by Nella Tyler
Ms. Eller looked even more crestfallen at that addition to my original comments, her thin eyebrows pulled together in sympathy over the discovery of my sad, dateless existence. Damn, was I such a pitiful case that a woman in her late sixties was feeling sorry for me? I wondered.
“It’s by choice,” I added, only making things worse, but I kept going, digging a deeper hole with each word. “I’ve been married to art since I decided on my major in my second year of college. Any man who might be interested in a relationship with me would need to understand and accept that.” I lifted my chin defiantly as the tour group laughed, Ms. Eller flashing a wide, amused grin but not continuing with her probe into my nonexistent personal life.
“Shall we continue to the final gallery space?” I checked the small gold watch on my wrist — a graduation gift from my mother and the nicest piece of jewelry I owned, so nice I only wore it on special occasions. “Lunch will be ready in thirty minutes.”
I led them out the way we’d come in, but now instead of thinking of art and how much I needed to not mess up this critical tour, I was thinking about relationships in general. While it was true that I hadn’t dated much in college and it had been by choice, it wasn’t because of some great love of art. It was because I’d made the biggest mistake of my life in the second semester of my sophomore year of college, burning a bridge that could never be repair again. Even thinking of it now stung like it had only happened yesterday.
In the years since I’d abruptly broken off all communication with Carter, I’d never been able to shake the bitterness of the all-encompassing regret I still felt at my core. Maybe I never would. It followed me everywhere, a constant weight on my shoulders that I’d just learned to live with, though it sometimes seemed so heavy it was difficult to keep from simply sinking to the floor. I kept telling myself time would heal the extensive damage, but I’d stopped actually believing that garbage a long time ago.
The only thing I believed with certainty now was that I was never going to be able to find a passionate, enduring love like the one Hayez depicted in his most famous painting, and I had no one to blame but myself.
Carter
One Week Later, Early December
Sophia was running towards me, her long dark hair whipping in the wind and equally dark eyes shining as she sped through the high grass to get to where I was waiting for her. She had on the light blue dress with the red sash tied tightly around her waist, the same one she’d been wearing the first time I’d ever seen her, both of us arriving with our moms outside of Miss Parker’s preschool class. She let out her tinkling giggle, and I laughed, too, my heart filling up just to hear how happy she was at the sight of me. She’d always had that effect on me, even way back when we were four.
I didn’t understand why we were so little again, but I was just so pleased to see her rushing towards me, that I opened my arms for her to dive into, still laughing, and we tumbled onto the grass in a squirming heap.
A few moments later, we were walking hand in hand through the flowers, Sophia talking a mile a minute about anything and everything, a habit that didn’t change as we got older. I was the quieter type, always had been, and was content just to listen to her speaking as my eyes traveled across the field around us, observing every detail. We played here all the time when the weather was nice, our mothers or fathers sitting on a bench at the edge of the park while we ran around like crazed, feral children.
“How long do you think we’re gonna be friends?” Sophia asked, putting those dark eyes on me, so much going on behind them that I could stare into them for days. Even as a little kid, I was smitten with her, hanging on her every word, ready to do whatever she wanted just to be close to her.
“Forever,” I said, and she smiled at the answer.
“What if I move away?”
“We can send letters,” I said with a shrug. “Or talk on the phone. My mommy and daddy do that all the time.”
She nodded once. “Mine, too. And they talk on the computer.”
“We could do that,” I replied.
After another few seconds, she added, “We should make a promise about being friends forever.”
A light bulb flashed to radiant life inside my head, uncovering a great idea.
“Wait here!” I ran off before she could ask why. I gathered flowers quickly and put together something I’d only just learned to make from my dad. Once I was done, I ran back to where Sophia was waiting with a big grin on her face. I was good with my hands, and she always liked the things I made for her. But this was the best yet.
“What did you do?” she asked.
I pulled out the ring I’d made from interlaced wildflowers, and she squealed at how pretty it was. “We can get married when we’re old and then we won’t ever have to move away from each other.”
She nodded fiercely, her dark eyes serious. “How old?”
I struggled to think of a high enough number and failed. I shrugged. “As old as our parents.”
She held out her hand for me to put the ring on one of her chubby fingers. She grinned as soon as it was in place.
“You have to promise to marry me,” I said, reaching to take her other hand, the one without the ring. “Say the words.”
Her face turned serious as she looked down at the flower ring. She looked up at me again before she answered. “I promise, Carter. Do you promise, too?”
“Yes,” I told her. “I promise to marry you when I’m old.”
Sophia giggled and ran off again, parting the tall grass with her sturdy little body, hair rippling free in her wake, and I followed her, screaming her name.
I opened my eyes, expecting to find myself lying on a bed of warm, soft grass, the sun on my face, and Sophia next to me chattering on in between giggles, my flower ring on her finger. But I was alone in the dark.
