by Jud Widing
Bernard, hard-edged, tough-as-nails Bernard, looked like he could cry right then. If he had, it would have been the first time Amy had ever seen him do it – outwardly, at least. She’s seen such sadness in him before, but it had never leaked out. Tears would have surprised her, and she’d have held him and comforted him without a second thought, because she loved him, and what was the odd surprise or two in the face of that wonderful fact?
But he didn’t surprise her. He just flopped down on the couch, shoulders slumped, saying nothing. And that was alright too – she flopped down next to him and held him just the same.
They waited like that for a long while, until the door opened and the girls walked in on a great big surprise of their own.
CHAPTER 41
What was the last thing I said to him?
Nur wracked her brains as she and Deirdre tumbled into backseat of Uncle Bernard’s mid-sized crossover. She continued wracking them as they weaved their way back through Boston. The streets that seemed so familiar from the sidewalk looked absolutely foreign to her now that she was on them, being driven along them with relentless attention to the speed limit, out towards Logan International. The ride was long and silent, which gave plenty of time for wracking.
What was it?
Probably something like, ‘ah, anyway, we’ll be going’. Had she said it to him, or to Deirdre to be passed along? She couldn’t even remember that. This was enraging.
She imagined all of the Hollywood endings. This was the part where the heroine seemingly passes beyond the point of no return, because that’s where the tension always is. Now how would she get out of this? Maybe they’d pull up to a red light and she would see Hyun-Woo on the street corner. What a coincidence! She’d leap out and they’d have one final, poignant moment together. And then, because she wasn’t a fucking idiot, they’d exchange contact information.
Then again, maybe she was, because they hadn’t. She didn’t even know his last name. What a glaring oversight!
The romantic in her made reassuring noises. No no, it’s so much better this way. You two had a wonderful thing, made all the more beautiful for its isolation in your lives.
Bullshit. They had a semi-wonderful thing that got sort of fucked up at the end, and she’d still have wanted Hyun-Woo as a pen pal. Maybe, given the width and breadth of his travel, they’d even find themselves in the same city one day, and reconnect.
A long shot, made long enough to wrap around the known universe and tie itself into a bow by the fact that they had no way to let each other know if they were in the same city. What, were they going to bump into each other at a café in Victoria? Smart money was on Hyun-Woo coming to stay at the De Dernberg Towers, if his business brought him into Seychelles for whatever reason…but did he know that’s where she worked? Did he even know her last name?
They had each others’ phone numbers, but Hyun-Woo’s was what the Americans on TV shows called a “burner”. It was disposable. So he had her phone number. That’s what it all came down to. He could reach out to her, and if he didn’t, or didn’t think to get her number off of his phone before he “burned” it, then that was that.
Still, there was some hope to be found there.
Nur sighed and leaned her head against the window. The fact that she was being taken to the airport to be taken to Seychelles hadn’t sunk in yet. Everything had happened so quickly, so abruptly, it had a dreamlike surrealism to it. Of all the increasingly improbable intercessions she imagined (a taxi cab screeches to a halt in front of Uncle Bernard’s car, and who gets out of the driver’s seat but HYUN-WOO!), she hadn’t yet gotten to “this is all just a dream”, but she would. Right around the time she started seeing planes taking off and landing in the distance, she’d start to wonder if this wasn’t maybe a nightmare.
None of this tracked to her understanding of relationships. Granted, she’d never been in a real one, and wondered if she could say what she’d had with Hyun-Woo fit the bill, but she had firm expectations. Those expectations included second chances and romantic gestures and tearful apologies and beautiful reconciliations and giddy recollections of the time when things almost fell apart but they didn’t let it, they couldn’t let it and so they didn’t. Mostly her expectations were about time, having it and spending it and looking forward to doing more of both.
But this? This was garbage. Where was the closure? Where was the grand summation of what they had meant to each other? Hyun-Woo had meant a lot to her, in ways she found nearly impossible to articulate in any language. He was the first man she had ever loved, probably. The first man? Why stop there? She wasn’t especially close with her family, which meant Hyun-Woo was the first person to whom she had ever said “I love you”, and absolutely meant it (it would be a few minutes before Nur realized that this was tough luck for Deirdre and the rest of her family).
It was impossible, she felt, to love someone without changing yourself. “Without being changed” might better describe it, but it made love sound like some alien parasite that gutted you like a pumpkin and carved you a new face. No, it was more self-sufficient than that. She’d like to think feeling such an overwhelming connection to another human being made her a better person, as she certainly wished she could be. But that might be overly optimistic. It made her different, and she could feel it. She looked forward to discovering just how different over the next few years of her life.
He’d also, in an indirect way, brought her closer to her sister. That was something she would get to take with her forever. Particularly now that they were heading off to apocalyptic punishments that would likely follow them for years to come, it was a gift to know she and her sister would face the reckoning hand in hand. They had each other now; having wasn’t just for lovers. Deirdre wasn’t through with puberty (or perhaps that would be best phrased the other way around), so Nur fully anticipated plenty of strife in their future. But they had a positive bedrock now, which was more than they had on the car ride in to the city last August.
