while I was anxious to know what he’d written, I didn’t think I could pull out the book there on the street. There was a rolled-up picture of Reza’s—I could tell straight away that it was his snow scene: we’d done them in art class back in January, and his had been particularly inventive. There were, mysteriously, three pairs of kitchen scissors in the bottom of the bag, the plastic-handled kind you buy at the supermarket; and there was something small, wrapped in tissue. In this, my impatience was too great: I tore at the paper, which had been clumsily but thoroughly taped, and shredded it until I uncovered a heavy silver chain with, hanging from it, an elaborate silver cross, inlaid with turquoise and what looked, in the semi-dark, like a blood-red stone. It was heavy in my hand, and rather elegant, a bit tarnished but still bright. What did it mean? Whose was it?
I let it slip back into the bottom of the bag. I wanted to think he had chosen it with me in mind. More likely it was an end-of-year gift from Reza, selected in haste by Sirena from a pile of possibles, and forgotten in the rush of departure. The simplest and least flattering explanation was always the right one, I’d learned over the years.
But in fact, I’d never know for sure. In my efficient forethoughtfulness, when called out into the night, I’d brought the geography sheets about Samantha and Jordan’s road trip through state capitals, of which I needed twenty-two—no, now only twenty-one—copies in the morning. So I popped over to the all-night Kinko’s next to the post office on Mt. Auburn. There was a paper jam on about the third copy, and I had to track down the bloated attendant, who blinked in the fluorescent light and burrowed into the machine with his pale, fat fingers. All this hoopla over a few photocopies—I’d thought to have been simplifying my life, because the copier at school was always either in use or out of order—and I got home to my apartment to realize that I’d left Skandar’s plastic bag on the table next to Self-Serve Copier Number Seven. I tried to call them, but nobody answered. I contemplated going back, but it was after eleven and my courage failed me.
In the morning I hurried over to Kinko’s before school, but the bleary girl who’d replaced the boy had no idea about a plastic bag. She showed me a lost-and-found box containing several sets of keys, an umbrella, two mismatched winter gloves, and a BlackBerry with a green dragon sticker on its back: this was the only place where lost things might be found. Eric would be back on at ten p.m., if I wanted to come in then and ask him personally; but unfortunately there was nothing further she could do for me.
And so it went, and was gone: I’ll never know the provenance or purpose of the necklace, nor will I know what, if anything, was written inside Skandar’s book. I was, that way, free to imagine many different possibilities.
I never told them about losing the bag, and if they thought it strange that I didn’t thank them for their gifts, they didn’t say so. But the final imaginary nature of those few objects would matter quite a bit, I think, in my peculiar ability to keep alive for so long the intensity of my connection to them all.
3
The next time I saw Sirena was in New York, almost two years later, when her Wonderland installation was part of the inaugural exhibition at the new feminist wing of the Brooklyn Museum. She’d been represented in America by Anna Z for almost all that time, and the two had become very close friends—Anna Z was younger, and Sirena was her up-and-coming star. When I saw them standing together inside the door of Anna’s gallery on West Thirteenth Street, there was something about their physical relation to one another that reminded me of how it had been between us, and I suffered a great wave of jealousy.
Sirena, although the smaller of the two, seemed to emanate intensity, light almost, and Anna bent toward her, like a plant toward the sun. There was no awkwardness when I approached—a familiar embrace from Sirena, who then held me at arm’s length and said, “Nora, darling, let me look at you!” Nobody would have known, perhaps least of all she herself, what she’d meant to me, what I’d lost,