An Echo in Time

Chapter 1 RED LIGHTS

Boston, USA

Present Day

After the day she had, Charli doesn’t want to get out of bed, but her Great Dane is staring at her with his big dopey eyes, demanding attention. His tongue hangs from the side of his mouth like the slack of a belt that’s far too long. She named him Tiny when he was small enough to fit into her tote bag, but now, when he stands on his hind legs, he’s taller than she is.

If he only knew what she was going through, he’d let her spend another afternoon curled up in bed with a book in her hands, checked out from the world. He couldn’t possibly comprehend the agony of being human, of working an uninspiring job, of constantly trying to live up to the overachievers surrounding you, of worrying and worrying and worrying about your parents, one of whom you don’t even know why you care about in the first place.

It must be so nice being a dog, not having to make a living, not having to go outside unless you want to, not having a concern in the world other than always hoping to go to the dog park.

He’s such a snarky canine that he’d probably reply, You try eating the same thing every single day. And don’t get me started on having my privates clipped off. Humans have it made.

“You really are incorrigible,” she says to him, setting her book down. “You know that, right?” Wouldn’t it be nice to just go away a little longer, fall back into a fictional world?

Tiny pulls his tongue in and tilts his head sideways, as if he’s trying to understand the language this two-legged creature speaks. He raises a paw as big as Charli’s hand, holds it up like he’s casting a vote. Then he presses it to her chest and whimpers, a strange sound coming from this dog that last weighed in at 161 pounds. But he knows how this action melts her heart and gets him what he wants, a guaranteed Pavlovian response every single time.

“I know, I know,” she says. “We all know who wears the fur in this relationship. Give me a sec to collect myself, and then we can go to the dog park, okay?”

He hears dog park and pops up to a stand on the bed.

“Are you sure? We don’t have to go to the ... dog park .”

The two words send him into a frenzy, and a smile rises on Charli’s face. He’s just about the only being who can do that to her, make her almost believe life is okay.

When she sits up, he leaps off the bed and scrambles clumsily down the steps of her loft to the living room. She hears his nails click on the hardwood floors as he races to the front door of her apartment. As if she could be ready in three seconds.

Charli throws on jeans and slips into an army-green sweater with shoulder ruffles, then follows him downstairs. She peels back the blinds of the large windows that look out over Washington Street in Boston’s South End. A streetlight casts an orange glow over her living room. Snow falls for the second day in a row, the flakes dancing in the wind. It’s already dark outside, and the hint of the day’s warmth has surely dissipated. Still, Boston is alive with activity, drivers smashing their horns, pedestrians moving like cattle toward their evening affairs.

With Tiny shooting those adorable eyes at her, Charli zips up her puffer jacket, puts on her hat and gloves, and reaches into a basket for the Chuckit! launcher she uses to sling balls across the park. Right then the dread of having forgotten something hits her like she’s left a candle burning somewhere.

The sinking feeling in her chest makes it hard not to be disgusted with herself. Her mother would thoroughly enjoy this moment and let her have it. What a surprise, Charli. You forgot to do something. You dropped another ball, space cadet. Way to go. Really proud to be your mom.

Was it a work engagement? Charli wonders, trying to ignore her mom. Did she forget to do something at work? Or was it ... dog food?

The thing she’s forgotten wraps its icy hand around her heart, and she wants to cry. Her fingers go limp, and the launcher falls to the floor.

Before it even settles, her mind goes to work conjuring up potential excuses. Bad traffic coming back from Arlington, a deadly wreck. Someone pickpocketed her. The Russians are attacking; she can see the paratroopers from the window. It doesn’t matter, does it? Her relationship with Patrick is coming to its due end.

She glances at the Agatha Christie clock on the wall. Agatha’s character Hercule Poirot stands in the middle, and his arms perform the task of the hour and minute hands. This clock is supposed to be hanging in her bookstore—the one that never got off the ground. Thank you for the steady reminder, Agatha. You’re correct. I can’t do anything right. You and Mom would have loved each other.

