I covered my eyes with my casted hand. My mind floated back to my high school youth group: The youth minister’s exuberance bordered on mania, and of course she was a “Love the sinner, Hate the sin” homophobe, to boot. When challenged on any biblical truth, she would turn especially nutty, and claim that the fact that Jesus had once walked on earth was enough proof that we high school kids should stick to all archaic rules: “He was here! Do you not get it? Dadgummit! Do I have to explain it to you again and again? He walked among us! He was here!”
Like the chorus of a pop song, I knew, I knew, I knew that Brandon had heard me say terrible things, and that life as I had known it—just fifteen minutes before—had ended.
Dear Reader, while I had been lost in the pangs of dorm-room horror, Westsider Books had kept on hopping. Miles was still holding court. A hipster dude had joined the crazy lady and was quizzing Miles about a geographic inconsistency in his novel, and asking if he knew Alyssa something or other from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. My sole relief was that the migraine in my eye had faded to a buzzy gray whorl.
I heard a great deal about Alyssa. Alyssa was a fiction writer, but she had done the poetry program, not fiction, because she didn’t want to get bogged down with craft or plot. Alyssa just wanted to concentrate on, like, the purity of words. The crazy lady said she got it; she loved words too. And the proprietor of Westsider Books looked on, smiling, at the impromptu salon.
And then, Dear Reader, I saw her. My vision turned from blinking to blurred, as if I were viewing her through a camera lens Vaselined for an aging starlet. Emily Brontë descending the staircase, holding an armful of books. Her coat was root-beer-brown crushed velvet, and a pencil secured the loose bun at the nape of her neck. I thought she would be with her sisters, but she walked alone. I had just a few seconds, but I had a chance. I wanted to tell Ms. Brontë what she had meant to me, a hand crashing through the window, wanting connection. It was my hand, and Emily Brontë held it. I wanted to say that she wrote about the soul-crushing aftermath of romantic love perfectly, to tell her that my class was studying Wuthering Heights, writing speculative essays about where Heathcliff had gone when he dropped out of the narrative.
But he came back. Heathcliff came back: Vengeful and heartsick, yes, but he came back.
I couldn’t help myself. I put my hand out and touched her velvet sleeve as she passed by. Emily Brontë gave me a shy smile and a cursory, “Hi!” She didn’t stop to chat. Miles raised his head and looked over at me, the smallest frown gripping the skin between his eyebrows. The touch of crushed velvet was the briefest succulence. I rubbed my fingers over my chapped lips, trying to memorize the texture of Emily Brontë’s gorgeous coat when, unbelievably, the hipster dude put his arm around Miles, whipped out his phone, and took a selfie, as if Miles were Jay Z or Taylor Swift, not a lucky young writer. Miles and the improbable book groupie distracted me so that I lost sight of Emily Brontë in the bookstore. I walked to the door and saw her there on the sidewalk. As she looked though the glass at me, her previous reticence vanished and she recited a stanza of her own poetry. Dear Reader, though I had always mocked situation-specific Facebook memes and the pointed poetry on inspirational greeting cards, her words, forming in my heart as she moved her lips, were exactly what I needed to hear at that moment: “Little mourned I for the parted gladness / For the vacant nest and silent song / Hope was there, and laughed me out of sadness / Whispering: winter will not be long.”
I put my hand on the glass door and watched her turn away and disappear into the crowd, and then I pulled the handle and walked out of Westsider Books. No, Dear Reader, I wasn’t going to stalk Emily Brontë on Broadway; I needed, more than ever, to look for Brandon.
Of course Miles followed me out, jogging to catch up. “Sorry, Caitlin. But I’m so grateful—astounded, really—that people have responded so generously to my book that I want to spend a little time with each person who has read it.”
I had heard Miles say these exact words to Terry Gross last week, employing an NPR-friendly aw-shucks voice. I was running my tongue over my teeth, trying to come up with a little moisture. My mouth was so very dry, but I managed to mumble, “Cool. Great seeing you. Take care.”
