Now she was sitting on it. Stained yellow; round wooden feet, brocade flowers, a missing centre cushion.
Jessica went to the kitchen and put water on for tea. She changed out of her wet clothes while the tea was steeping, sat back down on the couch, and turned to the next page. It was empty. Impulsively she picked up a pen and wrote:
Renee was in shape from swimming twice a week so she and Neil were able to carry the couch down the street, around the corner into the alleyway, through the butcher’s yard that always inspired her, for fifteen minutes at a time, to become a full time vegetarian again, instead of a lapsed little-bit-of-chicken, little-bit-of-fish one. They set it down to pant heavily, exuding vast puffs of vapoury breath, dragon like, staring at their frozen whale, the return journey up the fire escape: the hard part. It didn’t help that they’d gone to the campus pub earlier and were drunk, or maybe, on the contrary, that was what made them think they could pull it off.
Jessica remembered she’d gotten the top end, being so much smaller than Simeon. She’d asked him to abandon the project because the slats of the fire escape were icy now and slick with sleet. She was afraid she’d lose her grip on the couch and kill Simeon. She told him so but he thought it made more sense to keep going than to take the couch back down. Jessica had hoped they could just leave it on the fire escape, a canted yellow whale.
She put down her pen and turned the page.
The unknown writer continued the story:
Renee learned to hate the couch—she always meant to find a replacement for the missing centre cushion that, if it wouldn’t match, would at least fit. She never did. The couch sat there for a year and eventually she called Neil and they lifted it once again and carried it back down the fire escape from whence it had come. They left it on the second storey roof; a place to sit and contemplate unlikely cannas. The young women downstairs appreciated it more than she did. They always drank cold Steam Whistles on its leaf-shadowed squishiness in the afternoon when they got home from their landscaping jobs. Leaf shadows joining with brocade fabric ones, mutating.
Years later, when Renee was happily married, she found a yellow couch at a yard sale that reminded her of the first one. It was as if the couch had followed her. Why? What did it mean? Should she buy it? She pulled out her cell to call Neil and ask him.
Jessica shut the book. She was apparently reading her own future.
It was a good future. She still lived in the apartment; she had nice new downstairs neighbours. She still had the couch. She still had Simeon. And later on, she found a nice guy, and got to keep Simeon too.
There was a tiny part of her, she realized, that had always doubted there would be a later on, for her. She felt reprieved by this story, by whoever had written it.
Jessica remembered her and Simeon’s Ouija board phase. Ouija boards were usually a girl thing, but Simeon was Simeon.
Will I find love?
O-H Y-E-S.
Who will it be?
M-O-R-G-A-N.
Jessica spent all of grade eight looking for Morgan but he never appeared.
This was like that, only much worse. Or better, depending on how you looked at it. Except that Jessica wasn’t thirteen anymore. She couldn’t get excited. It was just nuts. There had to be a rational explanation, and suddenly its obviousness dawned on her. She picked up the cordless and called Simeon. “I found your book,” she announced.
“That’s great,” he said. “I thought I’d have to get a new one! Bring it to class tomorrow.”
“Okay,” Jessica said. “It was right on the street outside my door. You must have dropped it last time. We drank two bottles of wine, remember?”
“I’m so relieved. They’re eighty dollars,” Simeon said, “and there aren’t any at the used bookstore.”
“What are you talking about?” Jessica asked.
“My biology textbook.”
“No, this is a yellow hard-cover journal with lined pages. You’re writing a short story in it. It’s about you and me, and that day last winter we brought home my couch, only you’ve changed our names to Renee and Neil.”
“Not so,” Simeon said.
“You’re lying to mess with my head,” Jessica said.
“That would be someone else,” Simeon said.
“But who? No one saw us that day. The description of the roof, the cannas, the fire escape. It’s all there, exactly as it happened.”
It was Simeon’s turn to say it. “You’re lying to mess with my head.”
“But I’m not. And it even describes our future.”
“Oh?” Simeon didn’t do too good a job of sounding credulous.
“We’re still best friends in a year, and even after I get married. See you tomorrow.”
Jessica hung up. She picked up the yellow book, opened it to the page ahead of the last entry. It was empty. Should she write something more? She leafed through the remaining pages one by one. Every single one was empty.
If she wrote something else about Renee and the yellow couch, would another entry appear, one page ahead?
Jessica knew how to find out, but she was too afraid to try. Instead, she slipped the yellow book into her canvas bag. She’d show it to Simeon. He’d admit it was his after all. That had to be it. The part about her writing the missing part of the story was just a coincidence. Pleased with her analysis, Jessica went to sleep.
The next day Jessica went to the café after class to meet Simeon. Her cheque from her little job at the library had finally cleared, and it was her turn to treat. She stood in line at the crowded counter while the manager stuffed two carrot muffins into a paper bag. Someone tapped her shoulder. She thought it was inadvertent; the café was so crowded. The tap came again. She turned around. A young man in a wool scarf and a duffle coat stood there holding out her journal, the black one she’d lost the day before. Everyone had those notebooks. Except that she’d taped a postcard of a Christiane Pflug painting to the cover, “Cottingham School with Yellow Flag.” What was it about yellow, anyhow?
She took it. “Thanks,” she said. She felt exposed, wondering if he’d read it. She wrote in journals to vent, not to be brilliant. She felt suddenly angry at all the imaginary people who’d found her many lost notebooks and snickered at her.
“Do I know you?” Jessica asked. “How did you know it was mine?”
Maybe he stared at her in some class. Maybe he’d surreptitiously stolen her book so he’d have an excuse to introduce himself.
He smiled. “I’m Morgan,” he said, and turned away before it even sank in.
“Wait!” she called when it did.
He was already at the door. He heard her, though. He turned around and said, “I don’t think you’ll lose your notebooks anymore, Renee.”
She pushed through the crowd to follow him. On St. Andrews she turned both ways. He was gone. She felt like someone was performing experiments on her. How would she react?
“Jessica!” someone said behind her, and she started, afraid to turn and look, see the young man again. Except whoever it was had called her Jessica, not Renee. And she knew Simeon’s voice, she always had. She was just so disoriented she’d momentarily forgotten. Just as she’d forgotten—or pretended to have forgotten—that the handwriting in the yellow book wasn’t like Simeon’s, not even remotely.
She reached into her bag to get out the yellow journal and show it to Simeon. But her bag felt, once again, alarmingly empty. Jessica felt as if she’d been captured, and taken on a long ride through inexplicable weirdness—unmoored in space and time, coerced to explore a maze of many new dimensions.
“Oh fuck,” she said, and laughed.
“Fuck what?” Simeon asked. “You haven’t lost your journal again; you haven’t had time to buy a new one since I saw you yesterday.” He noticed she was holding it then, the postcard of the Pflug painting still taped to its cover. “Oh,” he said. “You found it.”