by Parker Swift
In an instant I was taken back to the previous September when I’d been arriving at that same airport on the departures level, a crumbled notecard with Dylan’s phone number on it in my pocket. Luggage full of my best knockoff outfits. The keys to the Notting Hill house at the bottom of my tote. I’d been wearing my worn-in denim jacket. I’d been so excited to get to London. I’d been so eager to leave my grief behind. I’d had no idea what was coming.
Now I stood there, nearly eight months later. Inching forward in the taxi “queue”—and it was the word queue that rolled through my mind automatically, not line—in an Alexander McQueen black cashmere coat that Dylan had bought me in Greece. I stood there engaged to be married. I stood there completely changed by everything that had happened over the past months.
I’d had no idea that nearly a year after my father died, there would be a part of that grief that would clearly never waver, never fade. But I’d also had no idea just how effective leaving New York would be for pushing it to the side, avoiding it.
Standing on that bustling sidewalk, my luggage by my side, the smells of home woke up corners of my mind that had been lying dormant. Images of subway rides to Jackson Heights for Indian food flashed through me. The memory of when my father took me to the airport when I went visit a college in North Carolina (as if I’d ever have left New York back then) came to mind and was followed quickly by the memory of him being too sick to bring me anywhere just a couple of years later. I thought of our spring walks in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the taste of good coffee, the feeling of sitting on our stoop. For the first time in months, possibly years, I really thought of my life in New York, of who I was there, of what I’d lost there.
It wasn’t until a taxi attendant tapped me on the shoulder that I realized my cheeks were wet. That my chin was quivering. That I was crying for my father for the very first time.
* * *
Dylan and I still weren’t speaking, technically, so the silence was peppered only with the most minimal of texts, the first of which I sent when I got to the apartment.
SATURDAY, 12:15 pm
At the apartment. x
As I pressed SEND I could feel that there was something almost worse about that one x than nothing. Something perfunctory. But I didn’t know what to say. The things I’d had to say couldn’t be said over text. And all of the important things had already been said. But they’d never been heard, and maybe they never would be. I didn’t know where we went from here. I wanted him. I wanted to marry him. But I wanted him to want to marry me, to have it be more important than his pride or his misguided ideas about separating us from the rest of his life.
He’d started and stopped returning my text for at least two minutes, the little dots appearing and disappearing, before his reply finally came through.
SATURDAY, 12:17 pm
Thanks for letting me know. Let me know if you need anything.
I’d sighed, sad, and tossed the phone on the bed, frustrated. Let me know if you need anything. Didn’t he get that that was what I was mad at, or part of it? I did need something, and it wasn’t a plane ticket upgrade. It was him.
I wished Daphne were there. Instead she was in Japan at some international law student conference. Figured. The one time I was actually in Brooklyn and needed her desperately, she was on the other side of the world and wouldn’t be back for another week. I sank onto the bed and closed my eyes, just trying to be comforted by the familiar smells.
My father had owned the apartment. He’d bought it back when that part of Park Slope was considered dangerous, when no one lived there. Now I owned it, which was strange to think about. I’d avoided thinking about it for a year—it had been rented through a management company, and the lease had run out the month before. I’d decided not to renew it, thinking I’d stay here for these few weeks and then maybe rent it to Daphne or even consider selling. Now I honestly wasn’t sure. Most of my father’s belongings had been boxed and put into storage along with my own furniture and clothes, the few things I’d accumulated in my brief stint of New York adulthood before abandoning the continent altogether. But there were still several boxes in a locked closet. I stared at that closet door for about ten minutes before I managed to roll off the bed, open the door, and begin my search for one box in particular.
