IT’S NOT GETTING better, not even staying the same. She’d been sure, from experience, that every time she got too near the brink, she’d be able to swerve away. But this time, she’s out of control: Look, no hands. All the warning lights are flashing in vain, and she senses that people are alarmed—they’re actually moving out of the way when they see her coming. She’s just had a fight with her boyfriend. She could have killed him. It came that close: a centimeter, a second! She’d diced with tragedy. What if he’d been just a bit slower and clumsier? And like after every explosion, she is particularly calm, lucid, and ashamed. Gloria takes great strides up the rue Saint-Jean, under a pelting shower of rain. Soaked through, she feels stupid, grubby, and above all, back on the streets. She’d moved in with him, but something tells her that after the scene she’s just made, she is—temporarily—homeless. She makes a mental list of the apartments of people she knows. Most of them have children, and no room anymore to put someone up.
