He learned she’d been raised in Virginia, a tiny town called Boones Mill. She had a sister, Kim, eleven years older. Her parents had died when she was only five, but she wouldn’t say any more about it than that.
Kim became Emma’s legal guardian when she turned eighteen, got work locally, and raised her sister instead of going to Jefferson College of Health Sciences in Roanoke, where she’d been accepted. It wasn’t until Emma graduated high school—and matriculated at UVA—that Kim finally went to Jefferson, for nursing. Emma remembered her life after her parents died as time spent in only three places: home, school, and the South County Library, twenty minutes away in Roanoke.
“My favorite librarian there was a woman named Ms. Rook,” Emma said. “She helped raise me almost as much as Kim.”
They were halfway through dinner, onto their second bottle of hot sake, and leaning toward each other across the small wooden tabletop. The customers crowded close all around, and the waiters had so little room to move that Apollo got bumped every time they passed by, but he hardly noticed. He only listened to her.
“Ms. Rook used to sit me down with a movie if Kim was late coming for me. That way she could start closing up. I watched everything they had for kids. Then one day, when I was twelve, I picked up something almost at random. I just liked the picture on the front. A couple of black people half naked and carrying spears.”
“That made you want to watch it?” Apollo asked.
“It was the only movie in the entire library that had black people on the cover. Of course I wanted to watch it! The movie was called Quilombo. A Brazilian film. Ms. Rook even came to check on me. She saw the movie playing, saw that I was occupied, and went on her way.”
Emma had become tipsy by then, laughing loudly.
“There’s no way Ms. Rook could’ve known it was a movie about the slave uprisings in Brazil. Or that the movie would show tons of Portuguese people getting killed by those slaves! She was such a sweet lady, I never told her what the movie was about. I knew she’d be mortified, and I was too polite to say anything. But I really liked it. It became the only thing I wanted to see.”
Here Emma tilted her head to the side and watched the ceiling, grinning.
“It was in Portuguese with English subtitles. I loved the way the language sounded. It took awhile, but I got Ms. Rook to order a few more Brazilian movies after that. Bye Bye Brasil, Subway to the Stars, Os Trapalh?es e o Rei do Futebol. Finally, Ms. Rook had to stop buying them because one girl’s love of Brazil wasn’t enough to justify the costs of the tapes. But she’d done enough for me. I realized how big the world was. Bigger than Boones Mill. And I wanted to see it.”
“One of your eyes is bigger than the other,” Apollo said. He’d only just noticed it. The difference was hardly noticeable, but it made her seem to be peering at the world more deeply than most. Or maybe Apollo was just falling for her.
Emma lowered her head and covered the larger eye. Maybe she’d taken his observation as an insult. He doubted he could say anything to make it better now, so instead he said the first thing on his mind.
“I never cared if I had a boy or a girl, you know? I just want to be a good father to whatever kids I have.”
Even as he said it, he understood how nutty that sounded. Great topic of first date conversation, Apollo! Why not ask if she’d like to sign a thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage with you, too?
Emma lowered her hand and poured herself a little more sake. She drank it in a slow sip, set down the cup, then spoke. “I want to explain why I said no when you asked me out that first time.”
“And the next five times,” Apollo added.
“And the next five times,” Emma agreed.
Now Emma sat back in her chair while Apollo hunched forward.
“I said no because I’m moving to Brazil. Already bought my tickets. I’m going to Salvador do Bahia, in the north.”
“For how long?” Apollo asked.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Apollo drank straight from the ceramic sake bottle to finish off the booze.
“Then why did you say yes to me now?” he asked.
She looked at the table and grinned. “I found myself looking forward to Friday sales because I hoped you’d be back.” She raised her eyes to meet his. “I missed you.”
As he led her back out onto the street, he took her hand. She squeezed it tightly when he did.
“Now about this trip to Brazil,” Apollo said.
I am the god, Apollo, he told himself. I am the god, Apollo.
“Are you sure I can’t convince you to stay?”
Emma Valentine smiled at him crookedly, intoxicated as they kissed.
Four weeks later she left for Brazil.
TRY DATING OTHER women after a night like that. Apollo certainly did. But his heart wouldn’t buy it. It was Emma Valentine or bust. How long could she stay in Brazil, anyway? They wrote each other, but Emma couldn’t rely on an Internet connection. She left Salvador after a few months and moved to Manaus, then Fortaleza. Eventually she’d hit Rio and S?o Paulo, but not yet. Apollo found himself reading news from Brazil online. He got a DVD of Quilombo, and though the movie was serious business—African slaves battling the vicious Portuguese—he laughed when he imagined a twelve-year-old Emma watching it again and again in a public library in Roanoke. In Emma’s absence, he only fell more in love with her.
Apollo sold off the entire D’Agostino library, piecemeal. He put the Crowley postcard up on his site, and fourteen hours later he had five bids, finally selling it for three thousand dollars. In late 2003, he helped Lillian put a down payment on a house, a neat single-family home out in Springfield Gardens, Queens. She refused his help until they sat down together and calculated how much she’d save if she could put 30 percent down on the house instead of 20. This kind of thing helped occupy Apollo’s time and mind. After a year Emma wrote to say she was coming back to the United States. Her flight wouldn’t arrive until late at night, she wrote, and he might not even be interested in seeing her anymore, but if he did want to see her, she’d love for his face to be the first one she found at arrivals.
The plane, meant to arrive at ten o’clock, got delayed twice. Apollo ended up spending the night at JFK. The families and friends in the arrivals area sat, slumped, shuffled, and shrugged, and some fought. The longer the delays, the more everyone settled in, Apollo among them. Sometime after midnight he slipped into sleep.
At intervals one delayed plane or another arrived, and its sluggish passengers appeared, greeted by similarly sluggish loved ones. The grand windows of the international arrivals terminal let in the dawn light when Emma’s plane finally landed.
Her hair had grown longer, curlier; the brown showed a faintly reddish tinge now. Her skin was darker, and her clothes bright, fabric thin, all wrong for the cool spring season. She hadn’t brought back her suitcase, only a backpack slung on one arm. She’d left with more and returned with less. She moved slowly, seeming weary but also unrushed, and she saw him before he saw her.