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Somehow, I don’t think that’ll
happen where you are. But it’s nice to think I see you!

I hope you’re doing well! Six
months won’t be so long, really, if we just take it
easy.

Sorry this is short, but I just got
back from work and you know how tired I am when I come
home.

More soon!

Love love love,

Mia

A dense cloud cover darkens the
stairwell and the automatic lights are hours from their timed
lighting, so the passageway is quiet, as if abandoned, and I feel
like a ghost or an intruder. Halfway to the ground-floor mailboxes,
I smell a thick spice, curry maybe, and something clanks behind
number three’s door—a spoon in a pot?—and then there is chopping,
chopping, something on a block, and humming that matches the smell
of whatever it is she’s cooking. And then there is
another—familiar—odor.

Just one would be all right. Just
one cigarette after all that writing, or to celebrate sleep, maybe.
I’ve been good, and a joint doesn’t count.

I knock on the door.

“One minute,” she says, and after a
second or two opens the door. Two brown braids, hanging from
underneath a yellow scarf tied around her head, fall just to her
shoulders. “My upstairs neighbor,” she sings, hands held in front
of her, palms up, touching nothing. Two cats, one black and one
gray, sit at her feet like statues with tails curled around their
hind legs. Behind her in the kitchen, a mosaic of foods in cubes on
the counter.

I sneeze from the curry.

The gray cat creeps toward the door
and she nudges it back with her foot. “I am Safia,” she
says.

“Mia.”

She waits and I stand in the
hallway. Cigarette smoke snakes through the air from somewhere
inside.

“Is there something…?”

“Oh, sorry,” I say. “I just—I was
making sure you had your cats. I was the one—”

“You knocked on my door!” She bends
to pet the black cat with her wrist. “Frankie. Always breaks
free!”

“Well—okay. I mean, good. Frankie is
here.”

“Yes,” she says, “but he gets no
more treats.” She stands again and waits again and sniffs and rubs
her wrist under her nose. She steps back and waves and says, “Thank
you,” and closes her door.

I take the stairs down and leave my
letter to Jake on the shelf for outgoing mail.

Back in my living room, the message
light blinks ‘1’.

Jake.

I sit at the desk, but I can’t, so I
stand, leaning close to the machine to miss nothing.

“Mia,” says the voice that isn’t
Jake’s. “Donny. Donaldson…You home? Issa weekend. Saturday. I need
a ride.” The sound of a lighter lighting, an inhale, an exhale. “I
don’t need a ride. . .Where are you?. . .I, uh…no one gave me your
number. I got it from the book. Remembered your name from that
card…You know, that…your ID, on the dashboard. Anyhow…I won’t call
again…But I wanted to tell you. Party tonight. You know where…Come
over. Bring friends…Or don’t. This is Donny. Bye.”

I press the delete button. It
doesn’t register. I push it again.

“To delete all messages, press the
‘delete’ button again.”

I press it again.

“All messages deleted.” A steady red
‘0’.

Something glimmers, sparkles, takes
my attention away from the desk. Balls. Four of them, silver,
dangle from stiff branches the color of rust. The rest have fallen.
Slipped off when dried needles snapped. Batted down by Chancey and
soccer-kicked around the apartment until they were lost to the dark
spaces under furniture. A single light strand droops between
boughs. The tree leans left and the skirt is a bundled mess of fake
velvet. Chancey sleeps curled around the stand.

Across town there is a party. A
strange house filled with strangers, secret smiles and private
jokes. No phone—not mine—to wait for, and watching TV would be
considered poor form.

I put on a different pair of jeans,
clean and smelling of a fabric softener, and brush my hair and draw
on a layer of lipstick. I look in the mirror and wipe it off, but
it stains, in a nice way, I suppose; like my lips, if lips could
be, are flushed. I turn on the TV to watch a little, just a little,
with an equally little drink, and not a strong one. Not too strong.
I bring it to the living room and sit down, and on the screen a sun
as perfect and white as a hole punched from paper balances atop the
sharp point of a mountaintop.

