“Come on, now,” she said, “give me your arm.” Johnny was exhausted. She’d fed him a big bowl of mac and cheese for dinner, and that had filled him up and tired him out, so he didn’t put up a fight. He remembered the routine, the tightness of the straps on his wrists and legs, though it had been a long time since they had last used them.
“Mama,” he said, the word a question. “Ma?”
The moment Gita locked the apartment door behind her, she felt herself go limp. With every step she took, a shiver ran from her shoulders up her neck to her throat, and it wasn’t until she finished her second rum and Coke at the Butcher — the new hot spot by the water — that her arms and legs felt normal again.
When she returned home a few hours later, Johnny was sleeping peacefully, and she kissed him lightly on both cheeks.
Gita leans in to peer through the rooftop telescope, swivels it on its axis from left to right. Do the people down there realize it’s possible to peep right into their homes? The curtains on most of the windows of the apartment complex on the water are drawn, but she can see right into some of the illuminated living rooms, make out a shape here and there that could be nothing more than a houseplant but could just as well be someone’s husband or father or lover. Gita releases the telescope and reaches again for her phone, presses again on Femke’s name. Does a screen light up behind one of those windows?
She puts the phone away and returns to the telescope, aims it straight down twenty-two stories to the street: the black asphalt jumps into focus before her eyes. There, 367 feet below, is where their plan began. It wasn’t much later then than it is now, though at that time of year it was still quite light out. It was cold, their summer jackets too thin for the crisp September evening.
“Oh no!” cried Femke.
“What?”
“It’s closed. We can’t go up.”
They’d talked about the Tower often, laughed at the crazy idea of the giant swing on the roof, visible from every café, every house and apartment in the area. It was big enough for two people, they could see that from the ground. But could you sit close enough to hold hands, and was it really safe? They weren’t going to find out, not that night — now that they’d finally talked themselves into the adventure, the Tower was closed.
A little old woman hurried past the shuttered doors, struggling to keep up with a dachshund on a leash. The dog trembled, as surprised by the cold as they had been. “An accident,” the woman told them. Femke shook her head sadly, but Gita didn’t understand at first. “A jumper,” the woman said quickly, as if she’d already told the story a dozen times today, and perhaps she had.
Gita and Femke stood there in silence, necks craned, looking up to the top of the Tower, the observation deck, ringed by a tall fence meant to prevent the sort of tragedy that had apparently occurred despite its presence.
“That fence is six feet high,” said Femke softly, and Gita visualized a man — it had to have been a man — reaching above his head, grabbing hold of the top metal bar, pressing the toe of his sneaker into one of the diamond-shaped openings in the chain link, and hoisting himself upward.
She can’t remember which she noticed first, the music — a piano being played beautifully somewhere behind them — or the shadow that suddenly fell across Femke’s face. Gita turned and saw the colossus: a ship, the AIDA, the biggest cruise ship in Europe, though she didn’t know that at the time. At that moment, the ship made her think of Mireille’s balcony, the only difference being that the people on the ship’s balconies seemed happy, little Playmobil figures who leaned over their railings and waved at them. And where was that heavenly music coming from?
“Three concert halls,” said Femke, reading her mind. “Two casinos, four pools, nine restaurants.”
As they watched the enormous craft glide by, Gita was reminded of an animated film she’d recently seen, Pinocchio. The movie was long and too difficult for Johnny. He’d begun to whimper impatiently, and she’d put him to bed and watched the rest of it alone in her dim living room. One moment in particular had stayed with her — the scene with the whale, a sea monster so huge that it sucked whole schools of fish, sea urchins, anemones, even poor wooden Pinocchio down its gigantic gullet, the whale’s jaws gaping wide and everything in its path disappearing between them. She imagined the prow of the cruise ship breaking open and inhaling her and Femke from the dock into its maw.
She felt dizzy. She might even have staggered a bit, and suddenly Femke’s arm was around her waist, supporting her. It was the first time Femke had touched her in such an intimate manner. She was a little taller than Gita; her slender arm slid easily around her back, her left hand came to rest on Gita’s hip and held her close.
“We should do that,” said Femke. “You and me, we should go on a cruise.”
“Yes,” said Gita, “absolutely.” And she laid her hand on Femke’s, and the two of them stood there for a moment, until the ship and its music had passed out of their sight and hearing.
A cruise, they’d told each other several times that evening, we really have to do that, each time bursting out in peals of laughter — and when Femke laid a thick travel brochure on the bar the next afternoon, Gita assumed she was making a joke.
But Femke leafed furiously through the colored pages until she found what she was looking for. “This one!” she said, tapping her forefinger on a photograph of a sleek white ship with bright blue trim. “Leaves from Naples and goes all the way around the world!”
“That would be wonderful,” Gita sighed, and she tried to slide the brochure aside to make room for the glass of Macallan that Femke had ordered, but Femke held it in place with her finger.
“Look,” she said, “thirty thousand euros a person, all included. Around the world!” She drank down half her whisky and took an envelope from her purse.
Gita had seen similar mailings before. Every so often, one of them showed up with her bills and advertising circulars: Need extra cash for Christmas? or words to that effect.
“Fill this out and sign it,” said Femke. “We’ll be on our way in three weeks.”
Gita looked up from the envelope and couldn’t tell from Femke’s expression if she was serious or trying to be funny. “That’s a loan application,” she said. “How am I supposed to pay it back?”
“We’ll split the payments,” Femke replied cheerfully. “Sixty euros a month each, that’s doable, isn’t it?”
Gita shrugged, and then Femke did something she’d never done before. She slid off her stool and came around the bar. From behind, she put her arms around Gita and hugged her. Femke was so close that Gita could feel her heart beating against her back, could smell the familiar musk of Gauloises. All at once, she felt truly happy.
Femke put her chin on Gita’s shoulder and nodded at the brochure. “Look,” she said, “that woman in the straw hat is me, and the one holding the cocktail is you.”
It all went as smoothly as Femke had predicted. A week after Gita signed the application, the money was deposited into her account.
She worried that people could smell it on her. When she hunched down in the supermarket to pluck the cheapest brand of tomato soup from the bottom shelf, she felt like she’d been caught red-handed: was this the behavior of a woman in possession of so much wealth? Femke proposed that they open a special vacation account — putting it in Femke’s name would get her a significant break on her taxes, she explained, and she was a financial consultant, so she ought to know what she was talking about — and Gita was relieved to see the enormous sum disappear from her own account, as if she’d taken off a heavy fur coat that had never really fit her in the first place.