Eliza is six and there’s something unusual about the morning. The day seems to have forgotten to wake up. It’s black outside the windows except the silver pools the streetlights leave on the pavement. She can hear a faint, familiar noise: her parents’ alarm, an ongoing stacatto rhythm that usually ends just after it begins. She goes downstairs in feeted pajamas, one warm thing in the dark house, one pink smudge in the somber white living room with its vaulted ceiling. She sees her mother sitting on the sofa in her nightgown, part of the pale triangles that lace the shadowed room.

Eliza stands in the center of the carpet and her mother doesn’t move and the alarm doesn’t stop. At some point, her mother’s head comes out of her hands. “Sweetie, why are you up?” she asks. Eliza crawls into her mother’s lap, but she doesn’t find the comforting circle of arms and steady heartbeat she expects. Instead there is a strange communicable urgency in her mother, and a too-soft voice in her hair. “Honey, you should try to go back to sleep.”

Another startling request. Eliza doesn’t know how to go back to sleep when she’s already woken up. Her whole life she has fallen asleep without incident and slept without interruption at the day’s end, reliably a few hours after eating dinner, ten minutes into a bedtime story. It can’t enter her mind that this is night; she never thought of it as such an enduring darkness. She never realized that people like her mother moved around in it, eyes open. She thought night was flashing shapes and sometimes enormous horses that licked her hands like puppies. “Good night, sweet dreams,” her mother always says - has for as long as Eliza can remember - when she tucks her in, like those four words are one thing, one place every one goes.

*

Eliza is twenty-four and the bus is late. She looks at her watch for something to look at, just as the other people shuffling their feet at the bus stop glance at pagers or cell phones or blackberries. The analog hands are ticking at their predictable pace, and the gray light of the city morning is at the right angle to catch the seam that almost perfectly bisects the circular face, a crack she can’t remember incurring. Someone is humming along to an ipod in the space behind and to her right, but Eliza doesn’t turn. This group of strangers look at everything but each other. It’s understood.

Eliza wonders at the definition of “stranger.” She could know each of these people so well, after daily opportunities to talk to them all. Some she sees at her neighborhood grocery store, with their husbands and wives, holding childrens’ hands. Right now they are in suits and ties and skirts and blouses and uncomfortable shoes. Eliza participates helplessly in the charade of anonymity, especially unnoticeable in gray slacks and black pumps with scuffed toes.

“Hey, you got the time?” a man asks. Eliza doesn’t realize he’s talking to her until she glances up several seconds later, unwittingly making eye contact with a tall man, a genuine stranger she’s never seen before.

“Um, yes,” she says, looking back down at her watch. “It’s a few minutes after seven.”

“Is this bus usually late?” he maintains eye contact without seeming to be doing it on purpose. Eliza is flustered, but she processes the question and responds, albeit a little sluggishly.

“No. No, this is unusual.”

*

Eliza is nearly nine, drinking orange juice at the kitchen counter before school. Her mother is reading the newspaper, and in the next room she can hear her father on the phone. Her mother is beautiful, with her dark hair braided, wearing a simple black dress and a silver crucifix necklace she bought at an antique store. It matches a bracelet she gave Eliza.

Eliza’s father comes in with his jacket over his arm. “I’ll see you for lunch, then, right?” He seems to take notice of Eliza’s mother suddenly. “Are you wearing that?”

Her mother is startled, and so is Eliza. Both of them look at the black dress: the simple fall of it, the way it makes her skin look white and smooth. “You don’t like it?” Eliza’s mother asks.

“Well, honey, you look a little bit like a nun. Maybe lose the cross?” He leans over quickly to kiss the top of Eliza’s head. When she giggles, she feels like a traitor. “Have a good day, honey,” her father says, and then he is out the door, shrugging into his jacket before it closes, and Eliza’s mother is still looking down, at her feet, her hands, the floor, like all of them are new and unfamiliar.

