he was the very first to die. So early that he didn’t die of AIDS, because there was no such acronym; he died of GRID. The G stood for gay, and she’d blocked out the rest. Jonathan had been healthy one day, and the next he had a cough, and a week later he was in the hospital, and the next day he was gone.
It hadn’t occurred to Fiona till just now, her hands gripping the cold bridge railing, that her mother might have known where she was going all those weekends, all those years. As she got older, when Girl Scouts wasn’t a legitimate excuse, she’d made up stories about skating parties, study sessions. Maybe her mother had left her purse unguarded for a reason. As she called Claire’s name one last time into the wind, as the city returned her voice on the wet air, Fiona remembered her mother calling and calling for Nico in the yard when they were kids. Had she ever stopped calling for him? Had she ever stopped leaving coins around, hoping they’d find their way to her boy?
After Nico died, their mother spent twenty years drinking. Fiona knew she was crushed, but she couldn’t forgive her. They had done this to Nico, her mother and father. Her mother had stood there, crying, arms crossed, the night their father kicked Nico out, but she hadn’t done a thing to stop him. She hadn’t even given him any money. She’d gone and found his duffel bag in the basement, as if that were a favor.
Over the years, Fiona visited them less and less. She withheld Claire.
And maybe Claire would have been better if she’d had grandparents, a safety net, extended family.
Our bridges can no longer withstand your gestures of love.
Well, fuck.
She peeled her fingers from the railing.
She walked back to Richard’s, climbed the stairs toward the smell of browning garlic.
1986
In the morning, they ate their too-sweet cherry cobbler, and Bill nursed his hangover, and they watched the snow fall. “He won’t make it, will he,” Roman said. “The counsel.”
Yale said, “I’m more concerned the rest of them won’t. They’ll say they have to delay because of the snow, we sit around three more days, it all falls through.”
Even one extra day might mean more interference from Frank, an intervention from Cecily, a telegram from the president of the university.
“Good God,” Bill said. “Who called in the doom brigade?”
Roman stammered an apology. His hair, still wet, hung in clumps. One clump had left a spray of water across his glasses. He said, “I mean no one’s called yet, have they? That’s good. It’s a good sign.”
* * *
—
The three of them were there at 9:50, waiting in the car until the bank unlocked its doors. At ten, they stood in the lobby trying to warm back up. Yale cursed himself for wearing Nico’s shoes, which had gotten wet in the snow and let the slush onto his socks. But they’d brought him luck last time, and he was superstitious. Why couldn’t he have claimed Nico’s scarf instead? It might even have smelled like Nico, like Brut and cigarettes. It was Nico’s favorite joke to try to convince people that Carly Simon’s song was about him, about his apricot scarf. “And I am so vain!” he always said. “So you know it’s true!” (“That scarf is not apricot,” Charlie always responded. “It’s orange and gray.” Nico would reply that British men were known to be color-blind.)
Yale tried not to look at the clock above the counter. Despite the snow, despite Nora’s obstructive family: If this didn’t happen today, it would be his failure, his embarrassment. It was a magnification of how he felt when he was the one to pick the movie out of the listings: Although he couldn’t control the action on the screen, he was the one who’d set it in motion, and if anyone had a bad time, it was because of him. Instead of simply watching the movie, he’d watch it through Charlie’s eyes, glancing over for the reaction, listening for laughter. And right now he wanted Bill Lindsey thrilled. He wanted to give Roman the experience of a lifetime. He wanted these curious bank tellers to keep watching, with fascination, as art history was made.
The snow continued falling in huge, lacy chunks.
Roman said, “I’m worried the roads are getting worse.”
But just then Debra walked in, wrapped to the eyeballs in a brown coat, a blue scarf. She said, “One of you has