The Distance Between Us (28 page)
Read The Distance Between Us Online
Authors: Masha Hamilton
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #War & Military
She knows what she wants, then, and it surprises her. She wants it slowly, with her eyes open this time. She steps closer to him. She moves her hands to his neck, his shoulders. Then she stops, suddenly awkward in an unfamiliar way. Stingingly self-conscious, and aware that she’s grown so far from the relative purity of that girl in the cornfields.
He takes her hands and shifts her chin so she has to look at him directly. She would rather twist away, but she knows the moment requires full clarity.
He puts his head to one side and with this gesture, she sees Marcus. Marcus: in Goronsky’s posture. Marcus: in the breeziness of his expression as he observes her.
It sucks away her breath.
They are standing in a wash of pale sunlight that pierces the window, and Goronsky reaches to lace his fingers through her hair—exactly like Marcus. She begins searching him rapidly then. Touching his cheeks, his chest. In answer to her urgency, he is measured. Unhurriedly, he presses the warmth of his palm against first one part of her, then another, as if memorizing the diagram of her body. Each hollow, every muscle, the solidity of each bone. This surprises her. This is not Marcus. In fact, she’s never been so traversed.
Maybe his deliberateness is what does it, what finally stills the racket within her. That internal hurtling noise that has, for weeks, surfaced and submerged and surfaced again. The turbulence of some gigantic machine careening forward at reckless, pointless speed. It’s been there constantly, though she’s pretended not to hear it. Now it dies down, and then out. Spent.
At last, she can hear everything else. The gathering of his breath. The percussion of her heart. The humming of his flesh against hers.
She turns her attention to his forehead, his shoulders and chest: the solid bits that conceal the fragments within. He bends to her, cups her breast. His gesture holds sorrow, as though they were mourning together.
Above them, she hears the deep reverberation of a fighter
jet. More retribution to be taken, more to be earned. And then the vibration vanishes.
She pulls him toward her—or does he pull her? She cannot tell anymore to whom each movement belongs. Who grasps, who clings, who enters or is entered.
When she finally emerges, her cheeks are damp and this man she is with is wholly Goronsky in scent and shape and spirit. Marcus is gone. She knows with an inner certainty, a return of intuition, that this time it is absolute. There will be no more temporary reprieves. No journals in the mail, no hint of Marcus’s voice in her ear. She feels that loss in her throat, but it is lacking the sharp edge of despair. “Cheers ciao au revoir,” she says softly.
She tries to pull away. Goronsky won’t let her. He is holding her palm to the light, studying the lines there. “We still have fifteen minutes,” he says. “Thank God for a delayed flight.”
“Goronsky.” She leans on an elbow. “I’m not going.”
As soon as she says it, she’s relieved. And disappointed. He stares at her. He opens his mouth but doesn’t speak. For a breath, his eyes are completely naked. Then he rolls on his back and stares up at the ceiling. “I knew that.”
“You couldn’t—” She takes a breath. “You couldn’t have known.” She didn’t know herself until moments ago.
“You didn’t bring anything except your backpack.”
He’s right, Caddie realizes. She’s left her bag at home.
“You’re more transparent than you realize,” Goronsky says.
She sits up. “You’ve always recognized me.”
He turns his back to her, his face toward the window. “The first time . . .”
“At the hospital.”
He shakes his head. “Maybe a month before that. You were interviewing Palestinians at a checkpoint. You were with the photographer. I watched for a few minutes. You were serious, and then you were laughing.”
“Marcus always laughed.”
“You, too.” He rolls on his side, facing her. “It was clear that you belonged—the way you stood, the expression on your face. That’s what I wanted. That’s why it stuck with me.”
She takes his face between her hands.
“And so?” he asks.
She gestures with her head toward the door.
He pulls away from her. “It’s a mistake,” he says. “There’s something between us. Something that doesn’t fit into words. A tiny plant that might grow into a tree, if we water it.”
“You’ve gone places,” she says, “I don’t want to go. Not anymore.”
“I can come back from there, Caddie.”
She sees herself reflected in his eyes. “When you get back,” she whispers, “call me.”
He looks away. And, looking away, he nods.
T
HE AIR FEELS CLAMMY
as she walks down the Mount of Olives past scattered graves, stones the color of skin and blood, twisted olive trees hundreds of years old. At a distance,
soaring edifices bear down on squat ones; flat rooftops press against domes. A few buildings lean apart, allowing others to be wedged between them, as messy as love triangles. The sky is brooding, but a momentary shaft of sun breaks through to illuminate the golden dome of Al Aqsa Mosque. Church bells from the Basilica of the Agony overtake the hush of Kidron Valley. The resonance brushes her face, then floats away on an indiscernible breeze, like soap bubbles.
The bells. They will be first on her list of grounds for refusing New York. Not the bells alone, but the intoxicating brew of their peals merging with the cadenced Moslem calls to prayer and the guttural allure of Hebrew. Another reason: those voices she’s now ready to fully hear. The Sarahs, the Halimas. The Marcuses. A third: the flawed words themselves. The words that show how violence manipulates and corrupts and finally transforms. The words she hasn’t written yet, but will. She will. Maybe even today, after she visits the mourning house.
She has, after all, a survivor’s pact with this land: both are tainted now, but both will endure. That’s the payback—and the revenge. She’ll find a different way to explain it to Mike, though. Something cleaner, more straightforward. There are, she’ll say, two types of people. There are those who leave, and those who stay.
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