The Stall Street Journal now seemed to be whining, crying even, to be written in, and so she brought it with her back into the bathroom, hoping it might catalyze her creativity. She liked, also, the notion that she was old enough to appreciate the symbiotic relationship between past and present, how her yesterdays helped write her tomorrows.
Slipping back into the tub, she leafed through the parchment-like pages, too quickly to make out any individual words, until she landed on a blank one. In her best cursive, she wrote the proposal poem’s title—Hoppily Ever After?—an ode to the beer from their date in Indy, the night she’d realized that their love story might have a lot more life left in it.
Rae took another sip of wine, and then a gulp, waiting for inspiration to strike.
The sun shifted down, casting a lone ray on top of the cabinets, turning dust into glitter.
She turned to the very last page in the journal, deciding it might help if she started at the end and worked her way up. But the last page was already written on, in alarming red pen:
Some hearts never start;
Some hearts never stop;
But all of ours are beating tonight.
—Bellini
Vein by vein, coldness cut through Rae. She turned on the hot water but quickly turned it off again. She was craving the cold, the alertness of her senses, taking in the world one frozen frame at a time.
The red pen matched the ink on the very first page, half burned, where Dustin had inscribed that other Bellini quote about how if the world feels cold to you, then at least you know you’re still warminside. And Rae realized how Dustin had known, back when he first gave her the journal, that she’d write her way to the end, even when she hadn’t had a drop of faith in it herself.
Submerging her head in the tub, she held her breath as long as she could, and then a little longer.
For a while now, she’d been trying to block out the darker, complicated emotions that might threaten her contentment. She’d been keeping her feet on the path she wanted them to follow, keeping her head down and burying herself in Stu’s smooth-water optimism so she wouldn’t feel her own storms. But in trying to keep the peace, she now realized she’d lost so many other pieces of herself. She was living the life she thought she should, not the life she thought she could.
Her lungs stretched, and her eyes blinked water in and then out again.
The forecast for the future was dissolving into hazy clouds, but she saw hazel clarity for tonight.
She couldn’t hold her breath any longer.
Coming to the surface, she dried her hands on the sleeve of the bathrobe and opened the Stall Street Journal to its second-to-last page, completely blank, and wrote four rhymeless words.
PART 5
ELEVEN DAYS AFTER THE DEADLINE
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
A NEW CYCLE BEGINS
“I’ve missed you,” Rae gritted out, finally guiltless as she stood on the Lorimer Loft rooftop in late October. “God, I’ve missed you.”
She was staring into the bright eyes of the volatile skyline that had wrapped her back into its urban folds as spectacularly as it had elbowed her out.
From across the East River, Manhattan pulsed to an electric hypnosis that made Rae forget that she’d ever left, or why she’d wanted to.
An ambitious wind gust tugged her newly chopped hair, poking out from the Santa hat she was wearing. The hat’s pom-pom bobbed against her cheek to the changed-but-still-the-same Brooklyn beat.
On her walk over, no one had looked twice at her for wearing a Santa hat in October, and though she once might’ve been miffed that no one had even lookedonce, the blanket acceptance now made her love this city with fresh intensity.
She’d moved back on her thirtieth birthday, eleven days ago. It had felt like a very satisfying symbol of rejecting the rigid married-by-thirty timeline that she’d built up for years and years, ballooning it into the ultimate delusion of success.
The plane ride had physically lifted her, freeing her from the weight of other people’s expectations, and more importantly, freeing her from her own. Contrary to what she’d made herself believe, and what society had made her believe, she had not shriveled up into a withered old maid now that she was single at thirty. Paradoxically, or perhaps not paradoxically at all, she felt younger than ever, a newborn child in this vast, vast world that asked nothing from her except that she might pause and breathe in its miracle.
This was her first time on this rooftop in over two years. She’d sneaked into the building in the drunken wake of a group of baby-faced midtwenties. Too energized for the elevator, she’d walked up all eight flights of stairs and emerged onto the empty roof.
Back in Indiana, the breakup with Stu had gone as smoothly as she could’ve hoped, but it still left her feeling frayed. He’d asked if she’d change her mind if he agreed to move to New York with her, but she’d said no, she still didn’t think they were the right fit, and he’d said okay, there was no way he’d move there anyway. During their final hug, she’d slipped that horribly insufficientI’m so sorry, Stunote into his jeans pocket, liking the idea that he might keep it for a while and remember her handwriting, before he found someone else whose cursive was easier to read.