Nur reached out and placed her hand on Deirdre’s. Without turning her eyes from the window, Deirdre flipped her hand over and wrapped her fingers gently around Nur’s. They sat that way for the rest of the ride.
It was the soft squeeze of her sister’s hand that dispelled the final illusions for Nur. This wasn’t the moment where something suddenly happened, or someone suddenly had a change of heart. She was leaving. Not just the relationship, but also her time in America (and, dear god, it was only now that she realized how much she had fallen for this strange, slightly gross country!) was over in an instant. No prelude, no fanfare, not even a thank you ma’am, just wham bam. And that was a lesson right there. Sometimes that’s how things ended. With neither a bang nor a whimper, but an
(absence)
If Nur and Deirdre hadn’t been straining to fight back tears, they might have noticed that Bernard was struggling against his own ocular waterworks. These girls never seemed to have taken to him in the way he would have hoped, but he was going to miss them just the same.
Aunt Amy sniffled for a bit from the passenger seat, but limited her outward grief to her presence in the car. She didn’t have to come, but she did, because she wanted to see the girls off. That said something. She just hoped the girls were listening to it.
They pulled up to the departures curb. Uncle Bernard clicked his hazards on and unlocked the back. Being in the backseats, Nur and Deirdre got out and made to pull their own luggage onto the curb, but Uncle Bernard insisted on doing it himself.
And that was it. They said their goodbyes, made slightly awkward by the circumstances, and went their separate ways. Nur led Deirdre into the terminal, passports at the ready.
Oh, hell, she realized too late. If she’d left her passport at Uncle Bernard’s, that would be one of those romcom things that could happen to bring her back from beyond the point of no return. Too bad she hadn’t.
/> She sniffed and stepped through the door, feeling a fresh sense of perspective hit her as hard as the air conditioning.
What she’d had with Hyun-Woo was beautiful, partially for its brevity. She conceded this to her latent romanticism. He had helped her become a better person, or at least different, but on reflection yes, perhaps better, and she could only hope she had reciprocated in some small way. Or not so small. She had been his first, hadn’t she?
Despite the punitive darkness in front of her, she smiled. There was so much light and warmth behind her, and if it was, well, behind her, she felt privileged that she’d gotten to pass through it.
Besides, she mulled on the threshold of laughter, he’s got my phone number! Looking ahead, perhaps those were slanting rays of light cutting through the stormclouds. And who knew what was on the other side of those thunderheads? There’s only one way to find out, she thought in a jaunty voice not quite her own. Perhaps we’ll turn out to be Seoul Mates after all! Boosted by the joy of emergent fluency, evinced by her first English-language pun, Nur trekked to the terminal with a hopeful spring in her step.
She and Hyun-Woo never saw each other again.
EPILOGUE
DEPARTURE
There was and remains a saying in America that Nur and Deirdre never learned. They probably would have, had they gotten to stick around for their full year. It wasn’t anything especially difficult to parse; just something to the effect of how every cloud has a silver lining. And in case there was any lingering confusion over the symbolism, their own situation would have clarified. There was valuable metal to be found limning those metaphorical, frostbitten thunderheads looming in their immediate future, and in time it would be found. But there were more immediate clouds of a more literal persuasion, that yielded results in kind.
Immediate and literal, that is.
Somewhere in the world, there was a storm. It was an actual storm, featuring actual atmospheric disturbances and actual drops of rain the size of cherries that had a way of falling directly into one’s eyeball. It was the sort of storm that’s almost always happening somewhere around the globe without your knowledge, because if the storm isn’t happening to you, it might as well not be happening at all.
The storm wasn’t happening to Nur and Deirdre. The sky over Logan International was, by now, a pillowed azure, like the ocean reflected in a pearl. But, in a sense, the storm was happening to them. Because it was happening in the path of their flight. Or maybe one of their three connections? They weren’t entirely clear, nor did they need to be. The voice garbling out of the loudspeaker gave them a great deal of extraneous information, when it could (and should) have announced your flight has been delayed and then returned from whence it came.
And so Nur and Deirdre’s American adventure was extended by three whole hours. They spent a large portion of this time trying to coax a bag of chips from a selfish vending machine. In went their coins – coins they wouldn’t be needing back in Seychelles, coins they might as well be rid of – F7 went the buttons, whrrrrrr went the lazy spiral ring holding back the colorful bag of the flavored favor…and that was the end of it. The bag didn’t fall. It just hung in there.
Deirdre slapped the machine. Nur laughed and put more coins in, because there was no point in saving them. When could they ever expect to come back here? She punched in F7 once again. The ring whrrrrrred some more, and the first bag fell…and caught on a sleeve of cookies, leaning out over its own silver spiral railing. The second bag from F7 caught on the ring just as the first one had.