I sat up slowly, the disorientation sticking stubbornly to me as I blinked around in the bluish, early morning light. My eyes fell on the alarm clock next to my bed. It was just past four in the morning. The present snapped into clear focus, and I remembered exactly where I was: my apartment in San Francisco where I’d been living since I arrived here in June.
It all came rushing back in a flood of agonizing sensation, the years since I’d last visited that open field blooming with wildflowers. It had been more than a decade since Sophia and I ran through it as preschool kids. We’d driven there on the way to somewhere else in my dad’s car for old time’s sake, laughing at the children we’d been. She’d admitted that she still had the wildflower ring, long since dried in a keepsake box in her closet. That had touched me, that she’d thought to keep it at such a young age.
We’d been ready to head our separate ways for college at the end of senior year, me staying in Wisconsin while she ventured to the east coast. And though we didn’t make promises to marry each other when we got older, we vowed to stay in touch and not let the distance change a friendship that had lasted more than fourteen years.
I shook my head as I swung my feet around onto the ground, trying to knock the memories back into the darkness where they belonged. I knew it was useless to try going back to sleep. Once I opened my eyes in the morning, I might as well get up, no matter how early it was.
I grabbed my phone and headed for the kitchen with it, planning to get the coffee started. I didn’t have to be at work for several hours, and it was too early to go running. I had no idea why thoughts of Sophia were weighing so heavily on me lately.
It had been years since we’d last spoken on the phone or communicated electronically. I used to email her daily after we started studying at different colleges — having her so far away was its own kind of torture, as we were used to seeing each other every day growing up in Madison about a half mile apart — and she would answer those emails all the time at first. Then she’d answer every other email. And then she started going a week between replies until, finally, the semester after our sophomore year, she didn’t answer at all. I’d worried something had h
appened to her, even going so far as to reach out to her mother, who seemed surprised that I hadn’t heard from her, given how well she seemed to be doing in school.
That had been the first in a series of crushing blows, all delivered by Sophia’s sudden lack of concern for me. When I finally realized that she didn’t want anything to do with me anymore, I left her alone, not messaging, texting, or calling, just receding into her past like an object once cherished, but now broken and useless. I hadn’t understood what had gone wrong then and I still didn’t, even with all the time I’d spent puzzling it over.
While I waited for the coffee to brew, I leaned against the counter and pulled up my personal email on my phone. I’d had the same account since freshman year of high school. I opened the folder marked Her, which contained every email I’d ever sent to and received from Sophia. There were hundreds of them, going all the way back to ninth grade.
The second to last one I’d gotten from her had been about a few weeks into the spring semester of our second year in college. She’d been curt and harshly direct, hardly sounding like herself, only writing me a scant paragraph to my twenty or so. After that, radio silence…until the final email, which had only been a single sentence directing me to never call her mother again.
I’d sent at least fifty more emails after that second to last email, I was ashamed to admit — and that didn’t even include the texts I’d sent, voicemails I’d left, and direct messages I’d sent through various social media accounts. It seemed so pathetic, but I didn’t know what was going on with her. Had something happened? Had I done something wrong? Was she in trouble that she didn’t want me to know about? Was someone hurting her? My mind was overrun with every possible scenario, each one worse than the one before it. I pictured her kidnapped, unconscious, hospitalized for some serious illness or injury that kept her from reaching out. She could have already been dead for all I knew. I was in terror. She refused to answer, freezing me out so completely that I had no choice but to ask mutual friends about how she was doing.
But that was years ago. I hadn’t tried to reach out to her after she made it clear she wanted me to leave her alone in that last email. All I knew about her now was that she’d graduated from her fancy college on the east coast with a degree in art history. She was supposedly working in some museum in New York City. I could probably find out more by bothering her mother or some of our mutual friends from high school, but that felt too desperate. We were done. She wanted a life that didn’t include me in it, and I had no choice but to accept that, even if it still felt like a knife was twisting in my chest.
I read through a few of the emails I’d sent her after she when incommunicado — I did this a lot, sad to say — but I had to stop after three. It was just too depressing, and it brought up all the feelings I thought I’d painstakingly put behind me. I was dismayed to realize I was still miserable without her, but I was also furious at being cast aside so thoughtlessly.
We’d been best friends since preschool, inseparable confidants in every grade, growing and changing together, seeing each other through our own personal, life shattering tragedies — Sophia’s dad dying while he was serving overseas and my mom leaving the family and never looking back as she rebuilt her life without Dad and me in it.
We’d never made the romantic turn in our relationship that I’d wanted, despite the flower ring I’d put on her finger. I was forever stuck in the friend zone, which I didn’t mind because just being near Sophia had been enough. Despite the fact that we’d each dated a number of other people in high school, I’d harbored a private hope that we’d end up together when we left our childhoods behind us and went to college as newly-liberated adults. But then she got the acceptance letter from Cornell, and I decided to stay close to home and attend the University of Wisconsin. Before I knew it, we were on opposite sides of the country.
