October 5 - A fragment

When the smoke cleared, Reyam screamed. Where her house had been was a heap of ashes, charred wood, piles of rubble that had once been plastered stone walls. Nothing resembled the place where she had nursed her children, where she prepared her family’s food over the kerosene stove, where she and her sister gossiped as they embroidered, about the new ways their husbands had found to tickle their toes or nip at their ears. Nothing that spoke of something she called Home.

She rushed forward but found she couldn’t go anywhere. Her body was jerked back roughly by a hand, and she turned in dismay to regard the American soldier who gripped her arm. The veil had slipped back from her forehead and she bowed her head. Not in shame. It was a boy’s face attached to that soldier’s body, not a man’s, and the thought was disconcerting, angering, so she couldn’t stomach it. She looked down so she wouldn’t spit in his face.

He said something. It sounded polite. He called her ‘miss’; he knew a little respect anyway. She still wanted to spit.

“He’s saying it’s not safe yet, Reyam,” said her cousin. He had run over from across the street where he lived with her sister Roza at the sound of the blast. “There could be another blast, this bombing could be connected to another. You’ve heard the stories.”

Of families rushing in to salvage the tatters of belongings and the limbs of loved ones only to be blown up themselves; yes, she had heard the stories. She watched the smoke turn from thick black to a watery gray and she wailed. She and Roza wailed on the sidewalk while the American soldiers – all of them no more than boys – stomped in, there heavy boots accomplishing what little destruction the bomb itself had managed not to inflict.

“They’ll patrol the area more heavily now,” Roza said, nodding to the khaki and camouflage; it made fragmented shapes of the figures before them, not people. Discombobulated shapes.

Reyam did spit this time.

“I don’t want their patrols near my house.” She didn’t have a house. Her argument was as thin as the last tendrils of smoke.

Roza shook her head. “You are too stubborn, little sister. You will come live with me now, and the same will not happen again. Not with more patrols in our neighborhood.”

Roza saw things rose red, with all they had endured; Reyam saw them as they were. Some time later – she had lost track – the soldiers left the shell of her house – what had been her house – moving away to something more pressing than the pieces of her life. No one bothered to find her, express regret, tell her it was safe to enter now.

She picked her way onto the rubble, things crunching under her feet – shards of pottery, glass from picture frames, pebbles that bit through the soft soles of her shoes to the flesh within. There had to be something intact, something to save.

With a low cry, she fell to her knees in front of shards she recognized from their vivid blue. The vase had been a gift from her grandmother, passed down from her grandmother before. Ancient, and beyond price. How many times had Ammar begged her to peddle it – to the Americans, to the museum. She would clutch it close to her breast. “Never, never,” she would moan in response to her husband. “They can take our country and our pride, but I will keep this legacy.”

Here it was in shards. She picked up one fragment, rounded, smooth in her palm like the soft swell of a budding breast.

“Come, come,” Roza was saying, tugging insistently at her arm and looking fearfully over one shoulder. A few packs of errant teenagers were loitering at the entrance to the alley across the street, talking for now, but they would be looters, and they would be looking for whatever they could find, and they wouldn’t have regard for the woman who had once had a home here.

“Come, come,” Roza insisted again, dragging Reyam away and wishing that her husband hadn’t gone to the center of the city to find out news of which group had planted this bomb. It didn’t matter to her, either way; they were all parts of the same whole.

“Do they know they leave only fragments?” Reyam asked mournfully, as she was led away.

* * * * *

Diane peered down from the balcony of her hotel room – if it could be called that – it had a cot, a chipped wash pitcher, white walls pockmarked where the plaster was peeling, but it still took in guests, and it was close enough to the Green Zone that she felt a modicum of safety here. She could see the last wisps of oily smoke drifting towards the sky from a distance of perhaps a kilometer away; the cloud had been thick and black, hours ago, but little was left. She should be out there finding information, typing up an article, relaying it back to the bureau office in New York of the journal she worked for. She didn’t want to go out because she knew she would see Enrich again and she didn’t trust herself to look on his face. Breathing in, she wrapped her arms around chest as if suddenly cold, but that couldn’t be because it was never cold in Baghdad.

