by Lisa Tuttle
But inside it was another envelope, this one light green, addressed to me c/o my mother in handwriting I recognized immediately: a neat, rounded, girlish hand that stabbed me to the heart. I peered closely at the stamp, which showed an old-fashioned airplane and a man decked out in fur-collared coat, flying helmet, and cheesy grin—but I couldn't make out the postmark. I turned it over in my hands, feeling oddly light-headed.
“More coffee?”
“Yes, please. Oh, and could I have a glass of water?” My mouth was very dry, from nerves now as well as dehydration. I waited until he'd brought my water and gone away again before I opened the green envelope.
There was a card inside. On the front of the card was an atmospheric, arty photograph, a misty scene of a low hill topped by a small grove of trees, outlined against what might have been sunrise or sunset. With a deep, foreboding chill, I felt myself back inside that timeless dream.
It was an effort to turn the card over to look at the acknowledgments on the back. They were there, as for any normal photograph: the name and logo of a publishing company, the title (“Morning Mist”), and the photographer's name. The man's name meant nothing to me, but maybe this was a famous image, maybe I'd seen it on a poster or a book cover. It was an odd coincidence, but surely not sinister. Without looking at the picture again, I opened the card and read the message written there in dark blue ink in Jenny's familiar hand.
Dear Ian,
After dreaming about you three times in the past month I finally decided to listen to my subconscious. I would like to see you again, in real life, and talk to you about what happened to us. I'm not asking for anything more than a meeting. I am happy, and my life is good in a lot of ways, but I guess turning 40 is one of those milestones that makes you look back over the way you've come and think about what might have been. I wonder if you're feeling the same way? Or maybe you think that the past should stay dead and buried. I wouldn't blame you. It's your choice. You don't owe me anything. I'll be in New York City early in September, and I'm planning to visit The Cloisters on the 6th. If you're there between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. I'm sure we'll find each other.
Your
Jenny
That was it. I read the brief note again and again, but there was no more to it than that. No address, no phone number, no way of contacting her unless I accepted her challenge and met her in New York on the day we'd always celebrated as our anniversary.
Celebrating the first anniversary of our first date—seventeen years ago!—I'd taken Jenny to New York. It was the first time she'd ever been, and she'd thought nearly all of it was wonderful, but her favorite place by far was The Cloisters, a collection of medieval European art and artifacts in Fort Tryon Park. As I tried to remember it now, I couldn't recall how to get there, or what the building looked like. My one sure memory of that day was the awe shining on Jenny's lovely face as she gazed in mute wonder at the magnificent Unicorn Tapestries.
I looked down and read the note again. This was so typical of Jenny, I thought, she hasn't changed at all.
No mention of her marital status, any children, or what she'd been doing for the past ten years: As far as we were concerned, none of that mattered. No promises, of course, although she signed herself “Your Jenny.” No room for me to maneuver: As I had no way of getting in touch with her, I couldn't argue that my job, bank balance, wife, or any other commitments prohibited a trip to New York on that date. If I cared I'd be there. If I wasn't there, I didn't care. Did she care? I'd have to wait and see.
She was still an absolutist, still the emotional dictator . . .
And I knew from the pain in my chest that what I felt for her was more than just curiosity or regret. I wanted a second chance. But to have to wait, and do nothing, for nearly three months was impossible. I would have to find her before then. Why should I let her make all the rules?
I wouldn't. I would find her first. After all, finding people was what I did.
I paid the bill and went home to begin my search.
It was still too early to call most people in America, but my mother was always an early riser, so I took the risk.
“Sweetheart, how nice to hear your voice! How are you? Did you have a nice birthday?”
As if I was still into birthday treats. “Mmm, quiet. I mostly just slept.”
“Really? Well, I guess you must have needed it. I'm glad you took the day off, at least.”
“Mom, do you remember my old girlfriend, Jenny Macedo?”
“Of course I do! Did you get her card?”
My heartbeat quickened. “The one you forwarded? Yes.”
“Oh, that's good. I wasn't sure it would arrive on time. Wasn't that nice of her, to remember your birthday.”
“How did you know it was from Jenny?”
“What do you mean?”
“There's no return address on the envelope.”
“Of course there was. One of those little sticker things. I'm sure I remember that.”
This news sent me hurrying across to the couch where I'd dropped my armload of papers when I came in. The outer envelope would be there, and maybe the address label had fallen off inside it. Clamping the phone to my ear with my shoulder, I began excavating. Bingo. But the envelope was empty.
“Well, it's not here now. Must've fallen off your end. Can you remember anything about the address? The city?”
She made the little humming sound she used to signify thinking. “Well . . . you know, you might be right. Maybe there wasn't a return address. There was a sticker, though; it was on the back flap, like a seal. It said ‘Jenny' in fancy script, and there was a little picture, no, a design, it was sort of like a logo, I think. Sorry, I can't remember it exactly. Anyway, I saw her name, and made the assumption it must be from your Jenny, and I was right, wasn't I?”
“My Jenny as was.”
