My phone goes off again and her eyes flicker away from my face.

“Sorry,” I mutter as I glance quickly at the screen. Asha’s icon is still typing as I put her on Do Not Disturb. “You were saying?”

“You could try taking your phone off the table,” Evi says as she crosses her arms. She’s pretty when she’s angry, her eyes get all narrow and glinty while her clenching jaw makes her naturally soft features harsh. It makes her look older, I think, as I place my phone exactly where it was.

“So what did you want to talk about?” I lean forward, trying to keep my smile from drifting into a smirk.

“I think you know.” The restaurant is mostly empty, but they still made us sit in the corner, basically behind the door. Inside Out is playing on the most inconveniently placed TV I’ve ever seen, above Evi’s head.

“Do I?”

Evi sighs. “Look, I don’t want to make this a thing, okay?” Her fingers thread through her hair, winding and unwinding the same curl. “I barely see you anymore, I don’t think it’s asking too much for you to be, like… responsive.”

I try to soften my expression. “I’m not trying to be rude,” I say, reaching for her hand. I pull her fingers away from her hair, running my thumb over her knuckle. “But I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I feel her hand clench into a fist. “God–Don’t you ever listen to me?” She snaps so suddenly I almost pull away. “You never come up here, you never reply, you never initiate, you-”

“Are you serious? You’re mad that I have-”

“I’m not mad! I’m just- I’m frustrated, okay? I-”

“You do realize how busy I am, right? Sorry that your need for constant attention isn’t really my top priority.”

“Constant atten- What is wrong with you? I’m literally just asking you to be a slightly less shitty girlfriend and you can’t even-”

“It’s not my fault you live in goddamn Sacramento. That’s not exactly close, you know. You could come to me if you care so much but no, I’m always the one who has to-”

“That’s not the point!” Evi’s voice is so loud the restaurant’s sole waiter removes an Airpod and glances at us quizzically. “I know it’s far, okay? I get that you can’t see me as much as I’d like, I get that. But you don’t even reply to my texts. Sometimes I think if I stopped pushing, I’d never see you again.”

My face burns and I struggle to keep my tone level. “You know that’s not true.”

“Do I?” Evi snips back. Her body is wound tight like a snake but I’ve never been a mouse so I let her anger sizzle in her teeth, trapping her in my silence.

After a minute of nothing, Evi speaks again, softer now. “Saira?”

“Yeah.”

“Look, um-” She fidgets, glancing at our hands. “Okay. I’m just going to say it-”

“Can we leave?”

Evi blinks, her mouth still open. “Uh- What? We didn’t even order. And there’s something I need to discuss with you.”

“Okay well let’s discuss outside.” I stand abruptly, letting her hand fall.

Lyric drummed her fingers on the table, the sound calming her just enough to stop her from grabbing her emergency bag and running. He was late, as he had been every day of his life, even in the moments that counted.

Especially in the moments that counted.

Three quick taps against the blacked-out window made her roll her eyes. Of course he would come to the window.  It wasn’t safer, but it was infinitely more dramatic. She had half a mind to let him wither out there, clinging to the windowsill.

Standing, she took her time getting to the window before opening it just a crack. Eyes so similar to her own, yet missing the weight she carried, cheekily greeted her.

“Lyric! My goodness, it’s been far too long! Mind letting me in?”

She cracked the window open just far enough for him to enter, but not without significant difficulty. She wanted to relish the sight of him squirming through, but her stomach was beginning to churn and she couldn’t properly enjoy it.

“Cyril,” she acknowledged him coldly.

“Oh, c’mon, baby sister,” Cyril exclaimed. “You can’t still be mad at me after all this time, can you?”

Lyric said nothing, arms folded across her chest.

“Apparently you can. Okay. How long has it been? Fifteen years?”

Lyric’s shoulders tightened and she retreated to the kitchen counter, gripping the edge with both hands. “This isn’t a reunion.”

“You were, what, fourteen when you ran off? So yeah, fifteen years.”

“I saw Mom yesterday.”

Cyril finally stopped in his tracks.

“That’s– that’s impossible. Mom’s dead. We saw–”

“I know,” Lyric interrupted. “But obviously, we were wrong. Or– I was.”

She could practically hear Cyril’s eyebrows furrowing.

“What do you mean, you were wrong? I saw the same thing you did.”

“No.” Her fingers found the handle of a knife on the counter – just a butter knife, smeared with peanut butter, but it made her feel a little safer. “You didn’t. You saw her dead, and I saw her die.”

“Look, if you want me to apologize again–”

“Of course not,” Lyric scoffed, eyes narrowing. “Why is Mom still alive?”

Cyril shrugged, although his discomfort was still visible. “It probably wasn’t even her.” He doesn’t attempt to answer the question.

