“It’ll be easier that way,” says Annie, haltingly. “To continue your career.”
“Are you kidding?” Varya uses a napkin to blow her nose. “There’s no way to keep this quiet.”
Annie is silent, conceding this. “Still,” she says. “It’s a better way to go.”
Annie has kept the bulk of her anger from Varya, if only because, unlike Bob, she knows Varya’s story: in the hospital, Varya confessed the truth about Luke as Annie’s expression moved from fury to disbelief to pity.
“Goddammit,” she said. “I wanted to hate you.”
“You still can.”
“Yes,” said Annie. “But it’s harder now.”
Now Varya swallows a bite of her wrap. She is not used to restaurant portions, which seem comically huge. “What will happen to Frida?”
“You know as well as I do.”
Varya nods. If Frida is very lucky, she’ll be moved to a primate sanctuary, where former research animals live with minimal human intervention. Varya has campaigned for this, making daily calls to the hospital and to a sanctuary in Kentucky where primates roam thirty acres of outdoor enclosures. But the sanctuary’s capacity is limited. More likely, Frida will be shipped to another research center and used for a different experiment.
That evening, Varya falls asleep at seven and wakes just after midnight. She crawls out of bed in her nightgown and stands at the window, opening the blinds for the first time in months. The moon is bright enough for Varya to see the rest of the condominium complex; across the way, somebody’s kitchen light is on. She has a curious feeling of purgatory, or perhaps it is afterlife. She has lost her work, which was meant to be her contribution to the world—her repayment. The worst has happened, and amidst the hollowing loss is the thought that now there is much less to fear.
She retrieves her cell phone from the bedside table and sits on top of the covers. The other line rings and rings. Just when she is resigned that it will go to voice mail, someone answers.
“Hello?” asks the voice, uncertainly.
“Luke.” She is overcome by two emotions: relief that he has picked up, and fear that whatever window he’ll give her will not be long enough for her to earn his forgiveness. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry for what happened to your brother, and I’m sorry for what happened to you. You should never have had to experience that, never; I wish you hadn’t, I wish I could take it away from you.”
Silence on the other end. Varya presses the phone to her ear, breathing shallowly.
“How did you get my number?” he asks, finally.
“It was in your e-mail to Annie—when you asked for the interview.” He is quiet again, and Varya continues. “Listen to me, Luke. You can’t go through life convinced it was your fault. You have to forgive yourself. You won’t survive otherwise—not in any comprehensive way. Not in the way you deserve to.”
“I’ll be like you.”
“Yes,” she says, and wills herself not to cry again. These words apply to her, too, of course. But she’s never let herself believe them before.
“Are you really going to Jewish-mother me now? Because I’m pretty sure the statute of limitations ran out on that one twenty-six years ago.”
“That’s fair,” she says, though she coughs out a laugh. “That’s true.”
She transmits a plea: that he will extend to her the gift of empathy, however undeserved. She looks across the condominium complex, at the one lit kitchen.
“I have to go to bed,” says Luke. “You woke me up, you know.”
“I’m sorry,” says Varya. Her chin—stitched, still bandaged—trembles.
“Can you call me tomorrow? I get off work at five.”
“Yes,” Varya says, closing her eyes. “Thank you. Where do you work?”
“Sports Basement. It’s an outlet for outdoor gear.”
“I thought, the day I met you—I thought you looked ready to go hiking.”
“I usually do. We get a huge employee discount.”
How little she knows of him. She feels a bolt of disappointment that her son is not a biologist or a journalist but a retail employee, and then she rebukes herself. He is being honest now, and she holds his honesty inside her: one more thing she knows of him that’s real.
• • •
Three months later, Varya sits in a French bakery in Hayes Valley. When the man she has come to meet enters the café, she recognizes him immediately. They’ve never met in person, but she’s seen promotional photos of him online. Of course, he is featured too in older snapshots with Simon and Klara. The one Varya likes best was taken in the Collingwood Street apartment Klara and Simon once shared. A black man sits on the floor, leaning against the window, one arm slung up on the frame. His other arm rests on Simon, who lies with his head in the first man’s lap.
“Robert,” says Varya, standing.
Robert turns. She can see the handsome, muscular man he used to be—he is tall and arresting, his expression alert—though he is now sixty and thinner, his hair half-gray.
Varya has wondered about him for years, but she wasn’t brave enough to search for him in any serious way until this summer. She found an article about two men who run a contemporary dance company in Chicago. When she wrote by e-mail, he told her he would be in San Francisco this week for a dance festival at Stern Grove. Now they chat about her research, his choreography, and the South Side flat where he and his husband, Billy, live with two Maine Coon cats. “Ewoks,” Robert says. He’s laughing, showing her photos on his cell phone, and Varya is laughing, too, until she’s suddenly close to tears.
“What is it?” asks Robert. He pockets the phone.
