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Neal said in a low voice that
made her wonder if he were addressing her or himself.
    “I don’t think I’ll ever
be a practicing Buddhist, but yes, now I can appreciate some of the concepts a
bit more,” Tess said.
    “I admire you,” he said.
    “Admire me? Why?” she
asked, her voice cracking. She felt his eyes on her, but when she turned to
him, he stared straight ahead.
    “It’s easy to get
brainwashed as a child, to do as our parents say, but you seem to have had your
own ideas as a child and maintained them. That’s brave.”
    “I don’t think it’s
brave. It was just how my mind worked—I questioned everything when I was a
child. If things didn’t make sense to me, I couldn’t just believe them.” She
stopped. “What is that?” she asked pointing to the necklace he wore.
    Neal rubbed the
necklace’s centerpiece, which consisted of two squares of woolen cloth
connected with each other by two strings or bands; the front segment rested on
his chest, and she imagined that the other part of it hung down his back.
    “It's a scapula,” Neal
said. “It’s supposed to help guide people. When you pray to it, you never say
Amen because the prayer is continuous. It doesn’t have an end.”
    “For someone writing a
book that equates religions, you seem to be a pretty devout Catholic,” Tess
said.
    “Religion has played a
big role in my life. The book is helping me to make sense of what my truth is,”
Neal said.
    He rubbed his scapula and
glanced up at Tess and then down at the floor, as if he were checking to see if
it was still there. There was an innocence to him that she couldn’t place, a
shyness around her, and she wondered if he were gay.
    “Are you far along with
your book?”
    “I've had a lot of false
starts, but I think that I'm on the right path now. I’ve written a few chapters
in the past week.”
    She couldn’t place his
accent: Midwest?
    “Well that’s good news.
Hopefully you’ll figure out your truth in no time at all.”
    They stood in front of a
painting of a young, bare-chested Jesus holding Mary's hand, pulling her along
a road. The sky in the painting was parting so that Jesus and Mary’s faces
radiated. Tess felt herself growing warm, and then they were moving on again.
    “Are you from Brooklyn?”
    Neal nodded. “I grew up
in Mill Basin.” They walked down another corridor. “It’s nice to be back in
Brooklyn,” he said.
    “That depends on where
you’ve been.”
    Neal stopped rubbing and
stared down at his hands, as if Tess had asked him to pull a frog from his
throat.  She envisioned a nasty divorce, his going bankrupt, an illicit affair.
She had learned that it was probably better that people didn’t know one
another’s secret lives.
    “I’ve been up north,
Canada.”
    “I’ve never made it to
Canada. Sometime you’ll have to tell me about your life there.”
    He looked as if he was
about to hyperventilate and she would have said something witty- that Canada
could be his secret - but his hands on his chest made her lose her thought.
Smooth and strong, with fingers that were long and lean with well-kept nail
beds, glossy and pink-white. They were the hands of someone that was precise,
deliberate; they were the hands of someone who didn’t do manual labor.
    What was that glow on his
head? Aside from dull lights overhead this end of the corridor, it was dim.
There was no stained glass where they were standing. She saw the way the red and
orange and yellow merged seamlessly from his forehead to the crown of his head.
A rainbow! It was a rainbow. Were you supposed to wish for something when you
saw rainbow? Just as she was about to tell him, the rainbow vanished.
    “Are you okay? Is something
wrong?” he asked.
    “Oh. No. I'm fine,” Tess
said. A rainbow on a man’s head? She smiled to herself.
    “Did you grow up here?”
Neal said.
    Tess shook her head. “Woodstock.
Upstate New York.”
    “I’ve never been,” Neal
said.
    “It's an