Her gray eyes, on mine, were clear and cool. “Thank you so much, Mrs. Barbour,” I said. “For everything. Tell Andy I said goodbye.”
“Certainly I will,” she said. “You were an awfully good guest, Theo.” Out in the steamy morning heat haze on Park Avenue, I stood holding her hand for a moment longer—slightly hoping that she would tell me to get in touch with her if I needed anything—but she only said, “Good luck, then,” and gave me another cool little kiss before she pulled away.
iii.
I COULDN’T QUITE FATHOM that I was leaving New York. I’d never been out of the city in my life longer than eight days. On the way to the airport, staring out the window at billboards for strip clubs and personal-injury lawyers that I wasn’t likely to see for a while, a chilling thought settled over me. What about the security check? I hadn’t flown much (only twice, once when I was in kindergarten) and I wasn’t even sure what a security check involved: x-rays? A luggage search?
“Do they open up everything in the airport?” I asked, in a timid voice—and then asked again, because nobody seemed to hear me. I was sitting in the front seat in order to ensure Dad and Xandra’s romantic privacy.
“Oh, sure,” said the cab driver. He was a beefy, big-shouldered Soviet: coarse features, sweaty red-apple cheeks, like a weightlifter gone to fat. “And if they don’t open, they x-ray.”
“Even if I check it?”
“Oh, yes,” he said reassuringly. “They are wiping for explosives, everything. Very safe.”
“But—” I tried to think of some way to formulate what I needed to ask, without betraying myself, and couldn’t.
“Not to worry,” said the driver. “Lots of police at airport. And three-four days ago? Roadblocks.”
“Well, all I can say is, I can’t fucking wait to get out of here,” Xandra said in her husky voice. For a perplexed moment, I thought she was talking to me, but when I looked back, she was turned toward my father.
My dad put his hand on her knee and said something too low for me to hear. He was wearing his tinted glasses, leaning with his head lolled back on the rear seat, and there was something loose and young-sounding in the flatness of his voice, the secret something that passed between them as he squeezed Xandra’s knee. I turned away from them and looked out at the no-man’s-land rushing past: long low buildings, bodegas and body shops, car lots simmering in the morning heat.
“See, I don’t mind sevens in the flight number,” Xandra was saying quietly. “It’s eights freak me out.”
“Yeah, but eight’s a lucky number in China. Take a look at the international board when we get to McCarran. All the incoming flights from Beijing? Eight eight eight.”
“You and your Wisdom of the Chinese.”
“Number pattern. It’s all energy. Meeting of heaven and earth.”
“ ‘Heaven and earth.’ You make it sound like magic.”
“It is.”
“Oh yeah?”
They were whispering. In the rear view mirror, their faces were goofy, and too close together; when I realized they were about to kiss (something that still shocked me, no matter how often I saw them do it), I turned to stare straight ahead. It occurred to me that if I didn’t already know how my mother had died, no power on earth could have convinced me they hadn’t murdered her.
iv.
WHILE WE WERE WAITING to get our boarding passes I was stiff with fear, fully expecting Security to open my suitcase and discover the painting right then, in the check-in line. But the grumpy woman with the shag haircut whose face I still remember (I’d been praying we wouldn’t have to go to her when it was our turn) hoisted my suitcase on the belt with hardly a glance.
As I watched it wobble away, towards personnel and procedures unknown, I felt closed-in and terrified in the bright press of strangers—conspicuous too, as if everyone was staring at me. I hadn’t been in such a dense mob or seen so many cops in one place since the day my mother died. National Guardsmen with rifles stood by the metal detectors, steady in fatigue gear, cold eyes passing over the crowd.
Backpacks, briefcases, shopping bags and strollers, heads bobbing down the terminal as far as I could see. Shuffling through the security line, I heard a shout—of my name, as I thought. I froze.
“Come on, come on,” said my dad, hopping behind me on one foot, trying to get his loafer off, elbowing me in the back, “don’t just stand there, you’re holding up the whole damn line—”
Going through the metal detector, I kept my eyes on the carpet—rigid with fear, expecting any moment a hand to fall on my shoulder. Babies cried. Old people puttered by in motorized carts. What would they do to me? Could I make them understand it wasn’t quite how it looked? I imagined some cinder-block room like in the movies, slammed doors, angry cops in shirtsleeves, forget about it, you’re not going anywhere, kid.