It was Whitney’s turn to sit quiet. She gave him everything she had.
“During those stretches, though, the one thing I could fixate on when I wasn’t on the court was getting back home for summer. To the swimming pool in the back, to the concrete court off the yard where my brothers and sister and I played two-on-two everything you can think of.…It’s always been about my brothers and sister and mom and dad. When we would fly somewhere, it would have to be all of us on board, or max two of us together. So that if the plane went down, no one would be left all alone. It was always that sort of thing, those sorts of considerations. So, yeah, just getting back home, to that house, to that block. They pave the streets with bricks there. Wide sidewalks with cracks from tree roots. Streetlamps. Big old elms on both sides of the block, and branches that meet in the middle of the street like the roof of a church or something.”
“There’s the good Catholic bringing everything back to…” she said.
He smiled. “That’s what I’d think about when I was feeling sick, when I couldn’t get myself out of bed in Norway…those trees in summer. The heat coming up, the trees buzzing. For weeks with the team, I’d throw up I ached so bad. But then I’d get home and everything would just settle again. Even Christmas worked. The week off at the holidays. The snow piled up in the gutters. The way—I don’t know what the word is, but the way I used to tell my mom that the smell of the snow had different colors: green and black and blue. The blue snow compacted in the yard.”
She’d taken a seat on the couch, wrapped tightly in her robe, listening close, watching him melt into the bent shape of a child.
“Blue,” she said. “I love that. Reminds me of visiting my grandparents in Colorado. That clean cold like we never got at home. Blue cold.”
“So, anyway, I love it there,” he said. “I’m just afraid, I guess. It’s dumb. But I really am afraid that I’ll get back tomorrow, and just never leave again for the rest of my life.”
“But that doesn’t have to be the—” Whitney started.
“I’ve been away six years and coming back without knowing any fucking thing. Here I am at the end of this whole time away and I’m returning with what, exactly?”
“Well, at least you know what you don’t know,” she said. “And so what? It’s the same for literally everyone. I thought I knew some things, and now every day the universe informs me that I don’t. That’s how it’s apparently gonna go from here on out. You’re still trying to decide what kind of person you want to be? Okay. Welcome to the club.”
Her face went a little haywire, a jolt of recognition, having heard herself say it. She watched his face react, and then he said it back to her: “Right. Exactly. I’m still figuring out what kind of person I want to be…”
“But before we get too squishy,” she said, “I just want to point out that when you had me on your block, outside your house, that was good. That was the establishment of a world—of a very specific, emotional place for you. You have this place, and it punches you in the chest. You’ve got a house on this block in a town where the weather rolls around. You’ve got something you love, but something you maybe yearn for beyond it. That’s the first five seconds of a movie, right? Maybe that’s something that could be useful to you. That set of images to open on. So: now what?”
He was biting his nails, something she hadn’t seen him do before. His legs were slung out in front of him.
“Now what?” he said.
“Now what?” Whitney said, smiling stupidly at her dumb repetition, and she felt herself drawing in slightly to his sprawling roots of bone and muscle and skin and hair. She wasn’t wearing anything beneath her robe and her mind began to fixate on the ease with which she could drop the robe to the floor. Some decisions require patience and care and an order of operations. Others require nothing but the act itself. It could be achieved in the simultaneous snap of her shoulders, arms, and hands. A choice could be deliberately plotted or reckless—the point was she was in control of it.
“Now what,” he said, “is I’m gonna hop in the shower.” He stood. “You can throw your clothes in the dryer down the hall, if you want. Mine have been in for five minutes, or however long I’ve been blabbing. But shouldn’t be a problem to drop yours in now, too.”
“Great,” she said, and smiled through the pinkness of her cheeks, the steam still in her face, the tension between a decision and a not-decision still taut in her mouth.
“Make yourself at home,” he said, before disappearing into the bathroom.
She put her clothes in the dryer and then walked in tight lines around the parts of the apartment she could see from the living room, never veering too close to a wall or a closet door or anything that might be disturbed or intruded upon. The window curtains on the far side of the living room were drawn and she pulled them aside to peek at the view.
They were on the eighteenth floor. The apartment had an unobstructed look out onto the Mediterranean. Below them, to the right, were the residential buildings of Barceloneta. Way out on the promontory was the hotel where she’d holed up that morning. Farther still was the considerable altitude of Montjuïc, and the Miró museum. Directly in front of her was that stroke of beach and palm trees they’d walked through that first night together a million years ago on their way to and from the club.
The city was
