by Nicole Baart
“I’m sorry it worked out this way,” he apologized over the phone, when it became apparent that he wouldn’t be able to sneak away for even a day.
“I don’t get it,” Meg countered, trying to keep her voice neutral and whine-free. “Aren’t the courts closed for the weekend?”
“Yeah, but we’re up to our eyeballs in research. Turns out, our client wasn’t entirely honest with us. Imagine that.”
Meg grunted.
“We have a lot to do to be ready for court on Monday morning.”
“So . . .” she drew out the word, trying to picture the boy she had grown up with in this new world, this self-contained universe of almost film-worthy importance—for some reason the court scene from A Few Good Men looped continuously in her mind’s eye. Jess seemed to hold the key to some stranger’s sad life. “So you’re some big hotshot lawyer now, huh?”
Jess laughed. “Mostly I get coffee and pull files and nod. I’m still an undergrad, remember?”
“Still sounds important.”
“Nah,” Jess demurred. “But if I hope to boss some puny little intern like myself someday, I need to be here.”
“Okay,” Meg said because there was nothing else to say. It wasn’t like he needed her permission. “It was a nice thought all the same. Maybe we’ll see each other in another couple of years.”
“Thanksgiving?” Jess asked.
“Christmas this year.”
He moaned. “Maybe I’ll have to come to California sometime.”
“Maybe.”
Meg was about to click off the phone when something dense and unspoken in the silence between them made her pause. There were so many things left unanswered, so many possibilities that had been postponed, or worse, surrendered with this one small stroke of fate. For a moment, she saw her life as a collection of coincidences, a haphazard map filled with random twists and turns that would have been wholly different if she had slept in late once or twice, listened to her mother’s warnings, said no. Or maybe yes. She felt like this telephone good-bye was permanent, an opportunity missed that could never be recaptured again. It made her brave.
The query bubbled up and out of her so quickly, she was stunned by its unchecked urgency: “Why did you write that on my ring?”
There was no need to explain. Jess knew exactly what she meant. “I wondered how long it would take you to ask,” he said, all trace of humor in his tone spent. Instead, he sounded tired, and Meg imagined a certain bittersweet edge to his words. “I kept waiting for you to notice it and ask, but when you never did, I just assumed that either you weren’t very observant or you just plain didn’t care.”
“It made me angry,” Meg admitted, and realized as she said it that it seemed small to her now. Insignificant and immature. She almost wished she could take the question back.
“I kept waiting for you to ask, for a chance to explain. I guess it’s too late now.”
“I’d like to know.”
There was a long stillness during which the only thing Meg could hear was their breath in quiet harmony. She was about to laugh it off and pretend they’d never followed each other down such an old and winding road when Jess broke the peace between them and disclosed the secret that she hadn’t even known he kept.
“It’s not literal,” he said. “I never meant for you to think that I considered you mine. In fact, quite the opposite. Remember when we were kids? All the backyard games and the bikes and skateboards and basketball . . .”
In spite of the uncertain pound of her heart, Meg smiled at the wealth of memories they shared. “Of course.”
“Even then you were larger than life. Little Megan Painter, tougher than the boys, braver than kids twice your age, steady and confident and fearless.”
She almost opened her mouth to tell him that even if she appeared to be the girl he described, she didn’t always feel that way. The person she let the world see was not necessarily the young woman inside. But he continued before she had a chance.
“I think I loved you when you were still in diapers. Is that possible?”
Meg laughed. “Not likely. But I was a cutie.”
“Still are,” he declared, and Meg wasn’t at all surprised by his boldness.
“You haven’t seen my new haircut.”
“I’d like to, but that’s irrelevant. I was trying to tell you a story here. If I get sidetracked, I’ll lose my nerve.”
“Go on.”
He drew in a long breath and let it out slowly. “Like I was saying, it doesn’t mean mine like I think I own you or something. I guess it’s ironic—I claimed you knowing I could never claim you because you don’t belong to anyone. Because I was eighteen and believed I was in love.”