“Another morning here,” says a man’s
voice from behind the image, “and another day for things to go
extraordinarily well, or to go horribly, horribly wrong. With each
sunrise there is new promise, but that can be a promise of
something good or, as we know too well, Janie and Tom, it can be an
omen. Yes. A promise of another kind, of something terrible to
come.” A red filter covers the sun in blood. “After last night, we
could sure use a good day. An intense battle raging for five hours,
both in the air
and
on the ground, losing a reported twenty-five soldiers and
marines, and killing approximately one hundred of theirs. And, as
you know, Janie and Tom, that’s the highest death count we’ve had
on our side in one day since the start of the war.” Janie says
they’ll get back to him after these messages, but his voice carries
on in my head:
Your soldier—that’s right,
yours!—could be one of the dead. Tune in at six to find out if
you’re today’s winner of an elegant trumpeted service and a brand
new, gen-you-ine American flag courtesy of the American Honor
Guard!
I wonder if they have a board marked
up with tally lines, “their side” and “our side,” each soldier a
Roman numeral one. Jake. I. William. I.

I. I. I. I. I. I.

I. I. I. I. I. I.

I. I. I. I. I.
I. I.

I. I. I. I. I.
I.

Jackasses.

I finish my drink and follow it with
another, stronger. Tie my hair in a ponytail. Change from jeans to
Jake’s flannel pants and a T-shirt. Give Chancey water. Sit in
front of the TV and watch more news and make another drink. Each
one tastes more like orange juice, so I add more vodka, and more
vodka, and the treetop leans closer to the floor and the balls hang
in a smile. A popular sticker comes to mind, a yellow smiley face
with a bullet hole in the forehead dripping red. Kids in school,
the smokers, would wear them as patches on their jean-jackets when
patches and pins were in. I had one, too, ironed onto my jacket’s
shoulder like a tattoo. Because cool kids burned things, I would
hold the cherry of my cigarette to the bullet hole until, over
time, a real hole burned through to denim. “Nice dimension,” Jake
said one day during our lunch break, his smoking habit new, the
cigarette still awkward in his fingers.

I leave my glass on the floor and
hug the wall on the way down the stairs to apartment three. I rap
one, two, three, four tim—

“Who is it?”

“It’s Mia,” I say.

“Who’s ‘me’?” says the
voice.

“No,” I say. “Mia. From
upstairs.”

“Ohhh,” he says, and the door opens.
He has the hair and complexion of a Viking, an interesting contrast
to the thin-stemmed wine glass he holds with graceful fingers.
“Hello,” he says. Safia comes up behind him cradling a half-empty
fishbowl, the goldfish skimming a thin layer of green and blue
rocks. It swims left, sucks at the water, then swims
right.

I ask them for a cigarette. “I would
buy my own, but I quit smoking a year ago, and if I buy a new pack,
I’ll smoke them all by midnight, and I’m just having a
really—”

“No problem,” he says, and to Safia,
“I think they’re on the kitchen table, doll.” She looks at him,
then carries the bowl away.

“Thank you …”

“Paul.”

“Mia.”

“I know.” He smiles.

Safia reappears with the pack in her
hand, one filter poking out. I take it, say, “Thank you both so
much,” and ask for a light. Paul gives me one from his pocket and
tells me to keep it.

When I’m inside, home with the cat
and my walls, and my door is closed and I’m sitting on the floor
beside my drink, I take the first drag, deep. The smoke is thick
and rough in my throat and the lightheadedness that comes halfway
through mixes with traces of nausea. Chancey crawls out from under
the tree and lifts his nose to the smoke, then recoils and leaves
the room.