At this point, Nur’s laughter had escalated to something near mania, and it was catching. Deirdre shook her head and fished some more coins out of her pocket. This time they hit the keys for H7, the slot of the hated cookie sleeve. The machine whrrrrrred, but that was it. The ring didn’t spin, the cookies didn’t tumble, the chips didn’t fall, all things stayed the same.
The De Dernberg sisters were doubling over with hilarity. They scavenged their pockets and purses for more coins, and came up empty. This struck them as a spectacular punchline, though they could never have articulated the setup. It was all just funny, and that was that.
Beyond those coins, they didn’t have much cash on them. They’d set up their bankcards to handle foreign transactions, and considered relying on these safer than carrying cash. What a bummer! If they’d loaded up on greenbacks, and now had fistfuls of currency that would be no good to them just a few hours from now, they’d have an excuse to go on a bit of an airport bender, spending up a storm without zero guilt, because what else were they going to do with that money?
Granted, they should have been glad they’d have that money to spend on things more substantive than neck pillows and Panda Express, but the cheap thrill of going on a last-minute tear in the airport would have been well worth the actual expense. Independently, they considered saying ‘fuck it’ and doing it anyway, making it rain plastic and foreign transaction fees. Each independently decided against it, though several years later they would reminisce about their final moments in America, and learn just how similar were their wavelengths in that moment.
Even then, they were planting the seeds of sisterhood that would bear so much fruit throughout the rest of their lives.
They milled around the airport, not spending any more money together but spending plenty more time, until whatever it was that had caused their plane’s delay resolved itself (as these things sometimes do), and the 767 that would take them to Paris, their first and most glamorous layover, came whining up to the gate.
The last-minute seats their parents somehow secured for them were way in the back of the plane. No surprise there. This meant they were the last to board, and would be the last to debark. Joke’s on mom and dad though – that was just more time for them to spend with one another. And, more importantly, to not spend with mom and dad. Oof, that was going to be rough, but there was no sense dwelling on it. Pain was coming their way, so why not savor the small pleasures to be found in these preceding moments?
Like how they had laughed at the vending machine, or like how they could lift the armrest between them for a little extra shoulder space, or like how the view from their window was unobstructed by those pesky wings one gets in the more centrally located seats, or like how they were right next to the bathroom, which was a wonderful convenience and would remain so as long as nobody went in after, say, going on a last-minute tear at Panda Express. Surely the crew had air fresheners though, so that was alright.
They settled into their seats, falling silent as the flight attendants attended to their duties, slamming overhead compartments shut and politely suggesting certain people bring their chairs to the full upright position. Deirdre leaned her head on Nur’s shoulder and almost immediately began to doze. They hadn’t gotten very much sleep the night before, after all. Being in the window seat, Deirdre could just as easily have leaned up against the Plexiglas. Nur supposed she was a softer cushion, because she wasn’t aware of how sharp her shoulders were. Other factors had gone into Deirdre’s choice of headrest.
The plane made its various noises, humming and dinging and thwunking and finally roaring, and then they were airborne. Nur’s ears popped, as they always did. She’d forgotten to get gum. Drats! Perhaps it was nonsense, but she’d been told that chewing gum helped with the pressure of takeoff and landing. Something to do with keeping your jaw moving. Or something.
Carefully, so as not to wake her, Nur reached past Deirdre, to the purse she’d stuffed under the seat in front of her. Delicately, because mustn’t wake her now, Nur pawed through Deirdre’s bag in search of gum.
She found none, which figures. Would it have killed Deirdre to steal a pack, ha ha ha, just this once?
Amused by her own wry irony, Nur returned Deirdre’s bag to its proper place with slightly less elegance than she’d brought to the extraction.
She settled for pinchin
g her nostrils shut, clamping her lips together and blowing. This…forced the air to her ears, or something? It was another method of relieving the pressure, and she was pleased to find that it worked. Who had told her about this one? Deirdre, wasn’t it? Deirdre who didn’t need to know it after all; she remained fast asleep. If the pressure was bothering her at all, it wasn’t enough to wake her up. Lucky.
Anyway, Nur knew from last August’s journey that the descent was always much worse.
As the plane reached its cruising altitude, Nur took a deep breath and rested her head atop her sister’s, eyes lolling heavily towards the window. They were above the clouds now, and the sun turned them golden - an endless field of perfectly roasted-marshmallows, i.e. Nur’s conception of heaven.
Oh, sure, somewhere out there the marshmallows burned and wept acid tears for the celestial s’mores that could have been. Even if Nur couldn’t see them, the belated departure of their plane attested to their presence. Somewhere. But that was fine, because the world was round, and in both principle and practice (though the practice was so impractical as to be, in principle, impossible) they could just keep going, through the crackling pillars of heavenly discontent, through the raging winds and slanting rains, keep going going going until they had come all the way back around to this oasis of rolling down, comforter of the gods, where everything was as it should be, and always would be, and if not here, then somewhere else.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jud hopes you enjoyed this book.
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