“You’re going to be a good mom,” I say. “A great one, even. You already are.”
“That’s not true,” she says.
“It is,” I say.
Carol straightens up. She wipes her eyes. “How could you possibly know that?” she asks me.
And then she meets my gaze, and when she does, it’s like she knows. For just a beat, a breath, a millisecond. She sees. I’m certain of it. There our life is, caught between us. All the love and pain and connection. All the impossibility of her loss and what remains. Everything, in the space between us. Then:
“I’m sorry. I’m a mess. And I’m going to be late for the Sirenuse pitch if I don’t get going. They were really clear that they have a tight schedule today, and I’ve been going over it for days. I can’t miss it.”
“That’s today?”
Something twists in my stomach.
“Yes,” she says. “I was just trying to clear my head a little before and then—”
“Who are you meeting with?” I ask her.
She stands up. She brushes some dirt off the skirt of her dress. Her eyes squint into the sun.
“A developer this time,” she says. “I think his name is Adam.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I leave Carol and dash down the stairs to the hotel. Nika is at the desk, and I go up to her, gulping air. “Have you seen Adam?” I ask her.
“He just left,” she says. “Is everything all right, Ms. Silver?”
“Nika,” I start. I want to know, but I also don’t. I’m terrified, and yet I need an answer. I need one now. “What year is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“What is the year? Right now?”
She laughs. I feel her casual, befuddled amusement. “Nineteen ninety-two,” she says. “Last time I looked.”
I feel a rush of cold air across my skin. This whole time.
I’m not finding my mother’s world when she finds me; I’ve dropped into hers. Adam, Nika, Marco. They all belong to the past.
I dissolve into a chair by the desk. I sink my head down into my hands.
“Ms. Silver,” Nika says. “What is wrong? What is happening?”
I do not know. I do not know where to begin. My mother died, and she left me with no instructions. Nothing on how to live or who to be in her absence. Now she’s here, and she wants to stay. Oh, and last night I slept with a guy who isn’t my husband, thirty years ago. What isn’t wrong?
“Nothing,” I say. “Nothing. Everything is fine.”
“Okay…” Then Nika holds up her hand like she’s just remembered something. She disappears in the back and returns a moment later holding a letter. “This was returned,” she says. “Your friend Carol mailed it a few weeks ago, but it came back.”
I see the stamp, the Los Angeles address.
“Will you give to her?”
Nika hands it to me, and I tuck it into my shirt. “Yes, absolutely. Thank you, Nika.”
I turn and walk up the stairs, take the elevator, and arrive at room 33. I put the letter down on the bed. I take a shower. I go through the motions of this day. The utter incomprehensibility of everything that has happened, is happening.
I put on a dress; I brush out my wet hair. I think about Carol, right now, getting ready for this meeting. I don’t know if she heard me on the path. I don’t know if I got through to her.
I take out some sandals. The ones I bought at the Century City mall with my mother two Augusts ago during an end-of-summer sale. I didn’t like them. I still don’t. Why did we buy them then? Why did I bring them? They’re my shoes. They’re my feet.
So I don’t put them on. Instead, I put on a pair of white flats. I take a look at myself in the mirror. I’m tanned, freckled—rosy, even. There is no other way to put it: I look healthy. It’s startling after so many months of sunken, hollow skin.
I take my room key and then head back downstairs. I have to go intercept that meeting. I have to make sure Carol understands. She cannot stay here. This is not the life she is meant for. She cannot take this job, and they cannot offer it to her.
I have realized, between the time I left Carol at her door and right now, walking the stairs back down to the lobby, something important. Something obvious. The truth of why I have come and why I have found her here. My mission—to send her home.
“Listen,” I say to Nika when I’m back at the desk. “I need you to do something for me. It’s really important.”