London
Seven weeks earlier, at the end of April, Gemma woke up in a youth hostel on the outskirts of London. There were eight bunks to a room: paper thin mattresses, topped with regulation white sheets. Sleeping bags lay on top of those. Backpacks leaned against the walls. There was a faint reek of body odor and patchouli.
She'd slept in her workout clothes. She eased out of bed, laced her shoes, and ran eight miles through the suburb, past pubs and butcher shops that were still shuttered in the early light. On return, she did planks, lunges, push-ups, and squats in the hostel common room.
Gemma was in the shower before her roommates woke up and started using the hot water. Then she climbed back into her top bunk and unwrapped a chocolate protein bar.
The bunk room was still dark. She opened The Mill on the Floss and read by the light on her phone. It was a thick Victorian novel about loss of innocence. George Eliot wrote it. Her friend Willow had given it to her.
Willow Blair was the best friend Gemma had ever had. Her favorite books were always about orphans and loss of innocence. Will was an orphan herself, born in Minnesota to a teenage mama who had died when Will was two. Then she'd been adopted by a couple who lived in a penthouse on New York's Upper East Side.
Paulina and Corey Blair were in their late thirties at the time. They couldn't have children, and Corey's legal work had long included volunteer advocacy for kids in the foster care system. He believed in adoption. So, after several years on wait lists for a newborn baby, the Blair's declared themselves open to taking an older child.
They fell in love with this particular two-year-old's fat arms and freckled nose. They took her in, renamed her Willow, and left her old name in a file cabinet. She was photographed and tickled. Patti cooked her hot macaroni with butter and cheese. When little Will was five, the Blair's sent her to the Greenbriar School, a private establishment in Manhattan. There, she wore a uniform of green and white and learned to speak French. On weekends, little Will played Lego, baked cookies, and went to the American Museum of Natural History, where she loved the reptile skeletons best. She celebrated all the Jewish holidays and, when she grew up, had an unorthodox bat mitzvah ceremony in the woods upstate.
The bat mitzvah became complicated. Paulina's mother and Corey's parents did not consider Willow Jewish, because her biological mother had not been. They all pushed for a formal conversion process that would put off the ceremony for a year, but instead Paulina left the family synagogue and joined a secular Jewish community that did ceremonies at a mountain retreat.
It was at age thirteen that, Willow Blair became more conscious of her orphan status than she ever had been before, and began reading the stories that would become a touchstone of her interior life. At first she went back to the orphan books she'd been pushed to read in school. There were a lot of those. "I liked the clothes and puddings and the horse-drawn carriages," Will told Gemma.
Back in June, the two of them had been living together in a house Will rented on the island of Martha's Vineyard. That day, they drove to a farm stand where you could pick your own flowers. "I liked Heidi and God knows what other dreck," Will told Gemma. She was bent over a dahlia bush with a pair of scissors. "But later, all those books made me puke. The heroines were so effing cheerful all the time. They were paragons of self-sacrificing womanhood. Like, 'I'm starving to death! Here, eat my only bakery bun!' 'I can't walk, I'm paralyzed, but still I see the bright side of life, happy happy!' A Little Princess and Pollyanna, let me tell you, they are selling you a pack of ugly lies. Once I realized that, I was pretty much over them."
Finished with her bouquet, Will climbed up to sit on the wooden fence. Gemma was still picking flowers.
"In high school I read Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, Great Expectations, et cetera," Will went on. "They're, like, the edgy orphans."
"The books you gave me," Gemma said, realizing.
"Yeah. Like, in Vanity Fair, Becky Sharp is one big ambition machine. She'll stop at zero. Jane Eyre has temper tantrums, throws herself on the floor. Pip in Great Expectations is deluded and money hungry. All of them want a better life and go after it, and all of them are morally compromised. That makes them interesting."
"I like them already," said Gemma.
---------------------------------
Will had gotten into Vassar College on the strength of her essay about those characters. She wasn't much for school besides that, she admitted. She didn't like it when people told her what to do. When professors assigned her to read the ancient Greeks, she had not done it. When her friend Holly told her to read Suzanne Collins, she had not done that, either. And when her mother told her to work harder on her studies, Will had dropped out of school.