Charli finally looks at the time. It’s three minutes till six o’clock. She was only reading for maybe thirty minutes, and now she has three minutes to get out the door and cross town, a comical notion with the traffic outside.

Patrick will be disappointed in his own sweet way. How many times did he tell her of tonight’s importance? Dammit, how could she have forgotten? She’d set a reminder on her calendar but hadn’t even glanced at it. Patrick’s been working nonstop, so they haven’t seen each other in days.

But you know what? What’s the point? She should have ended it weeks ago. Things were already going south. She could feel his annoyance when she would steer away from any genuine conversations about their future. Couldn’t he see that there was no future?

Charli does a quick inventory of her appearance in the large mirror hanging above the long glass table pushed up against the wall. Her battered jeans have holes. The casualness of her pilling sweater is just shy of wearing a pajama top. Her dark-chocolate hair is too thick for its own good today, and her face doesn’t match what’s going on inside.

Charli stares deep into her own brown eyes and searches for the glimmer of the fighter that she knows is in there. She’s better than the part of her that wants to pull out of their plans. No, she can’t do that to Patrick.

Tiny’s pressing up against the door as if a mound of treats waits on the other side. “I can’t, sweetie. Sorry, I have to go.”

He doesn’t get it and sits and wags his tail, waiting for her. With the leash still dangling on the coatrack, she runs back up the steps and riffles through her closet. Her mind races so quickly now that making any rational decisions feels like putting on makeup while riding a roller coaster. All she manages to do is change into some black jeans and a camel-colored cashmere sweater, both recent thrift store finds.

She races back down the stairs as she considers the best method of transportation. A catapult might be the best way. Then he’d feel sorry for her as she landed with a crimson splat on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. It doesn’t seem like that bad a way to go. A taxi is another option, but it might be faster to drive. In the bathroom, she realizes she’s a mess. Never in her life has she applied foundation so quickly. She’ll do the rest en route.

Tiny is impatient now, whining as if she’s taken away his food.

“I’m so sorry, buddy.” Her heart goes out to him, but there’s nothing she can do.

Looking for her keys in a frantic scramble, she pushes aside the mail cluttered on the table by the door. Charli can hear her mother’s condemning voice: So typical ...

Patrick is surely making excuses for her, how she has a high-maintenance dog, a new job ...

“I can’t believe I forgot!” Charli cries to herself, imagining the worst, seeing Patrick’s eyes as she dashes into the restaurant looking like ... like this. She pulls back pillows and opens drawers, trying to find the keys. As she runs out of options, she accepts that she’ll have to call a cab.

On her way out the door, she gives one last apology to Tiny and offers him a Himalayan dog chew as a consolation prize. She steps into her L.L.Bean snow boots and rushes down the three sets of stairs, her feet smacking the steps in what sounds like a herd of buffalo racing across the plains. Maybe twenty minutes late won’t be that bad. It’s snowing and dark outside. People are late all the time.

She hears Patrick’s voice from three days ago as she busts through the doors of her building out into the snow. “Charli, please. My mom is punctual and old-fashioned. Just be on your best behavior, okay? She comes into town once a year, and I try not to rock the boat. Besides, I’m excited to introduce you.”

“I can’t wait to meet her,” Charli had replied, feeling a shovelful of trepidation. His mother is only in town from Rome for two nights—she’s some kind of marketing exec there.

Charli should have said no the moment he brought up introducing her to his mother. They hadn’t even been dating for six months. Come to think of it, why didn’t Charli pull the plug on their relationship right then? She vaguely remembers deciding that she could stomach this meal with his mother so that she could put off the breakup for a few more weeks. That would give him time to get the message. Maybe he’d end things himself, which is always Charli’s preferred option.

Her breath transforms to fog in the cold. She thrusts her hand into the air and calls “Taxi!” but a guy in a business suit beats her to it. She goes to the edge of the curb. Snow falls around her, flakes the size of fingertips. A juxtaposition of quiet and loud exists, as is always the way in the snow in Boston. Without a taxi in sight, she looks at the Uber app. A text from Patrick is waiting for her. Friendly reminder about tonight! She doesn’t know how to respond.

