Hello Now

by Jenny Valentine

  Novo’s hand was on my back and I reached round and held on to it. There was silence in the room for a minute, and Henry turned away from the sink and everything about him was over-careful, studied—the slow rotation of his body, his feet in their slippers, parallel, pointing forward, aligned with the checkerboard tiles on the floor. His ankles were creased and swollen, like tulip bulbs. He dried his hands on a tea towel, folded it into precise quarters. His eyes locked on to mine as he looked at Novo and me through that crack in the door, through a crack in time.

  “How long have I been gone?” I said, and Novo shrugged while Mum pushed her food away, uneaten, put her finger through the hot skin of her tea.

  “It’s just a Now,” he said. “You’re missing now.”

  “I can’t take much more of this,” she said, and Henry put his hand on her shoulder.

  “I know. I understand.”

  “The only one who matters,” she said. “The only one. Smart and sensitive and creative and thoughtful. Curious. Funny. Kind. Generous. I raised that kid. I love that kid. God, Henry, I love that kid.”

  She was crying again and I needed to make it stop. Reality is messy and it hurts people. Actions have consequences. Things happen and can’t be undone. I wanted to go to her and at the same time I wanted to be back in that cave where the rocks felt like velvet and I could breathe underwater and there was no such thing as time. With Novo in a perfect bubble, without cause and effect, under the radar together where nothing but Now mattered, nothing but that. But that was over. He showed me a world of endless possibilities, just like he promised, but now I was suddenly hard up against the things we had to do.

  Henry was still looking at me when he said, “Jude’s going to walk through that door any minute. That’s what I think.”

  I looked at Novo and he kissed me, passed his thumb across the flat of my top lip, and stepped away.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “What about you? Where are you going?”

  “Nowhere. Not yet.”

  “Not yet?”

  There was a knock on the door then, and Mum jumped half out of her skin and Henry said, “I’ll get it,” and when he walked past us in the doorway, he said, “Come back. Now.”

  He opened the door to two police officers, fingers bothering their uniforms and worrying their hats while they waited for him to invite them in. They must have a script, I figured, for times like this. They must be nervous, hearts pounding, like actors stepping onto a stage. The flowers were still bright in our yard, the lawn still green, all the warm color of the morning, and when Mum stood up to meet them, there was no color in her face at all.

  “Novo,” I said, and I gripped his hand. “Can I be back here and still be with you?”

  He smiled. “I hope so. I hope you can have everything you want. And I already told you. I’ll be here,” and he pushed me gently into the room where Henry was waiting, and Mum with her back turned was talking quietly to the nervous police.

  She said, “I’ve been calling and calling. Like twenty times. And I’ve left messages. Nothing.”

  She dropped her forehead so it rested on the table and she spoke out loud to me, even though she couldn’t know that I was right there, behind her, listening. “This is why you should check your phone, Jude. Why don’t you just answer your bloody phone?”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Through the door and the light changed, and my senses felt sharper, heavier, more defined. I looked at my bare feet on the kitchen floor. I felt myself in my body like a lead weight, like a rock, and I thought, Really, where was I if I wasn’t in here?

  “It’s broken, Mum,” I said. “My phone’s broken,” and the kitchen spun and the police looked up like startled foxes and she was out of her chair and all over me, her hands on my shoulders, forehead to forehead, her hands on my face, and Henry smiled.

  “What?” she said.

  “You were calling me. But my phone’s messed up. I think you forgot.”

  She didn’t let go of me. Everyone was talking and I was back, I knew I was back, and I looked for Novo in the doorway behind me but he wasn’t there.

  “Where have you been?” Mum said. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “I’m not sure,” I told her, because it was the truth.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Yeah. I’m okay. I’m fine.”

  She was smiling and crying and laughing and the police were getting up, gathering their things, and Henry was in a very still place in the corner of the kitchen, watching me.

  “I’m so sorry I wasted your time,” Mum said to the police, and they said, “Not at all,” and everyone was smiling, and nobody seemed to know how long I’d been gone.

  I asked Mum, and she looked blank, and the police were at the door already, saying goodbye, and when I asked her again, she said, “I had a feeling. A terrible gut feeling. There was this space, this black hole in my center, where you always are. And it was empty.”

  She started crying again then. She said, “It’s the most terrible feeling in the world.”

  I thought about what Novo had told me on the other side of that door, that I was missing in the Now, and I thought maybe it was like that night horizon, this moment, no beginning or end, and that’s why she couldn’t tell me when it started. That’s why she could only say how it felt.

  “I didn’t go anywhere,” I said. “I think I just went to the beach and fell asleep.”

  She was shaking. She was too exhausted to be angry with me. Too relieved that I was back. “I panicked,” she said. “I lost it.”

  “I’m sorry, Mum. I’m so sorry.”

  “You’re here. That’s all that matters, Jude. You’re here.”

  She flew around the kitchen like Charlie Parker then, hardly landing, moving from place to place, all nervous energy, asking me if I was hungry, asking me what I wanted to do.