“Okay . . .”
There was a beat or two of silence. Then Jess tried again. “Right before my grandma passed away, we all went around her house with pieces of masking tape and put our initials on whatever we wanted to keep. It was our way of setting aside the things that meant the most to us. Of saving them. It was hard when you flipped over something special and found someone else’s name already on it.”
“What did you put your initials on?” Meg asked, because he didn’t need to explain it anymore. She understood.
“A pair of my grandpa’s wooden shoes. He wore them around the house when I was a kid.”
“I can picture them,” Meg said, smiling. “You kept them on your desk. I didn’t know they were your grandfather’s.”
But Jess was already over the shoes. “Do you still wear the ring?”
The question stopped her cold. No. No, she didn’t wear it and hadn’t since she’d slid it off her hand and try to offer it to him when they broke up. But she had kept it close, in a little canvas pouch where she stored her makeup, and her fingers would sometimes brush along the cool ridge of the cut leaves.
“Don’t answer that,” Jess split her reverie with a hurried command. “I shouldn’t have asked. It doesn’t matter anymore. Besides, we never really had a chance, did we? You loved Dylan even though I was right there in front of you. Heart in hands, as it were.”
“I didn’t love Dylan,” she retorted without wondering if what she said was true or not.
“You acted like you did,” Jess said softly. “But hey, this is all ancient history, right? We’ve grown up. Left our childish ways behind . . .”
And with that, everything was neatly shelved away, out of reach and beyond discussion, for a line had been drawn between what had been and what would be. It felt to Meg that Jess left no room for overlap.
“Wish I could have seen you,” she said, her throat tight though she couldn’t quite pinpoint why. Her mother was right, people always want what they don’t have.
“Me, too,” Jess echoed.
When they said good-bye, something felt different, and Meg sat clutching the phone for many long minutes in the solitude of her childhood bedroom. Then she got up and went to find the makeup bag that sat like a visitor on the counter of the bathroom she used to consider her own. At the very bottom, beneath the shiny tubes and pretty glass bottles that comprised her meager drugstore collection, she found the ring lying in wait.
She didn’t look at the inscription again. She didn’t have to. But she did hold the narrow band to her face, admiring the cut of the flowers, the iridescent, rainbow-colored glow of the opal. Then she slipped it onto the index finger of her left hand. It still fit.
Meg passed the remainder of her trip enjoying the little things and forcing herself to take what she had been given, to accept it at face value and not permit her heart to expect more. Her mother’s pancakes were a gift, and the sound of her father whistling in the morning. There was the familiar but untraceable scent of fresh linen that graced the Painter home, and the way her bed had sunk to fit every line and curve of her body. The days were long and hot, but the evenings fell gently, cooling the air with a mellow, soft breeze that stroked her skin as she sat on the deck, mom on her right, dad on her left. They watched the s
tars come out, lighting the overgrown bramble of raspberry bushes like a string of fading Christmas lights, and talked about things that were pleasant and safe, as comforting and wholesome as butterscotch candy on Meg’s tongue. They discussed her childhood. College classes that would start in just a couple weeks. The tomatoes that hung like heavy jewels from the twining plants just off the edge of the deck.
It was a time of hard-earned peace, and maybe it lulled Meg into a place of calm acceptance, a sense that everything was okay, had always been okay, and would work out all right in the end. And if life was not going to deal her a happily-ever-after, then at least it would be filled with enough joy to make everything well worth it. It already was.
Linda dropped her daughter off at the airport late on Saturday. It was an evening flight that would deposit Meg on the West Coast drowsy and red-eyed, but for once Meg wasn’t leaving behind a mother with matching bloodshot, tear-filled eyes. It felt right that she was going and they both knew it.
“Love you, hon,” Linda said, leaning over the console to give her daughter one last parting hug.
