A thought is just a thought, a thought is just a thought, a thought is just a thought ...
Chapter 28
Fat snowflakes coat the sidewalk, slicken the streets. Worker bees frantically spread across the city to cover every paved surface with salt, but despite their efforts, wrecks have been popping all morning. James stuffs his hands in his pockets and braces against the cold as he steps out of Butterfly House, his new favorite café.
He orders cappuccinos now. Upon landing in JFK in September, he asked for his usual iced latte, but when the wet condensation hit his hand, he knew he wouldn’t be able to drink it. Forcing down even a swallow would have made him sick thinking of Nelle. Since starting his new life, he has only one rule: all reminders of her are banned.
He sips his cappuccino as a buzz fills his pocket.
Jessie’s name pops up, along with a photograph of her wearing thin rectangular sunglasses and smoking a joint on her balcony.
“Hey, loser.”
Her voice sucks him out of his day of despair. His feet are sore from standing in the cramped halls of shitty apartment buildings, holding every personal document imaginable in a manila folder, attending open house after open house, each potential listing more nightmarish than the last. There are only so many minifridges and communal bathrooms he can bear.
The pedestrian signal across the street is an orange hand, and a crowd forms to stare at it, or at their phones, waiting for it to change. A few brave souls stride across the four lanes in front of oncoming cars.In his three months as a resident of New York, James has yet to stop traffic to reach his destination on time.
“Hey,” he says. “I’m on my way. You still at the bookstore?”
“Yeah, I don’t get off until four,” Jessie says. “No luck?”
“Everything’s so expensive.” Steamed milk and espresso settle in his stomach. “And I fear working at a bookstore with a shit-ton of student debt doesn’t make me a desirable tenant.”
“I’ll cosign with you,” Jessie says. “Or stay with me. Use my spare bedroom for the next two years if you need to. Or ten. Unless I have kids, then we’ll all move to a bigger place together, if you’re willing or still unable to—”
“Thank you, but no,” he cuts her off. “I’ll be gone as soon as I score an apartment with a freezeranda shower.”
“Well, the offer’s there. Did you get your tuition worked out?”
The light changes, and the crowd shifts into motion. James crosses the street, weaving between people, smog ghosting over cars, snowflakes coming down like ash.
“Yes, the loan finally came through. It’s all finalized. I have a meeting with my advisor next week to go over my schedule.”
The night he received his acceptance email from NYU, he screamed and barreled into Jessie’s room. She was half awake, hair a bird’s nest, when she heard the news, but that didn’t stop her from insisting they celebrate with ice cream from the corner store. They made whiskey floats and talked until dawn.
He pauses outside the narrow wood-paneled door to Shack O’ Books. A woman walks by with her shoe-wearing dog, followed by a pair of bundled parents pushing a stroller. A suit cuts James off, booming into his phone. Behind him strides a rail-thin woman with the stature of a fashion model.
James pushes inside the store, snow blowing in with him. A bell dings its welcome note.
Jessie waves from her perch behind the vintage register. Into her phone she says, “Have fun at work!”
“Yeah.” He slides onto the stool beside her. “You, too.”
Jessie’s spare bedroom is James’s now.
Despite his insistence that his stay wastemporary, she took him antiquing for decorations, then to Pottery Barn for new bedding and sheets. Scarlet pillows on a green-and-cream patterned quilt, a knitted throw over the foot. Chestnut bookshelves filled with his favorites. The red typewriter rests on the nightstand, the typewritten copy of his novel hidden in the back of the dresser drawer. On the desk, beneath the window where he spent those weeks high on love and writing, sits a silver slab. His laptop, a magical device that has increased his productivity tenfold.
Too fast for his own liking, he has reintegrated himself back into a technological lifestyle. If society didn’t require it, he would go months at a time without touching his phone. The weeks he traveled with Nelle, free from the chains of his phone, were some of the best of his life.
She left the cottage without giving him a chance to explain. To reason. Didn’t bother to hear his feelings before she reacted. But he can’t blame her. Like him, she knew what she wanted. And for the first time, that morning in the cottage, she had the power to leave.
He unplugs his laptop, digs his manuscript from the dresser, and takes them to the bed, exhausted from a day of walking and apartment hunting and work. The glare of the screen blinds him, so he squints as he types in his password. Jessie suggested he try transcribingThe Summer Curse, that it would be therapeutic. He refused to let her read it, but he has told her bits and pieces. Nothing revealing about Nelle.
He plops the manuscript on his right and opens a new document on his laptop. Though it’s undoubtedly a bad idea to fall down this hole, James opens page one and starts typing. As he sinks into the story, he relives those early memories of July. The honeysuckle outside Nelle’s window. Fire crackling. That first taste of freedom on the highway.
It’s past 3:00 a.m. when he forces himself to stop. RereadingThe Summer Cursemakes his rib cage feel like it’s sinking in on itself. He ponders an alternate reality where he chose to stay with Nelle, to travel the world with no money, to live homeless wherever they went, with only enough saved up to book a flight from one city to the next.
Is that her life now? She is still alive, of course, but is she happy?I hope she’s not happy.No, he doesn’t mean that. He wants her to be happy. He just wants her to miss him like he misses her, to wonder whether she made the right decision, to twist her bedsheets up at night thinking about what went wrong and how it could have gone differently. He wants her to want to be in New York, sleeping beside him.
