The Nest Part 7

"It was a gift." He handed Jack the paper. "Here's Stephanie's number, the phone's in the front hall."

"What happened to it?"

"It sustained some damage during an unfortunate incident." Tommy pointed to the front hall, but Jack could see his hand tremble a bit. "Phone's in there."

"What kind of accident?"

"Fire."

"The scratches didn't come from a fire, though," Jack said, walking around the sculpture. "And for bronze to actually melt, the fire would have to be incredibly hot, incredibly strong."

"Yeah, well I'm an ex-firefighter," Tommy said. "I've seen fire do some pretty unbelievable things."

"So you recovered this from a fire?"

"That's not what I said," Tommy said.

Jack squatted and knelt before the statue "Did you say this was a gift?"

Tommy walked to the front hall, praying Jack would follow him. Now he was the one with telltale sweat on his upper lip and brow. What had he been thinking, letting this guy into his house? "I'm calling Stephanie for you right now," Tommy said.

The damage to the statue was tugging at Jack; something about it felt significant. He started to feel a familiar tingling in his fingers and at the back of his neck, a feeling he'd learned to trust when trolling through flea markets and estate sales and antique shows, a little tick tick tick that alerted him he might have found something of value among the piles of c.r.a.p. In the front hall, Tommy was standing with the receiver to his ear. Jack stepped out of Tommy's line of sight and quickly took a few surrept.i.tious pictures of the cast with his phone.

"No answer," Tommy said. "I'll tell them you stopped by. If there's nothing else I can do for you-"

"Nothing else," Jack said, walking into the front hall, eager now to get home and make a few calls. "You've been very helpful."

Tommy opened the door. Jack gave a quick wave to the dog who was standing like a sentry next to Tommy and who followed him as he walked down the short path and unhooked the gate. As the gate clicked behind him, he turned and bent a little at the waist, referencing the only Frank Sinatra tune he could summon. "I'll be seeing you, Frank," he said, causing the dog to growl and leap up and bark madly at Jack's back until he was completely gone from sight.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

The first few weeks Tommy had The Kiss, he'd been elated. He couldn't believe how easy it was to procure (that's how he thought of it when he was forced to a.s.sign a verb to his actions: procure). The sculpture had appeared on his very last day of working the pile at the World Trade Center site, early April 2002. By that time, Tommy had been working the pile for seven straight months, since the early hours of September twelfth. As a retired firefighter (his lower back had betrayed him once and for all years earlier), he was one of the first to be cleared to work rescue and recovery. The cough he'd developed somewhere around week six was only getting worse and his daughter Maggie was apoplectic about him going there every day.

"Ma would have hated this. She would've wanted you to take care of yourself, to be here for me and my sisters, for your grandchildren," she'd say, pus.h.i.+ng more and more food in front of him. She'd taken to feeding others (everyone except herself) with an alarming zeal over the past seven months. She'd cook all day, layering the freezer with pans of lasagna and enchiladas, containers of chili and homemade soup, more than the family could possibly eat. Her hands were in constant motion. If she wasn't cooking, she was scrubbing a pot or polis.h.i.+ng flatware or zealously wiping down counters as if she were eliminating scurvy from a dangerously filthy s.h.i.+p. The furrow between her eyes never disappeared now. She'd delivered his first grandchild three months earlier and had already dropped the pregnancy weight and then some; there was a new slackness to her jawline. Her pretty brown eyes, always so engaged and eager, were often watery and bloodshot and unfocused. "You're working yourself into your grave," Maggie told her father.

"Poor choice of words," Tommy said, trying to keep his voice light instead of bitter.

"You know what I mean, Dad."

Tommy knew. He showed up at the pile every day because it was his wife's grave, as much of a grave as she'd ever have anyway. Ronnie had been an office manager for a financial services company on the ninety-fifth floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center. Before the planes. .h.i.t that morning, Tommy and Ronnie had pa.s.sed each other in the outdoor concourse between buildings, as they did many days when Tommy was heading home from the occasional late-night security guard s.h.i.+ft and Ronnie was arriving. She was supposed to be off that Tuesday but had decided to go in and help her boss clear out a backlog of files.

