At this, Gerald stood and collected plates, and Will had a feeling like he’d had the day Marian and Mrs. Salas had arrived with all their Tupperware. Sabotage, he thought, but this time, he supposed he didn’t really mind.
“I’ve got more than a thing for her,” he said, because the correction seemed important. “That’s the problem.”
Sally looked at him with eyes full of sympathy. “So it’s unrequited, then. No wonder you look this bad.”
He would’ve been insulted, but he’d seen himself. He did look bad. He needed a shave and a good night of sleep, and also probably a few more meals like the one he’d just eaten.
“I’m not sure it’s unrequited,” he said, which was an embarrassing thing to admit. But also he was sitting at a dining table next to two cats and getting a talking-to from his boss’s ex-wife, so.
“Well, what’s the problem, then?” She lowered her voice and smiled. “Does she criticize you for putting your elbows on the table?”
“Nothing like that.” He shifted in his seat. “I’m not—I don’t know that it’s a good idea, for me to get serious with someone.”
“You’re one of those, then. Commitment-phobic!” She threw up her hands. “I’ve met a bunch like you. When you turn forty and start losing your hair you’ll probably want to have a baby.”
Will resisted the urge to touch his hair.
“No, that’s not it.” Or at least it wasn’t that particular version of it, not the way Sally meant.
“It’s her or it’s no one,” he added, and as soon as it was out of his mouth he felt the truth of it, right in the aching center of his heart.
Sally had a look on her face like Mrs. Salas when he talked medicine. “So why isn’t it a good idea?”
She said it so nicely, so genuinely, that Will thought he probably could’ve told her the whole thing, and she would’ve listened.
I’ve got this fear, he could’ve said, that I’m exactly like my parents. He could’ve said, I’ve got this fear that I don’t know how to love anyone any other way. He could’ve told her about what had happened to him, when he’d seen that picture: a big, blurry rush of unpleasant memories. He could have told her that seeing his parents so young and in love had only reminded him of where they’d ended up: utterly lost at the prospect of being without each other.
I’ve got this fear that I’d lose sight of everything else.
But Will’s boss was still in the other room and Sally didn’t have all night, and anyway, this wasn’t as simple as fixing up Donny’s apartment or finding a home for the two cats sitting next to him. This wasn’t the kind of thing Sally could have a solution for.
So instead he said, “She and I, we’re pretty different.”
Sally shrugged. “Gerald and I are different.”
“You’re divorced.”
She pursed her lips and cocked her head at him, giving him an exasperated look. “Obviously,” she said, “we are working on it.”
He nodded down at his placemat, appropriately chastened.
“Will,” Sally said, and he could tell a big, frustrated, Why are you like this? sigh was lingering beyond it. “Let me ask you a question.”
One of the cats started to climb onto his lap. Quincy, which meant it was fifty-fifty he was about to get peed on, screamed at, or both.
“Why not,” he said blandly, pretty much to both Sally and Quincy.
“Do you want to work on it?”
Quincy’s tail swiped across Will’s face like an admonishment, and frankly, it was extremely clarifying. Of course you try to fix a brain bleed, asshole, he thought to himself, straightening in his chair. It was like having an anchor dropped in his body, slowing him down enough to see his surroundings, to actually think for what felt like the first time in days, maybe since he’d seen that picture. He thought about Gerald in the other room, washing dishes and probably deep breathing through his annoyance over Sally’s elbows on the table. He thought of Gerald in the hospital, asking him about purchasing a kitten or a gift card, trying to sort out ideas for nonroutine dates.
God. Suddenly, being more like Gerald Abraham seemed a whole lot better than being himself, selfish and sullen and ruminating. So he’d overreacted to the photograph. So he’d gotten too in his head about his parents, and about himself. That didn’t mean he couldn’t work on it with Nora; that didn’t mean he couldn’t find a way to figure this out so that it would be good for them both. He just had to focus. A diagnosis, and now a treatment. In fact it is common sense!
