“Almost there; buckle up, y’all.” Ray stood in traffic, inching his car toward the Ambassador Bridge. While Carrie texted her daughter and Franklin texted his wife, Ray tried to defuse the tension by teaching Eleonora about American culture courtesy of the stereo: “This is Earth, Wind & Fire; this is the dope shit”; “This is Post Malone; it’s bullshit.”

  “Come on, don’t worry; getting through this’ll be easy,” Ray told Eleonora, but, really, what did he know? He had no stamps in his passport; the farthest he’d ever traveled from Evanston was Disneyland with his wife and kids. He’d kept these plans secret from his son and daughter because he knew they would have tried to talk him out of it, would have parroted back the same lecture he’d given them their whole lives: keep a low profile, do what you’re told, don’t take unnecessary risks, remember who you are and what you look like, doesn’t matter what the truth is, what matters is what they’ll choose to believe.

  A banner was stretched across the bridge—a Canadian flag and the Stars and Stripes; between them, in big black letters, UNITED WE STAND. Customs officials in black uniforms and baseball caps strolled between cars, peered in windows, took passports, driver’s licenses, and customs declarations, opened trunks and examined what was inside.

  The border agent looked barely old enough to drive. He stepped out of his booth. Ray took off his sunglasses and handed over the passports. The agent studied them, then leaned into the car. “Mr. Tounslee?”

  “Yep.”

  “Dr. Hollinger?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Lichtenstein?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Miss Lichtenstein?”

  No answer.

  Eleonora was staring out her window as if she had already forgotten what her name was supposed to be.

  “Miss Lichtenstein?”

  Carrie poked her and the agent took a closer look at Eleonora’s passport.

  Ray called out. “Hey, man,” he said. “If you want, you can run a twenty-nine on all of us. But they’re all gonna come up as ‘None.’ ”

  “You some kind of cop?” the agent asked.

  Ray nodded. “Sergeant.” He pulled out his ID, handed it over.

  The agent took the ID, looked it over. “Shouldn’t you be thinking about retiring soon, Sergeant?”

  “I would if I could figure out something else to do with my life.”

  The kid laughed. “I sure hear that,” he said. “You married?”

  “Widowed.”

  “Real sorry about that. Kids?”

  “Grown. ’Bout your age.”

  “You all on some kind of business?”

  “Vacation,” said Ray. “Meeting up with a pal we haven’t seen since high school.”

  The agent nodded toward Eleonora, who was focused on the bridge and all the water beneath it. “Doesn’t she talk?” he asked.

  “Talks plenty when she wants to.”

  “What’s she got to be so upset about?”

  Ray laughed. “You wanna spend the last days of your summer vacation with your folks and their old school pals?”

  “Yeah, I hear that.” The agent gave back the passports. “You have a good day, now, Sergeant. And you find yourself a hobby. Keep safe.”

  Ray saluted the agent, hit the gas, and rolled on into Ontario with the stereo blasting the O’Jays, “Now That We Found Love”—all the while wondering if it had always been as easy for people to lie to him as it was for him to lie at the border. The trick, it turned out, wasn’t to make anyone believe you were innocent; it was to make them believe you were one of them so they wouldn’t care if you were guilty. Maybe if he’d known that when he was seventeen, everything could have turned out differently. After he had slammed Trey Newson to the ground, he could’ve told the cops to run a “29” on him; they would have asked if his dad was a cop, and he would’ve said, “Yeah, Chicago PD, brother,” and they would’ve let him go.

  He took a deep breath and let it out: “Dah-yumn.”

  Eleonora had done her best to hold back her tears at the border; now they flowed. “It’s all right,” Ray said. “The worst of the bullshit is over. All we gotta do from here on in is drive, eat, and sleep. You got nothing but possibilities in front of you. Ms. Grenfall will get you all set up; you can stay with her as long as you need. You’ll go to school. You’ll make friends. No one’ll send you back. What do you wanna do?”

  “I’ve been trying not to think about that,” Eleonora said. “Every time I dream of something, it doesn’t come true—unless it’s a nightmare; those wind up happening.”

