“I have absolutely no idea why I decided to give it to her. I just had this intuition, this instinct that if she read it she might meet someone too. And, Alice—” she drumrolled the table “—she did.”
Part of what made Maria so smart was that she never wasted time. She listened to podcasts while she showered, dictated lecture notes while she cooked, darned socks while she watched TV. She wasn’t about to devote time she could spend doing something more productive to reading Alice’s story.
On a brisk afternoon, Maria skipped down the steps from Gabby’s apartment building, eyes glued to a page of Alice’s hummingbird tale, and smacked right into Claudia.
Claudia had taken the day off work because her dog, Claudia Jr., had eaten chocolate. Rather, her mother had fed the dog a Hershey’s Kiss, not realizing it was like feeding the pup arsenic. Claudia had looked over in time to see Claudia Jr. funnel the kiss into her mouth but not quickly enough to stop her from swallowing it. Induced vomiting and several doses of activated charcoal later, Claudia Jr. was released from the vet. Claudia, feeling particularly sentimental from her dog’s near-death experience, couldn’t fathom teaching that day, so she stayed home with Claudia Jr., snuggling on the couch. When signs of the dog’s typical boundless energy appeared, they decided to go for a walk. Two blocks later they rounded the corner, and bam—there was Maria, nose deep in the flutter of Alice’s hummingbird.
Maria had always been a cat person, one of the few things she and Alice had in common. She had two at home. Claudia loved cats almost as much as she loved dogs. People always assumed you had to like one or the other, she told Maria an hour later when they were back at Claudia’s apartment, naked in bed. Cats or dogs, vanilla or chocolate, wine or beer, apples or oranges, men or women. False dichotomies, Claudia insisted. Well, not the men or women, at least not for Maria and Claudia. They only liked women. On that, like everything else, they agreed. By the time Claudia Jr. had fully recovered, Maria and Claudia were deeply in love.
“You don’t really think either of those instances was because of my story?” Alice asked when Gabby finished telling her about Maria. What she meant was,You don’t really think either of those are examples of love?
Gabby shrugged, a knowing smirk on her face that made Alice’s stomach drop, even before she said, “Well, Maria may have given it to Erica.”
Erica was Maria’s best friend, and after Erica met Dale when she rear-ended him at a red light, indulging her bad habit of reading while driving, she’d given the hummingbird story to Sal, her roommate. Sal then met Frankie at the library, where he took a break from his dissertation research to read the hummingbird tale. He became so absorbed in Alice’s bird imagery that he didn’t realize he was the last patron left inside once the library had closed for the day. Frankie, the head librarian, found him tucked away in the stacks when she was doing her final sweep of the premises. Sal then presented the story to his mother, Cat, who was reminded of a glass hummingbird feeder she’d purchased years ago. When she scoured her gardening shed for it, she discovered it shattered beneath a shelf of pots. She had bought the feeder while her husband was still alive and, at the sight of the broken glass, felt inexplicably overcome. She needed to replace it right away, so she headed straight to the plant nursery. Calvin was looking for a way to get rid of the starlings who were eating his strawberries. His wife had planted them the fall before she died. In their second year, their roots were deep, and they’d taken over an entire bed, producing enough fruit to make the jam and pies his wife would never get to taste. Calvin hadn’t meant to tell Cat all this when they started chatting in line at the nursery. She’d cried at his story and the thought of strawberry rhubarb pie, which had also been her husband’s favorite. She told Calvin that she couldn’t eat strawberry rhubarb pie without thinking of her husband. “Maybe that’s beautiful instead of sad,” Calvin had proposed, holding out his handkerchief. It was embroidered with his initials, CL. “Those are my initials too,” Cat told him, and they stared at each other, wondering where the other had come from, how they’d happened to be there in line together at exactly the right time.
Five single people. Five readings of Alice’s hummingbird tale. Five encounters. Five instant connections. Easy. Deep. Drowning.