“Yes,” he said to Sally, gently moving a stiff-legged Quincy back to his chair. “I do.”
Sally smiled across the table at him, her expression a mixture of pride and excitement that dampened some of Will’s confidence. He cringed, thinking of the Good luck text.
“Pretty sure I’ve dug a big hole here,” he said.
Sally might as well have had a tablet and a neon pink binder in front of her when she spoke again.
“I suppose it’s a bit like that mess of an apartment you walked into not so long ago! You’ve got to start somewhere.”
When Will walked into his own dark apartment an hour later, “starting somewhere” did, admittedly, feel like a dimmer prospect than it had when he’d been sitting across from Sally. After all, Nora was still in San Diego until tomorrow, and his options for starting to fix things were limited. He could’ve called, but she’d been pretty clear about wanting to wait until she got back, and anyway, he wanted to give this the focus it deserved, didn’t want to call her unless he’d really thought about what he wanted to say.
And another Good luck–type text message absolutely wasn’t going to cut it.
He kept the lights off at first, not ready to see his spare, functional apartment yet, not wanting the reminder that he— unlike . . . Gerry? . . . nope, Gerald—might not ever get out of this purgatory. But as he moved through his lonely nighttime routine—shower, sleep shorts, brushing his teeth—lights became a necessity, and when he went into the kitchen to get himself a glass of water, he caught sight of his mother’s old book on the counter in the spot where he’d left it almost a week ago. The photograph was in there, he knew; he’d seen Nora slide it gently between the pages when she’d come to find him.
One place to start, he supposed, would be taking that photograph out and staring down at it until he could be assured he wouldn’t overreact again. But the fact that the book was still there at all, he supposed, was progress of a sort—years ago, months ago, weeks ago, even, he probably would’ve gotten rid of it, would’ve put the photograph into the same box where he kept all pictures from his childhood, small and shoved into the back of his closet.
That was Nora’s influence, he thought—maybe she held on to things too hard, but she did love an artifact, more like her parents than maybe she realized. Over at her place, she had an origin story for everything, and mentioning them brought a certain smile to her face, always. The teapot that had been an anniversary gift from her grandfather to her grandmother. The painted tile that Nora’s mother had made in third grade. The lamp that he’d seen her giving away last week, apparently from Italy.
So even though he didn’t much want to look at the book or the photograph yet, it comforted him, somehow, to know he’d held on to them; it gave him hope he could fix this with Nora. Still, for the first time in his life he thought it might be nice to have the kind of artifact lying around that might make him feel like she did—comforted and closer to someone she’d lost.
A thought hit him, and he set down his glass so quickly that water splashed over the back of his hand. He shook it off, wiped it on his shorts, and moved down his galley to the drawer where he always shoved extra pens or rubber bands or those garbage bag ties he never ended up using anyway. He yanked it open, heart hiccupping, and there it was, exactly what he was looking for: a scroll of paper, a number written lightly at the top.
He smiled down at it, the memory like a balm: in his mind was a long green dress, the line of Nora�
��s shoulders, her long braid and her flower crown, the look she’d given him when she’d handed this scroll over to him, mischief in her eyes.
He felt a smile spread over his face.
He took it with him to his bedroom, for the first time in days not dreading the thought of lying down without her. He propped his pillow up against the wall (something to be said for his furniture-arranging) and sat back, tapping the scroll against his palm and thinking about that night—not only Nora, but also Mrs. Salas and her Solo cup, Mr. Salas’s food and Benny’s beer, Jonah calling him “Beanpole” and Marian and Emily sitting in the front row, their hands joined together. He thought about himself at that microphone, determined to win over the crowd.
When he first pulled it open, it didn’t strike him as much more than what he saw that night: a name he recognized, a soothingly short number of lines. “Sonnet 98.” Spring, summer, flowers, that sort of thing. He remembered Nora saying it was sad, and Jonah, too. He didn’t know if he was up for sad, but he was up for starting somewhere, and a poem that meant something to his story with Nora, that seemed as good as any idea he had so far and definitely better than Good luck.
