Approaching the Speed of Light by Victoria Lustbader

Author:Victoria Lustbader
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Twelve

EINSTEIN PUSHED HERSELF PAST THE babysitter’s legs into the doorway like a determined linebacker, her muscular upper body in the entry hall and her waggling rear in Ella’s music room. She wedged her nose into my palm, gave a sniff and a sharp stealthy nip at my fingers, sniffed Ella’s hand and lovingly licked her fingers—some major girl bonding going on there—then put herself in reverse and pointedly sat down below the dangling end of her leash, which I’d looped over the standing coatrack just inside the door.

Ella and I went out to monitor the sitter’s trip home—three multimillion dollar town houses further west on Eleventh—and as soon as the girl waved goodnight and closed her door, Ella turned to me. With movements sensuous as taffy, she lifted her arms, rested one hand on the nape of my neck, caressed my head with the other. Small shocks rippled across my scalp and down my spine.

“Jody. Tell me this isn’t crazy. Tell me we’re right to trust what we feel.”

I couldn’t pretend to trust my feelings. Or anyone else’s. Reassuring her that I did would be a whopper of a magnitude that was beyond even my capabilities. But she and I were an inevitability and, if I knew anything, it was that you couldn’t avoid the inevitable. There was nothing for it but to slosh through the dread, trust or no trust, and hope you came out the other side. So I was able to say with some confidence, “This isn’t crazy.”

Her eyes wandered, slow as her liquid hand, over my face.

“It’s true, what you said. You’re not young. You never had time to be young. Life moved too fast.” She pulled her head back. “You don’t even look like a boy, not really, not beneath the surface, and you certainly don’t feel like one. Matt didn’t either.” She brought her head close again and her eyes bored into mine. Her hands clutched my shoulders. “You feel so much like him. I don’t know why, but you do. But I have no fantasies that you are him, Jody. Maybe Tess does, but I don’t. It’s important that you believe me. You’re you. And you are the reason I told Alex I couldn’t see him anymore. Because I didn’t want to make the same mistake with him that I made with Ronald.”

I could have told her why I felt so much like Matt to her, why I made her feel the way he had. I knew the reason. Because even though I was right there with her, I was already gone, the way Matt had always been already gone the whole time Ella loved him. That moment in Cambodia when he’d disappeared once and for all was rushing in to meet him from the second he was born, he’d been feeling it all his life, a searing wind in his face, and he’d been waiting for the instrument of his obliteration to reveal itself, terrified and exhilarated, while she remained ignorant and innocent, stunned when it happened.

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