I slip out of bed and get ready for the day, pulling on comfortable clothes for the plane and braiding my hair into two French braids. At 5:15 a.m., I sit down on the edge of the bed and put my hand on John’s shoulder.
“John,” I whisper. “I’ve got to go.”
He blinks blearily in the dim light and then drags himself out of bed to walk me to the door. He’s still half asleep, but he wakes up as he helps me lug my suitcases to the car.
“Is that it?” he asks.
I know he’s talking about the luggage, but the words still cut down to my bones.
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “That’s it.”
We look at each other. Crickets chirp in the darkness. He moves first, wrapping his arms around me tightly. I press my face into his shoulder. I am not going to cry.
“Drive safe,” he says.
I nod into his chest. “Will do.”
We stay like that for another few seconds, then I lean up to kiss him.
Our last kiss, whispers a voice in the back of my mind. And yeah, that’s no good. I’m definitely crying now.
I pull away first and say, in a strangled voice, “I hope things work out with the shop. You’d be really great at it.”
“Thanks. You too. With the museum stuff, I mean.”
“You don’t think I could run a racing performance shop?”
He smiles thinly. “No,” he says. “I guess not.”
For a brief, painful second, I let myself imagine staying here. I know he’s not really expecting me to stay and help him run an auto shop, but I think I can picture the future we could have together. Me, coming home from a day of caregiving work to laugh with him about whatever mean things Doris said, while he tells me about the new bit of equipment he’s ordering, or asks my opinion on which billing system to buy. Going to dinners with Kiara and Jake and his parents, looking for houses together, embedding ourselves fully in our happy Waldon life.
I swallow hard. “Well—bye, then.”
He lets out a heavy breath. “Bye.”
We look at each other a moment, then there’s nothing to do but turn away and get in my car. He stands barefoot in the driveway and watches as I back onto the road. I raise my hand in one last wave, then I put the car in drive and pull away. I watch my mirrors, wondering if he’ll walk to the end of the driveway to watch me go, but if he does, it’s too dark to see it. At the end of the street, I turn left at the stop sign, and that’s it.
On to my next life.
31
The air in the city is hot and humid and smells like car exhaust and garbage. The streets are teeming with people, including a family of tourists who practically shove me and my suitcases off the sidewalk in their haste to get to Starbucks, and it’s so loud I can hardly hear the scary guy with the angry political sign screaming obscenities at me. It’s chaos—total chaos—and it’s scary and intimidating andbrilliant.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still totally torn up about leaving John. Part of me wishes he’d never come over last night, that I could have left when things were tense and angry. It would be easier to deal with than this strange, squicky feeling I have now, one that feels eerily close to uncertainty. But I can’t give in to that. I need to focus, instead, on the immense, shiny buildings looming overhead, and the laughter of a group of girls my age passing by on the sidewalk, and the feel of the bright New York sun beating down on my skin.
As I wait for the lady at the NYU admissions office to get my dorm keys, I watch people walk by on the street. Even in the sweltering midsummer heat, everyone seems to be moving purposefully from place to place, striding along the hot pavement as though they don’t have a second to waste. It couldn’t be more different from Waldon, where some of the locals’ favorite activities include sitting on a park bench and watching the ocean, sittingon a park bench and watching traffic go by, and sitting on a park bench watching absolutely nothing.
My dorm room is small but clean, and eerily similar to my old dorm at university. It’s like I’ve gone back in time, like I’ve hit the reset button on my own life.
I don’t want to unpack right now because I have a feeling if I stop moving my grief will catch up with me, so instead I just dump my suitcases in my room, change out of my grimy travel clothes, and head back out onto the streets. I’m not even going to look at a map, I’m just going to wander around and stare.
Every corner seems to hold something interesting to look at, whether it’s a gorgeous building or a cute little park or a group of models decked out in head-to-toe Chanel. Some of it is kind of scary, like a group of guys that leer at me and a woman hissing nasty things at strangers, but as long as I keep walking, I can keep my nerves at bay. I’m like a shark. As long as I keep moving, I won’t drown.
The shiny newness of the city keeps me going until late afternoon, but by the time I make it back to my dorm, I’m sweaty and sunburned and my feet are two solid blocks of pain. I sit down on my unmade bed with a thump. I briefly consider ordering a pizza for dinner, but that would be staying still, and staying still is death. Instead, I dig a summer dress and cardigan out of my suitcase and look up the fanciest restaurant within walking distance. My parents transferred two hundred dollars to my bank account as an early birthday present and ordered me to spend it all on a good meal.
I wind up at a restaurant called Frost, a small, ultramodern placewith deep-blue lighting and white velvet booths tucked between faux ice sculptures. I hardly recognize a thing on the menu, so I pick something at random and order something called an Ice Melt cocktail to sip on while I wait. It’s absolutely gorgeous, a very pale-blue liquid with a single ice cube in the shape of an iceberg in a fancy glass with a sugary rim. I take a sip—yikes, that’s strong—and rest my chin on my hands, letting my eyes move over the restaurant. It’s really early, barely six o’clock, so it’s not that busy, but there are a group of young girls nearby dressed in cocktail dresses and an elderly woman with a heavy silver necklace sitting alone. Her hands tremble slightly as she takes a sip of her water, and I wonder if she has someone to help her at home. For a moment, I think about doing a little caregiving work here in New York.
Then I shake my head and take another sip of my drink. There’s no way I want to mess around with US healthcare. If one of my clients fell and broke their hip here, their family would probably sue me for negligence. John’s mother has a friend who works as an obstetrician somewhere in the States, and when she told me how much he pays in malpractice insurance, it literally made me sick to my stomach.