“Dean?” she called to her boyfriend. Where had he gone? She hadn’t heard him make a noise in the small room since she came up from the café downstairs several minutes ago. She tapped on the door to the bathroom, pitted and pock-marked, and when there was no answer, pushed it open tentatively with one toe.

“Dean?”

He was sitting on the toilet, but his pants were up, and he didn’t raise his head, which was bent over a sheaf of lined notebook paper. His hands were clenched so tight that the paper was crumpled at the edges.

“Oh no,” she said.

His eyes met hers, vacant eyes with everything snuffed out of them, and she flinched away from that stare.

“How could you?” he asked.

“It’s just a fantasy, just a poem,” she tried. About Enrich, yes, but nothing had actually happened between them yet. She had met the UN worker from Germany when she was reporting on advances in water safety and the recent cholera epidemic a month ago. Enrich had been put in charge of the project, and had taken her to a café where they talked for hours beyond the interview.

They saw each other five nights running before she admitted it.

“I am with a man,” she had had to say quietly. “My boyfriend, Dean. He followed me here, just to be with me.” She had laughed. “To Baghdad! You can’t turn your back on a man who loves you enough to follow you to a war zone.”

“I understand,” said Enrich, leaning forward to caress her cheek. He ordered them each another Coke.

She had written the poem when she returned to the hotel room that night, Dean sleeping on the cot, his mouth hanging open vulnerably.

I left the love of my life for a man with big hands…

It was a hypothetical, a fantasy. If I write it, she had thought, then I won’t be tempted to act on it anymore.

And here was Dean with the papers in his lap, fat tears at the corners of red-rimmed eyes. She was sure she had hidden it where he wouldn’t look.

“Promise me it’s not true.”

“It’s not true,” she promised.

He shoved the papers towards her violently and she took a step back; she had thought he meant to hit her, but instead he waved the papers back and forth in mid-air.

“Then rip it up.”

A weight sank into her belly.

“Dean, no.”

His expression became even flatter. “You said it’s not true, so rip it up.”

“Dean, it’s my writing. Don’t ask this of me. I’m a writer, that’s what I do.”

“Rip. It. Up.” She took the papers, if only because then he couldn’t rip them. He folded his arms. “I’ll watch.”

She half-raised her hands to perform the task, her eyes falling on the lovely lines of the poem she had crafted, everything it meant to her about Enrich, the way she wanted to lie with him at night, not just watch his body on a chair in a café. She tried again, failed again.

With a yell, Dean surged forward and grabbed the papers from her hand. He ripped it once, twice, three times, more; bits of paper floated down onto the dingy floor of the bathroom, and he threw the rest into the toilet.

Diane gave a strangled yelp, thought only a moment before darting her hand into the brownish liquid and fishing the pieces out. She could tape the shreds back together. She could puzzle it together again.

She turned from where she knelt and saw Dean watching.

“And now you’ve proven to me that it’s true,” he said quietly.

“Dean, no.” She stood with the dripping papers in her hand, reached out her other hand towards him, but he slapped it back down.

“Don’t say my name. Don’t say a word. I followed you here because I loved you, do you understand that? I have nothing but fragments left of my life without you.”

The walls of the hotel shook. Somewhere outside, there had been another explosion. Far away, if the extent of the rattling was any indication, another neighborhood, another place.

“I need to find out what that was,” she said lamely. He just stood there, blocking the doorway, so she pressed past Dean’s body and out of the bathroom.

* * * * *

Maria was old enough that she didn’t do much now except watch the neighbors from her stoop. The back and forth, the to and fro of the younger generation, that was what kept her living now because her own motion had stopped, because there wasn’t anything left to her existence, except to wake, and watch, and sleep, and wake again. She understood these things now, in a way that didn’t trouble her anymore. Hadn’t she lived? Hadn’t she loved? It was twenty-three years now since John had died, and she had never remarried, never taken another lover. Two mornings ago, she had woken up and realized she couldn’t remember John’s face, and that scared her. She clutched onto the shower curtain until the panic subsided and she could picture his face again, but she recognized that it was blurring. How could she even be sure it was still John she recalled in her mind’s eye? The pictures of him, too, had worn with time, so no reality was left. There was comfort in the fact; it meant it was almost time for her now, too.

