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In Texas there are horses, and long runs of mountains and scrub grass, and fields of bluebonnet in the spring. Lupinus Texensis. Pippa has to learn the name out of a book. She wants to learn to ride but of course she can’t even walk, not for weeks, and even then she can only limp out with her walker to the paddock, and lay her hand against their noses. Paintbox. Scrabble. Where did those names come from? Why are they in her head?
Her memory of the day of the bombing is fragmented at best. Most of it has been wiped clean away—and what’s left doesn’t make any sense. Dark shapes, colors, voices that don’t sound like anything human. She doesn’t remember going into the museum, or most of the exhibit. The things she does remember: her flute case knocking against her knees as she walked. Welty’s voice saying with bright, amused twist, “He once wrote a patron to say her painting would have to be delayed, because the yellow roses had already bloomed that year—“
When she woke it was to the speckled tiled ceiling of St. Luke’s trauma center, buoyed up by a warm, silver cloud of morphine. Her head was so muddled. She kept forgetting he was dead. Each time she remembered was like someone scooped out her heart, her lungs; she couldn’t stop crying. And when they let Hobie visit he was hardly any better, sitting at her bedside increasingly unshaven and in the same smart blue blazer, with the same light stain at the lapel, every day. The doctors came and went and when they said she was well enough they had her do a series of tests, there in her room, with flashcards and cups. Then she went for a scan in the MRI machine. It was a big cylinder, lit white on the inside, but the ledge was too high and they had to lift her in. The machine sounded like the inside of a heart. And then they told her.
She can’t trust as many things, now. After. At one point in her life she thought Welty would always be there for her but now he’s gone, and Hobie wasn’t been able to keep her in New York, and everything has changed. Now her body is a stranger’s body, weak and unfamiliar. It cannot do the things she asks of it. It cannot run, or ride, or play the flute; it cannot fold into itself and become something new; it cannot turn back time.
The horses blow and huff against her outstretched palms. Their noses are as soft as velvet, and their eyes are sad.
Her aunt is the sort of woman who, once she’s accomplished something, moves quickly on to something else. For Pippa this means that once the business of bringing her to Texas has been sorted, and she has been settled, her aunt actually has very little to do with her. Pippa sees her sporadically, passing through on her way out each morning, voice lifted in a pleasant good morning and an inquiry after Pippa’s health, and sometimes she says goodnight in the evening. Her conversation is friendly, bright, and entirely one-sided.
I don’t like it here, Pippa writes Hobie, in letters she asks the housekeeper to send for her. I miss everything.
Even with the walker, she can only make it short distances. Her leg is weak, and full of pins, and it hurts, even with the morphine. Every morning the cook sends a lollipop with her breakfast. Every evening, she sends the bare stick back with her plate and silverware. The cook is her favorite person here, even though she’s never seen him. She gets her meals in bed on a little folding tray, and he arranges her food into funny shapes. A sliced orange becomes a starburst; the ketchup on her breaded chicken traces out seagull shapes, like a child’s drawing, the impression of wings.
Her aunt does not approve of this, when she finds out from the nurse. “She needs to get out of doors,” she says. “She needs to start getting about on her own. She’s not getting better. This business with the food—it encourages stagnation. Do you know she cries in the night? I can hear her on the other side of the house.”
Her nurse, her voice low, inaudible, a bee’s humming in the long grass. From the paddock, one of the horses calls to another in a long, urgent whinny. Horses get lonely too. These are the things Pippa thinks about as she lies in bed, stagnating. They wouldn’t be lonely if they were wild, running through the hills the way they were meant to, the way they did, once, years ago. When the housekeeper comes to tidy the room—which really means checking on Pippa, because she doesn’t make a mess; she hardly gets out of bed—she tells Pippa stories about her family, about her great-uncle, who had been a cowboy.
“It wasn’t like what you see on tv,” the woman says. “It was dirty, and it was hard. But he said that the land out there was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, all those horses running wild, raising dust clouds a mile long. Spiritual, he called it. Anyway.”
The nurse comes and goes. She brings tea and milk and a collection of pills sorted into boxes marked for each day of the week. The pills are always the same, though. Every day.
The pink pill is morphine, a baseline dose. For her pain.
The chalky blue pill, for anxiety.
The round white pill, also for anxiety.
The yellow capsule, for her head.
The green pill, at night, to help her sleep.
