Girl Through Glass Read Free Page A

Rachel.
    He laughs. “Okay, kid. Okay.” Something bright and bubbling passes between him and her mother. Abruptly, her mother puts the bag of nuts back in her purse and stands up. She shakes her head so that her hair moves over her shoulders. She moves her weight onto one hip. “We have to get on with our shopping mission.”
    He begins to move away. With a few furtive looks back, he moves into the shadow of the next building. Then her mother’s hand is on the back of her head, pushing Mira inside. At the counter, her mother mumbles something. An emergency . . . tow to the Bowery . . . Can you watch her for twenty minutes or so? The ladies seem to understand something in her voice. Not quite her Manhattan voice. Not quite her Brooklyn voice. Something low and rolling behind the high, strained notes. The shop lady nods. As Mira climbs up on a rickety stool the shop lady has gestured toward, she knows there is no emergency. They took the subway here. Rachel’s eyes brush over Mira with an unseeing look, and, cheeks blazing, she exits.
    Mira sees through her sideways vision the man’s plaid coat disappear and she feels the rise of the familiar loneliness of waiting, while the city rushes, clocks, and clatters all around her.
    Ever since she was little, Mira remembers the feeling: her mother would be there, and then suddenly not. Mom, she would call. And then her mom would appear from another part of the house, or another part of a store, or even where she had vanished moments before from a crowded sidewalk.
    Her mother always comes back from wherever she goes, her voice, no longer fraught and high, but low and Brooklyn, full of salt and tide. Mira’s job is just to wait.
    On the subway ride home, amid the rhythmic clatter of the train, Mira looks up at her mother. “Do you and Dad love each other?” she asks.
    Her mother looks at her daughter, her daughter who, to her secret pride, is another version of her. Pale skin, freckles, hair the color of carrots simmered too long in broth.
    â€œOf course.”
    â€œWhat’s the difference between being in love and loving each other?” Mira’s voice is becoming higher, more anxious.
    Her mother sighs. “Being in love is like falling off a cliff. Being in love is like flying—or falling. All you feel is the wind around you.” She adds: “Loving someone is something you can feel along with lots of other feelings.”
    â€œCan you hate and love someone at the same time?”
    â€œWell, yes, I think you can. Yeah, I definitely think you can.”
    â€œDo you sometimes hate Dad?”
    â€œOf course not. Why would you ask that?”
    The train clatters and bangs in the tunnel under the water toward Brooklyn. When the train squeals into their station, they gather their bags and get off.
    They turn down Clark Street. They pass stores whose front windows are still shattered. Tape covers the web of cracks at the florist shop. A board covers the front of the shoe repair shop. A lightning strike to a power generator, they said. Act of god, they called it. But the fires and broken windows were not caused by god.
    They pass in front of the giant old hotel where old men gather pushing shopping carts stuffed with their belongings. Her father tells her to ignore these men, they are tenants who in time will be replaced , but her mother always greets them. “Evening, captains,” she says in her Brooklyn voice. The men show grins of missing teeth.
    A cool gust of wind blows in from the harbor. It is a clear evening, with darkness spreading across the sky.
    â€œI hope Dad is home,” Mira says. The shreds of a sunset hang over lower Manhattan, behind the lit-up jigsaw of buildings. An eerie silence comes over the city, as if it remembers how it is to be naked in the night.
    But her father is not home.
    â€œMaybe he’s just late,” says her mother, but her voice is low and unsure. Her Brooklyn voice.