chin, her neck. “Why do you think we met each other?”
“Because you were drunk on the airplane.”
“I mean cosmically. People don’t come into each other’s lives like this for no reason. Why’d the universe throw us together?”
“Did you say cosmically?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t believe in it. Nothing’s random, it can’t be. The people we meet, the people we’re smashed together with, right?”
“I’m not, like, ending up with you. This is not destiny.”
“I didn’t mean that. I’m being philosophical. Don’t you ever think about that stuff? Like, where we go when we die?”
“Christ, Jake, it’s two in the afternoon.”
“I think it’s like sleeping,” he said, “but you get to help dream up the world. So whatever happens here on earth, all the weird stuff that just happens, a volcano erupting or whatever, that’s the collective dreams of everyone who’s ever lived.”
“So these attacks—a lot of dead people dreamed them.”
“Right.”
“Huh.” She started laughing. “Yeah, no. That’s very wrong.”
“I don’t actually believe it. But it’s nice to think. And it’s just that the world is so weird sometimes, it’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“You think the dead control us.”
“Sure.”
“I’m gonna tell you a secret,” she said, and he rolled onto his side. She had fresh gauze on her hand, and she picked at the edge. “We’re in charge of them. I mean, my friend Julian? When I thought he was dead, all the things we’d ever said to each other, all my memories of him, they were mine. One of the weirdest things about seeing him again was that something left me. Some kind of energy. Like the air whooshing out of a balloon.”
Jake said, “Is it a relief, or are you sad?”
“Not sad, that would be ridiculous.”
“You lost a loss. That’s still a loss.”
Fiona sat up. “Thanks, Dr. Seuss.”
“What, did I hit a nerve? Hey, come back!”
* * *
—
Out on the street, when she turned her phone on, a message from Claire: Everything was fine. And maybe tomorrow, did Fiona and Cecily, together, want to meet Nicolette and watch her for an hour while Claire was at work and before Kurt could get across the city to pick her up? Her babysitting had fallen through.
1990
The broken rib prevented Yale from doing more in the apartment than he’d have liked. Teresa insisted he sit on the couch while she paraded box after box of stuff in front of him. Charlie’s clothes, which he didn’t want. Charlie’s books, which he didn’t want either. The kitchen things that had once been his, but which he’d long since replaced. Nico’s stripy orange scarf. Yale couldn’t believe it. He ran his fingers through the fringe. He rolled it carefully into a fat cylinder. He’d give it back to Fiona, finally. Here was his own Michigan sweatshirt, smelling like a crypt. He wondered if Charlie had kept it on purpose, or if it had just stayed buried somewhere, unnoticed. Here was the map of Chicago that Nico had drawn on top of, illustrating the places they’d all been together—a tiny Richard with his camera on the Belmont Rocks, a tiny Julian holding a tray of food by the sandwich shop where he used to work, Yale wearing a beret at the Art Institute. This, he would keep.
When he reached for it, Teresa said, “Don’t keep moving all over. If you don’t take full breaths, you’ll wind up with pneumonia.”
It felt good to be mothered. And with Charlie gone, he didn’t feel guilty taking up what little mothering energy Teresa had left. So he stayed on the couch that still, after all these years, softened itself naturally to the shape of his body, and he let her bring him tea with honey, and he let her fill two big boxes with things he knew he might never unpack.
The apartment was bizarrely the same. Charlie hadn’t redecorated even a little, hadn’t added anything to the walls. The same refrigerator magnets, same sad plant on the windowsill. Yale was glad. It would have felt bad, in some inexplicable, unjustifiable way, to see physical evidence of the ways Charlie’s world had moved on. Or maybe it was just that he wanted to believe in a world where this apartment still existed, where it was forever 1985, where the door might open at any moment and there would be Julian with a party invitation, Terrence with beer, Nico with a new comic for Charlie.
Teresa said, “You’re not going back to work, are you? Don’t even pop in. You know how people are,