Dear Reader

by Mary O'Connell

  The contents made her heart sink.

  Of course she imagined Miss Sweeney standing on the toilet seat of the next stall, her hands gripping the partition wall, her face a perfect smirk as she looked down at Flannery. Did your heart really sink? Are you in possession of a sunken heart? Sunken, as in treasure, or ships? Ahoy there, Matey!

  But Flannery really could feel her heart sinking through her chest cavity. Because everything in that purse was useful. She believed there was not a single item Miss Sweeney would willingly leave behind.

  An asthma inhaler.

  Her keys—four of them—on a cheap, touristy Lady Liberty key ring.

  Three tampons.

  Stila eyeliner in morning plum.

  Her cell phone.

  Crest Whitestrips.

  Concealer.

  Her paperback edition of Wuthering Heights. (An older edition with a pulpy, Harlequin-looking cover. The pages were stiff and ruffled at the edges, as if it had been dropped into the bathtub.)

  Her wallet, containing a ten and four ones, a library card, her driver’s license, her insurance card, a blurred photo of—was it a rat with a fluffy pink wig?… and her frequent-customer punch card at Java Joe’s.

  Flannery ran her fingers over the fragmented paper and counted out the punches: Miss Sweeney was two espresso drinks away from a free beverage of her choice. Flannery wasted a long moment in the bathroom, oddly comforted by the smell of Clorox and the incessant swirl of the running toilet, wondering if Miss Sweeney would choose a standard latte or beat the system with a four-shot caramel Freebird, which, with tip, was usually seven dollars.

  She was putting the wallet back into the purse when she thought to unzip the change compartment. It had felt flat, empty, but contained a folded-up piece of paper:

  LCPL Brandon J. Marzetti-Corcoran, Kansas City, MO, was killed in action in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan on Sunday, March 11. Born in Kansas City, he graduated from Holy Angels High School in May 2005 and entered the Marines on November 19, 2005. He was devoted and loyal, to a fault, to family and friends. An accomplished athlete, Brandon was the starting quarterback for the Holy Angels 2004–2005 championship team. He was an avid sports fan, devoted to the Kansas City Chiefs and Kansas City Royals. He is survived by his loving parents, Lisa Marzetti (Liesel Charles) and Ray Corcoran; his fiancée Megan Reynolds and grandmother Helen Marzetti. He is also survived by his future in-laws, Suzanne and Phillip Reynolds, and many friends all over the world. Mass of Christian burial will be at 10:00 am Thursday morning at Saint Thomas More Catholic Church. Burial with full military honors will follow at Oak Hill Cemetery. A rosary will be said at 6:30 pm Wednesday evening and family will receive friends until 9:00. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests memorials to the Holy Angels Athletic Department in care of Holy Angels High School.

  Flannery thought obituaries were always tragic, even when the person was elderly, because whether they were ascending to nothingness or Neverland, to Heaven or a fiery, multi-pitchforked Hell (fingers crossed, for many denizens of Sacred Heart!) their time on earth was over and how could you imagine or train for nonexistence? But Brandon Marzetti-Corcoran wasn’t old; he was twenty-five and had died violently. He also had the symmetrical features of a Hollywood hero, which shouldn’t have mattered in the least, but Flannery found herself running her finger over the photo and rereading the obituary … Brandon Marzetti-Corcoran’s funeral was happening in an hour. No, two hours, she thought, with the time difference in the Midwest. Could Miss Sweeney have gone out of town for the funeral and not told anyone? Flannery folded up the obituary and put it back in the change compartment, realizing that Miss Sweeney’s erratic classroom behavior was not mimicking the violent emotions in Wuthering Heights—she was not reenacting the Mood Swings of the Moors. Her grief was purely personal, nonliterary. But, oh, the eternal tenderness of the world, the random ravaged sadness! It all made Flannery want to become a bedroomed hermit keeping the world at bay with books and blankets, with YouTube and cherry Pop-Tarts, because any old day was pure Wuthering Heights for someone.

