Chapter 34
“Where are you going?” Sawyer asks softly, speaking into Nick’s shirt.
She doesn’t want to let him go; doesn’t plan to until she has to.
Nick is quiet for a moment, then gives what sounds like a cross between an embarrassed grunt and a laugh.
“Coney Island.”
Sawyer stiffens with a mixture of bewilderment and amusement.
“Coney Island?” she repeats, almost in the same tone she used to use to tease him.
“Yep,” Nick says, finally releasing her.
“Why are you going to Coney Island?”
“Honest?” Nick says, suddenly and very openly letting down his defenses. “I was going because I’ve been thinking about you.”
“I’ve been thinking about you, too,” Sawyer says.
Nick doesn’t reply. The train stops at another station—Sawyer has already missed Prince Street. She doesn’t care. She’ll go to the gallery over the weekend; it can wait.
“So,” she says. “Coney Island.”
Nick wipes his eyes and reclaims his usual stoicism.
“Want to come?”
Sawyer gives him a silly smile, like she can’t decide which of them is crazy. Finally, she twists her lips to one side and shrugs.
“Why not?” she says. “After all—you know what today is?”
“What?”
“Friday,” she answers.
Nick looks at her with a bittersweet smile. His eyes grow slightly glassy again, but she can see he has made up his mind not to let another tear slip.
She grabs his hand and squeezes it.
“I’m in,” she says.
At some point, they ride under the damage of Ground Zero, or at least very near it. Sawyer shifts uncomfortably. She doesn’t want to think about it; she wonders if she’s just being oversensitive and melodramatic, but just as she gets lost in this self-scolding thought, Nick grabs her hand, and she knows: he understands, and he feels the same. His touch brings her focus back to another moment.
He asks about Sawyer’s work, and she proudly tells him Erin gave her a lead on an opening over at Random House, which she was bold enough to follow up on. She reports to a senior editor she really looks up to—Fiona—and often has lunch with Erin. She was recently allowed to acquire her first book, whereupon Fiona officially promoted her to assistant editor.
“?‘Assistant editor,’?” Nick repeats appreciatively. “Sounds like you’re moving up pretty fast.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” Sawyer shrugs. “But the big thing is: I don’t sit around worrying about whether my boss hates me anymore. You can’t imagine how liberating that is,” Sawyer says, laughing.
“You’re right; I can’t,” Nick says, still true to his own character. “Because I would never worry about something like that.”
“Of course not,” Sawyer says. She rolls her eyes. “But we can’t all be you.” She pauses reflectively for a moment, then says, “It’s nice, though—for a change—to ask myself who I like…who I want to work for…who I want to look up to.”
Nick smirks. “It’s like I always said it was, Sawyer…you’re the one to impress. I’m glad you finally think so, too.”
At last, they reach the end of the line, and the N train comes to a stop at Coney Island.
Sawyer is shocked by how empty the streets are. The parking lot full of picnic benches outside Nathan’s is utterly empty, save for a handful of strutting pigeons, and a man bundled into a sleeping bag on a bench in one far corner.
They reach the boardwalk. Its wooden planks are gray and pale as whale bones, and mostly devoid of people. Only a few of the restaurants and snack shops are open, the workers within mostly cleaning and idly listening to a local radio station to keep from getting too bored.
Nick points across the boardwalk, to one of the benches facing out to the water.
“Sit for a while?” he asks.
“You mean—you don’t want to go swimming?” Sawyer jokes.
“Please don’t dare me,” Nick replies. “I haven’t changed that much.”
Sawyer laughs and follows him over to the bench. They sit.
It’s a long stretch of sand between the boardwalk and the water’s edge, but they stare into the distance at the waves, which make a pleasant sound as they lazily roll onto the shore. Without the summer sun, the water is a flinty gray.
Sawyer shivers a little.
“Here,” Nick says, starting to take off his coat.
“No, no,” Sawyer refuses, insistent. “But…” She scoots closer.