"I'll take an extra day next week," she'd told Tommy. "I'll enjoy it more if I get this work out of the way." They'd kissed in the lobby, talked about what to do for dinner. "Load the dishwasher," she'd said, giving him a little squeeze on his upper arm.

"Roger," he'd said. She'd smiled and rolled her eyes a little; they both knew he'd forget. He was tired after working all night but not too tired to notice her short skirt, how fine and high her a.s.s looked beneath the center seam of the gray wool, how shapely and firm her legs were after three daughters and, soon, a grandson.

Through the excruciating hours and days and weeks following that morning, he'd thought repeatedly about that moment: Ronnie's long, strong stride in the bright morning sun, how those legs should have carried her down to safety, how he should have been there to catch her. He remembered the shoes she wore that day, red patent leather with a little cutout for the toes. She always wore sneakers to commute from their house in the Rockaways, but would stop in the concourse lobby to slip on her heels. She cared about things like that.

"Appearances count," she would tell their kids. "If you want people to judge you based on the inside, don't distract them from the outside."

His eyes had followed her that morning as she'd walked to the elevators. He would always be grateful for that, at least, how he'd stopped and admired the little sway of her derriere, watched her swipe her employee ID, press the up b.u.t.ton for the elevator, gently tug at the hem of her skirt. How his heart had softened thinking what a fierce specimen of a woman she was, how lucky that she belonged to him.

"Mom would have hated you going there every day," Maggie told him repeatedly in the following months. "She would have hated you putting yourself at risk."

Tommy didn't care what Ronnie might have thought of his days spent digging through the pile, but the concern on his daughter's face wore on him. Her husband had pulled him aside recently to delineate how poorly she was still sleeping, the frequency of her nightmares and crying jags. How her grief had trans.m.u.ted from her mother's absence to fear for her father's health, a sticky certainty that he was using the pile to slowly kill himself and that he wouldn't even live to see his first grandson's first birthday. Maggie repeatedly asked Tommy if he'd help with the baby so she could go back to work part time. He knew the request was just her way of trying to get him away from the site. With the cleanup only weeks away from being finished, he decided to give notice and help with his grandson to give Maggie and her two sisters some peace of mind. They deserved it.

TOMMY SPENT HIS LAST MORNING at work walking around and shaking the hands of the men and women he'd worked with side by side for twelve-hour s.h.i.+fts, six days a week, for months. Soon they'd all be gone, this unlikely, contentious family of firefighters, ironworkers, electricians, construction workers, police, medics. They'd spent months dismantling the ruins of the buildings and it was time for all of them to return to their lives, including him, whatever that meant, whatever life was going to be on the unimaginable other side of the pile. He took his rake and went to his usual position, still believing that today, his last day, might be the day-the day he found something belonging to Ronnie.

It was a silly, unlikely desire and one he couldn't shake. Every morning as he crossed the Gil Hodges bridge and followed the Belt Parkway to downtown Manhattan, he imagined coming across something of hers while sifting through the debris-anything-her reading gla.s.ses in the fuchsia leather case, her house keys on the Cape Cod key chain she'd used for years, one of those red shoes.

On his worst days, he was angry with Ronnie, angry that she hadn't sent him a sign, some small rea.s.suring object. He knew this was just one of the many irrational thoughts he'd had over the past months. For weeks he was sure he'd find her, still alive and huddled under a pile, dirty and tired and coated with that omnipresent gray dust; she'd look up at him, extend a hand, and say, Take your sweet time why don't you, O'Toole?

