Chapter 14
I reach into the freezer for the half-eaten pint of AmeriCone Dream. After all, one cannot be hung up on by an old-lover-turned-celebrity without appropriately wallowing in some vice. And if my chosen act of personal self-destruction comes by way of potential cavities? Well, so be it.
I can’t believe him.
Read the whole thing, he told me. No, admonished me is more like it. Like I’m some sort of child.
I can’t do it right now. It’s Monday night, for God’s sake. I need to prep for school tomorrow.
This apartment is too quiet.
All I can hear are the words spinning in the empty air around me.
I think I lost you.
I fell in love with you.
Read the whole thing.
Fuck.
I decide to go the original route and call Evan. He picks up right away. “Hey, Melody. To what do I owe the late-night honor?”
“I’m sorry, Ev. Is it too late to call? That’s my bad.”
“Not too late for me. Too late for you! You’re the one who rocks that senior citizen lifestyle. Shouldn’t you be drinking your evening Metamucil in your housecoat or something?”
“Wow, Evan. Just wow.” I laugh, though, which I’m sure was the point.
“What’s up for real, though? You okay? It is a little late.”
“Yeah,” I say, trying to shake off the interaction I just had with Beckett. “Quick question, and then we can talk more later in the week.”
“Sure. Shoot.”
“You read Beckett’s book. How did it end?”
“Oh. I’m not sure.”
“What?” I ask, confused.
“I read, like, the first fifty pages, and then I skipped around a good bit.”
“You didn’t read the ending?”
“I’m afraid not, Mel. I did read all the sex scenes, though, with great interest. I mean, they weren’t my cup of tea, you know, but I was mining them for information and was surprised by how similar they were to yours.
But no, I didn’t bother with the ending.
You can guess with romance. Happily-ever-after. Same thing every time.”
“Right,” I say. “Okay, Ev. That was all.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah. I’m fine. No worries.” I am decidedly not fine and am actually all worries, but nothing this phone call’s going to solve. “Talk soon?”
“Sure thing. Have a good night.”
“You too,” I say, hanging up the phone.
Then, out of options, I gather up my phone and my ice cream and bring them both into my bed. I reach for my hacky sack—I just want to have it nearby—and pick his book up off my nightstand. The Beginning of Everything. What kind of a title is that even?
It’s romantic, sure, but our time in Aruba was the end of everything for me. My whole fucking world fell apart there.
It’s okay, Melody. Breathe. What you’re holding is fiction. Just read it.
I take a bite of chocolate-covered waffle cone, along with a deep breath, and open up to the page I’ve dog-eared.
Welp, I think. Here goes nothing.
We shared a meal that first night, a trio of unlikely travel companions basking in an ambience of light and laughter.
Harmony and her mother actively nurtured a remarkable relationship; each breath of consternation over whether the other’s meal was prepared to her liking or whether the coastal breeze was too much made me ache for a familial bond that strong.
Perhaps the most wistful truth was that I was better off the way things were.
I opted not to divulge the details of my father’s sudden disappearance from my life at our little dinner party.
Decidedly, it wasn’t an appropriate topic for a first date, particularly considering said date involved a third person for whom the stakes of my second impression were rather lofty.
Besides, seated at a table for three in paradise, the last thing I wanted to do was let invasive thoughts about my deep childhood disappointments worm their way into my cranial space.
Instead, I kept it simple. I asked her to dance under the twinkling strands of lights inside the Cuban restaurant, then, between a spin and a dip, asked her if she’d like a nightcap at the hotel bar after her mother retired for the evening.
She said yes.
We walked back to the hotel from the square, and Harmony’s mom excused herself to turn in early.
The elevator doors closed and I found myself face-to-face with Harmony.
I drank her in, struck by her perfect rosebud lips and those doe eyes staring back at me.
This was a girl who definitely had no idea just how beautiful she was.
“Hey,” she said. “Thanks for being so nice to my mom.”
“Of course,” I replied. “She’s great. But I don’t want to totally encroach on your vacation. This is supposed to be bonding time for you both, I’m sure.”
“It’s okay,” she reassured me. “I mean, yes, this is a special trip for us, but if she was upset, believe me, she’d let me know.” Harmony smiled, and her whole face glowed as we walked toward the bar along the edge of the open-air lobby. “She’s good that way.”