  Flannery took Miss Sweeney’s Wuthering Heights out of her purse and studied the cover: A generically dashing Heathcliff stood behind busty, black-haired Cathy, who wore a daffodil yellow gown tied with a scarlet sash. Her face in profile was the carved jewel of a Fifties starlet, and Heathcliff was standing behind her, holding her by the elbows. Flannery couldn’t decide whether this was sadistic or merely manly, but with her eyes-and-mouth-half-open expression of ecstasy, Cathy herself seemed pretty okay with his grip. Flannery thought back to Monday morning when Miss Sweeney had introduced the book, claiming that Wuthering Heights got a bad rap about being a mere literary bodice-ripper, the madcap antics of Heathcliff and crazy Cathy. For the reader with an open heart and an open mind, Wuthering Heights was more than an entertaining read about doomed lovers roaming ravaged estates and postcard-lush moors.

  “Every single thing you need to know about life can be found in the pages of this book.” Miss Sweeney had raised her hands, palms up, a bossy priest bullying her congregation with a personal truth. “Depression and heartache and joy and love and loss? Integrating the dark and the light, the calm and the storm? Ladies! It’s all there.” But she had lost her condescending composure when she’d sighed and said: “God. It’s just such a good book.”

  Now the door swooshed open, and Flannery quickly flushed the toilet, as if she’d needed a legitimate reason to be in the bathroom. There were three stalls, and Flannery was in the one farthest from the door. Instead of taking the other end stall, the girl who had just entered the bathroom chose the middle one, as if in some grotesque game of toilet tic-tac-toe. Vexed, Flannery started to stick Miss Sweeney’s book back into her purse, but then found she couldn’t quite part with it; she held it to her face and breathed in the dusty, papered sweetness of secondhand bookstores. Flannery always loved to see what was written in the margins of old books, those random penciled words that added up to a cryptic love letter to both the author and the next reader: OH YES! Ughh creepy shades of Uncle Joe here; Just like the kitchen smell of celery + loneliness.

  The chance to read Miss Sweeney’s marginalia about a book they both loved? Flannery, perched on the closed toilet, opened Wuthering Heights. She fanned quickly though the pages, looking for any red-inked comments in the margins. But Emily Brontë had apparently fared better than Flannery. Miss Sweeney had circled no extraneous words, there were no mocking exclamation points, and she had not advised YOU MIGHT WANT TO WATCH THE HYPERBOLE METER, as if casually endorsing a new indie film. She turned to page one, and she read:

  Manhattan! My old Alpha and Omega!

  Flannery thought just one thing, just one word: “WHAT?”

  She flipped back to the title page: Caitlin Sweeney was written in red ink in the left-hand corner, and then in the middle page, in flourished black typeface, was the standard “Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë,” nothing unusual, all was well, and then she turned to the next page, a genealogy chart to help the reader keep track of the names and dates of birth of the characters in Wuthering Heights; okay, sure. But when Flannery turned to the first page of text, she read:

  Manhattan! My old Alpha and Omega! I was in the backseat of a cab! I was back! Back to the towering rents and the naturally beautiful and brilliant and the strivers trying to become beautiful or brilliant, and the hipster douchebags and the fatigued-looking women in their Dunkin’ Donuts polo shirts and always a lonesome summertime voice calling out, Delicioso coco helado! Delicioso coco helado! Or there’s the winterbliss dream of ice-glazed Central Park, the buses lumbering up Central Park West in the violet-blue hour, and of course the seasonless surprise of seeing the shockingly miniscule Madonna jogging with her two bodyguards, of seeing Lady Gaga nee Stefani Germanotta at Duane Reade with her four bodyguards, and the old men playing chess on the stoops, and the rich moms laughing into their cell phones while the nannies trail with the toddlers, and all the other celebrities a
nd stereotypes I am neglecting! I was back! I had no purse, no ID! I was fluid! I was free!

  I was not following my bliss, not even the memory of bliss, nor was I deluged with melancholy, trying to escape into the sepia-toned past. Dear Reader, I was all about the future! I was Ray Bradbury’s pin-up girl! I was following the angel of my life, the one and only Brandon Marzetti-Corcoran, and when I found him, I wanted New York City to swallow us whole, to take us into its glittering and gritty manic jaws and hold us close.