He knew from the first wrenching moments he saw the wreckage on television, before the towers even fell, that she didn't have a chance. Still, he'd spent the first few weeks digging frantically where he imagined she might have fallen. And then, for a disconcerting number of weeks, he'd had an overwhelming desire to taste the ash, to take it into his mouth. The only thing that stopped him was the fear that someone would see and send him to the tent for grief counseling and not allow him back. Finally, he'd gotten himself a.s.signed to the raking fields nearest the north tower, a silly distinction because there was little rhyme or reason as to how the piles of debris arrived at his feet; still, it rea.s.sured him. He spent his days with a garden rake in his hands, hoeing for artifacts. His desire made him a fastidious spotter. He'd found countless objects. More wallets and eyegla.s.ses than he could count, faded stuffed animals, keys, backpacks, shoes; he made sure each and every one was tagged and bagged, hoping it would give some other family relief, however anemic.

Still, this one idea persisted: that he would find something of hers, and as long as he was there digging through the carnage it was possible-it had happened, just not to him. Salvatore Martin, retired EMS, who worked the 5:30 A.M. s.h.i.+ft seven days a week had drawn his rake through a tangled pile of cable and dirt one bitter, frozen winter day and staring up at him was a photo of his son Sal Jr. on a laminated corporate ID, slightly burned around the edges, picture intact. Sal had quit the following week and everyone thought seeing the plastic badge had been too much, had sent him over the edge. Tommy knew the truth. Sal had found what he'd been looking for-proof, a talisman-and so he was free to leave.

Tommy's last afternoon on the pile. He decided to find his own souvenir to take that was of this place where Ronnie had last lived and breathed-something easily pocketed to sit on his desk or the windowsill above the kitchen sink, something he could bear to look at every day. As he raked through the rubble, considering his options (a piece of stone, a pebble-it couldn't be anyone else's personal effect, he wouldn't do that), one of his coworkers hollered for him.

"Tommy!" It was his friend Will Peck. Most of Will's engine company in Brooklyn had been lost when the towers went down; Will had stayed home that morning with the stomach flu. They'd both been there since day one, embracing and exorcising their particular demons. Will waved him over to where an excavator had just dumped a heaping pile of dirt and dust and mangled metal.

"We got something here, O'Toole. Might want to come over and take a look."

WHEN TOMMY HAD BRUSHED THE DEBRIS AWAY from the sculpture and understood what he was looking at, he could barely contain his glee. Oh, she was feisty that one, waiting until practically the very last hour of his very last day, but she did it! The minute he saw the hulk of metal emerge from the dirt and dust, he knew it was from Ronnie. In spite of its damage, he could see the tenderness of the couple's embrace. The woman in the sculpture had one of her legs draped over the man's leg, exactly the way Ronnie used to sit when they were alone, when she'd move in close and swing her leg over his and put one of her arms around his shoulder and draw him close with her other arm.

Am I too heavy? she'd ask.

Never. Even when she was nine months pregnant, she was never too heavy in his lap. He loved the feel of her fleshy thigh on top of his, how she'd press against his chest. The posture was so intrinsically hers, so intimate and familiar that when Tommy saw the statue, even covered with grime and grit, it took all his restraint not to whoop and holler, to tell everyone what its appearance meant, whom it was from. But he couldn't be that cruel, couldn't flaunt his luck in front of the others. He closed his eyes for a minute, silently thanked his wife.

The Kiss sat there until Tommy's s.h.i.+ft was over and it was night. The statue was secured to a flatbed cart and he volunteered to wheel it over to the Port Authority's temporary holding trailer, where the piece would be doc.u.mented and photographed before being handed over to the authorities in charge of artifacts. In an exquisite piece of luck, the Port Authority worker doing doc.u.mentation that day had gone home early. Standing at the trailer's door, Tommy knew what he had to do. It had proved absurdly easy for him to wheel the sculpture up a plank and into the back of his pickup and drive it home. He knew it would be weeks or months, possibly never, before anyone noticed it was missing. Among the piles of scorched debris-all the personal possessions and pieces of buildings and tires and cars and fire trucks and airplanes, who would even remember this thing? Who would think to ask where it had gone?

CHAPTER TWELVE.