“I always liked her. I was sorry it broke up the way it did. It's nice that you're back in touch. What's she up to these days?”
I shook my head helplessly. “I don't know. Thinking about the past, I guess, but I don't know why.” I spent the rest of the day at my computer, trying to find something more about Jenny, but made no progress. Everything I learned was a negative: no phone number for her in Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, or San Antonio; no Jenny Macedo listed on the Web site self-advertised as the largest cyber meeting place for rug-weavers; no definite hits on any of the search engines. Surely anyone who sold anything these days had to have a Web site, but if she ran a business or had a design trademarked as “Jenny” (this had occurred to me following my mother's comment about the sticker looking like a logo) I hadn't yet found it.
I felt sure she'd changed her name. It was the easiest, and most ordinary, way to disappear. Most women still took their husband's name when they married, especially if they had children, and it made them practically impossible to find.
I tried to find Jenny's sister, but there was someone else living at her ten-year-old address, and there was no listing for her in the greater San Antonio area. Maybe her husband had been transferred to another state, or overseas, or maybe she'd left him and changed her name, too.
It was a relief, really, when I had to stop my compulsive Web searches and get ready to go into town for my meeting with Laura. I knew I needed a break. Tomorrow I'd take a slightly different tack and dig through my memories and old address books for everyone I could recall who'd once known Jenny, and I'd track them all down. They, in turn, would suggest others, until, finally, the magical combination was reached and the connection made.
I knew I could do it, and I tried to put it out of my mind, to concentrate instead on the evening ahead. But what should have been pure pleasure, a date with Laura, had become a duty, a distraction from what I really wanted to think about. Before leaving, I slipped Jenny's card into my breast pocket, where I could feel it against my heart.
Approaching the pub Laura had named, I saw a slim figure in green just vanishing through the door. Immediately, all other thoughts
fled as I hurried after. She was wearing the same leaf-green linen dress she'd worn to our first meeting, but instead of anxiety on her face, this time I saw happiness.
“You look great,” I told her, bending to kiss both cheeks, inhaling her fresh and sexy scent with pleasure.
“Thank you.” She smiled and tilted her head coquettishly. I was ambushed by emotion, startled by how quickly my fantasies about Jenny had been displaced by desire for the woman standing in front of me.
“What would you like to drink?”
“They're advertising Pimms' cup, to celebrate summer. Shall we? Something appropriately English for my last night here.”
I heard her with a pang of loss. “I hope this won't be your last night in England.”
“No—of course it won't. I'll probably be flying back and forth between London and New York a few times over the next few months. And that's just on business.”
I bought our drinks and we moved to a table in the back corner, which fortuitously had cleared.
“Cheers,” I said, raising my glass.
Instead of responding, she dipped into her big shoulder bag and brought out something wrapped in plain brown paper. “Happy birthday, even if it is a day late.”
I was startled, embarrassed that I'd mentioned it, but oddly pleased she'd remembered. “You shouldn't have.”
“It's no big deal. Just something I happened to see that I thought you might like.”
It was a book. The sight of the cover made me smile: it was faded red, with the image of an American Indian with a writhing green snake in his mouth. Weird America: A Guide to Places of Mystery in the United States.
“Oh, wow, this is great! I had a copy when I was in high school, but it disappeared a long time ago. Thank you!”
She ducked her head, smiling. “You're welcome. I thought maybe, as a change from the mysteries of the British Isles, this might tempt you back to explore your native land.”
“As a matter of fact, I have been thinking about going back.”
“Really?”
I nodded.
“Whereabouts, exactly?”
“Well . . . I have a reason to go to New York . . .” I touched my breast pocket and hesitated, wondering whether to tell her about Jenny.
A faint pink flush appeared in her cheeks, and her eyes sparkled. “I guess you do,” she said softly, gazing at me.
She thought I was flirting. Damn. I felt like a complete heel, but I had to tell her. “I'd love to visit you, but—”
She went very still at that “but.”
“Something's come up. Some old business. Personal business. I told you about Jenny.”
“The girl you left behind.” She took a large swallow of her drink.
“The girl who left me. Whatever. I had a card from her today. She wants to meet and talk about what happened to us. She's going to be in New York on the sixth of September—that was our anniversary.”
“So you're going to meet her.”
“I think I have to. She didn't give me any way of getting in touch with her before then, but I'm working on it.”
“What's her situation?”
“I don't know. She didn't say.”
“What are you expecting to happen?”
“I'm not expecting anything.”
She gave me a hard look.
I shrugged. “OK, at the least, I'm expecting some answers. Why she left me. Why she never tried to get in touch before.”
“If you're a father or not.”
“Well, that's something I should know, don't you agree?”
“Of course.”
I longed to touch her but knew I didn't have the right. “Laura, I want to be honest with you.”
“Honesty is good,” she said, her tones measured. “Is that why you never bothered to call me?”
“I meant to. I overslept.”
She gave a delicate snort. “You overslept by two days.”
