Love Read online

  I miss her before she’s even all the way out of the garden.

  I miss her and the person she was supposed to become.

  9.

  The next morning I walk to the bakery to get breakfast for Mom and me, and I walk toward the garden on my way home. There’s an old bench there and it’s covered in hearts and initials and proclamations of love and curse words galore. I’ve always liked the romance of sitting on a bench that so many other people sat on before me.

  Today I need it. It’s been years since I’ve gotten to sit in a room with Mom and Dad’s love, and I won’t get to sit near Jack and Delilah’s love either, now. The bench is the closest I can get. I’m desperate to sit on it with my coffee and a pastry and enjoy five minutes without thinking about Jack or Delilah or Chicago or the looming Seven-Year Anniversary of the Times Square Bombing.

  It’s sunny, finally, and little patches of pink are blossoming all over Brooklyn. It’s strange, when nature conflicts with what’s actually happening in the world. It should be a gray day in the dead of winter. The garden itself should be barren and flower-less and damp.

  Instead it’s downright beautiful.

  Cruz is already at the gate to the garden, staring at the bench.

  I stand next to him. Since yesterday, someone’s painted the whole thing white and they’ve written LOVE WAS FOUND HERE on the back in shiny blue strokes.

  It’s actually sort of beautiful, and the carvings are all intact underneath the new coat of paint. You can’t paint on top of shadows.

  I put a hand on Cruz’s arm and squeeze. He jumps a little.

  “I didn’t see you there,” he says.

  “You can’t sense when I’m right next to you?”

  I think he smiles.

  “Who did this?” I ask. Cruz shrugs.

  Delilah could have painted the bench, maybe, but as far as I know she hasn’t been out since we were all in the garden yesterday. It actually seems like the kind of thing Owen would do—some grand romantic gesture I didn’t ask for—but he didn’t even want to kiss me last night when he walked me home.

  “You remember us meeting here?” Cruz says.

  I hadn’t remembered, but I do now. My family moved to the street a few weeks before Cruz’s. The day Cruz moved in, my dad took me to the garden to play while my mother painted my bedroom. Dad smoked a cigarette and told me not to come near him, so I had to stay on the bench while he hung out near the gate. Cruz and his dad were in the garden, too, kicking a soccer ball back and forth across the plants. Later, Angelika would come by and yell at us all—Dad for smoking, Cruz and his dad for disrespecting the plants, me for the unabashed way I was staring at Cruz.

  “Hi!” I called out to him. I was different then. I liked other little kids and waving hello and the sun in my eyes, even.

  “Hi,” he said back, a little less enthusiastic, shading his eyes and wrinkling his nose.

  “I like your curls!” I said, wishing I could run on over and pull one.

  “I have a sister,” he said. “You can play with her.” He was seven and I was six. I didn’t want to play with his sister. I wanted to play with him and his soccer ball and his springy curls.

  “No thanks,” I said. “I’ll stay here and watch you.”

  I don’t remember much about being six, but I remember that.

  “That was a good day,” I say, and want Cruz to agree.

  I still want to pull on his curls.

  Cruz swallows and moves closer to me. Our elbows touch and neither of us moves them away.

  Love Was Found Here, the bench proclaims over and over, as loudly as if someone were yelling it.

  “And we’ve been having some really bad days,” Cruz says. I wince, Jack’s face popping up in my head. That gasp of pain. I don’t know how to get rid of it. Cruz covers his throat with his hand, like his heart has leapt up there.

  “Right now’s not so bad,” I say, thinking that the bench is a little hopeful and being near Cruz is a little wonderful. When Dad died, Mom said to be sure to let myself have good moments. Even when everything hurts, even when other cities are exploding and people we love are disappearing, there’s still space for sweet things. I let our elbows’ resting against each other feel good, while everything else feels bad.

  Cruz doesn’t say anything. He keeps looking at that bench, so I do, too. And the bench looks right back at us.

  10.

  Mom allows me one more day off from school on Monday.