“That was my first thought,” Lyric replied. “But then I ran that night over again in my head. You remember it, don’t you?” She stared directly into Cyril’s eyes, while he looked anywhere else. He waited a beat too long before he spoke.

“I told you that she was downstairs and that I’d catch up. You killed her. I took the body away. You ran off, and I didn’t see you again. Until now. Happy?”

Lyric shook her head, refusing to let the tears fall.

“No, I’m not. I ran away because at fourteen I had become a murderer. Now at twenty-nine, I find out that my big brother lied to me.” A singular tear escaped through her eyelashes, blurring her view of Cyril’s elongated, flustered expression. “You never let me see her face, because you’d told her about our plan and you let her get away. It wasn’t her.”

“Please, let me explain–” He began to put his hands on her shoulders, but she grasped the butter knife and held it at his eye level.

“Do you realize now what you did? She knows what I meant to do.  I can only guess you told her. And now she’s here to kill me. So you’re going to be here when she comes, and you’re going to make it up to me.”

“And mom?”

Dan looked up for the first time in minutes as his sister broke the uneasy silence. He fiddled with the end of his tie under the table. “Won’t be out there in time. She’s been staying with aunt Jess since February and doesn’t want to fly. It takes a month or more to rent a wheelchair van.”

Freida looked out the window. The yard was still illuminated in warm afternoon light, although she knew it wouldn’t be long before the bottom of the sun became visible through the top panes. Without hesitating, or turning back to face her brother, she replied, “Okay. When are we leaving?”

Dan blinked. This wasn’t the tentative, careful-stepping Freida he’d had to cajole to leave the house during thunderstorms growing up.

“Dan? Have you looked at flights?”

Dan dropped his tie, straightened up slightly, and reminded her, “I think we need to talk about risks.”

“It’s safer now than it was a month ago. We’ll get rapids and mask when we get to him.”

“His immune system is so weak. Not to mention you see dozens of people every day at work and I have two kids in different schools – we could both have it right now and not know. Rapid tests aren’t always enough, Freida. We have to assume we have it.”

Freida angled her chair further away from Dan, craning her neck uncomfortably to try to glimpse the sun descending. Instead, her eyes fell on the two red bikes outside–one with training wheels and one with blue streamers–that her nieces begged Santa for last December. Looking back, she could pinpoint three centers of Dan’s living room that Christmas eve. One was the fire, with kids and dogs and toys and books overflowing the carpet before it, pushed in close on the coldest night of the year. One was the tree, with ornamental clutter rivaling the carpet. Freida had helped her nieces hang their clay handprints next to hers and Dan’s. Three boxes of decorations had been rifled through, and still no one had been able to find the star. The third center of the room was the mostly-ignored monitor on the table, where her parents’ fuzzy faces beamed bittersweetly at the scene in front of them. That was one of the last calls where both were in the same square.

Dan could tell Freida was lost in thought. His sister had to know visiting could be reckless, could shave further weeks off of–he didn’t like to think how much time they had left. Sighing in resignation, he said, “Stay for dinner. No, stay the night. We can talk more in the morning, when we’re both feeling less impulsive.”

“I’m going to go. You don’t have to. I don’t care if they don’t let me see him, I just want to be close. You don’t have to come.”

“In the morning. We’ll talk in the morning.”

“I want to leave tomorrow. I can’t stay, Dan. I have to pack, I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.”

No, this wasn’t the Freida he grew up protecting.

“You can pack after dinner. Let me get you another cup of tea.”

Freida handed over her mug, unsteady. She didn’t want to think at all right now. She would leave in the morning. She would cry on the plane. But tonight she would tuck in her nieces and sleep on the couch.

As Dan left the room to fill their cups and call his daughters in for dinner, Freida turned back to the window right as the edge of the setting sun dipped into view.

Marie-Louise stared at the empty shelf in front of her in disbelief. She was shivering uncontrollably, feet trembling in her boots, socks soaked all the way through and heavy with the weight of the freezing rain that pounded down outside. She closed her eyes and reopened them carefully, as if a slow enough blink could make a box of Pop-Tarts suddenly appear on the shelf. This was, of course, a fruitless effort, and the empty space continued to taunt her as she stood in the aisle, motionless, trying and failing to come up with her next move.

In the months since her divorce, few things brought joy to Marie-Louise’s life anymore. She still enjoyed Wheel of Fortune every night at 7:00 PM, and she still enjoyed her favorite Beatles album (Rubber Soul, out of spite, because her ex-wife always overlooked it), and she still enjoyed chatting with the mechanics at the auto-repair shop while they inspected her Volkswagen for the fifth time in one week in hopes of figuring out what was wrong with it. They couldn’t, and she had to leave her beloved car there overnight, vehicle-less save for her old green bicycle.

