The Cookbook Collector

27

Years later, they remembered where they had been. At their desks or in their beds, indoors or out. Driving, walking, working, alert, or half asleep. Each recalled momentary confusion. An airplane hit the World Trade Center. Pilot error? Technical glitch? And then the shock. A second plane. No accident. No mistake. The flames were real, as everyone could see on television. The Twin Towers burning, again and again. Bodies falling, again and again. The same towers, and the same bodies, and the Pentagon in flames. The scenes played constantly, at once heartbreaking and titillating, their repetition necessary, but also cheapening. Who, after all, could believe such a catastrophe after just one viewing? And who, after viewing once, could look away?

Finishing the night shift at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, Mrs. Gibbs saw the fire on every TV, in every patient’s room.

Waking early in Los Altos, Laura found her children staring at the giant television in the den. She stood transfixed with her three little ones in their pajamas, until she began to understand what they were seeing, and snatched the remote control away.

Across the country, Chaya Zylberfenig was running on her treadmill in the bedroom, and she called her husband. “Shimon! Come quick!” even as her feet kept moving under her.

Shimon didn’t hear. He was sitting outside with his New York Times, reading headlines already out of date. As so often, Chaya would be the one to tell him what had happened. Hands on hips, she watched him watch the planes smash into the towers on TV. With dark fierce eyes, she glared at her quixotic husband, as if to say: I dare you to find the good in this.

At ISIS in his corner office, Dave was meeting with Aldwin, when Amanda ran in. “Look at CNN!” That was when Dave saw the breaking story on his desktop. He watched along with Jonathan’s friend as the words American Airlines Flight 11 flashed across the screen.

“That wasn’t Jonathan’s flight, was it?” Aldwin asked. “That wasn’t …”

Amanda was covering her mouth with her hand.

“Call the airline!” Dave screamed at her.

She burst into tears as she fled back to her office.

Orion lay in bed, asleep after the all-nighter, and his cell phone started ringing on the floor. When he found the phone and opened it, he heard Sorel crying on the other end.

“What?” Orion said, and his voice was fuzzy with sleep. “What’s wrong?”

“Jonathan’s flight,” she said.

“I can’t hear you,” Orion told her. “Slow down. Sorel, Sorel …”

At that moment Molly rushed in from the kitchen, and he closed the phone.

Molly looked so pale that he thought she’d heard him talking, but she had not heard him murmuring Sorel’s name. She’d heard the news, and now they watched the flames on television. They watched together, and he read his e-mail, the ISIS announcement that Mel and Jonathan were on American Flight 11 and presumed dead.

Molly leaned against him, and he wrapped his arm around her as he stared at the inferno on the screen. Of course, Jonathan had been Molly’s friend too. The news shook her too. He felt the weight of Molly’s head on his shoulder, the softness of her face. Despite their troubles, her long hours, her nagging, their estrangement, they absorbed this shock together.

And yet he had to talk to Sorel. He had to be with her. He knew she needed him as well. They had been the last to see Jonathan, and Jonathan had been the first to see them together.

He remembered Jonathan’s smile at the river, his expression mischievous but forgiving, his slight shake of the head, as if to say, I won’t say anything. He remembered Jonathan’s laughter, and his aggression. The way he turned from fun-loving to steely, cold—until he switched back again, once he got his way. Be very careful, Jonathan told Orion once, and for a moment Orion had hated his old friend, but Jonathan was impossible to hate for long. Of course Orion pitied Mel, poor guy. He remembered Mel too, but in death, as in life, Jonathan was the one you couldn’t shake. He was the world beater, the history maker. He had a force field all his own. He drew you in. Oh, Emily, Orion thought. What are you feeling now? How are you getting through?

She heard on the radio just as she sat down for breakfast. She was sitting at her white table, with her bags already packed for L.A. She was bringing them to Veritech and then going to the airport straight from work. That was the plan, anyway. That had been the plan….

Breaking into Susan’s report to give you breaking news from New York City where planes, two planes, have hit both towers of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan—the upper floors of the World Trade Center, a hundred and ten stories high …

That’s terrible, she thought, as she sliced a banana into her cereal. The first plane is said to be a commercial airline, and the second, also thought to be a commercial jet…. Software failure? she wondered, as she began to eat. The indications are that one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center was in fact a hijacked plane. The American Airlines plane from Boston …

From Boston? she asked herself, confused. But that wasn’t Jonathan’s flight. He’d left already.

All air travel has been grounded….

She glanced at her flight bag by the front door. She couldn’t go to L.A., and Jonathan was stuck at Logan. Ironic. Typical. She called him, but he must have turned off his phone.

Her own phone began to vibrate in her hand. That would be Jonathan. But it was not Jonathan. It was Dave.

“Emily,” he said.

No one had ever spoken her name with such sadness or such dread.

“We’re in shock,” Dave said. “I am sitting here unable to …”

Today we’ve had a national tragedy, President Bush announced on the radio.

“Jonathan was on the first plane,” Dave said.

“What do you mean?” Emily challenged him, opening her laptop to check his itinerary. American Airlines …

“Flight Eleven,” said Dave.

She forced herself to swallow. That wasn’t really Jonathan’s flight. It couldn’t be.

American Airlines said that one of the aircraft that crashed into the Trade Center was American Airlines Flight Eleven, hijacked after takeoff from Boston en route to Los Angeles …

She was shaking. She was sick, vomiting cereal-banana-milk. She couldn’t talk. She couldn’t listen. She felt her way into what looked like someone else’s kitchen, and she opened drawers, but she had no idea what she was looking for.

On the counter, her answering machine was pulsing, filling up with messages. Laura. Orion. Her own father.

“Emily?” Laura’s voice wavered, trailing upward, uncertain, childlike, and she seemed to be standing in a crowded room; she seemed to be speaking very quickly, asking questions.

“Are you there?” her father asked her, and his voice was furred with rust.

“Hey,” Orion began, and then he said nothing. She heard him standing there trying to think of something to say.

Shivering, she ran upstairs to her bedroom and huddled under blankets. She piled every blanket she owned onto her bed, burying herself, but she could not get warm. She closed her eyes. Sleep was the only respite from this dream.

The house was quiet when she woke. Her arms ached. Her body knew, but she lay in bed, tracing the woven leaves on her comforter, a pattern difficult to follow because the foliage was white on white. She traced each leaf and stem with her finger, and recalled the day before, the night before, the moment before she turned on the radio. She worked her way backward, from banana slicing to pouring milk, to taking out the cereal box. She was nothing if not disciplined, and she kept to her task, tracing white leaves with her finger, working her way backward through time, as though she could repair the breaking news.

She was patient, deliberate, rational. Therefore, she did not cry as she remembered her last conversation with Jonathan, when they’d fought on the phone, and he’d said, “Don’t say you miss me, when you won’t come to see me.”

“I do come. I just did!” she’d protested.

“You came in March. I’m the one dropping everything to fly out to L.A.”

“You don’t drop everything. You never drop anything,” she said. “You work me in. You schedule me in. I’m the one moving. I’m the one leaving my job to move in with you.”

“Just don’t say you miss me,” he told her, “when you won’t change your schedule for me.”

And those had been his last words. You won’t change your schedule for me. Words that would have faded, once they were together. An argument painful to remember for many reasons, but primarily because she wished their quarrel had been worse, that their bickering had escalated into a full-scale conflagration and his refusal to meet her in L.A.

Oh, but he had refused, he must have. In the end he had missed the flight on purpose. She could not let go of this idea. Jonathan had not stepped aboard that plane. In fact, she was almost convinced he’d been too angry. She would delete the messages on her machine, the panicked voices. One by one, she would erase them, because they were wrong. She knew the truth. She and Jonathan had fought. He’d skipped Tech World, and he was sulking. He wasn’t speaking to her. In fact, he had turned off his phone.

This was her delicate logic. Each idea and contingency fed the next, as in a Rube Goldberg machine. A furious little red ball collided with a green ball, which flew up on a miniature trampoline to land at the top of a chute, where it began traveling down again, gathering speed to push over the first domino in a vast array. The last of these black-and-white dominos tripped a switch, which blew a fan, which extinguished a candle. In this way, Emily put the fires out, and saved Jonathan, and the world as well.

To which end she hid in bed. She did not eat or drink or speak to anyone. Far below, she thought she heard someone at the door, but she did not venture down to answer it. She kept the faith all day, pretending nothing had happened, struggling to protect herself, building new facts by which to breathe and live, but she had competition. Working overtime, her imagination took a guilty turn, and reason followed, where it was afraid to lead.

If she had not delayed the wedding, if she had hurried east the year before to marry Jonathan, then he would not have flown out to L.A. to meet her. If she had not hesitated; if she had simply married him when he’d asked, then she would not be alone. If she had loved him as she should have loved him, without trepidation, without tests, then Jonathan would be alive.

Because he was right after all, in everything he said about her. If she had really missed him, if she’d really wanted him, then she would have come to him before. She’d have shown him, instead of talking and postponing all the time. She would have been with him.

What was wrong with her? Why had she held back? She should have left Veritech long ago. It seemed a paltry sacrifice in retrospect. She might have saved him, if she had been less ambitious.

What did waiting get you in the end? There was no perfect time to marry, no ideal moment to move or leave your job. The only perfect time was now, and now was what she had denied herself. Who said that patience was a virtue? And temperance? And practicality? Who said, “Look before you leap”? With all that wisdom she had murdered Jonathan. These were her thoughts, as the banging on the door below grew louder.

I killed him, she thought, as Jess called, “Emily, let me in!”

I never really loved him, she accused herself.

I’ve never loved anybody, she thought, and she hoped that was wrong. She hoped she had loved Jonathan—loved him still!

“Emily!” Jess screamed, and the banging came from the back of the house, a thumping so loud that even in her distracted state, Emily remembered that her neighbor worked nights and slept days, and she scrambled to open the kitchen door.

