“It’s you.” She finds her voice finally, but it’s dreamy. She sounds awed, wonderstruck, but I know it must be something else.
“It is?” he asks.
“Come in,” she says, still dreamy, like she can’t believe it. “Come in.”
He wipes his feet, but it’s only a gesture because he’s dripping all over the entryway. He looks all around at everything except for me. And there’s not a whole lot else to look at. Books everywhere. A scratched kitchen table, mismatched chairs. At the moment, and most moments, the kitchen is buried beneath a mudslide of dirty mixing bowls, baking pans, wooden spoons, and measuring cups, plus the pastry knives, flour sifters, whisks, and rolling pins which mostly just stay out for there’s no place to put them away because the cabinets are full of books. But beneath all that, somehow, you can still make out stained countertops, cheap linoleum, cabinets without handles, drawers without pulls. Through the doorway into the living room, there’s matted, worn carpet the uneven but unrelenting gray of winter skies, a faded sofa roughly the same non-color, an upturned packing crate masquerading （unconvincingly） as a coffee table, Monday’s lumpy yellow recliner, which hasn’t reclined in years, leaking stuffing onto a pile of romance novels. There’s a fat old TV on top of the plywood bureau that holds Nora’s clothes right there in the living room since it doesn’t fit upstairs. Our house smells like a bakery but looks like a thrift shop. We have none of the grandeur of the library, none of the glory or the soaring space, none of what his family must have with which to fill it either. Only the books. And here, they are out of place.
And then Nora finds her real voice, her sense, her purpose at last. “River, is it?”
He nods, dripping sheepishly.
“Tell me this, River,” and I brace myself, but instead she says, “Are you hungry?”
* * *
The promise of cake lures Monday out of her corner, the promise of drama Mab from our room. I am parked at the head of the table like a queen. The middle is piled with rainy-day baked goods: zucchini muffins, crème de menthe brownies, and a red velvet cake dyed green instead. There’s coffee, and Nora’s poured some for everyone then opened another bottle of water to make more when she sees River blanch.
“Oh, sorry,” Nora says when she takes in his face. “Do you not drink coffee?”
“I’m sixteen,” he says.
“Can I pour you a glass of milk,” she offers solicitously, “or make you some cocoa?”
Mab smirks at him over the rim of her mug, but I can see her considering whether she’s cool and he’s childish, or if it turns out sixteen-year-olds who drink black drip are yet another Bourne anomaly and she just never knew.
I sip mine through a straw from a cup gripped by a snaking hose clamped onto the side of my chair.
River tries not to stare at me.
I try not to stare at River. But not that hard.
“So, River, what brings you here?” Nora is not used to guests, but somehow she knows what to say anyway.
“She left screaming”—River points at Monday—“so I thought I should check if she was okay.”
“Thought you should, huh?” says Nora.
He nods and looks at his plate of baked goods, says nothing.
“She’s fine,” Nora says lightly, as if worry over someone who had to be bodily removed shrieking from his home makes him something of a fussbudget. “She’s just—”
“How did you find us?” Mab interrupts.
“I asked at the laundromat. It was the only place open.”
“Lots of downtown’s closed these days,” Nora muses, as if idly.
“I asked the guy at the counter—”
“Rich,” Nora puts in helpfully.
“—if he knew where two sisters named Mab and Monday lived.” He looks pleased with himself for this bit of sleuthing. It seems not to have occurred to him that I must be a sister as well. “I felt bad because my parents can be kind of … off-putting.”
“You don’t say.” Nora is expending so much energy on her nonchalance, I expect her to collapse from the strain.
“And I don’t know anyone here, so…”
He trails off, and I wish he wouldn’t. I want to know what he intended to say. So I’m settling for the two of you? So I’m really invested in our quarter-hour of friendship so far? So even though we’ve barely met, running through the rain as if at the climax of the kind of TV movies that air Sunday afternoons seemed the way to go?