Chapter 10
As it turns out, I’m not particularly good at living ‘in the moment’.
For most people, living each day as if it’s your last means living with gay abandon, and little regard for the consequences.
And good for them. I wish they could teach me their ways, because, in reality, it’s kind of exhausting, really, living each day as if it’s your last. Always worrying if you’re enjoying things enough; if you’re truly experiencing life to its absolute fullest, or if there’s perhaps something more you could be doing to ensure you’re appreciating it all appropriately.
Or maybe that’s just me?
I think it has to be just me, because I’m just over a week into ‘living for the moment’ with Elliot, and if my life was a movie, I guess this would be the montage scene.
The snow keeps falling, turning the village into a scene from a Christmas card.
We go for walks in it, our hands linked, even though our fingers feel like they’re about to fall off from the cold by the time we head back indoors.
We drink mugs of hot chocolate in cozy pubs, with log fires and Christmas carols playing in the background.
(I draw the line at mulled wine, but I can’t deny the vibes are still the same…
) We spend long afternoons curled up in Elliot’s sagging double bed in his hotel room; me reading, him writing, both of us just marking time until we can reasonably forget everything else and fall into each other’s arms again.
It’s amazing. It’s perfect, actually. Even the days when I have to work at the bookstore, and Elliot comes and sits at the counter with me, while Dad glares at us from between the bookshelves like a soap opera spy, have a slightly surreal, dreamlike feeling to them, which has me constantly questioning when I’m going to wake up.
And the entire time it’s happening, the knowledge that there’s a time-limit to it all hangs above us like a noose.
I try my best to ignore it, because I know perfectly well that’s not how this is supposed to work; that over-thinking everything doesn’t exactly meet the criteria of ‘living in the moment’.
That we’re having a fling, not falling in love.
But then, every time I meet Elliot’s eye, and he gives me one of those smiles of his, I realize this doesn’t feel like ‘just a fling’ at all; and the thought of his imminent departure becomes a rogue full-stop in the middle of a sentence I wanted to read to the end.
I don’t tell Elliot any of this, though. There isn’t much point. He’s leaving, and there’s nothing either of us can do about it; so I just smile back, and kiss him as if I haven’t realized there’s an upper limit on the number of times we’ll do this.
But there is.
I don’t know what the exact number is, but from the moment we met, Elliot and I were destined to have only a set number of kisses, a certain amount of walks in the snow, and only a handful of days together.
One day soon, all of this will end. And it won’t be anything like losing Mum, because Elliot will still be somewhere out there in the world, but it will still hurt — which is why, I tell myself I’m living in the moment, but, the entire time I’m holding a little of myself back.
Telling myself this isn’t serious. That we’re just having fun; or enjoying each other’s company, as Elliot put it.
I tell myself I can do this. That some people are just meant to be a single chapter of your life; even the ones who seem like they’re going to be one of the main characters.
That’s how it is for me and Elliot. We’re a short story, nothing more.
A one-season romance that will end along with the winter.
And that’s why I can never let him know that, in my head, I’ve been secretly imagining a different ending.”
“So? What do you think?”
We’re lying in Elliot’s bed again, our feet intertwined as I finish reading the latest pages of his manuscript. I put them down beside me and turn to face him.
“I like it,” I say carefully. “I think the characterization is amazing. Your great -grandfather — Luke — especially. I feel like I know him.”
“But…?” Elliot looks at me anxiously. “I’m not wrong, am I? There’s something missing?”
I prop myself up on one elbow and rummage through the piles of paper scattered on the bed until I find what I’m looking for.
“I think it needs something more,” I tell him, holding up the photo of the couple in the square, so he can see it. “I think it needs this. Her. Or someone like her, anyway.”
“Her?” He looks at the photo, then back at me. “The woman in the photo? You think I should turn it into a love story?”
He pulls a face, as if the thought doesn’t exactly appeal to him.
“Not exactly,” I say, smiling as I place the photo back down on top of the others.
“It doesn’t have to be the whole story. But maybe a sub plot?
Something to, I don’t know, kind of pull people through it?
