Hugo & Rose

by Bridget Foley

  And Hugo looked like Hugo. Beautiful Hugo. Brave Hugo. Flying through the air, launching himself fearlessly at the beast. His words in bubbles, beckoning her to the next step in their adventure.

  At some point Rose had sunk to the floor as she flipped through the book, because she was leaning against the drawers when she reached the final page.

  The final image was a picture of Rose, close up on her face as she lay on the sand that made the floor of the Blanket Pavilion. She smiled up from the page, a private, satisfied smile. The picture was intimate, and immediately Rose remembered that exact moment from the dream, the missing part of the scene, the image that the artist had not drawn …

  It was Hugo, lying across from her, smiling that same smile back at her.

  At the bottom of this page sat the only blotch of color in the book. A fluorescent-green Post-it note; on it someone had written, in the same neat block script as the envelope, “PLEASE MEET ME.”

  Beneath that, there was a phone number.

  nine

  She did not call right away.

  She had lost sense of time while she read and reread the pages, scanning them for details. Each time she looked she saw some new thing, the delicate feathers of the Tickle Crabs on the corner of a page or the distant shadow of a herd of Bucks in the grass, all confirming the impossible.

  An eyewitness account of her dreams.

  She was late to pick up Penny, and soon after they got home, the boys arrived, filling the house with their loud, masculine energy.

  It did not feel right to call with the children around.

  If she called at all.

  Rose hid the book in her bedside drawer, under the lube and the cough drops. The kids knew that was for Mommy’s private things and thus forbidden, and Josh never went looking for anything without asking first.

  She visited it several times that afternoon, making excuses to get away from the kids, opening the drawer to catch a quick peek of this drawing or that … just to make sure she wasn’t imagining it.

  He was real.

  Hugo.

  The book was unsigned, but that was the only explanation. A crazy, irrational explanation, but the only one that made sense.

  He had drawn it.

  All these years, she had thought Hugo was just some manifestation of herself. That he was an alter ego, a useful tool of her psyche—built to cope with the trauma of the bicycle accident and then sticking around as she grew up, to mitigate the other minor traumas of adulthood.

  But he was real.

  And he had been there for all of it.

  When Rose looked at the pictures, she felt the brush of a familiar feeling. She felt seen, the way Josh saw her when he made love to her.

  But instead of the shame that accompanied her lovemaking with Josh, her response was something else.…

  A giddy syrup of a feeling. Warm and oozy, spreading through her limbs and chest.

  Someone knows the real me, she’d think as she thumbed through the pictures. Someone really knows me.

  * * *

  She waited until the kids were asleep, their monitors silent, to call the number. Josh had texted he’d be home late. Rose cleaned the kitchen, made a cup of tea that she forgot to drink, and sat down at the kitchen table—staring at the Post-it and her cell phone.

  She dialed the number into the screen, her thumb paused above the dial button.

  What would she say? What would he say? Maybe she shouldn’t do this.

  Yes, she should definitely wait.

  Rose debated for some time in that chair in her kitchen. She studied the phone number on the screen, searching it for clues, looking for an answer in its numbers.

  Finally she decided to wait. She could always call tomorrow.

  But still she sat. Staring.

  In the end, her thumb betrayed her, twitching slightly from her nerves and brushing the screen.

  It set in motion the chain reaction of connections, impulses of electrical information sent beaming from her cell to space and back again, finally to a receiver in some place unknown to her, to some random number assigned to some random person, reorganizing in that distant speaker the zeros and ones of digital information into the distinct sound of Rose’s breath heavy in the receiver.

  It went to voice mail.

  “Hi, this is David. I’m not available right now, so please leave a message and I will get back to you as soon as I can.”

  It was his voice. Hugo’s voice, picked out of her mind and playing for her here in her kitchen.

  But David?

  The beep sounded and Rose realized she had spent a few seconds simply breathing into the phone.

  She hung up.

  It was all too much. She needed to calm down. To think about this. About what this meant.

  It meant something impossible.

  She was considering throwing away the Post-it note when her phone chimed with a text.

  Rose?

  Rose felt her lungs halt. She felt faint.

  Another chime:

  This is Hugo.

  Rose felt her head shake. No. No. No. No. But beneath that, the syrupy, oozy feeling began to rise, drowning out the chorus of the impossibility of it all.

  Another chime:

  Please, is this Rose?

  Rose tapped out three letters.

  Yes.

  * * *

  They decided to meet in the food court of an outlet mall that lay off the highway about half the distance from both of their houses.

  When he had suggested it, Rose wondered how he knew where she lived. And then she remembered the envelope, the blocky handwriting, and the credit card that had led him to her like Cinderella’s slipper.

  They met on Tuesday. His day off, Rose knew, and a day on which she could get Mrs. D to watch Penny.

  Rose showered. Did her makeup while the boys got dressed. The children stared at her funny, so odd to see Mommy in anything other than sweats this early in the day.

  “Why are you doing that?” asked Isaac, waving a noncommittal hand at Rose lining the edges of her lips.

  “Because I want to look nice.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I have some errands to do.”

  “You don’t look nice when you do errands usually.”