Jake wouldn’t like that I’m smoking.
Even so—or as a result, what the hell—every drag is better than the
last. I blow the smoke at the tree and envelop it in fog, in lake
mist, in the cloud that precedes a charging fire. I picture the
toxins filling my lungs, damaging the cilia, leaving a black, ashy
film on what it took me so long to re-pink. Months of smoking four
a day, three a day, to none. Before today, I hadn’t smoked a
cigarette in six months.

Maybe he’ll get shot down this year,
and maybe I’ll get cancer.

The odds have to be weaker against
both of us.

MARCH 29, SATURDAY

Denise pulls aside the dressing room
curtain and waits in a floor-sweeping red gown for me to say
something. She reaches behind her neck and gathers her hair in a
loose nest. “It’s so expensive, but I just love it.”

“Are you buying it?” I wonder where
she’ll wear it, what plans she has.

“It’d be silly not to. It’s
perfect.” She shakes out her hair. “Aren’t you going to try
one?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Oh, come on. I saw a yellow one I
think would look stunning.”

She grabs my wrist with one hand and
raises her hem with the other. “This way.” She stops at a rack of
satin and sequins and drapes my arm in something yellow, then
shoves me into a dressing room and says, “Don’t come out until you
have it on.”

The bench in the dressing room—a
closet, really—is a hollow plywood box that creaks when I sit. On
the floor: a price tag, a knotted piece of black string, and a
white button. I pick up the button and put it in my pocket, then
hang the dress on the hook and take off my pants and sit in front
of the mirror. The lighting they use drops shadows in dimples in my
skin that never show in the mirror at home. The hanger spins and
spins around the rod when I yank off the gown. I slide it over my
naked legs.

Out there, between dressing rooms or
in a room near mine, two girls—teens, I judge by their ‘likes’ and
‘ums’—talk about jeans, which ones the boys like, which ones they
won’t buy because boys don’t ask out the girls in the jeans that
sit too close to the belly button. One of them says
tell me about it
, and the
other says she and Bobby had sex for the first time two nights ago,
so she thinks she’s ready for the really low waistline because her
mom always said super-low-rise jeans were for
those girls,
and now she, finally, is
one of them
.

The friend says
omigod
, because she and Daniel had sex
for the first time two
months
ago, and she had thought
she
was way behind.

They bring to mind my own first
time, years ago, in a one-person tent on a lakeside sand-and-gravel
clearing. Pit-sparks popped and fireflies blinked and dead-skunk
smell drifted over from the highway behind the trees. I remember
his name, but it—he—is little more than scenery in the larger
memory. When it was over, we went for a walk. “Was everything…all
right?” he said. Fine, I told him, wondering what “all right” would
have been.

One of them squeals at something and
the other says “Oh my god!” but I don’t find out why. Only giggles
follow, and whispers.

I don’t really want to try on the
dress. Where to wear it, anyway?

The satin falls in waves to my
ankles. I rub it, take it between my thumb and fingers and slide
one layer against the other, feel the ribbed resistance in the fine
grain. Silk-smooth and slippery.

My first efforts had failed
because—maybe—the blankets were too heavy, or the air too cold. The
cat was making too much noise or the downstairs neighbors would
hear or I couldn’t stand the way my own hands felt because they
shouldn’t have been mine.

But here in this nowhere, I am
nobody. All memories exist on the other side of the
curtain.

And that’s all it takes,
really.

“Is it on, yet?” Denise’s voice
comes from somewhere down the line of dressing rooms.

The first time we kissed, his hair
was long and thick and my hand caught in the coarseness of it
circling my fingers like netting.

“Not yet,” I say, and I hope she
doesn’t come in, but to make sure, I say, “Don’t come in.” I get up
only to slide my jeans beneath me, then sit back down, barely
feeling the seam that presses into the skin on the underside of my
thigh. My body surprises me, the reaction more immediate than I
would have expected, and the rest comes just as quickly, my breath
held.

We stand in front of a three-way
mirror. I can’t deny the yellow is flattering.