She had seen these things come and go. Her two children never visited anymore; Sam was running a hedge something-or-other in Chicago that had nothing to do with the green kind of hedges as she envisioned them. Money and stocks and “hedging one’s bet,” that’s what it was about. Clarice was a lawyer in San Francisco, who spent her days litigating and her nights with her lesbian lover. Maria shook her head; these things had troubled her once, but she was old enough now to let the untied loose ends drift off their own way.

She had seen the couple down the road divorce, from this very front stoop. Heard the arguments, the acceleration, the climax, the denouement. She had seen the children of the neighborhood go off to college and never return, while their parents kept a watch from the porch as if expecting the car at any moment, and later, as technology changed, the cell phone call. She had heard the wails of the young wife last week when the army sergeant pulled up in his shining car and handed her a folded flag, a flag that was meant to signify: Your husband has died for his country.

For what?

The wife had wailed for days.

“Do they know?” she asked herself. “Do they know the way they create only fragments?”

October 4 - Three things my father told me

Beer glasses, she decided, looked taller when they were full than when they were empty. Perhaps it was the misleading lighting in the bar, low-amber colored sconces that hid the flaws on the women’s faces where their makeup had run thin, and that masked the stubble on the chins of the hipster men who had wound their way into the establishment. Perhaps it was only this illusory trick of the light, but she noticed it anyway, when the couple next to her was served, how tall and full and brimming their beer glasses were. And once the liquid had been sucked down – actually, that was wrong; it was savored along with a heavy side dish of flirtation that made her nauseated – once the liquid was gone, at whatever pace, the glasses looked small and sad. Pitiful little things, really. She gave a start, wondering if perhaps, somehow, the glasses had been switched while she wasn’t looking. But no; those were the originals, and it was only the illusion that made the difference seem so apparent.

“We’ll have two more,” said the male of the pair, walking up to the bar because the bartender had been too slow to amble back over to their table. Two more beers, another half hour gained, so the flirtation could continue, and suddenly the glasses looked huge and hopeful once more. She smiled into her cup, reassured by this.

Only then did the bartender turn to her. “A glass while you wait?” he asked her, and suddenly she understood why she had been thumbing through the pages of a magazine for the past thirty minutes without being served. He assumed she couldn’t be alone and she had been too polite to look up and demand his attention.

“Oh!” she exclaimed in apology. This was always her way. Effusive. Apologetic. She had learned from a young age not to attract notice. “It’s just me.”

The bartender went so red in the face you could see it even in the deceptive lighting that tried to hide such realities.

“Oh!” he exclaimed in turn. “I’m so sorry. I assumed…” He left his assumption unsaid. They always assumed.

“A glass of pinot noir,” she ordered without skipping a beat. It had been thirty minutes wait already, after all. Outwardly she was patient, but her throat itched for a sip.

The bartender watched her carefully, as the night went on, intrigued at her ease at being alone. Or was that a façade? If it was, it was perfectly practiced; he’d give her an Oscar on the spot. When the crowds thinned a bit, he leaned his hands on the counter in front of her and tried a smile.

“You like the wine?”

It was trite, but it was something.

She gave a half smile.

“It’s quite good.”

She had turned away already, back to the book that she wasn’t really reading, he could tell, because the lights were too dim in here for reading anyway, and her eyes kept flickering up to the other people in the bar. Or maybe she was reading, so practiced at doing so and not doing so at once that the two activities were intertwined. Unsure which to believe, he moved to the other side of the bar so he could watch her more circumspectly. She was the only one alone tonight, he couldn’t help noting, on a Thursday night. Couples, friends, groups. Hell, that even looked like a mother and daughter team in the corner. She was the only one who had shown up alone, and it made him so uncomfortable he wanted to throw aside his role of bartender and sidle up on the stool next to her own.

The crowd thinned further. He tried again.

“And what’s a pretty lady like yourself doing out and about all alone on a Thursday night?”

Instantly he knew it was the wrong opener. Her lips thinned, her expression went slack. She took a long deliberate sip.

“My father always told me never to listen to men with poor pick-up lines,” was what she finally said.

The bartender coughed nervously. “A wise man, your father,” he allowed.

She laughed, a low sound, and extracted a slim, silver-plated cigarette case from her purse. “May I? It’s late enough and there’s hardly anyone left around.”