  Rose fixed him with a glare. “Isaac, go clear your cereal bowl.”

  He crossed his arms. “I already did.”

  Rose raised her eyebrows. “I’ll be down to check in thirty seconds … one … two … three…”

  Isaac bolted, rushing to make a truth of his lie.

  She drove directly to the mall from Mrs. Delvecchio’s, arriving an hour earlier than they had planned. She had been here a few times before. Josh’s mother was a deal hound and often tried to bond with Rose on her visits by dragging her away for a girls’ shopping excursion. Rose dreaded these outings, following Josh’s mother in and out of the factory stores, trying to look interested in last season’s sweaters, with their stretched-out necks and dinge of gray from being tried on so often.

  She wandered the halls for a while, past the big-draw stores and the struggling local vendors. There were more empty storefronts than she remembered from her last visit. Signs hung on empty windows: “Over 10,000 sq feet of ideal retail space.”

  Even half-occupied, the place drew shoppers. People wandered the corridors, singly or in pairs, dressed in unseasonable shorts and socks with sandals. They filtered into stores with evening gowns in their windows, causing Rose to wonder if perhaps they really were shopping for the dresses. Had these unattractive, lumpy midday shoppers been invited to balls and state dinners? Was that what had driven them out to this place on a Tuesday morning, desperately in search of something sexy but tasteful? With sequins?

  Or were they here for some other reason? Did looking at expensive dresses (even at clearance prices) make these people feel something they couldn’t get in another way?

  Rose ducked into the ladies’ room.

  She pee
d, staring at the walls of the bathroom stall.

  Washing her hands, she studied herself under the stuttering fluorescents.

  Even with makeup and a shower, she was a closer relative to the shoppers with their fanny packs and paunches than she was to the woman who had been drawn in that comic book.

  Rose sighed. There was nothing more she could do. She could not have plastic surgery, lose fifty pounds, and age ten years backward in the next ten minutes.

  She dried her hands and went to the food court.

  The cafeteria was a world tour of crappy fast food. Sbarro. Panda Express. Yoshinoya. Taco Bell.

  The designers of the place had incorporated this theme into their décor, and on the walls someone had affixed three-foot cartoons of children from around the world in their native dress. The drawings bordered on racist, with slanty-eyed Chinese children in coolie hats and brown-skinned Mexican kids in sombreros. It was like “Small World,” but without the ninety-dollar admission price, the smell of chlorine, or the whiff of corporate shame.

  Rose sat in the middle of the dining room, her eyes searching for him.

  Hugo.

  But he wasn’t there yet. Rose’s eyes swept the growing clumps of shoppers. It was still early.

  “I thought it was a prank.”

  Rose swiveled and there he was.

  He wore the same blue windbreaker she had seen on him before. But he had taken more care with his hair. It was still dampish, showing the lines where the comb had dragged through.

  He took a step closer to her.

  “There was this guy. A kid. One of the employees. He broke into my office at work and I caught him looking at my comics. Like the one I sent you.”

  Rose didn’t understand.

  “I thought he sent you to get back at me. Because I fired him.”

  They stared at each other for a moment.

  “But it’s not a prank, is it?”

  Rose shook her head. His face was absorbing hers, lapping up the details where the fact of this Rose overlapped with the woman in his dreams. She did the same … such a strange moment.

  Rose felt the syrupy, goopy feeling again.

  She laughed.

  It burst out of her, nervous, excited, girlish. She slapped her hand over her mouth trying to keep it in, but—

  “This is soo weird,” she said.

  Hugo smiled back at her … the way he always did—that slow creep of a smile, moving from one corner of his mouth to the other, until it filled his face.

  They grinned at each other a moment … then they both laughed.

  “It’s you,” said Rose.

  “It’s you,” said Hugo.

  * * *

  They sat talking through the lunch rush. The tables surrounding them cycled through diners, scarfing their meals wrapped in paper as quickly as possible in order to get back to their shopping.

  At one point Hugo asked Rose if she was hungry, and she remembered the first time he had asked her such a thing—a little boy on the beach, holding out a seashell that tasted like candy.

  Rose watched from the table as Hugo stood in line at the Taco Bell. For a moment she felt the way she had during those weeks when she was following him, his back turned to her. Then he felt her gaze on him and turned, smiling at her from across the dining room.

  It made Rose feel light and nervous. Perched on the edge of a laugh.

  There was something familiar about the way Hugo smiled back at her from a distance. Something about the manner of it … Rose realized—

  It made her think of Josh. The way her husband sought her eyes across the room at a party or on the other side of the airport security line. It was that reassuring look that said, I am with you.

  Josh.

  What would he think of this?

  Rose shook off the thought. She didn’t want to spoil this feeling. Just for this moment, she wanted to be just happy. With no other feelings in between.

  Hugo returned to the table, his hand wielding a tray of franken-Mexi-food. Rose watched him as he tore open five sugar packets and poured them into his Styrofoam cup of coffee.

  “You like it sweet.”

  Hugo looked at her, quizzical. “Yeah?”

  She shrugged. “It’s just … I know you. You’ve been with me as long as I can remember. But stuff like that—”

  “My coffee?”

