She hadn’t wanted the hug to end, but she’d been relieved when it had. Stu, too, seemed to acknowledge that this good-bye was going to stick in a way their prior ones hadn’t. He had seen it in the way Rae’s eyes stayed fixed even as they dripped tears: the two of them came from the same place, but they were branching toward vastly different futures. Or rather, she was branching off and he was staying put.
Sitting there in the hot tub of the Wilcox Box, Rae had finally started to admit to herself how a comfortable life with Stu in that comfortable house on the lake gave her the feeling of being caged in, like a cheetah who’d been taken to a zoo before she’d ever had a chance to sprint full-speed across the savannah and feel the raw power of her own legs.
Rae wasn’t done with her wild yet. It was starting to feel like she’d never be done with her wild, that maybe that was the whole point of womanhood after all, to break out of all the self-made or man-made cages, to run unleashed down the paths that you can’t stay away from, not to obediently walk down the ones you think you ought to.
Leveraging the momentum, she’d broken up with her job, too. It was finally time to work as hard for herself as she’d been working for someone else—no more distractions or excuses justifying why her dreams still had no mass. She’d saved up enough money to take a gamble at the writing life for a while. Otherwise, she’d never know. As she explained in a poem she’d jotted down in the cab ride from the airport,I’d rather be haunted by failure than by not knowing if I would’ve failed.
The decision to move to New York hadn’t felt like a decision at all. The same holy force that had drawn her to New York for college had drawn her back now. There was no other setting in which she could picture herself being a real writer, no other place bursting at the skyscraper-and-subway seams with so many stories.
She’d told her boss that she was moving back east to be a writer so she could look herself in the eyes before she died and say,Yes, I tried. He’d listed off all the reasons she should stay until she made partner, but when she’d come into his office for a last good-bye, his computer had been open to an article titled “10 Reasons to Retire ASAP and Travel the World in a Van.”
Rae hadn’t second-guessed the decisions to leave her steady partner or steady paycheck, and it left her with a peculiar sense of melancholy that she wasn’t the type of person who was content being content. But more than that, it had given her a new kind of adoration for herself, that she was finally making decisions based on how they felt inside her, not how they looked on paper.
Intuition was her new portfolio manager, exposing the grave-shaped holes in emotional investment strategies that focused on minimizing loss over a hundred-year time horizon rather than maximizing gains during each twenty-four-hour period.
Her mom hadn’t said much about Rae’s high-risk career switch, too busy mourning not getting Stu as a son-in-law (the moms had evidently already planned the wedding, down to the peony bouquets). Rae had told her mom to use the flowers at her own wedding to Chris, scheduled for the fall. As unfeminist as it felt, picturing her mom having a husband made it easier for Rae to move away again.
Her grandpa had ridiculed Rae’s decision, but at the airport he’d grumbled lovingly in her ear, “You’ve got your grandma’s spirit.”
Her dad had been the most enthusiastic fan of the pivot. “Life’s short,” he’d told her, during one of their biweekly catch-ups that they now had scheduled in their calendars—consistent baby steps in what had been an inconsistent rebuilding process. “Might as well go for it.”
Rae had finally felt like her dad understood her in that moment. He knew what it was like to do irrational things to avoid the hauntingWhat if?Though Rae hadn’t left her family to chase after a new life, she’d still let people down in the process. Perhaps this might be the deep connection point they’d been lacking to really get to know one another as the adults they’d become.
Ellen had been surprisingly unsurprised when Rae delivered the newly-single, newly-jobless news. “The universe was pulling you back,” Ellen had said as Rae set down her suitcase in the future nursery of Ellen and Aaron’s new Tribeca apartment, where she’d stayed while apartment hunting.
Rae had been set against ending up in Williamsburg but ultimately caved to the creative energy. She was subletting a scrunched third bedroom from two off-Broadway actors she’d met on a roommate-matching app. The women had resisted accepting “tainted money” from an ex–Wall Streeter until Rae had shown them theNew York Timespoem, which proved “decent insurgent potential.”
Having roommates again was somewhat of a step backward, but she felt propelled forward with a freedom she’d thought she’d find only in fiction.
“And so begins a new cycle,” Rae said, gripping the rooftop railing with clammy palms. Nothing had ever inspired her quite like this view.
Since being back in New York, she’d had two coffee chats with literary agents, the only ones who’d gotten back to her from the long list she’d cold-called. She hadn’t shown them her writing—she was still experimenting with voices and styles and wanted to play a while longer before being judged on a full manuscript—but she thought it would be helpful to learn about the industry from insiders. During both coffees, Rae had ordered tea, and both agents had explained that poetry books were extremely hard to sell. They didn’t want her to be disillusioned, they’d said, though that seemed very much their intent.
Instead, Rae had walked away more determined than ever to beat the odds.
Last night, in her thin-walled bedroom, as her roommates belted lines in the living room, she’d sneezed out six pages of half-prose, half-poetry that felt like it might take her somewhere, or perhaps nowhere, but she was going to find out.
All four Scramblettes were back in New York, with Sarah having returned after business school with her girlfriend-turned-fiancée. Mina had never managed to move away and was now living with the guy she’d bumped into on the staircase. Perhaps they’d all scramble back together, or maybe they’d just flip memories from time to time, smiling as the yellow yolks broke over a city that wore too much black.
As for Dustin, Rae hadn’t told him she was here. She’d moved back here for her own personal goals, not any expired romantic hopes. Sure, she’d thought about him while sitting in the bathtub trying to write that proposal poem for Stu—and more than a few other times since—but that didn’t mean he was the right person for her. It just meant Stu was the wrong one.
She wasn’t even halfway sure anymore that she wanted to end up with anyone. Maybe she’d never get married or have children, maybe she’d adopt kids on her own or have a sperm donor, or maybe she’dbecome a wife after all, but on her own timeline. She had no idea what the future held, but this didn’t make her feel blind or behind. It made her feel like she was bursting with life.
The only deal she wanted to close was the one that freed her from all of her archaic obligations and expectations.
She and Dustin would always be tied together at a spiritual level, but in a concrete sense, they were destined to unravel. She’d matured enough over the years to see that and respect it. Gone were the days of trying to force fate to conform to her own imagination.
She wasn’t exactly sure how she’d ended up back on this roof tonight. She would’ve liked to blame the judgment call on alcohol, but she hadn’t been drinking. She’d just been taking a nighttime stroll through the graffiti-streaked streets of Williamsburg, sponging up the vibrancy so she could wring it out onto the page later, and she’d somehow wound up here.
Now she found herself scrolling through her phone to find Dustin’s number. Perhaps it wouldn’t be the worst thing to just let him know she was here, she decided. It would be a pleasing and poetic proof of her evolution as an independent woman, how she could stand right beside him on this memory-haunted rooftop and not fall back into his arms.
He picked up in the gap between the third and fourth ring.
Her voice escaped, a raw, scraping sound. “Dustin.”
A pause stretched, then condensed. “Rae?”
She willed herself to think of something poetic or witty, or better yet wittily poetic or poetically witty, but nothing came.