“Mommy,” Eliza says. She realizes as she speaks that she has never been so serious in her life, that there seems to be an entirely serious element to existence she previously overlooked. “Mommy, you look so beautiful.”

*

The tall stranger is sitting next to Eliza on the late bus. He smells like soap and dry cleaning, and his shoes are exponentially shinier than Eliza’s. She looks at their feet and she feels him looking at her, as though he can make eye contact with her without her making eye contact with him, and eventually she gives in and looks up and can’t look away. They talk about the bus and the passengers and his job - a basketball coach - and her job - a paralegal - and she says, “I didn’t know coaches had such a strict dress code.”

His face falls, then he smiles wanly, flexing his fingers in a quick dismissive gesture. “I’m not coaching today. I’m going to a funeral.”

Eliza cannot ask, “Whose funeral?” That would be impolite. But she says nothing, which is the polite version of doing the same thing, and looks mutely concerned.

“My friend’s sister’s roommate died,” the tall stranger says. “I know how that sounds, but he’s a really good friend, and he had a crush on this sister’s roommate for about ten years. It’s been really hard on him, and he was worried about showing up alone. Didn’t think he could handle it.”

“That’s so tragic,” Eliza says.

“Yeah,” the tall stranger says, and for a while they both indulge in his eye contact. Eliza observes the flecks of gold ringing the iris of his odd light brown eyes, and the bump in the bridge of his nose that suggests it has been broken.

“This is going to sound really weird,” the tall stranger says, “but do you want to come with me?”

*

Eliza is fourteen and her mother has disappeared. She is sitting at the kitchen table with her father and he is raking his hands through his gray hair over and over so that it stands up in spikes. His handsome face is red, which somehow makes him handsomer. Eliza has always been proud of the way her parents look together, like two movie stars, holding hands in public or kissing one another on the cheek at a restaurant. But he seems to look better without her mother, with this new naked thing on his face.

“Eliza, your mother loves you so much,” he says. Eliza is confused. Why is he telling her this? Does he think it’s possible she couldn’t know? “This has nothing to do with you.”

It hasn’t occurred to her that it might be her fault until he says this. Now her whole mind floods with moments she could have handled differently with her mother. Moments she could have reached out instead of pulling back, moments where the sadness was like something to taste, to swim in.

“Are you going to get a divorce?” she asks, feeling like a baby or a stupid person, ashamed of the fact that she hopes she can get away soon to sneak out and meet at her friends’ house, where someone’s brother has provided three 32 packs of beer. She feels like two people: the one who wants to hold both parents by the hand until they look at one another again, and the one who can barely bring herself to care.

“I don’t know. I think,” her father says, “that is going to be entirely up to your mother.”

*

“I might be underdressed,” Eliza realizes aloud at the last minute, stopping suddenly halfway across the crosswalk, the tall stranger a few feet in front of her. He stops and looks at her slowly - but not too slowly - in a way that makes her cheeks flush.

“You look great. I appreciate this so much. I can’t tell you.”

He takes her hand and she almost trips over her shoes as they get to the far sidewalk and he consults his directions.

“Address is 9918.” He reads the numbers with careful individual emphasis.

“That’ll be up this way,” she says, but doesn’t lead, waiting instead for him to stuff the piece of paper back in his pocket and begin to walk.

“I know what you must think, we just met and I’m inviting you to a funeral.”
Eliza imagines a thousand first dates, infected with awkward silences, hardly endurable without several drinks. She is having more fun than those thousand first dates combined, and all they’ve done is get off the bus and cross the street.

“No, it’s okay.”

He smiles. “I’m Nick.”

“I’m Eliza.”

*

Seventeen, and the new belief that she might know everything, that as people get older they start losing information like they lose their faculties, so that there is a peak in early adulthood at which total wisdom is won. Eliza is exercising this theory in a match of verbal sparring with her father, but they are laughing at one another too much to take any of it seriously. They are fishing and already sunburned from three hours on the water. He is wearing an ugly safari-style hat and she is wearing a tank top and they haven’t caught anything and they’re having fun.

