Chapter 35
It’s cold and unpleasant.
She is shivering, but she is intent on staying there until she can’t stand it, memorizing the gray of the sky and the sand, the rough squall of the waves. Coney Island was such a bright, colorful place when she and Nick visited it two summers ago, in the full heat of July. But the derelict, abandoned version of it that is all around her now suits her mood better.
She feels strangely stunned, like she just got everything she wanted, and somehow walked away empty-handed.
She knows she should be grateful. Things went as well as could be expected. She got to apologize. They got to say their goodbyes in a dignified way.
The flicker of anger she’d seen ripple through his features when they talked about their previous goodbye was to be expected. More than expected, in fact. It could have been so much more than a flicker. Nick was truly gracious about it.
And the fact that he’d taken a phone call on his cell, that he ran off to go meet someone…she isn’t entitled to any reaction at all to that.
But still.
A murky disappointment sinks into her brain. A sensation of hollowness, an emptiness she has not felt before.
She stares at the steely horizon of the Atlantic, listening to the frantic white noise of the waves tumbling the gray sand, feeling bereft, adrift.
Time passes. Her fingers become so cold she can’t feel them. She should get up and make her way back to the train. There is probably a car waiting with open doors in the station and she can at least sit inside it and attempt to warm up while she waits.
But another fifteen minutes pass, and she still hasn’t moved.
Part of her feels like if she gets up and leaves, she is agreeing to forget about her summer Fridays with Nick, that she is acquiescing to let them become just another memory of middling importance in the grander scheme of things.
She sits, and continues to study the distant waves.
Then, unexpectedly, she hears a noise.
Something is beeping. The cell phone in her bag. She pulls it out and flips it open.
“1 message” the screen says, with the outline figure of an envelope.
It’s a text.
No one she knows sends texts.
She clicks the button to read it.
For the record, I still prefer face-to-face, but I’ll resort to this if I have to.
Sawyer frowns. She feels stunned again, but a different kind of stunned.
After a moment or two, a slow smile breaks over her face. She works the buttons to text back a reply.
S: Hey! How do you have my number?
N: I have my ways.
N: I tracked it down a while back.
S: But you never used it.
N: I’m using it now.
Her brow furrows as she processes the information. She wants to ask more questions, but this would be tedious; Nick has already given her the most important answer. He tracked her number down a while back.
S: I see. And what are you using it for?
N: To tell you I was right
S: About what? (this time)
N: That after meeting you, my mom would ask about you every time I saw her.
The phone call he had taken. She revisits it in her head. He hadn’t spoken in Russian. It occurs to her that he wanted her to have the impression he might be talking to someone else. A flood of relief surges into her heart.
S: Aha…So that wasn’t just some chick on the phone
N: A wise person once told me you shouldn’t call them “chicks”
S: Are you saying I’m right???
N: You might be right.
S: “Might be”? I guess I’ll have to settle for that.
N: As good as it gets.
Sawyer feels her lips curling in a happy smirk, giddy to sink back into their old routine. But at the same time, an inkling of sweet despondence sets in. She isn’t ready for this exchange to end again.
S: You’re at your mom’s now?
N: I had a date to visit her
S: Tell her I say hi.
N: Tell her yourself.
Sawyer freezes, wanting to be sure she is reading things right.
N: It’s Friday. What are you up to?
As she thinks of how to respond, she glimpses a familiar figure: the old man covered in green face paint and tinfoil that she and Nick saw during her first visit to Coney Island. He roller-skates past her, music blaring from his battery-operated boom box. Now, there’s a guy who plainly remembers our alien-fish ancestors, Nick had said at the time. He’s overdue for a visit home.
Sawyer grins, impatient to share news of the sighting.
But before she can work the keys, her phone beeps with a new text.
N: Don’t make me get the chimp in a tuxedo on the case.
A bark of laughter escapes her lips, but softens into a tender sob.
S: No one says no to a chimp in a tuxedo, I hear
N: It’s true
Sawyer stands, and pulls her bag onto her shoulder. Tears are falling from her eyes again, but now the tears are different; they are tears of happiness, the tears of someone who has been on a long odyssey, and is finally walking the last steps that will take her home.
She taps in one more message, and clicks send.
S: I’m coming.
N: I’ll meet you halfway.