So he started to read.
At first it wasn’t easy: words he recognized but that he struggled to make sense of in this context, laid out in an order that seemed unnatural to him. He read it silently twice, all of it swimming together, before he tried it out loud again. One line at a time, making sense of punctuation marks like he never had in his life. He read it and read it, until it got easier, until it got to be like breathing.
“‘From you have I been absent in the spring,’” he read, again and again.
A poem about missing someone.
About moving through the world and missing someone all the time. A few days, or maybe sixteen whole years. Living every spring and summer of your life without really noticing it. Everything you looked at that was beautiful you couldn’t see quite right: figures of delight, all of them an imitation of the person you were missing the most.
“‘Yet seem’d it winter still,’” he read, the phrase like a cold wind across his skin, “‘and you, away, / As with your shadow I with these did play.’”
Jesus Christ, that was a sad poem.
But also . . . also it felt like a start.
He looked at the clock, realized he’d been reading for a long time. Where Nora was, it wasn’t so late. He could have typed it all out right then, probably from memory by now. The next time she checked her phone, she’d find it—this memory of one of the first nights they’d spent together, this written expression of how he’d felt all the time without her. Not since she left.
Since before, since before.
But as he reached for his phone, he had a passing thought for the morning, for the golden hour when Nora would be waking up in California. By that time, he would have already started his day. He’d send it then, he decided, so that she’d know how much he missed her, thought of her, while she was gone.
So she’d know how glad he was that she was coming back.
That, he decided, would be exactly the right start.
Chapter 17
“He’s going to fight for you, Nora.”
Sitting crisscrossed on Deepa’s jewel-blue velvety couch, Nora sipped her wine and shrugged, affecting a posture of nonchalance that did not, perhaps, entirely match the range of feelings she’d wrestled with over the course of this long and stressful week in San Diego. Surprise and frustration, excitement and anxiety, certainty and also a fair bit of sadness. Inside her, it all swirled, a soaking-rain sort of thunderstorm that somehow felt welcome for all the things it was washing away.
“He might,” said Nora. “But it won’t change my mind.”
As of today, Nora had made the decision: she was leaving Verdant, too.
Not right away, not until she’d wrapped up work on all her current build-outs, and not until she’d helped Austin bring on someone new.
But soon.
It wasn’t that being back in the office had been awful. In a way, it’d been comforting: friends she hadn’t seen in months other than through videoconferences, favorite snacks from the cafe on the building’s first floor, two in-person bathroom mirror meeting debriefs with Dee, who was taking all the news in happy stride, given that she had already found a new and better gig at a marketing firm back in Berkeley. Even the time Nora had spent with Austin had been comforting: however frustrating he could be, it was good to remember how well they’d always worked together, how he trusted her expertise and valued her input, even on projects she wasn’t all that enthusiastic about.
But it had also been clarifying. In person, there was no denying the way Austin had changed, the way his priorities had shifted. And now that he’d revealed the full extent of his plans—the move to LA, the shift away from sustainability alone, the pivot to celebrity and influencer brands—Nora had known there was a reckoning coming for her and Austin. After the full team meeting in the afternoon, he’d pulled her aside and practically begged her to come back to California. “More money,” he’d said. “A new title, whatever you want. But this will go smoother if you’re with us in person.”
He’d left that if there as a concession—not quite telling her that remote work was off the table, but definitely not pledging his ongoing support of it, either. Certainly not if she wanted more money, or that new title.
A few years ago—a few months ago, really—she would have felt that tug of loyalty to him, would have genuinely considered it: a move to a city she wasn’t overly fond of, an uprooting of her life for someone who’d always been firmly in her corner.
But now, Nora was different. She knew, deep down: she didn’t want to leave Chicago.
Not now.
Maybe not ever.
