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

graffiti said. They could have been more creative. Silly boys, always on their skateboards, banging into our door and startling my heart. And the landing lights were broken again. The TV yammered in Dottie’s apartment above us.
Survivor.
What else do you need to know about her?
    Ada was waiting at the door. The single curl of gray hair at her left eye. She put her arms around my shoulders and pulled me to her. Dear heavens, she was strong. She did yoga, surely. Chin-ups too, I bet.
    “Miss Victoria,” she whispered in my ear.
    She held me. I was everywhere else. Down the hall, green rain boots, welcome mat, umbrella, slash marks on a door from a crowbar, and next door, the door frame, white paint with a tan rectangle from where old lady Kratzner’s mezuzah once was. We didn’t have one. We didn’t want the attention. I blamed that now. We should have. I blamed everything.
    I knew from the words. Of course I did. From the way that she said them. It was that easy. I wasn’t stupid.
    “Miss Victoria, Miss Victoria,” she said.
    Miss who?
    Miss me?
    How long had that mezuzah been gone? It would have taken so little to fix the door frame. A dollop of paint. Wite-Out, for goodness’ sake. Toothpaste even. Ada’s gray curl played leapfrog now. She was moving her head around like she was an unhappy cow. She had lovely eyes like one too. A nutty brown. Long lashes. She didn’t need to say it. She had experience in this. The eyes did it for her. What a waste of words, of good, useful breath.
    “He has passed,” she said.
    Her mouth moved. Her teeth were the color of white lilies. Her lips the color of something more tropical. A gentle sprinkling of dark freckles was cast across her nose and cheekbones. Any face can become enchanting if you stare at it long enough.
    “So so sorry,” she said.
    I was a tall building crumbling. I was a tall building with the insides ripped out. I thought I might faint.
    Once, years ago, I fainted. I never told Joseph. Couldn’t. It might have been dehydration. That’s what the doctor insisted. I’d been in the hospital. I’d given birth. Given. Funny, you give. I gave birth. I gave her up. A few days later, I was walking down the street alone—I saw a child, I smelled dairy, the baby smell, and the blackness came. The sudden wispiness of the world around me. The chilly cold. And down I’d gone, collapsing like the ingénue in a musical. When I came to, a stranger told me he’d thought I was faking. My hand went to my forehead, he said. A high-pitched sigh. I fell as if I were dancing, as if someone had forgotten to catch me. I couldn’t tell Joseph. It would have been the crack in my armor.
    Now the blackness came toward me in a sequence of shots. Ink from a squid. I felt soaked and heavy. But Ada was here. She was keeping me upright. I stepped out of her embrace. The corridor wobbled. I put out my arms for balance and whacked my wrist against the door frame. I went into the study, saw him: the cashew color of his face, the sluglike scar on the left side of his nose. The oriental carpet was a heap of autumn colors. The metal mechanism that turned the sofa into a bed was exposed where the sheet had lifted, skeletal. He was on his back. He was lying on his back.
    Joseph didn’t move. He hadn’t moved. It was Ada’s fault. It had to be. I had not done this. My heart was pumping in my throat and in my wrists and in my gums and in the hairless spaces behind my ears.
    He wasn’t dead. He could not be dead. I watched, waiting for his belly to lift.
    “Say
Victoria,
Joseph.” I might have said this out loud, or maybe not. I might have tried it in Arabic after that. If I’d known how to speak Russian, I would have tried that too.
    This is it,
I thought. The moment I’d been waiting for. I had not been waiting for him to get better. For months, this was all I’d imagined, all the time. Scenario after scenario of how I’d find out that he was gone—the sound I’d make, the socks