Well, shit. I didn’t even have that amount of confidence in myself.
It was settled. But as I packed up my inadequate wardrobe, booked a ticket using my father’s miles, and anxiously prepared to take my seat on the plane, one question kept tugging at me.
Will you be able to find me?
Yes, he’d told me not to wait, and I loved him for that. For setting me free, for giving me the only gift he had left to give me. Even if it felt more like a curse than a gift to have to grapple with the possibility that some hateful bitch, right this second, was filling the space in the hollow of that magnificent body that I had foolishly thought I would be the only one to ever fill. And worst of all, was doing it openly. Was sharing coffee dates. Was making dinner and streaming shows and walking with him side by sidedown an ordinary street like two ordinary people, the same way I had longed to do every goddamn day since we met but couldn’t, not to mention being the one holding his hand when he finally, finally got to enter a world he’d been in but never part of. And that was when this hypothetical trollop was not teaming up with him to mount elaborate undercover capers at glamorous DC political galas wearing one of those slinky black catsuits, after which she would slowly and sensually peel it off, arch her long, flexible back, and—well, I could continue this ridiculous and unproductive train of thought, but that was the gist of it.
Look, I knew that in his mind, regardless of what he wanted—even with his colossal jealous streak that I’d never, ever get him to admit to—he’d had no other choice. It would kill him to imagine me wasting even a second of my life—let alone three whole years—waiting for him. Waiting for a ghost.
But if he was a ghost, why could I still feel him?
Ghosts were incorporeal. They were cold. Ghosts haunted. They didn’t—when you were lying wide awake in a frozen, barren bed, shivering and haunted by everything else—hold you. They didn’t make you feel loved and warm and safe. They didn’t, night after night, murmur,it’s okay, mäi léift, we’ll figure it out, we always doin your ear and make you believe it, enough to finally get you to close your eyes, even out your breathing, and sleep.
Well, maybe really clever, charming ghosts could figure out a way.
In any case, how could I—in the face of one trollop or a thousand—ever let go of that? How?
In the end, that’s what I told Milagros. After a goodbye dinner of homemade pozole with my other family, under that August dry heat that swelled unbearably during the day before dropping to perfection and lingering into the night. And I was delighted to find that the crystal-blue phosphorescence emanating up from the bottom of the pool—that light thathad once adored him—made his sister’s face shimmer just as brightly. She lay in the hammock next to me, her remaining fingers curled and resting lightly on the sleeve of my white lace coverup. Between the cannabis smoke and the peace of Maeve’s soft, sage-scented breath, I felt more relaxed here than anywhere else, even though in mere days, I would fly into the void.
“No one’s asking you to let go, you know,” Milagros said, resting the cane she was using these days on the side of her chair and settling herself back into it. She relit the joint Ivy had passed her.
“They’re not?” I asked from the hammock, genuinely surprised, twisting the stem of my glass of Spanish wine, its bouquet alone a pineapple-scented headrush of memory. “It sort of seems like everyone is. Or at least the world is.”
“Well, if I’d let go of Erica, I wouldn’t be here,” Milagros pointed out, inhaling deeply. “Of course sometimes you should let go, too. And before you put this thing out in my eye for suggesting that, I mean on your own timeline, no one else’s. And in the meantime, whatever you do—I can’t stress this enough—take care of yourself. Which is something I really wish someone would tell Erica. Someone other than me so she’ll listen.” She exhaled slowly.
“Where is Erica?” asked Ivy, her long, languid legs draped over the lounger, her black crochet coverup elegant as ever. An afternoon of splashing in the pool—not to mention being talked to, given treats, and treated like people by someone other than Ivy—had worn the kids right out. They had both passed out on the guest bed, which was both cute and mortifying given my own memories of that bed and that pool. Meanwhile, my professor had slipped into the house soon after dinner, not to reappear.
“Working,” Milagros said with another puff. “Don’t ask. Since she was reinstated by the department, her hyperfocus hasbeen through the roof. But it’s something that will benefit all of us. So she says. Then again, she says that about all her work.”
“It’s true, though,” Ivy said.
“I know. How convenient that it also makes it impossible for anyone to argue with her about it, especially me. But hey,” Milagros shrugged, blowing out an indolent cloud of smoke, “I knew what I was getting into with her.”
“But what if I don’t want to?” I asked suddenly. “What if I—”What if I can’t let him go, ever? What if I can’t let this die? Let us die?
“You know,” she said, seeming to read my thoughts, “maybe this is a stoner thought, but light is never lost.”
“Huh?”
“Photons travel until they’re absorbed, bent, scattered. Even when we think it’s gone—it’s somewhere, doing something. Warming a surface. Feeding a leaf. Lighting up dust in the air.”
Her gaze traced the arc of Orion rising above the coconut palms. “I always thought it was comforting, in a way. Back when I was scrubbing office toilets for ten hours a day, back when I never thought I’d see Erica again, never thought I’d get to use my mind, never thought I’d be free. Back when I only had thememoriesof joy to comfort me. I even sometimes thought it was a waste. That none of it mattered. That it might as well not have happened. But,” she said, “every bit of light we put into the world ends up somewhere. Even if it’s small. Even if we never see where it lands.”
“Why do I feel like this is something he’d be explaining to me, if he were here?” I remarked.
Her gaze slid to the door, toward the children sleeping in peace behind it. “We don’t get to fix everything, Louisa. We want to. We try. We almost always fail. But that doesn’t mean what we do doesn’t matter. A single act. A single feeling. A choice. Younever know what it might become, years from now, in someone else’s hands.”
Then, lightly, she added, “Even falling in love with someone they told you not to. That’s light, too. Maybe the kind that travels the farthest.”
She passed the joint to Maeve, who inhaled inexpertly, coughing a little with good humor. She had her knees pulled up into her chest, head partially resting on my shoulder, watching the moon waver on the surface of the pool in the peculiar reverie of someone inventing new worlds in her head pretty much all the time.
Honestly, in freedom, Maeve was killing it. She was improving her English and studying furiously to get her high school equivalency degree so she could apply to university. She was going for long hikes in the Saguaro National Park and boldly reading her vivid, fanciful poetry at open-mic nights, where I was her biggest fan. Jobs for someone like her were hard to come by, but she was looking hard and cozying up in one of Ivy’s many spare rooms in the meantime.
Maeve was like a solar eclipse—it hurt for me to look at her, and yet I couldn’t not look. It was hard to believe that after seven years apart, brother and sister could still have so many of the same quirks, but they did, starting with that cute little wayahsounded likeachin their accent. Their habit of reaching for their hair when things got awkward. The gears in their heads that never stopped turning, even for a second. But most of all, it was the eyes—that sudden bold stare that always knocked me flat.
“He told me you used to make up your own constellations,” I said to Maeve, raising my head to the galaxies.
“Ah,” she said, though of course it came out likeach, complete with that adorable, guttural little noise at the end. “You meanSternenflüsterin?” Maeve said, shifting in the hammock, resting on her elbow, golden irises sly and glimmering in themoonlight. She pointed up to a cluster just above the horizon. “She wasn’t made up. She was real. She’s right over there.”