He kept pace as I walked down Broadway, reaching over to touch my left hand, its silvery white hash mark scars. Brandon had been with me when I’d broken my hand. Miles had stayed at the hospital with me when I’d had the rods removed eight weeks later. How quickly the world had moved then, how fluid life had been, when I did not yet know that some choices were irrevocable.
Miles seemed alarmed: “Caitlin! Can you tell me what’s wrong?”
Tears slid into the corners of my mouth. Ah, I thought, I’m crying.
“I’m just in a hurry,” I said briskly. I was licking my tears, relishing the warm water.
“But what is wrong?”
Poor Miles! We’d stayed together, off and on, until I’d finally broken things off for good our third year at Columbia. My parents had been bummed. They had met him twice and loved him; his parents had tolerated me with a certain This-too-shall-pass-or-so-we-hope wariness. (Yes, Dear Reader, the old switcheroo: When Miles’s parents had discussed covenants at Gay Head or the improbable buoyancy of the salads at Chez Panisse, or any old thing foreign to my social milieu, I would think: I am Brandon!)
And now, as we walked along Broadway, Miles found himself in a rather awkward segue. He had to shed the swagger of the successful person sticking it to the woman who had failed to love him properly in the past and move into a new territory of pure concern, of kindness.
He walked with me for a few more blocks, making gentle small talk. I couldn’t stop crying. God, I was dying to get away from him. I felt antsy, my body serving up a new delicacy, Ants Two Ways: the plain old jumbled feeling of anxiety, plus I was pretty sure thousands of ants were crawling on my hands: a moving mosaic, their tiny, feathery legs going this way, this way … no THAT WAY. And if Brandon saw me walking companionably with Miles it would ruin everything.
“Miles, listen, I’ve got to run.”
“Hey! Cait? Where are you going?”
“I need to check my e-mail.” As soon as I said it, the words felt true. I did want to check my e-mail, and then, Oh God, I was desperate to check my e-mail.
“But I don’t have my phone with me.”
“Just use mine,” he said, digging into his jacket pocket.
“No.” I held my hands to my face as if to protect myself from all the wretched decisions I’d ever made. “Got to go,” I sobbed. I took off running across the street, the screeching brakes and predictably furious honking of the uptown traffic, and made it safely to the other side of Broadway to the grumbling of fellow pedestrians. Damn, you trying to get yourself killed? But there it was in the distance, the great glass ship, magnificent as any Oz: the Apple Store.
I took one last look across at Miles. He was standing where I’d left him, his hands in his pockets. Soon he would be home to his cursing Disney princess and his twins, but for now he was watching me. How sad he looked, for the grudging space where Miles had kept me in his heart would surely be empty now—The vacant nest! The silent song!—because the conceited, fun young woman he’d once loved was now so changed. Dear Reader, he did not know that those we have lost return to us in different forms.
Ten
Flannery closed Miss Sweeney’s copy of Wuthering Heights and looked up at Heath. He was standing, his elbow on the staircase, absorbed in The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor that he’d just purchased.
“We really have to get to the Apple Store,” Flannery told him. “Miss Sweeney’s on her way. We can catch up with her this time.”
Heath nodded. “Let’s go, Flan. Can I stick my book in your bag?”
“Sure.” Flannery unzipped her backpack, slipped Wuthering Heights inside, and held the pack out to Heath. As they stepped out, Heath handed the bookseller at the front desk a Sharpie. “Thanks for the loan, Mate.”
&
nbsp; “Well, no problem whatsoever,” the shopkeeper said, his voice cheery and fulsome, though Flannery had noted his terse words on the phone earlier: O, all the world loved an Englishman.
And then they were back outside, the bustle of Broadway, Heath checking his phone for the address of the closest Apple Store. “Do you think I might receive a credit on my bill for Googling the Apple Store on my Apple phone?” He tapped his phone screen. “Ah, just as I thought. The store is down the street a bit.”
They took off walking, and the traffic moved so slowly that Flannery and Heath outpaced the cars on Broadway. Frustrated drivers rolled down their windows, a teeming multitude of driver’s ed teachers from Hell: “Pull up closer to the curb, asshole. Stop your goddamn texting and learn to drive!”
Heath pulled out a cigarette and gave Flannery an apologetic shrug. “Do you mind?”