And it wasn’t just on account of her loyalty this time. When she’d chosen Chicago last fall, she’d done it because Nonna had needed her, because Nonna had wanted her to stay. She’d known she was going back to a place and to people she loved— the building, Nonna’s apartment, her neighbors. But now, something else drew her there; now, she was choosing for herself. She wanted to go back to the building and her apartment and her neighbors, but also to the neighborhood and the city around it; she wanted to go back for the weirdly Midwestern beaches and the sights she hadn’t seen, to the big, brutal seasons and the collective attitude of a city that didn’t get nearly enough respect.
And she wanted—maybe foolishly—to go back to Will.
“Honestly I can’t believe he hasn’t called like a million times already,” Dee said, and without thinking, Nora answered.
“I did basically tell him not to.”
Dee furrowed her brow. “Wait, you did? I thought at the meeting you told him—” She broke off and nudged Nora with her foot, obviously clocking the flush Nora could feel heating her cheeks. “Haaaaaaaaa,” she said, happy teasing in her voice. “You’re thinking about him again!”
Nora took another sip of her wine, skipped the shrug this time. No point trying to fake it, since in between the many work rants and resolutions she and Deepa had both participated in over the course of the week, they’d also spent a fair bit of time talking through what had happened between Nora and Will.
“Ice-cold, Eleanora,” said Dee, laughing. “About to tell a whole man you’re going to leave him, and you’re already on to the next one.”
“It’s not the same,” said Nora. “Austin is my colleague. And also, I think we have well established by this point that I am not, in fact, on with Will.”
She shifted, uncrossing her legs and adjusting so that she and Dee faced each other, both of them now with backs against either arm of the couch, legs stretched alongside each other. Dee wiggled her feet against Nora’s ribs, a gentle, teasing comfort that made Nora smile.
“You’re going to be okay?” Dee asked. “If he doesn’t come around?”
Nora dropped her head back, closing her eyes. Behind her lids the words Good luck flashed irritatingly,
so she opened them again, staring up at Dee’s ceiling and sighing out a disappointed breath. It wasn’t fair, maybe, to be upset that Will hadn’t reached out, especially not after all the times she’d said it was better to wait until she was back. At first, she’d set that boundary out of fear—fear that she’d cry, fear that she’d blurt everything she felt out into the open air and freak him out forever. Even as she’d listened to the message he’d left her the morning of her flight—Nora, he’d begun, in that perfect way, I wanted to hear your voice before you left—she’d still forced herself to finish packing, to get all the way to the airport before she let herself text back. Some of it had been that same fear, but some of it had been her belief that Will really did need the time. That what he needed to work out—about his parents, about being serious—he needed to work out without her.
Now, though—a day away from heading back—she worried she’d made a mistake, insisting on the wait. Banishing him to silence when he’d at least tried to reach out, and all because she hadn’t wanted to take the risk: to tell him she loved him, and to have him not say it back.
To have him not feel it back.
“I will,” she said finally, trying to convince herself, trying to ignore the vise grip she felt around her heart when she thought about it. “I’m going to tell him how I feel, and if he doesn’t feel it, too, I’ll move on.”
She paused, lifting her head to look across the way at her friend. “Not that I have a great track record of moving on from things in an expedient manner.”
Dee smiled sympathetically, patting Nora’s shin. “Now, now,” she said. “Give yourself some credit. You forget the pictures you showed me of that bathroom you redid.”
“True,” Nora thought, trying not to focus on the fact that she’d done nearly all of that moving on with Will right at her side. “And I have plans now.”
All week, she’d been thinking about them: changes she would make once she got back home. Away from the apartment, not so immediately surrounded by Nonna’s things, it had been easier to consider. When she pictured it now—that jammed-up bedroom she used as an office, that floral couch she really couldn’t stand—she could see how silly she had been to keep so much of it exactly the same. And as she stayed here with Deepa, helping her friend with the preliminary packing for her move next month, it’d been easy to see how well Dee’s things—her bold, comfortable furniture, her gilt-framed decorative mirrors hung in clever arrangements on the walls, her many, many candles—reflected Dee herself.
Love at First Page 25