“Shh! Be quiet!” Emily pleaded, barefoot, wild-haired, blinking in the late-afternoon sun, balled-up tissues in the pocket of her plaid pajamas. And then her eyes teared up, and she began to laugh and cry at the same time. For there stood Jess, with her hair pulled back, wearing the Vivienne Tam suit Emily had given her a million years ago. Tweed jacket in brown and rust, caramel silk blouse, tailored skirt, and stockings, actual stockings, and a pair of brown pumps. “You’re wearing the suit now? You’re getting dressed up now? Why now?”

“You know why.” Jess took her sister’s hands in hers.

“What happened to your hands?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Jess tried to hug her sister.

No, Emily thought. Don’t. She would break into pieces at the slightest touch. She would shatter.

Jess sensed this and stepped back. She stood before Emily in that beautiful suit and said, “I got dressed up so that you’d see … so you’d know I’ve come to take care of you.”

28

Ash fell. A fine gray powder covered everything. Ash coated burned-out cars and traffic lights. Ash infiltrated apartments, graying books and dishes, smothering house plants, clouding windowsills. Ash smogged streets and soiled papers, loose and lost, invoices and receipts, canceled checks, business cards, appointment books, memoranda unremembered. Black dust, black ink, black banner headlines in The New York Times. Black articles about firefighters, rescue workers, schoolchildren, orphans. Black bordered ads from ExxonMobil, Allstate, Prudential, Home Depot, OppenheimerFunds, Fleet, Lufthansa—to our friends in America, AOL Time Warner, Merrill Lynch. Our hearts go out to everyone who’s been touched by the tragic events … our thoughts and prayers … our gratitude for the tireless efforts of the emergency and rescue workers. Condolences from Israel and Egypt, the city of Berlin, the Iranian-American community—profoundly saddened, the Red Cross, the Ministries of New York—we’re here to pray for you.

Museums opened free of charge. Oases of deep color: Rothkos, Rembrandts, Egyptian tombs, Roman glass, iridescent bottles outlasting their perfume. Amulets, silk gowns, and Grecian urns. Those young girls with parted lips, those haystacks, those stone angels taking flight, those paintings of fruit and full-blown flowers.

Classical-music stations broadcast elegies, and listeners stopped what they were doing to hear Fauré’s Requiem or Barber’s Adagio for Strings. To breathe again.

Churches opened doors for candle-lighting, singing, sermons, vigils. In the nave of the National Cathedral, President Bush said, “We are here in the middle hour of our grief …” and he told the American people to keep on living, to travel, to attend the theater, to go out and buy. Alas, buying did not appeal. Only American flags sold out. Great flags hung from walls and firehouses. Smaller versions adorned shop windows and front doors. Drivers clipped miniature flags to car antennae where they fluttered in the breeze.

A flag was tangible. Its stars and stripes were real, unlike the dot-com bombs of yesterday. Who remembered those? The upstarts, overhyped and overfunded. When the Nasdaq reopened on September 17, even Cisco hovered at twelve dollars a share. Vaporizing into usefulness, online shopping, e-mail, and instant news, the Internet lost its mystique, and suddenly it was everywhere and nowhere, like the air. A flag had value. A leaf blower made sense. Unprofitable companies with huge growth and huge debt did not. Few bought Veritech at two. Fewer wanted ISIS, even at eighty cents.

None of that mattered to Emily. For the first time since Veritech’s IPO, she did not check her company’s share price. She didn’t look; she didn’t care. When Alex called, or Bruno, or Milton, or Laura, she let Jess answer the phone. With each ring, she expected Jonathan. She couldn’t talk to other people.

When Dave invited her to Jonathan’s memorial service, Emily told Jess to thank him and say no.

“Maybe you should think about it,” Jess said when she put down the phone.

“No, I don’t want to think about it.”

“You don’t have to decide right away. You don’t have to say anything yet.”

“Okay, don’t say anything.”

For days she did nothing. She didn’t even open her computer. She sat at one end of the couch with her legs tucked under her, and then sometimes, for a change of scene, she moved to the other end.

Jess reminded Emily to get dressed in the morning. “You can’t wear pajamas in the daytime.”

“Why not?”

“Your circadian rhythms will get out of whack. I read an article about it. You shouldn’t work in your bedroom, you shouldn’t wear pajamas in the daytime, and you shouldn’t exercise or eat at night, or work too long in the dark. So put these on.” Jess pulled out a shirtdress and a sweater. Obediently, Emily changed into clean clothes.

Laura came bearing Emily’s dry cleaning along with a loaf of homemade pumpkin bread. The condo association left a giant fruit basket wrapped in cellophane. Emily’s cleaning service, Maid for You, sent her a condolence card and refused to charge her for the week of September 11. Orchids proliferated on the coffee table. She had been in all the papers. He leaves his fiancée, Veritech cofounder Emily Bach, and so everybody knew.

Jess shopped and prepared meals: oatmeal, or brown rice with broccoli, or avocado-and-sprout sandwiches on cracked-wheat bread. Like an old married couple, the sisters completed the New York Times crossword puzzle each morning. They played Scrabble, backgammon, cribbage, even checkers, and then sometimes they didn’t play anything at all. Emily did nothing, and Jess was the perfect companion, fielding phone calls, nibbling cashews, scribbling on dog-eared papers in red pen.

Waking up was hardest, because each day Emily had to teach herself that Jonathan was gone, and the life she might have had with him was gone, their conversations and their fights. That was the worst part. Her struggle against Jonathan was over, all their arguments and their competing claims for time. The person she had been with him was gone, and the man she’d hoped he would become was lost, and she was left with the words Jonathan had said, and the things he’d actually done. Her ideas for him, and her future with him would never come to pass. She hated him for that, for rending her world, ruining what might have been.

After waking, she was careful to stay still. No sudden movements or long conversations. No newspapers, no radio. Brimful, she was afraid of tipping.

She slept poorly, and once, she woke crying with bad dreams. Then Jess lay down at the foot of the bed.

“I’ll stay here,” Jess said.

“Are you comfortable?” Emily asked anxiously.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Are you going to sleep here all night?”

“Yes.”

“Jess?” said Emily.

“Stop waking me up.”

“What about the Tree Savers?”

“Don’t worry about them.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re fine without me.”

Emily took this in, and then asked delicately, tentatively, “Are you done with them?”

“Done.”

“Oh, good,” Emily said, but with sleepless, worried interest, she pressed, “What about Yorick’s? Isn’t George wondering where you went?”

Jess hesitated. “He knows.”

“Did you tell him when you’re coming back?”

“I’m not coming back.”

“You quit? You just left?”

“Well …,” said Jess, “I had to stop.”

Emily roused herself a little, as though she wanted to see her sister’s face, and Jess was glad that it was dark. “What do you mean?”

Don’t tell her now, Jess reminded herself. She mustn’t say anything now. “It’s not important.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. Nothing happened.” Jess meant nothing happened compared to what you’re going through. “I got a little bit … involved with him.”

“Jessie!” Emily sat up in bed.

Jess couldn’t help laughing.

“It’s not funny!”

“I know,” said Jess, wiping her eyes. “But it’s so good to hear you sounding like yourself.”

“Did you … did you really …?”

“Well …”

“You slept with him? Jess, how could you?”

Jess confessed, “Actually, it wasn’t all that difficult.”

“I can’t believe you!”

“Please.”

“You know that he’s too old.”

Jess said nothing.

“It would be totally—”

Jess cut her off. “I told him that we can’t see each other. I explained to him that I’m going to be with you.”

“So that’s over too.”

Jess hedged, “We’re still friends and all.”

“You have the strangest idea of friends,” said Emily.

“I love my friends,” protested Jess.

“That’s the problem.”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s not important,” Jess reassured her sister. “Don’t worry.”

“It’s over,” Emily reassured herself.

She tried out those words, but she did not believe them. Jonathan’s absence weighed on her, his disappearance clouded her mind. How could he vanish so completely? She longed for a body, a clue, a sign.

And yet he persisted in the world. Jonathan still worked his will at ISIS, in ways she never guessed. With share prices hovering at thirty-two cents, the executive committee met in secret in Oskar’s office in the new cheaper building. They dragged in their swivel chairs to speak of Jonathan’s pet project, his magic bullet, the October rollout, the surveillance system based on the secret Emily had told him, the plans she’d whispered for electronic fingerprinting.

“He left us with a revolutionary product,” Dave murmured to Orion, Jake, Aldwin, and Oskar. “We got it built. We got it tested. We’re ready.”

“But is this the time—would anybody notice now?” Orion asked.

“Yes! This is the time,” said Aldwin. “Think like Jonathan.”

“What do you mean, ‘think like Jonathan’?” Orion retorted.

“Think smart,” said smart old Oskar.

Dave nodded. “Exactly. If you think like Jonathan, you seize the moment.”

Aldwin explained, “Our dot-com customers are folding, but government contracts are huge. With the new antiterrorist initiatives, surveillance is the perfect space for us.”

“We’ve got the goods,” Dave said.

“And we’ve got the name from Marketing,” Aldwin announced. Standing at Oskar’s whiteboard, he uncapped a green dry-erase marker. “Operational Security and Internet Surveillance.” Carefully he lettered the new name: OSIRIS.

Hushed, they stared at the new acronym, their new god.

Jake mused, “Osiris was the brother of Isis, right?”

“Right,” said Aldwin. “The brother of Isis and her husband too.”

“I love this,” Oskar said.

“Fantastic,” Dave chimed in.

Orion sat up abruptly, and the back of his swivel chair snapped upright. “Wait.”

“We can’t,” said Aldwin. He was wearing a suit jacket with his tie folded in the pocket. ISIS was holding its memorial service that afternoon.

“Now is the time,” Dave said sonorously. “Thanks to you and your team, we’ve got the firepower we need.”

Orion protested, “We never said the surveillance tools were for government apps.”

“Oh, come on,” Aldwin said.

“What do you mean, ‘come on’? Our new customer is the Bush administration? We’re supposed to be the eyes and ears of the War on Terror?”

“Exactly,” Dave said.

“But you do see what this means. Loss of privacy, loss of civil liberties…. The Feds could access e-mail, and search everyone’s transactions—and we’d be the instrument! This is not what Jonathan was thinking.”

