As long as I can’t let her go, nothing will ever change. It’s the one bitter truth Marcus can never tell me, even though I already know it.
****
Marcus opens the passenger-side door, helps me out of the car and starts toward the house. It’s twenty-seven paces from the driveway to the front door. One... two...
"Marcus... what does my house look like?"
He’s silent for a long time before answering.
"It’s big," he says. "An old sea captain’s estate directly on the Mystic River. A very nice, elegant place for you. It’s in a good school district and in a popular sightseeing area, so it should only grow in value from here. Thirty-two hundred square feet, plus your laboratories on top of that."
That doesn’t tell me anything. I don’t want an economic breakdown of my house—I want to know what it looks like! Marcus is the best assistant I could ask for and one of the greatest scientific minds I’ve ever met, but he has no imagination or talent with words.
"Are there bushes?" I ask. "Does it have a stone façade? Old brickwork? Ivy?"
"Yes."
He’s so aggravating that I could slap him. God, just tell me what it looks like!
"Yes to bushes? Are they green? Holly? Any flowers? Anything?"
"Isaac..."
"Terrence."
"Terrence," he corrects himself, "you need to stop this. You know I can’t describe things the way you want me to."
I sigh and shake my head. I should have known better. He’s all science and objectivity, so completely one-dimensional that he can’t eod an̵ven describe reality in a creative way anymore.
"You know what you need?" he asks, prodding me gently in the ribs with his elbow. "You need someone like that nice girl at the library. I bet she could tell you stories. Staircase in three, sir."
I want to snap at him for calling the real world ‘stories’ but I bite my tongue. I don’t want stories—I just want to let my mind see what my eyes can’t anymore.
"Just get me up to my room, okay?" I tell him with a sigh.
Marcus guides me carefully up the eighteen stairs to the second floor. The floorboards creak beneath my feet, and I imagine the wood is old, dark walnut, more gray than brown from age. In my mind, there’s an antique oil painting of the house’s former owner, the old sea captain, on the wall at the top. He’s smoking a pipe and wearing a black hat, and he has a scruffy black beard, blue eyes and...
And you just imagined Captain Haddock from the Tintin books, you idiot, my brain mocks me.
Holy crap... I did. I just put Captain Haddock on the wall in my mind. I’m going insane. What’s next for me? Whimsical Seussian bushes in the garden? Maybe Marcus can bring me Angela Lansbury for my evening tea.
My bedroom is at the end of the long corridor on the right. At least, I think it’s a long corridor. It’s thirty-seven steps from the top of the stairs to the door, and that at least seems like a long distance. Two feet per stride, maybe seventy-five feet from the stairs to my room? That sounds about as long as the hallway back in my parents’ mansion.
Tall windows with red curtains lined the entire east wall of the hallway back home. I remember the beams of sunlight streaming in and the bright, warm rectangles on the carpet in the morning. The beautiful fall leaves outside rustled in the wind and set the world on fire.
All I know now is that we have windows. I hear the wind but I can’t see anything. Well... sometimes I think I see light. I don’t know if it’s real, though. I’ve been trapped in the darkness since I was twenty-one.
"Here we are, sir," says Marcus, and I let go of his arm and grab the doorknob. I’ve memorized my bedroom, and I guide myself the remaining six steps in and then three steps to the left where the edge of my bed awaits me.
"Could you bring me my tape, please?" I ask as I sit down.
"That old thing again, sir?"
"Yes," I answer curtly. I don’t need him trying to fix me tonight—I just need my damned tape deck and my mood will pass on its own.
Marcus rummages around inside my top dresser drawer, and then a moment later, he places the heavy cassette player on my lap.
"Anything else, sir?"
"Yes... where’s Columbus?"
"Asleep in your chair as usual."
Of course he is—he’s the worst seeing-eye dog ever. What does that dog ever do but sleep and actively not guide me places?
"Anything else, Terrence?" asks Marcus once again.
"No, that’s all. Thanks again for all your help today. I’ll see you in the lab tomorrow morning."
"You’re welcome. Have a good night," says Marcus, selays Marand I again catch the sadness in his voice. He hates my tape—hates that I still keep it around after all these years—and I understand exactly why.
The door closes behind him, and as I listen as his footsteps fade into the distance, I can feel the setting sun coming in the window. It’s warm on my skin, like the chimney of my old house...
...no, I can’t. My window faces to the east. My body’s lying to me again, inventing sensations that can’t possibly exist in a futile attempt to fill the sensory void my failed vision left behind.
My ears and memories won’t lie to me, though. I press the button on the cassette deck and listen to the faint, magnetic hiss coming through the speakers. Five seconds later, Nina’s voice comes to life.
"The Golden Goose, by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Demo narration by Nina Torres. Once upon a time..."
