You came home because you wanted a kale smoothie and a hug. That’s not giving up. That’s taking a break. Everyone needs a break.”
“What if I’m too late?” I’m not thinking of the library crumbling, though I should be. I’m thinking of the look in Sutton’s eyes. I’m thinking of the way he held me like I was something precious, and the way I walked away. He won’t forgive me for that. I don’t blame him.
“Well,” Mom says, her voice half pragmatism, half mystical acceptance of the world and its vagaries. “You might be. But you won’t know unless you try.”
My Uber driver is from Egypt, something he tells me only when he sees the library book I’m reading as we leave the airport. Maybe he thinks I’m getting ready for international travel. “Don’t use a purse,” he says. “Too easy to steal. You want to keep things in your pockets, but deep inside. With buttons or zippers to close them.”
“You seem to know a lot about picking pockets.”
He waves a hand. “Everyone knows a lot. It’s the only way you don’t get robbed. There’s no place on earth with more thieves than Cairo.”
That makes me think of the Thieves Club, the semi-ironic name that four men in Tanglewood gave themselves. Hugo and Sutton. Blue and Christopher. Because every dollar they earn must be taken from somebody else. “Is that why you moved here?”
“It was the killing,” he says frankly. “The stealing I could live with.”
“That seems reasonable.”
“I have two daughters. It was no place for them to grow up.”
Fathers. So protective. There’s a tightness in my throat I don’t want to be there. It’s terrible to be angry at someone who isn’t alive to defend himself. The older I get, the more sure I am that he knew what would happen at that will reading. Maybe he would have changed it if he and Mom had started dating for a while, but at one point he knew he would humiliate her.
He did it to protect me. He knew I would hate him for it and did it anyway.
“Don’t believe anything they tell you,” Abdel says. “They will try to sell you a thousand artifacts in the streets and around the pyramids. Mummified cats, but you open them—only birds and rocks and dirt inside.”
“Why would I want a mummified cat?”
“Ancient scrolls that are made of plastic. Convincing plastic.”
“Okay, I’d like an ancient scroll. I might have fallen for that one.”
“They charge you so much money, that’s why you believe it’s real. That is the irony. If it was cheap to buy, then you would know.”
Abdel takes me to Walmart, because it’s the only place that sells paint at midnight. He accepts cash for waiting in the parking lot and helping me load the supplies into his trunk.
Then we go to the library.
“This place doesn’t look open,” he says, eyeing the dark corners in all directions. “Or safe. This looks like a place you will experience the stealing.”
“Better that than the killing,” I say, moving the gallons of paint to the curb. There’s a lot to do before morning, and I think construction crews start sooner than art gallery exhibits.
He walks toward the driver’s side door. Sighs. Comes back. “I don’t think I should leave you here. Probably you’ll get stabbed and then they’ll take away my Uber license.”
Clear as day I can hear Christopher’s voice telling me I have a death wish.
Maybe I did, back then. It’s not that I wanted to die, but I didn’t really know how to live. There was always money in the way, always something that had to be fought over. Always a struggle to survive.
“I’ll call a friend,” I say because I’m a long time from sitting on a railing alone.
On my phone there’s a long list of contacts. People from Smith College who always knew where the best parties would be. Artists from New York City. Actors in LA. There are only a handful of people in Tanglewood. I’m not going to call the newly expectant parents, Bea and Hugo, to the west side in the middle of the night, even if they would come.
Even though I know I can’t call him, that I lost that right, it still hurts to see Sutton’s name. It would be nice to have his steady, capable presence beside me while I do something inadvisable. My finger hovers over his number, not pressing.
And then there’s Christopher, who helped me paint a mural once. I thought I might