After taking what feels like forever for the Uber app to load, she types in the restaurant’s name, only to see that there is a surge fare, which means she’s going to pay four times the regular price because of high demand. She’s already going to be late, might as well not be fifty in the hole too. A cab will be just as fast.

She jaywalks to a location where she has better luck flagging down a taxi. Eight minutes later, she’s in the back of one, creeping along Huntington Avenue toward Brookline. The driver is a chatty woman with gray hair pulled up in a bun. On the screen in front of Charli, Jimmy Fallon tells a joke that she’s too distracted to follow.

“Why don’t you try Tremont?” Charli suggests through the glass. “I have to be there five minutes ago.”

“Five minutes ago is a tall order,” the woman says.

“My whole life is a tall order. Please get me there as fast as you can.” Charli scrolls to her messages and types out a quick note. The traffic is awful. We’re catching every red light. I left twenty minutes ago.

Through her therapist, she’s learned that she fibs to avoid conflict, an aftereffect of being raised by an abusive mother. She’s tried to curb the habit, but it’s difficult, especially in a case like this. Charli is no stranger to being a lot of things, including a bad girlfriend, but she hates to be a disappointment. It’s why she bails when everything is still golden.

Charli hopes for a quick response, stares at the screen. Hopes for the three dots to show he’s responding. Maybe he and his mother are also stuck in traffic.

But probably not. Fully aware of traffic patterns at this time of day in Boston, he’d plan accordingly. She can already feel his mother’s eyes looking her up and down, judging whether Charli is a good fit. No, Patrick’s Mom, I’m not a good fit at all. I play the game well, but then it falls apart. In fact, I’m wondering why he’s still hanging around. I couldn’t possibly be that good in bed.

Patrick doesn’t write back. Charli grips the phone but diverts her gaze out the window. The traffic is a tortoise race. Horns beep. A biker smacks his palm onto the hood of a car that nearly slammed him into the back of a garbage truck. Pedestrians bob and weave around stopped cars on the crosswalk. More cars are stuck in the intersection.

Red lights.

A long line of red lights stretches like holiday decorations down Huntington Avenue, carving out a path toward her doom.

“We have to get off Huntington,” Charli says. Barring a miracle, she’ll be thirty minutes late.

The cabbie tries a few tricks, cuts down Parker and even tries an alley. But a garbage truck is blocking the way, so they have to reverse. They finally get going, and the cabbie presses the gas to beat a yellow light. They barely squeak by as they’re assaulted by a barrage of angry honkers.

“Thanks for trying,” Charli whispers inaudibly. “Sorry to storm in here in such a rush. I’m late to meet my boyfriend’s mother for the first time.”

“Oh, I remember that day well,” she says. “I’ll do the best I can.”

“Thank you.”

Charli looks at her phone again. Nothing. She feels sick inside, knowing how much she’s letting him down. A memory barges in, as if it were waiting on the other side of the door for the opportune time to ambush her. She was ten or eleven—shortly after their housekeeper had quit because Charli’s mother, Georgina, had screamed at her for not vacuuming under the couch. Charli had been forced to take up some of the slack, and she seemed to always have toilet duty. She remembers being on her knees, wearing giant yellow rubber gloves pulled past her elbows and breathing in bleach, as her mother stood over her, saying, “This is about all you’re good for.”

They hit more red lights. They haven’t caught one green light since they left. She texts Patrick again, assuring him she’ll be there.

Finally, he responds in short: K .

Ugh. He’s pissed and has every right to be.

She squeezes the phone like she’s strangling an intruder and watches as every red light slowly turns green, as the cars in front inch forward.

Finally.

Finally , Colton Four comes into view. The restaurant doesn’t have a sign and doesn’t need one. The Boston Globe raves about them constantly, calling it the hippest place in town. After winning a competition on television, the chef is now taking over New England.

Charli reaches into her purse. Of course she doesn’t have cash, as she’s misplaced her debit card. She hands a credit card over as they slide to a stop outside the restaurant. Waiting for the damn machine to run and print a receipt is agonizing. But walking inside will be worse.

