Dear Reader

by Mary O'Connell

  I couldn’t be bothered, but they kept going.

  “When Heathcliff moves to any city, he’s bound to meet a new girl. For him to still be weirdly obsessing over Cathy when he returns? What is he, a girl? Guys move on—I don’t know how, but they do. He’d have to be more isolated to keep his obsession so pure. Maybe Heathcliff went to, like, a monastery?”

  “The text is sprinkled with religious allegory, but it doesn’t indicate his beliefs, so, though it would probably be pretty sweet for Heathcliff to live at a monastery and brew beer or decorate cakes after life with crazy Cathy, how would he make his fortune?”

  Wuthering Heights in cupcake motif—with sprinkles!

  And oh, how those girls loved the word text. Yes, they were hyper for the text. They thought text sounded smarter than novel, or God forbid, book. But they were dear, in their annoying way, and I would miss them. Not all of them, but really, quite a few. There was some kindness in the mix; there was unironic enthusiasm. Flannery was taking in a deep breath, gearing up for her next comment.

  Dear Reader, I couldn’t wait forever. Brandon had his hands on the window, the mystery of his whorled fingertips pressed against the cold glass. Even if I had to crash through the window like a sunblind pigeon, I would go to him. I would find him. I would tell him: You have always been in my thoughts. I would leave my little world and meet him in his new one. Love was the map, and I would have to draw it myself; I would be the most repentant cartographer, verve and passion making up for skill, for basic understanding.

  “I’ve done a little research on this,” Flannery said. “Some lit theorists think he sailed to the New World.” (She said “lit theorists” like an ethereal, dreamy candy, the briefest spun sugar on your tongue.) “And that Heathcliff made his fortune in New York City before returning to Wuthering Heights.”

  When I opened my mouth to speak, my top lip stuck to my gum, giving me a weird dog smile. Also, I was panting, but just a bit.

  “New York City, that’s the place, right? For adventure, reinvention, to become someone new, it’s the place: the city of dreams. Flannery, I agree: I think that’s where Heathcliff went to lose himself when he was so full of anguish. Well, that’s where I’d go if I wanted to get lost. By myself, or even with someone else.”

  Brandon tipped his head so that it was touching the window, and I felt a quick bliss of chilled glass on my own warm forehead.

  “I would go to New York City and I would never, ever come back.” My words were coming so quickly, a row of falling dominos I could not stop or even predict, so I bit my lip again, to quiet myself. There.

  The girls all looked a little wide-eyed, except for Flannery. A slight frown gripped the skin between her eyebrows, but she was smiling, too, the very picture of concerned radiance.

  “But, Miss Sweeney, I think for Heathcliff, the whole point in leaving is coming back. He wants to return a changed person; he wants to impress everyone who has shunned him and underestimated him his whole life. But mostly, he wants to show Cathy, who chose the wealthy, safe person, what she could have had—Heathcliff himself—if not for her reprehensible social-climbing.”

  Brandon lifted his face. Was he smirking?

  “Right. Hmm.” I gave Flannery the weakest smile. I rolled my tongue around the sides of my dry mouth, trying to dredge up moisture. “Cathy and Heathcliff are teenagers, of course, and as such, given to impulsive decision-making—no offense, ladies. Clearly, Cathy shows some pretty substantial regret about choosing Edgar Linton over Heathcliff. And of course Cathy and Heathcliff are both such complicated characters. And, probably, mirrors of each other, as we know from Wuthering Heights’s most famous line of dialogue, Cathy’s dramatic announcement: I am Heathcliff.”

  Flannery smiled, obviously besotted with the tragic romance of Wuthering Heights. “Actually, Cathy and Heathcliff seem pretty different to me throughout the book. And when Heathcliff does return, he’s somewhat recognizable, but entirely different, as anyone is after a long, deep journey.” Flannery was stuck on the idea of Heathcliff’s return! She cleared her throat and ran her finger down the page: “It was a deep voice, and foreign in tone; yet there was something in the manner of pronouncing my name which made it sound familiar.”

  Flannery had employed a slight British accent while reading, and the eye-rolling from the super-mean girls was so intense it seemed that their irises might disappear entirely, that not even a crescent of color would survive their scorn. How I wished that I possessed a cartoon freeze-ray gun, so that they would be stuck with their boiled-egg eyes. But Flannery powered on, holding one finger in the air as she flipped through the book with her other hand, imploring us to wait, wait. When she found the passage she wanted, she read it softly, and with an injured poignancy, if she were talking to Heathcliff himself. “What! You come back? Is it really you? Is it?”