  “Are you tired?” she said. “Are you all right? Do you want a shower? A bath, maybe? Shall I make you breakfast? Do you want to go out for lunch?”

  The hollows under her eyes were deep gray in the spotlights. Henry and I exchanged glances.

  “I think we should both sleep,” I said. “When did you last sleep?”

  She stopped moving. Frowned. “I can’t think,” she said, and then she stretched and yawned. “You might be right. I think I’m shattered.”

  “Me too.”

  She stood, slightly swaying, and reached out her hand once more to stroke my cheek.

  “Go to bed,” I said, and she smiled.

  “Will you be here when I wake up?”

  “Course I will.”

  She left the room and Henry pulled out a chair for me to sit down.

  “Where is he?” I said. “Where’s Novo, Henry? Do you know?”

  “He’s still here,” he said. “Don’t worry. You know that boy would do anything for you.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “I’m sure he’s fine.”

  “My body is so heavy,” I said. “Like I can’t carry it. I feel so strange.”

  “That’s only natural.”

  “I don’t understand what happened. Tell me what to do,” I said, and he shook his head.

  “Help me, Henry. Please. We’re the same, aren’t we? You and me? Can you tell me what I need to know?”

  Henry sat down opposite me. “We’re not the same,” he said.

  “But this happened to you, too, didn’t it? With Dulcie.”

  “I’m not like you, Jude.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dulcie was like you. But I’m not.”

  “But she was pure magic. You said so.”

  “She was, to me. And you are to Novo. It’s you that’s the miracle, Jude, to him.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “I th
ought—”

  Henry spoke over me. “Novo and I are one and the same. Or we were, at one time.”

  “What?”

  “I was like Novo once. As wild and dazzling and powerful.” He smiled sadly and looked down at his hands. “But that’s over now.”

  “How old are you, Henry?”

  “Too old to be human,” he said. “Not mortal like you and Dulcie. Infinite, like Novo still is, for the time being. Eternal.”

  “Infinite?”

  He looked around the room, those eyes of his, so tired. So ancient. “The loneliness you saw in him?” he said. “On the beach?”

  I pictured it then. That solitary boy at the water’s edge, on the stilled beach, sighing. “Yes.”

  “I need you to know. That loneliness is nothing compared to mine, with her gone, and me stuck here without her, forever.”

  “Forever.”

  “I’ve seen five generations come and go on this street,” he said. “I’ve seen the town built on fields since she went. All from this window. All from this cage.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I am a stopped atom, Jude. The rock in the stream. Novo wouldn’t tell you this, he can’t. So I have to. I stayed with Dulcie because she asked me to. She chose me. I stayed because I always loved her. I love her now. I always will.”

  “And you were together.”

  “Yes. In the real world. But a lifetime in the real world is a blink of the eye for me and Novo. And Dulcie couldn’t stay. Not forever.”

  “She left you here?”

  “She died, Jude. She could do that. And so can you.”

  “And you’ve been alone ever since.”

  “Not just alone. Stuck. Trapped. I can’t get out. Dulcie chose to be with me, she gave me one moment in time to belong to, but it meant I would be stuck here. In this Now, in this house. Always.”

  “Your map of the world,” I said, and he smiled sadly.

  “It’s one way to travel. For me, the only way.”

  I wanted Novo with me, right then, more than anything, and at the same time, I knew for sure that it was a selfish, insatiable thing.

  “He doesn’t want you to know,” Henry said. “He wants to stay. His whole existence is bound up with you.”

  “But I can’t do that to him. Trap him like that. How could I?”

  “I don’t know, Jude. Dulcie wouldn’t have done it either, if she’d known. It’s why I didn’t tell her. And we both paid for that. It broke her heart to leave me.”

  “I love him,” I said.

  Henry smiled at me. He took my hands in his, and those seen-everything eyes burned into mine. “And how will you do that, Jude? How will you prove it?”

  In that moment, I realized the truth. But I could barely get the words out. “I have to let him go,” I said. “I have to,” and I felt it then, the sheer scale of that. The lifelong pain and weight as soon as I heard myself speak.

  Henry just looked at me. Deeply sad, and deeply alone.

  “Is there another way?” I said. “Can I go with him?” but even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t that simple.

  “If only it worked like that,” Henry said. “But it doesn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you are the planet and Novo is your moon. If you left, it would change everything. Reality would feel it. Like a scar. You’ve seen. He can only come to you. He is here only for you. And you’ve got a whole life here.”

  I remembered the sight of my mother then, colorless with grief when she thought I’d gone missing. And I knew Henry was right.

  It was below me, ahead of me, all around me, the Grand Canyon of loss. But still, I knew what I needed to do. For Novo. And it was the last thing on earth I wanted.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The last time I saw Novo, he knocked on the window above my bed. I opened my eyes and it came to me like a wrecking ball how much I loved him, how I had never wanted to feel that way about someone in my life, and now that I had, how I never wanted to stop feeling it either.