Melody had been sitting in her car outside the small consignment store on Main Street for almost an hour. Her coffee in the cup holder was cold. She was wasting gas because it was too chilly to turn the car off and sit for more than a few minutes without running the heat, but she still hadn't worked up the nerve to go inside and talk to Jen Malcolm who owned the store and whom Melody knew a little bit because Jen also had children at the high school, two sons, and because Melody had occasionally sold a piece of furniture to Jen in the past. Items she'd bought and refinished but didn't quite work in her house and were too nice, she thought, to sell on Craigslist and too bulky for eBay. Jen always liked the pieces Melody brought. Most of them sold, and Melody would earn a little extra money doing something she genuinely loved to do. Today's errand felt different.

Melody turned the key in the ignition, cutting the exhaust but leaving it in the position where the radio would still play. When she got too cold, she told herself, she'd go inside and show Jen the photos of all the furniture in her house, the many pieces she'd spent years hunting down at flea markets and estate sales, her favorite finds, the valuable items acquired for a song from sellers who didn't know any better: a neglected Stickley table that someone had criminally sponge painted, now stripped and restored; a black leather Barcelona chair pocked with cigarette burns and other unsavory stains she'd reupholstered in a bright turquoise tweed; and her favorite, a beautiful oak drafting table that tilted. Nora and Louisa had used it for years to draw or do homework or just sit, side by side, reading a book. She would sell all of it to appease Walt and slow him down. She would sell anything. Almost.

MELODY KNEW NORA AND LOUISA called her the General behind her back, but she didn't care. She didn't care because she also knew what it was like to grow up in a state of anarchy, in a house with parents so hands-off they were nearly invisible. Melody knew what it was like to have teachers ask, hesitant and concerned, if her parents were going to come to a parent-teacher conference. She knew what it was like to search in vain for their faces in the school auditorium during a play or a concert. She'd vowed to be an entirely different type of mother, and having twins never set her off course. Some days she drove herself crazy, running from one daughter's after-school activity to the other's. She charted the time spent with each child, making sure to even it out as far as was humanly possible. She never missed a single concert, play, soccer game, track meet, Brownie meeting, choral performance. She packed a healthy lunch every day, including one indulgent sweet on Fridays. She wrote them encouraging notes and arrived fifteen minutes early for pickup, so they would never stand in a parking lot alone, wondering if anyone was going to show up to bring them home, wondering if anyone even realized they were gone.

She remembered their first exploratory trips upstate as if they'd happened yesterday. Driving north, watching the scraggly city trees gradually replaced with the stately elms and elderly pines of the Taconic. Nora and Louisa asleep in their respective car seats in the back, both sucking away on identical pacifiers. Melody had instantly loved their small village with its quaint dress shops and bakeries, all the women pus.h.i.+ng strollers while wearing jogging suits the color of sorbet. It was nothing like the grime and cacophony of their street that was technically in Spanish Harlem.

They rented a condo on the less desirable side of town. For two straight years Melody would put the twins in a stroller and walk the streets on the other side of the tracks, literally. The commuter train divided the town into its desirable (nearer the water) and less desirable (nearer the mall) side. She didn't know what she was looking for until the day she saw it. A small house that had managed to survive the kind of gut renovation and expansion happening on most of the surrounding streets. It was an Arts and Crafts bungalow that had clearly fallen into disrepair. The morning she pa.s.sed by, a man about her age was loading a car with boxes.

"Moving out?" Melody said, trying to sound friendly but not overly curious.

"Moving my mom out," the guy said; he was staring at the girls as people tended to do. "Twins?"

"Yes," Melody said. "They're almost three."

"I have twins, too." He leaned down in front of the stroller and played with the girls for a minute, pretending to s.n.a.t.c.h a nose and then hand it back, one of their favorite games.

"So what's going to happen to the house?" Melody asked.

The man stood and sighed. He squinted at the house. "I don't know, man," he said, sounding beaten. "There's so much to do to get it in good shape to sell. The Realtor says it's not even worth the work, someone will probably tear it down and rebuild into something like that." He pointed disgustedly to the house next door, a renovation Melody had watched-and secretly admired-over the past months.