  Flannery was not only thinking “WHAT” but saying the word over and over, drawing out the vowel and sounding so gasping and questioning and, apparently, grating, that the girl in the next stall sighed with lavish aggravation. Flannery didn’t blame her, because who wouldn’t be annoyed to be in the bathroom with an odd girl talking to herself, a girl whose heartbeat was thundering into what felt like a sternum-cracking crescendo?

  Flannery certainly knew the beginning of her favorite book by heart, and the setting was not New York City: “I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist’s heaven: and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us.”

  Where had that page gone?

  She peered at the book spine to see if pages had been added; she ran her thumb along the space where the pages met the spine and found it smooth. Flannery touched the cool beige metal of the partition wall—just for the sudden comfort of a stable, physical object—and read the good-hearted bathroom graffiti. Peace to all who read this! Jesus loves YOU! (Along with the less sanguine: Maribeth K is a total whorebag.)

  She opened Wuthering Heights again.

  As soon as I’d arrived at my classroom this morning I’d seen Brandon at the window. I put my trembling hands on my desk and watched him from my peripheral vision. “You’re back,” I whispered to the empty room, wanting to confirm the itinerant miracle of it by saying the words aloud. Brandon had appeared at the window the previous day when class had already started, but I’d found it difficult to simultaneously process a miracle and lead a class discussion on Heathcliff’s going rogue from Wuthering Heights as my own personal narrative arc was careening so wildly. But I had prayed for Brandon to return—throughout the night, while taking breaks to watch infomercials and seeing his face on every body selling acne wash and exercise machines—and there he was at the windows of Sacred Heart, again: my miracle man, my personal Huck Finn, coatless and wearing an I HEART NYC shirt. O, he was his sweet younger self, my way-back boy. Except for his super-short hair—sexy, sure, but I missed his foppish bangs of yesteryear—he looked just as he had looked seven years ago when we had moved to New York City together, a couple of kooky eighteen-year-olds in sweet, sweet love.

  Flannery snapped the book shut and closed her eyes. She took a deep breath in, which was not particularly cleansing, and counted … 1, 2, 3, 4 … and then opened her eyes as she exhaled … 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. She looked at the bathroom floor, the white tile that had yellowed around the base of the toilet, hopefully from age, and reached down and touched her short, flowered combat boots, which looked and felt real, but perhaps were dream replicas of actual boots? Had the trip to T.J.Maxx where she’d bought them with her birthday money been a dream too?

  But a comforting thought stemmed Flannery’s existential crisis, if not her panic, because when you read in a dream the words appeared scattershot, changed. A traffic sign might say: WARNING! CARAMEL APPLES FOR THE NEXT 10 MILES, or if you opened On the Road while dreaming, the paragraphs might contain kitten emojis and Roman numerals, and who knew why a brain might churn out candied fruit instead of road construction, or muddled code instead of manly adventures. But it made perfect sense that Flannery’s adoration of Wuthering Heights and her concern for Miss Sweeney had comingled into this lucid dream of a changed narration. Flannery nodded vehemently—yes! Yes! She tapped the book on her leg, warming to her dream theory, which formulated as she sat there on the closed toilet. Emily Brontë herself had considered the power and sway of dreams with a vivid curiosity that had inspired some of her best dialogue, the meme-friendly lamentations of Cathy: “I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.”

  That Flannery was in the midst of a dream was a bit more appealing than the other option, that she was going insane. And so she read a little more, hoping: dream, dream, dream.

  Standing in my empty classroom seven years later (Dear Reader, cue the bad luck!) and seeing Brandon as he once was, whole and free and beautiful, filled me with a distilled nostalgia that veered into nausea; my stomach roiled and the room was a sudden sauna. It was the morning of his funeral, but I was remembering another ending, the first ending, the exalted one: the last summer night Brandon and I spent in Kansas before we moved to Manhattan.

  We had driven out to the Flint Hills, to the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. He parked his truck by the locked Park Service gates, which were low and inviting and seemed a mere formality. We scrambled over them easily, and then it was just the bison and deer and the owls and the eagles, and Brandon, and me. Throughout our school years we had learned from many a dull speaker on Kansas History Days that the soil in the Flint Hills was never used for farming because it was laced with flint and limestone: All those miles of rocky ground had never known the sharp mouth of machinery, and so the native prairie grasses flourished. The sun-blanched bluestem glowed orange in the darkness, halving the world into dark sky and bright ground, and beneath that was the rock, the flaw that would save the prairie.