We’d drifted apart from there. Not at first — she had been the one emailing, texting, and calling me the most, completely miserable in New York before she started slowly making friends and getting used to being so far away from home — but then it seemed to happen all at once. She didn’t need me in her life anymore and just kept moving on without even giving me an explanation.
After that, I couldn’t even bring myself to drive by her house when I was back in the old neighborhood. I stayed away from all our old haunts too, terrified at the prospect of running into her only to have her completely write me off to my face. That would be so much worse than what had already happened. Even now, I found myself avoiding Madison. I could usually pretend that I just didn’t want to go home after spending most of my life in Wisconsin, but late at night and early in the morning, I stopped even trying to hide the truth from myself. I was staying away because of Sophia.
I poured myself a mug of coffee, added a bit of creamer, and sipped at it as I walked through my quiet, barely furnished apartment. I decided that I wasn’t in the mood to go running this morning, choosing instead to jump in the shower and walk to the corner bakery once the sun came up for a croissant and a cup of something stronger than the medium roast coffee I’d just made.
I turned on the water and stepped underneath it before giving it a chance to warm up, hoping the chill would cast the unhappy thoughts from my head. But they only intensified, with Sophia’s smiling face at the center, the look in her dark eyes lighting me up from the inside out the way they had for years. I’d give anything to have her here in front of me right now, to hear her giggle or rant angrily about something that had pissed her off for no discernable reason until I managed to talk her down.
I pushed my face under the showerhead, letting that water beat against my eyelids. I didn’t know what had come over me in the last few days, but it needed to stop. I wasn’t a little kid anymore. Stupid promises I’d made at five or six didn’t translate to much of anything in the adult world. I needed to move on with my life, no matter how stuck on Sophia I still felt.
She’d moved on and was probably engaged by now — the thought ripped the barely healed scars on my tender heart right back open again, the blood gushing to fill up my insides all over again, making breathing painfully difficult — which mean I needed to move on, too.
Putting an end to not just romanticizing our entire relationship but love in general was step one. I had to be fine with accepting that love wasn’t going to be this grand adventure, that I wasn’t going to meet some woman and click with her instantly, the way if felt like Sophia and I had done. Whatever I found was going to be hard work, but I would never find anything if I didn’t let go of my lingering feelings for Sophia once and for all. I needed to take a page out of Jason’s book, dating different women until I found someone I felt a connection to, instead of waiting for the world to deliver the perfect someone — namely Sophia Ray — to my doorstep.
I stepped out of the shower with a new, albeit shaky resolve. I was going to move the hell on with my life. I was going to find love, even if it wasn’t perfect. I’d let Jason be my guide in starting this brave new chapter. Constantly looking behind me was getting me nowhere. All I had to show for it was a handful of first dates that had gone instantly off the rails and a persistent dread of going home again.
So, I decided to make San Francisco my home. My new life started today, at this moment, I told myself.
I dressed, feeling better already, and put together the things I needed for work. Without another thought of the past, I left my apartment, whistling as I charged down the steps and out onto the street, headed for the bakery where I planned to treat myself to a chocolate croissant and an extra large cappuccino to toast this new beginning.
Sophia
SophiaSeveral Days Later, Mid December
I didn’t have to go into the museum today — we never opened on Mondays — so I planned to do absolutely nothing besides languish in my warm apartment. I’d already brewed some coffee in my French press and had a few buttered pieces of toast to eat while I went through the emails on my tablet, erasing the cra
p and responding briefly to the important ones. I was buried chest deep in a cocoon of blankets surfing through several of my social media accounts, liking and reposting whatever caught my eye when my phone rang. It wasn’t even nine o’clock, but my mother was calling. Frowning, I answered, expecting the worst.
“Is everything okay?” I asked, instead of hello. She never called earlier than noon, going back to my days in college when it was unlikely I’d be away before that. Now I got up early even on my days off.
Mom laughed, and I relaxed immediately. “Hello to you, too. What a strange greeting.”
“Well, you don’t usually call so early.”
“I wanted to catch you before you left for the day.”
Now it was my turn to laugh. I didn’t have a landline, so every call came through my cell, meaning it didn’t matter where I was. Mom had both a cell and a landline, and she sometimes forget that we were all connected, all the time.
“You can call whenever you like, Mom. I carry my phone with me wherever I go.”
She made a dismissive sound.
“What’s up?” I said.
“What are your plans for Christmas?” she asked, sounding hopeful.
I’d just gone home for Thanksgiving, which was my way of making up for the fact that I wasn’t planning to come home for Christmas. I had a lot of work to do at the museum and wanted to just have a low key holiday that didn’t involve traveling and long lines at the airport full of cranky, impatient people. Willem had invited me over to have Christmas dinner with his wife and kids. I hadn’t accepted yet, but I planned to. Not leaving the city would be great. There were tons of great things happening here during that week that I wouldn’t get to take part in if I went back to Wisconsin for the holidays.