She watched Ansel pick through the brambles, so studious and intent, and she thought how sad it was that a single bad thing could turn you into a story, a matter to be whispered about. Tragedy was undiscerning and totally unfair. Saffy certainly understood that.
*
That night, Saffy watched him all through dinner. Thirty-second intervals, so no one could accuse her of staring. If Ansel winked again, Saffy missed it, her gaze trained on her mashed potatoes as she counted down from twenty-nine.
When everyone gathered around the television for the eight o’clock episode of Family Ties, Saffy stole down to the basement. Her chest was heavy with disappointment, and the basement felt like the right place to be, all concrete and spiders and randomly strewn carpet squares. Miss Gemma kept a dusty record player down there, along with a cardboard box of albums. Saffy liked to sift through them, to study the photographs on the covers. Joni Mitchell had such an inviting gaze—Saffy had practiced that expression in the mirror, but it never looked the same.
“Hey.”
It was Ansel.
He stood at the base of the stairs, half in shadow. His hands were stuffed in the pockets of his corduroys, shoulders hunched self-conscious.
“Can I take a look?” he asked.
Then Ansel was beside her, flipping through the box. Saffy studied his fingers as they flitted past ABBA, Elton John, Simon and Garfunkel. Ansel’s hands were too big for his body, the hands of a boy much older than eleven, like a puppy not yet grown into its paws.
“Have you heard this one?” Ansel asked, pulling a record from the stack. Nina Simone. Saffy let out a stupid, embarrassing squeak and shook her head no.
“Let’s sit,” Ansel said, gesturing to a clump of carpet squares on the floor. When he smiled, Saffy shivered. Once, Ansel had aimed this exact smile at Miss Gemma, who had blushed scarlet and pulled her bathrobe tighter—the girls made fun of Miss Gemma for days afterward.
When the music started, the feeling was uncanny. Saffy was certain she’d lived this moment before, in some other life, the song reaching through her chest to touch a place she’d somehow forgotten. Ansel lay down next to her, flat on his back. His shoulder was close to Saffy’s, and when she began to see stars, Saffy realized she was holding her breath. The song swelled, the singer rasped—I put a spell on you—and Saffy wished she could stop time right there, take a still shot and save it, just to prove it back to herself.
Then it was over. The record hummed a beat of silence before the next song started. Ansel did not move, so Saffy did not either. They lay there until the record had finished, until Saffy’s spine was sore against the hard, cold floor, until the bedtime bell rang, and the other kids’ feet pounded and thunked across the ceiling. None of it touched her, because she had this. It was magic. Maybe, even, it was love. Love was a thing that could move you and change you, Saffy knew, a mysterious force that made you different and better and warmer and whole. A delicious smell. Familiar, untraceable. It made her hungry.
*
Before Saffy’s mother died, she liked to talk about love.
Saffy’s favorite nights were those she’d spent sitting cross-legged in her mother’s closet, picking through floral hippie skirts from her mother’s time in Reno, pairing them with clunky jewelry. You’ll see, Saffy girl, her mother used to say. Real love is like fire.
Is that how you loved Dad? Saffy asked, tentative. Like fire?
Let me show you something, her mother had said, and she’d reached for a shoebox on the closet’s highest shelf.
Saffy wondered often about her father. He’d left them before Saffy was born, with nothing but his last name—Singh, a name the kids on the playground mocked in an accent they’d learned from taxi drivers on television. At the grocery store, people stared, as if Saffy could not possibly belong to her own blond mother. Her dad was from a city called Jaipur, and he lived there now, a fact she used to report proudly, until she realized it meant he had not loved her enough to stay.
Inside the dusty shoebox, there was a photograph. The only evidence Saffy had seen of her father’s real, tangible existence. He sat in a library, books splayed across the table in front of him. He was smiling, his hair proudly covered in a navy turban, which her mother explained was a part of his religion. In his gaze, Saffy saw herself for the first time, squinting back like a startle in the mirror.
Why did he leave? Saffy had asked, careful, like her mother was a bird she might frighten from a branch.
His family needed him back home.
But what about us?