“Of course not! It’s perfectly fine!” Flannery couldn’t help being such an exuberant proponent of smoking: Oh, the strike of the match in the cold air, and Heath bringing the cigarette to his mouth …
“So the other Flannery?” Heath draped his arm around her shoulders. “Flannery O’Connor?”
“Yes. Her. What?” It was hard to walk and think straight with her upper body caved in his arm, and he smelled so dizzyingly good—smoke and pine needles and copper and paper and the faint black licorice undertone of nicotine—that Flannery wanted to reach up and bite his shoulder. She really did. Oh God, she wanted Flannery O’Connor to stray from the Southern Gothic and write a short story about a girl in Manhattan who was simultaneously falling in love and discovering her latent vampire impulses …
She heard the voice of Miss Sweeney: You would like Flannery O’Connor to rise from the dead, only to sit at some lonely kitchen table in Georgia with a lined tablet and a pencil and write a teenage vampire love story for you? Does this seem like a judicious way for the resurrected Flannery O’Connor to spend her miraculous corporeal hours?
“Now I’m admiring your parents not just for giving you such a lovely name, but such a wonderfully bookish one as well. She’s quite a writer, it seems, just from the short bit I had a chance to read. Tell me, do you have brothers and sisters at home? Sweet Baby William Blake? A frightfully moody preteen Mary Shelley?”
“No, it’s just me. One and done, as my parents like to say. How about you?”
“I’m adopted. One brother and one sister.” Heath pulled his arm from her shoulder and pointed at the stoplight. “This is our cross street. Here we are.” He pointed at the glass Apple Store across Broadway.
“You must miss them, living so far away. Have they been here to visit?”
“They don’t have the faintest idea where I am.” Heath nodded, as if assuring himself of this sad fact. “It’s complicated.”
“Everything is,” Flannery said, companionable, empathetic.
He spoke slowly, and with a touch of condescension: “No. I assure you, it really, really is quite complicated.” And with that he exhaled a plume of smoke over his shoulder and stubbed the cigarette out under his shoe. “Shall we?”
He held the door open for her, and they walked into the gleaming, glass Apple Store just like any other young couple in possession of an iPad with a cracked screen or a credit card at the ready for a new laptop. But as Heath rubbed the back of his neck and glowered at the sleek computers on long, low tables, a sales associate in a blue polo gave him the side-eye and tentatively approached Flannery.
“Oh, we’re just looking, but thanks.” Because they were just looking: an exercise in overstatement, given her sidetracked zeal to locate Miss Sweeney.
Tourists on the street snapped photos through the glass, which gave Flannery the rudderless feeling of being outside and inside at the same time, and Heath’s discomfort escalated; he was now muttering to himself as he looked up at the curved glass ceiling. Other customers looked up too, and as Flannery joined them, stretching her neck back, she thought of Emily Brontë’s thorn trees at Wuthering Heights: “all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun.”
She snuck a look at Heath’s raised face: What if Heath wasn’t just being flip about coming from Liverpool, then Haworth? She thought about his family story: the adoption, the one sister and brother, and not being in touch with them when he was so far from home …
“God, this place!” Heath kept looking up at the glassed-off sky. “It’s like an elaborate trick, right. Look up at the heavens! But look only while you’re waiting in the queue for your computer to be fixed. Otherwise, let’s all hook ourselves up to these little machines and see the sky on your retina screen—it will be loads clearer.”
A few roving Apple employees traded coded, neutral expressions: Yeah, we’ve heard it all before. And an older woman in business clothes and sensible low heels gave Flannery a droll eye-roll, as if to telegraph: You must be having fun with him. But Flannery was in fact having the most miraculous day of her life: It was a ruthless thing to admit, as Miss Sweeney was probably having the worst day of her life, but it was also true, even in this moment with Heath ranting, diluting the magic.
“Whether you’re a shepherd in Andorra or working at City Hall in Biloxi, you will be sucked into the artificial world. Wi-Fi will find you, eventually.”
Flannery gave a smile of supplication to the Apple employee closest to her, letting her know that everything was completely fine, that Heath was merely an unusually animated shopper.