I removed the framed photographs one by one and placed them in their original homes—my high school graduation picture went on the upright piano in the living room. The photo of my father and me next to the roller coaster at Coney Island belonged on the bookshelf by the window looking out onto the tree-lined street. The photo of the lemonade stand I’d set up at Grand Army Plaza when I was eight went on a shelf in the kitchen—my father had always said that it should go in my office someday. “Evidence of your business savvy,” he’d said. I’d have to remember to bring it back to London with me. Assuming I was going back to London. I put all the photos back in their places, and when I was done, I could somehow breathe easier.
* * *
I gave myself a buffer to settle in, to launder the sheets, buy fresh flowers and groceries, and take walks through my old neighborhood. I made the rounds, stopping to chat with the other people in our building and visiting my father’s friends at his favorite bar, Great Lakes. I called the Franklins, the family I used to babysit for, and made plans to have dinner with them and see the children. I took those days to reassemble the threads of my New York life, breathe it back in.
Then I rolled up my sleeves and dove into work. It was the only way I could make the day go by, could keep my mind off the eerie silence that awaited me every time I looked at my phone. I needed the focus, the escape. I spent a day speccing out the new space with the decorator and contractor. I spent hours on the phone with the manufacturers, checking shipment statuses. We had two weeks to finalize the pop-up space in SoHo before we opened. And I still had the Madison Ave shop to think about—I spent hours sifting through résumés for eager potential sales clerks and store managers. And each night there’d be one empty “goodnight” text, but otherwise it was still silence on the transatlantic Dylan–Lydia wire.
I caught myself smirking at one point, when my mood had morphed into a slightly sardonic post-coffee “well, I guess this is my life” phase. I was literally on my hands and knees, on the floor of the shop space in SoHo, screwing in an outlet cover—when I realized that this time I had fled to New York to escape problems in London. How recently I had been fleeing New York. The irony.
The days were endless flows of checking things off of lists, and I began to fill my evenings with I’m-back-in-town dinners with friends. Anything to keep me busy, to try to reassert my New York self. I felt like I was digging around for evidence that pre-Dylan Lydia could be found here. I wanted to find her, to find something solid while so much in my life felt like liquid.
And it worked to some extent. I did love walking to and from the familiar subway stop on Fourth Avenue and Union. I loved the smells of walking through Chinatown. I loved being on familiar ground. I loved the old faces of college friends around dinner tables, and the reminiscing that came with it. But it wasn’t complete. The dinners weren’t just reunions, they were reminders of the man I was missing so much. Sitting in a friend’s lounge—I meant living room (god, I really was becoming British)—in Greenpoint, someone asked me about my love life, and I’d had no idea what to say. I’d wanted to say I was engaged. I’d wanted to say, Well, actually, it’s kind of a crazy story. I’d wanted them to know about it. Because them not knowing about it, about Dylan, about us, made it all feel like maybe it just had been a dream. Somehow Dylan had become part of me, half of me, and now, sitting in front of my Brooklyn friends, who had no idea about us, I felt like half of me was missing.
A week. This went on for over a week. One empty text a day, but no other communication. We should have talked, figured this out before I’d left. But I hadn’t. We hadn’t, and now I didn’t know where we stood. I wasn’t even sure what needed to be said, what could be
said.
On the tenth day, as I walked from the subway to the shop at seven in the morning—I had only four more days to prepare the space before the shop opened for its two-week-long stint—my phone rang, and Dylan’s face graced the screen.
“Hi,” I said, stepping through the gate of the playground I’d been passing.
“I hate this,” he said as I was sitting down on the swing, pushing myself back on my heels.
“Me too.”
“Damsel, I…” He trailed off, never finishing his thought.
I don’t know what I was waiting for, but it wasn’t this. It wasn’t an admission that this sucked. That we missed each other. The longer his silence went, the clearer it was that this wasn’t going to be the conversation where we figured things out. Where we made up.
“Dylan, I have to get to the store,” I finally said, leaning back and staring into the cloudy morning sky, as if it would provide me with the answers I wanted. The answers I’d been hoping he’d give.
He sighed audibly on the other end. “I miss you.”
