the couch—looked significantly fuller and warmer than it had yesterday.
Fiona had spent an inordinate amount of her adult life engaged in two different ongoing fantasies. One, especially lately, was the exercise in which she’d walk through Chicago and try to bring it back as it was in 1984, 1985. She’d start by picturing brown cars on the street. Brown cars parked nose-to-tail, mufflers falling off. Instead of the Gap, the Woolworth’s with the lunch counter. Wax Trax! Records, where the oral surgeon was now. And if she could see all that, then she could see her boys on the sidewalks in bomber jackets, calling after each other, running to cross before the light changed. She could see Nico in the distance, walking toward her.
The other fantasy was the one where Nico walked beside her everywhere, wondering what the hell things were. He was Rip Van Winkle, and it was her job to explain the modern world. She’d done it at O’Hare on her way here. Focused as she was on Claire, on getting to Paris, she’d suddenly had Nico beside her on the moving walkway as it rolled past a sign advertising “a firewall for your cloud.” How could she even begin to explain why a cloud needed a wall of fire? And once he was in her head, he was following her all around the terminal—ordering food with her off the iPad at the pizza counter, jumping at the autoflush toilet, reading the scroll at the bottom of CNN and asking what Bitcoins were. He asked why everyone was staring at calculators. “You’re living in the future,” he whispered. “Feef, this is the future.” And when she saw something he’d fully understand—a baby crying for a dropped pacifier, a McDonald’s, a whole wall (was it still possible?) of pay phones—she felt the world had been set right.
And there were times, too, when she simply narrated for herself what was happening around her, things that sounded as if they could have come from another era. Right now, for instance, she told herself she was sitting here with Kurt Pearce, that she and Kurt Pearce were having a conversation. That Richard was off at his studio, and she needed to give Cecily a call later. A description that would have made perfect sense in 1988.
Except Kurt would be an adolescent, not this enormous man sitting opposite her, his legs reaching halfway across the floor. Jake wouldn’t have been standing against the wall, arms folded across his chest in an attempt to look like a bodyguard.
Kurt seemed sober, lucid. He spoke quietly, his voice impossibly deep. “I don’t know how much I can tell you. I don’t know if you’re going to try something.”
“Try something!” Fiona said, and then stopped herself. She shouldn’t get emotional.
“I always thought she was way too harsh on you. You did the best you could. And you’re making an effort. I get it.”
He seemed so young. This whole time, she’d hated him for being closer to her own age than to Claire’s—and he was just a kid, a hippie doofus.
He said, “Look, I wish it had worked out differently. I messed up pretty bad for a while. But everyone’s fine. We’re all doing okay. Hey, what happened to your hand?”
“Are they here in Paris?”
“I can tell you everyone’s safe and healthy. But beyond that—it’s not my place to tell you stuff. I’m lucky to be back in their lives. I’m lucky Claire allows that.”
It was all Fiona hoped for, herself—to be allowed back in. She hadn’t messed up as badly as Kurt—she hadn’t been arrested, at least—but maybe she’d messed up for longer. And maybe it was harder to forgive your mother than a man. She’d always figured that her own failings would make more and more sense to Claire as she grew up—that an adult would understand an affair (such a garden-variety mistake!) in a way a child couldn’t have. Shouldn’t Claire know the messiness of the human heart by now?
She had too many questions for Kurt, and no good starting point. And she couldn’t give away that she’d spied on him, been in this apartment yesterday. She said, “I understand you’re married.”
He looked back and forth between Fiona and Jake, and then he said, “Yeah, she’s a good match. It’s healthy.”
“Well, I’m happy for you. I’ve always wanted the best for you, and I just wish—” She wouldn’t be able to express how much fondness she’d always felt for him, or at least for his