Give them something to hope for — other than that he makes it through the war alive, I mean?
I don’t know. It’s just an idea. You’re the writer, here; I just read. ”
“Hey. Don’t do that,” Elliot says seriously. “Don’t put yourself down. I asked you to take a look at it because I value your opinion. I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t.”
I force a smile, stoically resisting the ever-present impulse to say something self-deprecating, and completely spoil the moment. Because that’s not what ‘live for the moment’ Holly would do, and that’s the Holly I’m currently pretending to be.
“You’re smart, Holly,” Elliot insists, refusing to let me off the hook. “I don’t understand why you seem to think you’re not. Did someone tell you that? Is that why you doubt yourself so much?”
He sits up, as if he’s prepared to leap out of bed and fight them, if I say they did. This time, my smile is genuine.
“No one said that,” I assure him, giggling at the fierce look on his face.
“It’s just… well, me, I guess. I tell myself that.
Look, I didn’t go to college like you did.
Or like all of my friends did. I just stayed at the bookshop.
And then the people I grew up with all graduated and moved away, and I’m still here; still in that bookshop, still doing exactly what I’ve always done. ”
I do my best to keep my tone light, but Elliot isn’t fooled.
“Well, for one thing, there’s nothing wrong with the bookstore,” he says firmly.
“I think it’s pretty cool, actually. And, for another—” he reaches out and threads his fingers through mine — “Just because you’re here right now, it doesn’t mean this is where you’ll always be.
There’s a big old world out there, you know.
Maybe it’s time to think about seeing some of it? ”
The words hang in the air between us. I think about Florida, with its orange groves and theme parks; about California palm trees swaying in the sun. I think about sunshine; the kind of heat that feels like a physical presence — a wall of warmth that hits you as you step off the plane.
Then I think about Dad, trying to manage the bookstore alone; going home each night to an empty flat; getting a little older, and a whole lot lonelier with every year that passes.
The sunshine and the six-lane highways abruptly disappear, like the mirage that they are.
“Maybe I will one day,” I say, as if the thought of leaving doesn’t occupy my every waking thought. “Right now, though, we have this book of yours to think about.”
I pick up the pages again, signaling that this part of the conversation is at an end. Elliot watches me for a few moments longer, then gives the tiniest of shrugs, before reaching out and picking up the photo from the pile on the bed.
“Okay,” he says thoughtfully. “So, what are we thinking? Who is she? How does he meet her?”
I rest my head on his shoulder so I can look at it with him.
“I don’t suppose we’ll ever know who she was in real life,” I say. “But it doesn’t really matter if it’s fiction you’re writing. You can just make something up.”
“It wasn’t going to be fiction,” Elliot says, still looking at the photo.
“I had it in my head that it would essentially be a biography. But I get what you mean about it needing a sub-plot. I guess it’s a bit dry without one.
And I kind of like the idea of turning real life into a story. That could be fun.”
“Real life is a story,” I protest. “But you could still make this a true one, if you really want to. You could still write it as a biography, I mean. You’d just need to find out who she was, first. If that’s even possible.”
“Oh, it’ll be possible,” he says. “Maybe not easy, granted, but still. It’s not that long ago, really. I found tons of records going back to the war when I visited Fort Stafford — that’s the military base he was stationed at. It’s a museum now, though, so that made it easier.”
I nod, remembering visiting Fort Stafford on a class outing when I was a kid.
It’s just a couple of miles from Bramblebury, and the soldiers would apparently frequent the village pubs and dance hall on their time off.
It’s strange to think Elliot’s great-grandfather was one of them; that he might even have sat at the bar below us at some point, or visited the bookstore — or whatever it was back then.
To Elliot and me, it is just a story, but to him — to the man this book is about — it was very real.
It was his life, and he was the main character; just as we all are, in our own stories.
“I like that way of thinking about it,” Elliot says, when I share this thought with him.
“I like the idea that we’re all busy writing the story of our life, even if we never put pen to paper.
And he never did; which makes me all the more determined to do it for him.
Find out the truth. Tell the full story.
And I guess that means starting with Mystery Woman here. ”