And it does, it helps her sleep—but it doesn’t help her dreams. She never remembers them, but she always wakes the same way: suddenly, heart pounding, afraid. Once she wakes with the certain knowledge that she’s just been someplace terrible, someplace she didn’t know, and she wanted Welty but he didn’t, or couldn’t, come.
She finds out later that Welty lived for some time after the blast. From Hobie first, in New York two Christmases after the bombing, and then from Theo, on the front steps of the shop years later, in the snow. The overhang shelters the porch but their shoes stamp out prints on the lower steps. Theo is wearing someone else’s scarf, maroon cashmere. She can’t say how she knows it isn’t his, except that it doesn’t match his clothes at all. He has been very carefully not touching her, but his voice is low and steady, even for the terrible parts.
But before that she thinks it was the same for Welty as it was for her: a black flash, a bright light, confusion and a split second of stupefied awe. She likes that better than the long lingering death which was the way it actually happened, a death full of pain and confusion, old memories emerging fragmented from the gloom. Green lizards. Stolen rugs. A sunny room with a piano, in a foreign country: Theo can’t remember which. Spain maybe, or France.
“Probably France,” Pippa says. “He has family there. Or did, once.”
A green lizard. Stolen rugs. A piano in a sunny room. She repeats these details until she has them memorized, as if it can bring him closer to her. As if they can help her understand.
She is jealous of Theo, at first. In Texas she sees the ring her aunt wears and knows it was Welty’s, and then realizes what that must mean. She wants to have been the one to talk to him as he died, and she wants, too, to be the one to have walked away unscathed. She doesn’t know then about Theo’s mother. If he ever told her it slipped from her mind in a soft glide of morphine; she knows only that he seemed unharmed, and that however much she liked him she was also the one lying in bed, unable to keep her eyes open for more than five minutes at a time.
Hobie writes to her when she’s in Texas, but she never hears from Theo. Months later, when she can walk without crutches, even, she hears from Hobie that he’s gone to the West Coast. Nevada. So he’s in the desert, too.
She doesn’t hear anything more about him, after that.
It’s her aunt’s idea to send her to Switzerland. She poses the idea over breakfast one morning, scrambled eggs and sausages, biscuits and fruit, Pippa with a mouthful of orange juice that tastes like it’s come from a can. The morphine makes everything taste strange.
Switzerland. The brochures are glossy with inset photos of girls sitting on hilltops, at table, picturesque backdrops of mountains like the mountains on the front of her colored pencil box. The descriptions of the curriculum are frustratingly vague, but they make a big deal about the medical facilities. Pippa doesn’t understand the pictures. She doesn’t understand what these girls, with their neat dresses and their wholesome faces, are trying to tell her. Switzerland. It might as well be on another planet.
“You’d like to be around children your own age, wouldn’t you? There are several good places in France, but there are at least a few Americans at Mont-Haefeli.” She says the name with an odd, flat intonation, and Pippa knows, even then, that that’s not how it’s meant to be said. “Near Zurich, dear,” Aunt Margaret says, at Pippa’s silence. She bites into an orange, tears the meat from the flesh. “You need a specialized school, of course, and they have doctors on staff.”
“But I don’t know anyone in Switzerland. And I don’t speak French.”
“Well, it’s just the best place for you right now, Pippa, you’ll have to take my word for it. I simply don’t have the means to care for you here, you see. I can’t give you everything you need. Do you understand that?”
“Then send me back to New York,” Pippa says desperately. “My doctor’s there, and Hobie—“
Her aunt makes a sharp, dismissive motion that makes Pippa’s teeth squeak with how hard she clenches them together. “James is hardly a fit guardian, Pippa. Living in that trash heap, wading around in his bathrobe—“
“He’s better than you,” Pippa says. She has been miserable and angry for days. “I hate it here! And I hate you! I wish I was still in New York!” Her head aches, fiercely, but she can feel her rage running hot through her lungs, up her throat—and than she’s vomiting all over her breakfast plate, yellow chunks of scrambled egg and the sour stink of what’s left of last night’s dinner. Her aunt makes a brief, startled sound, like a dog.
In the end it doesn’t matter what she wants. Aunt Margaret has already sent in the applications, along with the supplemental medical report from Pippa’s doctor in New York; she has, actually, already heard back from them. The only thing left to do is for Pippa to pick her classes. She explains this seated in the nurse’s chair beside Pippa’s bed, her voice friendly and calm, though Pippa can hear the strain in it. The room they’re in was a guest room before it became Pippa’s; the walls are beige, and there is no decoration aside from what Pippa brought with her, and the bedspread is solid navy blue, like something from a hotel.