Varya wipes her eyes. “I’m so happy to meet you. My sister, Klara—she talked about you frequently. She would have loved . . .” The conditional: a tense she still hates. “She would have loved to know you’re—”
“Alive?” Robert smiles. “It’s all right; you can say it. It was never guaranteed. Not that it’s guaranteed for any of us.” He adjusts an engraved, silver bracelet, which he and Billy wear instead of wedding rings. “I do have the virus. I never thought I’d live to be an old man. Hell, I thought I’d die by thirty-five. But I made it until the cocktail became available. And Billy has energy enough for both of us. He’s young—too young to have gone through what we did. When Simon died, he was ten.”
Robert meets her eyes. It’s the first time either of them have said Simon’s name.
“I’ve never been able to let go of the fact that I didn’t see him after he left home,” says Varya. “Four years he lived in San Francisco, and I never came. I was so angry at him. And I thought he’d . . . grow up.”
The words hover. Varya swallows. Klara was with Simon and even Daniel spoke to him, a brief phone call he described after the funeral, but Varya was rock, was ice, so remote he could not have reached her if he’d wanted to. And why would he want to? He must have known that Varya resented him more than she did Klara. At least Klara had made it clear she was leaving; at least she had the decency, once in San Francisco, to pick up the phone. Varya gave up on Simon. It was no surprise that he also gave up on her.
Robert puts his hand on top of hers, and she tries not to flinch. His palm is broad and warm. “You couldn’t have known.”
“No. But I should have forgiven him.”
“You were a kid. We all were. Look—before Simon died, I was cautious. Too cautious, maybe. But when he died I did some stupid, reckless things. Things that should’ve gotten me killed.”
“The thought that you could die from sex,” Varya says, haltingly. “You weren’t terrified?”
“No, not then. Because it didn’t feel that way. When doctors said we should be celibate, it didn’t feel like they were telling us to choose between sex and death. It felt like they were asking us to choose between death and life. And no one who worked that hard t
o live life authentically, to have sex authentically, was willing to give it up.”
Varya nods. Beside them, a little bell on the door of the café jingles as a young family enters. When they walk by her table, Varya forces herself not to lean away from them. She’s seeing a new therapist, one who practices cognitive behavioral therapy and encourages her to withstand these moments of exposure.
“I’ve always wondered what drew you to Simon,” she says. “Klara said you were so mature, so accomplished. But Simon was such a kid, and proud. Don’t get me wrong—I adored him. But I could never have dated him.”
“That sounds about right.” Robert grinned. “What did I love about him? He was fearless. He wanted to move to San Francisco, so he did. He wanted to become a dancer, so he became one. I’m sure he didn’t always feel fearless. But he acted with fearlessness. That’s something he taught me. When Billy and I started our company, we took out a loan we thought we might never repay. The first three years, man—we were all in the trenches. But then we did a show in New York, and we were reviewed in the Times. When we got back to Chicago, we turned a profit. Now we can afford to give our dancers health insurance.” He takes a bite of his croissant; buttery flakes land on his leather jacket. “I never planned for retirement. I’m still afraid to look too far ahead. But that’s okay; I love my work. I don’t want it to end.”
“I wish I felt that way. I’ve left my job. I’ve never felt so adrift.”
“No more of that.” Robert raises his croissant and points at her with an expression of exaggerated admonishment. “Think like Simon. Be fearless!”
She’s trying, even if her definition of the word is laughably small when compared to anyone else’s. She has begun to sit back against chairs, and take walks through the city. Ten years ago, when she moved to California, she visited the Castro for the first time since Ruby was born. She tried to envision Simon there, but she could only see him on their walks to Congregation Tifereth Israel, running away from her. Now she imagines him again, but this time, he does not stay within the bounds of the person she knew. As she hikes from the Cliff House to the old military hospital near Mountain Lake Park, she sees Simon pose by the remains of the Sutro Baths, where there was once enough space for ten thousand people to swim. She has no idea whether he walked these bluffs; the Richmond is at least forty-five minutes from the Castro by bus. It doesn’t matter. He’s there amidst the scrub and lilac, his hair whipped by the wind off the water, clearing a trail as Varya follows behind him.
• • •
When she returns to the condo, there is an e-mail from Mira.
Dearest V:
Will the eleventh of December work for you? Turns out Eli has a commitment on the fourth, and Jonathan still likes the idea of dragging everyone to Florida in the winter, crazy man. (It will be nice, I think. I just have to get over the embarrassment of telling everyone I’m actually getting married in Miami.) Let me know.
Love—M.
Jonathan is a fellow professor at SUNY New Paltz who lost his wife to pancreatic cancer four years before Daniel’s death. He was not someone Mira had ever considered romantically. After Daniel died, he brought Mira meals—“It’s brisket,” he said, “but store-bought; my wife was the one who cooked”—and stayed with her through the panic attacks she began to suffer before teaching. It was two years before she fell in love with him.
“Though I didn’t fall. The pace was glacial,” said Mira, during one of her Sunday night Skype sessions with Varya. “I had to surrender.”
Mira put her plate on the coffee table and tucked her feet beneath her. She was still petite, but more muscular: after Daniel’s death, she took up cycling, riding from New Paltz to Bear Mountain as the world rushed past, looking like the blur it felt.
“Surrender what?” Varya asked.
“Well, that’s what I kept asking myself, and I realized that what I had to surrender wasn’t my pain, or my trust. I had to surrender Daniel.”