He understands, letting her scoot so they are close enough to just touch.
They sit like that for a while, both of them at peace, staring at the water, breathing in time with the waves.
“I hope you’re still writing,” Nick says.
Sawyer smiles. “I have a book of poems coming out this fall,” she replies shyly.
“A book? Wow,” Nick says. “That’s incredible, Sawyer.”
“It’s a small literary press,” she says. “I was pretty excited to get the news they had accepted my collection. I was counting the days. But I guess I haven’t thought about it much since everything that happened.”
Nick shakes his head. “This is when people need poetry the most,” he says.
“I guess you’re right,” Sawyer agrees.
“I’m always right.”
They exchange a smirk.
Sawyer asks him about his music.
“I’m finally putting a little money into it,” he says. “You know…recording things.”
“That’s great,” Sawyer says, enthusiastic.
“I know I was kinda cynical about shelling out for studios and recording time before. It seemed like getting your hopes up to be crushed. But after that summer…I guess something changed.” He pauses and then adds, “I decided it’s OK to care about things.”
They fall back into silence for a few moments.
“You know,” Sawyer finally ventures. “I still think of you on summer Fridays. I’ll wake up and realize what day it is, and part of me still wishes I were spending it with you.”
Nick turns his head to look at her and she meets his gaze with a long look of her own, just as they used to do.
“Me, too,” he says finally.
They look back to the water.
“That day…” Sawyer begins, and finally explains why she didn’t go away with him that day he came to pick her up, how her heart was breaking but she had a clear idea of why she couldn’t go, what had happened, and why it changed everything in the blink of an eye.
His jaw clenches. She can see a flicker of anger in his eye as she talks. She almost stops at one point—it is clear that part of it is still raw. She feels like she is inflicting the hurt on him all over again.
“I figured it was something like that,” Nick says, when she’s done explaining. He pauses, then adds, “I was still mad for a long time afterward, of course.”
Sawyer nods, understanding.
She doesn’t state the obvious—that she feels a piece of Nick in all of it: the way she’s taken charge of her career, the pride she takes in her writing…even the decision she ultimately made that day.
She feels him looking at her now. She sees he is looking specifically at her hands, and her bare ring finger.
“No ring,” Nick says.
“No. No ring.”
He nods, his jaw clenching again. “You were always way too good for him, anyway.”
“I don’t know about that,” she says, thinking back over the summer she spent mostly with Nick, a man who was not her fiancé.
“I do,” Nick disagrees. “I remember the night we went to sushi, the night of my gig. The way he looked at Kendra. All I could think was what a jackass he was to not know what he had.”
In the days following Ed’s passing, Sawyer had remained by Charles’s side—as a friend. When they finally officially called off the wedding, it had come as a relief to them both, and they’d sat down and had a longer, more open talk than they’d ever had while engaged. Charles had admitted that something had happened with Kendra. He skirted around the word “affair,” but it was clear that their involvement had been sexual.
By then, all Sawyer could feel was relief—relief to know her paranoia wasn’t unfounded. In all other ways, she felt strangely serene. She nodded and listened sympathetically, letting Charles explain about how he wasn’t seeing Kendra anymore, but how at the time she was the only one who could truly understand the pressure he’d been under with the case.
Holding Charles’s hand through his father’s death had reminded Sawyer of the days when they’d made a good, steady team in college, and how deeply she cared for Charles…but also how this was not the same thing as love, or lifelong passion. They both understood this now, and were happier for it.
Kathy slowly accepted it in her own time. Sawyer knew she would always have a special place in Kathy’s heart—because Sawyer had known and loved Ed—but likewise understood when she gradually, gracefully, began to hear from Kathy less and less often.
“You didn’t deserve that,” Nick says now.
She knows he means Charles and Kendra. She shrugs.
“Maybe,” she agrees. “But I went and fell deeply and irredeemably in love with someone else.”
Nick turns his head to regard her, and they lock eyes again for a long, intense moment. She can tell the words mean something to him. She wonders if they mean something to him now.
