They were all still vulnerable to each other, still recovering from the events of the spring. Kreindel had made no secret of her night-time trips to the attic, nor did she even try. Rightly or wrongly, the girl had insisted that since her new landlady knew all of Kreindel’s innermost fears and desires, she was entitled to know the Golem’s in return. The resulting conversations had made the Golem feel as though she were spreading out her life upon a butcher’s counter, pointing out the choicest bits. Now there was little that Kreindel didn’t know about her. She supposed that to ask for her locket back would be beside the point: with or without it, Kreindel held her life in her hands.
She finished the salad, covered it with waxed paper, and put it in the refrigerator, then fetched her wicker basket and went out to the garden.
After a summer of enjoyable toil, the once-neglected kitchen garden was now twice as large as before. She made the rounds of the beds, filling her basket with ripe tomatoes and eggplants, fragrant basil, bell peppers and summer squash. The harvest was far too much for their small household; she would send much of it home with Toby, along with challah and stuffed cabbage rolls and jars of borscht.
She pulled a few weeds, then paused with her fingertips in the earth, feeling the life that traveled from the soil into the roots. Yossele was here, buried among the beds, his clay strengthening the Brooklyn loam. Sometimes, working in the garden, she’d turn over a fragrant spadeful of dirt and be transported back to the Asylum basement, and the bliss of their connection. Sometimes, she wondered if she’d broken her promise just as much as the Jinni had. Or perhaps I will have only you had been entirely the wrong promise to make.
I love you. She’d never said that to him, not once. They’d traded so many words in their countless arguments that it was hard to believe one small phrase, not even a breath’s worth, might’ve changed matters. Perhaps it was the only thing that could have.
In the kitchen, she chopped the tomatoes and basil, sliced and salted the eggplant. There was ground sirloin in the refrigerator, and homemade pappardelle drying over a wooden dowel. She finished the preparations quickly—she could work as quickly as she liked now—and put it all away for later, then untied her apron and went out back again, past the garden, to the newly renovated carriage-house behind it.
The carriage-house was hers alone. Downstairs was her sitting room, with a fireplace for the winter evenings. Upstairs, there was a small bedroom, used mainly for its wardrobe; a bathroom with a claw-foot tub deep enough to submerge herself completely; and a large, sunlit study with an old rolltop desk, newly sanded and refinished. She, like Kreindel, had begun to build a library, though her own was far more eclectic. Volumes of world history sat beside collections of folk-tales and fairy-stories. Investment books and housekeeping manuals kept company with travel memoirs, anthropology journals, and a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. There were myths in a dozen languages, and explorers’ dubious accounts of tribal superstitions and unexplained events. Her vast, flawless memory absorbed each tale and snippet, looking for hints, matches, threads. It was her own vigil: she would keep watch, and find whomever she could, and offer help, if they wanted it.
She sat at Arbeely’s desk and reviewed the map spread before her, marked with arrows and X’s: the first on Ireland’s southern coast, then Southampton, Casablanca, Fès, and Algiers. She traced her finger past the X at Algiers, to Tripoli, Alexandria, Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus. She stays near the cities now, Sophia had told her the last time they spoke. She doesn’t want to admit it, but she’s less lonely when she can hear human voices. How long would it take the jinniyeh to reach Palmyra? the Golem wondered. Might she have changed, by then, into someone who could accept the company of those unlike herself? Despite all that had happened, all the various wounds the jinniyeh had inflicted, the Golem hoped that she’d consent to become an ally someday, if not a friend. And for good or ill, even if she wanted nothing to do with any of them, she’d never be truly alone.
* * *
On a bright September morning, the Golem took the subway to Union Square and walked to a hotel on the corner of 15th Street. She counted the windows—over, up—and found the one she was looking for, then stood beneath it on the sidewalk, beside a lamp-post. She gazed around while she waited, taking in the theater marquees, the fashionable crowd. The balmy weather felt like summer’s last gift before the arrival of autumn. She’d sensed it on the subway ride: the ground drawing into itself, banking its warmth.
She didn’t have to wait long before the Jinni emerged from the lobby door and came to where she stood. He wore a new suit in navy pinstripe, and carried a suitcase in his hand. After a moment’s pause, he offered her his arm: a formal gesture, almost shy. She took it, feeling a pang at the hint of distance. She wanted to object, to descend with him into the subway, to take him back to Brooklyn and her carriage-house—to hoard time with him against his absence, enough for a night, a week, a year. But this walk together was what they’d agreed to instead.
They said little as they went north along Broadway, side by side. They passed Madison Square Park, and the Jinni realized he was trying to look at each statue and elm tree and bend of the skyline, storing the sights like rare riches. He wondered when he’d see
