29. When One Door Closes …
When One Door Closes…
HENRY
A movie blasted from the TV when I came home from my studio space, sweaty and in need of some sleep. My first major New York City art exhibition was going up in three days and I needed the pieces done by tomorrow. Of course I was running right up until the deadline for hanging.
The apartment I lived in was in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.
The unit itself was long but slender with barely any natural light thanks to windows that looked out directly onto brick walls.
From the front door, you entered into the living room with its scuffed floors and peeling tan paint.
The narrow hallway extended to the left toward the outdated kitchen and to the right toward the three closet-sized bedrooms.
The price was right, it had been available for move-in immediately, and it allowed me the extra pocket money I needed to sublet studio space out in Brooklyn.
It took hours to commute to it, but it was a place to go and be creative when I wasn’t working my soul-sucking retail job.
When not hawking Broadway wares to tourists, I scoured the subway stations and parks for abandoned books and lost toys, debris of a life lived, and later turned it into art.
Kelly and Corbin (my two roommates) and Paige (Kelly’s girlfriend) were smushed together on a yellow love seat watching the Christmas Movie Channel.
“Wait, wait. Ask him!” Corbin stage-whispered.
He was an aspiring actor whose most recent credit was playing Man Smiling Near BBQ in a regional grill commercial that paid surprisingly well for what it was.
“No, you ask him!” Kelly responded. By day, she was a manicurist. By night she was the lead singer of a Taylor Swift cover band. She even sort of looked like a young Taylor with the wild, curly blond mane and closet full of sparkly boots and acoustic guitars.
“Ask me what?” I kicked off my work sneakers by the door so I didn’t track any unsavory materials across the floor. Not that we were the cleanest bunch to begin with. I’m not even sure we owned a vacuum.
“Didn’t you used to date him or something?” Paige pointed at the screen. She and I had known each other the least amount of time so she had no qualms about asking a potentially touchy question.
On the screen, Aidan, older-looking than I’d last seen him, acted the role of a widower falling for the daughter of the town mayor while working a cookie-baking competition together.
His statuesque features beamed in from forever and a day away.
My heart tilted toward him like a flower thirsty for sparse sunlight.
“Used to. Yeah,” I said. His skin still glowed with the verve of youth, and his eyes were still as clear as Caribbean seas. Though those could’ve been tricks—caked-on makeup and colored contacts. I didn’t know anything about movie magic. Only real-life magic that had long since abandoned me.
Shivers swiped down my spine. The way he was staring at his costar in the scene, well, he had looked at me that way. Once upon a time… “Years ago,” I added to put some distance between me and the feelings.
Corbin flipped around onto his knees, so he was leaning over the back of the couch. Oh, to be twenty-four and sprightly again. “No way! You know an actor who’s in legit movies? Do you guys stay in touch?”
After Aidan left on that midnight train to New York City, we kept in constant touch. He texted me when he arrived. When he found the hostel. When he saw Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment. When he stepped on a rat tail in the subway and felt bad for it.
For weeks, he kept me abreast of his whereabouts—what he’d seen, who he’d met, how he was doing in the job hunt. That last part he was mostly falsifying. He’d listed me as his only reference, and nobody ever called from a bookshop or a café to ask about his professionalism or skill set.
After emptying out the apartment on Anchor Avenue, I moved back in with my parents for a bit. Not the desired location, but it had to be done while I planned my next chapter and watched after Great Aunt Isla.
Some nights, with loneliness crunching in our voices, Aidan and I would stay up talking on the phone into the wee hours of the morning about the stories Aidan was writing and the art pieces I was making.
At that point, he’d still never kissed anyone else.
I hadn’t dated anyone else. We still ended all those calls with, “I love you.”
Most times, if I closed my eyes and laid the phone on my pillow, it was like he was there. The phantom weight of him would dimple the mattress, and all would be right with the world.
Only that wasn’t true.
Great Aunt Isla’s health took a turn for the worse that spring and by summer, the situation looked grim.
I called Aidan after several weeks of one-word texts from him.
“Henry, hi!” He sounded happy to be talking to me as always, but an obvious party raged on in the background, which made him difficult to hear.
“Where are you?” I asked. “It’s been a while.”
“Provincetown,” he said. “It’s marvelous. Have you been?”
