She steps back, and his hand feels incomplete without hers.
“Go, James.”
He soaks her in, ash flaked on her sweater, in her hair, on her nose. She reaches into her back pocket and pulls out a journal. Fighting tearsand every instinct to slap that journal out of her hand, James turns his back on her.
Cursing himself, he climbs into his truck.
Count to thirty.Watching the trees, he starts.One. Two. Three ...
Nelle pulls the journal from her back pocket, but something else tumbles out with it. A golden locket, engraved with a rose. She excavates it from the ashes, cracks it open, and stares at the two empty ovals, like a pair of black eyes, watching her. Waiting.Are you going to do it?they seem to ask.Well?The same taunt that almost drove her to write with her own ink on a street in New York.
The truck door slams shut.
Count to thirty, she said. By then, she will be gone. Flakes of dust on the wind.
Nelle runs her thumb over the locket. Then the journal hits the ground, fountain pen beside it, glass barrel black with her ink. Wind brushes the hair from her face, giving its blessing.
Go on, be free.
Thirty.
James opens the truck door, breathlessly hoping to find Nelle where he left her, already envisioning how he will sprint up to her, how good she will feel in his arms, knowing that she chose to stay. But when he steps out, she is gone.
No use fighting tears now. He braces against the chimney, hollow. The sun climbs, the sky brightens to robin’s-egg blue, and then James notices it.
He kneels in the ash beside the journal, pages splayed open and—
Blank.
The pen is cast aside, ink glistening.
She didn’t write it.
James looks up, left and right, spins around, but Nelle is gone.
He snatches up the journal and pen. Knowing that she is alive, that she might one day master her thoughts, that she might come back ...
That is her parting gift.
Or maybe, he thinks as he drives away,it’s her parting curse.
Chapter 35
James thought he would never see Nelle’s face again, but there it is.
Plastered on the front cover of a magazine’s Valentine’s Day issue:Big City, Young Love. The photograph is of the two of them in profile, zoomed in and so clear that James can see individual follicles on his chin, gilded in low gold lamplight. Each freckle on Nelle’s cheek, looking up at him as he grins, her tiny finger touching his nose. In the moment, the boop felt playful, but here it comes off as sensual. He buys a copy, then takes the L across the river.
Jessie’s new Williamsburg apartment is,temporarily, his home address as well.
Notes from class ring through his head on the five-minute walk down Berry Street. Talia’s comment about his style being too flowery for serious prose. He countered with,What if I don’t want to write serious prose?which broke the number-one rule of Professor Gadley’s workshop: unless prompted, don’t speak while being critiqued. Gadley, to James’s relief, didn’t take issue with his writing style, but she did feel disconnected from his main character.
James punches in the door code and takes the stairs to apartment 4C. Hot sugar swirls from the kitchen to the foyer as he drops his key in the ceramic bowl by the door.
“Did you rob a bakery again?” He careens into the kitchen, which overlooks the living room, which overlooks Third Street.
“No, just your pantry.” A voice floats down from the terraced second floor, footsteps ringing on the iron spiral staircase. Lucy’s fuzzy socks and soft smile. “Your cinnamon’s out, by the way.”
James frowns. “I bought a new container last week.”