“It’s what he would be thinking,” Aldwin said.

Orion closed his eyes. He saw Jonathan’s playful smile at the river.

“Take a breath,” Dave advised, and Orion understood what that meant: “We all know you’re from Vermont and you went to Quaker schools.”

Orion did not take a breath. He blurted, “I built Fast-Track.”

“OSIRIS,” Jake corrected.

“Whatever. OSIRIS. I don’t want to see it co-opted for dubious political …”

“Not co-opted. Marketed,” Dave told Orion gently.

“This is what Jonathan would have wanted,” said Jake. “To take the competition by surprise.”

“To make new opportunities where there were none,” said Dave.

Orion muttered, “To boldly go where no start-up has gone before.”

“Yes!” said Aldwin.

“What about free information?” Orion asked the others. “What about free enterprise? Do you think Jonathan built this company to sell out to government agencies? You’re stealing my work for your own mercenary purposes.”

“If you believe in free exchange of information, why are you so worried about stealing?” Aldwin asked.

“I’d share my work with anyone. The point is, I don’t want you to sell it to the government.”

“Selling is what we do,” Dave said in his most patient voice.

“Do you really think Jonathan wanted to become part of somebody’s counterterrorist agenda?”

“It’s an important agenda,” Dave said. “It’s tracking killers, maybe Jonathan’s own.”

“No,” said Orion. “That’s not the way Jonathan thought.”

“Of course not. How could he have known?” Dave soothed. “But in our position, sitting here right now …”

“If he were here right now, we wouldn’t be in this position, would we?” Orion said.

“We all miss him,” Aldwin said. “We all want him back.”

“We need some time,” Dave said, “but we don’t have time right now. We’re hemorrhaging, and even though we’re hurting, we have to act.”

“Jonathan would not have done this.” Orion spoke definitely, but what he meant was more complex: The Jonathan he loved would not have wanted this. He had been too independent. “He was a researcher at heart.”

“Before he was a researcher,” Dave pointed out, “he was a Marine.”

“This is my project,” Orion reminded the others, “and I say no.”

Dave looked at him steadily. His steely eyes softened. “We want you to be ready, but if you’re not, we understand.”

We? Orion looked at the others surrounding him, and he understood that they were all against him.

“Look, this is very, very difficult,” said Dave. “We’re all grappling with this thing. We’re all emotional. We have the … the memorial service this afternoon. It’s a terrible time, the worst possible time, and Orion, you have your issues, and I understand that, so we’re leaving this up to you, whether you want to participate in this initiative or not.”

“It’s amazing to me,” Orion said slowly, “how my leadership becomes conditional, and my team becomes collective property, and Jonathan’s memory”—his voice broke—“even his memorial service becomes something you can use for your agenda, which is now and has always been solely about money.”

“This is not art we’re making here,” Aldwin shot back indignantly.

“This is my friend you’re talking about,” Orion said. “Don’t tell me what he would have wanted.”

“Orion,” Dave chided, “we loved him too.”

He would say this at the memorial service as well. Orion knew exactly what Dave would say that afternoon. We loved him. We all loved him. Oh, and Mel too. We all loved Mel too.

He was so angry, he didn’t want to go, but his father was on the program. Orion had lobbied hard for Lou to come down to read. What better voice for a memorial? Craggy, irreligious, oddly deep. And who but Lou might have anything to offer Emily? From childhood she had admired his work. Naturally Dave worried that the service would run too long, but Orion won him over, promising his father’s brief elegy “Where Are the Bees?”

Now, driving to South Station to meet the train, he hoped his father had canceled at the last minute. He had canceled readings before. He was old and shaky. A seventy-seven-year-old man descending from the mountains with his visionary cri de coeur. Jonathan deserved the tribute, but ISIS was hardly worth it.

Orion drove to Boston, and he was late, and Lou didn’t own a cell phone. Aggravated, Orion barely glanced at the white sailboats on the river, the dark choppy water, the deep-blue October sky. He arrived at the station to find his father slightly crumpled in a brown corduroy sports jacket, dark trousers, and his old fly-fishing hat. As soon as he saw Orion, pleasure lit up Lou’s dark eyes, and for an instant he was young again.

“I’m sorry, Dad.”

“Never apologize, never explain,” said Lou.

“How are you?” Orion picked up his father’s flea-market briefcase, an old-fashioned doctor’s bag.

Lou shrugged. “I’m doing about as well as can be expected, given that Dick Cheney and the Bushies have ceded our government to a military-industrial complex which is bombing the Afghan people back to the Stone Age—as if that’s going to solve our problems.”

“Let me take that.” Lou’s bag was surprisingly heavy. “Do you want something to eat or drink?”

“I had a drink.” Lou laughed at Orion’s quick glance.

“Shmancy,” Lou said as Orion unlocked the BMW. He caressed the seat when he sat down. “What is this, leather?” He sniffed the upholstery.

“Do you want to rest?” Orion began driving back to Cambridge. “We have plenty of time. Do you want to take a nap?”

“Nah.”

“You have the poem?”

Lou gasped. “Oh, the poem!”

“Dad!”

“I’m kidding,” Lou said. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Everything,” Orion muttered as an SUV cut him off.

“Drive to the river,” Lou told his son.

“What’s at the river? I’m going over the river. See? We’re driving to the bridge now.”

“Closer,” said Lou.

Orion parked on Memorial Drive, and he and Lou stepped out. “Watch the traffic, Dad. Careful!” Orion held Lou back as cars whizzed past, and then guided him across the road to the grassy bank.

“Hmm.” Lou approached the river and peered down into the murky water.

Orion had a sudden vision. His father in waders and a fly-fishing vest, the green canvas fisherman’s hat with a flip-down magnifying glass clipped to the brim. Orion had often watched Lou fishing waist-deep in rushing water. Whenever Orion was too short to stand, Lou would lift him onto a rock on the bank, and then Orion watched his dad casting, his lines floating beautifully, scribbling the surface with a delicately tied caddis or a little midge or mayfly. Sometimes a sleek otter would swim past, a stealthy creature, only its nose showing, its long body submerged, gliding just under the surface of the stream. Orion knew better than to shout this out. No talking and no splashing were the rules, but Orion kept still because Lou held him in suspense, casting and casting with no luck, and then suddenly a trout, bending his wand to water, tripping line with a zzzzzz. Splashing, leaping, a huge brown fish Lou wrestled with his hands and looked in the eye, before he let it go. This casting, this deft motion of the arm and wrist, this balancing in currents with legs apart, had always seemed to Orion the center of his father’s life, the source of his art.

When he was ten, Orion had to create a family coat of arms for school. With markers on poster board, he outlined a shield and then divided it on the diagonal. On one side of the divide he drew a pen, an apple, and a rose to represent his mother—the writer, teacher, gardener. On the other side, he drew a big-eyed fish for Lou. On the surface his parents were still together. They didn’t divorce for another three years, but Lou was already gone many weekends, and in summers, and odd times in between.

“Is there a motto for the Steiners?” Orion had asked his mother.

“‘Catch and release,’” Diane had told him, and Orion hadn’t heard the irony at all. The words sounded poetic and sportsmanlike, and he wrote them out in yellow marker, the color closest in the box to gold.

“You aren’t going to find much here,” Lou said. “Maybe a pike. Possibly a bass.”

“The Charles isn’t known for fishing,” Orion said.

They were standing close to the BU Boathouse, east of the place Orion and Sorel walked in the mornings. No one was rowing, the shells were all locked up inside. A lone rowboat floated gently, tethered to the dock.

Lou said, “Let’s take that boat out for a paddle.”

“Take the boat? We can’t take the boat.”

“Why not? We’ll bring it back,” Lou told him.

“But it’s not ours.”

“Oh, don’t be such a skirt.”

“I’m sorry,” Orion said, with some heat. “Not everyone can live like you. I wish I did, actually. I’d rather be a painter or a poet, and work for myself and do whatever the hell I wanted without dealing with people, and all their meetings and their games. You have no idea what it’s like to fight and play politics and—”

“Hold on, hold on,” Lou interrupted. “Let me disabuse you, kid. For sheer backstabbing and jealousy, the politics of poetry are second to none. I guarantee that, compared to poetry in America, anything you’ve experienced at ISIS is child’s play.”

“Yeah, right.” Orion kicked a tuft of grass. He did not see his father’s tender face. He did not realize that Lou had visions too, that he turned to Orion and saw the boy who asked questions like, “Is it true that if you eat enough poppy seeds you fall asleep?”

“Look, it turns out nothing is easy,” Lou murmured. “We’re all dodging bullets of one kind or another—death or disappointment. Whatcha gonna do?”

“You should have warned me earlier,” Orion said. “I would have lowered my expectations.”

Lou grinned. “True story. A woman and her lovely young daughter are sitting on the beach. An enormous wave comes crashing down and sweeps the daughter away.

“The mother is hysterical. Weeping, she stands at the water’s edge. If there’s a God in heaven, she screams, please bring back my child!

“Lo and behold the wave returns and washes up the lovely daughter, alive and well.

“Thank you, merciful God! the mother cries. Then she looks around her. She looks all around, and at last she calls up to heaven once more. She cries out, There was also a hat?”

They laughed together, and for a moment Orion felt like himself. He wished he could really talk to Lou, and tell him how he hated ISIS. He wished above all that he could tell him about Sorel.

“We should go,” Orion said instead. “We should get there early to check the microphone. You brought your reading glasses, right?”

Lou overrode the question with his own. “How’s Molly?”

Orion helped his father up the riverbank. “She’s good.”

“Is that all?” Lou asked. “That’s a shame.”

“How is ‘good’ a shame, Dad?”

“Oh, because goodness is necessary but insufficient.”

“She’s working very hard. She’s totally committed to medicine.”

“I never understood that,” Lou said.

“What, that Molly is so practical and grounded?”

“I guess I never understood why ‘grounded’ was such a positive thing,” Lou told his son mildly. “Naturally, your mother and I disagreed on this. In your case, I admit, I always pictured you with someone flighty.”