Shortly after Child Protective Services took Nina away, her deathtrap of a house was condemned and her mother evicted. This cassette—a demo tape I stole from her old room before the demolition—is all I have left of her.
In my mind, she’s sitting beside my bed as I climb under the blankets. I close my ey
es—as if it matters anymore—and imagine that she’s reading to me until I finally fall asleep.
wi
wi
wi
Chapter IV
Irene
The windshield wipers of Susan’s blue hatchback are hypnotic. My eyes keep following them back and forth, back and forth, as the rain pours down.
"Thanks for coming in to read again," she says, breaking the silence.
Flip flop, flip flop...
"Um... no problem. Thanks for the ride home," I answer. I only live five miles from the Groton library, but between the rain and darkness, walking home tonight would have been miserable.
"You know, Irene," says Susan, "I’m all for giving you rides home, but one of these days you really need to get yourself a car."
"I know—I’m trying. Between rent and student loans, it’s all I can do to even stay above water, Susan," I tell her.
She sighs and shakes her head, and I bite my tongue to stop myself from saying anything else. I appreciate the ride home, but it’s not like I asked for it tonight. She stopped me on the way out the door and refused to let me walk home in the rain. I’d love to see her try to make a car payment while paying for rent and student loans on only nine bucks an hour.
Susan sometimes complains that she’s underpaid as the librarian and about how poor she is. She has no clue. Poor is being excited to go to school because it means that you get to eat. It’s wearing the same shirts from when you were twelve even though you’re sixteen and your body’s changed, and all your classmates think you’re doing it to be ‘slutty.’
She might not be well off, but she’s never been poor.
"Feels like it’s autumn already," I mumble. I’m not very good at idle conversation, and I’m particularly bad at it when I’m feeling self-conscious.
"Yeah, it’s coming early this year," says Susan. "Lots of rain, too. They say it’s a good sign for fall foliage, but I don’t know where they get that from."
"Or who ‘they’ are, either," she adds after a long silence.
"The evil weather illuminati, duh."
"In a world where it occasionally rains," Susan growls, "only one woman stands again the mysterious weather
illuminati."
"Coming soon to a theater near you," I growl right back, and she laughs.
She pulls up in front of my apartment building—a run-down, foreboding brick building built in the sixties as low-income housing—and I wave goodbye before hurrying out of the rain. I drip my way across the lobby and then down the hall to the elevator.
Up-arrow button. Ding! Up I go.
I nearly gag at the stench of cigarette smoke inside as the doors shut, and I hold my breath for three floors as the elevator shrieks, groans, and complains the entire way up. The hallway smells like smoke, too. My god, people... does nobody here understand what NO SMOKING means? There are signs plastered on the wall every ten feet in here.
As I open the door to my apartment, the sweet scent of tomato sauce and cooking wine overpowers the tobacco and makes everything better. I love my roommate.
"Hi Cassie! What are you making?"
"Welcome home, slutface! Tomato sauce for dinner tonight," answers Cassie as she darts around the kitchen like a sugar-high hummingbird.
I’m the tiny one here at five-foot-two, but somehow my tall blond roommate, a graduate student in biology at nearby Connecticut College, is the delicate flower to all our friends. She’s the elegant pixie and I’m the lumbering midget. I have two left feet when it comes to dancing, but I’m not that bad... I think. Even if I am, I love her anyway. She keeps me sane.
"So who’s a girl got to screw to get a bowl of that spaghetti? It smells so good, Cassie!"
"Flattery will get you nowhere, dear," says Cassie, sticking her tongue out at me as she stirs the sauce.
"How about a promise of spicy fish tacos next paycheck?"
"Now you’re talking," she answers with a wide grin. "Just eat up in a hurry because it’s date night, okay?"
"Ooh, I thought you were going over to Mike’s place."
Cassie spends about half the week over at her boyfriend’s apartment across town. I understand why—it has air conditioning and is way nicer than ours is—but I still get lonely while she’s gone.
"His dishwasher broke and flooded the kitchen, so the landlord’s tossed him out for the night to get it fixed," she explains. "He can stay here for one night, right? Please?"
"Of course he can," I answer, waving off her concerns as she gives me puppy eyes. "No problem."
"You’re the best! I promise we won’t be too loud."
Loud? Shit – I should’ve guessed.
Mike arrives five minutes later and Cassie puts him to work setting the table while I make a salad. Whoever did the grocery shopping last week forgot all the vegetables. The tomatoes are all in Cassie’s sauce and pretty much everything else in the fridge is a cucumber. I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s my fault, so I keep my mouth shut and pretend I’m intentionally making a cucumber salad as Cassie babbles on abem"abbles out whatever the hell new outfits she bought this week. I swear, for a girl whose stipend's hourly wage is so low that it could be mistaken for her GPA, she sure does a lot of shopping.