“Love you, too.” Meg shouldered her backpack and swung open the car door. Catching her mom’s outstretched hand, she gave it a good-bye squeeze. “See you at Christmas.”
“Don’t forget to send me a wish list.”
“It’s August.”
“I know! I’m already way behind.”
Meg laughed as she grabbed her carry-on out of the backseat. “I’ll work on it on the plane.”
“Brilliant.” Linda powered down the passenger window so she could wave as she pulled away, and blew a final kiss through the opening before merging with the traffic that flowed through the drop-off area.
Meg watched until her mother’s taillights disappeared around the corner, then she set off down the median between the two wide lanes separating drop-offs from pickups and commercial vehicles from private ones. The airport had been under construction for as long as she could remember, and it had encouraged her parents to dispense with the drawn-out good-bye routine involving short-term parking and handholding through the check-in line. Nowadays she didn’t even have to go to the ticket counter. No checked luggage and a preprinted boarding pass meant she could show up an hour before her flight and breeze through security hassle-free.
But though she could go through the steps blindfolded, Meg always battled a little anxiety right before a flight. What if she had misread the departure time? What if her flight had been postponed? What if it took an hour to get through security?
Meg was so focused on getting to the revolving door beneath the United sign that she didn’t hear him calling her. His voice was nothing more than one more thin layer of suffocating noise adding to the chaotic symphony of people and cars and announcements crackling through the tinny loudspeakers. But then he said her name again, Megan Elise Painter, all of it, as if he was reading from a roll sheet and she had no choice but to say in obedience, “Here I am.”
At first she didn’t see him. She turned a slow circle, scanning faces for someone familiar, but she didn’t recognize anyone among the crowd of evening travelers. The sky was dark, the sun all but set behind a wall of impenetrable clouds, and a tower of shifting slate that climbed the horizon as if it lived and breathed cast shadows that played off faces like light on water. A storm was coming, and Meg doubted for a moment that her flight would take off at all. Forgetting the sound of her name as it had sliced through the sticky, humid air only a handful of heartbeats ago, she spun on her heel to enter the airport and check a departure board.
But then he called her one last time, and she stopped dead in her tracks.
She knew his voice, familiar and foreign, strange but intimate, and it pulled her, took her by the shoulders and spun her around. She couldn’t stop herself from searching for the face she still knew, the features her unconscious traced in midnight dreams.
This was no dream.
He was parked beside a swath of crumbling concrete, the driver’s side of his pickup nearly brushing against the orange pylons that sectioned off a particularly messy phase of the unending airport improvement project. He had left the truck on, and the engine growled like a sleepy beast well past its prime. Meg knew that truck. Knew the hand that rested against the hood, the dark eyes that scanned the crowd of travelers swelling in and out of the airport terminal. She was supposed to be leaving, hopping on a jet plane and disappearing off the edge of the known world, but here before her stood a reminder of who she was. Who she had been.
Meg wondered for a moment if he was allowed to be there at all, if airport security would rush over and tell him he had to move before she had a chance to decide if she wanted to see him or not. But even as she contemplated the simplicity of walking away, she knew that it was far from simple. It was the sort of decision that tasted like forever.
Forever. The thought made her heart seize, her chest feel tight. She knew she should turn around, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. There was an instant of complete immobility, a few seconds during which the world seemed to sputter, gasp, and start, and Meg stood rooted to the ground as if she had been planted there before the beginning of time. Then something in his face changed, and she knew that he realized she had seen him. Her fate was sealed.
He grinned at her. A slow-moving, all-encompassing smile that started at his lips but didn’t end there. His joy seemed to envelop the rusted lines of his truck, the space between them, her. The force of it hit her at the same time a cool wind lifted from the south, a quick exhalation of air that carried with it the scent of rain and the first few rumbling notes of thunder in the distance. Meg didn’t mean to, but she smiled back. And when she crossed the drop-off lane to meet him, his name was waiting on her tongue, sweet and warm and begging to be whispered. To stitch together the small span of space between them.