  It was almost midnight, and the air was still thickly warm, weighted with Kansas humidity. Brandon and I held hands as we walked along the winding trail cut by the Park Service. We were quiet. We had talked nonstop on the drive out to the Flint Hills, an hour of marveling over the fact that we had a direct flight to NYC in the morning and we weren’t merely visiting—no tourism for us, baby! How lucky I felt to have Brandon give up everything he knew to move to NYC with me, to have a person support me so fully. My journey was his journey.

  Unburdened by the zest for irony and oh-so-quirky originality that I would find in boyfriends of the future, Brandon, my one true love, my soul mate, looked at me in the passenger seat and simply said: “I love you so much. We’re starting the next phase of our lives together. Columbia, Caitlin.”

  When the college brochures had started piling up, it was Brandon himself who had pulled Columbia from the wicker basket on my nightstand. Instead of the ubiquitous campus photography of students listening attentively in lecture halls or peering through microscopes, the Columbia brochure had featured a street scene of students walking through the gates at 116th and Broadway, and photos of the great city itself, so vast and heralded with promise that it seemed anyone could land there and succeed.

  Brandon was squinting, moving his finger along the fine print: “Columbia alum Herman W-Wouk?” He struggled with dyslexia. I believe this was the first time I’d heard him read aloud.

  I shrugged. “Whoever that is.”

  He was sitting on the edge of my twin bed, and I was on the floor, painting my toenails the color of Brandon’s eyes: a dreamy aquamarine. I held my breath as he finished the sentence: “Herman Wouk said Columbia was a world of … doubled magic, where the best things of the moment were outside the … rectangle of Columbia and the best things of all history and human thought were inside the rectangle of Columbia.”

  “Doubled magic,” I said. “Abracadabra times two.” I flicked my nail polish brush like a magician’s wand, and a dot of aquamarine landed on the carpet, an iridescent moon I rubbed away. “They sound a little in love with themselves at Columbia. And, please, I could never get into a school like that.” But truthfully I knew I
probably could get into a school like that: I was a National Merit Scholar from an underserved state.

  “You should try to go there,” he said. “You’re brilliant. And it sounds great.”

  Brandon’s brilliant was so flattering, his great so winsome, that his words made me feel, not for the first time, that I couldn’t live without him.

  “And people move to New York City for all sorts of reasons,” Brandon said quietly. He ran his hand through his lion-colored hair. “Not just for college.”

  I joined him on my twin bed—quietly, as my parents were in the kitchen cooking dinner—trashed my pedicure, and we made a plan. More importantly, Dear Reader, we executed that plan. I was going to go to Columbia and live in the dorm, and Brandon was moving to NYC too, where he would find a cool apartment and a job. And now it was all coming true. The day had finally come.

  But not quite yet; we were still in the heart of the Kansas night. Brandon led me off the trail, and with the bluestem scraping at our calves, we walked deeper into the prairie. We might have been the only souls on earth that night—it did feel like that—except for the migrant cicada chorus singing us their buzzy migraine of a love song and the occasional truck rumbling down the two-lane highway in the distance.

  We made an impromptu bed out of a flat plane of limestone rising out of the soil. Fear not, Dear Reader, I am not about to go all Harlequin on you. I will move onto the safe terrain of “afterward” when we were naked (sorry!) on our backs on the cool rock, watching a fast bloom of storm clouds move through the endless lava lamp sky: bruised purple melting into navy blue, then charcoal. The sky, the swirling sky. The parched rattle of the prairie grass. The lonely birdsong of an Eastern Phoebe: Fee-bee. Fee-bee. The spent, ragged breath of someone who loves you.

  Flannery startled at the sound of gagging and splashing. And then came the familiar odor. In dreams, she knew, one could not smell. She pressed Miss Sweeney’s copy of Wuthering Heights to her chest and hissed: “Oh my God.”