“I went to sleep Monday night. I dreamed I saw Fred, and she told me how to go under the hill and disappear. Then I heard a bird singing. It was the phone. It was you. I might never have woken up without your call. You saved me.”
I saw her battling with disbelief. Almost against her will, it seemed, she decided to believe me. “Is this because of Peri? Are you in trouble for going after her?”
I shrugged. “She decided to come back. It wasn't anything I did. But I guess I have been playing with fire. And you know what they say about that.”
She looked at the garish cover of the book lying on the table. “I shouldn't have given you that. You should get out of this business.”
Might as well tell me to get out of my life, to stop being the kind of person I was, drawn to mysteries. I drained my glass and nodded at hers, which was nearly empty. “Want another drink?”
“No. No, thanks. I'd rather have something to eat.”
We made our way through busy streets, the warm and vibrant circus of London in the summertime, to Chinatown and Lee Ho Fook's. Not a particularly romantic place to dine, which was probably just as well given the state of play between us, but the food was reliably great.
After we'd settled in and decided what to order, I asked Laura how Peri was doing.
“She's good. Great. She's more like her old self again, but different. I mean, she's a lot like she was when she first came to London, before she went off to college, but with that, she's, I don't know, older, I guess. More grown-up. More settled, somehow. Hard to explain. But she's good.”
“Has she talked about what happened?”
“She doesn't want to dwell on the past. She's here now, this is her life, that's what's important.”
“She hasn't told you anything?”
Laura frowned. “I didn't say that! Of course we talked, that first night up in Scotland. We had a good long talk and she told me a lot about it.” She shook her head. “Strange, though.”
I leaned forward, eager to know more. “Strange, how exactly?”
“Well, strange mostly that it wasn't stranger, I guess. The way she talks about it, she ran off with this rich and powerful man because she couldn't resist knowing what she'd be like with him, in a completely different life. She lived in his house, met his friends, went to parties, listened to music, went horseback riding—he had a whole stable of gorgeous horses, and she was always horse-mad . . .” She trailed off, sighing, then went on.
“I don't know, it sounds not so different from what might happen to a beautiful girl swept off her feet by an eccentric, foreign billionaire. The only thing that made it different was the way she was completely out of touch with me and everyone else she'd ever known. No letters, no phone calls, no turning up at Christmas. And even that, she claims, was mostly her fault. She could have kept in touch; she just forgot. Forgot.” She shook her head in wonder. “And she talks about it like she was only away for a few months. That's what it felt like to her: months, not years.”
“Is she living with Hugh?”
“Not yet.” She busied herself fixing a duck pancake. “She's been staying with me. He had a few things to take care of.”
“The other girlfriend?”
She frowned. “His film. He's been working day and night. He's not quite finished yet. She doesn't have to move in with him right away; the lease on my flat has another month to run. I wanted to renew it for another year, in her name, so she'd have somewhere of her own, no pressure, but the landlord wouldn't agree; he's decided to sell.”
“So Fiona's out?”
“It's really none of my business,” she said with excessive gentleness. “But I don't think she ever actually lived with him.”
I thought Hugh would be advised to get his locks changed, and take any other precautions he could think of to keep the two women apart. Fiona might not be a sorceress like Fuamnach in the story of Etain, but she had just as much reason to feel jealous, and jealousy could be a dangerous emotion.
But I didn't say any of that to Laura.
“They are defin
itely an item, then—Peri and Hugh?”
Her face softened. “Oh, yes. It's like before—they're completely besotted with each other. I'm glad. It makes it easier to leave, knowing she'll be with him, and happy. I've been encouraging her to think about college, but I don't know what she'll decide to do. Right now, just being with him seems to be enough for her.” Her smile was wistful.
I wanted to know more about Peri's experiences in the Otherworld, but there was no point in pumping Laura about it; even less than there'd been in quizzing Peri. Whatever she told me would simply be just another secondhand story, her experience, always at a distance from me, something I could not understand. This was my obsession, to want to know something that couldn't be known. I might as well accept that the Otherworld would always be a mystery to me. Some people, a very few, were privileged to go there and return to tell the tale, but I was sure now that I would not survive the experience.
So I let Laura change the subject. We chatted about New York and London and enjoyed the food. She had insisted on paying, pointing out that she'd invited me. It was still early when we left, and the daylight streets were full of noise and life, people coming and going, talking and laughing, spilling out of pubs and restaurants as if all were part of one huge, communal celebration of midsummer. The magical golden dusk seemed to hold such promise, as if the whole long evening were just beginning, stretching out ahead of us, alluring and full of endless possibility. Standing on the street corner, I inhaled the warm, fume-laden city air like an intoxicating perfume. I was clearheaded in spite of all the drinks I'd consumed, and I felt more wide-awake than ever before in my life.
I touched Laura lightly on her bare arm. “Where to now?”
“I have to go home and finish packing. I'm off to New York in the morning.”
“So this is good-bye?”
Conflicting emotions flickered in her eyes, and she made her decision. “Ian, I'd like to stay in touch.”
