Love Saves the Day

Laura stands and laughs again. “Not for me, it wasn’t. This thing lasted exactly one day in my room. I woke up in the middle of the night and was sure I saw a rat on my dresser. It took my mother hours to calm me down enough to fall back asleep. The next day she brought it back to her store.”

I keep my eyes intently on the fake rat hanging from Laura’s hand as Josh puts one arm—the one that isn’t holding his towel up—around her shoulders. “You should give it to Prudence,” he says. “I think she wants to play with it.”

Laura leans her head against his shoulder and looks up into his face. “You think?” Now Josh is looking into Laura’s face, too. Without looking away from him, she tosses the fake rat in my direction. “Here you go, Prudence,” she murmurs.

Josh keeps his arm around her as they leave the room. I swipe at the fake rat with my claws a few times. But silly toys aren’t what I’m thinking about right now.

10

Laura

THE WOMAN ON THE SUBWAY WAS MIDDLE-AGED AND FORMIDABLE. Short but sturdily built, she had caramel-colored hair and red fingernails so long they arced gently half an inch from the tips of her fingers. She spoke emphatically to the man standing in front of her. Also middle-aged, tall and slender, his head seemed too large for his frame. It bent slightly toward the woman, like a flower beginning to droop on its stem. “La gente cambia,” the woman said, aiming one red nail in the direction of his face. “La gente cambia.” And then, in heavily accented English, “You don’t know me. You don’t know me at all.” The man didn’t do much in the way of response aside from nodding his head dolefully from time to time. Whether because this conversation pertained to him in particular (could they be splitting up, this middle-aged couple in this very public subway car?), or in silent acknowledgment of the fickle mystery of the human heart, was impossible for Laura, seated half the car’s length away from them, to discern.

The two of them clung to the steel bar above their heads, the occasional lurches of the train throwing them slightly off-balance but otherwise not disrupting their conversation. All around Laura, seated and standing, people shivered in the too-chilled air-conditioning as they tapped on BlackBerrys (which Laura knew she should be doing, but wasn’t) or fiddled with iPods, or stared blankly into the middle distance. The train stopped, and a hot whoosh of fetid air from the station entered the open doors along with a black-haired man dressed in a waiter’s uniform. It was a muggy July day, and faint yellow circles had begun to form at the armpits of his white jacket. He wheeled a linen-draped cart covered with plastic-wrapped platters of fruits and pastries, pasta salads and sandwiches. Somebody catering an after-hours meeting, Laura thought. Somebody who still has a budget to do things like that. The people who had to move to accommodate the cart looked at the waiter in minor annoyance, and he returned their looks with a vaguely apologetic expression on his sweat-slick face that said, Sorry, but I gotta work, too. Then everybody went back to what they had been doing, the middle-aged woman continuing to harangue the middle-aged man even as one corner of the cart dug into the flesh of her hip.

The woman was right, Laura acknowledged. People did change. Or maybe it was just that, over time, you started to notice different things. She’d been thinking about how dramatically Josh had changed these past few weeks, since he’d become involved in the cause of saving Alphaville Studios along with the apartment building on Avenue A. Except, Laura conceded, with the uneasiness of someone who’s deliberately shut her eyes to an unpleasant truth she now has to face, the real change had been happening slowly over the past few months. Once she’d thought Josh exempt, somehow, from the vicissitudes that threatened people like her, whose lives weren’t as charmed as his own. Now she realized what she should have seen in a hundred different ways, in small gestures and offhand remarks. Josh was frustrated. The “changed” Josh she’d seen during the last few weeks was merely the confident, energetic, pleasantly busy Josh she’d first met just under a year and a half ago.