Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots by Jessica Soffer Read Free Book Online

whole time, from the moment I left to the moment I arrived at Ellis Island, I kept thinking of Joseph. Happy, bright thoughts that prevented my body from shaking with cold and the grief of leaving everything I ever knew. Sometimes I think I would have shivered to death without him.
    In New York, everything changed. I thought love would come easily and I’d be good at it. I’d waited my whole life. We had nothing except for the clothes on our backs, feelings of betrayal and anger and nostalgia for a country that refused to keep us, and a rental with so many roaches that I slept with the covers over my head. I worked nights as a restaurant hostess and developed an allergy to peanuts. And though I was happy to be with Joseph, I couldn’t bear feeling so vulnerable. The idea of love doesn’t account for a fear of loss. In loving him, I grew afraid of losing him, more and more by the day. New York glittered; each light, I thought, was something else to take him from me. Something else for him to love more than me. Without him, I would be worse than just alone—I’d be alone after not being alone. It was possible, I realized, to hold on to something too tight, to suffocate it. In Baghdad, it had been different. Nothing was so precious. But in New York, I held on too tight. I’m not sure how to explain the feeling that’s left when love is sacrificed in the name of love. Surely it’s something hollowed out and dry.
    That place where I’d watched him from my window was long gone. I could find it on a map but that was all. And there were so many maps of it, twinkling with blue arrows and American-flag graphics on the television. A battleground now. A writhing sandstorm. A grainy whirl of limbs; eyebrows as thick as mine over eyes peeking out from a broken window; blood and enormous green tanks creeping along like crocodiles until—
boom!
—another fountain of sand burst from the earth and floated down like glitter. Another twenty-one, fifty-four, eighty-six, thirty-three, sixty-two dead, said that banner gliding across the bottom of the screen. You cannot glide across sand. Another forty-five, seventy-eight, one hundred Baghdadi citizens dead, it said. And here we were with unbroken windows all around us.
    On the day before Joseph left for the United States, I snuck to that place that’s no longer there to see Joseph Shohet at his father’s stall.
Shohet
means “chicken slaughterer.” Before Joseph and his father killed the chicken, they felt under the feathers, checking for good meat. Legally, they had to kill it in one stroke. It sounded like a whip. Joseph’s hands were sticky and so he kept them folded behind his back when he came to me. He put his toes over my toes. We were barefoot. He didn’t kiss me. He hovered his lips over my lips. His nose over my nose. We stayed there like that, training ourselves. It might be a while until we’d see each other again. He would go first. We didn’t know how long it might take. We were hiding behind a huge white wall covered in rose vines. Later, at home, I found a chicken feather stuck to my ankle. I arrived at Ellis Island more than a year later with the feather stuffed into my shirt, parallel to my spine, a mere needle then, barely recognizable.
     
    I was almost home. Three tight knots of dog poo were perched on the sidewalk, as if from an icing piper. I stepped off the curb, around the broken hydrant, and to the railings. A couple of beer cans lay crushed in the flower bed. The smell of boric acid was strong in the lobby. I thought I’d heard the five-hundred-pound exterminator yesterday.
    I walked to the elevator. Six steps and always six. Once it was four. The elevator light passed from the fourth to fifth floor, where it stopped, stalled, broken for the hundredth time this year. I walked up the three flights as slowly as can be, a little pain in my chest. There was graffiti on the second floor from the rascals in 2B who never got their hair cut.
JanICE,
the