The day came.
There was no card. There was no gift.
She sat in the window, and he did not come.
I wasn’t with her. We were both working through college, barely scraping by. At that point I had a submenial job helping clear out the basement of a local factory, and the guy wouldn’t let me take the evening off. There were plenty of other assholes, he knew, who’d be happy to step into my shoes. I couldn’t afford to lose the job, and Steph knew it and wouldn’t have let me. I’d given her my gift that afternoon—an inexpensive necklace and a new copy of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a book she loved—but had to leave her after that.
I got off work at one in the morning and walked back into town as quickly as I could. It was January and beyond cold. I’d talked to the other girls in the house and they’d said they were going to throw her a party, but either it hadn’t happened or she’d declined to take part. There was only one light on in her house, and it was Steph’s. Her room was on street level, had this big window in front. I stood outside and saw her at her desk. She had fallen asleep with her head on her arms. She was dressed in the best clothes she had.
She’d waited, and he hadn’t come.
I was young and didn’t understand a whole lot about the world, but I knew that this was dark and bad and wrong and could not stand. I stood there for ten minutes, too cold to shiver, not knowing what to do.
Then I turned back and walked home. I entered a silent house and looked around for what I could find. I knew it wasn’t going to be much, or anything like enough, but it was all I had and all I could do.
At six I walked back to her street and went up to her window. She was still at her desk, still asleep. I rapped on the window, quietly. She woke up. She looked over at the window, saw it was me, and her disappointment was only momentary. I gestured at her to come over.
She did, and slid up the windowpane. “He didn’t come.”
“But I did.”
“What are you wearing?”
The answer was the blackest jeans I had (sadly also the ones with a tear on the knee), a white shirt belonging to one of my housemates, and another’s crumpled black jacket—plus I had a tie I’d made half an hour before, from a strip of dark T-shirt.
“It’s Armani,” I said. “Really. I wrote it on the collar with a Sharpie.”
She tried to smile.
“Come on,” I said.
She climbed out through the window. I took her hand and led her up the street. It was still night-dark and when we got to Main there was nothing open yet except the place we were going. I felt kind of dumb and knew this could land very flat, but I also knew it was the best I could do and that I loved this girl enough to take the risk of looking a fool.
Finally we were outside the place.
“Bill, why are we . . . here?”
“Because we have a reservation,” I said.
I guided her toward the door. Inside the McDonald’s it was deserted, though it was technically open. Only half the normal array of lights were on. A pasty-faced server stood yawning behind one of the registers.
“Bill . . .”
“Shh,” I said. The manager came out from a side door, a guy called Derek, an older student and world-class dopehead I’d worked with at a previous job and who owed me for covering him a zillion times. When I’d called him at 4:00 A.M. that morning he’d been pissed as hell, but eventually decided he’d help.
“Ma’am,” he said, in a croak that sounded like a rook with a hangover. He cleared his throat, tried again. “Your table is totally waiting for you.”
He gestured, and Steph turned to see that the corner table in the window had two candles on it. I’d found them under the sink in the kitchen in my house. I had no idea how many years they’d been there, and one was three inches longer than the other. They had been stood upright in a pair of wineglasses I’d brought from the same place. There was metal silverware laid out, also from the house, a little bent and tarnished.
We went to the table and sat opposite each other. Derek brought us food. We ate. We talked, and when Derek couldn’t let the restaurant just be ours any longer and turned the lights and the Musak on, the first song that played was Shania Twain singing “You’re Still the One,” and sometimes that’s just how the world works, and finally Stephanie laughed and it was the day after her birthday, and everything was kind of okay.
That was our breakfast at McDonald’s.
Back when I was me.
I didn’t notice when it stopped raining. I merely realized, slowly, that it had. I called the hospital and was told that Stephanie was sleeping, and her signs were stable. I wanted to turn around and drive straight back, wait by the side of her bed and will her to be well again, but I knew that wasn’t what I had to do right now.
I pulled back out into the slow, postrain traffic, and drove on toward Longboat Key.
PART III
IMMEDIATE FUTURE
Let us depart, with a kiss,
for an unknown world.
—ALFRED DE MUSSET, La nuit de Mai
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Warner is in a chair again, but this time it is not a hard wooden chair but one that is padded and comfortable. He has no idea where the chair is, but it is pretty warm. He is running with sweat, though he is naked, and he can smell the smell of himself around him like a cloud. He can see the mess on his thigh and it looks terrible, like mangled meat left out in the sun. He has been given something—a lot of something—to make the damage fade away. It has worked. The pain got on a jet plane and flew to the other side of the world, business class. He doesn’t hurt at all, anywhere, even though his poor broken fingers still do not work. He feels great. He feels fabulous. He is just so fucking okay with everything, and everything is fine.
He jerks himself upright, peers around. Tries to work out where this heavenly place of comfort is. Hotel room? Apartment? The drapes are shut. The lights are low. The floor has been covered with plastic sheeting. There’s someone lying on it.
A woman.
And just like that, the pressure valve opens in his heart. It’s a feeling he’s known many times before. How many? He doesn’t know. He remembers the first, of course—he’s traced through that memory already this morning. But afterward? Who’s counting? He’s never kept souvenirs, though many do. Since he realized he was not alone and there was even an organization, he has met men—and a woman, once—who make marks on an internal stick, who keep a little something each time, who want to be able to go back in their minds to each occasion, to savor those bright stars one more time. Not him. Once it’s done, it’s done. You move on, keep walking, head on down the road.
There’s a noise, which confuses him. Did he make it? He doesn’t think so. It was a soft, low moan. It can’t have been him. He doesn’t feel like moaning. He feels like singing. He feels like shouting to the skies.
The sound happens again and he realizes it has come from the woman on the sheet, and he almost whiteouts with the surge of power inside his head, and his joy is unconfined. Oh praise be—she’s still alive.