"Yeah, that place is pretty awful," she said. And then without thinking: "My husband and I have been looking for a house, but everything is so much bigger than we need-and can afford. I'd love to find something to fix up, not to change but to restore." Once the words were out of her mouth, she knew they were true.

Walt had been against the house. He thought it was overpriced for what it was and feared a real-estate downturn. The seller liked Melody, but even with all the work the house needed-and it needed everything-he held firm on the price, which was more than they should borrow given that she didn't work. (Her working had never been worth the price of child care and now who would hire her?) Walt's salary as a computer technician in Pearl River was okay but not great.

The house's interior was dated, but Melody could see past the ugly carpet and '70s wallpaper to its excellent bones and understand what it could be: a home, a place her girls would feel safe and cared for. She loved the tiny leaded gla.s.s windows, the breakfast nook, the window seat at the landing of the front stair, the enormous oak in the front yard and the sugar maples in the back turning brilliant shades of orange. She and Walt would take the front bedroom, the one under the eaves. There were two small bedrooms in the back, perfect for Nora and Louisa. She could see birthday parties in the yard under the maples, early morning breakfasts in the paneled dining room; she knew exactly where she'd put the Christmas tree. The Realtor had pulled up a corner of the living room carpet to show Melody the original heart pine floor. She fought for that house in a way she'd never fought for anything before.

"All the mechanicals are going to need an upgrade," Walt had said, frowning. "Any money we have is going to go behind the walls, in the bas.e.m.e.nt, under the floors-we'll drain our savings for things you can't see."

"That's okay," Melody said. And it was. She knew how to do the other stuff, how to strip paint and steam off wallpaper and refinish. What she didn't know she'd learn. The house would be her project, her job. Alan Greenspan was on her side! And Walt couldn't argue with the concrete fact of The Nest.

But he did. For weeks. And when she thought they'd waited too long and the property would go to someone else, she'd broken out into head-to-toe hives. She'd been soaking in a tub of colloidal oatmeal, bereft, when he'd come to her to tell her the property-and hefty mortgage-was theirs. She knew his capitulation had finally come down to this: He loved her, he wanted her to be happy.

"Why can't we move to a town where everyone isn't a gazillionaire?" Walt would say to her every so often, usually when Melody was in a tizzy about something the girls needed-clothes, after-school activities, summer camp. But she didn't want to move. They lived in one of the best school districts in the Northeast. Melody had learned where to shop, how to poke around for what the girls needed. She knew how to wait for sales and who would take money off when she said she was buying for twins. She always came up with funds when necessary-for special school trips or instruments so they could take music lessons. When they joined the ski club, she'd paged through old school directories and called parents of twins who'd gone off to college asking if they had any equipment they would be willing to sell and she hit the jackpot, a bored-sounding father who told her if she'd come clean his garage of ski equipment-along with the ice skates and tennis rackets and bikes that his daughters never, ever touched-she could have it all for free.

Through all the years, the coupon cutting, working on the house every weekend until her knees ached and her hands were cracked and bleeding, rarely buying anything new for herself-or Walt-off in the distance her fortieth birthday glowed like a distant lighthouse, flas.h.i.+ng its beam of rescue. She would turn forty and the money would drop into their account. Most of it would go toward college and some of it would pay down the house loan and all would be, if not completely right with the world, better than it ever had been. She didn't like to think about the year the girls would go away to college, how she would feel without them, but she did allow herself to think about how things might get a little easier for all of them after The Nest. Finally, the girls could have something that wasn't about price. They could line up the college acceptance letters and Melody could say, Whichever one you want. Choose. Finally, she could start to relax. Finally, she was going to get a G.o.dd.a.m.n break.

