The Line Between

I was grateful for her presence, in part because she was far less senti–mental than I about most of Sam's belongings. Not all of them: once she had been folding and setting aside clothes for donation (gangster suit apart, his wardrobe could have been worn by the average British prime minister), when I returned from one more trek through the uncharted depths of The Dark Continent to find her rocking back and forth, dry–eyed, holding a gray silk shirt tightly against her cheek.

«The first time he ever held me," she whispered. «Look," and she turned the shirt so that I could see the scattering of faded brown stains on one sleeve. «My blood," Emilia said. «It got all over him, but he never even noticed.»

I stared at her. She said, «There was a man. I stopped seeing him before I ever met Sam. He followed me. He caught me on the street one day—downtown, near Port Authority.» She touched her nose quickly, and then the area around her left eye. «I don't know how I got away from him. I knew somebody at Ceilidh, but I don't remember going there. The only thing I'm clear on, even today, is that somebody was holding me, washing my face, talking to me, so gently. It turned out to be Sam.»

She kept turning the shirt in her hands, revealing other bloodstains. «He called the police, he called an ambulance, he went with me to the hospital. And when they wouldn't keep me, even overnight, he took me home with him and fed me, and gave me his bed. I stayed three days.»

«It's the feeding part that awes me," I said. «I could see everything else, but Sam didn't cook for anybody. Sam didn't even make coffee.»

«Chinese takeout. Mexican takeout. For a special treat, sushi.» She smiled then, sniffling only slightly. «He took care of me, Jake. I wasn't used to it, it made me really nervous for a while.» She turned sharply away from me, looking toward the corner where the bed had stood. «I was getting used to it, though. Tell me some more about how he was in high school.»

So I told her more, day by day, as we worked, and the apartment grew emptier and even colder, and somehow smaller. I told her about writing songs, doing homework together, playing silly board games late at night, and about trying to sneak into jazz clubs when we were too young to be admitted legally. I told her everything I could about what it was like to see him dance at seventeen. In return, Emilia told me about Adventures.

«The phone would ring late at night, and I'd hear this hissing, sinister, Bulgarian secret–service voice telling me to be at Penn Station or Grand Central with a rose in

my teeth at nine the next morning, and to look for a man in dark glasses carrying an umbrella, a rubber duck, and a rolled–up copy of Der Spiegel. And we'd each skulk around the station, with peo–ple staring at us, until we met, and wind up taking Amtrak to anywhere—to Tarrytown or Rhinecliff or Annandale—still being spies on the Orient Express the whole way. We'd spend the night, go out on a river tour, visit the old estates and museums, buy really dumb souvenirs, and never once break character until we walked out of the station again—back in the city, back in real life. And that was an Adventure.»

Her eyes never filled when she talked to me about their outings, but they stopped seeing me, stopped seeing Millamant roaming her old home step by crouching step, stalking ghosts. Emilia's eyes were doing just the same. «We took turns—one time I rented a car and took him to the cav–erns in Schoharie County, up near Cobleskill. We were agents who didn't speak each other's language, so we had to make up other ways to commu–nicate.» Millamant climbed into her lap, batted at her chin, bit it lightly, and put her paws on Emilia's shoulders. Emilia put her aside, but she kept coming back, meowing fiercely.

It lasted almost a year and a half, counting two separate weeks of vacation: one spent being international spies in Saratoga Springs, and one being contract assassins trailing a famously vicious theater critic who lived in Kingston. «We were always aliens, one way or another, always for–eigners, outsiders, Martians. That was the whole thing about Adventures—just having each other, and our secret mission.»

On the last day, with everything of Sam's packed up, sold, given away, donated or dumped, and the apartment echoing, even with our breath, we made one last pass through the shrunken Dark Continent in search of Sam's guitar. We never found it. I still worry over that, at very odd hours, wondering whether he might have given it up because of what I said to him on that bad night long ago. I swept the floor while Emilia picked up our own debris and shoehorned an unusually recalcitrant Millamant into her traveling case. Then we hugged each other goodbye, and stood back, awkward and unhappy, in that cold, empty place.

«Write," she, said. «Please.» I nodded, and Emily said, «There's only you for me to talk to about him now.»