in the apartment by poking around in her yellow gloves, and suddenly Orla could smell it all: the shower curtain growing moldy down the hall, the overstuffed trash warming under the sink, the putrid chicken desiccating in Melissa’s hand.
“Anna’s mother is following me,” she said.
Melissa put the chicken down. “What?”
“She’s down there sitting on a chair.” Orla pointed toward the window. “And when I left, she went with me. All the way there. All the way back.”
Instead of going to look, Melissa took off her gloves and placed them gently in the sink. After a moment, she turned back to Orla. “My advice?” she said softly. “Just let it go.”
“Let it go?” Tears rose in Orla’s eyes. She had been counting on an answer from the Melissa who calmly deconstructed problems.
“People grieve in different ways.” Melissa went to the coffee maker, which she had cleaned and set to brew. She pulled two mugs down from the cupboard above it and filled them carefully. “She’s not going to hurt you, or she would have done it already. She’s clearly trying to make a point, and we don’t know what it is, but after what we put her—after what she’s been through?” She took a sip from one of the mugs and pushed the other toward Orla. “Trust me—just be respectful.”
Orla picked up the coffee, sniffed it, and threw up into the sink.
“What?” Melissa said, as if Orla had spoken, not vomited. “Are you sick?”
Orla shook her head. “It’s the coffee,” she said shakily. “The smell of it.”
She watched horror rise upward, like steam, in Melissa’s face. First her jaw set; then she frowned; then her eyes went wide and sober.
“No, it’s not that. I can’t be.” Orla’s heart was thrumming in her ears. “It wouldn’t make any sense.” Every time with Danny—night, day, drunk, drunker, blissful, angry, bored—whirled through her head. No single instance stood out like the start of something new.
Melissa picked up Orla’s coffee and poured it down the sink. “And yet,” she sighed, “you obviously are.”
* * *
Melissa stayed with her that day. Orla let her lead her around, let her make arrangements. Melissa picked through the kitchen, throwing out things Orla couldn’t have: deli turkey, Brie, weird teas Aston left behind. She held her hand out for Orla’s insurance card and helped her find a doctor. When Orla grew tired again—the exhaustion made stinging sense now—she told her to sleep on her side, not her back.
“How do you know all this stuff?” Orla asked, pausing in the doorway of her room.
Melissa hesitated. “I was pregnant once,” she said. Orla remembered her in the bar, shouting about not having a baby. She let the moment pass.
When she woke up from her nap, Melissa was sitting at the counter, working. A bag from Duane Reade sat beside her. “Prenatals,” she said, nodding at it. “And saltines. They help with the nausea.”
Orla slid onto a stool beside her. “Did you see her?” she said. “Anna’s mother.”
Melissa nodded. She looked at Orla over the rim of her laptop.
“Did she say anything to you?” Orla asked miserably.
“No.” Melissa shook her head once, a hard jerk of her chin to the left. “She was painting her nails,” she said, with a sound that was almost a laugh.
Orla’s phone buzzed under her hand. She turned it over. It was Gayle.
Melissa saw it, too. “You should talk to your parents,” she said. “Your appointment’s not until Wednesday. Why don’t you go see them? I think it would make you feel better.”
Orla had a sudden vision of herself sitting at her parents’ table, looking out the bay window. She imagined Mrs. Salgado picking her way through the trees by the bank. “You don’t think—” she said.
Melissa shook her head. “No, Orla,” she said. “I don’t think she’ll follow you to Pennsylvania.”
* * *
Just to be on the safe side, Orla left the building through the freight entrance. Linus, the super’s son, directed her to it with city-kid sureness.
Downstairs at Port Authority, she got in line at gate nineteen. She stood behind a couple who gazed at an old backlit ad for the Greyhound bus, striped in blue and gray and parked proudly at a grassy curb. “What a lovely photo,” the man said. His voice had a trace of a Polish accent, and not a note of sarcasm.
Orla pulled out her phone and texted her mother. Hi Mom, she typed. I’m coming home. She watched the gray bubble that meant Gayle was responding ripple back and