“Liz,” he says at some point, “I’m sorry it took being the only parent for me to be a parent. I’m sorry about that.”

Eliza leans back on her elbows on the floor of the boat and looks up at the sun, and it burns down, and she closes her eyes and absorbs the red heat through her eyelids.

*

They stand in a circle of mourners. The coffin is closed. Every one in attendance is very, very old. “Which one’s your friend?” Eliza murmurs to Nick. He nods in the direction of one of many gray-haired men. He is two hundred years old, she realizes, and so is every one else. She looks at the tall stranger in a long moment of surprise, and then spends the rest of the service trying not to smile. Smiling would be very inappropriate.

*

“Love is hard,” her mother says when Eliza is twenty-one and wearing an engagement ring. Her mother is smoking a cigarette, holding it in a hand that trembles; her knuckles and the thick veins on the back of her hands make her seem older than she is. The skin on her face is still thin and pale and nearly translucent, taut over her cheekbones. She is so beautiful, and Eliza hates her for not passing that beauty on to her. She has always resented her mother for her body’s failure to give more or itself when she was still an infinite expanse of possibilities, anchored in her cool womb.

“Yeah, I know,” Eliza says, and her mother puts the hand without the cigarette on the one of Eliza’s without the ring.

“Don’t be smart,” she says mildly, and when she inhales from the cigarette again Eliza feels like she can hear tar taping down scillia in her lungs. “It’s about doing your best and sticking to it.”

“What the hell, mom,” Eliza says. “What the hell are you even saying? You didn’t stick to it.”

For a long while her mother just looks out the smudged apartment window. She extinguishes her cigarette in an ash-tray without looking down. “You two were better off. You turned out okay, didn’t you?”

Their conversations run a maze neither of them can navigate. They are always slamming into the walls of dead-ends; they pick up so much speed that they never quite get stopped in time to avoid them.

*

Nick is holding her hand again, quiet in a cab, and she doesn’t know where they’re going.

“Eliza,” he says, “I know I just met you, and I’m terrified of messing this up, but I’m a little bit afraid that if I drop you off I won’t see you again.”

His honesty impresses her, touches her, stokes dead emotions back to life and flares the old, weary hopes. She looks back at him and wishes she had words like he seems to have words, then settles for using his. “I’m a little bit afraid, too.”

“Then maybe I won’t drop you off. Do you like hamburgers?”

His apartment is tidy and terrible, clearly costing him almost nothing, but he seasons ground beef and cooks the patties in a pan and toasts the buns on a cookie sheet in the oven and sets the table with a candle. While he does this they talk about all the things Eliza never talks to men about. Somehow they laugh about things Eliza never laughs with men about.

“This is the only thing I can cook,” Nick says when he puts a plate in front of her. She gets juice and sauce on her hands and her chin and he reaches across the tiny cluttered table to wipe her face with his napkin. They kiss and he nearly ignites his shirt with the candle.

“Do you think things are ruined when they move too fast?” he asks, holding her away from him an hour later when they are half undressed. She is intoxicated by emotion and relief and discovery, but his words stop her. She can’t imagine throwing an obstacle in the path of this perfect day, so her hesitation is brief, and then she puts her mouth on the skin over his heart in answer.

*

Eliza is sitting with Nick’s friend Larry, the brokenhearted friend she met the day she met Nick. They are side by side in a sea of blue-clad teenagers’ parents watching boys in uniforms sprint up and down a basketball court. In truth, Eliza spends less time watching the game than she does the coach, a tense figure crouched on the bench, occasionally unfolding to his feet to shout terse instructions.

“You a fan?” Larry asks her. His breath smells like coffee and his eyes are bright and immediate. Eliza is embarrassed to be surprised by his vibrancy. She realizes, inexperienced with older people, she has always thought of them as partially hollow, beginning to recede into themselves.

“I’m a fan of Nick,” she says. It is a silly thing to say, but she is at a high school basketball game and a juvenile remark seems appropriate. Larry nods soberly, as though they are discussing the stock market.