More than any of those still-enjoyable things, Marie-Louise enjoyed a strawberry Pop-Tart. It tasted like childhood, she supposed, like hurried breakfast before elementary school, and like drunk college nights when snack options were limited to whatever was cheap and sugary. A strawberry pop-tart not only tasted good, or, well, good enough, but it felt so incredibly familiar in her hands. The crumbling rectangle was dry and chalky but soft enough to break up into little pieces, which was how Marie-Louise always ate it. Breaking off a piece with the correct crust-to-filling ratio was important, and she had been perfecting her technique for nearly two decades now. The Pop-Tart even looked good most of the time, the green and orange and pink sprinkles evenly spread on top of the white frosting, complementing each other. Occasionally one pastry would have a clump of sprinkles in one spot, ruining the aesthetic beauty, but Marie-Louise didn’t mind much as long as the rest of the Pop-Tart eating experience was up to par.

But there were no strawberry Pop-Tarts for consumption, not today. She had biked all the way to the grocery store in a moment of desperation, unaware of the fact that a rainstorm was due to start minutes after her departure, ultimately convincing herself that a quick ride through the rain would be worth it as long as she got her beloved toaster pastry. A foolish decision, and one that Marie-Louise hated herself for.

Marie-Louise backed up from the shelf, suddenly unable to get far enough away from it. Her step backwards was an unpleasant one, squelching, jolting her out of her introspective self-pity and back into reality, where she was drenched in dirty rainwater. She felt like crying, but she didn’t really want to cry in aisle eight of Jewel-Osco on a Tuesday night, and she definitely didn’t want to bike all the way home with tears in her eyes. She drew a shaky breath and turned away from the shelf where the Pop-Tarts should have been, choosing to surrender to the loss instead of trying to fight it.

Fourteen paces to reach the end of the aisle, where a heaping pile of pink and red Valentine’s Day candy sat stacked high, laughing at her. Marie-Louise used to tolerate Valentine’s Day, maybe even like it in the years when she still believed in love. Now the conversation hearts and Hallmark cards taunted her. She had to look away. Another twenty-six paces to the door, and nine more to reach her bike, leaned up against a lamppost. Even her beloved green beach cruiser looked pathetic at the present moment, so small, so wet, so sad. Marie-Louise reached for the handlebars, defeated, and looked up. The rain poured down on her, unrelenting, and she wished it would wash away her sorrow like it always seemed to in the movies. Mother Nature didn’t grant her wish, and Marie-Louise’s emotions swelled in her chest, cold and shaky and exhausting.

She stopped, peering into the darkened windows of the building. She had been walking to the bus stop after an optometrist appointment, but her muscle memory of these sidewalk routes had led her back here. A thick metal gate locked off the little entryway to prevent homeless people from sleeping under the awning. Although the glass doors were tinted, she could still see the faint outlines of that familiar hallway lined with lockers and benches, leading to the studio. How many hours had she spent leaping and spinning across those sprung floors lined with vinyl and gaffer’s tape?

Outside the building, a guy in a short sleeved button down and faded Aeropostale jeans smoked a cigarette on the stoop of the apartment building next door. The place was grungy and sometimes you could literally smell the decades of tenants and their sweat and cheap beer waft out from the open door. This guy was just standing and smoking. Not even looking at his phone or pretending to read a book. Just looking around at the city with an air of casual involvement. He noticed her looking around the building and turned towards her. “I think that place is the German Cultural Society,” he told her. “Are you a member?”

“Oh, it’s actually a dance school,” she said, and laughed. There was a golden plaque on the doorway from when it had been a German community center in the 1970s, before they renovated it into the studio.
“I used to dance here,” she said.

He looked surprised and said, “Wow, I had no idea.  I just moved here and I never see any dancers go by. Did they close or something?”

“Yeah, they moved to a bigger space downtown a few years ago, but it looks exactly the same.  There are even still mirrors on the walls.”

“What made you stop dancing?” he asked.

“I broke my leg in three places. But until then I was on the pre-professional track,” she said bluntly.

Back then, her mornings started early. She would wake up before the sun rose, pouring herself a cup of coffee and filling it with milk and cinnamon. She had twisted and gelled her hair down so many times that the strands grew brittle and faded from blonde to a dirty yellow, and then had a semi-permanent dent from years of pulling it back into a bun. Sneaking a cigarette on her walk to the train station, knowing that by the time she returned home, the scent of hairspray and sweat would mask the smell and fool her parents. She’d hold her breath in her chest, the tendrils of smoke circling her ribs, until she let go with a wheeze and watch her breath cloud up in the frost. Always breathing like a dragon, that one. It was her little devilish breakfast, a ballerina’s snack. In the studio she would stretch and do the exercises from her physical therapist. She loved how she could sense her body so expertly.  Like a deep sea diver, she could sink down into her muscles and bones and move them just so. Stretches were sustained tension, her muscles taut rubber bands that she held between her fingers and gently released. Until they snapped, her body betraying their covenant. Sharpness reverberated through her entire body, her leg spasmed in pain.