I nodded. “Fair enough. I’ll still try to be mindful of it, though.
” Again, I left plenty of words unspoken.
I didn’t tell her that if things went well, maybe we could just keep seeing each other back in New York.
I didn’t say that no girl had given me goose bumps or butterflies the way she could just by looking at me.
I didn’t want her to know how nervous she made me or how I wanted desperately for her to think I was even worthy of spending vacation time with.
Instead, I abandoned all that information in favor of an offer to buy her a drink, like someone much more naturally suave might have done.
She said yes, and we sat beside each other at the bar, her nursing a vodka seltzer with extra lime and me enjoying a cold Balashi from the tap.
“So, what do you do?”
“For work, you mean?” she asked, squeezing one of the lime wedges into her glass.
“Yeah.” I sipped the Balashi. It was probably the best beer I’d ever tasted. But then I thought that about the food at dinner too—how it was the best meal I’d ever had. It made me wonder if everything just tasted better when experienced from within Harmony’s microcosm.
“I’m a writer.”
“Really?” I asked. “What do you write?”
“Poetry. I teach it, too, at Queens College.”
“That’s very cool—sort of like your mom, with the songwriting.”
“I guess the apple didn’t fall far from the tree,” she said, pursing those pink lips together. “How about you?”
“You won’t believe this,” I replied. “I’m a science teacher. Seventh grade.”
“You are? That’s cool.”
“I’m also an aspiring writer.”
“Stop it. Seriously?”
I held up one hand and placed my other hand over my heart. “Swear it.”
“What do you write?”
“I’m working on a novel. Science fiction, middle grade.” I left out the part about it being a father-son time travel novel: the son loses the father in the time warp, then has to figure out how to find him.
“Wow,” she mused. “What are the chances? That you’d also be a teacher—and a writer? That’s some coincidence.”
“Explains a lot,” I said. More words, just hanging between us, not fully explained. I couldn’t just come out and tell her that I thought it was fate or some kind of destiny, that I should meet another writer on my first-ever writing trip.
She looked at me with a shy expression beneath her hooded eyelids. “Maybe not a lot, exactly. But it certainly explains why I like you already.”
My heart threatened to explode inside my chest. My fingers went numb against my glass, and a chill enveloped my skin. “I like you too,” I managed.
Okay, so he’s a convincing liar. There was no hotel bar; there was only a swim-up bar in the pool.
And poetry? Really? He never asked me to dance in the Cuban restaurant, and what was all that business about seeing each other back in New York?
Only for him to not call me once we got back home?
He seriously couldn’t manage so much as a text message in those first three days?
Creative, indeed.
I’m not sure what I was thinking. I’m just a gullible, stupid girl.
I should have left well enough alone after being catfished on Tinder just before Thanksgiving.
I swore off guys at that point, only to have it last, what, a month?
Also, if I ever heard a friend say she’d met “Mr. Right” on some vacation in paradise, I would have asked her when the last time was that she watched a Dateline special.
But when it’s me, I just lose all sense of myself.
I’m lucky Beckett Nash didn’t murder me and dump my body in the Caribbean Sea.
“Isn’t that the whole point of fiction, though?” My mom’s sweet voice hums inside my head. “To make stuff up?”
“Yeah, but—”
“There’s truth in there. You were the one who told me that fiction is just the truth, hiding in plain sight.”
I sigh.
“You can find it, Pretty Girl. You just have to be open to receiving it. The pages will reveal the truth to you.”
“You sound like some kind of oracle, Mom,” I whisper to the empty room.
“I’m not. But I stand by what I said. You and Beckett had something very special. You owe it to yourself to find out what happened.”
“It wasn’t worth it,” I mumble, heaving a sigh and blinking back moisture from my eyes.
“Pretty Girl…”
I close my eyes and try to feel her hand smoothing my hair, but—nothing. There’s an empty void in the space where my mother should be. “You should be here,” I say. The first tear spills onto my T-shirt.
“Hey,” a breathy version of her soul serenades me, “I am here. I’m always here, Melody.”
I bury my face into my pillow. “But you’re not,” I reply, my shoulders shaking. I push the book aside and give myself permission to soak the pillowcase until I fall asleep.