  I clapped my hands together. “Great! Thanks for reading that aloud, Flannery. That really freshened my memory.” I nodded in vigorous appreciation, as if I were being filmed for a public TV documentary about inspirational English teachers. But there was the sudden smell of Brandon’s fragrant deodorant, which I used to tease him about: ’Tis a bouquet of zesty spearmint intermingled with burning rubber tires, a veritable ode to zingy manliness! Dear Reader, he was everywhere.

  Flannery clamped her hands to the edge of her desk as if she were worried she might levitate: “I’ve always wondered what the book would be like if the plotline switched from the masculine to the feminine, if Heathcliff had died first, and Cathy had gone mad, chasing his spirit.”

  “Good! That’s good!” I couldn’t disguise a harsh little laugh. “Do you think Cathy would go mad or would she mourn Heathcliff properly—with socially acceptable amounts of nostalgia and regret? Would she succumb to the provincial coziness of her life at Thrushcross Grange? The bland husband, motherhood, her sewing circle. The rewards … or the restraints, perhaps, of her brief fling with—and I am quoting you here, Flannery—‘reprehensible social-climbing’?”

  Dear Reader, I had paid quite a price myself: Somehow—how? How?—my academic promise and wild-hearted romantic inclinations had devolved into my current, narrow life as a single schoolteacher who perused grad school catalogs and Match.com with equal fatigue. “Do you think she would always regret being shallow and traditional and disloyal to Heathcliff, who was clearly no prince, ladies? Still, would Cathy always regret dumping him so cruelly?” I looked at each girl’s face before continuing: Boredom, revulsion, and mild curiosity were the day’s emotional themes, but I had one disciple leaning forward, her mouth parted. “Yes, I do believe she would regret her short-sighted cruelty. I think it would cut her as deeply as it had cut him. Deeper.”

  Not only had I weirdly answered my own questions, but I had also started to weep in my classroom. Not a full-blown ugly cry, but the precursor to that, welled tears breaking free of my lower eyelids and drizzling down my cheeks. My antics produced a sudden and unfamiliar emotion in my Sacred Heart girls: uncertainty.

  As they looked around at one another, trying to gauge the correct response, their smiles were, just for these few fast seconds, merely nervous, stripped of all cruelty and slyness. Later I would find that my waterproof mascara—a bargain brand suited to a teacher’s salary and tested on rabbits—had drizzled down my cheekbones, heightening my crazy-lady visage into a sad tableau: Cottontail’s Revenge.

  Brandon took one hand off the window glass and touched his heart. His mouth formed my name, a cold cloud: Caitlin.

  I grabbed a tissue from the box on my desk and turned toward the green board while I blew my nose. Then I rallied with a bright, professional smile. It seemed as good a time as any for a break via a creative writing exercise! I stuck to my original lesson plan. “Okay, ladies! Use the rest of the hour to write a one-page response: Where do you think Heathcliff goes when he drops out of the narrative of Wuthering Heights?”

  I sat at my desk and I ruined everything by looking directly out the window. Br
andon disappeared; I had killed him with my lack of concentration. When I blinked, a splotch of his fatigues cometed through the blackness of my closed eyelids. I snapped my head to the left and looked out the window. Again. Still gone.

  My AP girls already had their earbuds in, rocking out while writing or studiously gazing up at the water-stained ceiling or the roses and crosses carved in the crown molding. Except for Flannery, who was chewing the end of her pen and watching me. I tapped my imaginary wristwatch, whereupon she looked down, put pen to paper, and wrote with the confidence of a National Merit Scholar.

  My breath was coming in tight, asthmatic bursts. I was cradling my chin with my hand to keep myself from turning to the window. Once upon a time, it’s true, I’d wasted my chance—O, my miraculous chance!—to be with Brandon.

  Dear Reader, I would never waste another.

  Two

  Stepping off the train in Grand Central Station was pure Shakespeare, pure O brave new world that hath such people in it … in extremis. Flannery had the thrilling, terrifying realization that no one knew who she was and no one knew where she was, and though Miss Sweeney always chided her students to move from the general to the specific in their writing, Flannery felt the joy of doing the opposite. Because on the island of Manhattan on this particular winter morning, Flannery was nobody; but she was anybody and everybody, too.