To bring her back to a time before everything had changed.
23
LUCAS
It wasn’t hard to find Jess Langbroek. Lucas did a quick search on his phone and came up with a half dozen possibilities that he quickly whittled down to one. There was a dentist in New Jersey and an artist in a small town in the Netherlands, as well as a handful of women named Jessica who went by Jess. But the man they were looking for was Jesse Elliot Langbroek, a presidential scholar and the resident of a small town that was only a forty-minute drive from Omaha.
“Sutton, Iowa,” Lucas said, showing Angela the address on the LCD screen of his phone. “But the information is a decade old. Jess Langbroek graduated from high school ten years ago. He’s probably long gone by now.”
“There’s nothing more recent on him?”
“Not that I can tell. Maybe he goes by Jesse now. Or his middle name.”
“Well, we have to go,” Angela said, leaving no room for discussion. “We’re less than an hour from knocking on the door of the guy who bought the ring. Her ring.”
“I’m familiar with the ring,” Lucas assured her. “I stole it, remember? But you’re jumping to conclusions. He could have moved. She could have given it away. It could be a dead end, Angela. You need to consider that possibility.”
“It’s not. I’m sure of it.”
“This article is about his presidential scholarship. We don’t even have an address.”
“I do.” Angela held up her own phone. There was a Yellow Pages entry for a Donald and Gayle Langbroek at 439 Ninth Street Circle NE, Sutton, Iowa. “It’s kind of an unusual name. There’s only one Langbroek family in Sutton. His parents? Definitely a relative.”
Lucas rolled his eyes, but the truth was that even without her prodding, he would have taken the road to Sutton instead of the interstate home. His heart was thumping a fast, irregular rhythm at the thought of being so close to where her story began. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll call Jenna and let her know we won’t be back for supper.”
But Jenna didn’t answer her cell, and Lucas was forced to leave a short, strangled-sounding message that he was sur
e crackled with the guilt he felt over his blunder with Angela in the car. Had she kissed him? Had he let her? Had he just cheated on his wife? Again?
Although men were supposed to belong to some sort of womanizing boys’ club by virtue of nothing more than their gender, Lucas had never joined. He had no idea how to handle the lingering effects of Angela’s almost-kiss and her subsequent confession. I love my wife, he thought, and he felt the need to say it aloud, to make it true by forcing Angela to hear the words. But underneath his instinctive reaction, he felt something living and insistent poke through the cracks of his carefully constructed pretenses.
When was the last time that Jenna had looked at him the way Angela did in the car? Had his wife ever looked at him like that? It was an unsettling thought, and Lucas was convinced that he could feel doubt growing like an eager weed as it raised jealous fingers toward the sun. Jenna had always been quiet, a bit of an enigma, a puzzle to be solved. But throughout their courtship and most of their marriage, he had considered her inscrutability to be one of her more intriguing qualities. At what point had her admirable autonomy become a liability? A root of uncertainty that, he had to admit, deep down made him question everything?
“You’re going to miss the turnoff if you don’t slow down,” Angela said, tapping her window to indicate the hidden road that intersected the highway they were on. “That’s the way to Sutton.”
“How do you know?”
“Sign, genius.”
Lucas flicked on his blinker and stepped on the brakes hard enough to make their seat belts lock. He hid a smug smile when Angela gave a little gasp.
“Thanks for the heads-up.”
Though he hadn’t been paying much attention to the drive, the road to Sutton required his full attention. They had climbed from the flatlands of the Iowa prairie to what he knew from hearsay were the rippled mounds and sheer ridges of the Loess Hills. The brown fields had given way to burr oak forests, their gnarled branches bent and arthritic. As the car wound through unfamiliar terrain, the smoky sunset of a gray sky was obscured by the soft curve of hills and the trees that grew in abundance. Lucas found it all rather pretty in an ominous, enchanted sort of way, as if the world had shifted to envelop the fable of the Woman and lend a sense of folklore to her tragic story.
