“I don’t see it.”
“I know,” he whispered. “Because your eyes are still inside, looking out the window. Bring them out here, where it’s dark. Down here, the bushes block the light from the hotel, the streetlights . . . even the London Eye.”
He was such a presence next to me, so solid and warm, that it was impossible to focus on anything but him. Being this close reminded me of how I felt standing at the bay in San Diego when I was little, watching a cruise ship approach from a distance, and thinking how unnatural it seemed for something so big to be able to move at all, let alone so easily.
“What’re you reading?” he asked, gesturing loosely to the book I’d forgotten as soon as I set it down on the grass.
“Oh, it’s—just a biography.” I slid my hand over it, trying to pretend like I was wiping it off, but in reality I was totally hiding the cover from him.
“Oh yeah? Who?”
“Rita Hayworth?” I didn’t know why I said it like a question. Sam didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who would judge either my reading choices or my obsession with all things Hollywood, but it was such a juicy biography, I couldn’t help but feel like a rubbernecker.
And a little hypocritical, if I’m being honest.
Apparently Rita Hayworth was much less interesting to Sam, because he changed the subject entirely. “Your grandma is a trip.”
Surprised, I turned my head to look at him, but when he looked back at me, I realized how close we were and blinked away. “Yeah. She gets a little, uh, tense when we’re away from home.”
He didn’t reply, and defensiveness for Nana rose in my throat. “But I mean, she’s not usually like that.”
“Really?” He sounded disappointed, and I could feel him looking at me again. So close. I’d never been this close to someone who was so obviously a man, and who so obviously relished that I was a woman. In comparison, my ex-boyfriend Jesse seemed like a scrawny teenager, even when he wrapped his arms around me, even when his lips met my neck, and moved lower.
“I like her like that,” he said, and I blinked back to the conversation, cheeks warm.
“Fussy?”
“Not fussy. Clear. She knows what she wants, doesn’t she?”
I laughed. “Oh, absolutely. And she’s not afraid to tell you.”
“She reminds me of Roberta.” He paused, smiling up at the sky.
“Roberta?”
“My grandma.”
I glanced back toward the hotel. “Luther’s wife?”
“Yeah.”
“Is she here with you?”
He made a little grunt that sounded like no. “At the farm. She doesn’t travel.”
“Ever?”
“Not really.” He shrugged.
“My mom’s like that.” The words were out before I could take them back, and a brush fire of panic flared to life beneath my ribs.
“Really?”
I hummed, noncommittal, and he returned his attention to the sky.
“Yeah, I guess Roberta has everything she needs in Vermont,” he said.
I attempted to steer us back to safer territory. “Then why did you and Luther come to London?”
“Luther always wanted to go.”
“No wonder he’s so excited.”
It was Sam’s turn to hum and the silence swallowed us up. Sam was right, though. The more I looked for them, the more stars I saw. In a rare twist of nostalgia, I remembered lying in bed while Dad read Peter Pan to me, and we picked our favorite illustrated page. Mine was Peter Pan peeking in the window, seeing the Darling family embracing. Dad’s was Wendy and Peter fleeing in the night sky, sailing clear past Big Ben.
Out of the quiet, Sam’s voice rumbled over me. “Want to hear something crazy?”
Interest piqued, I turned my head to see him. “Sure.”
“I mean.” He exhaled slowly. “Really crazy.”
I paused. My world for the past ten years had been a bubble: the same five people orbiting around me in a tiny, tourist community. For nine months out of the year—all but the summer—we were Hicksville, California. We never heard any crazy stories—unless they were about my dad—and I rarely saw or heard those anymore, Nana ensured it.
“Sure.”
“I think Luther is dying.”
Shock passed over me in a cold wave. “What?”
“He hasn’t said anything. I just . . . have this sense, you know?”
I barely knew Sam, barely knew Luther, so why did this possibility feel devastating? And what must that feel like? To sense someone close to you was dying?
The only person I knew who died was Safeway Bill. I didn’t even know his last name, just that he was a regular at the café and when he wasn’t sitting at the corner table getting free pie, he was sitting near the Safeway, panhandling and probably drunk. I think Bill lived in Guerneville even before Nana did; he looked about a hundred years old—leathered and with a tangled, messy beard. Tourists used to give him a wide berth when they passed, headed to Johnson’s Beach with their inflatable rafts and white sunscreened noses. Bill was the safest thing in that town; way safer than any of the frat boy tourists coming through, getting messy drunk and harassing people just minding their own business at the Rainbow Cattle Company on Friday nights. Nothing made me madder than seeing people look at Safeway Bill like he was going to stand up and turn violent.
Nana heard from Alan Cross, who works over at the post office, that they found Bill dead near the bus stop one morning. Nana showed her emotions in these tiny rare flashes. She stared out the window when Alan said this, and asked, “Now who’s gonna love my peach pie the way he did?”
But Luther was nothing like Bill. Luther was vibrant and alive and right upstairs. He worked and had a family and traveled. I’d never known anyone who looked healthy like Luther and just . . . died.
I was quiet too long, I think, because I heard Sam swallow in the dark. “Sorry, I guess I just needed to say it to someone.”
“No, of course,” I said in a burst.
“He’s not my grandfather by blood—I mean, I guess you figured that, since I’m white and he’s black. He’s Roberta’s second husband. They both raised me,” Sam said, and then reached back to tuck his hands behind his head again. “Him and Roberta.”
“Could you ask him?” I said. “Whether he’s sick?”
“He’ll tell me when he wants to tell me.”