  “I don’t know little things. Like how you take your coffee. Or big things, like … are you married?”

  He took a sip and shook his head. “Divorced. A while ago. You?”

  Rose pictured her family, bunched together and dressed up, like the portraits she had had taken last Thanksgiving.

  “Married. Three kids. Two boys and a girl.”

  Goodness, she thought. “Married. Three kids.” Is that all that my life boils down to?

  But Hugo smiled. “I have a daughter. She lives in Florida with her mother.”

  Rose was quiet a moment. There was more there, obviously, a distant child, a divorce. There must be pain, shame, loss, there beneath that sentence.

  But she had no right to it. She had no right to pry into the disappointments of his life … she had just met this man who sat across from her.

  She switched the subject. “You said no one calls you Hugo anymore.”

  His face colored. Embarrassed, he looked away. “I … changed it. After high school. I go by David, now.”

  “But not in the dreams.”

  “There are a lot of things about me that are different in our dreams.” He put his hand behind his ear and waggled his glasses at her. He jiggled the softness of his potbelly, grinning.

  Rose giggled.

  “But you’re still you … Here.”

  He shrugged. “I guess. How much is anyone really themselves in their dreams? The real me is fat and losing my hair and managing a fast-food restaurant. But when I’m asleep…”

  He trailed off, but Rose knew what he was thinking about. On the island they were heroes. On the island they were beautiful and strong and young.

  “Do you ever dream of anything else?” Rose had almost whispered it.

  Hugo shook his head. Quiet.

  “What do you think it means?”

  “I don’t know.”

  * * *

  He walked her to her car. Squinting in the sunlight, they said one of those strange formal good-byes one gives to people one may or may not ever see again.

  Because at that point they were still unsure.

  Even having discovered the miracle of their dreams, they both knew that there was no logical juncture in their waking lives for a relationship. Rose was a married mom with a minivan. Hugo was …

  Well, Hugo was David in his waking life. And as David he had his own proportion of responsibilities and obligations … even if they were less formal than Rose’s.

  There was a moment, though, at the end of their good-bye, when to an outsider it would have been clear that they would see each other again, even if to them it was not. They had said their finals and Hugo was heading away. Rose watched him for a moment before searching through her purse for her keys.

  His hug caught her by surprise.

  He had turned and rushed back to her, wrapping his arms around her, trapping her purse between their bellies. It was the first time they had actually touched. The first time they had confirmed the fleshy truth of the other.

  “I’m so glad,” he whispered in Rose’s ear. “I’m so glad you’re real.”

  Her chin lifted above the warmth of his shoulder. She caught the faint smell of caramel.

  * * *

  Rose was on time to pick up Penny at Mrs. D’s. There was an open bag of M&M’s on the table, evidence that certain dietary indiscretions had taken place. Penny’s breath was dark with chocolaty sweetness when she kissed Rose on her arrival, her tongue stained with streaks of blue and red. But Rose was too content to say anything to the Widow Delvecchio about the dangers of childhood obesity and using food as rewards. Instead she sm
iled as she handed over the neat pile of bills to the old woman. “Wave good-bye, Penny. Say thank you.”

  The buzzy, happy feeling had followed Rose all the way home from the mall.

  When the boys got home, she took everybody to the park for some air. She even treated herself to a drive-through latte on the way there, and she sat on a bench and watched Adam and Isaac chase each other over the play structures, sipping it, thinking of Hugo and all those packets of sugar.

  Isaac came bursting out of a tunnel, his eyes looking for her. “Mom! Adam’s doing it wrong!”

  Adam emerged behind him, his face guilty.

  His brother ran up to her, breathless. “He wants Hugo to rescue you from a witch, but I told him that there wasn’t ever anybody else on the island—not even a witch, so we can’t do that!”

  Adam was watching his mother. Rose shrugged. “You guys can do what you like … if Adam wants there to be a witch, then pretend there’s a witch.”

  Adam grinned. Isaac insisted, “But that’s not the way. That’s not right!”

  Rose took his wrist gently, smiled at him. “Zackie, it’s only a story. You guys can do whatever you want to it.”

  He scowled at her. She leaned close to his ear. “Do this for five minutes, okay? Be a big boy for me.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Oh-kaaay.” He and Adam ran back into the structure. “But you have to be the witch, okay, Addy?”

  * * *

  Josh was home early enough to have dinner with the kids. Rose chopped vegetables and sprinkled flour onto the countertop, supervising the children as they made pizzas.

  Whatever shift Josh had sensed in Rose had clearly bloomed now. She was playful with the children, taking pretend chomps at the toppings in their fingers. They would snatch them from her, giggling, then offer them again.

  He wondered if maybe she had started taking antidepressants without telling him … it wasn’t unprecedented for Rose to keep something like that private. She often kept things that she was “handling” from him, not wanting to worry him.

  She was so strong, his Rose.

  The boys begged for Daddy to put them to bed, and he obliged, rushing through the books they requested, eager to get back to his wife.

  He emerged from their room, wondering if there was a bottle of wine somewhere in the house that they could take to the bedroom, but Rose was not downstairs.