  “Back to normal tomorrow,” she says on our walk over to Delilah’s place. I raise my eyebrows. Mom shakes her head at herself. “I sound like one of those people.” We both know the people: the ones who have a timetable for how long grief should last. Probably the same people who came up with the idea of a Minute of Silence.

  “You read the horoscopes this morning?” Mom asks.

  “Mine was all about healing. I hate that word.”

  “They’re predicting heartbreak for Aquarians,” Mom says. “A long period of heartbreak.” Mom’s an Aquarius. She cracks her knuckles and I hear her heart speed up. Like most people, she never read horoscopes when they were hidden next to wedding announcements and crossword puzzles. Sometime after the Bombing, they started to grow. It’s different now that they take up two whole pages in the front section, a collection of essays instead of a sentence about what your future might hold. It’s hard to not read them now.

  “Aren’t we already in a period of extended heartbreak?” I ask. “All of us?”

  “Oh, I think we can find our way out,” Mom says, and she sounds sure but we don’t believe in horoscopes anyway so none of it matters.

  “Delilah’s an Aquarius, too,” I say.

  Things aren’t good at Delilah’s apartment: Her mother is hiding out in the bedroom, and Delilah won’t leave the stoop.

  “It’s where I need to be,” she says when Mom and I arrive with tea and sunflowers in hand. She’s in a new black skirt that goes past her knees. On top she’s wearing a gray wool sweater that is too heavy for April. It’s loose and close to her neck. I miss the delicate line of Delilah’s clavicle. I miss her waist and her knees and floral rompers and skinny blue pants and T-shirts with lacy sleeves and faded lettering.

  Delilah takes the tea and sips it hungrily. I’ve never seen her drink it before.

  Angelika says lavender promotes longevity and healing, and that sweetened with generous amounts of honey it will keep our intentions pure. Personally it makes me sleepy. I have to hope it will do the same for Delilah. She looks like she needs a rest.

  “Lorna thought she’d sleep over,” Mom says. Delilah didn’t take the sunflowers, so they’re still in Mom’s arms like she’s a beauty queen at the end of a pageant. It’s awkward and I’ve forgotten how to talk to my best friend. Delilah puts the tea down and focuses on her hands, which are weaving red and white threads together in her lap.

  “Yes!” Delilah says, smiling for the first time in almost a week. “You can help!” Her eyes flicker between my mother and me, and she sees Mom’s haircut for the first time.

  Delilah’s eyebrows dive into a deep V. “What’d you do?” Her voice is thick and grumbling, like the sound of the subway as it shudders beneath us once every five minutes. She starts shaking, and I don’t know if it’s from anger or exhaustion or if she’s been forgetting to eat since Jack died. I reach out to take hold of her hands and make them still, but she shakes me off.

  This is what we do now: I reach out for her and she shivers away from me.

  Delilah can’t seem to speak. She can’t take her eyes off Mom’s head. She brings a hand to her own hair and pulls at a few strands like she did the other day at the funeral, like she could make it longer right here and now.

  “It’s hair, honey,” Mom says. “Don’t change everything you’ve always known. Things are still the same.”

 
It’s the wrong thing to say. Delilah’s eyes fire up and she shakes her head violently.

  “Nothing’s the same!” she shouts. She leaps up and touches the ends of my mother’s hair. Mom lets her but it’s tense.

  “How could you do this?” Delilah’s voice is rising, accelerating fast. “You don’t care about me or Jack or anyone else? You only care about you?” She’s yelling, and people are leaning out of their windows, which are still open out of respect for Jack.

  Now it’s Mom’s turn to be speechless.

  Delilah shakes her head and picks up a handful of bracelets, shoving them in Mom’s face. “You need to wear these!” she says. “This isn’t the time for hubris! I can’t believe you would do this, after everything.”

  That’s when Delilah finally cries. Mom takes the bracelets and puts them in her pockets and Delilah crumbles back onto the stoop, like she never should have stood up to begin with.

  A few buildings down, Angelika’s door opens. She and her dog stand on their stoop and watch. Angelika’s arms cross over her chest and I get a flicker of fear.

