by Julie Wright
“What? Surprised to see me taking lessons on discretion?” she texted.
My head shot up to see that she was watching me watching my screen.
She smirked, nodded once, and went upstairs.
Her last text to me was, “Thank you, Charlotte.”
The brief interaction had been enough to later make me feel like I was standing on solid ground when I said “not yet” to Kat asking to move in with me.
Kat harrumphed at me but hugged me good night anyway.
It seemed goodbye was the only thing on the menu of life now that I was counting down to the moment I had to leave for the book tour. I had to say goodbye to my mom and Edward. I had to say goodbye to Kat. I had to say goodbye to my dad, and I had to say goodbye to Anders.
The next evening, when I opened my door, he stood waiting to take me to the station where he worked. They were having a farewell party for one of the guys.
The party was held at the station, where those who were working had already been on several calls: one overdose, one elderly woman not breathing, and two car accidents—one fender bender where the passenger hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt and ended up with serious head injuries and one where a guy had been drinking and then walked into oncoming traffic. He was a mess but would probably be okay long-term.
Anders loved the people he worked with. They were his family. But as the night wore on, I noticed he had pulled back from them. He laughed and joined in the conversations, but something was different.
“What’s up?” I asked when we had a minute alone.
“Ask me on the way home,” he said.
Which made the rest of the evening torture to get through. Was it me? Was it work?
I asked as soon as we were in the car and pulling out of the station.
He licked his lips—a sign I now recognized as Anders making life changes. “I think it’s time I change career paths,” he said.
Did not see that coming. Even with the lip signal.
“But you love the station and the work you do.” He had me all confused. Was it watching one of his coworkers moving on that made him rethink his career?
“True, but the pay isn’t great as compensation for the things I have to see in society, and I’m burned out. My ghost card is . . . full.”
Anders wasn’t talking about a real ghost card, not anything tangible and full of punch holes. It was a tally system he kept in his head of some of the worst things he’d seen as a paramedic. He’d been there a long time, outlasting most of the people he’d worked with.
“So . . . are you going to be a full-time photographer?” I asked.
He smiled. “I’d like that. I’d like it a lot. Maybe. Maybe I’ll go back to school and go into a medical field of some type or another—one that doesn’t require lifting gurneys with three-hundred-pound men on them. I love the work but not necessarily the work.”
I nodded. “Whatever you decide to do, Anders, you know you’ve got my support all the time in every way. You’re one of the smartest people I know. Whatever you choose, you’ll be great at it.”
He checked his mirror and changed lanes. “Thanks, Lettie. That really means a lot, especially since I think I’m going to be pulling a ton of overtime for the next few months so I can save up enough to get me by for several months until I get things settled.”
“Overtime?”
“I know. It’s not ideal, but it’ll be better long-term.”
“Sure. Of course. Better.” I nodded and tried to sound supportive and enthusiastic, but really, the idea of him doing a ton of overtime just meant I would be doing overtime spending time alone once I returned from the book tour.
Even the thought that I might get some writing done didn’t make me feel any better about the time spent together that we’d miss.
Funny how when I had a job, I managed to fit in things like a social life and writing without any issue. Now that I didn’t have a job, there didn’t seem to be enough time for either—and certainly not both at the same time.
“It’ll be good,” Anders continued. “To have me away more.”
“How could you being away more ever be good? Not that I’m saying you need to not take overtime or anything. It’s not your job to entertain me, but I don’t want you thinking I want time away from you.”
“I don’t want time away from you, either. But you’ve got the tour, and we both know you need to write.”
“I’m writing.” The defensive words tattled on my lie. How strange that he should echo thoughts that had already crossed my mind.
Or maybe not that strange considering how well Anders knew me.
“You are not,” Anders said with a smirk. “And every day you’re not writing, a bit more of the woman I love fades. You definitely need some time. Time to create. Time to be who you are with no apologies given—not to Toni, not to your online fan club.”
Truth shuddered through me. To create. To be who I am with no apologies given. My head was nodding before I’d fully registered the words in my mind.
I almost asked him about his need to create. If he was doing the amount of heavy overtime he mentioned, when would he have time to create? To be who he was with no apologies given?
When we arrived back at our apartment building, he walked me to my front door, where he kissed me good night. Something felt missing in that kiss. Something felt wrong. I brushed off my misgivings as nothing more than my paranoia. Anders said I was fading under the burden of my creative abstinence. He wasn’t wrong.
But when he said to be who I was with no apologies given, did he also mean no apologies to him as well? Because, though I didn’t love my couch, I loved the coffee table. I didn’t love some of the kitschy knickknack-y things on the coffee table that Toni thought made me look interesting and relatable while also being eccentric and mysterious, but the white curtains made my apartment feel breezy and clean. Anders hated everything that had come due to my arrangement with Toni.
Who was I when I was being me with no apology? Was I the heels or the flats? Was I the modern truth writer or the nineteenth-century fairy-tale storyteller?
