by Nicole Baart
“I don’t know,” Meg confessed.
“Maybe I should ask, ‘Who do you want?’ ”
It was a fair question, for after their breakup, Meg had admitted that her seemingly platonic relationship with Dylan was more complicated than she first let on. Jess had asked how she could have lied. After the initial shock and suffering that filled his days after Meg’s apology, Jess embraced his fury and didn’t keep secrets about what had transpired between her and Dylan. All the same, she didn’t want to field such inquiries from her mother. She forced a smile, but the expression faded fast and never reached her eyes to make cheerful creases. “Both,” she murmured.
Linda laughed at her daughter’s attempt at humor, but Meg hadn’t been joking. “They’re both good boys,” Linda said as if it was a matter of making a decision between two equally appealing choices. But if it were that easy, Meg would not have found herself lamenting the fact that it was no longer her choice to make.
“Good boys,” Meg echoed, because her mother expected a response.
“But I think it’s best we leave this all in the past.” Linda patted her daughter’s knee soothingly. “There are plenty of fish in the sea.”
Meg groaned. “That’s a terrible expression.”
“And it’s a big sea.”
“Now you’re mixing your metaphors.” Meg forced a chuckle for her mother’s benefit, and knew that when Linda walked away, it was with a feeling of accomplishment. They had talked, they had laughed, she had come to her senses—supposedly a surefire recipe for success. But it was banal, and it didn’t work.
Though it took Meg a long time to find her equilibrium again, she earned a perfect 4.0 average in her senior year. Part of her academic success was the direct result of the disentanglement of her heart and mind. No more was she drawn in two opposing directions. No more did she have to hate herself for feeling one way while acting another.
But as the months went on, a new awareness began to emerge. Not only was Meg’s life less complicated, it was more hers again. She felt like herself. She was more relaxed in her own skin, more aware of her wants and needs and able to balance herself when things didn’t quite work out as she planned. Without realizing that she was doing so, or even that she had stopped in the first place, Meg began again to make her friends laugh, banter with her teachers, eagerly try new things. She wasn’t who she had been, nor would she ever be again, but she was well on her way to redrawing the map that had been irreparably damaged.
“I’ve missed you,” Sarah told her one night.
And in a flash of understanding, Meg knew that she had indeed been missing. “It’s good to be back.” She grinned.
“You are never allowed to date again.”
Meg laughed. “That’s a bit harsh, don’t you think?”
After Meg graduated with honors and received acceptance letters from her top four choices for university, the world seemed once again set before her, a prize for the taking, a treasure to be plucked. There were long conversations about where she would go, what she would do. Veterinary medicine since she loved animals and was strong in the sciences? Education, given that she had a way with kids? Maybe marketing because, as her father loved to tease, she could sell oceanfront property in Iowa.
In the end, Meg opted for none of her family’s preferred futures. Instead, she found a job online with AT&T in a little community on the coast of California. A part of her was determined to prove Dylan and his accusations of her perfect, prearranged life wrong. But even more than that, she wanted to find her own path. To step off the road that had been paved before her and make her own decisions about all that was to come. She told her parents the day after graduation and left the week after that.
“Where will you live?” Greg demanded, his daughter’s announcement as raw and tender as a fresh wound.
“I found a roommate online.”
“Online?” The word might as well have been a vulgar curse.
“Her username is Kate24, but she told me I can call her Katie.”
“Her username?”
“She’s a good person, Dad. I checked it out online and she’s legit.”
That seemed to mollify him a little, but Linda still sat shell-shocked and silent behind him. “How will you afford rent?” Greg continued, rubbing his eyes as if he couldn’t bring himself to look at her.
“I have money saved,” she said quietly.
“College money.”
“I only need a little. Just enough for travel costs and the first month of rent.”
“And after that?” Greg demanded.
“I’ll go back to school in a year. I just—”
“No, I mean what will you do after that money runs out?”