  “No nightmares anymore,” said Ray. “Just the good stuff.”

  They had hoped to make it to Ottawa before they turned in for the night, but once rain started needling down, Ray could barely keep awake. He could have let Carrie or Franklin drive, but they weren’t on his insurance, and the last thing he needed was for cops to pull them over, run the license plates, and check their IDs again.

  The woman working the front desk of the Best Western asked how many rooms they needed. Ray asked for four, but Franklin said three would be fine: “Carrie and I can share.”

  Ray looked the two of them up and down, started to say something, then stopped. “Okaaay, then,” he told the woman at the desk. “Make it three rooms.”

  Eleonora held up two fingers.

  “You don’t want your own room either?” Ray asked. “All right, you take the bed; I’ll take the damn floor.”

  Eleonora pecked Ray on the cheek as if he were a kindly grandfather. He had a hard time seeing himself that way, but he had to get used to the idea that others did. “Come on, now, let’s get some shut-eye,” he said. “I’ll call up Ms. Grenfall, let her know we’re on our way.”

  When he got to the room, he called Fiona, and when she didn’t answer, he left a message on her voice mail. “We’re still making real good time,” he said. “We’ll be there Friday between noon and one, just like you said. Looking forward to seeing you, serious.”

  *

  Anne Frank and Peter Van Daan had showered. Anne Frank had called her daughter to make sure she was okay, and Peter Van Daan had called his wife to say he had arrived safely at the motel with Ray and the girl. Anne Frank and Peter Van Daan then walked down the hall to check on Eleonora and Ray and found Eleonora sitting up in bed, writing in her notebook and watching a reality show, while Ray was crashed out on the carpet, snoring.

  Anne and Peter were now in their room wearing what passed for pajamas: him, a white T-shirt and plaid boxers; her, a maroon U of C T-shirt and black yoga pants. They were sitting in the two armchairs in front of the beige curtain they had drawn across the windows.

  For a while Anne and Peter avoided discussing the fact that the two of them were alone in a motel room and that Anne no longer lived with her husband and Peter’s wife was with the kids visiting family in San Diego. Instead, Anne and Peter discussed the coming day: the drive to New Glasgow; how long they might stay. They asked after each other’s children: Kitty had found an apartment and roommates in Hyde Park; Maria Graciela had one year left of high school; Emma, a year of pre-K.

  “You hear from Declan at all?” he asked.

  “A little,” she said. “He sends me letters. I haven’t answered. It’s like, what would I say? I’m sure he’s lonely and I can’t imagine what he’s going through, but I wouldn’t want to give the wrong impression, particularly given the situation with Adrian, or lack thereof. Have you heard from Amanda?”

  “Asya?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, I made her a promise. She’ll be hearing from more than enough people without hearing from me, and if she wants to get in contact, she knows how.”

  For the first time in as long as they could remember, Anne Frank and Peter Van Daan were together and had no other place they needed to be. For now, Casa Segura would have to remain closed. Peter’s wife and daughters wouldn’t be back home until Labor Day, and as far as his job was concerned, Violet didn’t give a damn if he set foot in the Tomorrow building again as long as he kept writing stories that topped the Big Board.

  The only problem was that the man and woman getting ready for bed weren’t really Anne Frank and Peter Van Daan. Anne and Peter were dead. Peter had died in Mauthausen, Anne in Bergen-Belsen, and Carrie and Franklin were just two people who had pretended to be them long ago and couldn’t help thinking that having played those roles should matter.

  They often returned to the topic: What if Anne and Peter had survived? Would they have wound up together? Both knew but never admitted they were really talking about themselves. If she hadn’t left North Shore for her final year of high school, if she hadn’t gone to college in California and he hadn’t gone in New York, if she hadn’t been in Africa while he had lived in Central America, if he hadn’t been in Chicago while she had been in Ithaca, if they both hadn’t married other people after running out of hope that they would ever be together, what would have happened?

  “Well, here we are,” he said.

  “Yep, here we are,” she said.