As she’s climbing out of the car, the cabbie turns back to her and says through the glass, “Just be yourself.”

Charli lets out a breath she’s been holding entirely too long and whispers, “Thanks.”

Three minutes later, she scrunches her hair to give her roots some height, but her physical appearance is the least of her worries. She has to win over Patrick’s mom with all the humor and charm that Patrick has certainly promised. From the way he talks about his mom, she sounds like Cruella de Vil meets Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada .

Charli stops shy of the entrance. People push by her. Fear splashes down on her like a waterfall. She closes her eyes and attempts to steady her pulse.

“You got this,” she says to herself.

Charli comes through the door with her best strut. The small restaurant is packed, people talking over one another, servers winding by with trays of delicate cuisine. Patrick and his mother are not at the bar. She walks through the restaurant, one table at a time.

No sign.

She goes back to the hostess stand. “Do you have a Patrick Hannigan here tonight? I’m supposed to meet him. I’m late. Party of three.”

The hostess, wearing a dress and high boots, scans the book and shakes her head. “I don’t see a Hannigan. Could it be under another ...?”

“I don’t think so.” Charli casts a look back toward the restaurant, as if she missed a table.

“You’re sure it’s this location? You know we opened the place downtown too? On Washington, near the Opera House.”

The words of the hostess drive a stake into Charli’s heart. She’s at the wrong location. Patrick had told her a few times that he was switching it because his mom had opted for the Mandarin Oriental over “intruding” at her son’s place.

“Do you want me to call them?” the hostess asks. “You’re probably twenty minutes away.”

Charli looks up as tears sprout under her eyes. She’s twenty minutes and ten red lights away from everything in her life. “No ... no, thanks.”

Outside, the snow still falls. She looks up and down the street. Sure, she could catch another taxi, but what’s the point? She texts him. I just got here. To the Brookline location, the wrong one. I’m so sorry, Patrick. She tucks her phone back into her purse. There’s no use trying now. Peering up the street toward her house, she decides to walk.

The bell of her apartment rings two hours later. Tiny’s head perks up from his position on the floor. Charli took him to the park, and now she’s reading a book on the couch. Charli gets up to answer, assuming it’s Patrick, but she hasn’t checked her phone since she last texted him. She feels like a younger version of herself, hiding in her room in her family’s Beacon Hill row house, waiting for her mother to storm in and explode.

Patrick enters so much more gently than her mother would and says hello to Tiny and gives him a rub. Her boyfriend—for now—doesn’t say anything for what feels like five minutes. He holds his wool hat in his hands. A look at him now confirms the inevitable: they’re over.

Charli likes him; she really does. He’s kind and sweet to her. Opens doors, listens without judgment, brings her flowers. But he likes the best of her, and she’s tired of pretending. That’s the way it’s always been with men. She’s into it for a while, but eventually it fizzles. All that work of being your best self gets old.

Before Patrick, there was Adam. He was great at first but fell way too hard. She pulled the rip cord after three months. She was pretty sure he had a ring in his pocket when she said, “It’s my fault; I’m not ready.” Before him, it was Ben ... Ben, Ben, Ben. He was a journalist, and they loved to read together. That was pretty nice, actually. They could lie on the couch together for hours disappearing into their own stories. But then he got naggy, telling her she was the greatest thing that ever happened to him. Settle down, Ben. Desperation will get you nowhere.

The last remnant of her current boyfriend finally gives a weak smile. “Can we sit?”

“Yeah.” Charli nods to the couch in front of the television. Her apartment was once a cigar factory, and the brick walls and tall ceilings suddenly feel cold, despite all the rugs she uses to cover the chipped and overworked hardwoods. Hundreds of the leftover books from the Bookstore That Never Was line the shelves and stand in stacks along the wall; even they can’t mute the cavernous feel of her place during an awkward conversation.

They sit on either side of the couch. He seems relaxed, throws his arm up over the back. She studies his face. He’s clean-shaven and smells of menthol. God, he’s delectable.

“So . . . ,” he starts.

“So ...” She doesn’t apologize again. It would feel like an insult to do so. “How’s your mother?”