Low-slung Kresge Auditorium opened like the wide mouth of a baleen whale. In the glass-walled lobby, professors and administrators milled with students and ISIS employees. Even as Orion opened the door for Lou, he saw the dean of the School of Engineering and the provost standing before a life-sized photograph of Jonathan propped up on an easel. It didn’t matter that Jonathan had dropped out of grad school. The university reclaimed him. Another easel supported Mel Millstein, and he had his mourners too, his wife, and her rabbi, listed on the program as Rabbi Shimon Zylberfenig. Suspiciously, Mel’s grown children eyed the alien in the black frock coat.

Hundreds upon hundreds were paying their respects, and those who knew Jonathan and Mel the least looked most tragic, mouths turned down, eyes despondent. Did you see Mel’s wife? they whispered to one another. Did you see Jonathan’s parents? They came from Nebraska. Look. Is that his brother? Over there. And the crowd gazed upon the Millstein and Tilghman families, celebrities in the new hierarchy of grief.

So many gathered that it was difficult to move. Sorel stood sentry by the door, a white usher’s flower pinned to her long dark dress.

“Are you okay?” Orion asked her, under cover of the crowd.

Subtly, her hand brushed his, and almost unconsciously his fingers wove through hers. Contact for just the instant the doors opened. The crowd surged forward, and he and Sorel were not touching anymore, but they saw Molly looking at them. What had she seen? Nothing, except the way they stood together. Confused, questioning, Molly turned to Orion, and he might have had to explain himself, if not for the arrival of Emily, and Jess, and Richard, and his wife.

“Emily!” Broken-voiced, Molly embraced her.

“Hello, sweetheart,” Lou told Emily. “Remember me?”

“Of course,” said Emily, the still center of the storm.

“Emily’s read all my books,” Lou announced to the assembled. He spoke in his public voice, his poet’s voice, fortified with Scotch. “Emily was Orion’s first girlfriend,” Lou confided to the provost.

“Let’s get you inside,” Orion said.

Jess wished she could get Emily inside as well. She wanted to spare her sister all the strangers sorry for her loss, but she could not shield Emily entirely. The lesser mourners drew close to Jonathan’s fiancée, and looked at her with a mixture of curiosity and awe. They whispered, I can’t imagine what she’s going through, but they wanted to imagine. They wanted to touch her pain, if only to draw back again, as from a flame.

Chaya Zylberfenig was one such stranger, but she observed Emily and Jess with special interest. Chaya remembered Jess perfectly from the Shabbes dinner a year ago in Berkeley. She had thought then that Jess looked familiar. In fact, she looked like one of the Gould cousins. Now, watching Jess standing with Emily, observing the two together, she was sure of the resemblance. It wasn’t simply the dark hair, or gray-green eyes, the fair skin, it was something in the manner of these sisters, the way they spoke to each other, the way Emily bent her head to the side, a gesture both gentle and skeptical as she listened to Jess speak. Freyda had that look, as she took in some piece of news.

“Excuse me,” Chaya said. “Jessamine? My name is Chaya Zylberfenig. Freyda Helfgott’s sister. Do you remember me?”

Jess turned to see a bright-eyed woman in a navy-blue suit with gold buttons, and a sleek wig in pageboy style. The suit was both fancy and fanciful, lending the little rebbetzin a nautical air. “You were at a Friday-night dinner.”

“Yes!” said Chaya. “That’s right. Is she your sister?”

Jess drew Chaya away from Emily. Richard and Heidi were taking her inside, and Jess delayed Chaya from following.

“Baruch dayan emet,” said Chaya, then quickly translating, “‘Blessed is the true judge.’ Pardon me, may I ask you something? Do you have any relatives with the last name Gould?”

Jess shook her head.

“No one in your family from London?”

“My mother was from London,” Jess said, “but that’s it.”

“Your mother was from London? What was her name?”

“Gillian Bach.”

“That was her whole name? What was her maiden name?”

“Gold,” said Jess.

“Are you sure?”

Jess hesitated. “I think so. It was either Gold, or Gould.”

Oh, but this was all that Chaya needed. “Gould! And her first name. Are you sure that it was Gillian?”

“Yes,” said Jess.

“But originally it wasn’t Gillian.” Chaya’s dark eyes widened with discovery. “In Yiddish the name wasn’t Gillian, it was Gittel! Your mother was my older sister, Gittel.”

Baffled, Jess blurted out, “My mother couldn’t be your sister. You’re too young to be my aunt.”

“I’m the youngest in the family.” Now tears filled Chaya’s eyes. “I’m the youngest of nine. Gittel was the oldest sister. She ran away when I was a baby, and she left the rest of us behind.”

“They’re getting started now.” Clarence and Umesh, with white flowers pinned to their sweaters, were ushering stragglers into the auditorium, where Bach radiated from a scientific-looking pipe organ, all sawed-off cylinders.

“Jess. Let’s go.” Richard had returned for her.

“Hold on a second—” Jess began.

“We’re sitting with Emily in front.” Richard swept past Chaya in her gold buttons and he took Jess by the arm. In his grip, Jess remembered all the slights of childhood, along with larger silences, the relatives he never spoke about, the grandparents who had died, the family in London that Gillian had disowned because they had disowned her.

“We are gathered today,” Dave intoned at the lectern, “to celebrate the lives of two very special people.”

In their reserved seats in the front row, Jess sat folding and refolding her program in her lap. How could this be? How could her own mother be a Bialystoker? Maybe it wasn’t true. Maybe this was just some fairy tale Chaya had made up. When they found out she was Emily’s sister, people responded in strange ways, speaking in hushed voices, making odd connections, bringing up an acquaintance of their own who had been killed, or a distant cousin who had gone missing. Jess thought Chaya must be wrong, and yet certain phrases returned to her from Gillian’s letters: I know from my own experience that some memories are indelible. What memories were those? And why had Gillian kept them to herself?

Jess could not concentrate at all. She could not think about Jonathan. Her own questions interrupted every eulogy. Who was Gillian? And if Chaya was right about her, why had Gillian kept such a secret from her children?

How self-centered the imagination was. The living thought about the living, even when they had gathered to speak about the dead. Orion sensed Molly staring at him, considering him, possibly judging him, maybe even dangerously, expensively forgiving him. Rabbi Zylberfenig stroked his beard and rehearsed his remarks silently, while Lou produced his reading glasses and shuffled the typed pages of his poem. Orion’s father had his game face on. Lou understood that he was also clergy.

“Mel Millstein hired me at ISIS. He gave me my chance….” Sorel leaned over as she spoke, and her white usher’s-flower weighed down her décolletage. “He always looked after me….”

Lou told Orion, “I’ll bet he did.”

At the lectern Dave recalled, “The first time I met Jonathan, I thought, ‘Is this guy for real?’ Let me rephrase that. I thought, ‘Is this kid for real?’ I said to him, ‘What are your goals for ISIS?’ and he said, ‘World domination.’ I said, ‘You’re joking, right?’ He said, ‘I’m not joking at all.’

“It’s one thing to have confidence when the going is great. It’s another thing to feel that way when the going gets tough. That’s the mark of a leader, a hero if you will.” Dave coughed. “I don’t use the word hero lightly, but I’m not … I’m not exaggerating when I say that this young man was a hero to me.

“The last time I saw Jonathan, we were in a meeting and I felt, as I sometimes did, that I had to rein him in. I said, ‘The climate is challenging right now.’ He said: ‘The climate’s history. The point is where we’re going.’ He was already thinking ahead. Six months ago, even nine months ago, he thought his way into a new space. He came to us with that gleam in his eye. He stood at the whiteboard and he wasn’t moaning, he wasn’t whining—he never whined about anything. He was like a kid in a candy store. ‘I have a new paradigm. I have a new plan….’ He had no idea then how important his new plan would be—a new system for data tracking.”

Dave’s words overflowed with feeling, and in the audience tears flowed freely. Even Lou almost forgot his own performance. Only Emily sat up, dry-eyed. Others heard a tribute to Jonathan’s indomitable spirit. Emily understood that he had stolen her information, appropriated and built a version of electronic fingerprinting.

“He would never let us down,” Dave said. “He would never say die. He led as he lived, fearless, imaginative, excited about the future. How could we lose someone who loved life so much?”

But Emily thought, Jonathan, how could you betray me? All those conversations where you accused me of putting Veritech first. All those times you said I was inflexible. Had you sold me out already? Six months ago. Nine months ago. Had you already betrayed me then?

She heard the other speakers in a dream. She heard them all from far away. Rabbi Zylberfenig spoke of angels. “Our sages teach that for each of us on Earth, there is an angel. This is very interesting to think about. We are each one of a matching pair. Therefore in the universe, we are not alone….”

A baby wailed.

Aldwin read from Kahlil Gibran. “When you part from your friend, you grieve not; / for that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence….”

Sorel sat on a stool and sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” accompanying herself on her guitar. “Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord …”

Until, like the main event he was, Lou Steiner took the stage. Shuffling his papers, clearing his throat, he seemed to have lost his place somehow. Emily stared at him, but she didn’t see him. Orion glared at Lou, and he thought, My God, he’s drunk. But he underestimated his father. Lou knew his poem by heart, and the poem he recited was not the one promised. Not “Where Are the Bees?” but something else entirely, one of his old sixties flower poems.

When truth dies

No one comes.

Truth passes without ceremony.

Her friends can’t afford a proper burial.

Truth’s enemies write her epitaph

And build her tomb.

As for truth’s relatives,

They’re estranged.

How? Emily asked Jonathan. How could you?

When peace dies

Everybody comes.

Peace plunges to her death

With fireworks and flags.

Full military honors.

Her friends hang their heads.

Her enemies say they’ll bring her back.

She was so beautiful

And much too young.

This was not the villanelle printed in the program, not at all the short sweet poem Dave and the memorial committee had expected. Subtly, almost imperceptibly, Dave leaned forward to look at Orion.

Orion shook his head and smiled. With a grim satisfaction, he thought, Fuck you. Even you can’t tell my father what to do. He didn’t see Emily’s face, so pale, or hear her panicked thoughts: How could you? How could you?