  He held her hand. She didn’t take hers back. He leaned in closer; she remained still. He pressed his lips to hers. He closed his eyes; hers stayed open. “What?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  They kissed. She pulled back, still holding his hand. “What?” he asked again.

  “Isn’t it too late?” she asked.

  “As long as we’re alive, nothing’s ever too late,” he said.

  “You have a wife,” she said.

  “Technically, you still have a husband,” he said.

  “You have two daughters,” she said.

  “You have one,” he said. “And anyway, kids are resilient. The best lesson to teach them is to be true to their feelings, live their lives honestly.”

  “Is this honesty?” she asked. “I’ve been trying to live honestly; is this what it’s like?”

  “It feels honest to me.”

  Another kiss, longer this time. She stopped. He sighed. “What?”

  “What happens after?” she asked.

  “I don’t have an answer; that’s kind of the point.”

  They found their way to the bed and got under the covers. “It’s been a long time,” he said.

  “It has,” she said.

  “Nothing has to happen,” he said.

  “No. It doesn’t.”

  He brushed her hair away from her face, wiped the tear from her eye.

  “How do I look?” she asked.

  “Older and the same,” he said.

  “Same with you,” she said.

  “I love you, Carrie,” he said. “I always have.”

  “But what does that mean?” she asked.

  “Only that.”

  What happened between them—the way they undressed, drew themselves to each other, gasped as they felt the pressure of each other’s bodies until they couldn’t say for sure where one ended and the other began—happened as it nearly always did: in darkness, without words. But afterward, inevitably, the silence had to be broken; inevitably, their eyes grew accustomed to the night.

  They lay in bed for a long time, side by side, hand in hand, gazing not at each other but up at the broken wooden fan, at the stained, bulging ceiling tiles. “I’ve never been able to focus on the present, you know that,” she said. “That’s kind of my curse. I always think, ‘What’ll happen tomorrow?’ and then ‘What’ll happen the day after that?’ I can never let myself think about how happy I am at any moment, only how happy I might be later or how sad or angry I might make someone else feel.”

  “Yeah, I’ve never wanted to live that way,” he said. “I’m happiest when I don’t know what’s gonna happen, when I’m not thinking about consequences—when it’s all, like, ‘Follow your instinct, figure it all out later.’ People get hurt; they do. That’s gonna happen regardless. Every time you win something, someone else loses. Maybe tomorrow will come, maybe it won’t; you can’t count on it. One morning I was a kid and my mom was there for me. She made me breakfast, kissed me on the cheek; that afternoon she was gone. That can happen to any of us any time.”

  Carrie looked up. “You still think she’s up there, watching?”

  “Sometimes I think she is.”

  “What do you think she’s thinking?”

  “I think she understands.”

  “I’m just not sure that’s a way I can live,” she said. “Like, what’s the point of being with someone today if you’re not sure they’ll be with you the next day? Maybe that’s why we can never really be together.”

  “Maybe that’s why we have to be,” he said.

  “What do you think they would’ve done?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  “Anne and Peter,” she said. “I always think of what would have happened if they got out. I think of them finding an apartment together, finishing school, coming to America, starting a family, becoming grandparents, great-grandparents. But maybe they would’ve just wound up with different people, and that would’ve been that.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “The point is, none of it happened. There’s no happily ever after when you look close enough at any story. There’s happy for a moment, but only if you freeze it in time. It all keeps moving. Anne and Peter, their tragedy wasn’t that they didn’t get to be together; it’s that they didn’t get the chance to choose to be apart. They didn’t get to fall out of love, to follow their dreams and see them shattered; didn’t get the chance to marry the wrong people, realize they’d made a mistake, then try to fix it while they still were young enough to do something about it, to get back together even when they thought it might be too late.”

  He held her as they kissed, but this time he could feel her elsewhere. He may have been right there in that moment, but she couldn’t help imagining the morning and the next night, couldn’t help thinking about other people’s futures that were none of her business, but that didn’t make them matter any less. She imagined Franklin packing his things and leaving his family’s house; she imagined the talk he would have with his wife and kids about how everyone had to be honest and follow their hearts. She tried to imagine the conversation she’d have with Kitty, and she couldn’t decide which would be worse: Kitty feeling devastated or Kitty not caring at all. She thought of Eleonora in the room down the hall, her and every other kid she had seen at Casa Segura: How much would any of them have given for some harmony? Who cared how real it was?

