Perhaps, she thought at her window, watching the rain. Perhaps.
At last, the rain ended.
That night, he arrived at her boardinghouse at their usual hour, and they walked north together in a charged silence. He could feel the barely perceptible mist that she always carried about herself, like the lightest touch upon his skin. And she wondered, had he always been so warm at her side, a heat that she could feel from an arm’s length away?
They entered the Park, and walked through the Ramble, quiet and alone, making only the most inconsequential of comments. I’ve never noticed that path before. Look, the hillside’s washed away. They followed the Gill to where it calmed and widened, and the Jinni wondered why, for what felt like the first time in his hundreds of years, he found it impossible merely to say what he wanted. “I’d expected the river to be higher, after so much rain,” he said instead, helpless, cursing himself.
“It’s controlled by an aqueduct,” she told him, “so the rain doesn’t affect it.”
“Oh,” he said, nonplussed. “I’d assumed it was real, and they built the park around it.”
She smiled at this. “Of course it’s real,” she said—and then, before he could protest, You know what I meant: “Here. I’ll show you.”
She unclasped her cloak, letting it fall to her feet. He nearly asked what she was doing—but lost his voice in surprise as her shirtwaist and skirt followed the cloak, and then shoes and stockings, too. Not once did she glance his way, only calmly rid herself of clothing, then walked down the bank and into the current, disappearing beneath the water.
For long moments he was alone. Dumbfounded, he glanced at the clothing that lay on the bank, as though to reassure himself that he hadn’t imagined it all—and then the Gill rippled as her head broke the surface. She emerged onto the bank, water running from her skin in rivulets as she came to stand before him. She didn’t smile, but her eyes were alight; her expression was one of challenge, and expectation.
He raised a hand, traced a finger along the edge of her cheek; the clinging droplets vanished into steam. “What would you ask of me, Chava?” he said quietly.
“A promise,” she told him, “that you will have only me.”
He realized he’d expected this; what surprised him was his willingness. “And you’d promise the same?”
“Yes.” A whisper.
“Then I will have only you,” he said.
“And I will have only you,” she replied.
They smiled at each other then, tentative, wondering at what they’d done. He took her hands—they were freezing cold—and drew her closer.
A few hours later, the Syrian boy who liked to wake early was once again on his rooftop, practicing his aim with a slingshot. He’d just brought down half a row of paper soldiers when he spied the couple walking toward him. He stopped to watch, wondering why there was something different about them this morning. Then he realized: they weren’t arguing. They seemed, in fact, almost shy with each other. He pretended to busy himself with his soldiers as the pair neared—then glanced up again as they passed, and saw that the woman’s cloak was dotted here and there with blades of grass and tiny twigs, as though it had been used as a blanket atop the ground.
The boy’s eyes widened as, once again, he reached the correct conclusion.
The woman paused suddenly, then turned back to peer at the boy, her expression a mix of embarrassment and incredulous exasperation. She muttered something to her companion; he chuckled, and she shushed him. Together they walked on, and reached the fire escape—and just before they descended from view, the man turned and gave the boy a quick, conspiratorial wink.
* * *
Spring became summer—and in July of 1901 the heat fell upon the city like a hammer.
Horses dropped dead in the streets. Ambulances raced from building to building, collecting the stricken. The city parks became haphazard dormitories as all searched for somewhere cool enough to sleep.
In a stifling basement room near the Bowery, a young washerwoman named Anna Blumberg tried to comfort her baby boy, Toby, without success. She had no pennies left for ice, not so much as a chip, and Toby’s cries were growing weaker. Anna, numb with fear, was about to seek out the building superintendent—he’d made his desires clear enough, and his willingness to pay—when a knock came at the door.
An iceman stood in the hall, water dripping from an enormous block on his shoulder. “You got an icebox?” he asked.
She stared at him dumbly.
“Look,” he said, impatient, “some lady give me five dollars to come here. You want the ice or not?”
The ice filled Anna’s icebox, and a washtub besides. Wrapped in cool flannels, Toby calmed and took the breast at last. “A tall girl, on Eldridge,” the iceman said when Anna asked, between sobs of relief, who’d paid for the miracle. “Didn’t say her name.”
But Anna knew. She’d known it even before she asked.
Little Syria at midday resembled an open-air hospital. Men sat half asleep beneath awnings and on shaded stoops, shifting by inches as the sun moved. By unspoken agreement the neighborhood mothers had done away with propriety, and now the children ran about in their underclothes, boys and girls alike. The offerings at the Faddouls’ had switched from coffee to seltzer, which Sayeed sold at a penny a glass while, in the nearby tenement halls, Maryam traveled from door to door, asking after the littlest children, the sick and the elderly. In her wake, those with ice to spare sent it down the hall to those without; impromptu meals, too, were organized to share what might otherwise spoil. Her rounds finished, she went down to the street, thinking to catch an ice-wagon on its next trip to the warehouse at Cortlandt. Perhaps she could convince the driver to come south—
“Careful,” called a man on a nearby stoop.
Maryam stopped, startled. The man pointed at the open door of Arbeely & Ahmad, All Metals,