Visit truth and peace together.

They share a plot.

In lieu of flowers

Please send bodies

To the war.

In lieu of roses

Please send

Your Self-Addressed Stamped Sons….

The audience squirmed and whispered as Lou shifted into higher gear. What did this have to do with Mel and Jonathan? Wasn’t he talking about Vietnam? Even in Cambridge, this was almost embarrassing. The poem was almost—well, it was sort of on the nose for a memorial service, wasn’t it? And it went on and on. Such was the case with Lou’s antiwar poetry, predating his late, great pared-down lyrics, the new minimalism which charmed before it stung.

Even as Lou recited, Emily rose from her seat and hurried down the aisle. Whispers rustled under Lou’s clarion voice. Look. That’s the fiancée. It’s too much for her … too much for her. Softly they whispered as she exited the auditorium, and watched her as she closed the door.

Jess and Richard looked at each other past Heidi who sat between them, and their eyes said: Should I go after her? No, let me. I will.

In lieu of lilies

Please send

Lies.

In lieu of freesia

Please send

Funds.

Had Emily overheard Chaya Zylberfenig talking? What had Emily heard? Jess rushed to the lobby, where she found her sister standing still and pale.

“What happened?” Jess pleaded.

“Nothing.”

“Do you want to go? Was it something Lou said?”

“No.” Emily pushed open the glass lobby doors. “I just want to be alone, okay?”

“You were right, you shouldn’t have come,” Jess fretted.

“I’m glad I came,” Emily said grimly.

Then for the first time, Jess was afraid Emily would wander off and hurt herself. “Where are you going? Don’t go out there by yourself.”

Close-lipped, Emily smiled at the idea that Jess could come along, that anyone could travel with her to this new hell. The pain was entirely new, when she reconsidered all that went before. Where there had been no body, she’d held fast to Jonathan’s spirit. And now?

He had given her an enormously expensive ring, but she had given him information worth more than any diamond. She remembered his silence as they lay together in the dark and she told him about fingerprinting. He’d tried to stop her. He was overwhelmed, moved, shocked that she would say so much. Was that because he knew he could not resist making electronic fingerprinting his? Did he already know he would steal her idea?

But the idea had not been hers to tell. If she was accusing Jonathan, she should indict herself as well. Fingerprinting had belonged to Alex. Indeed, it belonged to Alex now. Even now, at Veritech, Alex continued to research fingerprinting for a project his team was developing to check for spyware: a project Emily herself had named Verify. What would Alex do when he heard what Jonathan had done? You were right, Jonathan, she told herself. You were right all along. You win. I’m just like you. You betrayed me, but I betrayed Alex first. She stood on the plaza in front of Kresge, and these ideas spread like poison through her body, numbing her fingers and toes, darkening her vision, blackening the sun.

29

That night, Richard sat with Jess at the kitchen table and he said, “Your sister’s been through enough.”

“She has to find out sometime,” Jess said, and unconsciously Richard glanced up at the ceiling, thinking of Emily upstairs. “Were you really planning to keep us in the dark forever?”

“You treat this as some life-changing revelation,” Richard said. “It’s not. It doesn’t change anything about you.”

“Yes, it does! This means that I have Jewish aunts! Chaya Zylberfenig and Freyda Helfgott. And Rabbi Helfgott is my uncle! Why didn’t you tell us?”

Heidi poured three mugs of herbal tea.

“You shouldn’t have kept a secret like that,” Jess accused her father.

Richard met her angry gaze. “It wasn’t my secret. Your mother didn’t want you or your sister to have any contact with those people.”

“Those people are our family,” said Jess. “Even if they’re religious mystics and they look different and act different from you and me.”

Then Richard struggled a little with himself. He tried to speak and stopped. Heidi stood behind his chair and kneaded his shoulders with her small hands until he put his hands up onto hers. “When they found out your mother had married a non-Jew, they sat in mourning for seven days. When she chose to marry me, they declared her dead.”

“And Mom took that name—Gillian? And she went by Gold instead of Gould?”

“She wanted a free life,” said Richard. “She wanted to choose her own husband. She wanted a musical career.”

“Yes, but—”

“She associated those people with pain.”

“But you could have told us,” Jess said. “You could have told Emily and me.”

“I did what she asked,” Richard said. “She felt that they were dangerous, and I agreed with her.”

Upstairs, Emily stirred in her twin bed in the guest room. She heard the voices below and opened her eyes in the half-light shining through the open door.

She heard her father’s voice: “Your mother and I …” and … “Yes, these Bialystokers are open and welcoming to everyone outside, but they have another attitude toward those within the fold, and that attitude is repressive to the—”

“Dad.”

“I would not violate your mother’s last wish—”

“Her last wish!” Jess raised her voice. “Her last wish was, ‘Don’t tell my daughters who I really am’?”

“No, you don’t understand. She knew exactly who she was. All she asked was that I conceal who she’d been.”

“But who you were fits inside of who you are. Can’t you see that?” Jess cried out.

Then Heidi said, “You’ll wake the children.”

But the little girls slept on upstairs. Only Emily lay awake, heart pounding in the dark.

Catharsis was for strangers. Those who knew Jonathan and Mel least went to sleep that night chastened, but cleansed, blessed to come home to their own families and lie down in their own beds. Those who knew Jonathan and Mel best left the memorial service uncomforted. The memorial was something they suffered for the sake of others. They themselves felt queasy at Sorel’s “Hallelujah.” A service in October was too soon. A service next October might be too soon.

Barbara slept. Whenever possible, she slept upstairs, escaping her relatives from Philly, her divorced younger sister with her autistic foster child, a sweet ten-year-old named Dominique who whooped more often than she spoke, and wouldn’t sit in chairs. Barbara outslept her dearest friends, the ones who brought My Grandma’s of New England Coffee Cakes and wept in her kitchen, declaring that Mel never hurt anyone, realizing that the world was unfair.

She appreciated Rabbi Zylberfenig’s approach, proactive from his first visit in September, when he had arrived with a roll of blue duct tape. All that morning he had taped sheets over the numerous mirrors in Barbara’s bathrooms. “This is traditional in a Jewish home of mourning,” he had explained.

After the memorial service, even as Barbara was finishing breakfast, the rabbi drove over to study sacred texts with Barbara and whichever relatives and friends showed up.

“Mom,” Annie whispered when she spied Zylberfenig through the kitchen window. “Does he have to come here every day?”

“You know Dad thought the Zylberfenigs were creepy,” Sam reminded her.

Barbara could not deny this.

“He thought Bialystokers were a cult. That’s what he told me,” Annie said. Barbara saw her daughter take a breath and turn pale behind her freckles. “We think that Dad wouldn’t want them in the house.”

Barbara placed her coffee cup gently on the granite kitchen counter. She had been a devoted stay-at-home mother, an involved parent—overinvolved, Mel used to say, when she drove hours every weekend for soccer league, stayed up all night sewing costumes, troubleshooting projects for the science fair. She had been a weeper, crying at every milestone and graduation. Even after the kids had left home, she’d longed for them, rejoicing intensely in their triumphs, hurting and worrying for them when they stumbled. In a real sense she’d lived for them. And now? Grief changed her perspective. Trauma provided sudden distance. Now Barbara looked at Annie and saw a young woman needing a haircut, and probably a new young man as well, someone who might find a way to fly east for his girlfriend’s father’s memorial.

“We were just thinking of what Dad would want,” said Annie.

Oh, really, young lady, Barbara thought. You have a lot of nerve. Did you and your brother get together and figure out what to say? Not very sensitive. Not very thoughtful. Not very bright! But she said none of this. She told Annie mildly, “Your father would want me to do whatever helps.”

Do what you have to do. Whatever works. Whatever helps. People said this, Orion mused, but they didn’t mean it literally. They didn’t mean, for example, go out and get high, or buy a gun and shoot someone. They were thinking more along the lines of go ahead and eat ice cream for dinner, carve a pumpkin, drive to western Mass. for apple picking. None of which appealed.

His anger did not subside. The pain only increased. Losing Jonathan, he had lost a year’s work as well. His friend, mentor, and rival dead, his tools repurposed for millennial cyberwars, Orion left the memorial service in such a fury, he didn’t know where to go or what to do. He took his father to the train station.

“Take it easy,” Lou told him as they hugged good-bye.

“I can’t,” Orion said.

He sped back to Boston, but he didn’t get a ticket. His wheels screeched as he turned off Memorial Drive onto Vassar Street. He hit a pothole that nearly sent his car flying, but he didn’t spin out of control. He pulled over and parked illegally in MIT’s West Annex Lot. Train tracks ran behind the fence. Every night at nine-thirty a train shuffled past.

He paced the lot, waiting. An hour passed. Two hours passed. At last he heard the horns and jingling bells at the railway crossing a block away, and then the steady shuffling engine.

He sprinted through the parking lot to the cyclone fence that ran along the tracks, and pounced, clawing metal, cutting his right hand, as the train barreled past. Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey circus. The circus had come to town. He watched the long silver train snake past. What did those cars contain? Tents and tigers, ponies, acrobats, sequined costumes, feather plumes. His father had written a circus poem. “The Circus Animals Return after Successful Contract Negotiations.” How did it go? The troupe returns / Those shopworn joys … His mother had taken him to the circus once, and he had learned to juggle. He had gone through a juggling phase as a child. In high school he got pretty good. He used to irritate his mother while she was cooking. He’d juggle a grapefruit and an avocado and a lemon. Sometimes a cantaloupe. Persimmons tended to explode.

He ran to the Store 24 in Central Square and looked for fruit. Store 24 was excellent because the fruit was so hard. None of it was ripe.

“Anything else?” the salesgirl asked, as she rang up four apples and a preternaturally orange orange.

At first he didn’t recognize her. He thought she was a new cashier. Then he saw that she was the same dark-eyed girl who always worked there. The same girl with one difference. She wasn’t wearing her head scarf anymore. Her hair was reddish-brown, bobbed to the chin. Couldn’t be, he told himself. But she was wearing her barrette with the tiny rhinestone diamond, fastened in her hair just above the ear.

