Chapter 5 Reece
FIVE
REECE
I see him through the window. Not… okay.
Back up. I’m sitting with Maya and Dev. Maya is talking about her advisor.
I’m half-listening because Maya talks about her advisor a lot.
I look up because I always look up. I can’t not.
There’s a man on the sidewalk looking through the glass and the man is Griffin.
The man is Griffin. No. I look down. I look at my hands.
My hands are on the table, around my coffee cup.
They are not shaking, which is interesting, because the rest of me is.
“And then she emails me back at eleven at night,” Maya is saying, “like that’s normal, like I’m just supposed to…“
“Yeah,” I say.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
I do not look up. I look up. He’s gone. The window is just window.
The sidewalk is just sidewalk. There’s a woman walking a dog past the door and a guy on a phone.
The morning light is cutting across the floor in a stripe.
There is no one standing there. Maybe there was no one standing there. Maybe I am… yeah. Maybe I am.
“Reed.”
“Sorry. What.”
“I said are you okay. You went weird.”
“I’m fine. Sorry. I didn’t sleep.”
“You always say that.”
“It’s always true.”
Dev laughs. Maya doesn’t. Maya’s looking at me like she’s deciding whether to push it. I am very close to telling her please don’t push it, which would be worse than her pushing it. I pick up my coffee and I drink it. He was there. He was there, on the sidewalk, looking in. I know what I saw.
Stop. He’s three thousand miles away. He’s at his job.
He’s in his apartment that I have never seen but that I have looked up the address of, once, eighteen months ago.
From the first town the program put me in.
The one I left when they moved me here for school.
And then I made myself stop. He’s in his life.
That’s the whole deal. He’s in his life and I’m in this life and the line between them is a wall and the wall does not move.
The wall just moved.
I have to leave. I can’t leave. If I leave now Maya will know something is wrong. Maya will ask. Maya will keep asking, because Maya is good. Maya is a good person. That’s the problem with good people — they don’t let you off the hook. I have to leave anyway.
“I have to…“ I start. Then I think don’t say what. I say, “I have to go. Thing. I forgot a thing.”
“What thing?”
“Library thing.”
“On a Friday?”
“It’s a Friday thing.”
I push back from the table — the chair scrapes too loud. I put on my jacket. Maya says, “Reed, seriously…“
“I’m fine. Text you later.”
I don’t text people later. Maya knows this.
Maya gives me a look that says I am filing this for later.
I take the look and I go. Outside the air is cold.
Colder than it was an hour ago. I stand on the sidewalk where he was standing.
Where I think he was standing. Where someone was standing.
I look down at the concrete like it’s going to tell me something.
It doesn’t. Because it’s concrete. Okay.
He wasn’t there. He wasn’t there because he can’t be there.
There’s no version of this where he’s here.
He doesn’t know where I am. He couldn’t know.
The whole thing, the whole point of the thing, is that he couldn’t know.
Unless someone told him. No. No one told him.
The list of people who know where I am is three people long and I have not met any of them in person more than twice.
So. So he wasn’t there. I start walking.
I don’t know where. Away from the shop. My apartment is the other direction but I am not going to my apartment, because if I go to my apartment I will sit on my bed and I will think.
Thinking is the thing I am specifically trying not to do.
I walk past the bookstore. Past the bagel place.
Past the bench where the guy who plays guitar plays guitar, except he’s not there today, which is a small relief because I don’t have it in me to nod at him.
My phone is in my pocket. I take it out.
I look at it. There is nothing on it. I don’t know who I thought was going to text me.
I put the phone back. Two years. Two years, three months, eleven days.
Although who’s counting. Me. I’m counting.
I count every morning when I wake up. It’s the first thing my brain does, like a clock that won’t shut up.
He looked good. That’s a stupid thing to think.
He looked like himself. Thinner maybe. Tired.
Or I’m making that up. I’m probably making that up.
I have to figure out if it was him. If it was him I have to leave.
If it was him I have to leave town. I have to call Mendez.
If it wasn’t him I’m losing it. Which would be…
fine. Fine. That would actually be fine.
That would be the better option. I am rooting, right now, for the option where I am losing my mind.
That’s where I am. I start walking again.
The deal was simple. The deal was: you go, you stay gone, you don’t look back, you don’t reach out, you don’t exist to him.
He gets to keep being the person whose boyfriend died.
That is the man gets to live. The other version, the one who knows, the one who has to carry it, that one doesn’t get to live.
Because that one isn’t safe. Because anyone who knows isn’t safe.
It was supposed to keep him safe. At the time, that made sense.
I made him safe by being dead — that’s the sentence I’ve used.
I’ve said it to myself a hundred times. It’s the sentence I use when I want to stop wanting to call him.
It works. It mostly works. It doesn’t work right now.
Right now I am walking past a coffee shop where a man who looks exactly like Griffin was, possibly, standing on the sidewalk looking through the glass. The sentence is just words.
I check over my shoulder. I do it without thinking.
The small turn of the head, the scan, the nothing, the keep walking.
Habit. If it was him, I have to leave. I keep landing on that.
I keep walking past it and coming back to it.
If it was him, I have to leave. And underneath it, the thing I am not saying, the thing I have not let myself say in two years and change, sitting at the bottom of me like a stone:
I don’t want to leave.