“Maybe we were,” I tell Adam. And with those three little words, I have changed everything.

Chapter 46

The midday sun is warm on our faces, even if we are only days away from Christmas. Over breakfast, Mom suggested we go to Randalls Island. It’s my first Saturday off in two weeks, and I don’t want to waste it indoors.

Mom’s sunglasses are large and round, her cheekbones high. She walks with her hands stuffed in her pockets. She swears yoga has kept her posture upright, and I believe it. She’s the reason I’ve been meaning to start yoga for the past five years.

“Hell Gate,” Mom muses as we stroll the asphalt path. “That’s what this stretch of water was called. Do you know why?”

“Probably sank a good number of ships trying to get through here.”

“True, but that’s not where its name came from,” she replies. “It’s Dutch for ‘bright strait’ or something like that.” We follow the walkway along the water’s edge, the brink of the island.

“Poor Hell Gate. An innocent waterway with a bad name.”

“Not all that innocent. She was a watery grave for plenty.” Wispy clouds drift away from the sun. Mom shields her eyes from the bright glare on the water. “They blasted the straits with a ridiculous amount of explosives over a hundred years ago. People all the way in Princeton, New Jersey, felt the blast. They used the rubble to make that little island right there.”

In my second year in an American school, I learned the word “rubble.” I’d mistaken it for the name of Russian currency, which made my ESL teacher laugh. She’d flipped through pages of a textbook until she found a grainy photograph of a tattered child standing on a pile of bricks in Poland during the Second World War.

Rubble, she’d said, so brightly she could have been revealing a birthday cake. Not ruble! This is rubble.

I’d gone home early that day, having spent half an hour on a cot in the nurse’s office with a stomachache.

I’d like to think I’m less affected by words now.

“How was last night?” I ask instead.

Mom laughs.

“Speaking of misfits,” she says slyly, then stuffs her hands in her pockets and curls her shoulders in. “So much reminiscing last night. A gaggle of women who can’t sit back and watch the sunset. Do you remember Evelyn? She’s the one who suggested Randalls Island for a walk. She told us stories of the insane asylums and orphanages they had here. They moved cemeteries from Bryant Park and Madison Square to this island. Thousands of bodies relocated.”

I see heaps of upturned earth and tilted headstones in my mind. I doubt Shair will come back to clinic. I’m going to have to find another way to push him for answers.

Mom interrupts my wandering thoughts.