Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,287

enough to remember. Five is when you see and try to forget. My parents stand together, though they are no longer married, which means I am sick. A doctor is there. Another Sunday in that same room, my father returns me after a weekend spent with him, and my parents talk in the hall. And I draw and draw, my face very close to the paper, and when I erase it all, my dad comes to say goodbye, towering over me. Not too fast, Evie, you’ll tear the paper.

And other places, other homes, all with the same reeling loneliness I felt until Rourke.

“The first time I saw you,” I confess, “I had a premonition. I had the feeling I’d found the thing I’d been waiting for. The next time I saw you, it was the same. And every time after it’s been the same.”

His hand reaches for me.

“I don’t want to lose you again.”

“You won’t,” he says. “You can’t.”

At the terminal, we get out. The sun beyond the concrete awning is high and the hot air is brutal, though there is wind. There is always wind at JFK, even in suffocating heat. I tie my sweater around my shoulders. I slide my sunglasses to the top of my head, and wait—for nothing. There is no more next, no more longing, no more separation of the soul. The feeling of nothing is so profound, so sure, it’s a guarantee.

Rourke draws his bags from the trunk. There are two; one is a garment bag. The trunk closes, thoom. One of his hands holds the luggage straps, and with his free arm he reaches for me. When we hold each other I feel it everywhere, low and high. I go closer, and he comes in as well. I remember how I used to look out the window for animals in the night, for creatures keeping warm beneath leaves; I remember being relieved that they could. I hope that we are that way, he and I, that we’ll be okay. I hope that love is a miracle, this love and all love and love like ours that is contingent upon nothing—and enriched wholly by concessions.

Rourke looks at me with gratitude, as if he knows what I’m thinking. Every man wants the secret of your eyes, Jack wrote. It’s better to love than be loved. Rourke kisses me—once, twice, his lips to my cheek.

He hands me the keys to the car. “So you know where you’re going?”

“Yeah,” I say, touching the GTO—careful, like it’s alive. “I know.”

“August,” Rourke says.

“August,” I say, “yes.” August. “Or sooner.”

I go on my toes, and he comes down—and in the middle we meet. My lips print against his lips, soft. There it is, the stain of my devotion. And once more, then, he goes. And I follow him through the lens of the terminal glass, watching him fold in and away. How meager the bags look, how small the crowd. The bodies and faces are real, and the colors real, and the stories real, and yet, only he stands out.

Three planes mark the horizon. It’s roulette to guess which is his. Planes are modern angels, silver-winged and supernatural, carrying away cargo that is precious. I don’t like to think of him up there, in airborne machinery, though it is right somehow for him to vanish this way, cutting through the flat dividing lines of time, soaring West.

And him. Does he search the paling membrane of the planet from the brightness of his cabin? Does he find me—minuscule, anonymous? Does he see me the way I once was, or the way I have become? In August I will thank him—for leaving me rich, for leaving me courageous, a fighter. For leaving me with everything I have ever wanted. I am an American girl. I stand with my feet firm on the soil of a nation.

“Oh, Jack,” I say out the car window, the world flying by. “Now that you’re gone, I swear to be filled with twice the life.”

Acknowledgments

As Eveline says, “Everywhere there are angels.” And since I have received more than my fair share of divine assistance during this process, I close with expressions of gratitude to those earthbound angels who extended themselves to help me achieve my purpose.

I am thankful to Meghan-Michele German, one of the original novel’s first readers, who arrived by my side in 2007 during a particularly rough moment and provided me with the encouragement and practical support I needed to give Anthropology of an American