She turned up the volume on the cla.s.sical radio station, which she only listened to when her mind was too occupied for lyrics or talk. Occupied was a polite term for the current state of her amped-up brain. If she hadn't been parked in plain sight on the main commercial strip of their tiny gossipy town, she would have lain down on the front seat and gone to sleep. She was so tired lately. She couldn't manage more than a few hours at night when she'd involuntarily s.h.i.+ft into some kind of exalted state of anxiety. She would be awake for hours, telling herself to get out of bed and brew some tea or run a warm bath or read, but she couldn't manage to do any of those things either; she would just lie next to Walt, listening to his gentle snore (even when sleeping, he was unfailingly polite), rigid and paralyzed with worry about Nora and Louisa and money and the mortgage and college tuition and global warming and pesticides in food and lack of privacy on the Internet and cancer-G.o.d, how often had she microwaved food in plastic containers when the girls were little?-and whether she'd permanently compromised their intelligence by not breast-feeding and what were the repercussions of that one month she'd let them joyfully tear around the living room in hand-me-down walkers from a kind older neighbor until an unkind younger neighbor told her that everyone knew walkers delayed motor and mental development. She'd fixate on what would happen to the girls when they left home and strayed from her watchful eye (What was the range of Stalkerville? How many miles? She'd have to check) and wonder who could ever love and care for them the way she and Walt did, except that lately she felt like a big fat failure in the love and care department. Oh! And she was fat! She'd gained at least ten pounds since the lunch with Leo, maybe more, she was afraid to weigh herself. Everything felt tight and uncomfortable. She'd taken to covering her unb.u.t.toned jeans with long s.h.i.+rts borrowed from Walt; she could hardly afford to buy new clothes. Nora's coat was looking particularly ratty, but if she bought Nora a new coat, she would have to buy Louisa one, too (it was her rule: parity in all things!), and she definitely couldn't afford two.

Melody remembered a day long ago when both girls had raging ear infections. Two fevers, two toddlers crying all night who both hated medicine of any kind. As she watched the doctor writing prescriptions, she wondered how on earth she was going to manage to get eardrops and amoxicillin into two cranky, sick babies (four ears, two mouths) three to four times a day for ten days.

"It gets easier, right?" she'd asked her pediatrician then, holding one squirming, sweaty child in each arm, neither one would be put down, not even for a minute.

"That depends on what you mean by easier," the doctor said, laughing sympathetically. "I have two teenagers and you know what they say."

"No," Melody said, dizzy from lack of sleep and too much coffee. "I don't know what they say."

"Little kids, little problems; big kids, big problems."

Melody had wanted to slap the doctor. Having twins seemed so hard when they were little, especially when they were living in the city. Now she found herself wis.h.i.+ng for the days when the hardest thing she had to do was dress and load two babies into the unwieldy double stroller and make her way to the playground where she'd sit with the other mothers. They'd all show up with steaming lattes in the winter, iced cappuccinos in the summer, and grease-stained paper bags with various pastries purchased to share. They'd talk and pa.s.s bits of lemon cake or blueberry m.u.f.fins or some gooey cinnamon confection called monkey bread (Melody's favorite), and the conversation would often turn to life before kids, what it had been like to sleep late, fit into skinnier jeans, finish reading a book before so much time pa.s.sed between chapters that you had to start from the beginning again, go to an office every day and order out lunch. "Sure I had to kiss a few a.s.ses," one of the women said, "but I didn't have to wipe any."

"I was an important person!" Melody remembered another mother saying. "I managed people and budgets and got paid. Now look at me." She'd gestured to the baby fastened to her breast. "I'm sitting here in the park, half naked, and I don't even care who sees. And what's worse is that n.o.body is even trying to look." The woman detached her sleeping baby from her nipple and ran a soft finger over his pudgy cheek. "These b.r.e.a.s.t.s used to make things happen, you know? These b.r.e.a.s.t.s didn't put anybody to sleep."