She never had children, Aunt Margaret. There is very little maternal in her. But Welty and Hobie taught Pippa to be polite, and kind, and Welty—Welty—
“Sorry,” she croaks, as her aunt is rising to leave. Her voice is hoarse and wet-sounding from crying.
Aunt Margaret stares at her for a moment. “Oh darling,” she says eventually. “It’s not your fault.”
The first thing they do in the Institute is change her pills. The ones she took in America mostly aren’t available, and anyway the doctors here, they think it’s time she was on lower doses of certain things. The morphine, for one, mien Gott. Schwachsinniger. She feels alright for a while; it takes time for her old ones to work themselves out of her system, Texas leeching from her breath, her skin, her blood. It’s what they said would happen. She’s still not prepared for the weird white moments she gets once the new meds kick in, seconds where she spaces out, and doesn’t know anything. She also gets something the German kids call ‘brain zaps’ in English, moments that feel as though there’s an electric charge sparking somewhere in her brain. Dizziness? the doctors ask. No, she says, it isn’t that.
They’re in the French part of Switzerland, but nearly all the doctors are German or German-speaking. Most of them speak enough French to get by in the markets but not much more; their conversations with one another are cheerful exchanges of what, to Pippa, is nonsense. Sie hat gesagt ich kann es nicht halten, aber—Ich weiss nie, was woran du denkst—In den Bergen—
In the mountains, there you feel free.
Hobie sends her books, though the shipping, she realizes later, must cost him a fortune. Her favorite is a book of fairy tales, beautifully illustrated, the smell of years in its pages. In the stories, girls turn into fish. They turn into swans, and polar bears. They fly from the places where they’re being kept, prisons of thorns and flimsy walls and violence, and they eat people whole along the way.
She adjusts to the new meds. Her doctors say she’s doing well.
They’ve put her with the French girls, because she took a year of French at school. Her mother didn’t speak it, but Welty did, and Pippa knew enough to put her ahead in an elementary language course. She never really spoke it, though. She can’t remember much. But even if she did, the French girls have no patience for someone who isn’t fluent. Sometimes they look at her when they’re talking, and she knows they’re talking about her. The German kids, and the Swiss-French, are warmer. The one Italian girl is the friendliest. But no one there is quite right in the head. Complete loonies, most of them.
Which, Pippa supposes, includes her, with her limp, and her moods, and her head injury, the weight of what happened dragging behind her like a stone.
She spends hours at the windows, that winter, straining to make out the distant trackless peaks. Apparently people ski in these mountains, somewhere. She imagines them, these people, in colorful jackets, falling down and getting up again, laughing. The girls at the institute are not allowed to ski. They are not allowed to do a great many things, like handle knives, or be responsible for their own medication. Which is good, since Pippa forgets to take her pills if no one reminds her. But despite the pills she still gets headaches. She still has trouble concentrating. She still wakes most nights shaking into the quiet dark of the dorm rooms, a cry strangled in her throat and the taste of ash in her mouth.
There is a phenomenon called blast overpressure, where the amount of force exerted on objects within the blast radius is sufficient to cause them to crumble; in particular it affects the hollow spaces of the body, the heart and lungs, the eardrums, things full of liquid and empty space. In the museum this phenomenon reduced several paintings to dust, and she sometimes imagines she can still taste the paint particles on her tongue, flecks of oil laid down long before she was born. Ash. Ash of paintings, ash of bones. This phenomenon can also destroy reinforced concrete buildings. Blood on the cupped hand; blood on the ground from the mouth. Blood it places where it shouldn’t be.
Her doctors give her new pills, and that helps.
In the morning, she dresses. “Bonjour,” she says into the mirror. “Ça va? J’aime ton écharpe. Puis-je m'asseoir ici?”
Next year they let her go home—really home, to New York—for Christmas. Well. The institute lets her go back to America, and she calls to convince her aunt she needs to see her doctor in New York the day after New Years. And since flights are so expensive then, and the airports so crowded, it would really be easier if she just flew straight in from Switzerland—
“Pippa, dear.” Her aunt’s voice is crisp, autumnal, even two thousand miles away. “You can go.” There’s something in her voice, though, that makes Pippa want to say, but you sent me here, you sent me away, you have no right to sound like that when you talk to me, like you’re missing something—but who knows. Maybe she is. Welty was her brother, after all, even if they hadn’t seen each other in years and years.