The bitter flicker of anger she’d seen in his face while she’d explained what happened the day he came to pick her up had been revealing. She had thought about contacting Nick—a million times!—after she and Charles had called things off properly. She’d danced on a knife-edge: whether it was braver of her to reach out to him, or if it would have been rubbing salt in the wound…too little, too late. An intrusion. An offense.
Or perhaps she was simply being a coward, afraid of what the devastation that total rejection from Nick might do to her.
The flicker of anger—tiny as it was—suggests that she was right to fear she’d wounded Nick too deeply that day on the stoop; he’d carried that anger a long time. But recent events have softened people, and she wonders if perhaps it has softened his anger enough to open a door again, even just a crack.
She opens her mouth to raise the question, not really sure how to word it, but before she can speak, the moment is interrupted by a digital ringing. Nick leans away from her to reach into his pocket. He produces a cell phone.
When he answers the call, Sawyer can hear the friendly softness in his voice, and realizes he’s talking to a woman. He explains that he went to Coney Island, and on his way, ran into an old friend.
“No, I haven’t forgotten about our date,” he says. “I just…I don’t know, felt like going to Coney Island. But I haven’t forgotten. I’ll be there soon.”
He turns away from where Sawyer sits on the bench.
“OK…Yeah…Love you,” he says quietly into the phone. “See you soon.”
When he hangs up, he sees Sawyer looking at him.
She smiles at him, a genuine, heartfelt smile, but also a little bittersweet.
He holds up the cell phone and points at it.
“I guess nowadays we all have one of these obnoxious things,” he says.
“Yes,” she agrees. She’d resisted for a bit, too, but finally got a cell phone about a year ago.
“Sorry for the interruption. I had to get that.”
“I understand.”
He remains sitting on the bench, but she can feel: he is restless now. He’d rather be somewhere else.
“It sounds like you need to get going,” she says.
“Oh.” He glances again at the phone still in his hand, like he’d already forgotten he was holding it. “Yeah. I guess I do.”
A few seconds of silence pass.
“Want me to walk you back to the train?”
She shakes her head. “Nah. I think I’d like to sit here for a bit longer. It was a long ride to get out here. I’m not ready to go back yet.”
“Well, then…”
He gets up. She rises politely. They stand from the bench and face each other.
“I guess…” Nick starts to say, carefully trying to find the words. “I guess this is goodbye.”
She nods. “This is much better than our last one. I’m still sorry about that.”
She catches one last glimpse of the flicker of anger, but sees him push it away.
“I’m glad we got a do-over,” he agrees.
They look at each other. She isn’t sure if she should hug him. After the phone call, she suddenly feels sheepish. He smiles at her, a sad smile. She can feel her eyes getting glassy.
“Hey. Something’s missing,” Sawyer says.
“Missing?”
“Like, from our encounter. Something’s missing.”
Nick doesn’t reply, unsure what she’s thinking of.
“Hey—I know what it is.”
“What?”
“Seagull poop.”
He laughs. “I guess that means no luck today.”
She shakes her head. “You don’t believe in luck. Remember? You called seagullshit on that theory.”
They laugh together.
“Well…I’m glad we ran into each other,” Nick says.
“Yeah,” Sawyer agrees.
Neither of them moves to hug or embrace in any way. It’s almost as if they are afraid to touch again…of what it would make them feel, or what it might make them feel they’ve lost.
“OK, bye.”
“Bye.”
Nick starts to walk away, then pauses, and turns back.
“Hey,” he calls.
Sawyer turns to look.
“It was luck,” Nick insists. “I was lucky. Lucky to have had that time with you, even if I couldn’t keep you.”
Sawyer gazes at him. Finally, she smiles.
“Ditto,” she says.
He grins one last time, and goes.
She watches him start to walk away, but feels her eyes watering up, until the image of him walking away dances a bit. She turns back around before a tear spills over, grabbing her cheek with a cold hand. She sits back down on the bench, alone.