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the back had sustained such grave injuries that he bled to death as the police tried to cut him out of the Mustang’s chassis. Dash had not said anything to the officers as they worked to pry him out of the skeletal backseat, but one of them got the sense that he had, for a while anyway, been conscious. Del’s college roommate and best friend, Madeline Singh, held her hand for twenty-eight days. Madi held it when Del was not invited to the funeral by the Winslow family, held it as Del agonized about whether or not to have the baby, tried to hold it as they waited on the plastic bowl seats at the Planned Parenthood clinic, and used every inch of her hands to clasp on to Del at John F. Kennedy Airport before her flight back to Greece, to go home, to get away from New York, to be embraced by a family that had already framed her diploma over their living room clock, encased in glass to keep the sea salt from infecting the gears.
    Del spent a year on Amorgos before returning to New York. In those four seasons drifting in the quiet Aegean she gained pounds and invested her afternoons in her own studies, first in the heart muscles of the human anatomy and then, with a strange interest in toxins and circulatory structures, in herpetology, reptiles, the
cold-bloods. The western diamondback drew her particular interest, fangs on one end, a rattle on the other, swerving through the deserts of America, reminding her of the country she missed. Madi kept a bed waiting for her return in an apartment on the edge of the East Village. By the time Del climbed out of a taxi on Avenue B with two pieces of luggage and a box of vinyl records—the only item she took from her dead boyfriend’s apartment before she slipped the key under the door—the pain of losing Dash Winslow had pretty much dissipated into the heartbreak of failed possibilities. Or rather, Del saw him for the distortion he had always been, a gorgeous kid who had been amplified in the head of another as the perfect, all-answering, money-backed future. He had finally been consigned to a blade of grass hidden in a locket at the bottom of her jewelry box.
    Eleven years later, she stood at the kitchen counter filling a glass with water from the faucet, and she could actually blame Dash’s death as the reason she had tumbled out of permanent citizenship in the United States by leaving that summer for Greece. If she had stayed, gone to graduate school or landed a job in biology research, she would have been granted one of those passes that the INS bestows on students who remain in the beneficent kingdoms of the educated working class. Instead, she had to apply all over again for visas, collecting letters from employers and friends on her merits every few years, paying cash for immigration lawyers who said “the chances are good, Ms. Kousavos. You work at one of the city’s top tourist attractions. Now when are you going to get that panda pregnant? My son loves pandas. Do you think you can swindle free weekend passes?”
    The last thing her father had said to her when she was home for Christmas three years ago was, “Don’t you do something drastic, young lady. Don’t go marrying some fool American for the papers, for the citizen card. You do a wedding here with your mother. We decorate the whole town for you.” She hadn’t phoned them yet to give them the news, and part of her wondered if she needed to tell them at all. Families far away are allotted such small windows into the lives of their children, wasn’t it best to let them imagine her world the way they wanted to, as if every day the Statue of Liberty drifted behind her shoulder and cops cleared her path at night until
she was safely locked behind her door? It amazed her that she had survived fifteen years in the city, for much of that time staying out late enough to see dawn break through the yellow night sky, and still her parents cautioned her to be careful if she told