A boy and a girl two benches down are making out unabashedly. She is gripping the front of his blue windbreaker with both hands, like a stiff breeze could carry him away, and his eyes occasionally flutter open, as though in surprise. When they break apart, they wipe their mouths, seeming vaguely dazed. Later Eliza tells Nick about the couple while he takes off his tie. He is still smiling to himself - the team won by three points.

“That’s how kids are these days. Especially the freshmen. Anywhere their parents will actually let them go without sitting beside them is a chance to make out.”

Eliza remembers aloud the experimental kissing she did in her own youth - though in more private places. She makes Nick laugh, but he seems a little surprised, too. She asks him why.

“I guess I’ve spent so much time around them nothing they do seems weird any more. You’re just about the only person I’m around that’s my own age.”

Eliza smiles, but as she thinks about it more she realizes the odd truth of what he’s saying. He spends time with Larry and his other friends, Wyatt and Lon, all of whom have been around for centuries, and the rest of it with the undeveloped personalities that populate his PE class and basketball practice.

“Why don’t you? Have friends your own age, I mean.” It might be an inappropriate question, but Eliza has begun to trust Nick not to censor her.

He shrugs. “I really don’t know. But maybe it’s because…I don’t know, I used to have friends I knew in college, and then some of the younger teachers and their wives, but they were all so…discontent. Maybe it seemed worse because I was around the kids all the time.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever been more discontent than I was in high school.”

Nick smiles ruefully. “Well, yeah, but there’s such passion in those kids. Even when they’re miserable. They write crappy poetry or make a crappy sculpture. They make out at basketball games. You know? They’re so…present.”

Eliza thinks about Larry, his energy seeming to leave him and pour into her when they made eye contact, and she is quiet.

“That didn’t make sense, did it?” Nick sits beside her.

“It made a little sense,” Eliza says. She wonders what about enduring life strips away the purest emotion, buffers the pain but also, necessarily, dampens the joy. She thinks about herself, drifting through college, making stacks of legal forms at work. Suddenly she wants to seize Nick around the neck and not let go, casting off her anchor, rising with him dangerously beyond the atmosphere, perilously near the sun.

*

Eliza is turning twenty-five in a restaurant with her father and Nick. They love each other. They have everything in common except fishing, which bores Nick, and business, which her father loves.

“Eliza has always loved birthdays. It’s the only time she lets herself be the center of attention.”

Eliza isn’t paying close enough attention to know which of them said this, but she watches them both laugh while the waiter refills their wineglasses. Her cell phone is ringing. She excuses herself and steps outside to take the call.

“Mom?”

“Happy birthday, baby. Are you having fun with your dad?”

“Yes.” Eliza listens to her mother breathe. It isn’t an awkward silence. This is a thing she inherited from her mother: they prefer silence to unimportant words. When there is something significant to say she says, “I miss you.”

“What’s wrong?”

Eliza is frustrated. She never learned how to answer this question. She can’t describe her pounding heart, the way the colors around her seem to dim and brighten in time with her pulse.

“Is it about Nick?”

Eliza realizes she can see the table where her father and Nick are sitting through the window. Their happiness with each other is even clearer without their voices. She watches the way Nick leans to one side, like he does when he talks about teaching, and her father’s smile goes all the way to his eyes, the way it does when he’s genuinely interested in what he’s hearing. Sometimes what she knows about the people she loves surprises her.

“You and dad used to sleep in together on Saturday mornings.”

“What?”

“I remember. Before that first separation.”

There is another long silence neither of them will fill with excuses. Eliza imagines her mother sitting in the living room of her little house, breathing.

“It’s hard, you know? It’s hard in a relationship like that. People expect consistency. They expect you to be the same person every day.”

Eliza is getting cold. It’s real night now, and she left her coat inside. She stops watching her father and Nick and watches the place she was sitting. Her black mackinaw is slung over the wooden chair, left partially pushed away from the table; her fork is resting on the edge of her plate.