“I told you: I already have a job. I’m going to be a retail sales consultant for AT&T. It sounds fancy, but basically it means I’ll be—”
“A cashier at a cell phone store.”
“You don’t have to make it sound that bad.”
“It is that bad.”
“Dad—”
Linda suddenly interrupted. “Megan Elise Painter. Don’t. Do. This.”
There was an urgency in her mother’s words, a purpose that thwarted Meg’s best attempts at remaining calm and collected. “I have to do this,” she whispered around the rising lump of emotion in her throat. “I need a year off. I have to be away.”
The steadfast silence that met her declaration was unnerving.
“I have to,” Meg continued, trying to make them understand. “Besides, I was accepted at Cal Poly. Either way, I’d be in California.”
Linda’s mouth dropped open a little. “It’s not the same. School and a job at a cell phone store are not the same thing.”
Meg knew then that it was no use trying to make them understand. Not now. Maybe not ever. But that didn’t ease her own growing need to go.
There was a book on the coffee table in the Painters’ living room, a hardcover copy of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. Meg had never read it, and the book had languished there for as long as she could remember, unread, but fat and imposing and beautiful with its dust jacket watercolor rendering of an alluring foreign landscape. The pastels were ethereal but distinct, impressionistic but hinting at a certain long-lost clarity, as if the painting merely represented the remnants of a dream already fading. It gave Meg a sense of isolation. Of an absence—her own?—but somehow the awaiting void was comforting, almost peaceful, as if all expectations had been stripped away.
She took the dust jacket with her when she left.
And although she departed without blessing, Meg felt blessed when the sun shone bright through the rear window of her car as she headed west. And when the mountains of Colorado began to rise in an imposing line of purple on the far-flung horizon, Meg’s cell phone beeped a text message from Bennett: You’ll be fine.
It had to be so.
Greg and Linda didn’t have much say in Meg’s self-imposed exodus, but they made sure that she was cared for on the journey. She wanted to go alone, and they let her, but they insisted that she stop along the way. Interstate 80 was the most direct route, requiring no back-road turnoffs, potential detours, or confusing twists through unfamiliar territory. They didn’t have friends or family along the approved itinerary, but Linda appealed to the ladies in her quilting circle and unearthed an aunt in Cheyenne and a retired pastor and his artist wife in Reno. Meg was scheduled to spend a night with each, and she reached her required destinations on time and cheerful, leaving behind her such an impression of spirit and maturity that her hosts called their Sutton connections and raved about “that lovely girl.”
It was only when Reno was a speck in her rearview mirror that Meg felt really cut loose. It was behind her, all of it, and there was no going back to the way things had been. In one breath she lamented the loss and embraced all there was to come, no matter where life took her from here. No matter what it held.
The address of her new apartment was printed out with careful,
handwritten instructions on the passenger seat, but when Meg got close to the coast, she ignored her predetermined destination and followed the signs to the nearest beach.
It was the perfect day to begin again. The sun was casting lazy rays in the sort of casual warmth that made coastal life seem so carefree and spontaneous, so undemanding. Meg could imagine herself here, barefoot and laughing, beside a friend or two, maybe a small collection of people who made her feel like the sun shining down on them was more than a happy coincidence. She grinned at the thought, and when she parked her car in the little rock-sand lot behind a small rise that obscured her view of the ocean, she was so excited that she forgot to lock the doors.
The Pacific itself was immense. Blue so pale in the late-afternoon light that as dusk approached, the water blended seamlessly with sky until all were one. Meg stared at it until her eyes hurt, trying to distinguish the line where the white-capped waves became clouds and wishing that she could see beyond the curve of the earth to the places where islands began to rise out of the sea.
