Read Online The Distance Between Us by Masha Hamilton - Free Book Online

comments seem disconnected from what she needs to talk about and she can’t think of how to respond to him, but she doesn’t want it to be over . After this it may be months, even years, before she talks to him again. He’ll move on, send a bit of cheerful e-mail at New Year’s. This thing between them, this thing they shared, will be gone, evaporated like dew, barely even a memory. And she doesn’t want that.
    “Take care of yourself,” he mumbles.
    She’d like to beg him not to hang up, to please please keep talking, but she’s suddenly afraid of what might happen if she tries for words spoken aloud.
    “Keep pushing forward, Caddie,” he says. “It’s going to get easier. It’s got to.” And then he’s gone.
    S HE WAKES AGAIN AFTER DAYLIGHT , hit by the now familiar sensation: part of her stomach has broken off and is churning within. Her breath comes fast, her fingers tremble, her tongue is as dry as a dead leaf. Moments repeat themselves: the driver slows, she hears a popping sound, feels the weight. She’s aware of severed branches, a smell like creosote.
    Then the effort—never successful—to shut it out, this hard, fundamental knowledge that blankets her like a needy lover when she lies, and churns at the pit of her gut when she rises, and won’t let her go. Marcus is dead. Somebody killed him.
    Hush, don’t worry. Marcus’s voice, softly, in her ear.
    The first thing she noticed about Marcus, really noticed—the feature that made her begin to sneak long looks at him—was his voice. What he could do with it. How gentle and warm he sounded as he took people’s pictures. It surprised her; she was suspicious at first of this quality in a war photographer. Then she saw that, along with the bold and the funny and the fearless sides, he really had a tender side. And she wanted that tenderness for herself. Greedily. The way a kid wants candy.
    Caddie throws her feet over the edge of the bed, walks to the window and stares blindly at the sky for several minutes. She rubs her own arms. Then she forces herself to focus on the street below. Anya is at the corner, standing motionless as though listening to an inner sound. Crazy street prophet Anya is their own neighborhood victim of Jerusalem Syndrome, that psychosis that attacks dozens each year. Some wrap themselves in white hotel sheets and wander the Judean Desert; others rally to the banks of the River Jordan believing themselves to be John the Baptist, or squat in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher waiting to give bloody birth to the infant Jesus. Unless they become aggressive or suicidal, they are usually ignored by the authorities. As is Anya.
    As always, Anya wears an ankle-length dress with widesleeves that intermittently slip up to reveal a tattoo of Venus on her right forearm. Her streaming blond hair is so snarled Caddie longs to shear it off. The neighbors say she’s in her midtwenties; sometimes Caddie believes it and other times she can’t imagine Anya is younger than fifty. Where she sleeps, how she gets her food, Caddie has no idea.
    Some days Anya seems almost as normal as any stroller. Occasionally, in a rush of off-kilter intimacy, she links arms with Caddie on the street and asks after her in a friendly, concerned matter. But on most days she is full of mutterings about Christ, or Woden, a Bronze Age Norse god she has fixated on. She often stops at an intersection and preaches about visions, her own and others’, the gift she says she’s been given “in compensation.” People never listen to the prophets of their own time; that seems to be her main theme. She sermonizes in such a friendly way that she usually draws a good-natured crowd.
    The story is that Anya—perhaps a little high-strung and overly religious, but basically an ordinary newlywed then—was touring Israel with her young husband and her mother. Anya’s husband was driving, her mother in the front by his side, Anya in the back. An eighteen-year-old immigrant from