“My mom dragged my grandmother to Saks to buy maternity clothes. But my grandmother got tired, so she sat down in the shoe department to wait for my mom to finish shopping. She was just minding her own business when she saw a woman staring at her. And staring. And staring.”

Like I was, now. Brian was not handsome, he was cute. He had edges that needed to be smoothed, and a smile that was crooked. Looking at him was not like stepping outside, unprepared, into a heat that took my breath away. It was more like being able, finally, to exhale.

“The woman came up to her and said, Forgive me…?”

I blinked. Forgive me.

Suddenly I was not in a little Italian restaurant; I was not holding the stem of a wineglass. I was in a place where the atmosphere had a pulse, where there were stars I could not see in Boston.

I was with someone else.

But Brian, of course, knew none of this.

“The woman asked my grandmother if she had been in Pionki. My grandma said yes, but she didn’t recognize the woman.”

“It was Tobie!” I said, shaking myself back into the conversation.

“Yeah. But she wasn’t five anymore, obviously.” Brian smiled at me. “They’ve stayed in touch all this time. She visited my grandmother about a week before you came to the hospice.”

I took a long drink of my wine and focused on Brian. “So you noticed when I showed up.”

“September fourth, just after ten A.M.,” Brian said. “Which sounds way creepier out loud than it did in my head.”

I wondered what it would be like starting over in Boston, after Egypt. I wondered if Brian’s grandmother had woken up for years after her liberation, panicked and bitter as memories of her prewar life grew harder and harder to recall.

When Alzheimer’s came at the end, was it actually a blessing?

Suddenly I wanted to cram my brain with details that had nothing to do with the Book of Two Ways or what Wyatt Armstrong looked like when he was asleep, and a dream was chasing him.

“What’s your middle name?” I demanded.

“Rhett.” Brian laughed. “My grandmother didn’t just love Gone with the Wind. She got my mom to love it, too.”

“Look at the bright side,” I said. “You might have been Ashley.”

Brian grinned. “Brussels sprouts. Yay or nay?”

“Yay,” I told him. “But God save me from celery.”

“Who doesn’t like celery?”

“It’s what sad people eat. It has no taste and it’s hard labor for your jaw,” I insisted. “First pet?”

“Komodo dragon,” Brian said.

“Why am I not surprised?”

“In a world full of elementary school kids with hamsters, I was an original.” He narrowed his eyes, thinking hard. “Theme song you know by heart?”

“M*A*S*H*,” I replied. “Used to watch reruns with my mom. How about you?”

“The Facts of Life,” Brian said. “Don’t judge me.”

We kept this up through the main course, a shared tiramisu, and a second bottle of wine. I learned that he could tie a cherry stem into a knot with his tongue. I told him I could whistle through my thumbs. By that time, the room was soft at the edges, and we were the only diners left.

“When was the last time you sang?” I challenged.

He ducked his head, smiling a little. “To my grandmother. She’s the only person who thinks I’m a decent baritone.” Brian drained his wineglass. “Okay, what’s your best cocktail party random fact?”

“When the mummy of Ramesses II was sent to France in the 1970s, he got his own passport, and the occupation was listed as King/Deceased.”

Brian burst out laughing. “That is so, so good.”

The waiter appeared with the check. I couldn’t imagine how expensive it was; I never ordered bottles of wine, only glasses. But I reached for the little leather folder anyway, only to be stopped by Brian, who grasped my wrist. “Please. My treat,” he insisted, but he didn’t let go, and his fingers tangled with mine.

I nodded, accepting his offer. “Well, don’t leave me hanging,” I said. “What’s your fact?”

Brian stroked his thumb over the back of my knuckles, watching, as if he were certain I would vanish beneath his touch. “M&M’s stands for Mars and Murrie,” he said quietly. “My grandfather Carl’s pension came from Mars, and as a kid, I used to think that was amazing—that he got checks from outer space.” He took a fan of twenties out of his wallet and set it on top of the bill. “If you could go anywhere when you blink your eyes,” he asked, “where would you be?”