“Okay,” she says, “thanks,” and then hangs up the phone. She feels a bit ill. She always feels a bit ill. The pills, the therapy, they’ve only done so much.
But Hobie is overjoyed to see her. He comes down to the airport and everything, and folds her into his arms, and she fits just the same as she always has, safe and warm, just under the crook of his elbow.
“We need to hurry back, though, I’m afraid,” he says, taking her hand as they walk. “I’ve someone staying with me at the moment, you’ll never guess who.”
“Roger Rabbit.”
“Nope.”
“Lady Macbeth.”
He shakes his head. “Do you remember Theodore Decker?”
He’s staying in Welty’s old room, in Welty’s old bed. She knocks, but there’s no answer, and when she opens the door she finds out why. Between the piles of books and knickknacks and framed etchings on the walls lingers the smell of sickness, the sour stink of vomit and sweat and unwashed skin. He’s pulled the shades, or Hobie has, and the room has a dark, otherworldly quality, like something dredged from the bottom of the ocean, water-logged and slow. She can hear a clock ticking, somewhere. She hasn’t seen him in ages but the sight of him - cocooned in blankets and pimpled now, older, with hair nearly down to his shoulders - brings that old time roaring back like a black wave over her head. They’re in Welty’s room, surrounded by his books, his smell, the odd little antiques he loved. The silver tea set. The elaborate hand-stitched quilt. She hasn’t been in this room since she left for Texas nearly three years ago.
Theo’s face is pale and sweaty even in the dim light of the hallway, the brighter light slanting in thin bars through the window shades.
“Hi,” she says. “Do you remember me?”
He struggles up out of the covers a little. “Privyet,” he mumbles. His eyes are wide and fever-bright. Something stirs on his chest, tucked in among the blankets, and Pippa sees a small white dog with shining black eyes, who regards her suspiciously over the rumpled mess of sheets.
“Sorry?” Pippa says.
He mumbles something else, something about a pool, about sleeping bags, about stars, then heaves a long, theatrical-sounding sigh, and sinks down into silence.
“Theo?” she tries again. This time, he doesn’t react at all.
“Poor lamb,” Hobie says, when she joins him in the kitchen. He’s already prepping for Thanksgiving, though it’s a full day away: green beans, red potatoes, yellow chutney sauces and something with carrots. They usually have a small turkey as well, but because Pippa’s vegetarian he always makes a special effort on the other dishes. “A few days ago he showed up on the doorstep, out of the blue, just the same as he did that first time. He told me he’d taken the bus all the way from Las Vegas, if you’ll believe it.”
“Why did he come here? I thought he was living out there, but it looked like he brought all his stuff.” She thinks of the big sling bag she saw in the corner of the bedroom, the paper bag folded neatly beside it.
“Ah. His father died, it seems. A car accident, though quite frankly I think there’s more to it than he’s saying. He was sick when he arrived, though, so we haven’t had much chance to talk. I imagine it’s quite hard on the body, being in the city after you’ve lived in the desert.”
Pippa smiles. “You make him sound like some kind of prophet. Forty days in the desert. Wearing a bathrobe, going mad. Do you remember that painting of Saint Jerome, with the red robe and the underwear that looks like a diaper? That sort of crazy look in his eye?”
“The Georges de la Tour, yes. I don’t think that’s quite what Theo’s life was like, though.”
Pippa falls silent. What was his life like? Better than hers was, surely, surrounded by nutters and girls who wailed in the night. She’s been one of those girls, though, so she can hardly complain. But at least Theo was able to go outside if he wanted to, into the desert, under the stars. At the institute, they locked the doors after dinner. After that you could only go out with an escort.
“Is he going to stay very long?”
Hobie is quiet for a moment, peeling carrots. “I don’t know, pigeon. No one seems to think this is the right place for him, and… well, I’m inclined to agree.”
“But why?”
“This city… I think it has too many memories for him. He needs a place he can relax in, a place where he can heal.”
Pippa steals a handful of carrot rounds, eats them one by one in bitter silence. “But you’re still here,” she says eventually. “And I wish I’d never left.”