Melody couldn't help but stare a little at the prominent veins running beneath the woman's fair skin, the darkened, engorged nipple. She'd tried to breast-feed the twins, had wanted to so badly, but had given up after six weeks, unable to get them on any kind of schedule and nearly out of her mind with lack of sleep. She watched the other mom hook her nursing bra closed and hoist the infant up on her shoulder, rhythmically thumping his back to elicit a burp. "I used to read three newspapers every morning. Three." Her voice was softer now so as not to disturb the baby. "You know where I get all my news now? f.u.c.king Oprah." Her expression was rueful, but also resigned, her fingers making small circles on the baby's back. "What can you do? This is temporary, right?"

Melody never knew how to join those conversations, so she didn't. She'd sit and smile and try to nod knowingly, but what she would have said if she could have mustered the nerve was that before her daughters were born she was nothing. She was a secretary. A typist. Someone who blew off college because her father died the fall of her senior year of high school and her mother was checked out and Melody herself was paralyzed with confusion and grief. Not to mention her kind of s.h.i.+tty grades.

But then one day Walter sat next to her in their company cafeteria. He introduced himself and handed her a piece of chocolate cake, saying it was the last one and he'd grabbed it for her because he'd noticed she usually allowed herself a slice on Fridays. When Walt asked her out for pizza and a movie and only months later asked her to be his wife and only a year after that she became a mother to not one but two brilliantly beautiful baby girls? Well, that was something; then she became someone.

She leaned back and closed her eyes. Maybe she could just doze for a minute or two. She thought about Nora's coat and wondered if a new set of b.u.t.tons would help. Something decorative-wooden or pewter or maybe a colorful gla.s.s b.u.t.ton, emerald green maybe. She could do that, she could afford two sets of new b.u.t.tons. Sometimes a small change could make all the difference.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

After they saw Leo in the park, it took another three weeks for Nora to coerce Louisa out again and that was the day Simone spotted them leaving and asked if she could join. "I thought I saw you two skipping out of this particular ring of h.e.l.l a few weeks ago," she said, stopping on the front steps of the building to light a cigarette. "I live around here. Want to go to my apartment?"

In the weeks since then whenever they skipped cla.s.s, Simone joined them and she'd completely taken over their weekly excursions. It was winter, and the only thing Louisa and Nora ever did now was go to the American Museum of Natural History because Simone had a family members.h.i.+p card and it was free or hang out at Simone's apartment, which was always empty because both of her parents were attorneys who almost always went into the office on Sat.u.r.days. Louisa was sick of it. She wasn't only sick of the deceit-she was certain it was just a matter of time before they were caught and then what?-she was sick of Simone's apartment and even sick of the museum, a place she used to love because it was one of their family's special destinations, one of the few Melody-approved field trips into New York, and what had seemed gleaming and exotic all through their childhoods-rooms with sharks and dinosaurs and cases of gemstones; live b.u.t.terflies!-had been dulled over the past few months, tainted with familiarity and guilt and boredom.

And then there was Simone-the beautiful African American girl who always sat in the front row and finished her work before everybody else and wandered the room offering help to those who wanted it. She was a junior in high school, too, and Louisa had overheard the instructor say that Simone could probably get a perfect SAT score without too much effort. "Probably," Simone had said, shrugging. Something about her made Louisa nervous. She seemed so much older than they were. She supposed it was just that Simone had grown up in Manhattan and was braver, more sophisticated. And she was free with her opinions of Nora and Louisa in a way that was discomfiting.

Every Sat.u.r.day, at the start of their outing, she'd appraise Nora and Louisa, looking them up and down and p.r.o.nouncing judgment on each piece of clothing and accessory: no, yes, G.o.d no, no, no, that is actually nice, please don't wear that again. When she laughed, she threw back her head and hooted a little and was so loud people turned to stare. She smoked. She applied bright orange lipstick without even looking in a mirror, flicking a pinkie into the cleft of her upper lip and the corners to be sure it was perfect.