  “I’m too late to fix anything; I’m too late to listen to what I should have done,” Delilah says, or I think she says, through the big heaves of her cries. “I shouldn’t have cut my hair. I should have worn a dozen keys around my neck. I forgot about the lights all the time. I made fun of Angelika. And tea. I didn’t drink the tea. I didn’t make Jack drink the tea. Jack was supposed to drink the tea. I shouldn’t have even looked at Jack.” She’s losing her breath but she says it again. “I should not have even looked his way. Not for one moment.”

  After a long while, Delilah starts weaving bracelets again and Mom can leave and I can stay and try to remember what we were like one week ago, before things fell apart.

  “Hubris is planning a future when you’re a Devonairre Street Girl,” Delilah says a long while later, and I know she’s been thinking it over and over for hours, days. “I planned a whole future.”

  I feel myself break a little more than before.

  Angelika doesn’t move from her place on the stoop. She watches us as we sit and try to be something that we aren’t anymore.

  I think I catch her smiling.

  • • •

  “Red is for protection,” Delilah says. “White is for breaking curses.”

  She doesn’t want to watch movies. She doesn’t want to eat ice cream or drink wine or talk about Jack. She doesn’t want to sleep or stay up or go for a walk. She only wants to make bracelets.

  She shows me how to wind the threads around each other in a lazy not-braid.

  “How many do you want to make?” I say. I’m careful not to let her know how much I hate this.

  “We need a lot,” Delilah says. “For the five of us, and you should hand them out at school, and obviously for your mom, too.”

  “So one for everyone we know?” I ask. I smile and wait for Delilah to smile back at me.

  She doesn’t smile. She rolls up the sleeves of her gray sweater. A red-and-white-striped pattern covers her forearms, and the effect frightens me.

  I put a hand on her shoulder and this time she doesn’t jerk away but she takes my wrist, and moves my arm in front of her. She ties on a bracelet, then one on the other wrist as well.

  I hold up my arms to look at what she’s done and attempt an encouraging smile. It comes out lopsided and wrong, I’m sure.

  “Do you love him yet?” Delilah whispers. “Do you love Owen?” There has never been a more worried face, a bigger tremble in someone’s voice.

  “I don’t know.” I never got a chance to tell her about I love the moon and you and I don’t have a chicken. I can’t tell her now.

  Delilah grins. It’s a grin Angelika gives, too. Like she knows something extra about the world.

  “If you loved him, you’d know.” I half expect a Polish accent. “Love is something you have or don’t have,” she says. “Love is like a fever.”

  Just because Angelika says it, doesn’t mean it’s true.

  “Angelika’s teaching me how to see it. She’s teaching me so much. I can’t bring back Jack, but maybe I can save someone else.”

  Delilah squeezes my cheeks. Her mouth gets close to mine, her eyelashes practically fluttering against my own. I swear she smells like Aramis.

  “Hmm,” she says, but nothing more. Two more bracelets get tied around my wrists. Then another two. And another.

  I want to ask her if she can see—if she knows whether or not I love him.

  Not that it matters. It doesn’t matter.

  I don’t believe.

  I’ve never believed.

  I weave a bracelet anyway. It doesn’t hurt anything. And it makes Angelika, and now Delilah, feel better.

  It takes me most of the evening to realize I feel a little better, too.

  11.

  I wake to the sound of Cruz’s voice and I reach for him before remembering I’m on a cot in Delilah’s room and Cruz and I have never shared a bed. I determine that his voice is coming from the hallway, which feels impossibly far away and dangerously close. I could go to him, but I decide to pretend to be asleep instead. I stay in Delilah’s room and listen in.

  I should be thinking of Owen and his romantic sleep-talking in the just-woken hours, when I’m horizontal and wanting and dreamy. I should be thinking of him when I talk to Delilah about love. I should be thinking of him all the time, really.

  “It’s early, Delilah.” Cruz sounds exhausted and I’d guess between all of us on the street we’ve slept a combined ten hours in the last three days. “Why am I here?”

