quite the same.”
“And what kind of sky am I?” Addie had asked then, and Sam had stared at her, unblinking, and then brightened, and it was the kind of brightening she had seen with a hundred artists, a hundred times, the glow of inspiration, as if someone switched on a light beneath their skin. And Sam, suddenly animated, wound to life, sprang from the bed, taking Addie with her into the living room.
An hour of sitting on the hardwood floor, wrapped in only a blanket, listening to the murmur and scrape of Sam mixing paint, the hiss of the brush on the canvas, and then it was done, and when Addie came around to look at it, what she saw was the night sky. Not the night sky as anyone else would have painted it. Bold streaks of charcoal, and black, and thin slashes of middle gray, the paint so thick it rose up from the canvas. And flecked across the surface, a handful of silver dots. They looked almost accidental, like spatter from a brush, but there were exactly seven of them, small and distant and wide apart as stars.
Sam’s voice draws her back to the kitchen.
“I wish I could show you my favorite piece,” she’s saying now. “It was the first in the series. One Forgotten Night. I sold it to this collector on the Lower East Side. It was my first major sale, paid my rent for three months, got me into a gallery. Still, it’s hard, letting go of the art. I know I have to—that whole starving artist thing is overrated—but I miss it every day.”
Her voice dips softer.
“The crazy thing is, every one of the pieces in that series is modeled after someone. Friends, people here in the building, strangers I found on the street. I remember all of them. But I can’t for the life of me remember who she was.”
Addie swallows. “You think it was a girl?”
“Yeah. I do. It just had this energy.”
“Maybe you dreamed her.”
“Maybe,” says Sam. “I’ve never been good at remembering dreams. But you know…” She trails off, staring at Addie the way she did that night in bed, beginning to glow. “You remind me of that piece.” She puts a hand over her face. “God, that sounds like the worst pickup line in the world. I’m sorry. I’m going to take a shower.”
“I should get going,” says Addie. “Thanks for the coffee.”
Sam bites her lip. “Do you have to?”
No, she doesn’t. Addie knows she could follow Sam right into the shower, wrap herself in a towel, and sit on the living room floor and see what kind of painting Sam would make of her today. She could. She could. She could fall into this moment forever, but she knows there is no future in it. Only an infinite number of presents, and she has lived as many of those with Sam as she can bear.
“Sorry,” she says, chest aching, but Sam only shrugs.
“We’ll see each other again,” she says with so much faith. “After all, we’re neighbors now.”
Addie manages a pale shadow of a smile. “That’s right.”
Sam walks her to the door, and with every step, Addie resists the urge to look back.
“Don’t be a stranger,” says Sam.
“I won’t,” promises Addie, as the door swings shut. She sighs, leaning back against it, listens to Sam’s footsteps retreating down the cluttered hall, before she forces herself up, and forward, and away.
Outside, the white marble sky has cracked, letting through thin bands of blue.
The cold has burned off, and Addie finds a café with sidewalk seating, busy enough that the waiter only has time to make a pass of the outside tables every ten minutes or so. She counts the beats like a prisoner marking the pace of guards, orders a coffee—it isn’t as good as Sam’s, all bitter, no sweet, but it’s warm enough to keep the chill at bay. She puts up the collar of her leather coat, and opens The Odyssey again, and tries to read.
Here, Odysseus thinks he is heading home, to finally be reunited with Penelope after the horrors of war, but she has read the story enough times to know how far the journey is from done.
She skims, translating from Greek to modern English.
I fear the sharp frost and the soaking dew together
will do me in—I’m bone-weary, about to breathe my last,
and a cold wind blows from a river on toward morning.
The waiter ducks back outside, and she glances up from the book,