  Franklin kept his arm around Carrie as she turned away. “It’s late,” he said. “We’ll have more than enough time to talk all this through. This conversation isn’t over yet; we can keep having it. There’s time.” He said good night and told her he loved her again. He held her closer when she said she loved him too. But when he awoke in the morning, she was gone. And even though he wasn’t shocked to see that Carrie had taken her suitcase and hadn’t left a note or even sent a text, he started to cry the moment he saw the one thing she had left behind: The Baron in the Trees, the book Franklin had loaned her on their first night together more than thirty years ago.

  He showered and dressed. He wheeled his suitcase to the lobby, where Eleonora and Ray were already sitting near the breakfast buffet. Franklin asked if they had seen Carrie and they told him they hadn’t. At the front desk, he asked if she had left a note and the clerk said no. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve, not knowing whether he should call her or not, try to follow her or not, head back to Chicago or keep going with Ray and Eleonora. He took only a small bit of comfort in the fact that his world still seemed to be made up of infinite choices, of decisions that might or might not be right, of stories that could end any number of ways—of chances that Peter Van Daan and Anne Frank had never had.

  *

  Fiona had listened to Ray’s most recent message three times, but she hadn’t returned it: “We’ll be there Friday between noon and one, just like you said. Looking forward to seeing you, serious.” She liked how he sounded, always had, probably too much. She didn’t know exactly how many people he was bringing with him or how long any of them might stay, but it didn’t matter: he could have brought a whole village. She certainly had the space—plenty of room at the inn, she thought.

  It had all gotten to be a joke with her, hadn’t it? Some empty catchphrase she had been uttering in one form or another ever since she’d been a girl. When Fiona was growing up, she was convinced that her parents were spies, not “diplomats,” as they claimed, and she still wasn’t sure she was wrong. Everywhere they lived seemed far more opulent than should have been the case for career foreign service workers. There were always vacation homes that Fiona would offer up as sanctuary for friends, colleagues, random acquaintances, and polite strangers.

  In primary school in Hong Kong, when everyone was obsessed with extraterrestrial life, she told her classmates about the home in the Cotswolds: “If Mars invades, we can all go there.” During secondary school, the fear was World War III—the U.S. and Soviets vaporizing Europe. If there was a nuclear winter, she told her friends and their teacher, Lloyd Crowder, her parents still had the house in Kenya; it had such a lovely garden. During her brief time in the preposterously posh home in Evanston, she fantasized that she had been alive during the Second World War: imagine how many families she could have hidden in a place like that.

  Fiona made similar offers at college and graduate school, at the universities where she taught, the laboratories where she worked, and at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where she produced Endangered!, her lovely, grim documentary series that had started with black rhinos and had now worked its way to human beings. She dangled the possibility of shelter after Chernobyl, after 9/11, after the bombings in London and the murders in the supermarkets and nightclubs of Paris: If the fallout spreads over Western Europe, if Al Qaeda detonates a dirty bomb, if some evil bastard starts shooting, if hurricanes wipe away everything you own, call me or just stop by; I have a place.

  And yet, until she got the call from Ray—darling Ray with his wife long gone and his two children grown; sad, sad Ray, whose life she thought she had ruined just like she had ruined the lives of everyone who made the mistake of getting close to her; reliable, middle-aged Ray whom she longed to see almost as much as she desperately wanted to avoid—she had done none of that. She had done little with her life other than “raise awareness,” a phrase that, to her, translated roughly to “doing fuck-all.” She had raised awareness in classrooms about the rising temperatures of the world’s oceans; she had raised awareness about the plight of those daft polar bears and Siberian tigers. But really, what had Fiona Bloody Grenfall done other than donate money and give lofty speeches while she polluted the countryside and depleted the ozone layer with her punch-red Jaguar and its criminally poor gas mileage and shitty air conditioner? How many people had she ever really helped?