Every Reason to Stay

Chapter 2: Small Cracks

Chapter Content:

By Monday morning, Amara had decided it was her birthday.

She would be twenty-one in three weeks, and Daniel had always been the kind of boyfriend who made a production of it. Last year he'd rented out the back room of a Brooklyn bakery. The year before, he had hidden twenty-one paper cranes around her dorm. A surprise was exactly the kind of thing that needed secrecy, and Joseph would be exactly the kind of accomplice who'd help. She spent the whole subway ride to class smiling at nothing, and by the time she reached Bleecker Street she had nearly convinced herself.

By Thursday, the theory had cracks.

Daniel was unavailable Tuesday night and Thursday night, both times for what he called "study group." When Amara called, he answered from somewhere echoing and hushed, and said he'd call back. When he came over, he kept his phone in his pocket instead of on the table where it had always lived. Twice she walked into a room where he and Joseph were talking and watched the conversation fold itself up like a map.

"Maybe it's a really big surprise," Zoe offered over cereal on Wednesday. Zoe was her roommate, a fine arts major who dyed her hair a different color each semester and had never once lied to Amara to make her feel better. Then she frowned. "Except I saw them on the downtown 6 last night. Daniel and Joseph. They were carrying books the size of cinder blocks. Not econ books. Something with a really intimidating cover."

"They have a study group."

"Sure," said Zoe, in the tone of someone who meant sure the way other people meant no.

That night, her mother called on her break.

Ngozi Okafor had worked the night shift at a hospital in Queens for as long as Amara could remember, and her voice on the phone always carried the hum of fluorescent lights and a distant beeping. "You sound tired," she said, before Amara could say hello.

"I'm fine."

"You always say fine. Fine is not a feeling, Amara." A pause, the scrape of a chair. "I'm cleaning the hall closet this week. I found your father's suitcase. The brown one."

Amara's stomach did something slow and cold. "You kept it?"

"He said he'd come back for it." Her mother laughed, a short, dry sound. "Twelve years. I'm throwing it out."

"Okay."

"Okay," said her mother, and then, more quietly, "Is Daniel treating you well?"

"He's wonderful, Mama."

"Wonderful is also not a feeling," Ngozi said, but she let it go, and they talked about the rent and the neighbor's dog until her break ended.

Amara sat on the edge of her bed afterward, holding the phone. She was twelve again, on the third stair of their building with her shoes already on, waiting for a man who had promised he was only going to Houston to make something of himself. He'd hugged her on his way out. He'd smelled like cologne and the inside of a taxi. He had said Be good, I'll be back before you know it, and for a long time she had believed that when people went somewhere better, they came back to get you.

They did not. That was the thing nobody warned you about. People went toward things, and the things were always bigger than the people they left behind.

On Friday she went to Daniel's apartment with takeout, and he opened the door with a smile that came a half second too late.

"Where were you last night?" she asked, lightly.

"Library. Joseph and I switched to the law library, it's quieter."

"Zoe saw you on the 6 train."

He didn't even blink. "We took the train to the good coffee place. Baby, are you keeping tabs on me?" He said it teasing, kissing her forehead, and it would have been a perfect answer if she hadn't spent her whole childhood learning to hear the lies that were told beautifully.

She let it slide. While he unpacked the takeout, she hung his jacket on the hook by the door, and something in the inside pocket crackled.

A small white paper envelope, from a photo shop on Third Avenue. Printed on the front in blue ink: PASSPORT / VISA PHOTOS. 2x2. Qty 4.

She slid one out. Daniel looked up at her, unsmiling, in a white shirt against a white wall, the face of a man about to be sent somewhere.

Three more of him lay behind it, identical, staring.

In two years and ten months, Amara had never once heard Daniel talk about traveling anywhere that wasn't a subway ride away.

She turned the envelope over. A date was stamped in the corner, faint blue ink: three weeks ago. Three weeks before she'd said a single word about her birthday.

Whatever this was, it hadn't started as a surprise for her. It had started as a plan he'd already made, long before she was part of it.