out this coffee-table book about the wonders of the world, both natural and man-made, and it’s full of the most incredible photographs—of Ayers Rock, the Great Wall of China, Angkor Wat, Petra, the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids—”
“I get it.”
“And the point is that whenever I lose faith in my life, I look at those pictures and I think, ‘You haven’t been here’ and ‘You haven’t seen that,’ and I’m suddenly filled with wonder, like the sky opening, you know, to think that all this exists, and hope, because I might someday experience some of it—the smells, the sounds, what the light is like.”
“So, okay?”
“So this fall, them, it’s been a bit like that: the sky opening; hope. A feeling of possibility. Yes, hope. Like maybe it isn’t all over yet.”
“Why would it all be over?”
“Because I’m thirty-seven and single and I teach elementary school and wear clogs every day.”
“I’m thirty-nine next month. Almost forty. I like to think of it as a whole new decade beginning. It’s gonna be great. I know it—Esther is forty-two, after all, and she just gets hotter by the minute.”
“By the minute?”
“To me, yeah. But that’s not the point. What’s got you so downcast, then? They’ve given you hope, and now they’ve gone away for the holidays. I don’t get the big downer. They wouldn’t have invited you over for Christmas dinner even if they’d been here, would they? Or would you have invited them to join you and your dad at Aunt Baby’s place in Rockport?”
I was laughing in spite of myself. We’d circled the pond and were almost back where we’d started, close to the Jamaicaway and the roar of the traffic. An old lady was walking her old dog along the footpath toward us, a gray-muzzled black Lab that picked through the snow as though it pained his paws; but she, the old lady, was muttering to herself, shaking her head in its woolly cap and laughing, like me.
“Come on, it’s got to be hormonal. You don’t have any actual reason to feel sorry for yourself.”
“I took Reza to the hospital. I stayed with them half the night. And then they don’t even call to say he’s okay?”
“So they’re bush pigs. Raised by wolves. No big deal. That describes half of America and probably more than half of the world at large. A handwritten note on personalized stationery would’ve been ideal, but hey, you can’t have everything.”
“But they might not even come back.”
“Why wouldn’t they come back?”
“She hates it here, she told me; and now that Reza’s been attacked twice … it seems possible they’d stay in Paris.”
“Then you’ll get the whole studio all for yourself. Come on, Nora, you’re being ridiculous.”
“If it seems ridiculous to you, it’s because I haven’t properly explained to you what it feels like.”
Didi tossed a stick out onto the ice, where it skittered and slid, and made the black Lab, now far away, bark. “You’ve told me all right. I get it. But you have to stop thinking that what you’re feeling isn’t in your control.”
“It isn’t. You can’t help how you feel.”
“Says who?”
I shrugged. “It’s cold. Can we go back now?”
“Okay. But you know, you don’t even have to feel the cold if you choose not to.”
“Right. Really.”
“You’re making up stories in your head. There’s nothing real in them. You don’t have any idea what those people are doing, or thinking, or why your Siren didn’t call. You’re just making stuff up.”
“I’m not a fool, you know.”
Didi put her arm around my shoulder. She emanated heat, even in the frigid air. “Nobody’s calling you a fool. Just a pessimist. If all you know is that you don’t know, can’t you let go a bit? Or at least make up a good story?”
“My OCD gets in the way.”
“So put your OCD to work for you. Get back to that studio and sit down and finish Emily’s room. So that whatever happens when they come back, or even if they don’t come back—which I seriously doubt—you’ll have the satisfaction of having used the time. My mother always said there’s no sense worrying about things you can’t do anything about.”
“A cliché for every occasion.”
“That’s my mom. But she’s no fool, either, you know.”
So I tried to take Didi’s advice, too. Christmas itself was spent in Aunt Baby’s condo by the sea in Rockport with her—my mother’s sister—and my father, two lonely and mild septuagenarians not even given to sentimental reminiscence, stultifyingly locked in their present, their small ailments,