“Egypt.” The answer came as easily as my next heartbeat. “How about you?”

“Wherever you went, when you blinked,” Brian said.

I felt as if I had been transformed. When was the last time I had smiled, laughed, had a normal conversation? Waiting for my mother’s death was like a slow suffocation; I had been holding my breath for weeks. In this moment with Brian, I could escape. I wasn’t a girl whose mother was dying. I wasn’t a grad student whose future had been upended. I hadn’t left a relationship halfway across the globe.

I was just someone who needed to forget the real world for a little while.

In retrospect, I was probably not being fair to Wyatt or to Brian. I was not thinking clearly. In fact, I was actively trying not to think.

We went back to the house he shared with his grandmother, who of course was not there. His room was painted in shades of gray and his sheets were charcoal. Then we were facing each other, naked, tangled at the ankles. His palms bracketed me, and I thought of his physicist’s ket, the quantum state of how a thing is. “I’ve never done this before,” Brian confessed. “Does that matter to you?”

“I have,” I told him. “Does that matter to you?”

He smiled his sideways smile, then. “Well, one of us should know how to steer this thing,” he said, and he rose over me. His hair, like the feathers of a raven, fell onto my forehead as he kissed me.

When he arched like a bow I wrapped my arms and legs around him, as if he could carry me with him as he fell. It was too fast for me, though, and so I held on. I held him.

“Worth the wait?” I whispered.

He blushed all over his body. “No physicist worth a damn would run an experiment once and give his conclusions.”

I smiled. “Tell me more about this scientific method.”

“Lectures are overrated. I’m more of a hands-on researcher.”

I remember that night. His touch was so different that where it should have felt awkward, it was a revelation. When I should have cried, I cried out. Brian traced my body, mapping me as if I were a new constellation, and his destination depended on navigating by it. That giddy thrill of falling, I realized, was rivaled by the discovery of a soft place to land.

I knew Brian would say quantum mechanics didn’t support it, but I had jumped timelines.

I fell asleep with him curled around me, and dreamed of my mother and the tide pool exhibit she manned at the Boston aquarium. Hermit crabs, she used to say, are too soft to survive on their own. To protect themselves, they find a shell that fits. They’ll tuck themselves inside, for protection. They’ll carry it with them, wherever they go.

* * *

—

THE FIRST NIGHT Brian and I made love, I woke up in the middle of the night, slipped out of his bed, and wandered through the little house. I opened the medicine cabinets and read the pill bottles. I scanned the contents of the refrigerator. I picked up every photograph I could find, learning Brian’s history by seeing him in a T-ball uniform, in a prom photo, at graduation. I touched tiny knickknacks on shelves: glass fashioned into the shape of an acorn, a brass mortar and pestle, bookends made of a stone that glittered as if it were weeping.

I looked at the books, too.

There was a full set of Hardy Boys mysteries and Isaac Asimov novels. War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Poems in their original Polish by Szymborska and Mi?osz.

There was one book bound in tattered green cloth, a worn collection of Polish fairy tales. The spine fell open to a horrific pen-and-ink drawing of J?dza, skeletal, clawed, living in a house made of the bones of children she had eaten. She stole babies from their mothers, put them in cages, planted them till they grew plump, devoured them. I read the story of a young boy who was told to lie down on a pan, so that she could roast him. He told her that he didn’t know how, and when she showed him by doing it herself, he stuffed the pan into the oven and ran away.

I thought of Brian’s grandmother, reading him these stories after his parents had died. Of her liberation from Bergen-Belsen, when she was too weak to stand for the American soldiers who came to her rescue. I imagined her in the shoe department at Saks, as timelines crossed.

I thought of my mother, lying so still that when I walked into her room at hospice, I had to rest my cheek on her chest to see if she was still breathing.

Then I went back to Brian’s bed and folded myself back into his arms before he even realized I’d ever gone.

In every fairy tale, the only way out is to keep running forward. To never look back.

* * *