He smiles at her a little sadly. “I know. Me too. But oftentimes we don’t want the things that are best for ourselves—even me. And it’s even more difficult when you’re young, which is why other people sometimes have to do it for us. Like your aunt did for you.” He lifts the cutting board, tipping the carrots into a big copper-bottom pot on the stove. “Here,” he says, peering into it. “Come have a taste of this. I need your expert opinion.”
For Pippa’s eighteenth birthday, her last in Switzerland, her aunt sends her a small brown box by special courier. Inside that is another box. And inside that is Welty’s ring, black and gold and buffed to a clean shine, with even most of the scratches polished out. Pippa bursts into tears when she sees it. Her aunt had it resized, and it fits perfectly, warm and hard in her palm when she closes her fingers around it.
She thinks about Welty more, now, than she did when she was younger. When she was a girl in Texas, or even earlier in Switzerland, his death opened a screaming void in her life but now it has healed some; now she wonders what he was like at her age, the things he did and loved. There were so many things about him she was too young to appreciate.
Welty singing in French and dancing, despite his back, in the kitchen. Riding between him and Hobie on her way to a performance. The time they went out for dinner on her eleventh birthday, just the two of them, because Hobie was sick. She missed having him there but it was nice to have Welty all to herself, suggesting things to order, letting her taste his wine—red wine, she still remembers—when the waiter wasn’t around. And even when the maitre d’ saw them at it, and gave Welty a disapproving look, he’d only smiled and talked his way out of it, the way he could talk his way into or out of anything.
The ring is a comfort during her last days at the institution, which are nothing but meetings, full of probing questions and a feeling like she’s torn out her intestines, her heart, and piled them up on the doctors’ desks. Her acceptance letter for university came two months ago, but everything is happening now, and so quickly. Most nights she goes to bed unable to sleep, her mind still whirling.
And then, suddenly: London. Gray winter skies, bad weather, the red and blue Tube signs a silent shout: Regent’s Park; Piccadilly Circus; Blackfriar’s; Bank. Camden Town in the rain, hurrying under a green umbrella, pulling up her hood so her hair won’t frizz. Writing papers in cafes with endless cups of green tea, genmaicha, chamomile with milk and honey; cooking in her tiny apartment, chocolate cake and red wine and no one to scream in the night but Pippa herself—lying on her couch for two days because she’s too depressed to move, and then hauling herself up again on Monday. Support system. Coping strategies. Her old doctor’s soft, German-accented voice. You need stability. You need routine. You need to remember to take your medicine.
His name is Everett. She meets him in the library, both of them in coats and scarves, Pippa in earmuffs and gloves as well because the libraries here are always so drafty; she shivers even indoors. He backs into her in the 700s, and she looks up, hands clasped in panicked reflex around the book she’s holding. Music. General Principles & Musical Form. On the opposite shelf: Pigment Processes of Printing. Metallic Salt Processes. She isn’t sure at first that it’s an accident, but then later she realizes it must have been. He hadn’t the cunning for anything else.
“I have money,” she tells him on their third date. He takes her for Chinese, noodles and sliced boiled eggs in broth, the smell of rice wine and rice flour in the air. She doesn’t say this because she knows he is poor, or because she could afford to take herself somewhere much nicer, if she wanted. His hair is the color of cornflour and he doesn’t drink, has never done drugs; he has lived a quiet life in a quiet town. His arms are pale but strong as trees and she says it because she wants him to understand where this is going to go.
He finishes his last mouthfuls of noodles in silence, and then lays down his fork. “Okay,” he says.
For their fifth date, he takes her to the opera. They’re showing Swan Lake, and it’s not long till Christmas—and it should be fine except they get cheap balcony seats, too close to the stage, and she can see straight down into the orchestra pit. The music swells and she can hardly see the stage but the music, the music—
It’s a life she could have lived, once. A life of concert halls and trains and gulps of wine in back rooms, under the lights, before they all trooped out in their finery; a life of laughter and beauty, speaking the silent secrets of the masters, the durability of time, the refuge of art. But that life is no longer open to her. The doors are shut; her own mind has locked her out. Smoke and heat, screams, blood in the cupped hand, blood on the floor from the mouth. Black flash of light. Green parrots. Something.
When Everett turns to her afterward, he notices immediately that something is wrong. He ushers her out of the theater, through a side door out into the cool dark of the parking lot. “Breathe with me,” he says, and together they work through a series of steps designed to bring her out of a panic attack, one of many things she has had to teach him since they started seeing each other. He hasn’t minded. He has been what she knew he would be from the beginning: steady, firm, with an unyielding heart.