It was true, he saw. Despite the laws, he waved a hand. Only one couple was left, and their lips were locked. They wouldn’t notice cigarette smoke if it choked them. She hardly waited for the cue, lifted the thin roll of paper to her lips and flicked the lighter twice before the flame caught. She inhaled, exhaled a puff slowly into his face so he deliberately abstained from turning away, from coughing. She removed the cigarette, ruby red left around the rim now from her lipstick.

“What else did your father say?” he asked, angling differently now. Women usually loved talking about their fathers. Another thin smile. Another long, deliberate puff.

“My father taught me three things,” she said finally. She held up a finger, the cigarette dangling forgotten, the smoke trailing off towards the ceiling lamps hungry for company.

“One,” she said. “Big people don’t hit little people.”

Another finger joined the first.

“Two. Don’t ever get addicted to cigarettes.”

A third.

“Three. Don’t ever get addicted to alcohol.”

He was about to ask if she had taken her father’s advice, but the empty glass in front of her, the butt in her hand, made him change his question.

“And did your father practice what he preached?”

She snorted. “My father was a chain-smoking alcoholic who beat my mother until the day he died of a heart attack at fifty-one.”

He tried to discern if she was telling the truth this time, but still couldn’t see, so he pushed himself away from the bar top and moved to towel dry glasses that were already dry. An illusion of purpose. He knew she saw it; she smiled at his farce.

“I’ll have another, when you get a chance,” she called, tapping her glass and he nodded.

October 3 - Taking a Detour

“I’m almost home already,” I said, when the phone call came, annoyed at the buzzing that tickled my armpit because my purse was tucked close to my body. My shoes sounded unnaturally loud on the pavement; people were sleeping, in this neighborhood.

“Take a detour,” Lara insisted. Lara had a way of insisting that melted resolve. What else could I do?

So I detoured.

The club had a line outside to rival ticket sales for a new exhibition at MoMA on an opening day, spidering down the sidewalk and around the corner and disappearing long past where the velvet rope disappeared. People spoke nervously to one another, pressing up close, their bodies waving back and forth like algae caught in a tidal pool whenever there was a sham of motion.

“Aja.” I whispered the secret password into the ear of the bouncer, a man four times my size with arms like small footballs, his extra extra large shirt straining to cover his belly, but not because of fat. That girth was from bulk. From size. One imagined he could bounce the next biggest man from here to the Meatpacking district with one shove.

He looked at me, considering a moment – did I look the part? I wore jeans, a sweater. I had been out for coffee with a friend, decaf, a late night cuppa, not expecting this. But I had detoured. So he considered, he nodded.

Velvet ropes parted.

Inside. Sweat. Music. Drum beats; that’s what I noticed, the beat tickling up my thighs and down to my toes again. Bodies bumped against one another in the dark, unaware of which liquid was alcohol, which saliva, which sweat. I would never find Lara in this crowd.

Chic, everyone, impossibly chic, so I wished for a moment I hadn’t been out for a mere cup of late night decaf, wished I had worn one of those silver New Year’s Eve style tops, and then instantly wished I hadn’t had this wish, my thoughts hadn’t diverged down that road in the woods because it instantly reeked of superficiality. I tugged at my neckline, pushed up my sleeves. Hot. There was heat in here not normally reserved for an October night.

Aja was the owner of the club, Lara said. “Our age,” she gushed; I could picture saliva beading up on her lips, anticipation of something with a man who would never give her a thing; I should have warned her of that now. She, too, was a diversion. “He’s our age, but already runs his family’s business. Empire.” A laugh. “Better call it an empire.”

Hotels. Chocolates. Other niceties; I didn’t let the particulars trouble my brain for long.

“It’s his birthday,” she had insisted over the phone. “Private party. But whisper the password and you’ll get right past the bounce.” Behemoth, she had neglected to mention.

Lara, I texted. I’m here. Massive crowd. Can’t find you. Best if I go.

I turned.

And ran into a body.

“Ooph!” I said.

“Hello,” it said. The owner of the body had a handsome face. A smile slicked across that face like oil.

