them over his other shoulder. “Bye.” He turned abruptly and threaded through the crowd, the skates bumping hard against his back.
“Sorry about that,” Billy said. “He seems like a nice kid, but after all, I’ve traveled on a bus for a million hours to spend time with you.”
When I stood up, my steps were uncertain, as though I were wearing lifts in my shoes. I could feel the air between the soles of my feet and the ground. It was like something important had altered, like gravity, or the air itself.
Fifteen
New York City
November 1950
The apartment was dim and chilly. I hadn’t pulled the shades open yet in the living room. I quickly crossed to them, and the even gray light of late afternoon flooded in.
Billy stood in the doorway to the living room, his cap in his hands. He turned it over and over while he looked around.
This was it, the moment I’d dreamed of, and I couldn’t seem to move. He was looking at our apartment, the one we’d live in together, only I couldn’t tell him that. I couldn’t tell him that this could be our future, if only we could say the right words, get back what we had.
All I knew, standing there, looking across the room at his uncertain face, was that I still loved him. It had been crazy to think that I didn’t. I had run here to New York not just because I was furious at my father. I had run here because I couldn’t imagine being in Providence without Billy.
Billy’s tie was crooked, and I wanted to straighten it. All those things I could do once, I couldn’t do now. That simple gesture, of straightening his tie, looking up at him, and he would look down and kiss me. Did I have a right to those familiar gestures?
He cleared his throat. “It’s nice. I didn’t realize you could get such nice places in New York.”
“I make a pretty good salary at the Lido,” I said. We were talking like strangers. In my head, a counter was whirring. Counting up the lies. “It’s not the Riverbank.”
At the mention of my old job, he blushed, and I realized that I’d made a mistake. I shouldn’t have brought up something that would remind us of that night. I quickly tossed my coat on the couch. “Should I make coffee?”
“You drink coffee now? You never drank coffee.”
“I’m a New Yorker now,” I said. “At least, I’m trying to be. Everybody drinks coffee, not tea. And you can get a bag of chestnuts for lunch and just walk in the park. I’m trying to get up the nerve to go into the jazz clubs in the Village. Maybe we could do that? While you’re here. How long are you here?”
The question escaped before I knew it. Because what I was really asking was, When do I have to start dreading when you’ll go?
“I have two weeks,” he said. “But I guess I have to go see my parents. I haven’t really been in touch.”
I crossed to him and took his cap. Our fingers tangled and he held on.
“Kit. You don’t know how good it is to see you.”
“What happens after two weeks?” This was the answer that would hurt, that would take my breath away. “Are you being shipped out?”
“I don’t know. Probably. They don’t tell you anything in the army. Some of us will be picked out for more training. I’m trying to get into the Signal Corps… maybe work with photography somehow. But it doesn’t seem like it will happen.”
“That would be great.”
“I’d still be going to Korea. But at least I’d be doing something. Not just… shooting people I don’t know.”
I wanted to ask him if he was afraid, but I couldn’t. I’d talked for hours and hours to Billy, lying on the grass in a park, at a beach, in a car with rain drumming on the roof. We talked about everything. But now there were places so tender we couldn’t go near them. Things that were just too hard to say. I had no right to ask him the questions he wouldn’t want to answer, no right to go to those secret places and hope I could make them better.
Could we still make things better for each other? Or was that gone?
“Why did you do it?” I whispered. Our fingers were still touching. “Why did you enlist?”
He pulled his fingers away. “I didn’t see another way to go. I was boxed in.