Olivia takes a sip of her drink and holds the lime in her teeth, pain shooting from the cold. A lime tree, Delan used to say. For our gin and tonics. Why don’t we have a lime tree?
“I’m getting a lime tree.”
Rebecca nods. “He’ll love that. All his gin and tonics.”
The moon above seems alone in the night, center stage in a cloudless sky. The same moon he would’ve seen. Something about that makes everything worse, that they can be so connected and yet so apart, and so she looks away, back to their bare feet on the porch railing. Her toenail polish is chipped and dull. Meanwhile, Rebecca’s is the perfect shining red of an apple meant to tempt. You want this? Rebecca asked the other day, when Olivia walked in on her painting her nails at the coffee table. It wouldn’t be the worst thing to go out, you know, she added. A drink maybe. Want to? And so Olivia spent ten minutes staring into her closet as if reading a book that had slid into a different language. The suede patchwork miniskirt that used to be a constant familiar no longer made sense. Her wants and needs had changed, she realized. Going out was no longer about catching eyes and trying to outshine others at a bar but about being happy and maybe forgetting and coming back whole and in one piece. So she grabbed her jeans and a clean T-shirt and knew that the least she could do was paint her nails, but she couldn’t. What she had on was the orange polish that she couldn’t bear to wipe away, the last bit of the trip upon her. The last touch of before. Already a light bulb burned out in their kitchen, and changing it felt like a horrible admission. He is not here, but life goes on.
Again the dream. Again her back burns, the film below her on fire. When she wakes, she stares into the dark of her room and adds to a list she’s started in her mind of all the reasons that Lailan will be okay, a list of what is good, because too often, Olivia thinks only of the bad. The land where Lailan lives is wild with beauty. Fruit tastes better there than it does here. There’s a connection to the past, to the start of the world, and the very ground is soaked in history. People are friendly and neighbors wave to one another and call each other by name, and one person’s tragedy belongs to all. Bright dresses and blue skies. Nights on a roof with a ceiling of stars. She is okay, Olivia tells herself, but still there is the fact that Lailan was born in a land wedged between people who want her gone, and with this, the girl’s very existence falters with uncertainty.
In the morning, a heavy mist hangs in the front yard. Windshields obscured. Lawns silvered. Through it all, she spots a rose. One tall, bright-yellow rose in the neighbor’s yard: the rosebush she thought was dead. The one Soran promised her was still alive. Leaves are full upon it and new branches have shot out—it must’ve grown two or three feet and yet she’d not even noticed.
You will have a rose to look at. And me to think of.
Tonight, she decides. Tonight she’ll develop and print the film. Face whatever it is her subconscious needs her to face. But she thinks of how her hands shook when she took the photos. How sick she’d felt, unable to even look up. And that was when she believed the person a stranger. Now it will be worse, and there is only one chance with this film and many ways she could destroy it. Break down at the wrong moment and the images would be gone.
She slides the box from under her bed. Inside is the canister. With her fingertip, she feels its warning dent, then slips it in her pocket.
At work, the bullpen is a mass of ringing phones, slamming file cabinets, and rushing steps. Now and then, she catches Peter Darrow on the upper landing, talking with another editor and pacing with his hockey stick on his shoulders, a frightening, hulking presence with his arms spread out. When she finds an excuse to go upstairs, she passes his office but sees him on the phone and so keeps walking, relieved. Maybe it won’t be today, she thinks. But on her way back, he’s done—the time is now. Still, she keeps walking to the stairs and is halfway down when she sees her boss hovering by her desk. With that, she stops and quickly turns around.
Peter Darrow looks up when she knocks, spotting her through the glass. “Enter. Please.”
Inside his office, she holds out the film canister. “I can’t do it. But I want it done. And not messed up by Fotomat or someone else.”
He takes the canister. “Got it. Won’t mess it up.”
She nods.
As she starts to leave, he holds up his hand. “Wait. I’ll fight for you. I don’t know if it makes it better or worse to know that.”
“Better,” she says. “Always better.”
The sky is leaking blue, settling into a white blind of heat when she gets home, her car stifling even with the windows down. An early heat this year. A taste of a ruthless summer. The threat of what’s to come matches the worry she feels about the film, about everything. Trying not to think, she peels her legs off the seat and gets out of the car. There, by the back steps, is a lime tree in a black container.
Rebecca sees her enter the living room and raises a glass of wine. “Did you see? That’s for you. And him. Win or lose, ‘you have it, you know.’ What’s wrong?”
“Anxious. Can’t talk about it.”
“Then don’t,” she says and nods to the spot on the couch opposite her. “I might