“I can’t believe you shared my story without asking me first,” Alice said. It was a novelty, being annoyed with Gabby. Vexed though she was, she was more hurt than angry. The story had been for Gabby. It had been their secret language, one that Gabby had now shared not only with her sister but with strangers too. It made Alice wonder if Gabby had let people read the letters she’d written to her, the passages where she bared her soul to her best friend, assuming no one else would be witness to it.
“Look, I’m sorry. You’re right, I should never have given it to Maria without asking you first. Forgive me?” She batted her eyes in thatI’m too adorable for you to be mad at meway that worked just as well on Alice as it did on Gabby’s lovers. “Besides, you’re missing the point. It’s... I don’t want to say it’s magic, but it’s something.” Gabby motioned wildly, spilling clumps of guacamole on the table. “Your story, Alice. Itissomething.”
At the time, Alice did not recognize this monumental news for what it was: the birth of her gift. At the time, she assumed that Gabby was letting her imagination run wild, seeing something fantastical in Alice’s story when the results were nothing more than happenstance. She decided to prove Gabby wrong with a little thing called logic.
“Yeah, it’s a jumble of not so eloquent words you all happened to be reading when you did something totally in character and met someone. I bet it was sunny too. Are you going to say that the sun caused you to fall in love?”
Gabby frowned. “It was cloudy, actually, when Maria met Claudia. And Cat hadn’t thought about that hummingbird feeder in years.”
“If she was the kind of person who had a hummingbird feeder, she probably cared about her garden, which means it wasn’t unusual for her to visit a plant nursery even if her reason for visiting it that day was out of the ordinary.”
“Why are you being intentionally obtuse?”
“I bet you were all wearing shoes too. Maybe it was your shoelaces that did it, maybe they were tied too tight and the pulsing in your arches put you in the mood for love.”
“I wish you’d take this seriously.”
“Gabby, there’s nothing to take seriously. Coincidences happen. That’s all this is. Maybe the story did manifest these connections,” Alice conceded, “only because you were all looking for it. You wanted the story to lead you to someone and it did. That’s the power of your will, not of the written word.”
“Trust me, I was not looking to meet anyone. It was the farthest thing from my mind when I sat down to read your story.” Gabby leaned forward like she was about to divulge a secret. “I’m telling you, Alice. There’s something about that story. I can’t explain it. It opened me up. Maria said the same thing. It was like being unfolded from the inside out, so the love could seep in.” Seep in, like disease. Lovesick. Add that one to the list of ways love enfeebles us.
“So where is it now?” Alice asked, ready to be done with this conversation. “Where is my magical tale?”
“Sal’s mom put it back in her bag as she was walking out of the nursery, but when she got home she couldn’t find it. Do you have another copy? Oliver wants to give it to his sister. She’s divorced.”
“That’s the only copy, I’m afraid,” Alice lied. Alice was the type of person who saved everything. Trinkets, old clothes, her father’s records, his books, every essay or lab report she’d ever written, even a silly story about a hummingbird.
“Well then,” Gabby said with a devilish smile, “I guess you’ll have to write another story.”
Alice was not about to write another story. She had no idea where the image of the hummingbird came from, how it led to any story let alone one that had supposedly caused five people—Gabby and four others—to fall in love. She told Gabby that, when she thought about everything she wanted to write to her best friend, the symbol had simply hit her like a dump truck. It was not an experience Alice could replicate even if she believed her story had such powers, which she did not.
“We’re going to have to work on your analogies if you’re going to write love stories,” Gabby said, her eyes sparkling as she saw the waiter carrying two plates of enchiladas to their table. “No one wants to be thinking about being hit by a truck when they’re trying to find love.”
They should, Alice thought. Love and death were two sides of the same coin. She shuddered at this analogy.See?She wanted to tell her best friend,My mind works in clichés.But Gabby was not looking for poetry. She was not asking for a gripping tale. She was looking for sorcery, something Alice had no interest in supplying.
“Gabby,” Alice said, opting for reason. “I have no idea why that story helped you all find love. It’s not something I can recreate.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I don’t know anything, that’s my point.”
