Chapter Fifty-Six Don’t Lie to Me
There is a hardware store on 4th Avenue. I stop to peer into the window, giving myself a minute to decide if this is what I really want to do. The next twenty minutes go by quickly. I press the call button on the wall and one of the guys who works there comes over to open a case for me. I make my selection without speaking. If I speak I will cry, and if I cry I will not stop crying. So it goes, so it goes.
It wasn’t even gradual, the change in me. It came suddenly, clarity…maturity. Grow up, Yara, I told myself. And so I did. I put away the childish things and I grew up.
I follow him to the register and he asks me if there’s anything else I need. I shake my head and pull the dollars from my wallet, green and crisp. They’re foreign to me again, all the male faces. I’ve been gone a long time.
When I leave I carry my bag up streets so steep my thighs burn, past men and women who hold cardboard signs asking for help, past Westlake Center, and across the 405. I feel the mist as the clouds open and rain gently rests on my head. It’s a soft caress, a reminder of where I am, and for that reason I don’t call a car. I need to think, burn off all this emotion. He did big things, and I’ve done big things, but surely this is the biggest thing, changing.
I flew across the world to show David that I’m not over him. That I’d never be. I had to snuff out my pride and fears to do that. And what he did with this grand act makes no difference anymore. This was for me first, then for him, then for us. I deserve love. Maybe not from this man who I’d abandoned and hurt so deeply, but from someone. It’s a matter of being ready to accept love.
I follow the directions to Capitol Hill. A white brick building with three pink letters above its door: IOU. People stand outside waiting to be called on, some of them huddled underneath umbrellas, some of them not. They look hungry. I walk right past them and step into the restaurant, shivering from the change in temperature. The smell of garlic and butter floats past me as a server walks by holding a plate over her head to avoid collision. The restaurant is much the same as the one in London—same structure, same booths, same dress code for the servers and bartenders. The only difference is the Seattle skyline painted on the main wall of the dining room. I head straight to the bar, shaking my can of spray paint as I walk. The roll of the ball syncs with my steps, an unlikely instrument that plays along with Nirvana’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.” There is the wall: Come back to me. Come back. Come. Kurt sings— My girl, my girl, don’t liiie to me…
I pull off the cap and toss it on the ground. Shaking, shaking. The roll of the ball inside of the can. My heart beats steady and fast.
I tag the wall, underneath the neon sign. There’s enough room for my message.
I’m back. Find me.
The talk in the bar slows, dims. Over the music I hear someone say—“Oh my God, what is she doing?”
I walk over to the bar when I’m done. The bartender is panicked, looking around for a manager. I set my can of spray paint on the counter.
“Are you hiring?” I ask. I grin at him as he stares openmouthed from me to the wall. “Guess that’s a no, then?”
No one tries to stop me and I walk out singing, “In the pines, in the pines, where the sun don’t ever shine. I would shiver the whole night through…”
It only takes me the length of one song to deliver my message.