“I miss you too,” I said, and I could feel the tears forming in my eyes. Because I did. I missed the crap out of him. I missed sleeping in his arms. I missed waking up next to him. I missed him touching me. I missed teasing him. I missed everything, and at that moment there was a part of me that was afraid we’d never get it back.
More silence. “I gotta go,” I said and hung up the phone. I swung my tote over my shoulder, picked my coffee up from the ground, and walked towards the park exit.
My phone buzzed in my hand.
MONDAY, 7:03 am
I miss you like mad. I’m sorry.
MONDAY, 7:04 am
I’m sorry too.
Chapter 11
Lydia
After that phone call I zeroed in on work for eleven straight hours. Eleven hours of unpacking Hannah gowns, shopping bags, and accessories. Organizing. Reorganizing. Calling the design team who would hang the store sign for the two weeks we would be open. And finally, calling every local media outlet I could get in touch with to make sure the press for the pop-up shop was coming along. The style writer from the New York Times had been unavailable all day, and he was the last call I was going to try to make before packing it in and heading home.
“Hello?” The male voice on the other end sounded busy. I could hear the din of street noise in the background.
“Is this Eric Stuart?” I had my script memorized and was on total autopilot making these calls, just running down the list of contacts Fiona had prepared.
“It is,” he said.
“This is Lydia Bell, calling from Hannah—”
“Lydia?” he asked, sounding surprised.
“Yes, I said my name is Lydia Bell, and I’m—”
“Lydia, it’s Eric. From NYU? Intro to Journalism with Professor Mario?”
Suddenly, memories of my team project came flooding back—long nights of laughing our asses off in Bobst Library as we scrounged through articles so old they were still on microfiche. For about five minutes freshman year I’d thought I might be a journalism major—that class had cured me.
“Eric! Holy shit. You work at the New York Times? That’s amazing!” I dropped the bags I had been sorting, and stopped to chat. “Sorry I didn’t realize it was you I was calling—I’ve been making these calls off and on all day. I’m only here for a month—I’m hosting a pop-up store in SoHo for Hannah Rogan, and—”
“You’re looking for press?” he asked, finishing my sentence, and I could hear the satisfaction in his voice.
“You got me. So what do you say? Can you help a girl out?” I asked.
“You said SoHo?”
“Yeah,” I replied, resuming my cleaning up so I’d be able to leave once this call was over.
“You there now?” he asked.
“I am.”
“I’m on Spring and Sullivan—why don’t we catch up over drinks and you can give me your pitch?”
I looked at my watch—it was nearly eight. I was starving, and I could definitely use a drink. Eric had been fun to talk to during college, and suddenly there was something so appealing about just flopping down on a bar stool and catching up with a friend. Not to mention, I really needed the New York Times to cover the store.
“As long as they’ve got food too,” I said.
“How about Raoul’s in fifteen?”
At eight fifteen I walked into the small dimly lit SoHo institution and saw Eric sitting at the bar. He was broader than I’d remembered. And blonder. He had this scruffy five-o’clock shadow journalist thing going on, complete with a beat-up messenger bag and a pen he was twiddling between his fingers. As soon as he saw me, he rose from his seat and came over to give me a hug.
“How the hell are you?” he asked, giving me a once-over. “You look great!”
“You too,” I said, following him back to the bar stools.
“So you work for Hannah Rogan now, huh?”
I nodded. “In London. I just opened her flagship store there.”
“London. Wow. I can’t believe you left New York. I didn’t think you’d ever leave the city. And the flagship store. That’s really impressive,” he said, and I could tell he meant it. “So now a pop-up here, huh? Testing the waters?”
I nodded again. “Well, actually, she’s moving into a permanent space in a couple of months on Madison—this is driving up the hype. So, you cover the fashion beat?”