Of course the pressure hadn't been the only reason Immie left Vassar. The situation was desperately complicated. But Paulina Blair's controlling nature was definitely a factor.
"My mother believes in the American dream," said Willow. "And she wants me to believe in it, too. Her parents were born in Belarus. They full-on bought the package. You know, that idea that here in the US of A, anyone can reach the top. Doesn't matter where you start out, one day, you can run the country, get rich, own a mansion. Right?"
This conversation happened a little later in the Martha's Vineyard summer. Gemma and Will were at Moshup Beach. They had a large cotton blanket spread underneath them.
"It's a pretty dream," said Gemma, popping a potato chip into her mouth.
"My dad's family bought it, too," Will continued. "His grandparents came from Poland and they lived in these tenements. Then his father did well and owned a delicatessen. My dad was supposed to move even further up, be the first in his family to go to college, so he did exactly that. He became, like, this big lawyer. His parents were so proud. It seemed simple to them: Leave the old country behind and reinvent your life. And if you couldn't quite live the American dream, then your children would do it for you."
Gemma loved hearing Will talk. She hadn't ever met anyone who spoke so freely. Will's dialogue was rambling, but it was also relentlessly curious and thoughtful. She didn't seem to censor herself or craft her sentences. She just talked, in a flow that made her seem alternately questioning and desperate to be heard.
"Land of opportunity," Gemma said now, just to see what direction Will would go.
"That's what they believe, but I don't think it's really true," Will responded. "Like, you can figure out from half an hour of watching the news that there's more opportunity for white people. And for people who speak English."
"And for people with your kind of accent."
"East Coast?" said Will. "Yeah, I guess. And for non-disabled people. Oh, and men! Men, men, men! Men still walk around like the US of A is a big cake store and all the cake is for them. Don't you think?"
"I'm not letting them have my cake," said Gemma. "That's my bloody cake and I'm eating it."
"Yes. You defend your cake," said Will. "And you get chocolate cake with chocolate icing and, like, five layers. But for me, the point is—go ahead and call me stupid, but I don't want cake. Maybe I'm not even hungry. I'm trying to just be. To exist and enjoy what's right in front of me. I know that's a luxury and I'm probably an asshole for even having that luxury, but I also think, I'm trying to appreciate it, people! Let me just be grateful that I'm here on this beach, and not feel like I'm supposed to be striving all the time."
"I think you're wrong about the American dream," said Gemma.
"No, I'm not. Why?"
"The American dream is to be an action hero."
"Seriously?"
"Americans like to fight wars," said Gemma. "We want to change laws or break them. We like vigilantes. We're crazy about them, right? Superheroes and the Taken movies and whatever. We're all about heading out west and grabbing land from people who had it before. Slaughtering the so-called bad guys and fighting the system. That's the American dream."
"Tell that to my mom," said Will. "Say, Hello! Will wants to grow up to be a vigilante, rather than a captain of industry. See how it goes."
"I'll have a talk with her."
"Good. That'll fix everything." Will chuckled and rolled over on the beach blanket. She took off her sunglasses. "She has ideas about me that don't fit. Like, when I was a kid, it would have been a huge deal to me to have a couple friends who were also adopted, so I didn't feel alone or different or whatever, but back then she was all, Will's fine, she doesn't need that, we're just like other families! Then five hundred years later, in ninth grade, she read a magazine article about adopted kids and decided I had to be friends with this girl Jocelyn, this girl who'd just started at Greenbriar."
Gemma remembered. The girl from the birthday party and American Ballet Theatre.
"My mom had fantasies about the two of us bonding, and I tried, but that girl seriously did not like me," Will continued. "She had blue black hair. Very cooler-than-thou. She teased me for my whole thing about stray cats, and for reading Heidi, and she made fun of the music I liked. But my mom kept calling her mom, and her mom kept calling my mom, making plans for the two of us. They imagined this whole adopted-kid connection between us that never existed." Willow sighed. "It was just sad. But then she moved to Chicago and my mom let it go."
