He ran to the Store 24 in Central Square and looked for fruit. Store 24 was excellent because the fruit was so hard. None of it was ripe.
“Anything else?” the salesgirl asked, as she rang up four apples and a preternaturally orange orange.
At first he didn’t recognize her. He thought she was a new cashier. Then he saw that she was the same dark-eyed girl who always worked there. The same girl with one difference. She wasn’t wearing her head scarf anymore. Her hair was reddish-brown, bobbed to the chin. Couldn’t be, he told himself. But she was wearing her barrette with the tiny rhinestone diamond, fastened in her hair just above the ear.
She eyed him nervously. “Would you like a bag?”
He shook his head. He looked at the orange and the apples on the counter, and he didn’t want them. He had no desire to juggle anymore.
He walked out into the night, and he thought, Why not? Why not leave the store and the city with its muddy river and its squares of college students? He would leave. He would leave them all behind. His apartment with its splintering roof deck, his convenience store, his frightened cashier, his future in-laws who were already planning for Thanksgiving, his so-called friends who’d cut him loose. The so-called ISIS family. The so-called ISIS team. The company had never been his family, and he’d never understood the rules if, indeed, there were any. Think like Jonathan. He knew exactly how Jonathan thought: How do I raise hell today?
“I’m leaving ISIS,” he told Molly when he got home.
“I know.” She was sitting in the living room watching the news.
He took the remote and turned off the television.
“Really leaving.”
“You say that every day.”
“I can’t be there anymore. I can’t work there anymore.”
Wearily, Molly turned to look at him. “You can’t do anything,” she said. “You can’t cook. You can’t clean. You can’t move. You can’t grow up. What is the matter with you?”
Orion didn’t answer.
“You barely live here anymore.”
“You should talk,” Orion shot back.
“I’m working!”
“And I’ve been working too.”
“Right, and now you want to stop. What’s your plan, Orion?”
“I don’t have a plan,” he said. “I don’t want a plan. That’s the difference between us. You’re the planner. Your parents are the planners. Not me.”
“It is eleven o’clock at night,” Molly said.
“So?”
“So it’s been five hours since the memorial service ended. Where have you been?”
“Nowhere,” said Orion.
“Nowhere? Do you think you might have called me?”
“I might have,” said Orion.
“You knew I was home tonight. You knew that I’d be here.” She got off the couch and began brushing crumbs off the cushions onto the floor. “I am so tired of waiting for you. I’m always waiting for you. For six years, I’ve been working and training and waiting for you, and you don’t care, you don’t want to be with me, you don’t …” Tears started in Molly’s eyes. “We were best friends, weren’t we? We used to tell each other everything. When I was upset I could come to you. When you had problems you would confide in me. But now you don’t want to talk to me, you don’t even want to look at me. All you want to do is run away.”
“If I’d wanted to run, I would have run already,” Orion said.
“Would have? You did! You already have. You run away from me every day.”
You make it easy, Orion thought.
Molly rubbed the tears from her eyes. “What if the whole world were like you? What if everybody ran away? What if all the doctors said, ‘I can’t treat you because I’m afraid of blood’? And the Army said, ‘We can’t fight to defend you, because somebody could die’?
“Wake up, Orion. Life is messy! The world is messy. And I’m sorry, but people get killed. Even people you and I know. And you can keep on working and try to make things right, or you can give up and make some random tragedy into an excuse for following your original plan—which was to do as little as possible.”
He heard his mother in Molly’s voice. He heard his mother’s anguished pragmatism. Please don’t sit around. Don’t sleep the day away. You’re wasting light. Molly’s words were angry, but also heartfelt, and he heard their truth.
The truth was not nearly enough. His mother’s admonitions were not enough. The old goat, his father, stirred within him. Don’t stay, his father whispered. Leave now. Don’t ground yourself with Molly, fly away.
“I’m leaving ISIS,” Orion said again.
This time Molly heard him differently. He saw the knowledge in her face, which seemed to swell with pain: He’s not just leaving ISIS. He’s leaving me.
“I’m sorry,” Orion told her. “I don’t deserve you—obviously.”
He was sorry, but that last qualifier carried a sullen little sting.
“You’re in love with her, aren’t you?” Molly said wonderingly. “You’re in love with that girl. The one in the lobby.”
“No.”
“You’re sleeping with her, aren’t you?”
“No!” Orion answered truthfully.
“You are such a coward,” she gasped. “Standing there like you’re having some kind of existential crisis! You’re totally involved with her.”
“I’m not,” Orion lied.
“You were afraid I would find out, and you got scared.”
“I’m not scared at all,” Orion said.
Before dawn, he knocked on the door of Sorel’s house. When she didn’t answer, he dialed her number, and her phone rang, but all he got was voice mail.
He stood on the porch and tapped on the window. Then he banged on the door until he heard her sleepy voice on the other side. “For God’s sakes.”
“Sorel,” he said, “it’s me. Open up.”
“No,” she groaned on the other side of the door. “I’m too tired. I’m too sleepy. I’m drunk.”
“It’s an emergency,” he said.
“Then why didn’t you call me?”
“Sorel, please.”
She opened the door and stepped outside, shivering. She was wearing woolly socks, and a long Phish T-shirt with a sweater over it.
“I missed you.”
“Is that an emergency?”
“I’m going away.”
“Where?”
“Don’t know. I’m leaving ISIS.”
“And Molly?”
“Yes.”
For a moment she didn’t speak. Then she asked, “Are you sure?”
“Oh, yeah. Everybody’s sure.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Really?”
She nodded very slightly and she kept her eyes fixed on him, so that even without her white robes and wings and paint, she looked like the angel in the square. “You’re at sea,” she said.
“I’m not,” he told her. “I’m not at sea at all. Not when I’m with you.”
“I like living alone,” she said. “And I like traveling. I’m planning an opera! And I’m spending the weekend working on a film in Somerville. A bunch of us from MIT are putting it together. I’m a twelve-foot bride.”
“I’d support you in all that,” he said, and he was totally serious.
“I have stilts,” she said, matching his earnest tone. “I don’t need support.”
He laughed and folded his arms around her.
“It’s a silent movie,” she told him. “I wrote the script. It’s sort of a feminist Perils of Pauline, so when she’s angry, she grows really, really tall. We’re filming in Union Square.”
“Do you have a permit?”
“No! Of course not. Do you think we have that kind of money?”
“So when the cops come you … what?”