  Her thoughts zoomed, addressing all the people at Grand Central Station: Um … hey! Who are you and you and you? And what, exactly, is this shared experience we are all having? She wanted to ask the elderly businessman death-gripping his iPhone: Why am I me and not you? She wanted to look into the mascara-ed eyes of the masked and gowned Muslim woman and ask: Why are you wearing that, or why am I not wearing that? She watched a group of dazzled Midwestern tourists with their ill-fitting jeans and marshmallow white tennis shoes, catcalling: “Let’s all stay together, m’kay? Let’s just all stay together. M’kay?” Flannery longed to tell them not to rue their cheerful ski jackets, which probably seemed awfully bright right about now. She wanted to deliver a bolstering message to the Heartland folk, not from Flannery Fields, but from the teeming city itself: Do not feel inferior, for we are all so terribly random!

  And the staying together was pretty solid advice, because when Flannery raised her head and looked at the ceiling of Grand Central Station—the heavens painted a soft, cerulean blue and glammed up with white constellations—she felt so tiny, so all alone, like one specific twinkling star in the vast night sky or an individual grain of sand on an endless beach.

  Miss Sweeney smirked in her mind: Twinkle, twinkle, little Flannery! Also? You might want to uh, beach that beach metaphor.

  She wished Miss Sweeney had gone to the airport instead of the train station, that she’d chosen not to revisit the stormy past, but to zoom off to a tropical island—a bikini and a beach book and a coconut ice. But Flannery realized the frothy beach fantasy resulted from her waning courage, because being in NYC without her parents was a little scary. She scolded herself for being such a big baby—one exasperated, whispered REALLY?—as she walked out of Grand Central Station and into the mouth of the wide, wide world—the rushes of people, the sirens and pigeons and screeching taxis, the shops selling mini-cupcakes or cologne and bright rayon dresses. Flannery looked up at the sky—a stripe of mottled blue-gray between the buildings—and brought her hand to her chest to feel her heart beat out the two-syllable joy of it all:

  I’m here.

  I’m here.

  I’m here.

  But she was there to find Miss Sweeney, to help Miss Sweeney! That was the journey, she reminded herself, not personal delight and/or fear and freedom. Flannery cradled her elbows against the cold wind and wished she’d gone to her locker for her coat before leaving Sacred Heart. She looked at the buses barreling up the street. Which way was north? She needed to get moving, to get up to the Columbia neighborhood. Well, it would be Flannery’s neighborhood in the fall, and that seemed nothing short of miraculous. So Flannery, emboldened, walked to the curb and held up her hand—a cinematic gesture that at first felt awkward and staged, and then sexy and commanding—Hello, you big bad world!—and a cab slowed to a stop next to her.

  She opened the door and slid into the backseat, her backpack jutting her forward up to the plastic partition.

  “Yes?” The cabdriver peered in the rearview mirror at her.

  “Oh, hi!” On the TV screen in the backseat, Beyoncé was modeling bikinis for H&M. Flannery reflexively sucked in her stomach. “Thank you for stopping.” He sighed and turned his head to the side, and Flannery smiled at his whorled ear and took a deep breath of the rose-scented air freshener.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Um, sorry, Columbia University? Do you know where that is? Sorry, I don’t have the exact address, which is crazy because … but … I can get it, hold on.” Flannery pulled her phone out of her backpack to Google the address, but the cabdriver was already roaring down the street and turning the corner, heading uptown. She slung her backpack onto the floor next to her and heard cellophane crinkling. She wasn’t smelling rose-scented air freshener but the real thing, a bouquet of red roses there on the floor of the backseat. Flannery picked up the roses—luckily, she’d only crushed the stems, the blooms looked perfect—and breathed in the chilled, chemical sweetness of a winter greenhouse.

  “Excuse me? Um, someone must have left their flowers back here.” Flannery held up the bouquet so the driver could see it.

  The driver frowned into the rearview window. “Flowers? Okay. They’re yours now. You keep them.” His heavily accented English sounded a bit accusatory, though, as if Flannery were being treated to an unfair beneficence. “You’re the one who found them.”

  As the cab zoomed up Broadway, Flannery delivered her awkward thanks, a confused chirp of a sentence spliced with nervous laughter and delivered coquettishly to the back of the cabdriver’s head: “Oh, these are so pretty, heh heh, are you, heh heh … sure?”

