She closes the lid of her suitcase and fastens it with a click. Her whole life fits neatly inside, with room to spare. It is a practicality of reinventing herself every decade. She can’t keep her old clothes, has no use for corsets and petticoats. And she has never been one for sentimental trinkets, not since she traded away her wedding band. If it doesn’t serve a purpose, she doesn’t keep it, and reminding her of a life she can never have again is not a purpose.
Besides, she doesn’t need a keepsake to call up the memories. She remembers them all, and she is certain she has never made a mistake like this. Not even the faerie’s curse, which at least brought her Oliver.
Oliver, who loved her.
She should have told him what he meant to her, should have told him she loved him, should have said goodbye. She should have said a lot of things.
She pulls his plaid sport coat from the arm of the gaudy chair in front of the television. It smells faintly of lavender and apples and forest and him. Or maybe she is already imagining him in places he’s not. She throws it over her shoulders, slips her arms through the sleeves, and wraps herself in it. Her gaze lands on his journal lying on the floor. The last piece of him.
She crosses the room and gingerly picks it up. The cover had been worn from use ages ago. Now, the spine is broken, a few pages torn loose and scattered nearby. Beatrix gathers them up.
She sits on the unmade bed, crosses her legs beneath her, and opens Oliver’s journal in her lap. She will read his stories over and over, try to find him between the lines he has written. She will memorize his words—etch them into her heart—yet she will still open the book, just to touch the pages he has touched. But not tonight.
Tonight, Beatrix flips past the pages Oliver has filled. Past Shakespeare and Carnevale, the ballet and the Crystal Palace. She passes Amelia Earhart and Paris, slows when she reaches Apollo 11. Turnsthe page to find a single word written across the top in Oliver’s blocky handwriting: Woodstock.
Her stomach drops, hope twisting into dismay, twisting into hope again.
Oliver hadn’t come back to the car, hadn’t come back to the motel. He doesn’t have the time. But Woodstock is here, in his journal. His next excursion. Already planned. Already approved.
Her heart races. Woodstock is less than a month away. She could get there. He could find her. Just like they promised each other under the bright stars of Lancaut.
And then she will tell him everything she has never had the courage to say.
August 15, 1969Bethel, New York
Beatrix weaves through the crowd, clutching her picnic blanket to her chest. Woodstock is larger than she ever thought possible, an endless ocean of people stretching in every direction. Oliver would have told her exactly how many people if he was here.
He is here. She just hasn’t found him yet.
She has no idea where to start looking.
She searches the faces of the people she passes, asks them all if they have seen anyone matching Oliver’s description. They laugh and look at her like she’s mad. Maybe she is. She only has an hour, maybe two, before the festival starts. And when the sun goes down, it will be impossible to find him.
Nearly.
Beatrix keeps looking, keeps asking, keeps shouting his name as she makes her way down the muddy hill toward the stage, sure Oliver will try to get the best view of history he can. When she scans the faces of the people gathered in the front row, she doesn’t find him there, either.
Maybe he is with the musicians or with the people organizing the festival. She keeps an eye out for anyone who looks official, but it is organized chaos, and mostly chaos at that.
And then she sees him, out of the corner of her eye. Tall, with dark hair and those thick-framed glasses, chatting with a man near the speaker towers. She races toward him, pushing through the people in her path. She’s about to call his name when he turns toward her, and her heart falls. Crashes. It’s not him.
It’s hopeless. There are hundreds of thousands of people. Even if he has come, how is she supposed to find him?
Maybe he will find her. She trudges up the hill and claims a spotwith her blanket, half hoping Oliver will appear out of thin air to sit next to her. Woodstock’s first act takes the stage and her heart sinks. He wouldn’t miss this.
Her hope dwindles as the evening stretches on. The sun sets and darkness settles over the crowd. There could be fifty of them or a million, the people swallowed up by the black night.
A young man with a cloud of curly brown hair and an acoustic guitar sings a folk rendition of Simon & Garfunkel’s “America” in the glare of a single spotlight. The crowd rises to give him a standing ovation, and Beatrix wonders if he feels—if any of the people cheering on their feet now have ever felt—that empty, aching loneliness he sang about.
The rain starts soon after, cool and unrelenting. Beatrix wraps her blanket around her shoulders, but it’s not long before she’s soaked through to her clothes, to her skin. It’s nearly one in the morning when Joan Baez takes the stage. The night’s final act. There is still no sign of Oliver.
His notebook is tucked away in her suitcase, protected from the wet and the mud and curious eyes. Beatrix doesn’t need to see the page to know what it says:Woodstock, August 15–18, 1969. But the fifteenth is over—the sixteenth just begun—and she hasn’t found him. He hasn’t found her.
There must be half a million people huddled against the rain, listening and singing and hoping together. Hoping love and music can bring peace. Solve the world’s problems and make this war the last war.
Beatrix wants to tell them they’re wrong. That their hope is pointless. That there is always another war. Because humans are cruel, their lives short, their memories shorter. Because sitting in this muddy field, surrounded by people full of hope and love, she feels completely, utterly alone. Because she is pathetic for wanting this life. Because the faerie was right.
Joan Baez’s lilting voice cuts through the darkness. She tells the audience she will sing one more song, the last song of the night. An ending.