She wasn’t even aware that she had stepped out of her sandals until her toes were nipped with cold at the very edge of the surf. It was such a pleasant thrill, so delightfully bracing and vital that she rolled up her faded jeans to the knees and waded in as far as she could go. Her pants were soon soaked by the waves, but she didn’t care. She would have shed them altogether if she had been alone. But there were people walking on the beach: an elderly couple, a group of kids that didn’t look quite old enough to be unsupervised, a woman with only her small dog for company. Meg waved at them and considered it a good sign when they waved back.
Just as she was about to drag herself from the water and go in search of her new roommate and, hopefully, friend, Meg felt something hard beneath the heel of her foot. It was embedded in the sand, but as she tried to pin it against the ocean floor, a wave slid backward off the beach and tried to pull it free. There was an erosion of sand, a splash as another tide sweeping in collided with the wave as it left, and Meg thrust her hand beneath the water, drenching her shirt with a blotch of wet that matched the damp on her jeans and emerging triumphant with a shell in her hand.
It was faultless, a fanned scallop in alternating stripes of buttercream yellow and salmon with two perfect triangles bordering the tip. Inside was a shimmering, silvery pink so delicate that it felt almost inappropriate to gaze upon its exposed beauty. She turned it over in her hand, dragging her fingernail across the ridges and wondering what had happened to its mate. It was half of a whole, but it seemed perfect to her.
Later, Katie would tell her that the shell was a heart cockle. Common. Boring. Certainly not a treasure to display on her nightstand as if it was some precious trinket. But ordinary or not, it was exquisite to Meg, and without knowing why she did it, she lifted the shell to her mouth and tasted the salt of the sea. The ribs were a pattern against her tongue, a vibration of the distance it had traveled. A reminder of away. Meg palmed the shell and pocketed it, and it never left her bedside after that day.
Three months later, the little heart cockle stood watch when Meg’s cell phone rang with an unfamiliar number.
“I miss you,” the caller said.
Meg had to admit that in many ways she missed him, too.
21
LUCAS
A chilly wind moaned through the hushed street, but Omaha’s Old Market still bore some signs of a warm and prosperous summer. Brown geraniums in hanging baskets drooped heavy heads in desolation, withered petals whispering free to create sad mosaics on the brick-lined street. Windows still clung to posters announcing outdoor concerts, art festivals, and craft fairs, and somewhere a forgotten wind chime sang a tune that seemed elegiac, a lament for the sun and laughter that had undoubtedly filled the quaint neighborhood only weeks before.
The unassuming storefront that quietly announced Michael Kane Designs was tucked between a high-end furniture boutique on one side and a smoky record store on the other. Lucas stood in front of the frosted glass that obscured the interior of the jewelry store and surveyed the street with a wary eye. He and Jenna had made the trek to Omaha’s picturesque historic district many times in their first few years in northern Iowa. They missed the bustle of Chicago, the noise, the people. And though Nebraska’s biggest city was tiny in comparison to the metropolis they were accustomed to, it was a relief to sit at one of the outdoor tables of the little coffee shop on the corner and bask in the presence of people. The scent of Indian food mingled with the earthy sweetness of their steaming lattes, fresh-baked sourdough bread, and cut flowers from the florist down the street. Lucas could picture Jenna there now, swirling the contents of a stoneware mug and lifting it two-handed to her lips while her eyes absorbed the colors, the lights.
They were sure they had marked every nook and cranny, every unexpected fountain and ivy-draped, crumbling path. But in all their wandering through the narrow streets, delighting in the kite shop, the one-room museums, the unexpected mall behind a modest-looking single-pane door, they had never chanced upon the little store marked with three letters linked in curling calligraphy: MKD.
“How long did you say this store has been around?” Lucas asked as he watched Angela trace the monogram with a manicured finger.
“Mr. Kane told me on the phone that this was his twenty-seventh year.”
“I don’t remember the place,” he mused.
“Well, just because he’s been in business that long doesn’t mean that it’s all been in this shop.” Angela gave him a strange look. “Besides, who made you the keeper of the Old Market?”
Lucas shrugged. “I’m not. I just don’t like being caught off guard.”
