It has come to my attention, she explained to him over email,that not all my stories lead to everlasting love. Some have ended in cheating and violence, heartbreak. It’s too dangerous to continue.
Almost immediately, he wrote back.Everyone found love before the heartbreak?
Yes, Alice admitted,but it wasn’t lasting.
I’d be happy to take that risk, he declared.When can you start?
She did not write back. She stopped engaging with the other requests entirely. The phone continued to ring at all hours. Her voicemail box filled. Even on silent she could hear her phone pinging with new texts. One day, when she couldn’t take it anymore, she decided to go for a walk, hoping to clear her head.
She walked north on State, away from the ocean. The symbolism was not lost on her, this reverse pilgrimage on the same street but in the opposite direction from all those pilgrims who had followed the hummingbird to the ocean and found love. She imagined that with each step she was erasing her love stories, the ones she’d written, the ones she would never write, all the love and danger she might manifest in the world.
All around her the scenery presented images for clients whose stories she’d abandoned. A streetlight. A phone pole. A Rottweiler. A leaf. They struck her as forcefully as ever. She walked faster, which exposed her to more material. When she arrived at the shopping center that housed her favorite bookstore, she dipped inside, hoping the holy presence of all those books might save her from her gift.
The familiar layout of the store calmed her, the burgundy carpeting, the tight aisles, the calligraphy signs dangling from the ceiling, designating the different sections. She shut her eyes and breathed in the smell of paper, of bodies, of calm.
“Alice Meadows?” a familiar but not quite identifiable voice called from behind her. “Alice, is that you?”
She opened her eyes to find a stranger smiling at her. Immediately she panicked. Was he one of her clients? It was reckless, how quickly she passed along their stories, then allowed them to vanish from her mind. Clearly she had never respected her gift, never afforded it the care and attention it required.
“I thought that was you.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Alice, Alice, Alice, is it possible that I haven’t seen you since you were fourteen?”
Fourteen. Fourteen had stopped being an age, a year of life, anything other than the before and after of her father’s death. Alice studied this man, who was clearly pleased by their chance encounter and who remembered that time differently than she did, a time not bleached by her father’s death. As he smiled, she saw through his wrinkles, furrows, and an unfamiliar shock of white hair.
“Mr. Thomas,” she said remembering. He was her eighth grade language arts teacher. Alice had always enjoyed reading, but Mr. Thomas had made it into a religion for her, something to believe in. All that was before. After, her teachers never mentioned the papers she did not submit, the books she did not read, the tests where she wrote nothing more than her name at the top. Her grades for every class remained the same as they had been before that last month of finals. When her report card arrived, Bobby decided they should celebrate her near perfect average. Alice saw nothing celebratory in those grades, the way they pretended that nothing had changed.
“I’m surprised you recognized me,” Alice said breathlessly.
“At the risk of sounding foolish, you look the same. Older of course, but you look like you. That’s refreshing these days. Don’t worry,” he laughed. He had a generous laugh. It was part of what made him such a compelling teacher. He seemed to genuinely revel in his students’ discoveries. “I’m not expecting you to tell me I look the same too.”
“Well, you look enough the same that I recognized you.” Alice’s body relaxed. For Mr. Thomas, her time in his class was just another year of teaching.
“I suppose that’s something.” He shook his head. “Well, I would ask you what brings you here. I suppose it’s pretty obvious. I’m so glad you’re a reader. I know I can’t take credit for that. It always makes me feel like I’ve done my job though when I discover that any of my students is a reader or writer.”
“I’m definitely not a writer,” Alice blurted. She tucked her hair behind her ears, embarrassed.
“Oh, I’m not so sure about that. I still remember the story you wrote for my class when we were readingAnimal Farm,” Mr. Thomas said.
“We wrote stories for your class?” She had no memory of the assignment. In fact, she’d been certain the story she wrote for Gabby was the first one her mind had ever concocted.
He nodded like a proud father. “I asked everyone to write an allegory, and you came up with this story about a tortoise and a tricycle. It was delightful. I was reading it when I first met my husband.”
This got Alice’s attention.
He rubbed his hands together like he had in the classroom when he wanted to make sure he had a rapt audience. “I used to do all my grading at this diner not too far from here. It closed years ago. On Saturday mornings I’d sit at the counter and grade as I ate my breakfast. I was so focused on your story that I didn’t notice the man who sat down next to me. I sensed his presence, but I couldn’t have told you the first thing about him, so absorbed was I. When he cleared his throat I looked over to see golden brown eyes watching me. ‘Must be quite the story,’ he said, and I followed his eyes to the counter where syrup was dripping off my plate onto my pants. I startled and jumped up, managing to knock the whole plate into his lap. I expected him to be pissed off. He just laughed and said, ‘Well, now I need to see what was so interesting that we’re both covered in your French toast.’
“At some point,” Mr. Thomas continued, “ourcoincidentalbreakfasts became planned. I’m not sure why either of us felt the need to be coy. Maybe it made everything seem more fated, like the kind of love story you’d read in a book.” He stared at Alice with the look she’d come to know well from her clients. She could hearOh, Aliceon the tip of his tongue.
Mr. Thomas leaned forward like he was about to tell her a secret. There were dark circles engulfing his eyes, his complexion ghostly white. “This might sound a little woo-woo—it felt like your words bonded us. Like the story was ours.”
Alice tried to smile in the way that was fitting for when someone told you how they met their partner, only she was still coming to terms with what it meant that he’d read her story, spilled some maple syrup, and fallen in love. Gabby’s hummingbird hadn’t been her first. And if this story had led Mr. Thomas to love, did her lab reports and history essays help her other teachers find their special someone? Maybe there were dozens of educators out there on whom she’d unknowingly bestowed love. Maybe her emails made people brave. Maybe every word she committed to the page was magic. Maybe her gift had been part of her since birth, not hers to control, something she couldn’t stop now even if she tried.
“Really, Alice,” Mr. Thomas said. “I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to see you. Wait until I tell Joe that I ran intotheAlice Meadows. You’re a bit of a celebrity in our house.”
“Are you still teaching?” she asked, hoping to steer the conversation away from herself.
His smile lines disappeared into the loose skin around his mouth. “I had to retire last year.”
All at once, Alice saw that he was sick. His pallor wasn’t fatigue but illness, lurking below the surface of his skin.