  “Let me in, sleepyhead,” he said, and I opened the window and he lowered himself down and pulled his shirt off, up over his soft swell of stomach, the deep cage of his ribs. The solid truth of Novo always shocked me. Larger than life. Physical magic. He lay down behind me, stretched himself out against the length of my back, his arm threading the space between my side and my elbow, his breath on the back of my neck.

  I didn’t know what time of day it was. I didn’t even know I’d been asleep.

  “Where have you been?” I asked him.

  “Walking,” he said.

  I turned toward him, touched the planes of his face with my fingers. He still didn’t know yet, what Henry had told me, what I had decided. I didn’t ask any questions. And I didn’t tell him.

  “I missed you,” I said.

  He gave me a sad smile. I saw it on his face, what he was ready to give up, for me. I wondered if he saw that same sadness reflected in mine.

  “I need you to do something,” he said, and I said, “Of course.”

  He moved away from me, and only I knew that was the last time. He moved away, unburdened by that, and he got up. “Let’s go.”

  “Where to?” I said. “What for?”

  “It’s time,” Novo said. Nothing more, nothing less. Just “It’s time.”

  We slipped out of the house for the last time together and we walked the center line of the road with the end of the light following, the sun’s last rays spreading out in the sky behind. All the flowers in all the gardens lifted their faces in one brief show of bloom and then closed them for the night, nodding softly, tucking themselves under, saying goodbye, and the birds dipped in and out of puddles and a fox by the trash cans stopped in its tracks, the same way Novo had the first day I saw him, with nothing between us but the width of the street.

  We walked away from town and up onto the cliff path and it was black-dark and moonless when Novo stopped. He let go of my hand and I couldn’t see him in all that darkness, but his voice when he spoke was very close.

  “Do you want to fall with me?” he said.

  “Of course I do. Always. But—”

  “If we fell from up here, I would catch you.”

  “And what would happen?”

  “We’d be together. You would always have me here.”

  “At what cost?” I said. “What’s the catch?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes, it matters.”

  “Let’s do it,” he said. “Why don’t we just do it?”

  I knew that if we did, I would feel what it was like to be him. I would fall without fear and always remember falling and never, ever have to land. Not without him. Not alone. I wanted that. It goes without saying. I wanted that more than anything else. I wanted to say yes. But love isn’t about what you want. Not really. Beyond that, it’s about what you give. Freely. Without asking for anything back.

  “Do it with me,” Novo said, and I could hear the gray break of the water, way beneath us, against the rocks.

  “Fall,” Novo said. “Fall in love. And I’ll fall with you.”

  For a moment, in my mind, I let us go, like birds leave the land or swimmers push off gently from the side of the pool. I let us out, together, into the air, so we were heavy, and the rushing of it past me was so quick and quickly over that I felt every part of it, can feel it still, the weight of us, the flat of the water rushing upward. I could never tell a soul well enough what that was like. In my mind, I could have done it forever, falling and not landing. It is insatiable, oblivion. Addictive, action without consequence. Falling without landing is an impossible habit to kick.

  But in the real world, I stepped back from the edge. Novo didn’t see it coming until it was done, my choice made, our last chance over, and there was nothing else
but the word in the black air as I found my voice and told him, “No.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Neither of us spoke as we walked back the way we had come, to the beach. So cold. The wind pulled at the top of the water, pulled at the sand. The moon was high now, the land and the water both silver, and Novo’s face when he looked at me was lightless and empty. Three cargo ships on the horizon, gray Lego blocks in the haze. We sat down on the cold ground and I stared at the line of stuff left by a higher tide—shell fragments and matte cuttlefish and the weeds lying brown like dead bracken, wet and rotten and all of it the lace-edged shape of the gone water. The sand was large and gritty. I picked up a fistful and let it leak between my fingers, and it left the palm of my hand white with fine, soft dust.

  There was a cold, dark well where my stomach should have been. I swallowed and I could taste its blackness and I hated everything then. I felt it bloom in me and it was ugly, knife-sharp, and I wanted to press the whole world out like a flame. The mass of the universe never changes, and you can’t have something for nothing, and loss goes hand in hand with gain, and I knew all that but it didn’t make it any better. The gulls were screaming and my spine was stretched tight as elastic and the water slapped hard at the ground. Everything in that Now was cruel. Everything tasted bitter. I wanted to scream. I wanted to break things.

  Novo put his mouth against my wrist. I felt him there, his lips warm, and the soft of his tongue. He spoke into me.

  “Henry told you,” he said, and I said, “Yes.”

  He shook his head, my wrist in his hand, his mouth still on my skin. He breathed out, slow.

  “Don’t hate him,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you should have told me. I deserved to know. And I needed to know to make the choice.”

  “And why did you make it?” he asked me.

  I brought his hand to my face and I kissed his palm. “You know the answer to that.”

  “I will see you again,” he said. “I’ll always see you, even if I’m not right there with you. Even when you can’t see me back.”