The American

Chapter Nine

I get attached to people too quickly—I know this—but with Teo, it's a thousand times worse. I don't know what it is about him that makes me feel so on edge, craving his every second. It is almost hypnotic, the desire to see him again, like I am not myself but the manifestation of hunger, burning with a violent craving to devour him and the seconds in which he makes me whole.

And I cannot seem to escape him, even when I want to. I run into him everywhere: on my way to the bathroom in between breaks from watching Netflix or in translation from the kitchen to my bedroom or on my way to the balcony during sunrise or in the kitchen as I am grabbing a Radler or—I can go on for days. I run into him so much that I begin to wonder if we are the opposite poles of two unsuspecting magnets, inevitably tethered to one another in this time and space.

"Hey Margie?"

Not now, please, Mario.

"Mar, listen. We finally decided on a date, Gram and I."

I find myself stripped away from my idyllic musings all at once. "A date?"

"You know. For Pap's burial. We were thinking about doing it on his birthday and then potentially heading back home," he begins, and that is all I can process before my head descends into chaos. I see stretched before me the feeling of displacement that I have armored for far too long, casting its shadow over me as I reenter sunny Tribeca, but this time without Papa's guidance to help me navigate it, leading me even more astray, even more lost—even more alone.

"His birthday works," I say, but it comes out as a feeble squeak.

"Margie," Mario says. He is looking at me with those eyes, those calculated eyes, those very eyes that give themselves away in the fleeting second that our gazes meet to indicate that he feels it too, this hollowness, and would do anything to tear mine away. How could Papa leave us like this, so confident, so headstrong and yet so lost?

"I said his birthday works," I repeat, this time louder, this time weaker.

"Margie..."

I feel my eyes begin to water.

"Mar, I love you. And I'm here for you. You know that, right?"

"Of course I know that, Mario."

"It's just, you have this look. You look so lost—it kills me."

I reach for my cheeks, relieved to find them so dry. And suddenly I am hugging him. Mario never knows what to do with me when I get like this, but today, he wraps his arms around me tightly and in such a way that I wonder if he will ever let go.

"Maybe I should wash my face now," I say after a solid thirty seconds.

He loosens his grasp around me. "I'm sorry. It's just—you and Sahara. You two are everything to me. I don't know what I'd do if anything ever happened to you."

"I just want to wash my face, Mario, not climb Mount Everest."

He chuckles, pulling away. It is then that I see he is crying too. He notes the date on his Google calendar, a Sunday three weeks from today, as I walk to the bathroom. And for the next hour, I drown my body in a bath, imagining Papa standing before me in our small veranda in Tribeca, with eyes that without a single word seem to say, Margie, my baby girl, I am so proud of you. It is as I am leaving the bathroom that I run into him again, not Mario but Teo: the familiar brown of his eyes, the fading birthmark on the periphery of his face and the jagged pathways of the veins on his arms.

"Excuse me," I say, trying to squeeze through in my towel.

But he grabs my wrist before I can get too far, igniting my body on fire. I am quite sure my fantasies are coming to life when he says, "You dropped your scrunchy" in his cheeky, God-Margarita-I'm tempted-to-make-you-fall-in-love-with-me voice, refuting the possibility that this is just in my fantasy. Without another word, he gently slides it into my arm.