He was tall enough that my neck had to crane to take him in from pate to shoes, polished shoes, I noticed, even in the dark; that was how much they were shining. Smooth black hair – how many bottles of gel, I wondered, but didn’t let it trouble me for long – smooth black hair pressed against a face, a handsome face, a model face, thick trembling lips, angular lines around his jaw that might have worked just as well to chisel stone. He reached out a hand, not to shake my own, nothing proper like that. He reached it out to rub my arm. For a moment I thought he was being overly familiar, then realized he was fingering the wool.

“You must be warm.”

“No,” I said. “Gail.” Supplying my name. My name was not warm. He frowned in confusion.

“You are here for Aja’s birthday?”

I shook my head again. “I am here on a detour. I was out for coffee.”

The frown deepened. Perhaps he had never heard of coffee. He was drinking clear liquid, but I knew instantly that wasn’t water, swirling around those bergs of ice. The crowd thumped. Bumped. Someone stepped on my heel.

“But you are here now.” He found solace in his own revelation. I shook my head a third time. Three times the charm, lucky charm. I tucked my purse tighter against my sweating armpit and felt Lara’s return text buzz like a vibrator against my upper arm, tantalizingly tingling. Reminding me I’d rather be at home where things were in my own hands.

“I was just leaving. I was just –”

“Gail!” Lara called. She raised one bronze arm high, a lighthouse. Lara was bronze in a February blizzard. She had dressed, as they say. Not prepped, not preened, but dressed. A production, a big budget Hollywood film. “Gail you came!” Everything an exclamation. I read her lips more than I heard her words.

My captor smiled at me slickly, wrapped his hand around my bicep again, not to feel the wool this time.

“You are here for Aja’s party,” he said now, certain. “Come, we will dance.” What else could I do?

So I danced.

I became a bumping, grinding, leaping, thumping, wriggling human among the mass of humans doing likewise. More like caterpillars, squirming after a spring rain, wiggling worms, burrowing moles, jumping kangaroos. Someone had put a drink in my hand – my captor maybe? Lara I hoped. So I drank. Someone else stepped on my foot, and I tried to throw them a glare. The lights were too bright for them to notice. Someone’s hair whipped in front of my face. It may have been my own.

My glass was empty. Ah there, replaced now.

So I drank.

Someone stepped on my toe again, I think. The thought didn’t last long enough to register.

I always looked at my watch, but the battery had died that afternoon while I ran errands. I had glanced at it all afternoon, forgetting already that it would still mockingly tell me time had frozen at 1.14 p.m. I looked now. It was still 1.14 p.m. on my silver strand of metal. It may have actually been midnight. It may have been three in the morning. It may have been another year from now.

“I was supposed to be in bed by one!” I yelled to Lara, understanding now why we exclaimed in this space, didn’t just speak.

“Forget it!” she exclaimed.

“Right!” Exclamation! Point! What else could I do?

So I forgot.

Dawn stained the sky when we stumbled out, I was gripping Lara’s arm, or she was gripping mine. Bed, I thought, kicking off my shoes into a corner in my room. Bed as the sun comes up outside my window.

October 2 - Never and Always

He took her hand that night, led her across a lawn damp with the leftover moisture of afternoon rain, a small shower, a respite, a sprinkling for the hungry earth that didn’t last long, was quickly forgotten, if not for that smattering of dew. She let him lead because she preferred to follow, the blades of grass tickling her ankles because she had worn open toe shoes. She never remembered that her toes got cold, nights like this. He wore shorts and a t-shirt, and she wondered how he didn’t shiver in the night when goose flesh pebbled her own thin arms, pockmarks, love marks, marks, anyway. It wasn’t winter anymore, but not quite spring, either, somewhere in between one season and the next so the days carried sun but the nights still nipped like kittens at your toes. A car drifted lazily across the drive that bordered the lawn, but he pulled her to him so they were motionless statues in the dark, no more than another blade of glass, maybe, perhaps, a little taller, and then the car was gone and the headlights dimmed down again and there was just them.

He led her to the building at the back of the campus, unlit at night, but unlocked to those who knew and understood these things, the giddy teenagers who thought it was somehow so much more grown up to wander to these places off limits, off center, off kilter. She bit her lip because she associated this gesture with nervousness, and all the story books said she should be nervous, when all she really felt at this moment was happiness. She wouldn’t let on to that, never. He led her up the stairs, one flight, two flights. She counted the steps and heard his breathing grow heavier, hers likewise, in unison, and she knew it wasn’t from climbing.