She eyed him nervously. “Would you like a bag?”

He shook his head. He looked at the orange and the apples on the counter, and he didn’t want them. He had no desire to juggle anymore.

He walked out into the night, and he thought, Why not? Why not leave the store and the city with its muddy river and its squares of college students? He would leave. He would leave them all behind. His apartment with its splintering roof deck, his convenience store, his frightened cashier, his future in-laws who were already planning for Thanksgiving, his so-called friends who’d cut him loose. The so-called ISIS family. The so-called ISIS team. The company had never been his family, and he’d never understood the rules if, indeed, there were any. Think like Jonathan. He knew exactly how Jonathan thought: How do I raise hell today?

“I’m leaving ISIS,” he told Molly when he got home.

“I know.” She was sitting in the living room watching the news.

He took the remote and turned off the television.

“Really leaving.”

“You say that every day.”

“I can’t be there anymore. I can’t work there anymore.”

Wearily, Molly turned to look at him. “You can’t do anything,” she said. “You can’t cook. You can’t clean. You can’t move. You can’t grow up. What is the matter with you?”

Orion didn’t answer.

“You barely live here anymore.”

“You should talk,” Orion shot back.

“I’m working!”

“And I’ve been working too.”

“Right, and now you want to stop. What’s your plan, Orion?”

“I don’t have a plan,” he said. “I don’t want a plan. That’s the difference between us. You’re the planner. Your parents are the planners. Not me.”

“It is eleven o’clock at night,” Molly said.

“So?”

“So it’s been five hours since the memorial service ended. Where have you been?”

“Nowhere,” said Orion.

“Nowhere? Do you think you might have called me?”

“I might have,” said Orion.

“You knew I was home tonight. You knew that I’d be here.” She got off the couch and began brushing crumbs off the cushions onto the floor. “I am so tired of waiting for you. I’m always waiting for you. For six years, I’ve been working and training and waiting for you, and you don’t care, you don’t want to be with me, you don’t …” Tears started in Molly’s eyes. “We were best friends, weren’t we? We used to tell each other everything. When I was upset I could come to you. When you had problems you would confide in me. But now you don’t want to talk to me, you don’t even want to look at me. All you want to do is run away.”

“If I’d wanted to run, I would have run already,” Orion said.

“Would have? You did! You already have. You run away from me every day.”

You make it easy, Orion thought.

Molly rubbed the tears from her eyes. “What if the whole world were like you? What if everybody ran away? What if all the doctors said, ‘I can’t treat you because I’m afraid of blood’? And the Army said, ‘We can’t fight to defend you, because somebody could die’?

“Wake up, Orion. Life is messy! The world is messy. And I’m sorry, but people get killed. Even people you and I know. And you can keep on working and try to make things right, or you can give up and make some random tragedy into an excuse for following your original plan—which was to do as little as possible.”

He heard his mother in Molly’s voice. He heard his mother’s anguished pragmatism. Please don’t sit around. Don’t sleep the day away. You’re wasting light. Molly’s words were angry, but also heartfelt, and he heard their truth.

The truth was not nearly enough. His mother’s admonitions were not enough. The old goat, his father, stirred within him. Don’t stay, his father whispered. Leave now. Don’t ground yourself with Molly, fly away.

“I’m leaving ISIS,” Orion said again.

This time Molly heard him differently. He saw the knowledge in her face, which seemed to swell with pain: He’s not just leaving ISIS. He’s leaving me.

“I’m sorry,” Orion told her. “I don’t deserve you—obviously.”

He was sorry, but that last qualifier carried a sullen little sting.

“You’re in love with her, aren’t you?” Molly said wonderingly. “You’re in love with that girl. The one in the lobby.”

“No.”

“You’re sleeping with her, aren’t you?”

“No!” Orion answered truthfully.

“You are such a coward,” she gasped. “Standing there like you’re having some kind of existential crisis! You’re totally involved with her.”

“I’m not,” Orion lied.

“You were afraid I would find out, and you got scared.”

“I’m not scared at all,” Orion said.

Before dawn, he knocked on the door of Sorel’s house. When she didn’t answer, he dialed her number, and her phone rang, but all he got was voice mail.

He stood on the porch and tapped on the window. Then he banged on the door until he heard her sleepy voice on the other side. “For God’s sakes.”

“Sorel,” he said, “it’s me. Open up.”

“No,” she groaned on the other side of the door. “I’m too tired. I’m too sleepy. I’m drunk.”

“It’s an emergency,” he said.

“Then why didn’t you call me?”

“Sorel, please.”

She opened the door and stepped outside, shivering. She was wearing woolly socks, and a long Phish T-shirt with a sweater over it.

“I missed you.”

“Is that an emergency?”

“I’m going away.”

“Where?”

“Don’t know. I’m leaving ISIS.”

“And Molly?”

“Yes.”

For a moment she didn’t speak. Then she asked, “Are you sure?”

“Oh, yeah. Everybody’s sure.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Really?”

She nodded very slightly and she kept her eyes fixed on him, so that even without her white robes and wings and paint, she looked like the angel in the square. “You’re at sea,” she said.

“I’m not,” he told her. “I’m not at sea at all. Not when I’m with you.”

“I like living alone,” she said. “And I like traveling. I’m planning an opera! And I’m spending the weekend working on a film in Somerville. A bunch of us from MIT are putting it together. I’m a twelve-foot bride.”

“I’d support you in all that,” he said, and he was totally serious.

“I have stilts,” she said, matching his earnest tone. “I don’t need support.”

He laughed and folded his arms around her.

“It’s a silent movie,” she told him. “I wrote the script. It’s sort of a feminist Perils of Pauline, so when she’s angry, she grows really, really tall. We’re filming in Union Square.”

“Do you have a permit?”

“No! Of course not. Do you think we have that kind of money?”

“So when the cops come you … what?”

“Run away.”

“On stilts?”

“I’m quite fast,” she said.

“Wait, let me get this straight …,” he began.

She pulled him toward her and kissed him freely, joyously. “What was the question?”

“I don’t have a question.” He sighed. “This is so much better than the stairwell.”

“You liked stairwells.”

“I did, but—”

She interrupted him. “Come in.”

30

While the family slept, Emily tiptoed out of the guest room she shared with Jess, down the hall past her father and Heidi’s bedroom door, past Maya’s, past Lily’s. Softly, she glided down the stairs to the glassed-in sunroom where she wrapped herself in the pink and purple afghan on the couch. There she sat and gazed at her sisters’ plastic groceries, their books piled on the floor: Princess Stories, My Body, The Book of Me. She looked at Lily’s miniature dinette, her pink and white play kitchen. She had heard every word of her father’s conversation with Jess.

Jonathan had concealed his plans for the future, and Gillian had concealed her past. She had loved them both, and this news made her feel entirely alone.

Or had she loved them? She had loved aspects of Jonathan, and tested him; adored her idea of Gillian, and studied her. She doubted now that she had known either. In the end, she was not a good judge of character—least of all, her own. How strange that people had looked up to her. She was supposed to be the sage one, the stable one. Emily had always told Jess what to do.

She turned and turned her sparkling diamond ring. She could not quite bring herself to take it off. What proof would she have, then, what physical evidence, that what she and Jonathan had was real?

She thought of her mother’s ring clinking against the bowl as she kneaded dough. Emily had been the conservator of her mother’s memory, keeping the birthday letters on her computer. Reading and rereading them. In the end what did those letters say? My hope for you and Jessie is that you go on to live your lives happy, independent, unafraid. Well, what did that mean? Isn’t that what everybody wanted? Guilt and regret are a waste of time. Think about the future. Tears started in Emily’s eyes. Think about the future? Her mother was telling her to play a game with only half the pieces.

Emily had assumed a transparency in people, expected it of everyone, even herself. But why? What basis did she have for such assumptions? She saw in her own case that they were ungrounded. She herself, supposedly so careful and straightforward, so reasonable, had betrayed Veritech’s secrets to Jonathan, made a gift of them, a token of love mixed with hope mixed with doubt. In the end her motives were hardly rational, hardly clear. That realization frightened her, but she was reflective, rigorous in her thinking, and she tried to think her way out of this morass. Bewildered, adrift in her father’s house, she tried to find a way forward. She was her father’s daughter, and she thought like an engineer.

First thing in the morning, she resigned from Veritech. She sent an e-mail to Milton, Alex, and Bruno: Today, after much thought, I have decided to resign as CEO. My time with you has been challenging, rewarding, and above all, interesting. As you know, I had been planning to step down in January. However, after the events of—she paused here, and then typed—the past month, I cannot continue to work at Veritech. I will miss your company, and I will miss the company we have built together, but I realize that now is the time to leave, to think about the future, and spend time with my family….

No excuses, and no confessions either. Emily’s sense of responsibility was strong, but her need for privacy was stronger. She sent the message from her laptop, and then proceeded to the next order of business—helping Heidi prepare breakfast for the children. The nanny arrived. Heidi took the train to Providence to teach, and Emily took a walk with Jess and Richard.

It seemed to Emily that the leaves had changed overnight. Suddenly, trees of ordinary green were scarlet, gold, spectacular. When she’d arrived in Canaan, she must have been too distraught to notice.

“I heard everything you said,” she told Richard, as they walked down Pleasant Street.

Jess took her hand.

“Now I want to know the whole story,” Emily told her father.

Richard didn’t answer.

“You have to tell us, Dad,” said Jess.

Richard kept moving, eyes fixed on the sidewalk ahead. “Well, what do you want to know?”

“I want you to start at the beginning,” said Emily.

“Your mother and I met at Cambridge,” Richard said. “I was on a Fulbright, and she was a choral scholar.”

“We knew that before,” said Emily. “I want you to begin at the beginning, with her mother and her father.”

But Gillian’s parents were not the beginning for Richard. Those dark-costumed people were not the story of his wife. Gillian began with him at Cambridge, where he bicycled with her through golden autumn fields and listened to her sing in the Girton College Chapel Choir. She had applied to college without her parents’ knowledge, and when she got her choral scholarship she broke from childhood, choosing music as her religion.

