He’s delicate with the final pieces of the story, the nuances of the main character’s ambivalence, that moment Maya’s always loved or hated depending on the men in her life — the point at which the man’s wife falls asleep and then her robe falls open. And he goes to close it, before realizing the other man is blind, and just leaves the robe as it is.
“Charl—” Jackie says, and then stops herself. “Professor Mega-
los.” He’s red, a little on the tops of his cheeks and ears, and Maya wonders if they’ve had a dalliance, if maybe they’ve been together, if maybe things unbecoming to their student-teacher interaction have taken place. Briefly, she feels something she doesn’t recognize at first, but then sees and is amused and then uncertain: jealousy.
“Do you think we’re supposed to like the narrator?” Jackie asks him.
Charles smirks and his shoulders square. He’s prepared for this. Perhaps he will not blunder; perhaps one day he’ll find and do all that he meant. She hopes this for him as he bounds through the answer. She hopes this in a way that’s overwhelming and complete.
“I’m not sure it matters,” finishes Charles, “though, especially with Carver, I’ve thought a lot about this.” He turns toward the class, addressing all of them, bringing them in. “Do you guys like him?” He’ll be a good teacher, she thinks. He will find his way.
A couple of the girls shake their heads; one nods. Jackie watches, interested but not willing to decide. A couple boys in back, who have hardly spoken all semester, shrug and look back into their books.
“Do you think you’d be more engaged with the story if you liked him? Would you be more likely to return to it?”
“I think it’s more interesting,” says Jackie, “him being kind of an ass.”
Charles is silent when Maya would have already jumped in to flesh the point out, but in this silence, she watches Jackie gaining strength.
“And in the end, it’s more, I think. I think it’s better. And that line, you know? At the end?” She flips the pages of the story. Charles, Maya, and the other kids join in. There are few things Maya enjoys more than pages shuffling. Jackie reads, “‘I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.’”
Jackie glances briefly at Maya, then back at Charles. “I don’t know what it means,” she says. “It doesn’t even make any real kind of sense, you know? But it’s exactly right, I think.”
Maya sighs. Charles nods and sits up on the desk. “Yeah,” he says. He’s smiling. “It is, isn’t it?”
Maya breathes out long and grins.
“You did wonderfully,” she says when the room has emptied. She feels happy, maybe. Strong.
She takes hold of his arm and finds herself standing too close to him. She can smell his soap, a little sweat; she thinks that she can feel the churning of his excitement.
“Thanks,” he says. He curls his neck down and curves his shoulders. She wants to hold his chin, to lift it up and make his shoulders square again. Stand up straight! she wants to say.
And he does look up and then down at her face.
They are very close. She leans toward him. There is a single, closed-mouth kiss.
Summer 2011
“You’re so grown up!” Annie says, then laughs at herself. She’s waiting at the bottom of the escalator near the baggage claim, off to the right of where the drivers stand in suits with signs. She bounds toward Ellie when Ellie is still five steps from the floor. Annie wears yellow Bermuda shorts and a white tunic, flip-flops — her hair is pulled back off her face — sunglasses perched atop her head. She’s thin the way lots of yoga in your forties makes you thin. No part of her looks like an accident.
“Of course you are,” she says. She has a wide mouth, a great big smile. She reaches for one of Ellie’s bags and slings it over her shoulder. “I’m not sure when I got so old!”
And she is old, older than Ellie expected. Her face is tan and lines form around her eyes when she smiles. There are two creases on her forehead that remain even when she’s looking straight ahead.
It’s been years since Ellie’s seen her. They used to come down at least twice a year when she and Ben were small. But for a while after that Annie was traveling. She sent Ellie’s mom emails from different places Ellie had never heard of, the names of which Ellie liked to repeat quietly to herself for days — Luang Prabang, Phnom Penh, Vientiane — the way the syllables slipped into one another, the way their endings slid along her tongue. Then she was in San Francisco, then New Orleans. She’d moved around a bunch and then suddenly she’d come back here when Ellie was ten. She’d met her husband and took over the restaurant that had previously been owned by her parents. She’d had a kid. But in Ellie’s head she was still young and gorgeous in a silk backless wedding dress that had clung to her as if there were nothing about her that was not worth showing. She’d had her hair down and all crimped and artfully messy, blowing in her face; she’d been barefoot on the beach. El’s mom had made a speech during the reception; Annie had clasped her hands in front of her chest and grinned, her husband, younger by a couple of years, handsome with long thick sun-streaked floppy hair, in flip-flops and beige linen, had leaned over and kissed her cheek, his hand big and firm on her bare back.
“You’re your mom,” Annie says.
Ellie bristles for a minute, pulling out from the embrace Annie has so readily given her; she shakes her head. “No one says that,” Ellie says.
“Oh, no, you are,” Annie says. “She was about your age when I met her. You had to know her then. She’s always that age in my head. Time passes and all that. But, this, you.” Annie swings her hand in front of Ellie, her fingers long and thin.
Ellie angles her pinkie finger into her mouth and bites down on the little that remains of her nail. “Maybe.” She repositions her backpack on her shoulder and glances at the conveyer belt that has just begun rotating, searching for, then grabbing her bag.
“The flight was okay?” Annie moves to help, but Ellie pulls free of her. They walk toward the automatic doors.
“Sure,” Ellie says. Her immediate reaction is to firm and harden. Annie’s tone, her trying, it’s too much like Ellie’s mom.
“The car’s just out here,” Annie says as the doors swish open and they enter the thick humid air. Ellie’s forgotten the feel of summer in Florida, like the air’s so wet and thick it’s lapping at you, dulling your senses and weighing down your limbs. Annie’s car is a convertible. It’s a small black VW Bug, and as Ellie settles into the beige leather seat Annie starts the car and unlatches each side of the top, reaching over Ellie briefly, her shoulder almost brushing Ellie’s nose; she presses a button, quiet, as the top folds back into the trunk.
“Nice,” says Ellie.
Annie nods. “Jeff hates it.” They start driving, through the parking lot and out onto the highway. Ellie hasn’t been down here in a couple of years; there wasn’t time or space enough for such things with everyone so busy trying to Save Ellie From Herself. But it’s all exactly like it’s always been, the heat and the moisture, overgrown grass, short stretches of trees, the rolling too-bright green of golf courses, concrete walls in front of rows of cookie-cutter — beige, brown, green, repeat — houses of the same concrete.