And we were off. We laughed about the journalism class we’d taken together, about the horror of shadowing a television reporter through Queens the week there was a high-profile drug bust, about what we’d been up to since graduating. He told me about the Times, what it was like trying to climb the ladder from the inside of such an old established paper, how he wished he’d gone home to Vermont to make a name for himself, because at least there he’d have a fighting chance of getting on the front page. I told him about my job, about Fashion Week, and we caught up on our mutual friends.
It was two and a half hours, two burgers, and too many glasses of wine later by the time we exited the little restaurant. Eric stood by the curb looking to see if there were any cabs, but then he turned and walked back to me, his bag over his shoulder, his hands in his pockets.
“You’ll get a car home, right?” he asked. The air was warm, a hint of spring in the air, and I could feel the heat of the restaurant rolling off of me.
“Yeah,” I said, yawning. I rolled my head back, stretching my neck and rolling my shoulders.
“You’re working hard, aren’t you?”
“I am, but it’s exciting,” I said, and I held my phone in my hand, ready to open the app to summon a car. I was tired. I couldn’t wait to get back to my bed. But then I felt Eric close. Too close.
“Eric, I—” I started to say, slightly stunned when suddenly his hand was on my hip, sitting at the crease where my jeans met my blouse.
“Lydia, I’m going to kiss you now,” he said. And I could smell his breath, and it was so different. And he wasn’t so tall, so his mouth was right there. It all just happened.
Maybe I’d had too much to drink. Maybe I was just too tired and too slow. Too confused. But suddenly his lips were on mine, warm and full and wrong. It was all wrong. I instantly pushed against his chest and pulled away, taking three steps back.
“Fiancé.” I said the word instinctively, emphatically. It felt like the most important word to get out.
“What?”
“I’m engaged. I have a fiancé, Eric,” I stuttered, and he looked back at me, staring, gaping. Suddenly I felt a cloud, thick and dark, settle over me.
“Engaged?” he asked. “You didn’t say anything. I thought—”
“I thought we were just catching up. It was so nice to see an old friend…I…I should have said something earlier,” I said, the panic welling up inside me. What had I done? Why didn’t I tell him about Dylan? “I’m…I’m sorry. I have to go.”
The next thing I knew I was
practically running towards the subway entrance. I kept my head down, clinging my bag to my side. If I could just make myself small enough, fast enough, maybe I’d just disappear completely.
There was a train just pulling into the station when I entered the turnstile, and I ran onto it, grateful for the doors shutting behind me, separating me from what just happened. I slumped down on the hard plastic seat and immediately, instinctively reached for my phone, my hand gripping it in my bag. Dylan. I needed to call Dylan. He’d know what to do. He’d know what to say. But I couldn’t call him. He couldn’t help me. I was alone in this.
I pulled the phone out, and there was Dylan’s nightly text sitting on the screen. It had come during dinner, and the pit of guilt in my stomach spread, thickened.
MONDAY, 9:05 pm
Our bed is so empty without you. Can’t sleep. Are you awake?
I hadn’t replied, and he probably thought I was giving him the silent treatment. Normally I would’ve said something, at least goodnight. I hovered over the reply, but I had no idea what to say. Anything was going to feel like a lie or an omission. Even if I hadn’t meant to, I’d betrayed him. Even if I hadn’t kissed Eric back, he’d be hurt. The anger I’d felt was now intricately swirled with guilt, reminders that I loved him. I put the phone down, and the tears started falling. In the mostly empty train car, I brought my knees to my chest, burrowing my face between them. What had I done?
Chapter 12
Dylan
Panic. Fucking panic. That was the only word for what I felt.
I’d texted her in the middle of the night, and it was an entire day later, and she still hadn’t written me back. I wasn’t even sure why I’d texted her what I had—I didn’t know how to make up, how to go forward, and still protect her from the chaos being married to me would bring. All I knew was that I fucking missed her. So I’d texted, more than I had in days. And she hadn’t written back. And now, well, now I was a bloody mess.
