Actually, it was worse than that. She’d felt glass-encased, as though everyone around her was part of this city, part of this world, and she was just gliding through it, untouchable and untouched.
She’d felt as though she would never be able to belong here.
“So what do you see?” Ben asked.
“Water.” It was flat and deep blue, the islands plunked on top of it as if on display.
“And?” He pointed across the water to the tall buildings.
“Jersey City?”
“Yep. And if you took a boat up that way, you’d be between Jersey and Manhattan, which makes it what river?”
“The Hudson,” she said dutifully.
“And out that way?”
A garbled announcement came over the loudspeakers, barely audible over the boat’s rumbling diesel engine and the excited chatter of the three Japanese kids to their left.
“Staten Island?”
“Yeah, smart-ass, what else?”
“Ellis Island, Statue of Liberty, Liberty Island, and—” She pointed toward the front of the boat. “—Governor’s Island, straight ahead.”
“You did your homework last time.”
“I’m a good student.”
“I bet.”
He smiled a little, and she smiled back.
She didn’t actually feel like needling him. Not if he would smile at her instead. His smile turned him into a different man—turned this ferry trip into something other than what it had been the first time. Probably it didn’t hurt that she was walking around in a cloud of mixed-up, anticipatory excitement, but she didn’t feel excluded this morning. She had her own bubble, with Ben.
Maybe all she’d needed was a friend. An ally.
Maybe she’d just been doing it wrong.
The boat pulled away from the dock. It was a little too cold, the breeze off the water stiff, but it felt good against her face. She inhabited her own body today, as though the pinball and the dancing and those minutes up against a brick wall with Ben between her legs had somehow driven her soul into her fingertips and the balls of her feet, pushed her spirit along her nerve endings so that every step she took and every breath she sucked in testified to her aliveness.
The cold steel of the hull pushed through her jeans at the knee, and the scratchy wool of her sweater rested against her neck. Beside her, Ben’s forearms balanced on the railing, and she looked at the dark hair and his scarred knuckles. Beneath them, blood and veins, muscle and bone.
Alive. Real.
“So what’s the lesson here, tour guide?”
He shrugged and nudged her shoulder with his. “C’mere.” She stepped closer. He turned slightly, lining them up like sardines in a can, and she felt the faint pressure of his lips against her hair.
“Did you know there was a bomb on the ferry once?” he asked.
“That’s alarming.”
“Yeah, but it was a long time ago. Back in the sixties, I think. And then later, some guy with a machete hacked up a bunch of passengers.”
“Okay, that’s just gruesome.”
“Sorry. I read an article about the ferry a couple years ago. There was an accident, and that gave them a reason to write about all these other big accidents. About ten years ago, the pilot conked out at the wheel and ran into the pier on the Staten Island side. A huge slab of concrete ripped the hull and killed something like a dozen people.”
“I can’t imagine why you think this is good tour-guide info.”
“They’ve been running this ferry a long time. Every hour or half hour, day in and day out. Bad shit’s bound to happen sooner or later.”
“But I don’t need to hear about it. Tell me something pleasant.”
“Pleasant, huh?” His palms rested on the inside of her arms. She closed her eyes for a moment, awash in the simple pleasure of being touched.
“Did you know the ferry evacuated thousands of people on 9/11?” he asked. “They just came pouring from Lower Manhattan, trying to get off the island. And the boats went back and forth, back and forth, taking people to safety. Then the military took it over for a little while. They had tanks on here, if you can believe that.”
Soldiers in uniform, guns and helmets, smoke and panic.
They pulled closer to Ellis Island, and the Statue of Liberty came into clear view. The Swedish volleyball girls smiled and posed for pictures. May imagined the ferry crammed with people, coughing and afraid.
“That’s not pleasant.”
“There’s a reason I spend most of my time socializing with bees.”
But she could hear the smile in his voice. He dropped one arm to wrap around her stomach, a band of steel beneath her breasts, and pointed with the other back toward Jersey City. “You know a lot of the Wall Street banks moved over there after 9/11? Most of those buildings are new, and the workers are over there now, even though the banks kept their Wall Street addresses.”