Emily and Jess pressed him, but they didn’t understand. Their mother’s life began when she came up to Cambridge on her own. “It’s like a fairyland here,” she used to say, when they walked through the ancient cloisters. She was a quiet rebel, buying a Liberty-dress pattern and sewing her own gown for the Emmanuel College ball, dancing until dawn, and then slipping barefoot onto the velvet lawns reserved for Fellows. As a soprano she sang for services and feasts. As an adventurer, she tried champagne for the first time and pork loin and frog’s legs. In summers she and Richard punted on the river Cam. On vacations she stayed in his apartment, and when he got the job at MIT, she married him. Her Hasidic family had nothing to do with it. They would not even meet Richard, much less look at their runaway daughter. She came to America, and took Richard’s family for her own.

Emily shook her head. “But don’t you see, Dad? That’s not good enough. Those are our relatives too. You can’t pretend they don’t exist.”

“How productive is this line of inquiry right now?” Richard asked her. “How will these questions help with what you’re going through?”

“Come with us to the Zylberfenigs’ house,” said Emily.

Richard’s jaw tightened. “Absolutely not.”

Undeterred, Emily took Jess that very afternoon to Alcott Street. Laptop in hand, she rang the bell. Then she knocked on the door. Seconds later, Chaya Zylberfenig welcomed the sisters with open arms.

“I knew I was right!” Chaya cried. “Come in, come in! The doorbell’s broken. Come sit!” She ushered Emily and Jess into her living room filled with bookcases of tall Hebrew books. She seated the young women on her slip-covered couch, under her picture of the Rebbe. Brushing tears from her eyes, Chaya said, “Welcome, nieces.”

“Is it really possible you’re our aunt?” Jess asked. “It’s so strange.”

“Ah.” Chaya smiled. “My husband always quotes the Rebbe. There are no coincidences.”

“You’re so young,” Emily said shyly.

Once again Chaya explained. “There were nine of us. Your mother, Gittel, oleha shalom, was the oldest. I was the ninth, and so I was much younger. She left home when Freyda and I were babies.”

Emily could not hide her disappointment. “So you didn’t know her.”

Chaya shook her head, “We were told unfortunately that she had died—even before her real death.”

“Don’t you think that was wrong?” Jess couldn’t help interjecting.

Emily touched her arm in warning.

“It was many years ago,” Chaya said diplomatically. “What she did and what our parents did is all said and done. But I can tell you all about the family. Your grandfather Leib, zichron l’bracha, was a jeweler.”

“A jeweler!”

Jess watched, amazed, as Emily whipped out her laptop and began typing. “How do you spell ‘Leib’?”

Two hours later, Emily was still bent over her keyboard, typing. She’d stopped only to plug her power cord into the wall behind the couch as she continued to pepper Chaya with questions. “How did he die?” And, “Where are those children now?” With a kind of manic energy, she added to her family record, while Chaya talked and Jess sat back and watched, overwhelmed by this sudden cousinage in London. Jess knew that there were stages of grief. Was this one of them? The genealogical stage? The note-taking, fact-finding, photo-album stage?

“This is the house where we grew up.” Chaya opened her crimson, leather-bound album to a picture of a tall brick town house. “This is my older sister Beyla, who raised us and who lives there now. She knew your mother well. These are my middle brothers, Menachem and Reuven … or maybe not.” She squinted at the picture. “Maybe that’s not Reuven. That could be Cousin Mendy.”

Emily studied the pictures. “We need to scan these in. If we digitize everything, then we can share the files.” Turning to Jess, she asked, “Did you see the picture of the house?”

“Uh-huh,” Jess said weakly from the corner of the couch.

“You’ll stay for lunch?” Chaya asked them. They adjourned to the kitchen, and the children gathered, blowing through in a little storm of elbows, arms, and knees. Chaya served cold cuts, which Jess didn’t eat. The boys tried to touch their noses with their tongues. These are my cousins, Jess thought. These are Rabbi Helfgott’s nephews, and his nieces, just like me. Emily kept typing, her face aglow.

“You in particular look like a Gould,” Chaya told Emily. “You have the Gould eyes.”

“Hazel?” Emily asked.

“Determined,” said Chaya. “This is very much a Gould trait.”

“Very much so!” Shimon agreed as he came in from the garage.

“Shimon, meet our nieces, Emily and Jessamine,” Chaya said.

“Baruch Hashem. Here you are!” said Shimon and he did not look in the least surprised.

“Clear your places!” Chaya called after her boys as they ran off. They doubled back again and threw their paper plates into the trash.

“Life is strange,” Jess murmured, looking at her uncle in his black frock coat.

“Life is very, very beautiful.” Shimon washed his hands and said a blessing, after which he sat down and fixed himself a sandwich. His blue eyes sparkled as if with news he couldn’t tell. Two new nieces, two beautiful souls in his own kitchen in Canaan, and one of them—He didn’t think of Emily as rich. He never used that word, even to himself, but she had means. She had capacity to illuminate everything around her. Like Barbara, Emily had much to give.

“Will you join me for my class?” he asked Jess and Emily. “My brother-in-law Rabbi Helfgott tells me that you, Jessamine, are one of his best students. Very philosophical.”

“Oh, I’m not,” Jess demurred. She didn’t feel philosophical at all.

All day and night, Emily continued in her hectic phase. Thoughts of her mother’s true identity had unleashed in her a million schemes and plans. She was sending e-mails to Aunt Freyda in Berkeley and Aunt Beyla in London. She was already telling Jess that evening that they should fly to London. The sisters sat on their twin beds in the guest room and Emily said, “We’ll go to Golders Green and see the house. We’ll see the house where she grew up and meet the family.”

“We could,” Jess said.

“There might be some of Gittel’s papers there, or school reports. Or maybe we can find a diary.”

Gently, Jess suggested, “From what Dad and Chaya say, I’m not sure you’re going to find any diaries or mementos.”

“You never know,” said Emily.

She had a new idea to pursue, and she held fast to it. She would not let go. Richard sat with Emily in the living room as she searched for fares to London.

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Richard said.

“You knew your grandparents, and you knew your mother,” Emily said calmly. “If you hadn’t known them and suddenly you got a chance—wouldn’t you go?” She seemed strangely happy, and also feverish, downloading Family Tree software and finding it wanting. “The interfaces are terrible,” she told her father.

In her first weeks of bereavement, Emily had been quiet and small, almost childlike, retreating into herself. She had tried to contain what she felt, to keep calm, and whenever possible, comfort her own comforters. Now she asserted herself, brooking no dissent, dismissing her father’s concerns about “those people” as he called them.

“Look, they’re controlling,” Richard told her. “They’re manipulative.”

Emily raised an eyebrow and tilted her head ever so slightly, as if to say, You weren’t controlling? You didn’t manipulate my sister and me?

“You have a lot of money,” Richard reminded Emily.

“Is that what you’re worried about?” Emily asked, irritated.

“You’re rich,” he said. “They’re poor. They have to provide for dozens of children, and you need to keep your eyes open.”

“How dare you tell me to keep my eyes open,” Emily said. “When all these years you kept me in the dark.”

Jess had never heard her sister and her father fight before. Jess and Richard had been fire and water, and of course he always won. Emily and Richard were like an ice storm, sparkling, deadly.

“You’re in a vulnerable position,” Richard said.

“A position you created.”

Suddenly something broke in Richard. Emily froze. Jess looked up, horrified to see her father crying. She had never seen her father cry before, and now his eyes were red and he was sobbing. He couldn’t stop himself. “I’m afraid for you, Emily!”

Heidi rushed into the room, and she seemed almost as surprised as Emily and Jess. She wrapped her arms around Richard, and he buried his head in her sweater and cried and cried.

“Dad, I’m sorry you’re upset …,” Emily began. “I’m sorry!” But now that he was crying, Richard could not stop.

Jess couldn’t watch. She slipped out the back door and tried to catch her breath. Hugging herself, she sat on Lily’s big-girl swing. It was getting cold, but she didn’t want to return for her jacket. She stayed out, swinging gently, trying to calm herself, listening to the squeaking chains.

At last she took out her new cell phone and called George.

“Hey,” she said softly.

“Jess. How are you?”

“Where are you?” she asked at the same time.

“In my kitchen,” he told her. “Missing you. Where are you?”

“On the swing set in the yard.”

“Missing me?”

“What do you think?”

Her voice was muffled, weary, terribly sad. “What’s wrong now?” George asked. “What happened?”

“I have to go to London.”

“No! No, you don’t. If your sister wants to go and see all those relatives, then you go ahead and let her. She’s a grown woman.”

“I have to go,” Jess said. “She’s in a bad way. I can’t let her go alone.”

“Why not? Why can’t you? You’ve been with her almost a month. Come home.”

“I can’t,” said Jess. “I can’t.”

“You keep saying that.”

“I’m helping her. She needs me.”

“I know,” George said. “But what about you?”

Jess demanded, “Can’t you look at this from Emily’s point of view?”

Then George was honest, much too honest. He knew even as he said the words that they would anger Jess, but he missed her so much that he could not help himself. “I’m not interested in her point of view.”

Silence.

“Jess? Are you there?”

“You’re very good at that,” Jess said.

“Good at what?”

“Triaging. You’re first, and I’m second, and everybody else is a distant third.”

“You’re overwrought,” George said. “This situation is poisonous for you.”

“Maybe it is,” said Jess. “But I’m the only one she has.”

“What about your father?”

“You don’t understand. He’s half the problem.” Jess glanced back at the house. “I’m the one who has to go.”

All that night and the next day, Emily worked busily. She drew up charts and lists and plans. She asked Laura to FedEx her passport. Then she took Jess for pictures and ordered her a passport as well. Emily was more than pleased. This new discovery satisfied her investigative soul, turning her heart toward social connections which were intricate but calculable, concrete, and fixed. Even as Jess watched, Emily returned to life, e-mailing, organizing, buying guidebooks and new clothes.

