The airport.
All these weeks, I have not told Brian why I left. He assumes it is because after he told me about Gita, I was shocked.
I was. But not at Brian.
When he confessed, when he waited for my fury or my absolution or something in between…I didn’t feel angry. I didn’t feel hurt.
I didn’t feel much of anything.
And that scared the hell out of me—more than infidelity; more than realizing that I might have mistaken comfort for love. So I did what I’ve always done, when nothing makes sense: I ran. Had Meret not texted, had the universe not intervened—I would have gotten on a plane.
Three weeks ago, I thought I was running away from Brian.
But maybe, without even knowing it, I’d been runningtosomeone else.
—
WHENIARRIVEin England, I have lost the entire day. I boarded the flight in the early morning, and by the time I land in London, the sun is just setting, and there is a stream of traffic on the road, people heading home from their workday. The zoom of headlights becomes a glowing snake, like when Meret would wave a sparkler around in the dark, and I tracked her by the firefly trail she left behind.
Meret.
The bus drops me off in the center of Richmond. I have Thane Bernard’s address, thanks to the Internet search company, but I’ve realized too late that I do not have international service on my cellphone. So I stop at a pub, where a group of men and women who look like office mates are drinking pints and playing a trivia game on the television behind the bar. There, I order an ale and a meat pie, and I ask for directions.
I feel like I have jumped timelines. Like this version of Dawn is one who might be friends with the raucous crowd next to me, trying to remember the names of the characters onThree’s Company. Like I might have moved here after grad school and taught at Cambridge. Except that this other me wouldn’t be sitting on a pub stool feeling a hole where her moral core used to be.
“Another, luv?” the bartender asks, nodding at my empty glass.
I could sit here all night and delay the inevitable. But I have a flight back to Boston tomorrow morning, when I have to learn how to be brave, how to face the mess I’ve made.
I walk along the bank of the Thames and through a beautiful park where joggers rush past me, lost in their own music. I stop and pet a dog wearing a bandanna with the British flag on it. At last I find myself in front of the townhouse of Thane Bernard.
It is red brick, with an intricate black Victorian gate. I crane my neck, trying to see all the way up to the third story. It is narrow, rooms built in layers rather than sprawled. Several of the windows spill soft yellow light, like cat’s eyes.
“Win,” I whisper, “this is for you.”
A letter can be a beginning, or so I try to convince myself. In Egypt there are multiple origin myths, and in the Memphite one, Ptah speaks creation, and the hieroglyphs become the world.
I take the scroll from my backpack and open the gate, walking up to the small stoop. There is no mailbox, just a little slit in the door. Before I can slide the scroll through the slot, a movement catches my eye. In the wide double window to the right of the door a woman is carrying a roast chicken on a platter. She sets it on the dining room table.
This, then, would be Win’s other timeline. She might be here, cooking dinner. Calling everyone down for the meal. Healthy. Alive.
The woman is pretty. Taller than Win but less willowy; she has strong shoulders and sound hips and curves. As I watch, a teenage boy skids in, grabs a chicken leg off the plate, and starts eating it. I see her scold him, but he just grins and sits down at the table. A girl follows him, a few years younger, typing on her phone as she slumps down at her seat.
“Can I help you?”
I whirl around to find myself staring at Thane Bernard. He is lanky and lean, wearing the bright spandex of an avid cyclist. He carries a helmet in one hand, and smooths the other over his sweating, bald head. He has a slight accent, thehinhelprising like a helium balloon. I try to take a mental snapshot, so that I can tell Win, and then I remember that she may no longer be alive.
For the first time I wonder if it is fair for Win to make dissatisfaction contagious. I had been thinking so much about allowing her to come full circle that I didn’t realize I might be breaking the smooth track of someone else’s life.
“I…I think I have the wrong address,” I sputter, and I push past him back through the gate. I walk without turning around, my heart racing.
Four blocks away, I stop rushing. I sit on the curb and draw deep drafts of air into my lungs. The stars squint, shaming me.
I can’t do it.
I can’t break up two families in less than twenty-four hours.
I walk past the Victorian gate again, hidden in the folds of the darkness. Thane Bernard and his family are deep in a conversation I cannot hear, amidst the ruins of a picked-over chicken and a scraped plate of mashed potatoes.