“Alright,” he says, smiling gently. “I guess we’re not doing that again.”
“No,” she says, “it’s not usually—it’s just—“
She can’t avoid it altogether. It makes her too unhappy. The trick is to find a balance. To listen to the right sort. Popular music never upsets her, but sometimes she’ll pass a busker in Covent Gardens, or around South Kensington, a clarinetist or guitarist, something that requires quick finger work—there are never any flutists, thank god—and just burst into tears. Crying all the way home on the tube, people looking at her out of the corners of their eyes, in reflections. Thinking she’s a tourist, probably, away from home for the first time, overwhelmed, missed her plane, what to do; people give her tissues and old ladies pat her on the shoulder and call her dearie, and she tries to get herself under control by the time she gets home.
The pink pill.
The chalky green pill.
The red capsule.
Everett puts his hands on her shoulders, the way she taught him to. Never leave me alone if you can help it. She told him that, too. I need a strict diet, and I need to exercise, and I need to remember to take my pills, but I’m not supposed to take more than prescribed can you—sometimes I might—want to. Take more, that is. Don’t leave me alone if you can help it.
“Come on,” he says. “We can take a taxi back.”
They don’t sleep together until almost a month later, and then he is gentle, and accommodating, the way she knew he would be. There is nothing of New York in him—nothing of Switzerland, either. His face is a blank slate and his voice a cheerful English fresh start, and the next morning he gives her one of his hats to wear home.
“It’s cold out,” he says.
“I’m used to it.”
“Don’t mean you have to suffer through.”
The smile she gives him feels wry and cool on her face. It doesn’t feel like her smile. “Isn’t that the only thing we can do?”
Growing up, Welty kept songbirds. Canaries and cockatiels, mostly, bright-feathered tropical birds in a big cage in the yard. There were no pictures left of them but he told Pippa their names once, and she still remembers them. They were all named after fruits. Mango, pear, strawberry, apple. Bright names. Bright colors. In the morning they woke him singing, and when he let them loose in the house to fly they would follow him around and perch in his hair, on the edges of his teacups, their delicate toes curled against the glass. The tiny, sub-audible scratchings of their claws. It was why he liked that painting so much, the one of the goldfinch, his favorite.
You didn’t see that sort of bird in America, he told her once. The environment was different. They evolved differently there: hardier. Brighter colors, more like canaries. But she hasn’t seen that sort of bird in London either. She stops by the pet shops sometimes on her way home from class, in the summer especially, when the owners hang the cages outside in the sun. These birds are different too. Not like the painting. They had brown bodies and a crease of yellow tucked into their wings but they also had red faces, not brown, soft as the bark of a redwood tree, dark as old blood, or rust.
She didn’t see it in Switzerland either though. So who knows if that particular strain even exists anymore. Maybe it, like so many other things, has quietly disappeared into the wreck of time, bred out, and now it's gone forever. Maybe it's just the paint, fading away under the steady pressure of the ages. And yet she's looked, off and on for years; she’s still looking.
“You know, birds are usually okay?” an owner says when she pauses outside his shop one afternoon. She knows him now, by sight if not by name. He’s a younger guy, but older than her, with wavy black hair and a hat he never takes off. He looks like a punk rock musician, or a magician: he looks like lines of coke on bathroom sinks. But he owns a pet shop. He takes care of the animals; cats paw at his rings when he pokes his fingers into the enclosure. Maybe there is a way to live in the skin you’ve been given, and still be happy. Welty did it.
“Sorry?” Pippa says.
“You’re probably renting, yeah? Obviously you couldn’t keep a dog or cat, but birds are usually fine. Lizards, sometimes. You asked your landlord?”
Pippa blinks at him. Then: “—Oh! No, I just… well. I’m just looking.” But how to explain that she isn’t looking for a pet, but for a particular bird? Moreover, that she is looking for a bird that doesn’t exist? She turns back toward the cages. The canaries and other little songbirds hop and scuffle around in the limited space afforded them, bright-eyed, inquisitive, trapped. She can’t buy them all. It would be pointless. She’s vegetarian but she does not believe her actions affect any cosmic balance, or even that they are particularly significant; she lost any delusions about her importance in the world in the Met when she was twelve years old.
She trails a finger against the side of the cage.
And yet.