It had been that afternoon when he told her to meet him, a note slipped by her elbow, casually falling, casually dropped, furtively read, furtively replied to. A quick note, a note of few words, but they both understood every dissection of those graphite lines, every word unsaid on that one white page.

Meet me after dark.

He took her to an alcove in the stairwell, a small blue-tinged carpet on the floor. Was it a thrill that anyone could have happened by at any moment, always? No one had business here, at this late hour, but then, neither did they, and here they were surely, in the flesh. So should she worry? She decided just to bite her lip again. He laid her down and he began peeling off the strata of clothing that covered her until she wasn’t sure she even had seven layers of skin anymore, each one carefully sifted off like she was flour dusting onto that carpet, sifting, melting. When he was done with his task, she was sure she was more naked than naked, more than just bare flesh but rather bare thoughts, bare intestines spilling open, the lobes of her brain shouting out in electrochemical intensity as if she were a color-coded map. Blue here for the fear, red for the passion, yellow for the nerve endings that were tickling in ways she hadn’t known about when she woke up that morning.

“Only if you want to,” he said, caressing one cheek.

Swallow hard a moment. “Yes,” she heard a voice say.

Yes, on a cold blue-tinged carpet, music drifting to her ears from somewhere far away, or was that her brain, or was that her eyes, or her nose, or her mouth? She wasn’t quite sure anymore where he ended and she began, only that her feet still itched from the memory of those blades of grass, as if imprinted in her flesh always. I will never forget the way this blue carpet feels, she thought, as it scraped against the bare, baby-soft skin of her buttocks.

He held her forever after.

Forever? That’s a long time. Perhaps we are exaggerating here.

“Will you leave me never?” she whispered into his skin, where bone met shoulder, where sweat met tears. She licked at the salt.

“Never,” he assured.

“Will you love me always?” he asked, nuzzling against her ear, where hair curled at nape, where inhale met exhale and wound its way back down his throat. Or her throat. You decide.

“Always,” she swore.

He led her back across the lawn, prickling lawn, tickling lawn, as always, deposited her at her room, where by now the honey lights no longer created watery pools in the darkness because they had been extinguished, blown out, snuffed out, nothingness, neverness. It is not that drastic; it is only that, here, everyone was sleeping, out in a dream world that would be forgotten by morning, ever, always. She was sad to think that this day on the calendar had come to a close, that it would never be livable again.

He walked back across the lawn, leading himself to the place that was his, only it wasn’t his anymore. He felt her under his fingernails, inside his pores, wrapped up around his tongue. He smelled of her, tasted of her, felt of her. His room was quiet, dark; felt barren and empty after the space he had shared. The floor here was wooden and he paused a moment, forgetting already. The carpet was blue? The carpet was green. Surely the carpet was green. He would remember that always, he decided then and there.

He was young; you understand the absurdity of his statement.

She slipped under the sheets of her bed, her flesh slippery on the sheets that felt smooth after what she had endured. Was that her roommate sleeping in the room with her? Was it him? His trace lingered in the room, like a ghost that would haunt the space always, except she knew that by tomorrow it would be never and they’d never speak of it again. Always, she thought. Always it will be this day in my head.

October 1 - On the Night Train To...

On the night train to Paris, rural France was only registered in flashes of gray and silver out the window. The low mounds of haystacks, like a Monet stripped of its colors; the steeples silhouetted against the treetops; the stone cottages of the South, each round block fitted neatly into its counterparts like a puzzle piece. Further north the houses turned to wood, the fields changed from low stunted trees and fuzzy bunches of lavender into glimmering corn and wilted sunflowers, their faces sleeping now, their yellow petals rendered some other color by the haze of twilight.