He shakes his head with the glimmer of a smile. He’s done putting up with her. It’s written all over him.

“Just rip off the Band-Aid, Patrick.” She loathes her childish behavior, but it’s coming up from her core. There’s something about her turning into an asshole that makes life hurt less.

“What do you want me to say, Charli?” he asks. “You knew tonight mattered to me.”

Her hands fly out in front of her. “And I tried. I got the wrong place, okay?”

He’s equally animated, as if this moment has been coming to a head for a long time. “But did you? I don’t even know what to believe. It wouldn’t be the first time you’ve bent the truth.”

He’s right.

Patrick sighs, letting it all out, all the frustration of dating such an impossible person. She was his first girlfriend in a while, as he’d been drowning in a surgical residency at Boston Medical Center. They’d met at the dog park. He was dog-sitting for a friend. Of course he was. He’s pretty much an angel. Deserves to be with his female counterpart, an overachiever-with-wings-type figure. A heart surgeon who walks on water, arrives early to everything, and has a giant loving family.

Patrick speaks to her like he’s sitting down to give a patient bad news. “I have tried. And tried. It doesn’t seem like you want to be in this relationship.” He raises a hand and lets it fall onto his lap. He has fine and steady hands, surgeon’s hands that could undress her and touch her with tantalizing skill. Even more, she’ll miss his arms around her.

Had he not brought his mother into the equation, they could have had a little more time together. Maybe if she were a different person, they could have had a lot of time together. She liked his spur-of-the-moment ideas, like riding up to Portsmouth for a play at the Music Hall and their Halloween visit to Salem last year, his way of making her feel better after she shut down her plan to open the store.

She fights off her silly romantic hopes. It’s that he was dating someone other than the real Charli. Well, Patrick, the jig’s up.

“What do you want me to say? I should have warned you.” God, they always have to sink their teeth into you at some point, as if a man must conquer you and own you and put a leash around your neck. Why can’t they be okay with having some fun and then moving along? Men are best rented and not owned.

He does what he does when he’s frustrated with her, which is twist the ring his grandfather gave him. “You and I could be good together. But you’re trapped in this ... this ...”

“This what?”

“I don’t know what,” he says. “This ... darkness. This thing where you don’t allow yourself to be happy. We could be great together, but you’re not letting us. It breaks my heart to say it, but I think I’m done.”

Charli presses an imaginary button in the air. “There it is. Exactly what I was waiting for.”

He retracts the steady hands that will never touch her again. “You see. I bring up the end of us, and you suddenly look light as a feather. Let me remove the burden of us .”

Her lips tighten into a thin line. “Once you get to know me, I’m not so pretty, am I?”

He looks flabbergasted. “Do you hear yourself talk? You have to stop. Yes, you’re beautiful. You’re smart too. Brilliant, even. I love our conversations. And you’re fun to be around when you let yourself off the hook for a moment. You make me laugh more than anyone. God, I’d love for us to work out. But you’re not ready. Tonight was another example of that.”

Silence fills the room. In a way, she does feel freedom. He’s right. The worst part is almost over. There’s so much trying .

“I get it,” she says. “And I’m sorry.”

Patrick sits there for a moment, a befuddled look on his face. He slaps his hands on his thighs and stands to face her. “Do you mind gathering my things and leaving them with the concierge? I’ll come by and drop off your stuff in a few days, make the exchange.”

“Yep, sure.” Why is an “exchange” the worst part for her?

Charli looks away as she feels herself disassociating from the moment. The sooner he’s gone, the better. She backs up and avoids eye contact. He doesn’t want her; he wants a better version of her.

Tiny slathers him with a last kiss. Charli watches, waiting for him to cross the threshold. Still avoiding his eyes, she says, “Have a good one.”

Then he’s gone.

She presses her ear against the door to make sure she can hear his footsteps. Once she knows he’s gone, she slides down to the floor and folds forward.

Tiny wedges his way in.

She runs her hands through his hair. “It’s back to you and me, lovey.” She looks over at all the books on the opposite side of her apartment. “At least I’ll get more reading done ...”