Free In Case We're Separated by Alice Mattison Page A

murdered.”
    He looked away. “Once you said the ghost was in here,” he said. The knife was in his hand. His orange curls hadn’t yet been brushed.
    â€œNo I didn’t.” Not in the healthy kitchen. She brought in a notebook and drew a map of the apartment. With dots, she outlined the haunted area. She knew just where her feelings changed.
    â€œThe bathroom is closer to the kitchen,” Josh said. He took her pen and corrected the drawing.
    â€œThat’s not precisely my point, is it?” Jo said.
    Â 
    F riday night Josh hurried to meet Laura’s train at South Station. She jumped into his arms. Chandler was hairy. He and Josh grunted and nodded: Greetings, fellow primate. Josh instantly disliked Chandler for daring to sleep with his cousin, who rumpled Josh’s curls and said, “You look great!” She handed him a colorful stuffed tote bag, and they took the Red Line to Davis Square. As they climbed Somerville’s narrow streets she said she and Chandler had met at a party three months earlier.
    â€œAnd you’re already calling him your boyfriend?” Josh said. “Jo and I didn’t even shake hands for a year.”
    â€œImpressive technique,” said Chandler from behind them. He spoke in a rich voice that was a little too loud. “How did you get her to shake hands after only a year?”
    At the apartment Chandler shook hands with Jo and the other two laughed. Josh stepped forward and also shook hands with Jo, and she nodded as if that happened all the time. Jo was a little stern, quiet compared to Laura, who knocked into objects, which quivered behind her but were not harmed. She was short, with wild, light-colored hair something like Josh’s. Leading the way into the kitchen, Laura announced that she’d learned to cook Ethiopian food. She’d frozen an entire meal and had let it thaw on the train. She took packages wrapped in foil and plastic from the tote bag. “People began sniffing as we left New York,” she said, grabbing her hair as if she’d lost something in it. She’d made injera—the flat sourdough bread—and two kinds of stew.
    While Josh and Jo heated the food, Laura phoned an old roommate, and Chandler examined the apartment. “I bet this place once had beautiful doorknobs,” Josh heard him say to nobody. “When a place like this is renovated, why do they put in ugly doorknobs?”
    Chandler took tiny pieces of the bread Laura had made, barely enough to pinch a bean or a cube of potato, while Laura, Jo, and Josh tore off handkerchief-sized pieces and seized all the food they could. “Explain to Jo how we’re related,” Josh said as they ate. “I can’t.”
    â€œYou always make me do that,” Laura said. “Our mothers are cousins. Our grandmothers are sisters. Your grandma is my great-aunt Sylvia. My grandma is your great-aunt Fanny.”
    â€œGreat-aunt Fanny!” said Josh. “I can never remember how I know her.”
    â€œYou’re just pretending.”
    Chandler said, “Why do people go on and on about families?”
    â€œYou ask a lot of questions,” Josh said. He meant rude questions. Being with Laura made him giddy. Together they grew younger, drawn back to the suitcase of potential babies that their great-grandparents, whose names were Sonia and Joseph, had dragged from the old country.
    Then Jo said, “I think I saw the man today.”
    â€œWhat man?” said Chandler.
    â€œThe man who did that to you?” Laura said. Her voice had become softer, slower.
    â€œI’m not sure,” Jo said. “I was having tea at Carberry’s with Sue. A man and a younger woman were eating lunch with a little girl. He wasn’t wearing the same jacket, but I saw his face when he looked at the baby.”
    â€œDid you call the cops?” said Chandler. Laura must have told him about it.
    â€œI didn’t even