The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [137]
“No,” Wolf said. But he clung to Phoebe as if she were the last thread binding him to the earth.
She thought of him whispering into Faith’s ear as Faith slept in his lap in the van, and Phoebe whispered now, to Wolf. “I found you,” she said. “You saved my life.”
“There were a million things I could’ve done,” Wolf said. “A million things.” He sounded tired.
“I found you,” Phoebe said.
Wolf said nothing.
After a while they moved apart and stood side by side at the wall, looking down. It seemed to Phoebe that a long time had passed since they’d come up here, more than a day. More than a year.
The light had changed, the sea with it. Now it crinkled like a rind, a deep, luminous silver.
They stood and stood, as if waiting. But what could possibly happen? It had all happened years ago.
Wolf seemed calmer, Phoebe thought. Or perhaps his mind had started to wander. Her own had, she couldn’t help it. Her mind just drifted away.
Water moved on the rocks, washing them clean. Yet this was the place, the very place where Faith had jumped. There was nothing left, not a trace.
“Let’s go back,” Phoebe said.
The sun fell as they walked, burning the sky. Phoebe felt as if she and Wolf were the last two people leaving the scene of an accident.
In the end you had to. What else was there to do? You left and went on with your life.
Phoebe wondered if Faith could have known this when she threw herself away.
Time never stopped, it only seemed to.
part four
twenty-two
Phoebe returned to San Francisco in the first week of September. It was late afternoon when her flight touched down, and pressing her face to the plastic window, she watched the land clarify from a white-washed blur into houses and roads, turquoise fingers of water.
She’d called home from Heathrow Airport, the first time since leaving in June. Her mother had sounded ecstatic. But as Phoebe stepped from the plane into a pool of bright light flooding the thick airport glass, she thought at first there was no one to meet her. She walked on uncertainly until her mother’s arms were around her, her mother’s hair in a softer, more natural style, small gold hoops in her earlobes. Phoebe hadn’t recognized her.
Arm in arm they walked to the baggage claim and then to the Fiat, each carrying half the unwieldy backpack, dusty and strange-looking in its new surroundings. “I can’t believe you tromped around under this thing,” her mother said. “I’m surprised you’re not a hunchback.”
“But I did!” Phoebe told her breathlessly. “I got totally used to it.”
Riding home, she squinted in awe at the sherbet-colored houses, the familiar brown hill branded SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO—THE INDUSTRIAL CITY like the hide of a cow. The city felt vast, metallic and glassy, so different from cities in Europe.
By the time they reached San Francisco proper, conversation had flagged. Phoebe felt as if she had lost the power to read her mother. The new hairstyle, the short-sleeved black sweater and the thin, graceful arms at the wheel—all of it threw her into confusion. For the first time in weeks the memory of their fight reared up again in Phoebe: the terrible thing she’d said, her abrupt and outrageous departure.
“So. You had fun over there,” her mother finally said.
“Not really,” Phoebe said. “Not fun.”
Her mother’s brows rose. She said nothing.
“It was hard,” Phoebe said.
“Hard in what way?”
“Scary.”
A tender look crossed her mother’s face. Only when it had passed did she turn to Phoebe. “I was scared, too,” she said.
“I sent you postcards,” Phoebe protested. “I told you I was fine!” But only now did it strike her, for the first time, how little comfort her postcards would have provided.
They spent the remainder of the ride in silence.
Phoebe had pictured her first weeks home as a kind of montage: running to classes at Berkeley, coming into the city