She and Jess drove to the Canaan mall and Emily bought Jess a puffy down jacket, and chenille sweaters, and good warm socks, and waterproof boots, and a pair of Indian gold earrings for good measure.

“Does it help?” Jess asked.

“Does what help?”

“Shopping.”

“Let’s get Dad something at Home Depot.” Emily strode across the parking lot to the great brick edifice dedicated to home improvement. “Look at these snowblowers. They’ve already got snowblowers out and it’s not even Halloween.”

“Emily?” said Jess.

“What do you think the difference is between Turbo Power Plus and the Turbo Power Max?” Emily murmured.

“Will London make you happy?”

Emily touched her sister’s shoulder. “We have a family there. It’s just such a gift.”

What was wrong with Jess, then? Presented with this gift, she felt utterly alone and empty. George was frustrated with her for staying with Emily for so long, and Emily expected Jess to accompany her. She not only expected Jess to go; she assumed Jess shared her excitement.

Suddenly among the shiny red snowblowers Jess understood how Sandra McClintock must have felt, hearing that her mother was the object of her uncle’s affections. She realized how disconcerted Sandra must have been. Information wasn’t always such a gift; it was also a loss, the end of possibility. To tell the truth, when it came to her mother, Jess preferred mystery. She preferred to make up her own stories. It was painful to think that Gillian was someone real. Maybe Emily took a macabre satisfaction in diving into the wreck to reclaim this relic and that. Wasn’t she missing the point? The storm at sea? The end of all their mother’s hopes, ideas, and memories?

“Is that your phone?” Emily asked.

Jess glanced quickly at the number and didn’t answer. She didn’t want to talk to George.

While Emily hunted down a salesman, Jess slipped away through aisles of locks, power drills, carpet rolls, kitchen sinks, doors with fanlights, bathtubs, vanities. Piled high with storm windows, a beeping forklift backed toward her, even as she scrolled through her telephone’s address book and dialed.

“Sandra?” she said.

“Who is this?”

“This is Jessamine Bach. May I speak to Sandra?”

“Oh, Jess!” Sandra exclaimed. “How are you?”

The cheerful voice sounded nothing like the Sandra Jess knew.

“I called to apologize,” said Jess as she walked down an aisle of white wire closet organizers.

“What do you mean?” Sandra asked.

“I ambushed you with information about your mother and your uncle. I saw their connection in the McLintock cookbook and I got a little carried away.” Pausing, Jess glanced at the shelves. “I was so proud of myself. I never really considered the effect it might have had on you.”

“Oh,” said Sandra. “Well.”

“I’m sorry,” Jess whispered. “I didn’t understand. I wanted to say that I do understand now. I’m very, very sorry.”

“Stop! That’s ridiculous,” said Sandra. “I’m fine, and everybody’s fine. I haven’t thought about any of that in weeks. Your discovery was worth a lot to me, as I’m sure you know.”

Jess stood before an array of paint chips. “No, I don’t know. I’ve been away. I’m out of town.”

“That’s right, you aren’t working for him anymore. I thought he might have told you. George reassessed the cookbooks after you found the McLintock, and he doubled his payment.”

“George?” Jess was shocked. “He paid you double?”

“He did,” said Sandra. “My daughter got a new lawyer because of that, and she’s settling with her ex for joint custody. We’re getting summers and every-other-weekend visitation.”

Jess plucked out paint samples in shades of blue: Chartered Voyage, Summer Dragonfly, Rushing Stream. “He never told me that.”

“Well,” Sandra said, “he felt that he’d undervalued the collection. He wanted to give me even more, but I was afraid my uncle would not have liked it. We agreed on donating to the Redwood League instead, toward the purchase of the Dillonwood Grove. Have you heard of it?”

“Yes.”

“The league is buying that tract to add to Sequoia National Park, and we’re making the donation in honor of Tom McClintock’s work on lungwort in the canopy. He was a very important lichenologist, you know.”

“I don’t think … I’m sure George never did anything like that before.”

Sandra answered with some pride, “He said he had never seen cookbooks like mine.”

Emily found Jess outside, crying among the terra-cotta flowerpots. “They’re actually plastic,” Jess said. She lifted a giant faux-stone urn. “Look how light they are.”

“Jess? What’s wrong?” Emily rushed over. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. What happened?”

“I didn’t know,” Jess said.

“How could you have known? Dad wouldn’t tell us who she really was. He tried to prevent us from finding out.”

Jess shook her head. “That’s not what I meant.”

“I’m angry at him too,” said Emily. “I’m disappointed, but the point is to think about her.”

“I can’t think about her.”

Emily wrapped her arms around her sister. “It’s a shock, but it’s really better to know. We have to know—even if it’s painful. I know you miss her….”

“No. I mean, yes, but it’s not that. I miss George,” Jess confessed.

“George!” Emily dropped her arms, and suddenly her hands were on her hips. “Oh, Jess, don’t tell me that—”

“Please don’t say, ‘Oh, Jess.’ Please don’t be that way.”

“You said it was over. You said that you’re just friends,” Emily scolded. “Why did you lie to me?”

“I didn’t lie.”

“Well, what would you call it then?”

Jess quailed a little before her sister. “Understatement?”

Emily shook her head. “You’re amazing. You go from one totally inappropriate guy to the next. Just one after another.”

“It’s not what you think,” said Jess. “It’s not some motherless daughter thing.”

“Of course it is. How old is he? He’s twenty years older than you, isn’t he?”

“Sixteen years older,” said Jess. “It doesn’t matter.”

“So he’s a very young middle-aged guy? Is that supposed to be endearing? You have no common sense, Jessamine.”

Jess turned on her sister. “Aren’t you the one flying to London to look up long-lost Hasidic relatives?”

“That’s real. That’s our family. What you are talking about is yet another of your infatuations.”

“No,” said Jess. “You’re the one infatuated with Gillian’s memory. Not me. You’re the one chasing a dream. Not me.”

For a moment Emily could not speak.

“You don’t know him, but George is actually wonderful, and funny. He’s musical. He’s … secretly philanthropic.”

“That’s the problem,” said Emily. “You’re part of his philanthropy.”

“No, Emily. No. Not really. He understands me. He reads me. I’m in love with him,” Jess whispered.

Emily sighed at her legible sister.

“I’m sorry I’ve cried wolf so many times. This time I mean it.”

Emily spun around and took her receipt to Security where the Turbo Max snowblower was waiting for pickup.

“Please believe me.” Jess hurried after her.

“If you love him so much, why are you here with me?” Emily asked her.

“Because you need me more right now. You come first.”

“If I come first, why can’t you confide in me?”

Jess was so startled that she couldn’t answer right away. “It … it wasn’t the time!”

“If you love him, then why is it a secret?” Emily asked. “And if you need him, then you shouldn’t be apart.”

“You can love someone even if you’re separated,” Jess answered slowly.

“For how long?” Emily asked.

“Is this some kind of test? For as long as it takes.”

“No,” Emily said.

“What do you mean?”

When Emily answered, her voice was serious and low. “You can’t be apart indefinitely. You can’t keep postponing and expect everything to stay the same. If you keep deferring, everything gets old. Even love, eventually.”

31

George closed Yorick’s at five. He closed the register, and Colm pulled down the metal grille over the front window. No one had come in all afternoon, except for Raj, who had driven over to show off his pristine first-edition Ulysses. “It isn’t signed,” Raj admitted, “and it’s been read …”

“Oh, too bad,” George said drily.

“But it’s very beautiful.” Raj opened a box, and lifted the cloth-bound novel as gently as a newborn puppy.

“Ooh.” Colm raked his fingers through his thick wavy hair.

“You don’t have a first-edition Ulysses, do you?” Raj asked George.

“I’ve already told you no, and I’m not buying this one, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I’m not asking,” said Raj, cradling the book. “It’s not for sale.”

“If it’s not for reading, and it’s not for selling, what’s it for then?” George inquired.

Later when Colm had gone to work in the back room, George whispered to Raj, “If you like him, why don’t you just ask him out?”

“It’s complicated,” Raj said airily.

He began to explain, but George said, “I don’t want to know.”

He couldn’t stand another set of complications. He felt so worn, tired, cranky, old. When he drove home that evening, up Marin Avenue, he thought his transmission was going. When he parked, the young deer devouring his daylilies barely looked up.

He collected the mail, climbed the steps, unlocked his door, and only then did he notice a pair of battered running shoes inside on the mat. His heart pounded as he ran into the dining room.

“Jess!”

“Just a sec,” she told him, holding up her hand to stop him.

She was sitting cross-legged at the head of the table with cookbooks stacked up all around her, the reference manuals, the laptop, the note cards, as of old. “What do you think of this? By 1736, McLintock includes sugar in over half her recipes. Generally she uses a pound of sugar for cake or biscuits. What was scarce is now a staple in the home cook’s pantry. The luxurious is now ubiquitous and sugar’s smoother, lighter, facile sweetness is not only desired but expected at the table. Desire shifts to expectation, and expectation creates desire. This dynamic applies to everyday mass consumption in the kitchen, and feeds new theories of supply and demand, hunger and satisfaction. Indeed, in 1739, just three years after McLintock published her Receipts for Cookery and Pastry-Work, her countryman David Hume diagrams the cycle of desire in his Treatise of Human Nature: ‘Any satisfaction, which we lately enjoy’d, and of which the memory is fresh and recent, operates on the will with more violence, than another of which the traces are decayed….’ (Section VI).”

“Not bad,” said George. “Who wrote that?”

“You know I did! I’m still working on the transition to Hume. I know what I want to say, but I still have to …”

“Keep reading,” he said, but she shook her head and opened up her arms for him.

He knelt at her feet and rested his head in her lap. She ran her fingers through his hair. “That’s as far as I got,” she said. “If I read you any more, I’ll have to back up and start from the beginning.”

“I thought you went to London.”

“Emily talked me out of it,” said Jess. “With a lot of lecturing.”

He lifted his head. “I can’t believe you’re here.”

“She says I’m too young for you, and you’re too old for me, and we’re at different stages. She warned me that we’ll become a cliché.”

“So what?” He took her by the hand and led her up the stairs.