“We will not all sleep, Flannery, not today anyway, but we will all be changed.”
She nodded. “Probably so.”
He lifted his hands, an irritated, palms-up gesture, as if to say: Really? Is that all you’ve got to say on this crucial topic?
So Flannery tried again. “Yes, well, I mean, we’ll all be changed, because it’s like a nouveau greenhouse in here, an enclosed environment for growth, but instead of tomatoes or hydrangea, Apple is nurturing ideas and words and glass and metal. And they’re definitely not sleeping.”
Heath grimaced. “What?”
Well, Flannery herself didn’t quite understand what she’d just said, but Heath’s Luddite monologuing was fairly irritating. “Actually, Heath, for people with disabilities, access to computers has been life-changing.” Why had her voice suddenly taken on the sunny tone of a peppy public service announcement? “My neighbor, Finn is his name, has autism, and his iPad changed his life.”
But Heath seemed not to care about Finn, or that men and women, brilliant introverts, she guessed, had concocted machines to help people live more fulfilling lives, machines that could help a teacher who had gone off her meds find her way back home, for instance. He loped around by the iPhone display, speaking loudly and more manically. “You know, your teacher leaving like she did—no wallet, no phone, no laptop? I salute her. I really do. It’s a brave thing to go against the grain, or the screen, I suppose. I almost hope we don’t find her. If she makes it to her deluded fifth dimension, I’ll bloody cheer for her. Caitlin Sweeney goes off the grid entirely! Free-floating despair for the win!”
“Free-floating despair for the win?”
Heath would cheer if Miss Sweeney had … gone off the grid entirely? He would cheer if Miss Sweeney had … the word formed in her head, but she would not allow herself to think it. She swept it away by staring at Heath, by wondering how the mercurial whiplash of his words could take her from ecstasy to a premonition of grief within the space of a few minutes. Sure, his itinerant kindness felt like a drug, but perhaps his harsh words about Miss Sweeney’s plight revealed his true character; perhaps he had just presented his essential self in the Apple Store.
Wuthering Heights was right there in her mind, Cathy scolding her sister-in-law for her burgeoning romantic interest in Heathcliff: “It is deplorable ignorance of his character, child, and nothing else, which makes that dream enter your head. Pray, don’t imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence … he’s a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.”
Flannery needed Miss Swe
eney right now; she perhaps had never needed her more, for who else would be able to help her discern this day? She walked away from Heath and into the heart of the busy Apple Store, threading her way through the rows of computers, looking for Miss Sweeney in earnest now: a zooming second of hope when she saw a woman hugging a taller man—mulberry black fingernails and the sleeves of her black-and-white houndstooth jacket on his back—until they pulled apart, and Flannery saw the face of a lovely stranger. And a familiar laugh speeded Flannery’s heart, but when she turned to look, the woman was a girlish sixty-year-old with gray braids and a fringed suede jacket. Oh, she was moving fast as she searched, her breath growing ragged as she took the stairs to the lower level. When Flannery was halfway down the steps, she heard a slight jangle from the buckles on Heath’s leather jacket.
“Flannery? Flan?”
She kept going, but Heath moved even faster, taking the spiral stairs two at a time, jostling an already-annoyed couple arguing about a warranty; he passed Flannery and waited for her at the bottom of the stairs. But she stayed on the last step, so that they were now eye-to-eye. “I’m just going to take a quick look around for her down here, Heath. In case she happens to be on the lower level of the Apple Store, and not, say, in the fifth dimension.”
Heath winced and ran his hand through his hair. “Flannery, I’m sorry. I really, really am. Sometimes I get a bit ahead of myself. And look, I don’t want Miss Sweeney to blast off to the fifth dimension. Of course I don’t. Sometimes I say the stupidest things.”
She nodded in agreement. But he looked so miserable standing there in his checked shirt with his hands jammed into his front pockets. Heath might not be concealing depths of benevolence, but he was nice, mostly. She dropped her brusque tone: “It’s okay. I say stupid things all the time. Everybody does.”
“I’m not sure if I can help you find her.” He rubbed his palm down his face and looked out the windows. “I’m as lost as your own Miss Sweeney.”
Dear Reader Page 21