Her ballet teacher swooped in like a storm cloud and held her hand until her mother arrived to take her to the ER. Her teacher wore all black and walked around the studio correcting students’ postures, poking their stomachs and backsides in, pressing down on pointed feet as far as they could bend without breaking. She told her eager students about dancing in Paris and Russia, and instilled a loving discipline in her girls. She called them her little chickens. She had taught the girl since she was too little to even reach the barre, and gave her a key to the studio when she was fourteen and began entering competitions, when she started needing to spend as much time as possible at the studio.

“What am I going to be able to do after this?” she asked her teacher, in that tearless moment between injury and shock. Her teacher looked down at her and said quietly, “You’ll always be a dancer, even if you aren’t a ballerina.” How many girls had she held while they waited for the terminal x-rays, falling like Swan Lake feathers, crashing like glass. Strong and young and always a short career.

She didn’t realize she had gotten so into her injury story until the guy on the stoop gently cut her off and steered the conversation towards its end. “Oh man, that sucks, I’m so sorry.” He sighed and looked apologetic. But he shifted his body away from her and pulled out his phone.

A pile of teen moms is sprawled all over the grass. They’re a diverse bunch–white, black, hispanic–but it’s hard to imagine them not being friends, the way they laugh so easily together. Mothers in arms.

It’s nice that it’s summer, with school out, so I don’t have to time my visits to the weekends and afternoons like in the spring and fall. I sit on a bench next to my stroller with my baby, who’s too young to do anything but sit in his stroller.  I flit my eyes between my daughter and them. They carry themselves with this intoxicating confidence that most young people don’t really have. Even the really tiny girls look sturdier than my teen boys. My boys have stronger, broader shoulders, but they slump, sag, slouch. The moms sit up straight. In a Darwinian sense, they’ve got nothing left to prove, their legacies latched firmly to their breasts or the monkey bars.

There’s a fifth girl, laughing along with them, with no baby yet but a belly at least seven months swollen.

“Ready to burst,” says my daughter unkindly about the girl, who is sort of hefty.

“You know, pregnant women and sunsets are never ugly.”

My daughter blinks and runs back to the slide.

The girl really is beautiful. She looks just like the weather today–dewey, heavy, and pregnant–she with her baby and the air with those gallons of moisture so thick that when it rains the droplets won’t even seem like they came from the clouds.  They will just erupt from the air they hang in and fall down onto us.

I don’t want it to rain just yet, although it looks like everybody else does.  Even the most feral kids are weighed down by the dense humidity, climbing slowly over the jungle gym. I’m hot too.  My forehead is slick and my dress hangs wet and heavy in the armpits.  Even the backs of my knees are sweating. I will welcome the rain when it comes and breaks the fever of the summer, but when it comes I know everyone will scatter and leave, even though it will be one of those summer rains that only lasts a little while.  And I will have to wait until tomorrow to see the teen moms.

When they throw their heads back and laugh, I can see their necks shining too. I feel for the pregnant girl, because I know that everything in that trimester is uncomfortable, especially the heat. I see how red her forehead is, and how she isn’t as quick to laugh as the others. A deep grumble comes out of the distance and everyone in the playground looks up at the sky as if they might be able to see the thunder. A few people start to pack up their diaper bags, summon their kids from the metal jungle gym. The girls help the pregnant one to her feet.

In a split second, the rain starts to fall down in quick, solid droplets. I will have to come back tomorrow. I flip the plastic cover over my Liam’s stroller and yell for my daughter, who would play in the rain all day if I let her. She whines, already cranky from the humidity, but she follows me as we start to exit, and soon enough forgets the playground ever existed as she breaks into a sprint, the rain slapping her body, her sneakers slapping the pavement.

As I shout at her to slow down, I look over my shoulder at the teen moms leaving the park and glance at the pregnant one, who finally seems to smile easily. The air is at least five degrees cooler now. I’m happy she is getting some relief.

I let my daughter run ahead as soon as we can see our apartment building. In those few blocks, the rain has already started to slow from a torrent into a drizzle. I lift up my baby’s plastic cover carefully so that the rain won’t get in and I wipe some of the condensation from it so I can see his beautiful face. He’s probably the only dry person in the neighborhood.

I imagine what it might be like to sit in that stroller, totally still but lulled by the outward movement of the stroller, the rain drumming on the plastic. I watch his wide-open eyes follow the heavy raindrops until the cover fogs up again.