The Distance Between Us by Masha Hamilton

When I was nine, my mother was in San Francisco, out on a street late at night alone, and she got mugged and beaten up. She died in the hospital.”
    “Your grandparents raised you, then?” Goronsky asks.
    “Grandmother. My grandfather was already gone, so it was only Grandma Jos and me.”
    Usually when Caddie tells these stories, her listeners give her a puppy-dog gaze. A child orphan, all these untimely deaths, what a shame . And usually she nods and thinks how easy it is to fool people into believing she’s been open, merely by pulling out a stale story.
    In Goronsky’s face now, however, there is none of the typical pity. Just, again, that recognition.
    Marcus was spontaneity and irony and a joke. Marcus was a noontime sun flooding the room, washing out its corners. This Goronsky is a single, eye-stinging beam that claims to know her even better than she knows herself.
    Unexpectedly, that pleases her.
    . . .
    H ALFWAY THROUGHT THE MEAL , she catches him staring at her.
    “Is it awful?” he asks.
    “What?”
    “The food. You’re mostly rearranging instead of eating.”
    She looks at her plate. She’s hidden the fish under the salad and hasn’t touched the bread. In fact, she realizes that she hasn’t eaten dinner for weeks, starting in the Cyprus hospital. The one meal she’s been skipping. “I’m not too hungry,” she says.
    After dinner, they walk again. They do not touch, but their shoulders are close. Too close. She sits on a bench and places her backpack between them as he, too, sits. “Now you tell me a story,” she says. “A story of your childhood.”
    “Hmm,” he says vaguely. “You are interviewing me?”
    “You already interviewed me.”
    “A typical Russian childhood,” he says. “We went to school as a number, not a name. We sat in neat rows behind blond desks. We dressed the same, drew the same pictures, spoke to the teacher in unison.” His tone grows impatient. “Sasha is the diminutive for boys named Alexander or girls named Aleksandra. You know how many Sashas were in my class? Nine. Every year, the same nine of us, growing older as one.” He presses his lips together and looks, for a second, as though he is going to spit. “As one of many Sashas, I was invisible. I could get away with anything.”
    Although she’s seen enough rage in the last few years to recognize it now, it surprises her. Even controlled, it seems outof proportion. To be invisible doesn’t sound like such a bad thing. How much better than being known as the girl whose mother, plainly put, couldn’t find a reason to stay.
    He grows so silent that she thinks he may not speak again tonight. “I like Jerusalem, don’t you?” she says after a few minutes. “The hills, the history.”
    He doesn’t answer but leans slightly over her backpack. The intensity of his attention attracts and chills her. She’s careful not to touch him, but he is near enough for her to breathe in the smell of him: a scent of sea salt.
    “I only wish Jerusalem had the ocean,” she says. “That’s the single advantage to Tel Aviv.”
    His body grows board-like. He rubs his arms as though chilled and looks away. “You like the ocean, then?” he asks.
    She hesitates. “I like its power.”
    “You’ve been to the seaside a lot?”
    “I didn’t ever leave Indiana as a kid. But later, after I was older, I spent a vacation in San Diego. For a week I collected shells and stones. Obsessive, almost—handfuls of them every day. Always looking for the perfect ones. Finally, I got over it. I gave them all away to a bum on the boardwalk.”
    “And since then you’ve collected, what? The maimed and the marred?”
    She laughs, ignoring the coolness of his tone. “Essentially.”
    He doesn’t speak for a few minutes. “I have a beach story,” he says at last, his voice inflectionless. “It’s about Israel. About a woman who emigrated from Russia. Do you want to hear?” He doesn’t wait for her answer. “Lean back,