Chapter 14 #2
“I thought you were just walking me to the train station.”
“The T stop.”
“What?”
“The train station is called the T stop.”
I shake my head. Nothing about this city makes sense.
“Fine. I thought you were walking me to the T stop.”
“I am.”
“Okay, but why are you paying to get on the train?”
“Because you need to get on the train to go to the museum.”
At this point, I can only assume he’s being deliberately obtuse, but he’s through the turnstile before I can stop him, and I have no choice but to follow him toward an escalator heading down.
Once we arrive on the train platform, we’re enveloped by the crowd already waiting there. A moment later, a loud screech echoes through the tunnel as the train appears, a long chain of metal cars with gleaming red lights to herald its arrival. It stops before us and slides open its door.
The car is already half full, but Ben moves us forward, wedging us in the far corner.
I can barely move, so I stare straight ahead at where my hand grasps the nearby metal bar.
Ben’s hand is just an inch or so above my own, close enough that they almost touch.
His hands are huge compared to mine, each finger marked with small nicks and calluses.
Like he spends a large portion of his time sanding and shaping, making things beautiful at the cost of his own skin.
I try to recall Matt’s hands, but the only detail I remember is that he has long fingers, courtesy of years of piano lessons.
They’re nimble, almost elegant, and used to dance across my skin, back when discovering each other’s bodies was a novelty.
Nothing like Ben’s broad palms and scars that seem to cut across other scars.
I wonder if he has scars on the rest of his body, too.
Lines and nicks in the skin across his chest or—
A deafening screech fills the car as the train does another jerky turn, jostling me from my thoughts.
Yes, okay, my cheeks are warm, but it’s also a very crowded car.
There’s no reason for Ben to think it’s from anything other than the people pressing in on us from all sides. Yes. It’s definitely that.
When we emerge from the train, it’s three o’clock. The museum closes at five, but Ben doesn’t seem like he’s in a hurry as we cross the road.
Then I realize why. The museum is just ahead, a modern glass-and-metal structure abutting an older brick building.
We enter the atrium-like lobby, welcomed by an almost otherworldly quiet, like someone has sealed us up from the rest of the city.
For the first time in days, I feel my shoulders relax.
Ben approaches the ticket counter, already pulling his wallet from his back pocket, but I grab mine from my bag first.
“Here, let me get it,” I say, reaching past the expanse of his chest to hand the woman my card.
“Marnie—”
“No, really. I insist,” I say, smiling at the woman while silently praying to the universe—and to the nearest branch of my bank—that it goes through.
“It’s the least I can do. You came all the way over here and it’s expensive for a random Friday.
Maybe not if it were like a date or something.
Not saying this is a date, because… obviously.
” I give him a combo shrug-nod, as if this is the universal sign for I know you have a girlfriend and I promise I’m not a threat, so maybe you could pass that on to her.
“Right,” he says, his brow creasing.
The card blessedly goes through, and the woman hands us our tickets before we head toward a towering courtyard. Plants and trees crawl up what looks like a Venetian palace, while arched windows into different galleries across four floors peer out across its greenery.
“Is this place real?” I whisper, almost to myself.
“I know. It’s pretty incredible,” Ben replies, looking around like he’s equally impressed.
“Was this someone’s home, or was it always a museum?”
“A little bit of both,” he says. “Isabella Stewart Gardner built it as a museum, but she also put her own apartment on the fourth floor. It’s essentially a museum of her private art collection, and she lived upstairs.
That’s why none of the galleries have any central theme. It’s all based on what she liked.”
I smile. “That sounds like my grandmother.”
He turns to me. “Yeah?”
I nod. “Her house was this beautiful mess of things she had accumulated over the years. She traveled a lot when she was younger, then she settled in Malibu and bought this bungalow overlooking the Pacific. It sounds impressive, I know, but she bought it in the eighties for next to nothing. The entire place was about a thousand square feet, but she managed to fit all sorts of things in there.”
“Did you bring any of it with you?” he asks.
A stab of guilt hits my chest. “Not really. Most of it is in a storage unit in California. I kind of wish I had, though. Maybe the apartment would feel more like me.”
He cocks his head to the side, like he’s waiting for me to continue.
“I just mean…” My words dissolve as we wander into a nearby gallery. What do I mean? The thoughts are still forming in my brain, this mess of feelings that’s so hard to articulate. “It doesn’t feel like home yet.”
“Why not?”
“Well, for one, there’s the ABBA. My downstairs neighbor listens to it nonstop.”
“You mean Brian?”
I pause. “Is that his name?”
Ben nods.
“Well, Brian listens to ABBA nonstop.”
“Does he?”
My mouth falls open. “Are you telling me you can’t hear it?”
“Only when I’m in the stairwell.”
I roll my eyes. “Count yourself lucky, because it’s a constant soundtrack in my apartment. It’s like he’s rehearsing for Broadway or something.”
“He is.”
I almost trip across the gallery’s brick floor. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah. He’s a dancer and just got a chorus part in a national tour for Mamma Mia!”
That explains a lot, I think.
“Well, apart from the ABBA, there’s also all this stuff I don’t recognize,” I say. “Growing up, everything my grandmother had in her house had a story, a reason for being there. I’ve always been the same way. I’m sentimental over the most useless things. And now…”
“You don’t remember why you have any of it.”
I throw out my arms as I shrug. “So it’s weird. I’m surrounded by objects that obviously mean something to me, but I have no idea why. It’s like I have a collection of someone else’s memories.”
He’s quiet for a moment, his gaze locked on an abstract portrait of a young woman as he says, “My mom does that.”
“Collects other people’s memories?”
“Sort of. She collects other people’s photo albums.” Ben says it like we’re discussing the weather.
“With pictures and everything?”
He nods. “We used to go to a lot of thrift stores and garage sales growing up, and when my mom came across an old photo album full of pictures, she always bought it. My sister and I would beg her to stop, but she said that those books were full of moments that somebody wanted to remember. And if no one else was around to, then she would.”
“I love that,” I say with a smile. “What’s your mom’s name?”
He looks down at me, and I notice a new softness around his eyes. “Joyce Martin.”
“Joyce Martin,” I whisper, like we’re sharing a secret. “Keeper of lost memories.”
He lets out a short, dry laugh. It crinkles the corners of his eyes and sends goose bumps over my skin.
“I wish people still kept photo albums,” I say, walking to the next painting, a sweeping landscape with an obelisk in the center.
“Didn’t your grandmother?”
“She did, but after my parents died, she stopped. I think it was probably too painful.”
Another moment passes before he asks, “Do you remember them?”