  The clock says five. There’s a clear bowl of lemons next to it.

  “I had a dream,” Delilah says. “I dreamt you and Lorna were together. So happy you were basically vibrating. Then we were all on the beach and you were writing your names in the sand like some stupid movie. And you kept kissing.”

  “All right,” Cruz says.

  I want Delilah to keep talking. I want to hear about the kissing and the vibrating. I want to feel the sand on my skin.

  “I woke up sweating. I could barely get a full breath. My heart’s still—well. Feel it.”

  I think she puts his hand over her heart. Their voices are low but the apartment is small and besides, I have extra-strong senses when it comes to Cruz and Delilah. I am attuned to the sounds of the people I know the best.

  “It’s gonna take a long time to feel okay again. I don’t even know how long. You’re going to have nightmares. Even normal dreams will feel like nightmares. And nightmares will feel real. And, Jesus, Delilah, it’s awful. What you’re going through—”

  And then silence.

  Cruz still has nightmares. He’s in Times Square but the lights go off around him until he’s in total darkness. Sometimes his father visits him in dreams. But he’s made of dust and fire, not flesh and bone.

  Cruz texts me the worst dreams, so some mornings I wake up to his recounted nightmares. On those days I buy him a bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwich from the best bodega, on the other side of the park. We don’t talk about it. I just hand him the steaming, salty deliciousness wrapped in tinfoil, and he devours it and tells me it’s going to be an okay day and we meet up with everyone else to walk to school. The dreams are secrets Cruz and I keep. People put too much stock in dreams lately, so they’re best kept to ourselves.

  Delilah moans and Cruz’s weight shifts. I think he’s hugging her.

  “This isn’t about me right now,” Delilah says loudly. “You’re not listening. I’m telling you to be careful.”

  “After my dad died, I basically thought the world was going to explode,” Cruz says. “You feel like more terrible shit’s gonna happen. I get it. But, Delilah. This is it. This is the bad thing. It already happened. Don’t make up more bad shit in your head, okay?”

  “I don’t think
she loves Owen.” Delilah’s not listening. My mouth is dry and I can’t clear it or cough or even risk swallowing. We’re LornaCruzCharlotteDelilahIsla. We don’t split into parts and tell one another’s secrets. We all have the same secrets, the same histories, the same sadnesses.

  “She doesn’t need to love Owen,” Cruz says.

  “I don’t think she loves Owen and I don’t think Charlotte loves you.” The floor creaks. Delilah must have stepped closer to him, for emphasis.

  “I bet you need food,” Cruz says. “I bet you could use some water and a sandwich and some sort of crappy TV. How’s that sound?”

  “Like bullshit. I didn’t call you over for a snack. I called you over because I’m terrified about what might happen.”

  “Delilah.”

  “Cruz, she could fall in love with you. Everyone’s always thought—”

  My body contracts, waiting for the end of her sentence but it doesn’t come.

  “Don’t be this person. Jack wouldn’t want this.”

  “This is exactly what Jack would want.” She’s speaking more loudly, and soon I won’t be able to pretend I’m asleep. Her bedroom feels small and the cot feels hard. I want to get out, but I can’t.

  “Even if Lorna did love me—” I squeeze the blanket harder. It doesn’t help. I’m floating away, I’m flipping upside down. Where are my sunglasses?

  “We can’t lose you.” Delilah hiccups on the last word and I know the tears are going to start again and I’ll have to come out of the room and circle her with my arms.

  “Hiba and Saad,” Cruz snaps. “Remember them. And me and Charlotte. Remember us.”

  “Everyone’s talking about you and Charlotte and Hiba and Saad. We need to be talking about the Curse. We need to talk about how much I loved Jack and how selfish that was and that Angelika knew this was coming. We need to talk about hubris. We need to talk about all the other stories, the books and books of notes Angelika has. The books and books of notes her mother had. All the things we’ve heard about the street and never talked about. We need to talk about the Curse.”