Marvelous? Since when did he use the word “marvelous”? “I haven’t. What are you doing in Provincetown?”
“New York was getting too hot. I decided to take the Amtrak up to Boston for a change of scenery. While applying for a hosting job at a restaurant near a college there, I met two wonderful men, Hugo and Paul. They’re married.
They have a house out here. They told me I could spend the summer in their guest cottage if I cleaned their pool. ”
“You’re a pool boy?” I asked.
“No, I’m their guest who cleans the pool.”
I did not press the subject. “Look, I just called to tell you Isla isn’t doing too well. The doctors don’t know how much longer she has. I figured you’d want to know.”
“You figured right. I’m so sorry, Henry.” The cheers and splashes dissipated in the background. I pictured him moving inside. Into some glorious kitchen. Away from the action. “How are you holding up?”
“As best I can, I suppose,” I said.
“Good. That’s good to hear.”
Was it? “Could really use one of your hugs right now,” I told him.
He made a sound like he was squeezing me. “I’m sending you one through the phone.”
“Thanks,” I said, masking most of my disappointment.
“Say, I do have to get back in a minute, but you’ll keep me updated on Isla?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said.
We exchanged stilted goodbyes, and I wondered when it was that I’d lost him. Not that it mattered. If he didn’t love me anymore, he didn’t love me.
“No, we don’t keep in touch,” I said to Corbin. “I don’t think I’ve heard from him since last December.”
“Aw, damn. That’s too bad. I was hoping he could help me break into the TV-movie world,” Corbin said, switching back around and taking a sip from his cider. “You don’t still have his number, do you?”
“No. I think he changed it.” I told him at one point that I couldn’t afford his phone bill while I was saving up to move. He understood, but the only thing he could afford at the time was one of those pay-as-you-go plans, which meant new numbers all the time.
Great Aunt Isla passed away in August of 2026.
She went peacefully in her sleep. It was all we could’ve asked for in the end.
I called Aidan again, this time to no answer.
I didn’t want to leave the news in a voicemail, but I’d already psyched myself up to make the call and delaying it would’ve made saying the words harder.
I didn’t hear from him—no return call or text message—by the wake nor the funeral.
At the burial, as people laid roses on Great Aunt Isla’s casket and I dropped dirt into the ground, I wondered if I’d done the wrong thing by sending Aidan off on that train.
But I let the wondering pass. Instead, I thanked the universe for giving me two solid decades of my favorite person.
A few weeks later, I got a sympathy card in the mail.
Dear Henry,
I can’t express how sad I am to hear about Isla’s passing. She was a beautiful soul. She helped me so much. I’m terribly sorry for your loss. Send my love to Alexa and the rest of your family.
Yours,
Aidan
Yours? I read that part over and over again.
He wasn’t mine. He hadn’t been mine for months. Ever since the I love you s dried up.
I threw the card in the recycling bin. I didn’t need a reminder of what wasn’t going to be. Maybe I was Great Aunt Isla, and he was my Georgine. Peace had to be found in that.
Once Great Aunt Isla was gone and her estate was settled, I took my share of the modest inheritance and jump-started my artist’s life in New York City. It wasn’t glamorous in the slightest, but it was mine.
“Hold on a second, he looks so familiar,” said Paige, leaning forward. I stood in the kitchen waiting for my microwavable Trader Joe’s burrito to heat. “Was he in one of these movies last year?” She typed fast into her phone, but I was faster.
“He was,” I said, trying not to sound bitter. “He played the best friend in The Christmas We Came to the Cape .”
While he was pool-boying out in Provincetown, a friend of Hugo and Paul’s heard about a Christmas movie filming two towns over on Cape Cod that was looking to hire local actors for the smaller roles.
He knew about Aidan’s love of TV and suggested he go and audition.
The way Aidan told it, he got through two lines of the scene at the audition before the director yelled, “You’re hired! ”
Aidan, having come to life the way he did, had a unique understanding of human emotion.
He approached it with a childlike wonder, a sense of unselfconscious play.
I was loath to admit, as I watched the movie over the heads of my roommates while nursing a cheese-and-bean burrito that tasted mostly like freezer burn, that those qualities made him a radiant actor.
“Oh, yes. Duh. I loved that one,” Paige said.
I hadn’t.