  “I’m very sure.” He sighed. “It’s your lucky day.” He clicked on the radio to a star shower of flutes playing “Clair de Lune.” Flannery rested her head on the seat back and looked out the window.

  She knew that true good luck would be meeting a person who cared about you enough to give you roses. Still, finding a bouquet in the backseat of a cab was pretty fortunate, and she enjoyed clutching it to her chest like a homecoming queen cabbing it through Manhattan. The ribbon of news bannering along the bottom of the TV screen let her know that it was 38 degrees; it was 11:37. Flannery smiled down at her bouquet, thrilled with herself. On any other March Thursday at this exact moment she would be back in AP World History right now, with lunch on deck, the cafeteria smells comingling up through the heat vents: warm chocolate chip cookies, reheated soy burgers, and woodsy pine cleanser. Flannery looked out the taxi window, the narrowed sky and sunlight shimmering across the top floors of the buildings. There was a window cleaner on skyscraper scaffolding, a stern reminder that the world was actually full of duty and potential peril, and that Flannery should concentrate on Miss Sweeney, who surely would not be Spider-Manning around midtown Manhattan. She would already be at Columbia, where Flannery was heading, too fast it seemed. Would Miss Sweeney even be glad to see her? Would their potential meeting be irrevocably weird?

  The light turned red, and Flannery lowered her eyes to the crosswalk, to the blonde woman in a winter-white coat and tall, toffee-colored boots, the leash of her corgi in one hand, a plastic poop bag in the other. From the opposite direction two tiny old men walked with their arms linked, as if they were French girls in the movies. In her mind’s eye Flannery Photoshopped Miss Sweeney into the crosswalk, her hands in the pockets of her dark coat, her gait loose and carefree until she saw Flannery’s face in the cab and stopped cold, her mouth forming the words: Flannery? What the …

  Flannery knew she needed to open Miss Sweeney’s book again; she needed to check what she’d read in the Sacred Heart bathroo
m to make sure she hadn’t hallucinated the pages.

  But then the light turned green; the clouds shifted. The cabdriver revved the engine and flipped down the sun visor, and Flannery became distracted by the clipped-on photo of a smiling dark-eyed baby with chubby cheeks, striped footie pajamas, and two lines of oxygen snaking into his nose, two thin tubes that would stop anyone’s heart, the saddest spagh … But even before Flannery’s thought had formed the last syllable, she envisioned Miss Sweeney’s red pen writing away, the soft thud of pen striking paper when she dotted the i in spaghetti: Really? The oxygen tubes are not merely “like spaghetti”? They are in fact the saddest spaghetti? The most despondent of all pasta…?

  Oh, if only Miss Sweeney hadn’t left her purse, Flannery thought, for the idea of free hands made it all seem so final—no money, no wallet, no tampons, no lip gloss. But maybe she was doing a bare-bones adventure, going off the grid?

  In Miss Sweeney’s classroom there was a black-and-white photograph of a sheet of paper in a Royal typewriter with one sentence: “He explored the island, although he created it.” Flannery stuck a mental S in front of the He, and in her mind’s eye she sent Miss Sweeney off on lighthearted adventures on the island of Manhattan: Taking the mic for some impromptu scat singing at a jazz club, reading a few profanity-laced lines at a poetry slam, walking through Central Park with a boyfriend on a starry night. You could probably do all those things with a purse, though.

  As the cabdriver pulled up to the ice-spiked iron gates of Columbia University on 116th and Broadway, Flannery felt the familiar panic of entering a new room, and the campus was no mere room, it was a GoodbyeToAllThatMagicKingdomMoorsUtopianHogwartsOz mash-up of potentialities. And yes, Flannery had already earned the Golden Ticket of admission, but in the stereotypical lingo of high school guidance counselors: It would be up to her to make the most of her experience! Seventeen long years on earth had taught Flannery that it was always better to think or daydream or read about experiences than to actually live them out, and while she didn’t wish to be back at Sacred Heart, she also didn’t want to step out of the cab, not ever. She wondered if she could pay the driver to just let her cozy up in the backseat and read Miss Sweeney’s copy of Wuthering Heights, for the cab was so safe and rose-scented, not just Flannery’s private chapel of contemplation but her window to the world.