"Now you have me," said Gemma.
Will reached up to touch the back of Gemma's neck. "Now I have you, which makes me significantly less mental."
"Less mental is good."
Will opened the cooler and found two bottles of homemade iced tea. She always packed drinks for the beach. Gemma didn't like the lemon slices floating in it, but she drank some anyway.
"You look pretty with your hair cut short," Will said, touching Gemma's neck again.
—
On her winter break from her first year at Vassar, Willow had rummaged in Corey Blair's file cabinet, looking for her adoption records. They weren't hard to find. "I guess I thought reading the file would give me some insight into my identity," she said. "Like learning names would explain why I was so miserable in college, or make me feel grounded in some way I never had. But no."
That day, Will and Gemma had driven to Menemsha, a fishing village not far from Will's Vineyard house. They had walked out onto a stone pier that stretched into the sea. Gulls wheeled overhead. Water lapped at their feet. They were the same height, and as they sat on the rocks, their legs were tan in front of them, shiny with sunblock.
"Yeah, it was total poop," said Willow. "There was no dad listed at all."
"What was your birth name?"
Will blushed and pulled her hoodie up over her face for a moment. She had deep dimples and even teeth. Her pixie-cut bleached hair showed her tiny ears, one of which was triple pierced. Her eyebrows were plucked into thin lines.
"I don't want to say," she told Gemma from inside the fabric. "I'm hiding in my hoodie now."
"Come on. You started the story."
"You can't laugh if I tell you." Will lifted the hoodie and looked at Gemma. "Chance laughed and then I got mad. I didn't forgive him for two days until he brought me lemon cream chocolates." Chance was Will's boyfriend. He lived with them in the Martha's Vineyard house.
"Chance could learn manners," said Gemma.
"He didn't think. He just blurted out the laugh. Then he was super sorry afterward." Will always defended Chance after criticizing him.
"Please tell me your birth name," said Gemma. "I will not laugh."
"Promise?"
"I promise."
Will whispered in Gemma's ear, "Talula, and then Tee. Talula Tee."
"Was there a middle name?" Gemma asked.
"Nope."
Gemma did not laugh, or even smile. She put both her arms around Will's body. They looked out at the sea. "Do you feel like a Talula?"
"No." Will was thoughtful. "But I don't feel like an Willow, either."
They watched a pair of seagulls that had just landed on a rock near them.
"Why did your mother die?" Gemma asked eventually. "Was that in the file?"
"I guessed the basic picture before I read it, but yeah. She overdosed on meth."
Gemma took that in. She pictured her friend as a toddler in a wet diaper, crawling across dirty bedclothes while her mother lay beneath them, high and neglectful. Or dead.
"I have two marks on my upper right arm," said Will. "I had them when I came to live in New York. As far as I knew, I'd always had them. I never thought to ask, but the nurse at Vassar told me they were burns. Like from a cigarette."
Gemma didn't know what to say. She wanted to fix things for baby Will, but Paulina and Corey Blair had already done that, long ago.
"My parents are dead, too," she said, finally. It was the first time she'd spoken it aloud, though Will already knew she'd been raised by her aunt.
"I figured," said Will. "But I also figured you didn't want to talk about it."
"I don't," said Gemma. "Not yet, anyway." She leaned forward, separating herself from Willow. "I don't know what story to tell about it yet. It doesn't…" Words failed her. She couldn't ramble like Will did, to figure herself out. "The story won't take shape."
It was true. At that time, Gemma had only begun to construct the origin tale she would later rely upon, and she could not, could not tell anything else.
"All good," said Willow.
She reached into her backpack and pulled out a thick bar of milk chocolate. She unwrapped it halfway and broke off a piece for Gemma and a piece for herself. Gemma leaned back against the rock and let the chocolate melt in her mouth and the sun warm her face. Will shooed the begging seagulls away, scolding them.
Gemma felt then that she knew Willow completely. Everything was understood between them, and it always would be.