If Yale weren’t physically incapable of sex right now, if Asher hadn’t just been talking about the leg pain and nausea he was still experiencing from his pills, Yale might have held out hope that the afternoon would end in someone’s bed. A one-time thing. As it was, the hand-holding was an end in itself. An acknowledgment, a dip into that same parallel universe he’d spied on back at the Briar house. And was friendship that different in the end from love? You took the possibility of sex out of it, and it was all about the moment anyway. Being here, right now, in someone’s life. Making room for someone in yours.
“Get a load of these two!”
A male voice, close behind. Asher tightened his grip on Yale’s hand before Yale could even figure it out.
“Hey, Louise! Get a load of these two!”
“Don’t turn around,” Asher whispered.
Yale thought Asher might want to drop his hand, but of course he didn’t. Asher didn’t even quicken his pace.
A woman’s voice, farther back: “Bert, don’t be an ass.”
“I’m not the one into asses! Hey, ladies! Gimme your time, will you? I got some questions!”
“Bert!”
“Listen, ladies. Hold on.”
But the voices were farther away now; perhaps Louise had detained Bert.
Distantly: “Get a load of those two!”
* * *
—
Asher and Yale didn’t say anything else the rest of the way to St. Joe’s.
Yale promised he’d get a cab, but then he didn’t. He walked to the El. He wanted to be near other riders, packed tight. He wanted to see the city from above, to pass close enough to people’s windows that he could see their kitchen tables, their fights.
The world was a terrible, beautiful place, and if he wasn’t going to be here much longer he could do whatever he wanted, and the thing he wanted most in the world, besides to run after Asher, was to fix Nora’s show, to give Ranko Novak’s awkward paintings and sketches their due, such as it was.
He thought about people who could help. There were the Sharps, but after everything they’d done for him, he couldn’t ask another favor. He hardly knew anyone at Northwestern anymore. He certainly couldn’t drag Cecily back into things. Across from him on the El stood a teenager with a column of silver hoops up her ear. It made Yale think of Gloria. Gloria was at the Trib. Gloria would help. He had no idea how, but she would know how.
One stop before his own, a man limped onto the train and looked like he was about to lurch into Yale’s lap, but then he opened a canvas bag. “Got socks for sale,” he slurred to Yale and the woman next to him. “Dollar pair. Two dollar, three pair. One size fit your foot.” He pulled out a Ziploc with a pair of clean athletic socks, yellow stripes at the top. They looked improbably thick and comfortable. “You got holes in your sock?” This was to Yale. “These make you feel better. Good socks, you feel all better. One dollar, all better.”
Yale found a dollar and gave it to the man, who grinned, toothless, and presented him with the socks. Yale stood for his stop and squeezed the bag.
A gift from the city, it felt like. Something soft to put between himself and the earth.
2015
Fiona and Cecily took a painfully long cab ride up to Montmartre, to the garden square where Claire had told them to wait. Traffic was terrible throughout the city; everyone was back on the road, but the roads weren’t back to normal. Fiona wondered if news trucks were still blocking things up, or if everyone was just driving distracted, skittish.
Square Jehan-Rictus wasn’t square-shaped but an oblong stretch of sidewalk looping through shrubbery, enclosed by fences and low brick walls. The green benches, if it weren’t for the bird shit, would have been lovely places to sit with a book on a summer day.
It was sunny but cold, and Fiona already worried Nicolette would be too chilly even as she feared Claire and Nicolette wouldn’t show up at all.
Cecily checked her watch. She said, “This should have been the hospital waiting room. The two of us waiting together for the baby to be born. Better late than never!”
They walked the loop, past the tiny playground. They stopped at the mural next to it, a shiny wall made to look like a chalkboard, with white writing and scraps of red. “It must be all ‘I love you,’” Cecily said. Te amo in one place, a hand making the sign-language word for love in another, most of it incomprehensible to Fiona—Thai and Braille and Greek and what might have been Cherokee. Above it all, a painting of a woman in a blue ball gown, with words in a bubble: aimer c’est du désordre . . . alors aimons!
Fiona felt, as she had on the bridge, that Paris or its more mischievous ghosts were directing messages straight at her. But that wasn’t it at all; this was simply a city that talked about love, that acknowledged its constant invasions, its messiness. What would happen to Chicago, she wondered, if they covered it with things like this? If they filled up Clark Street Bridge with painted padlocks?
Cecily squeezed her arm, turned her to the walkway: A little blonde girl, swinging her legs out of a small stroller. Above her, Claire, smiling uncertainly. Nicolette hopped out and ran straight past them to the playground, her pink coat open, rain boots trying to fall off her feet.
Fiona and Claire hugged stiffly, and Claire and Cecily shook hands even more stiffly. In the midst of everything else, it hadn’t occurred to Fiona till just now that the two of them didn’t know each other. Fiona must have carried Claire on her hip a few of those times she’d gone to visit Roscoe the cat, to catch up with Cecily—but those visits had tapered off quickly. Whatever bond had been forced upon Fiona and Cecily in Yale’s hospital room didn’t have lasting power; trauma wasn’t always the best glue.
Fiona turned to watch Nicolette scramble up the steps and cross the little bridge to the slide. She had it all to herself, and it was sized just right for her. She looked less like Nico than she had in the picture and more like Fiona herself, really.
Claire called to her, and she ran back from the bottom of the slide, buried her face in Claire’s legs. “Can you say hi? Can you say hi to Fiona and Cecily?”
It sounded so odd, but maybe, if everything went well, the two of them could pick out grandmotherly names for themselves. Grandy, Nana, Mimi. Mémère, even. She could deal with Fifi, a name she’d rejected her whole life, but one that might sound right coming from a French grandchild. She wanted to squeeze Nicolette, run her hands down those soft cheeks, but she didn’t want to scare her, and she didn’t want to scare Claire either.
Claire handed them a tote bag with Nicolette’s snacks and juice, a change of clothes, a couple of picture books. She told them Kurt would be there in an hour and a half. “And you could come to the bar in an emergency.” It was only two blocks away.