“Why?” Lily asked curiously.
Kath sat up and looked Lily in the eye. “Haven’t you ever wondered what it would be like to have nothing keeping you attached to the ground? When we were taking off, the plane was rolling along the runway on its wheels, right? You could feel every bump and every jolt. And it went faster and faster and then all of a sudden—nothing.” Kath snapped her fingers, the excitement of the memory suffusing her face in a rosy glow. “The wheels lift off the ground, and you don’t feel it anymore. There are no more bumps. Everything is miraculously smooth. You feel like—well, like a bird! Nothing’s holding you down. You’re floating. You’re flying. And the ground just falls away below you, and you look out the window and everything becomes more and more distant, and none of it matters anymore. You’re up in the air. You leave everything else on the ground. It’s just you and the wind.”
Lily was transfixed by the expression on Kath’s face: the sheer joy of her memory, the longing to fly again. “That sounds . . . incredible,” Lily said, her voice hushed.
Kath seemed to come back to herself all of a sudden, and she ducked her face shyly, plucking at the blades of grass on the ground. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to go on like that. My brother’s always telling me I talk too much about airplanes.”
“No,” Lily said quickly. “No, you don’t. I loved hearing about it. You can talk to me about it anytime.”
Kath smiled and shrugged selfconsciously. “Well, you might be sorry you said that.”
“I won’t be.”
They looked at each other, Kath with her shy half smile and Lily with her earnestness, and there was such an unexpected feeling of openness between them—a flying kind of feeling, as if they had lifted off from the ground right then and there. But then Kath flushed and looked away, and Lily was flooded with selfconsciousness. She shifted her gaze toward the edge of the park, where pedestrians were making their way around the grass. There were children running ahead of their mothers; there were a few couples. She was sharply aware of her heart beating in her chest, the air catching in her lungs when she breathed.
A group of four young women—probably in their early twenties—came walking down the sidewalk toward them, two of them in slacks, one pair arm in arm. Three of them were Caucasian, and one was possibly Mexican. One of the women in slacks had a debonair style to her in the way she walked, with her hands in her pockets and her eyes hidden behind sunglasses. The woman beside her—the darker one, with a head of glossy black curls—was looking at her with a pleased expression, but Lily couldn’t tell if the woman was pleased with herself or admiring her companion. And then she slipped her hand around her friend’s arm, their hips softly bumping together, and the woman in sunglasses turned her head and gave her a flirty little grin that struck Lily as shockingly bold. They were in public!
Lily glanced surreptitiously at Kath to see if she had noticed. Kath seemed to be watching the girls too, and there was something particularly studied about the bland expression on her face. Lily wondered if this was the moment they would finally talk about the Telegraph Club, but Kath seemed content to stay quiet. Was there something significant, then, in her silence? Lily felt as if the newspaper clipping and Kath’s acknowledgment that she had gone to the club made an invisible chain linking her and Kath together, and every once in a while she heard the chain clink like silver against glass: a faint, resonant ring. Did Kath hear it? How could she not? And yet Lily couldn’t bring herself to speak of it. What would she even say?
The moment was slipping away again. She watched the four young women disappear around the corner, and when they were gone, she felt a peculiar sense of loss. She said, “I should be getting home.”
“Me too,” Kath said.
Lily got up from the ground and offered a hand to Kath. Kath hesitated for a moment, but then let Lily pull her to her feet. Kath’s hand was cooler than Lily expected, and for one second, two, neither of them let go. Lily felt a sudden rush of heat in her face, and Kath dropped her hand. They both spoke at the same time.
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Goodbye.”
Lily turned away, walking briskly toward Columbus, not letting herself look back even though she wanted to.
9
At the intersection of Broadway and Columbus, Lily saw the Thrifty Drug Store sign across the street. She wondered if that novel was still there. The last time she’d gone, she had read through almost to the end before she had to leave, and she was dying to know what happened. She glanced at her watch. The light turned green, and she was halfway across the street before she knew she’d given into her impulse, and then she began to hurry so that she’d have as much time as possible to read. She was almost there—twenty feet, fifteen—when she saw one of her mother’s friends from the Chinese Hospital, Mrs. Mok, hurrying toward the drug store. She had an anxious scowl on her face, and she pulled open the door to Thrifty and plunged inside as if she too were racing against the clock. She hadn’t seen Lily.