from my hand and turning off the tap. His arms were encircling me, hard, his face in my hair, before I could say a word about Sophia’s call to me that morning.
Then Walter woofed at someone in greeting, and the screen door opened as Emma swung through it. Her backpack hit the table with a thud. “God, get a room, huh?”
She was leaning into the fridge a moment later, grabbing a can of diet soda before slouching against the counter. Michael and I separated with a sigh, and as Emma popped open the can, he kissed her forehead. She grunted “Daddy” in a tone of outraged humiliation, but he just shook his head and laughed.
“How was school?” I asked absently, adjusting the heat beneath the beans. I glanced at the clock on the microwave. “Did you have yearbook after?”
“Nope,” she said, hoisting herself up onto the counter, her sneakered feet swinging. “That’s tomorrow. I was doing costumes for the play.” She had inherited my mother’s love of fashion, and her facility with a sewing machine.
“What are they mangling this year?” Michael stepped back as Emma aimed a light kick at him.
“They’re doing Bye Bye Birdie, and they’re not mangling it at all,” she protested. “Or not much, anyway.”
The hair clip she’d been wearing this morning was gone, and the thick blond mass of her hair rested on her shoulders as she leaned forward. Her cheeks were flushed, and the tentative coat of mascara she’d been applying most mornings was long gone. She looked like my little girl again, and very much like Nell, I realized.
Would Drew look like Michael?
“What’s for dinner?” Emma said suddenly, interrupting my thoughts. “You two are probably hungry if you hung around here macking on each other all day.”
Michael snorted, but I hid my reaction by checking on the couscous steaming in another pot.
Once upon a time, we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. Didn’t all relationships begin that way, curiosity and infatuation making desire more potent, more immediate? After the first time that summer, we’d made love everywhere and anywhere we could, as often as we could, tangled together on the smelly old mattress up in my attic when everyone was asleep, reveling in the afternoon sun that streamed across Michael’s bed when his mother and sister were out. Everything was still new, still a discovery, every sigh or twitch of surprise a victory and a treasure.
Of course, twenty years down the road, we felt that particular urgency less often, and sex was sometimes more comfort and communication than passion. But it was still one of the threads that held us together—I’d treated that bond too lightly all those years ago. And the incredible news of a child of Michael’s wasn’t the only thing rattling me. It was wondering if Michael had believed then, or believed now, that I didn’t love him as completely as I knew I did.
AS I FINISHED MAKING DINNER, I thought back to those years so long ago when Michael and I were moving beyond the exhilarating newness of our relationship and into something solid, even with several states between us.
Surprising everyone, myself included, I’d applied to New York University during my senior year and been accepted. As a student whose grades had always been an afterthought compared with my form in pirouette, I’d managed to raise all my marks during the first half of my senior year—mostly because I had little to do but study, write letters to Michael and lie on my bed, moping and missing him. I’d given up the movie-theater job because the assistant manager was creepier than I could handle, especially when it was just the two of us behind the greasy concession counter on slow weeknights, and had taken a job at a bookstore downtown, instead. The owner was a wry, gentle man in his midfifties, and I was given just enough shifts to keep me busy a few afternoons a week and make some spending money.
Until Michael came home for the summer, nothing truly distracted me from the misery of being without him. When I moved into my Tenth Street dorm at NYU that September, though, it took a mere few minutes before I realized that this year distraction wasn’t going to be a problem.
The dorm was a converted hotel, and the rooms on my floor were former suites, with two generous bedrooms, a bath and several enormous closets. As dorm rooms went, it wasn’t the standard concrete-tiled cell I’d imagined, but I had four roommates. Living with four other girls was a shock of tempers, shower schedules, borrowed clothes and spontaneous bitch sessions about everything from boys to classes to the comparative number of calories in Famous Ray’s pizza versus Sbarro’s.
After a weeklong bout of what had to be estrogen shock, I loved it.
And I loved my classes, too, or at least most of them. The Psych 101 lecture at 8:00 a.m. wasn’t my favorite thing, but my other classes were just challenging enough to keep me interested, and life in the Village was exhilarating. Everywhere I went there were cafés, bars, vintage shops, newsstands, record stores and people. After years of trudging only into Penn Station and then uptown to Lincoln Center for ballet lessons, I found the Village young, alive and more like a small town than I could have imagined. I hadn’t stopped missing Michael, who was back at Harvard for his sophomore year, but the constant sharp pain I’d felt the year before had dulled to a low-level twinge. We wrote letters once or twice a week, although he was more consistent about getting to the mailbox than I was, and we managed to sneak in phone calls once in a while, too.
The sense of freedom was so delicious it seemed I could actually taste it with every breath of crisp autumn air. My sophomore roommates, Sydney and Marissa, were more than happy to show me around the neighborhood with fellow freshman Jane, from Connecticut, and Carter, a Southerner who constantly needed reminding to close her mouth and stop staring when we were out in the city between classes and on weekends. Manhattan wasn’t unfamiliar to me, but I’d never before had the chance to make my own mark on it, staking out my favorite coffee shop, the secondhand store that sold the best faded jeans, a diner that served breakfast twenty-four hours a day and made killer scrambled eggs for just a dollar fifty.
Sharing my experiences with Michael wasn’t easy, at least not in letters. He was the writer, not me, and his lazy, detailed descriptions of his Cambridge neighborhood were like something out of a travel guide. So the notion of him visiting didn’t take long to be born—unlike last year, when my parents had looked at me with a combination of horror and amusement at the suggestion I take the train up to stay with Michael one fall weekend, this year we were both free to come and go as we pleased.
“Y’all do know Thanksgiving is just around the corner, right?” Carter had drawled when I broached the subject of Michael’s impending visit.
“So they can’t wait,” Jane argued, folding laundry she’d brought up from the dorm’s basement. “It’s romantic. Which is more than I can say for me at the moment.” She’d had a fling with a junior philosophy student she’d met in the dining hall, which had ended in tears and avowals that Kant had ruined her attempt at a sex life.
In the end, Jane and Carter were both a bit awed that I had a sex life, and Marissa and Sydney agreed to let them bunk in their room when Michael arrived. The countdown began at that moment, after an excited and expensive call to Cambridge, and I spent the next week alternately pacing the confines of my room, daydreaming about what we would do while he was in the city, and feverishly trying to get ahead on my class readings so I could enjoy the weekend without guilt.
I met him at Penn Station on a Friday afternoon, hovering at the Amtrak arrival gate, dressed in my favorite jeans and a new sweater, a scarf looped around my neck that I knotted and unknotted with nervous fingers. When his face appeared on the escalator ascending from the track, blurry with sleep but searching me out