The two lovebirds fall for my dismal excuse for a salad, and I shoot them a wide grin before scooping myself an enormous bowl of delicious, steaming pasta. I swear, Cassie makes the best sauce. It’s so good I could skip the pasta entirely and just dig into the sauce with a spoon.
I glance over at Cassie when I realize she hasn’t said a word all through dinner, and I hold back a groan as I watch her and her boyfriend flirt. They’re making eyes at each other across the table, and I’d bet anything that they’re playing footsie, too.
Disgusting. Disgustingly cute... but still disgusting.
You’re just envious, I tell myself. You’re jealous because they’re all lovey-dovey and you’re the sandwich dope.
Gee thanks a lot, me. Great confidence booster.
The little voice in my head is right, though. I’m not interested in Mike or anything, but I sometimes wish I had someone. I don’t have much luck with men. I usually just end up dating assholes, and on the odd occasion that I actually meet someone nice... well, that’s when my memories kick in and ruin it for me.
No matter how wonderful the guy is—no matter how great a match he might be for me—he’ll never be Isaac. I must be mentally ill. I haven’t seen Isaac since I was a teenager and I’m still comparing people to him.
Cassie giggles, confirming my suspicions of an ongoing game of footsie, and I excuse myself and head to my room. I’m obviously in their way and need to surrender the living room.
"Oh hey, was there any mail?" I ask over my shoulder as I depart, bowl of spaghetti in hand.
"Yeah, I slid it under your door," she calls back in between flirtatious giggles. They barely waited for me to get down the hall before they leapt onto the couch together.
I lock the door behind me, snatch up the pile of mail, and collapse on my bed as I sort through it.
A student loan bill, the cable bill, plenty of junk mail, and... is that... oh holy shit!
Ferris Voice Actors Agency & Representation.
I sent them a demo CD almost six months ago, and they’ve sent me back an enormous manila envelope. Could it be an acceptance? Could this actually be a contract offer? Rejections always arrive in standard business envelopes—I’ve seen plenty of those in the last two years.
I tear the envelope open, my pulse quickening in anticipation, and I yank out the pile of papers inside.
"Dear Ms Hartley," I read aloud. "Thank you for your wonderful application for representation and for sharing your obvious talent with us through your demo submission."
Obvious talent? Good start!
I read the next line and my heart sinks into my stomach.
"However, we unfortunately have to decline your application at this time due to stylistic differences..."
The rest of the letter informs me that they’ve included a catalog for in case I’d like to buy any of their audio books to compare styles.
I crumple up the letter and throw it across the room.
They rejected me. I... I thought I had it. This envelope was going to be my big break, but it’s a fucking catalog. The bastards couldn’t just reject me—they had the nerve to advertise to me in my rejection letter!
Down the hall, Cassie’s getting busy with her boyfriend. Mike’s clearly doing something right, because she’s moaning so loudly that I can hear it all the way in here. I lie on the bed and cover my head with my pillow, but I can’t block out the sounds even with my fingers stuffed into my ears.
She cries out in pleasure and suddenly I’m back on the roof of my old house in New Haven. Mom’s downstairs screwing whoever the hell she’s with this week, and I’m...
...I’m alone.
I’m alone because Isaac’s gone, alone because I’m not Nina anymore and he can’t find me.
Because I wished I was someone else.
I miss you, Isaac.
****
The morning flies past and before I know it, I only have an hour until the lunchtime rush starts. The sandwich specials are ready and the cold cuts are prepared, but if anyone wants pickles or a condiment not involving horseradish, I’m out of luck.
"Tyler, where the hell is today’s shipment?" I reluctantly shout over to my manager across the cafeteria as he ‘organizes’ the candy shelf. It’s funny how food goes missing every time he helps out.
"Relax, babe! They’re just a little slow today," he calls back, and I grind my teeth to keep from snapping at him. I’m not his babe. I’m not his anything, but that doesn‘t stop him from flirting inappropriately every chance he gets.
Shit, why’d I even bother, I ask myself as he saunters in my direction. Now I’ve drawn his attention.
"So what’s the problem?" he asks with an irritating grin, leaning over the sandwich station and leaving giant handprints on my just-cleaned glass.
"Number one, I have no condiments. Number two, put on a goddamned hair net! You’re shedding on my cold cuts," I snap at him as I pick a brown hair out of the ham. He just leans in closer an
d keeps on grinning like the creep he is.
"You’re pretty sexy when you get angry, you know that?" he whispers, and it’s all I can do not to slap him.
"Put on a hair net," I tell him again. "Do you want a customer to get a piece of you in his mouth or something?"
Chasing Wishes Page 4