"This is my signature color," she'd told them, snapping the tube of lipstick shut and tucking it into her back pocket. "Black women can wear these shades. Don't you two even think about it." That day she'd had her long braids piled on top of her head in a coiled bun, adding inches to her already imposing height, elongating her face, which could be aloof or curious depending on her mood. She wore fitted tees made out of some kind of diaphanous cotton that left nothing above the waist to be curious about. Her bras, the kind with the molded cup designed to enhance cleavage, were brightly colored and lacy and clearly visible under everything she wore. Melody still shopped for most of Nora's and Louisa's clothing, buying them serviceable lingerie on sale that sometimes verged on cute-prints of puppies or handbags or seash.e.l.ls-but never veered toward s.e.xy.

Occasionally Simone would point to something one of them was wearing and say, "That is adorable," not meaning it as a compliment. As far as Louisa could decipher, adorable in Simone's lexicon was a combination of stupid and tacky. Simone was also fiercely critical of everything that was-to use her favorite insult-popular, her bright orange mouth twisting the word into an insult. If Simone liked something, it was tight, which made no sense to Louisa. "Shouldn't tight be negative?" she asked Nora. "As in uncomfortable, constrained, restricting. As in these old pants are tight?"

"Not everything's an SAT word," Nora said, in a drawl Louisa had never heard her employ before and which made her sound exactly like Simone. According to Simone, lots of the twins' favorite songs or television shows or movies were popular. And just like that, things Nora and Louisa had enjoyed became tainted-at least for one of them.

LOUISA HAD BEEN SITTING on the linoleum floor in the museum with her sketch pad for almost an hour, and the leg bent beneath her had started to go numb. She stood awkwardly and tried to stomp the feeling back into her thigh and b.u.t.t, which were tingling uncomfortably. She limped back and forth under the sign for the entrance to the small corridor where she'd been drawing: The Leonard C. Sanford Hall of North American Birds. She liked that part of the museum for a bunch of reasons. First, it was named after a Leonard and so was she, after the grandfather she'd never met (Nora was named after their father's father, Norman). She liked that the hall wasn't nearly as crowded as the more popular exhibits, the dinosaurs or the blue whale-on a weekend those rooms were nearly impossible to navigate, never mind finding a spot to sit in peace with her sketch pad. North American Birds was a dated, musty exhibit of field specimens tacked onto walls behind gla.s.s. It was more a corridor to pa.s.s through than a destination.

And she loved the bird specimens, even if they were old-fas.h.i.+oned and a little creepy. Her favorite case was the one displaying "Swallows, Flycatchers, and Larks" because the birds were in flight and almost looked alive. Her least favorite: "Herons, Ibises, and Swans," because the large birds looked awkward and uncomfortable. Purely for vernacular, she loved the case she was sitting in front of now: "Wrens, Nuthatches, Creepers, t.i.tmice, Mimic Thrushes, Jays, and Crows." She wished she knew what a mimic thrush mimicked and whether t.i.tmice ate mice. She supposed she could Google, but she preferred to wonder.

But even in the relatively spa.r.s.ely populated corridor, she was rarely left alone. People still constantly looked over her shoulder and asked questions about what she was drawing or why or, even worse, just stood watching in awkward silence. And the kids! Pestering her nonstop and asking if they could draw, too. Their parents were just as bad.

"Maybe if you ask nicely," one mother had said to her son while Louisa was trying to sketch the larks in flight, right before her leg went numb, "this nice lady will share her paper and show you how to draw."

"These aren't for kids," Louisa said, sharply, picking up her charcoal pencils and pastels from the floor.

"How come she won't share?" the little boy whined.

"I don't know, honey," his mother said. "Not everyone is a good sharer like you."

"Jesus," Louisa said, slamming her pad shut. The mother threw her a dirty look and walked away. Louisa started to gather the sheets of paper on the floor around her. One wasn't terrible. It was of a little boy who'd thrown a tantrum after his father wouldn't buy him a stuffed seal in the gift shop. He'd flung himself to the ground and buried his head in his arms, shoulders heaving. Louisa had sketched him quickly and she'd managed to capture the bereft set of his shoulders, his legs swinging in frustration, how one of his hands reached out, fingers splayed, toward the door of the toy shop where his object of desire was cruelly out of reach.