If she ever found that goldfinch she would buy it, and take it home, and set it free.
In March, she takes a telephone call from someone at the museum. She happens to be in New York at the time, or she wouldn’t have gotten it at all. She flew in last night and her eyes still feel heavy and blurry with sleep; the hallway is dark and unfamiliar in the evening gloom and she can hear Hobie snoring at the end of the hall. He goes to bed early, these days. Earlier than he used to. It’s only seven o’clock. The living room is empty of people but still a wilderness of little copper figurines and odds and ends from the shop, things Hobie picked up and took a liking to. In the slant of light from the front windows it looks somehow preserved. Amber light through the curtains, amber light from the hall.
The man on the other end speaks with an accent she can’t place, something with filed-off edges. The call is for Theo but he seems to have her name as well, for the same address, and perhaps she could convey the message? Of course. He’s perfectly polite but his voice still lowers her backward into a pit of dread. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. April 10th. They’re having a memorial, a vigil; a few of the survivors will be speaking, and one of the museum staff. For the tenth anniversary. Pippa knows by now that there are some wounds you never recover from, some things that burrow down to your heart and lodge themselves there for good. Living with a thing like that, afterward, becomes an art. How to move your body around the pain.
“Ma’am?”
She doesn’t dream about that day anymore. Theo doesn’t either; she’s asked. But she bears physical wounds: her bad leg, her height, her tendency toward chills and illness and panic—the ways in which that day marked her are harder to ignore. She hasn’t been back since she was a child, some psychic block turning her head whenever she rode up along Central Park. It isn’t hard to avoid it. She’s rarely up in that part of the city, even the library a mile away, and on the subway you never have to see anything at all. When she wants to see greenery, she goes to the High Line instead. It’s a different sort of place, literally removed from the city, wild and rough as the neighborhood the trains once ran over. Now it’s something else. It’s been reclaimed. Like the Texas wilderness she never saw and the remote howl of the mountains in Switzerland it is peaceful, and open, and alive.
“Ma’am, are you still there?”
She opens her mouth. Somehow, for some reason, she says yes. Yes, I’m here. Yes, I’ll come. Yes, I’ll let him know.
Theo’s going to college here in town, but spends most of his time down in the shop, or in the basement, or up in his room. Hobie told her that. Whenever Pippa’s actually been out to visit Theo’s spent most of his time in the kitchen with a cup of tea or coffee, making trips to the bathroom that send him past her room every hour or so. He does it on purpose. So, she barely even has to convince him. She thinks he would have hesitated, at least, that the thought of going back there would send the same black unease racing through his veins as it did through hers, but he grins, really grins, and says, “Absolutely, sure. And we can do dinner before, maybe? I’ve got class until four, and it’d be easier than coming home and then going back. I know a great little place.”
“Well, it’s kind of far off for me right now—I mean, I’ve got to go back to London before then—but let’s say tentatively?”
She adds it into the calendar on her phone. She doesn’t see him write it down at all, but when she sends him an email a week before the date—from London: heavy fog again, a muffled feeling to the world like she had waking up in the hospital that first time with one of her eardrums still healing—he emails her back and says they can talk about it when she gets into New York.
He wanders into the kitchen exactly three minutes after she comes through the door. There’s a surprised look on his face, but it’s forced, or fake, that’s as plain as anything, and he’s wearing the expression he usually wears when he first sees her, a stunned sort of awe that never fails to make her laugh.
“Pippa! I didn’t think you were getting in until later!”
“Well, my plane came in at eight, so. Nope.” She smiles, and opens her arms for a hug. He practically runs to her, but then he’s stiff and unsettled-feeling between her arms. She is acutely aware of her chest pressed against his.
“Are we still going to the thing at the museum?” he asks, pulling away.
“Yeah, two days from now, right?”
“Right.”
They stand there for a moment, smiling at each other, until Theo seems to realize how awkward the whole thing is, and hastily moves aside so she can get to her room. “Sorry,” he says. “Hobie’s downstairs, if you want to go see him—or I could get him for you? I know you don’t like all the sawdust and stuff down there.”
“That’s fine.” She smiles, shakes her head as she moves past him. “I’ll just call down the stairs.”
