“I just want to know if it’s good.” Alice nudged the pages toward her best friend.
“You don’t need me to tell you it’s good. Besides, what would you do if I said it wasn’t?”
“Burn it,” Alice sulked, as though Gabby had read it and hated it. This was why she never talked to anyone about her stories. From the way they cocked their heads or their eyes drifted as she spoke, she inferred judgments that weren’t there. In this way writing was a lot like love.
As a New Year’s resolution, Gabby had decided to take a year off dating. Alice didn’t believe she would last that long, but she’d already rejected three suitors, one of whom Alice thought she should have pursued. “If he’s around a year from now, maybe. If it’s going to happen, it will happen,” Gabby said.
In the eleven months since Alice wrote Gabby’s hummingbird tale, all five relationships it inspired had run their course. Gabby’s sister, Maria, had ended things with Claudia when she realized she hadn’t been single in a decade and had just run from girlfriend to girlfriend, slipping into domesticity before she could decide if the home they created together was one she wanted to live in. She and Claudia stayed friends, both admitting they’d rushed too quickly into something more—or less—than what they wanted. Who was to say that romance was a more serious relationship than friendship? Alice had certainly given more of herself to Gabby than she ever gave to anyone romantically. The others who’d read the story—Erica, Sal, and Cat—all decided that they needed time alone and separated amicably from partners who weren’t meant for the long term. In the end Alice had brought each of them love, just not with someone else. They’d followed the hummingbird to the ocean and learned to lead themselves.
Gabby pushed the pages back to Alice. “This one is for you.”
Alice sighed and put the pages back in her bag. “I’m just, I’m afraid.”
“It’s okay to be afraid. A lot of important parts of life are scary. Just imagine if you didn’t run from fear. What if you embraced it instead? Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.”
Alice had always run from fear. Fear was a hurricane, a tornado, a mudslide, something you sought shelter from. She didn’t know how to think of it as a steady wind you could catch in a sail, a storm that might produce a rainbow, a downpour to dance in.
The days mounted as Alice avoided her own story, ignored calls from potential clients, erased increasingly frustrated and frantic messages about works in progress. She couldn’t stop thinking about Madeline, who still seemed so real to her. She couldn’t believe that the old woman wasn’t waiting for her in the mountains. It made her realize that she had one more journey to make, one she’d confronted on the page but not in real life.
Alice’s heart beat faster the moment she started up the incline to Stagecoach Road, pounding as she wound around each hairpin turn. When she pulled up to that familiar tavern and bar along the road, the buildings looked smaller than she expected. Alice parked her car and followed the gravel walkway.
It smelled just as she’d remembered, Lysol and beer, stone and wood, but so much about its appearance was different. She’d spent enough afternoons here that she was certain its contours had been imprinted on her just as they really were. The ceiling was lower, the small bar almost claustrophobic. It held a few tables, and while deer heads and skulls lined the walls, there was no taxidermy bear, no moose heads. Above the fireplace a metal plate displayed a quote about how the clock was the eternal soul of a room.
“Get you something?” the waitress asked Alice, wiping down the bar with a towel. She was not Shirley of Alice’s story, but she was around the same age.
Alice ordered a beer and leaned against the bar since it was too narrow for stools. When the bartender plopped a disposable plastic cup of beer before her, Alice sipped it slowly, taking everything in. It was the same bar from her youth, only like everything about her childhood, Alice had preserved it as she’d wanted it to be rather than as it was.
When the waitress asked if she wanted to order any food, Alice declined. “Just the beer. I used to come here all the time as a kid. I haven’t been here in nearly twenty years.”
“Is that right?” the waitress said.
“On Sundays I’d ride up with my dad. His name was Paul Meadows. Maybe you knew him?”
The waitress looked squarely at Alice, breathing her in. “I’ve only been working here a few years,” she said regretfully. There was no one else around to ask about her father, no one to confirm that those trips to the mountains had been as adventurous as Alice remembered.
Alice finished her beer, thinking not of her father but of her mother. Bobby was right. Alice had glorified the past. It still scared her to let go of all the ways she’d made her father infallible, their time together perfect. Except it didn’t need to be perfect to be special. He didn’t need to be perfect for Alice to love him. Alice didn’t need to be perfect for someone to love her either.
Alice took the long way back to town, like she and her father used to do. The road dipped beneath the overpass of 154 and continued to wind through the dense forest. At some point Alice had passed the spot where Madeline’s house had been, but the roadside was all steep, sandy hills. There was nowhere for any other road, marked or unmarked, to branch off into the woods.
The trip back to the highway was much longer than Alice recalled. It gave her time to think. She was ready to read her story, ready to confront all the ways her gift scared her, ready to confront all the ways life scared her too. By the time she got home, she knew what she needed to do.
39
Just Breathe
The sign on the door to Willow Bindery was turned to closed. Alice peered through the window. The shop looked exactly the same as it had on her last visit. She wasn’t sure why she’d expected to find the card display gone or the wrapping paper wall displaying different prints, concrete alterations conveying that too much time had passed without her. In back, she could see light bleeding from Duncan’s workshop. She pounded on the door.
He emerged, looking slightly miffed at the intrusion. His hair was falling from his ponytail, and he had ink on his cheek. Relief washed over his face when he saw it was Alice. He unlocked the door, stepping back to create a physical distance between them.
“Alice,” he said, with too many emotions—wariness, hope, confusion, perhaps a touch of fear—fleeting across his face for Alice to isolate one and intuit what it meant for him to see her after two and a half months.
“Here,” she said, holding out the cat thumb drive. Her heart was racing so fast she feared she might collapse. She leaned back against the door, gasping for air. This pain was familiar to her body, but it wasn’t any easier to endure now that she accepted it signaled a phantom danger.
“Hey.” Duncan reached for the drive and set it on the counter beside the register. He put both hands on her shoulders. “It’s okay. Just breathe.”
He brought her behind the counter, sat her down on the single stool, and told her to stay put as he disappeared into the back. A distant faucet ran. Alice could barely hear it above the throbbing in her ears. This was not how she’d imagined their reunion.
By the time Duncan returned with a glass of water, Alice’s heart had slowed and her nerves had settled to her stomach where they felt sour and heavy. She brought the water to her lips. Its coldness soothed her throat. Duncan watched as she finished the glass. When she looked up at him, she expected him to make a quip about how that was quite the entrance or how he often had that effect on people; he just stared at her, concerned.
