full of blackness, death choking her. Her insides began to liquefy.
Face it. Accept it. Float with it. Let time pass.
The cab jolted forward a whole car length, then stopped again, and that small movement made her feel slightly better, as though saying the mantra had caused the car to move in the first place. She repeated it again, while doing her breathing exercises.
The driver shook a hand, his fingers spread, and muttered something at the dirty windshield in a language Kate didn’t understand. For some reason, she’d thought that cabdrivers in America would be stereotypically American—short men with caps and cigar stubs and loud American voices. But this cabdriver was turbaned and heavily bearded; except for the fact that he was sitting on the left side of the car, she might as well have been in London.
“How long is this tunnel?” Kate managed to ask through the partition. Her voice sounded cracked and timid in her own ears.
“There’s something up ahead.”
“Is it always like this?”
“Sometimes,” the driver said, then shrugged.
Kate gave up and moved back from the partition. She rubbed her hands along her thighs. The cab kept jerking forward, a few feet at a time, but after it passed the stalled Chevy, two lanes opened up and the cab was moving again. Kate breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth. She unclenched a hand and one of her knuckles cracked. She began to tap her thumb against her fingertips in ordered succession. The pinhole that was her throat opened up a little.
They cleared the tunnel, and Kate caught a glimpse of swollen clouds dominating the sky just before the cab dipped and swayed into another tunnel, but one in which the traffic was barreling along. The cabdriver made up for lost time before emerging onto another fast-moving road that wound along the Charles River. There was enough light left in the sky for Kate to make out the backsides of brick houses whipping past on her left. On the river, a rower on a scull skimmed along its placid surface.
The driver took a sudden, lurching left, doubling back to get onto a narrow road, square, brick houses on either side, blossoming trees along the sidewalk.
“Bury Street,” announced the driver.
“It’s 101.”
“Got it.” The driver sped up, then slowed down and halted suddenly, one wheel riding up onto the sidewalk, in front of a brick archway surmounted by a small stone on which the number 101 was carved. Kate could see into a courtyard with a low fountain. The apartment building, three stories high, ran along three sides of the courtyard. Kate’s stomach ached a little, a leftover from her earlier panic attack, and she thought guiltily of her second cousin, Corbin Dell, arriving at her unexceptional flat in North London earlier in the day. But he’d known what he was getting. They’d sent several e-mails back and forth. Her one-bedroom was cozy and conveniently located near a tube station, but Corbin’s place—she’d seen the pictures—was like something out of a Henry James novel. Still, she hadn’t been prepared for the courtyard entrance, very Italian, that seemed out of place with the small amount of Boston she’d already seen.
She waited on the curb while the driver removed her two bags—a large rollie and an even larger duffel bag. She’d gotten dollars at her bank in London the previous week and she paid the driver with the thin, papery notes, not quite knowing what to tip, so probably giving him too much. After he drove off, she balanced the duffel bag onto the rollie and made her way through the archway.
She was midway across the courtyard, paved half in flagstone and half in brick, when the central door swung open and a doorman shaped like a pear darted out waving his hand.
“Hello, hello,” he said. He wore a long brown raincoat over a suit, and a peaked cap. Under the cap he wore dark-framed glasses with thick lenses. He had dark black skin and a very white mustache, one side slightly thicker than the other.
“Hi,” Kate said. “I’m Katherine Priddy. I’m here to stay in Corbin Dell’s apartment.”
“Right. I know all about it. Mr. Dell’s moving to London for half a year and you’re moving here. London’s loss and Boston’s gain, I suspect.” He winked at her, and some of the tension that was still gripping her chest dissipated.
“I don’t know about that,” Kate said.
“I’m rarely wrong,” he said. Kate had read somewhere that Bostonians were notorious for their