Theo has a glass of wine at the restaurant, same as her, and then a tumbler of whiskey with dessert, which is fine. He’s probably more anxious than he’s letting on. Except then he excuses himself to use the bathroom, stopping briefly at the bar on the way there, and when he comes back there are two full shot glasses waiting. Pippa’s never liked vodka—too aseptic-tasting—and she’s about to go to him, tell him she’d rather not, but he downs both of them himself, one after the other, with neat twin turns of his wrist. He’s looking at the wall as he does it. When he puts the second glass down his hands are steadier.
Oh. Oh Theo.
She’s known he’s been taking pills for a while, but she didn’t think he’d been drinking too much too. But those little comments of Hobie’s, they make more sense now. She’s not sure if Hobie had even realized what he was saying, when he talked about Theo’s listlessness, his unseasonable bouts of flu, but Pippa knew. And now this, too.
He meets her eyes when he sits down, bright and pleasant, and Pippa understands that she’s meant to ignore what she just saw, like she is meant to ignore his drug habit, and his grief like a noose around his neck. The way he rambles in his emails, which, though always a bit shorter than her own, and never so fast he seems over-eager, never seem entirely healthy, either.
However fond Pippa is of him, he is not her problem. He never was.
“Are you ready to head out?” he asks, sipping at his water.
“Yeah. I’ll just pay for the dessert, if you want, and then we can—”
“Oh, no, don’t worry about it. You’re our guest. My treat.”
“Theo….”
“Really. Here, I’ve only got my card with me anyway. How about you get it next time?”
So he gets the check, and then a taxi, and then they’re speeding toward the park, the big old apartments and the uptown cluster of museums and galleries. Pippa insists they split the taxi fare.
The museum itself is solemn and huge, same as it has always been. Pillars like a state building painted that same official, bureaucratic white. She’s trembling as they work their way up the steps. Her mouth is dry, and she can taste cotton and the sour sting of half thrown-up wine, her head a confused whirl of green feathers and Rembrandt’s level, dismissive gaze. He’d looked positively royal in that self-portrait. Like someone with time on his hands and a lot of money. Except he’d died in poverty, the way so many of them did, drinking and gambling, filthy and closed-off and raving in the dark, too poor even to afford lamp oil. Everything went toward brushes and oils, paper and charcoal. So, brilliant, yes, but what was it worth if he died like that? Even his children deserted him.
They cross over into the entryway. Red plush carpet an inch thick, like walking on seed grass. The Met is the biggest art museum in America by collection, but the atmosphere tonight is more like a gallery opening. Like the ones Welty used to take her to as a kid. She can feel Welty everywhere. They’ve rebuilt it to look the way it did before the bombing, and she remembers these rooms, these certain walls, not just from that day but from all the other times she and Welty visited together. All those Saturdays, all those Sundays, all those after-school trips.
Theo drifts beside her in beatific certitude, an unmanned rowboat tethered to her bow. Pippa’s fairly sure he’s taken a pill along with the drinks. Given how he’s looking, there’s not much point in asking how he feels about all of this, but it hardly matters now that she’s finally figured out how she herself feels.
There’s a swelling feeling in her chest and a sense of sadness too, and when, hours later, she finds Theo’s eyes in the crowd and tilts her head toward the door, it isn’t hard to leave at all. She pulled that particular bandage off a long time ago. This is just the scar healing.
“I’m glad I went,” she says, standing on the curb, watching for taxis. It’s late now, eight or nine o’clock, and this part of the city is fairly quiet. The park lies behind them and there are blocks of apartments and closed businesses before the bigger shopping area on Park Avenue. She can hear the pigeons on the rooftops, and overhead the protracted funereal racket of home-bound crows.
Theo coughs. “Yeah, me too.”
In the taxi home he leans over and tries to kiss her; Pippa turns her cheek, and his mouth lands just below her ear instead. That is somehow worse. The feel of his breath there, stirring the first uncertain strands of hair. He pulls back, apologizing, but the damage is done. Outside the world is light and darkness, noise and the purple silence of the New York sky at night. She curls her fingers into the hollow of the door handle, thinks: the damage was done when she was twelve years old.
And yet, somehow, she has clawed herself free of it. Or, marginally further away. It is not far enough, will never be far enough, but—but—
The life she has now is not the one she dreamed of when she was a girl, practicing until her fingers cramped. It is something different. That does not mean it is less.
Later, in the warm dark of her room at Hobie’s, she undoes the zipper on her makeup bag and shakes out her pill organizer, this one marked with the days of the week, and pops it open.
One by one:
The pink pill.
The white pill.
The green capsule.
She swallows.