They both forced a laugh. Alice felt unsettled, like she hadn’t gotten at the essential truth she needed to convey to her best friend.
“I’m sorry I brought up Oliver. It was only meant to be a hypothetical. I just, I’m wondering why you want me to keep writing stories, knowing that some of them aren’t destined to work out.”
“You can’t promise that every relationship will be candlelit dinners and roses. That’s not what people want from you though. They want the love to be theirs. They just want you to make it appear.” Gabby fiddled with the switch for the window, sending the glass up and down an inch as she spoke. Was she right? Was this all her clients wanted from Alice, a beginning, a fighting chance rather than a guarantee of everlasting love? No one could guarantee that, not even Alice. Maybe her gift was more complex than she realized.
“Don’t doubt yourself,” Gabby added.
“You make it sound so simple,” Alice said.
“Well, it isn’t easy, but it is simple. It’s a choice, Alice. You’re stronger than you think. Believe in your strength.”
Alice wasn’t sure if they were talking about her stories anymore or something else entirely.
“Have you talked to Duncan?” Gabby asked.
“That’s over,” Alice insisted. She could hear everything Gabby didn’t say, everything Alice didn’t want to hear.
After six messages from Greta about the books waiting for pickup at Santa Barbara Bindery, Alice ventured to the shop with no plans of delivering the books to their intended recipients. Howard took pride in his work. Leaving the books to molder would be as great an offense as she could inflict upon him. The problem was not his books. The problem was the nature of her gift. The problem was love itself.
Greta was sitting in the front window when Alice arrived, knitting a scarf from multicolored alpaca wool with shiny strands of copper woven throughout, her long silver hair dangling over her right shoulder. The scarf was so long that it had collected at her feet and started to grow around her legs. It was the type of image Alice had only seen in stories, a never-ending scarf that could warm all the cold souls of the world. It would have been a perfect image for her client James, who—no, Alice would not let her mind go there. She was finished with her stories. Even if she could bring James love, it would not compensate for the violence she’d imposed on other lives. She hated that her mind thought in stories, that she could not control the images, the chill down her arms beckoning her to write. But Alice was stronger than her gift. She had to be.
“Alice,” Greta exclaimed when the bell rang as Alice entered. “We were beginning to worry that something had happened to you.”
“I’ve just been really busy.”
Greta rested the knitting needles on the windowsill, the bottom half of her body cocooned in color. She studied Alice. “You sure everything is okay?”
“Why is your scarf so long?” Alice asked, pointing to all that alpaca obscuring her legs. “It seems like it would be hard to wear.”
Greta shrugged. “It just hasn’t felt finished yet. The scarf will tell me when it’s the right length. Besides, I rather like the idea of a scarf so long I could wrap it around my entire body. Come—” She unfurled her legs from the scarf and stood. “Your books are waiting for you.”
Alice followed Greta to the back of the store where Howard’s printing press was.
“Howard’s on a delivery, one of those hoity-toity Montecito folks who can’t be bothered to drive into town. I shouldn’t complain though. They keep us in business.”
Greta found Alice’s eight cherry red books on the shelf, two copies of each, and handed them to Alice. As always, her mind drifted to Duncan when she saw Howard’s books. They looked identical to Duncan’s. The whole point of switching binders was to forget him, yet every interaction she had with Howard and Greta and their books just made him more present in her mind. If she couldn’t prevent herself from thinking in stories, from being inspired to write, she couldn’t keep herself from missing Duncan either, from wanting to forgive him. But Alice was stronger than her desires. She had to be.
Alice thanked Greta and started to leave with the heavy pile of books when Greta stopped her. “Oh, I almost forgot. Our distributor discontinued the cherry you use.” She held up three different colors of red leather, one burgundy, one amaranth, the other carmine. “Will one of these work instead?”
They were lush, deeply saturated colors, deserving of stories that brought people lasting love. Bound in any of these colors, the books would look different from Duncan’s. In their difference she would still be reminded of him.
“I’m actually taking a break for a bit,” she said.
“Good for you.” Greta put the leather away. “Your generation works too hard.”
Alice didn’t correct her.
Greta motioned for her to wait one moment. Alice watched as she crossed the shop to her knitting display, riffling through several hats until she found one toward the bottom of the pile and lifted it out. It was red, like Alice’s books. A beret.
“I knitted this a few years ago, but I knew the moment I met you that I was keeping it for you.” Greta set the beret on Alice’s head, angling it left and right until she was pleased with its arrangement. “We’ll be here when you’re ready to get back to it.”
In early December, it was still too warm outside for wool, but Alice wore the beret under her bike helmet all the way home. In her back pocket, her phone buzzed repeatedly. It had become a steady rhythm to her ride until she almost didn’t notice it anymore. By the time she arrived at her apartment, she had four messages from unsaved numbers and four missed calls from Gabby. Gabby never left messages, never called multiple times in a row either. Briefly Alice wondered if something was wrong, but she was running late for work—a wedding of course—and frankly she didn’t want another lecture from Gabby about Duncan. As close as they were, Gabby would never understand that it wasn’t some conquerable fear that Alice was running from. It was something deeper, something dispositional that she could not change about herself. When Gabby called again, Alice silenced her phone and dashed into her apartment to get ready for work.
27
The Reverse Pilgrimage
The requests kept coming. People offered more money, hard-to-get reservations, free housing. To them all, Alice gave the same response: she was no longer in business. One man proposed a sum so grand she would never have to work again, as a scribe or anything else.