Jennifer watched but didn’t see, images not registering beyond a flash of recognition here, a note to self of that was a farm there, each town slipping silently into the background of the humming train as it sped through the night. The old woman who sat opposite Jennifer had nodded off, her chin slipping into the lace of her collar, her jowls drooping lower and her lips puckered into a frown. When she came onto the train, there was an air of strength about her, even though her footsteps were slow and faltering, a knobby cane providing a third leg. She had purposefully extracted a slim livre poche from her purse, never meeting Jennifer’s eye, never asking her purpose or identity, and proceeded to read the entire way, all the way, at least, until the sun went down, at which point the volume was stowed back within her purse and her chin nodded down and her bright eyes lost their intensity, slipping shut behind heavy, wrinkled eyelids. Whatever strength she exuded by day was sapped with the setting of the sun. Jennifer looked away, now, embarrassed the woman might wake and find her staring so intently.

Quiet in the train car, all quiet.

Jennifer couldn’t find respite as the old woman could, as the man with a bulbous nose next to her could, a nose that produced a soft, watery snore every kilometer or so, as the young child on her papa’s lap could, her thumb stuck in her mouth and ringlets of hair matted against her cheek from where it squished into the flannel of papa’s shirt. No; she wished she could close her eyes and slip into dreams until Paris greeted her, but images of Marseilles kept flooding her vision. She didn’t want to remember this trip. Not the way Marion Jordan had collapsed into her arms the moment she descended from her train onto the quai of the Saint-Charles station. Not the way her mother’s normally impeccable appearance resembled something like confetti paper after a grade school class had gotten its hands on it, the hair frazzled, the makeup smudged, deep mascara creating war paint under eyes that had become red from crying. Not the solemn church ceremony under an unusually cold morning sky, the black of the mourners’ clothing sharp against the brown stone of the church, the white and cream of the flowers. She wished she could recall instead the good memories of past visits to Marseilles, in the last ten years since her mother remarried. Paul was a Frenchman twenty years Marion’s senior, with a deliberate accent and an even more deliberate manner of choosing his wine bottle at dinner, peering over his reading glasses at the list proffered as though life or death decisions or stock market crashes hinged on his verdict. Jennifer had never been overly fond of Paul and his careful manner, but he made her mother happy, and that was what mattered at the end of the day, right? She stifled all her complaints over the years – the way Paul went into the village to drink wine until late at night, the way he philandered behind Marion’s back, the way he sometimes spoke of her as though a small child, because she had never mastered his language and had little concept of a good ‘nose’ or ‘bouquet’ in a glass of Chateauneuf-du-Pape. Jennifer shrugged aside all these misgivings because the old Marion disappeared once she moved to France. The new Marion had found a semblance of peace here, after her years as a washed-up divorcée who drank too much brandy and bought jewelry as therapy. Marion had found happiness in a tiny hamlet outside the city of Marseille, where the two owned a small, local vineyard and oversaw the workings of an olive grove and a lavender farm. When her mother had called sobbing with the news of Paul’s death a week ago, Jennifer hadn’t cringed because of grief, or the need to buy a last minute plane ticket to France – she was always quick to efface the hardships to herself – but because Marion would quickly come undone by this.

“Will Jessica come? Will Jessica come?” Marion had asked into the phone over and over, her most urgent question. Jennifer could only sigh.

“I’ll try and persuade her.”

Her kid sister didn’t come. Jessica was acting – a bit part – in a Hollywood film and, “couldn’t deal with the frogs right now. Ha ha ha.” Jessica always got her way, always insisted on her way; perhaps that was why Marion doted on her younger daughter so, this refusal to reform, to repent, to show up, even. Jennifer reminded herself that she was the responsible one and it was for this that she let her own troubles fall by the wayside every time she saw Marion or Jessica, either one. She listened to their tales of grief in love, grief in life, woe at work, and bit her tongue. What story could she tell, anyway? She squeezed her eyes shut as the train plowed on through the night, darker now, the gray objects muted to mere hints of shapes outside the window, vast and indistinct so that the shadows that rose up could have been anything, this place could be anywhere. The man with the big nose gave another quiet grunt in his sleep.

“May I sit?”

Jennifer looked up in surprise at a human voice after the hours of silence. He said it in English, which surprised her as well, since the accent was French. What had given away her Otherness? The owner of the voice had strong, Gallic features, a mop of unruly dark hair on his head, a bold nose, piercing eyes. Large hands. He wore an overcoat, out of place in the warm car of the train. Unsure what else to do, she gestured at the seat next to the sleeping old woman, whose head now drooped lower into her lace, so it nearly tucked into her décolletage.