I didn’t know.
Life stayed too busy for me to analyze my feelings enough to find out. The next evening, Dad picked me up first. Before we left my apartment to retrieve Kat, he handed me a string.
“What is this?” I wrinkled my nose in confusion.
“I have a present for you. Follow the string and find the present.”
“Dad . . . You don’t need to get me a present. You being here is the best gift I could ever get.”
“Consider it an early Christmas, since I won’t be here for that.” He nudged my elbow and nodded his head.
I followed the string, winding it around my elbow and hand the same way I did electrical cords. Anders continually got after me for wrapping cords that way because it wasn’t the “right way.” It likely bugged him that I didn’t change my methods, which was fine, since it bothered me that he failed to accept my methods.
The string went down into the stairwell. “Since I couldn’t figure out how to make it work through the elevator,” Dad explained. It twined all the way down to the ground floor and down still farther to the underground parking.
It ended at the metal beam above his rental car. From it, hung a key.
I tugged hard enough to pull the key down from the string, then held the key out in my open palm.
“Should I assume this goes to your car?”
He nodded. “Check the trunk.”
I slid the key in and opened the trunk with a click, which turned the trunk light on as well. I gasped. “How?” Inside was a signed, numbered Vladimir Kush Atlas of Wander. “This had to cost you a fortune!”
The painting had been on my to-buy list as soon as Toni stopped controlling what went on my walls. How many times had she told me that surreali
sm wasn’t relatable to everyday people?
“Do you like it, my little storyteller?”
“Dad . . .” My eyes were leaking. “I love it.”
“I thought of you as soon as I saw it.”
I hugged him tight. “It’s been something I’ve wanted for a long time. And I thought of you the first time I saw it.”
“I guess it was meant to be then.” He gave me a teary, sentimental smile.
He helped me take it upstairs and secure it in my apartment before heading back to the car to get on with our night. I almost didn’t want to go out anymore—not when I had such a piece of art to inspire me.
Once we pulled up in front of Mom and Edward’s house, my dad stayed in the car while I went to the door to fetch Kat. Mom tugged me inside and shut the door at the sight of Dad’s running rental at her curbside. She whispered to make sure Kat didn’t hear. “Why is he taking your sister, too?” she said.
“Maybe he just wants his daughter and her sister to have a nice time together,” I said.
She opened her mouth to respond, but Kat joined us, which flustered my mom and made her drop the argument.
Part of me had wanted the argument to continue because I wanted to know why she hadn’t wanted to come to my book launch. I also wanted to know why she had ultimately chosen to show up. I wanted to know why she was being so weird lately. Cross-and-irritating Mom was someone I understood, but this up-and-down woman? I glanced back at the door, wishing there was some way for me to understand her.
“It smells like Halloween out here,” Kat said, calling me back to the present.
I smiled and took another deep breath that held the faint smell of a fire burning in a distant fireplace, along with freshly dried leaves that had flown along in the crisp wind that made my breath catch and forced a shiver through me. I even caught the scent of freshly cut pumpkins because Mom’s neighbors must have hosted a jack-o’-lantern carving contest, if the variety of orange grins in front of their house was any indicator. We were still early in the season, but there were no rules against carving pumpkins before Halloween. “Yes. It absolutely does.”
Anders had asked me about a favorite sound, but if he had asked about a favorite smell, this would be it. I decided to ask him about his favorite smell when I saw him again.
The evening had been fun, with my sister explaining to my dad all the various ways an oblong strip of cloth could be used to accessorize—or even become—an outfit and with my dad raving about his “famous” daughter and spooning praise and attention over me. I was sad we’d chosen to do a movie rather than hang out and just talk and was even sadder to see the evening come to an end.
The one bright spot in saying goodbye to my father was the realization that money wasn’t the obstacle it once had been. Visiting him would not be as difficult.
The one dark spot in saying goodbye to my dad was that I didn’t have Anders to mourn his leaving with me.
Because of the way the timing worked, Anders and I wouldn’t have any more time together before I returned from the book tour. I knew we wouldn’t see each other before my departure, but I thought when he came home from his shift, he would say something—a text, a tap on the ceiling from a broom handle, a something. I went to sleep feeling heavy. He’d come home and said nothing?
I stared at my new painting and felt the pull of the boat on the water. Like that boat, I felt like I was sailing off of the dusty pages and into an unknown adventure.
I hated that sometimes I felt like I was sailing alone.
Chapter Sixteen
“Happily ever after sets up false expectations. Were they really happy every minute of every day forever after? The minute Prince Charming put the toilet paper roll on backwards or the fair damsel missed a dinner date, I’m betting there were shots fired.”
—Charlotte Kingsley, The Cinderella Fiction
(The “Be Present” Chapter)
Book tours, it turns out, are glamorous only in the imagination. In reality, they were a lot of nervous energy spent all at once, followed by incredible amounts of exhaustion. They were a lot of hotel rooms and airports and rental cars. They were extreme highs of applause and extreme lows of eating alone in a hotel restaurant. They were enough to make me feel off-balance mentally.