Six months ago, Jonathan proposed. He has an eleven-year-old son, Eli, whom Mira is learning to parent. Varya is to be her maid of honor.
What do you want? Luke asked her, and if Varya had answered him honestly, she would have said this: To go back to the beginning. She would tell her thirteen-year-old self not to visit the woman. To her twenty-five-year-old self: Find Simon, forgive him. She would tell herself to take care of Klara, to sign up for JDate, to stop the nurse before she took the baby out of Varya’s arms. She’d tell herself she would die, she would die, they all would. She would tell herself to pay attention to the smell of Klara’s hair, the feel of Daniel’s arms as he reached down to hug her, Simon’s stubby thumbs—my God, their hands, all of them, Klara’s hummingbird-quick, Daniel’s slender and restless. She’d tell herself that what she really wanted was not to live forever, but to stop worrying.
What if I change? she asked the fortune teller, all those years ago, sure that knowledge could save her from bad luck and tragedy. Most people don’t, the woman said.
It is seven o’clock, the sky a neon smear. Varya leans back in her chair. Perhaps she chose science because it was rational, believing it would set her apart from the woman on Hester Street and her predictions. But Varya’s belief in science was rebellion, too. She feared that fate was fixed, but she hoped—God, she hoped—that it was not too late for life to surprise her. She hoped it was not too late for her to surprise herself.
Now she remembers what Mira told her after Daniel’s burial. They hunched beneath a tree, snow filtering through the branches, as attendees made their way to the parking lot. “I never met Klara,” Mira said. “But right now, I almost feel I understand her, because suicide does not seem irrational. What’s irrational is continuing on, day after day, as if forward momentum is natural.”
But Mira has done it. The impossibility of moving beyond loss, faced against the likelihood you will: it’s as absurd, as seemingly miraculous, as survival always is. Varya thinks of her colleagues, with their test tubes and microscopes, all of them attempting to replicate the processes that already exist in nature. Turritopsis dohrnii, a jellyfish the size of a sequin, ages in reverse when under threat. In winter, the wood frog turns to ice: its heart stops beating, its blood freezes, and yet, months later, when spring arrives, it thaws and hops away.
The periodical cicada hibernates underground in broods, feeding on fluids from tree roots. It would be easy to think them dead; perhaps, in some way—sedentary and silent, nestled two feet below the soil—they are. One night, seventeen years later, they break through the surface in astounding numbers. They climb the nearest vertical object; the husks of their nymphal skins drop crisply to the ground. Their bodies are pale and not yet hardened. In the darkness, they sing.
36.
On the first week of July, Varya drives into the city for her weekly visit with Gertie. Gertie is buoyant: Ruby is visiting. Varya has never understood why a college student would spend two weeks every summer at a retirement home of her own volition, but Ruby suggested this plan as a freshman and hasn’t wavered. Helping Hands is an eight-hour drive from UCLA, where Ruby will soon begin her senior year. Each summer, she arrives in a flurry of sunglasses and stacked bracelets, sundresses and platform heels, as well as a brutish white Range Rover. She plays mah-jongg with the widows and reads to Gertie from the books in her literature courses. On the last night of her visit, she does a magic show in the dining hall, which has become so well attended that the staff bring extra chairs in from the library. The residents are rapt as children. Afterward, they wait for Ruby in long lines, eager to tell her about the time they met Houdini’s brother or saw a woman slide across Times Square from a rope held in her teeth.
“What are you going to do now?” Gertie asks Varya. “If you aren’t going back to work?”
She sits in her armchair, a bowl of pickles in her lap. Ruby lies on Gertie’s bed. She’s playing a game on her cell phone called Bloody Mary.
When she reaches the fifth level, she passes the phone to Varya, who takes particular satisfaction in smashing the spry, hopping tomato that guards a bag of celery sticks.
“It isn’t that I’m not going back to work,” Varya says. “I’m just not going back to the Drake.”
She has told her mother that she made a critical mistake, something that compromised the integrity of the experiment. Soon—when Ruby leaves, perhaps—she’ll tell Gertie about Frida, and, most of all, about Luke. Their relationship has been too fragile to share, and though it is less fragile now, Varya still fears she’ll lose him as suddenly as he appeared. They’ve begun to exchange snail mail, photos and postcards and other small things. In May, Luke sent a picture of him with his new girlfriend, Yuko. Yuko is at least a foot and a half shorter than he, with an asymmetrical haircut dyed pink at the ends. In the photo, she is pretending to pick Luke up, one of his long legs slung over her arm as they squint with laughter. Another month passes before Luke admits that Yuko is his roommate, the one who posed as a Chronicle editor—though it wasn’t romantic then, he hastens to add—and that he kept this a secret because he did not want Varya to resent her.
Varya flushed with pleasure, both to see his happiness and to think he cared what she thought. That week, she passed a farm stand advertising homemade fruit preserves. She pulled to the side of the road and picked through the glass jars, their contents jewel-like in the afternoon light. When she found cherries, she bought two jars, keeping one and mailing the second to Luke. Ten days later, his reply came: