to work, much more than I’d ever realized, but I didn’t want to work alone. The paradox was perfect: I didn’t want to work alone and yet could only do my work alone. What possible answer could there be to my dilemma? Sirena. Sirena was my answer.
I tried, then, on Tuesdays, when the children had science with Estelle at the end of the day, and on Thursdays, when they had PE last thing, to escape to the studio forty minutes earlier. Once I forgot a staff meeting, and got a puzzled rebuke from Shauna: “Is everything okay?” she asked. “Because this isn’t like you.”
“Isn’t it?” I said. “I’m beginning to wonder.”
“Don’t make me worry about you, Nora,” Shauna said, and while she acted concerned I could tell from her tone she meant it. People don’t want to worry about the Woman Upstairs. She’s reliable, and organized, and she doesn’t cause any trouble.
“Never been better,” I said, and meant it also. On those Tuesdays and Thursdays I had almost an extra hour of company while I worked; and Sirena was glad of my presence too, I could tell by the way she gathered her scarves around her and drifted toward me, even if I did no more than say hello. She’d ask about Reza, or about the other children, whose characters she came to know from my stories, or about finding a good local shoemaker, or whatever it was—and we’d be talking then, and also working or preparing to, and we’d have our coffee with the afternoon before us—it was only two thirty, on those days—and I could barely keep from grinning. Who cared about Shauna McPhee?
Occasionally, Sirena would come to my end of the studio and lean over Emily Dickinson’s room. She always behaved as though it were new to her, as though this was something she never did when I wasn’t there.
“It’s really coming along,” she’d say, with an intake of breath, running a tentative finger along a wall’s top edge. Or she’d point to the photos and postcards of the actual room spread out on my table and say, “Wow, you’ve got it exactly” or “How are you going to do that piece, then?”
I’d worried about her judging me, but it never felt that way. It felt as though she was curious, plain and simple, because she was curious about me. Because she liked me. One afternoon when she was passing me my coffee, she put her hand not on my arm but on my hand. “My God, you know, it’s great that you’re here,” she said. “I might go crazy without you.”
“To friendship.” I raised my chipped cup.
“Yes, to friendship.”
“We’re both lucky, you know,” I told her. “This is such a gift for me. Even if I’m getting into trouble.”
“How do you mean?”
I told her about missing the staff meeting, and Shauna’s annoyance. “But it doesn’t matter,” I said, “because I’m here with you.”
And then I felt I’d sounded too eager, too needy. I could feel myself blushing.
“Ah, but it’s different, you see, for you. This is nice for you, but it’s just an extra in your real life, which goes on every day,” Sirena said, looking not at me but out the window, holding her cup beneath her chin as if she were cold. “But for me, I have here in Boston no real life, so this is it. This is everything. Besides Reza and Skandar, of course. Which is why I’m so glad you’re here.”
I could have said a lot of things. I wanted to say that my real life had fewer furnishings than her temporary pretend life, that the mystery of my life was how it could be so much like a highway through the Great Plains, miles and miles of straight and flat with barely even a tree. And now, not merely a tree, but an oasis. I didn’t say this, obviously.
Instead I nodded, looking at her profile silhouetted against the light, and the glimmer of her dark, sad eyes, and I wanted to step forward and touch her the way she touched me, but I couldn’t see a way to do it that wouldn’t be awkward. I guess I’m repressed, or uptight, but I was worried in part because I didn’t know quite what it was that I felt—some intensity of emotion I couldn’t articulate—and I had no idea what it was that she might herself feel, and I didn’t want to be misconstrued or embarrassed. So although I wanted to touch