“That’s one of your problems.”
“I think this used to be a pottery store . . .”
Angela rolled her eyes but tucked her hand in the crook of his arm with an indulgent smile all the same. “Come on, honey,” she cooed, batting phony doe eyes at him. “Act like you love me.”
Lucas still had serious reservations about her plan that they play a happily engaged couple, but before he could restate his protest, Angela swung open the door with her free hand and pulled him inside.
A bell over the door caroled their arrival with a trill of light notes before it fell back against the aged wood in an unharmonious jangle. There, it seemed to say. I’ve done my job. Standing on the threshold and glancing quickly around the small store, Lucas realized that everything else had that same tired quality. There were two lighted display cases with smudged glass and more than one spent bulb. And the hardwood floor wore a groove down the center from all the feet that had crossed it in the century since it had been laid. Looking up, away from the dilapidation of the once-lovely floor, Lucas caught sight of a crystal chandelier, impressive in its size and the cut of the glass, but covered in a film of dust so thick the light it produced was meager at best. Other than the floor, the glass counters, the chandelier, there was nothing at all in the room. No pictures on the walls, no cash register, no chair. Nothing.
Except a door directly opposite from where Lucas stood with Angela’s hand still warming the curve of his elbow. It appeared unnaturally short, as if he would have to duck to enter the dark recess behind the retail space, and it was covered with a red brocade cloth like he would have expected to see at a French opera house. From behind this curtain there was the rattling sound of a thick, smoker’s cough, followed by a husky “Be with you in a sec.”
“Mr. Kane?” Lucas whispered, looking down at Angela’s upturned face.
She shrugged and fixed a smile to her lips as if it was an accessory she could take on and off.
The curtain moved and an elderly man stepped from behind it, inclining his head in what appeared to be a courteous greeting, but Lucas saw the low beam of the lintel brush the mop of his thick gray hair as he passed. “Hello, hello,” he called, and though his face was deep-set with unnumbered crags, his crinkled eyes were warm and friendly. The smile he offered them was genuine, if only a
bit hesitant, as if he had endured the slight of many browsers who merely glanced at his goods and left. “What can I do for you?”
Lucas took a breath to speak, but Angela gave his arm a hard squeeze and gushed, “Are you Mr. Michael Kane?”
The old man looked confused for a minute, but then he straightened the collar peeking from beneath his brown sweater and gave an almost shy nod. “That’s what they call me.”
Angela let go of Lucas and rushed forward with her hand outstretched. “Oh, it’s so nice to meet you, sir. I’m a big fan of your art.”
“My art?”
“Your jewelry. You are the designer, aren’t you?” She swept her hand to indicate the meager displays behind her, the same ones that she and Lucas hadn’t even taken a moment to glance inside.
“Yeah, it’s mine.”
“Well, I just love what you do. It’s understated but exquisite, the perfect balance between—”
“She’s enthusiastic,” Lucas interrupted, coming up behind Angela and forcing himself to put his hand on the small of her back. His fingers hovered over the fabric of her coat, not quite daring to press against the curve of her body. He didn’t want to put himself in the middle of the situation, but he thought Angela was laying it on too thick. She might be disarmingly beautiful and irrefutably charming, but he got the impression that if she didn’t cool it a little, Mr. Kane would disappear into the rabbit hole behind his diminutive store and not come back.
Lucas cleared his throat and forced a smile. “We’re, uh . . . we’re engaged. And I told her that she can pick out the ring.”
At this, Mr. Kane shrugged and pursed his lips apologetically. “I don’t work with diamonds.”
“Oh, I don’t want a diamond,” Angela assured him. “I’m familiar with your work. I’ve been to your website.”
Mr. Kane nodded proudly. “My grandson designed that. As for me, I don’t know how to turn on a computer, much less surf the spiderweb.” He seemed as pleased with his own lack of technological skills as he was with his grandson’s obvious expertise.