It didn’t help that Toni played critic to my every move. She monitored the internet to see how people complained about me and then made certain to point out those complaints so I could “do better next time.”
My texts and calls with Anders didn’t offer the relief and comfort I had hoped for. While Toni criticized every move I tried to make without her guidance, Anders criticized every move I made with her guidance. For every “Why didn’t you wear what I told you to?” from Toni, there was a “Why are you always wearing what she tells you to?” from Anders. It didn’t help matters that Anders had made his social media accounts public again. Toni all but demanded I have him change them back to private. It was difficult to explain that dating someone did not give me license to dictate his life to him.
Going home was a greater relief than I had ever imagined. It meant I could smooth things over with Anders and fix the few pseudo-fights we’d had via text. I hoped it meant I would get a break from my phone pinging and buzzing every time Toni found another string to pull.
My red-eye flight got me home at 5 a.m., so I’d gone straight to bed, happy to pay a sleep tribute to the sandman after the exhausting tour and jet lag.
Waking up at nearly noon to find that Anders hadn’t written me or called me was . . . well, weird.
I texted him.
And called him.
And checked the calendar to see what shift he was working, only to find that he was, in fact, home. Or at least he should have been home.
So I thumped down the stairs and knocked on his door. Maybe he’d slept in late as well.
He didn’t answer.
I knocked again and checked the doorknob. Locked. “Anders?” I whisper-yelled, which was the same thing as yelling really.
I knocked some more, but he didn’t answer. Ms. Schofield opened her door a crack. “Don’t the two of you have phones?”
I went home and texted again. He didn’t respond the entire day.
I didn’t want to do what I’d done before and call around to places where he might be to see if anyone had seen him. That had caused me enough trouble to last a lifetime.
As the evening and the path on my floor wore on, I gave up and used the fire escape to enter his apartment and search for any clues of foul play. It was dark out, making the fire escape a bad choice for my point of entry.
Once inside his apartment, I flipped on the light. No signs of a struggle seemed readily apparent. Everything was perfectly clean, even though it had been a few weeks since I’d done maid service for him. He’d done a good job of maintaining my hard work. And everything was in its place.
Everything . . . except the pictures of us and the pictures of me that had hung on the wall. The only evidence of pictures having once hung on the walls were the little brass nails.
Anders had taken my pictures down? Our pictures down?
I tried not to let that panic me. Sure, he’d been judgy of the things I’d worn lately. Sure, he’d made fun of my couch from the first moment he’d sat on it. Sure, he’d scoffed at the eyelash extensions that had happened on the third day of my tour and the hair tinting that had taken my hair from its natural red to a more subtle auburn on the fifth day.
But none of that merited removing my pictures from his wall.
Did it?
“Anders? What is your deal? Where are you?” I said to the empty apartment.
Imagine my surprise when the empty apartment answered me.
“He’s at work.”
I whirled on the voice in the doorway. Sadly, my arms and hands had a habit of going out in front of me karate-cho
p style whenever I was caught unawares. When I saw the thin blonde standing still and staring at me with something that could be called less than enthusiasm, I tried to nonchalantly lower my hands in the hopes she hadn’t noticed how my fight-or-flight response had gone all Mortal Kombat. I swallowed down my alarm enough to say, “Who are you?”
She raised her left eyebrow in a delicate arch over her eye. Her features were all like that: delicate and perfectly positioned. She looked like a female version of—
I blinked.
And stared harder at her—if such a thing was possible. She looked like Anders, which had to mean . . . “You must be Magdalena,” I said, since she hadn’t answered my question.
She didn’t relax, even though I’d managed to reveal her name, which should have put her at ease that I wasn’t doing anything wrong by being in his apartment—because if I knew him well enough to know her identity, didn’t that put me on the safe list?
“I’m Let—”
“I know who you are.” She straightened from where she’d stood in the doorway—clearly a family-favorite position. Anders seemed to always be standing exactly like that.
With introductions off the table, and because I didn’t know what else to do with myself, I said, “Anders didn’t mention having to work tonight.” It hurt that he had gone to work when he’d known my flight brought me home today, but I tried not to let the hurt seep into my words.
“One of his coworkers needed someone to cover for them.”
“Oh.”
Well, that topic ran out of conversational steam fast. She said nothing else for several long moments. I considered asking her where she’d come from, since the open door indicated she was just entering the apartment, but decided it wasn’t my place to ask.
She stared at me while I nervously worked to look at anything but her. A roll-away bed was made up and settled over by the window. I should have noted that detail right off upon entering.
“Anders told me you were coming,” I started again.
“Yes.”
“How long have you been in town?” I asked.
“I got in this morning. I’ll be leaving in a week or so to go to Sweden to take over for my parents. They’re there now, caring for my grandfather.”
