Are We There Yet? (21 page)

Julia applauds and slips off her clothes. Before Elijah can react, she is putting on the dress.

She looks even more beautiful with it on.

Danny is nervous that Ari won't show up. He has been looking forward to this too much—he is relying too heavily on a random encounter. He paces the sidewalk in front of the restaurant for twenty minutes—fifteen minutes before Ari is supposed to show and five minutes after. Danny is worried that he misheard the directions. He is worried he is waiting at the wrong place, for the wrong person.

Then Ari appears, apologizing the five minutes away. He shakes Danny's hand and ushers him in the door. The maitre d' seems to know him, and the table they get has a spectacular view of the nighttime alleyways.

“I'm so glad I found you,” Ari says, sitting down.

“Likewise.”

It has been so many years, but they plunge into them quickly. Danny says he can't believe Ari is already a pilot, and Ari tells him how it came to be. He dropped out of Harvard for flight school, which caused his parents no end of grief.

“Is your mom still in Ohio?” Danny asks.

Ari nods. “Same house. Same life. Her gallery keeps getting bigger and bigger—she just bought out the jeweler next door, so she can expand again.”

“And your father?”

“What wife was he on when we last wrote to each other?”

“The second, I think. No wait—he was just starting with …Laureen.”

“I can't believe you remember her name!” Ari exclaims. (Neither can Danny, for that matter.) “She actually never made
it to the altar. Dad left her for Gail. Now he's with Wanda, soon to be wife number four.”

“Do you like her?”

“I like that she's his age.”

“Does your mom still make those raisin cookies?”

“Yup. You are still, to this day, the only person who liked them without raisins.”

“I didn't appreciate raisins back then.”

“You always wanted chocolate chips.”

The waiter makes a third pass at the table, and Danny and Ari finally take up their menus. Danny steals glances at Ari as Ari carefully reads the selections. He wasn't a particularly attractive kid, but he's grown up to be an attractive man. Not that Danny can really tell. But he takes some satisfaction that it's not only the bastards who get good looks. Danny remembers back when they were in camp—every body change seemed like an event, shocking and fascinating, the prelude to such alien phenomena as sex and shaving. Now they've crossed over to that other world. They are comfortable within their own skin (or at least Ari seems to be).

Did they even think about the real future back then? Did they just assume they'd be friends forever?

Danny cannot remember what his younger self foretold.

Julia takes Elijah to a room lit only by candles. There are other people within it, but they are only flickers in the background, sounds in the air.

“This is wonderful,” Elijah says. He had tried to stop at an ATM on the way, but Julia wouldn't let him. “It's my night,” she had said.

The owner gave Elijah a jacket at the door. Julia said it made him look dashing. Like a film star.

Now she watches intently as he unfolds his napkin and places it on his lap. She is taking him all in.

He picks up the menu, but she waves him down.

“Allow me,” she says.

The waiter approaches. His hair is the color of burnt embers. Julia orders for them both, her Italian faltering in parts.

The waiter nods, understanding. Two minutes later, he is back with the wine, which Julia sips to her satisfaction. The room is warm, and Elijah can feel himself settling into the candlelight glow. The waiter pours the wine. Julia smiles secretly.

“A toast,” she says, raising her glass. “To the end.”

“I was engaged once,” Ari tells Danny. “I really thought she was the one. I really thought,
This is it.
I met her while I was in school—we volunteered at the same shelter. Perfect, right? She was a nurse, so that made scheduling a little hard. But we managed. For three years, we managed. I proposed to her the first time she flew with me. My instructor lent me his Cessna. At first, Anna was really nervous—she wasn't a big fan of flying. But I asked her to trust me, and she did. I took her up over the Rockies—it was a gorgeous day, you could see everything. When we hit ten thousand feet, I put on the autopilot, pulled the ring from my pocket, leaned over to her, and asked her to marry me. Right away, she said yes.

“I thought that was the hard part, but I was wrong. We moved in together, which was great when we were both there, but we weren't both there a lot. I graduated, and Continental picked me up. Denver was still my home base, but I had to go wherever they wanted me to go. At first, Anna understood this. She supported it. But after a while it wore us both down. Finally, one night I came home—it must have been two in the morning—and she said it was too much. She said she wasn't sure she was old enough to be anybody's wife. And she sure as hell wasn't old enough to be a pilot's wife. I couldn't argue with her. We both realized we'd gotten as far as we could go, and that the only way to go from there was backward. And neither of us wanted to go through that.”

Ari pauses and takes another sip of his water. “How about you? Anything like that?”

Danny shakes his head. “Nothing.”

“Not even a little?”

“Not even a little.”

At first, Elijah thinks he's misunderstood her. Or that she's misunderstood him.

“To the end?” he asks.

“To the end,” she repeats, taking a sip of wine.

“But tomorrow's my last night. I leave Sunday.”

“I know.”

He still doesn't get it.

“So why is this the end?”

Julia puts down her glass and says, simply, “Because it is.”

Danny is amazed that he feels so comfortable. He is amazed that while there are some people you can see every day and not say a word to, there are other people whom you can see once a year—or once a decade, or once a life—and say anything.

“How's your brother?” Ari asks. “God, he must be old now, right? I remember you writing to me about how you were going to teach him multiplication, even though he was only four. You were going to make him the smartest kid in his nursery school class.”

Danny starts off by saying Elijah's fine. Then he finds himself telling Ari everything that's happened—from the moment he got his parents' call to the moment Elijah left the hotel room in Florence. He remembers that Ari has two brothers of his own—two brothers and three stepsisters.

Ari listens carefully. Danny isn't just talking to say things aloud. He is talking directly to him.

“I don't know how we got this way, Ari. I don't know when I stopped wanting to help him, or even when I stopped wanting him to be smart. I
dreaded
coming here with him. I really didn't want him to come—I figured I'd be happier alone. And I don't know whether it's because he was here and then he left, or whether I was just wrong in the first place, but right now I wish he was here. Not at this table with us. But I just wish I knew where he was.”

“It's hard.”

“Yeah, it's hard.”

Ari puts down his fork and looks right into Danny's eyes.

“Brothers are not like sisters,” he says. From his tone, Danny can tell this is something he's learned. “They don't call each other every week. They don't have secret worlds to share. Can you think of two brothers who are really, inseparably close? No, for brothers it's a different set of rules. Like it or not, we're held to the bare minimum. Will you be there for him if he needs you? Of course. Should you love him without question? Absolutely. But those are the easy things. Do you make him a large part of your life, an equal to a wife or a best friend? At the beginning, when you're kids, the answer is often yes. But when you get to high school, or older? Do you tell him everything? Do you let him know who you really are? The answer is usually no. Because all these other things get in the way. Girlfriends. Rebellion. Work.”

“So this is normal?” Danny asks.

“Don't go for normal,” Ari suggests. “Go for happy. Go for what you want it to be instead of settling for what it is.”