“I saw you were awake.”

Jennifer nodded.

“I, too,” he said, gesturing grandly towards his chest, “could not sleep. I think, I feel, something troubles you this night.”

Her mouth dropped open. A low, keening church bell tolled somewhere outside the train’s window, one quick call to whoever lived in the anonymous village as they glided past. She blinked.

“My mother’s boyfriend – husband,” – she needed to correct herself, still, after ten years – “passed away. I came for the funeral. Not a good trip.” She tried a laugh. “A memory I’d just as soon forget.”

He nodded as if he expected exactly this tale. “Tell me how you feel.”

She blinked again. “Excuse me?”

“This man, who died, this…”

“Paul.”

“Tell me how you feel.” Jennifer’s hands twitched against the handle of her purse, clutched still in her lap after the hours of riding; she had forgotten to stow it overhead.

“My mother will be undone by this. When my father left her fifteen years ago… She had only ever been a housewife. She didn’t know how to exist if she wasn’t an appendage. And then with Paul, here, France. She was happy, you understand? But it meant everything to her that Jessica – that’s my little sister – meant everything to her that Jessica come for this funeral. She never comes for anything, you understand? And she didn’t come for this either, which means it was just me, and Mom… Mom never really paid much attention to me, didn’t notice me almost. I’m not sure she knew I was at the funeral.”

Jennifer looked at her feet, embarrassed to have said so much.

“Stop telling me about your mother,” he commanded suddenly into the silence, so that the old woman’s eyes fluttered half-way open before being dragged down again by the weight of her lashes. “Stop telling me about your sister. Tell me about yourself.”

Jennifer gave a quick laugh. “Myself?” She squinted at the train ceiling, hoping for guidance. The dark landscape outside the window could provide no cliff notes, no cheat sheet.

“Tell me a memory.”

It was the first one that presented itself to her, which made her laugh again, because she hadn’t thought of it in at least twenty years, but here it was now, the image appearing in the blurred glass of the train window.

“We’d taken this canoe trip,” she said slowly. “Lord knows why. It must have been some glorious summer day and my parents got it into their heads that we would canoe from one end of the river in town to the other. Only about a mile! It was a small town, you know? Hardly an outing, and the only time we ever did it, even though we lived in that town for nineteen years. We must have been…” She squinted again, counted seconds as the train rumbled. “I must have been ten years old, Jessica about eight.” He frowned at her, so she hastened towards her point. “So my parents canoe us to this park at the other end of the lake, where we picnic, you know? In the sun, the blanket, the basket, the pre-packaged sandwiches, the whole thing. And as we’re walking back to the canoe on this little path – through the woods, right? – Jessica – poor Jessica – she walks right over this wasps’ nest and one of them stings her.”

She looked to see if these words had any effect, but the man was still only staring, so she cleared her throat and continued.

“One of them stings her, see, but Jessica, she was so young she didn’t know what had happened. So what does she do? Instead of running to my dad who’s safely in front of her, she ran back through the wasp’s nest to my mom and promptly got stung twice more.” Jennifer could picture her sister still, her thin arms flailing, her mouth open in a wail of pain, fat tears leaking from her eyes, the panic in her expression. She shuddered, but then smiled.

“And see, I probably would never remember that outing at all if the bee stings hadn’t happened. I’d wouldn’t remember the afternoon where we were fitted for life jackets, climbed into the wobbling canoes on the river, my parents rowing in time with one another, the way they rowed back as fast as they could while we pressed the leftover ice from the picnic lemonade against Jessica’s welts, wouldn’t remember any of it at all if the pain and catastrophe hadn’t happened. Is that it?” she asked, suddenly. “Is that what it is? That we only remember things once they become traumatic, and otherwise they are lost? Because all my memories, all my…” Her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth. The Frenchman’s mouth had a sour twist to it. She leaned back into her seat, relieved to find the old woman was still asleep.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I’m no good at this. I’ve never been any good at this.”

“At what?” he drawled out in concern.

“Talking about myself.” His eyes widened, those large hands twitched. It was not what he had expected.

“Perhaps I’ll leave you,” he suggested, after a long pause. Jennifer nodded, but he didn’t see it in the dark.

“Perhaps that would be best.”