The Alchemy of Forever

to sound confident.
    “How will you get home?” he worries.
    “I think I know how to call a cab,” I say drily. “I’m a big girl.”
    “I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right to me, leaving you here with no one to take care of you.” His voice is uncertain now. I sense a crack in his armor.
    “I don’t need any boy to take care of me,” I say sharply. “Do you think I’m really that weak?”
    “No, of course not.” He smiles. “That’s one of the last words I’d use to describe you.”
    “Then let me do what I want. I promise I’ll be safe.”
    “Okay . . . I guess, if you really want to be by yourself. But you have to text me the minute you get home so I know you’re safe.” He pulls me close to him, and I bury my face in his chest. I listen to his heart.
    In a tiny voice I whisper the words that I want to say. “I love you, too.” His arms tighten around me, and I feel one small tear threatening to escape my eye, but I blink it back.
    I feel his hands on my shoulders, and I look up. I find his lips and kiss him. “Go,” I tell him, tearing myself away.
    “I wish you were coming with me,” he says.
    I do, too.
    “I had fun tonight, Noah.”
    “Text me,” he repeats. “As soon as you’re home.”
    “I will,” I lie.
    He reluctantly walks away, leaving me alone on the bridge. I have to bite my lip to keep myself from calling out to him, to keep myself from crying. Please don’t leave me. But he honors my wishes, and I watch him disappear in the fog.

thirty-four
     
    I wait for a long time before taking action. I need to be sure Noah’s far away from the scene of Kailey’s death so there’s no chance he’ll be implicated.
    I walk near the railing and listen for the sound of the water below. I imagine falling for real, the welcoming arms of the water as it would pull me under, down into the world of shipwrecks and silvery, silent fish.
    Don’t be silly , I tell myself. There would be nothing soft about that water at all.
    But maybe if I jump, the wind will catch me up like a bird, or I’ll sprout wings and fly, like Kailey in the portrait of herself as an angel. It’s almost time for me to send my message to Kailey’s mother. But not yet. I close my eyes and wait, thinking about the one person I know who actually can fly: Amelia.
    It was in Brooklyn, 1913. Cyrus took me to the circus. I held my breath as the tiny blond acrobat leaped from a swinging trapeze and landed on the high-wire tightrope, strung at a neck-craning distance across the tent’s ceiling. The crowd erupted in applause as the ringmaster cried out, “The beautiful, the amazing, Lady Amelia defies death! See her fly without wings!”
    “I wish he would shut up,” Cyrus murmured next to me.
    “Yes. What if the noise makes her fall?” I worried.
    “Impossible,” Cyrus said breathlessly and with admiration. “She really is a bird.”
    As if she could hear us, Amelia coiled her muscles, jumping off the tightrope and spinning backward in the air before landing on her feet. I squinted—she did have feathers in her hair, jewel-toned peacock plumes pinned at each temple, as well as gathered at her tiny wrists.
    After the performance, Cyrus dragged me through the dusty fairgrounds till we found her trailer, its side decorated with a painting of a winged woman reclining in a giant nest. She answered our knock wearing an iridescent silky robe that shimmered between purple and green, and I could tell by the way she coyly cooed Cyrus’s name that they had met before.
    From a distance I had first mistaken her for a child. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, with impossibly slender limbs and fine, pointed features. Her white-blond hair hung around her face in a feathery shag. I reached up and touched my own smooth chestnut hair, which was carefully styled in pin curls. I felt too coiffed, too earthbound. She was a wild thing, and I wanted to be like her.
    She flitted about the trailer fixing us drinks that tasted like melon, with a hint of bitterness. Cyrus leaned back on a pile of beaded shawls and regarded the two of us. “Amelia,” he said, “Sera loved your performance today.”
    Amelia was perched on top of a trunk, her slim feet pulled up under her robe. She cocked her head at me and smiled sweetly. “Thank you,” she said, “that is so kind.”
    “It was amazing. It really seemed like you could fly. How long have you been an aerialist?”
    Her face fell. “Too long. I’m getting