by Mae Wood
When I left his place for the airport the next morning, I got a hug and peck on the cheek from my boyfriend of three years. It didn’t feel like a goodbye, but it didn’t feel like love.
The hour drive to LAX sucked. I sat in the back of the car, ignored the driver, popped in my earbuds, and found some music to fit my mood. Aching and bitter. Things with Scott were as good as they were going to get. And as good as it was going to get wasn’t good enough for me. Maybe Elliott’s letters had screwed with my head. Maybe I was pining for a guy who lived a hundred years ago. But there was no doubt in my mind that if Scott were Elliott, I wasn’t his Alice. He didn’t want me in that way that said need and longing. And what was he to me? My once upon a time easy answer to having a boyfriend?
By the time I was back in my own apartment, I had the afternoon to burn and I didn’t want to show my sad face to my mom or grandmother or Caroline. They liked Scott. They liked me with Scott. But did Scott like me? And did I like him? After the weekend, I wasn’t sure.
I dumped my carry-on in front of the laundry closet and threw dirty clothes in the washing machine. Laundry started, I called Scott to let him know I was safe and sound. I was half convinced that he wasn’t going to answer, that he was going to screen my call.
“Hey,” he said, his voice more distant than it had been a short six hours ago. “You got a minute?”
“Always,” I said.
“I should have said something to you while you were here, but, Ali, this—”
“Isn’t working,” I said, accepting the truth even though my mind raced to find a solution to make it work, to make us work, to keep us together.
“Yeah.”
“I’ll call the recruiter I’ve been working with and get in touch with a few more. Maybe there’s someone better to use. I’ll run down folks from Georgetown and Boston and work my network to really focus on getting in with a practice in Orange County.”
“Ali—”
I wasn’t stupid. I didn’t need any more words from him to figure it out. And I could tell by the way my name hissed out of his mouth on a sigh that his mind was made up. He was done. We were done. And the root of it was my fault. My inability to choose being near him and choose a perfectly good small practice over the prestige of a position at a research hospital.
“Got it,” I snapped, going into doctor mode. The land where my needs were second and the task ahead of me was paramount. And right now the task was getting off the phone with Scott with some of my dignity intact.
“Ali, don’t be like that. Listen—”
“No, really. I get it. You don’t have to say more, okay? Let’s just say goodbye.”
“Christ, Ali. I mean, I know you can be a hard-ass at times. I like that about you, but I thought we’d at least talk about it.”
“A postmortem?” I chuckled, fighting back tears. “You don’t change your mind, Scott, and I don’t want the play-by-play on why six months of being apart somehow changed everything.”
“Okay, then. I won’t give it to you. It’s not you—”
“Just don’t,” I warned, fighting back equal parts tears from sadness, and laughter from the ridiculousness of our self-imposed distance. The distance that was our downfall. “Don’t finish that sentence, okay? Because it is me. It’s us. And whatever worked in Boston isn’t working now and I’m doing my best to fix it, to hold it together.”
“Ali—”
And this time, I let him continue. I let him say all the things he wanted to say, but they were only sounds to me. I blocked it out. The apologies, the justifications, the rationalizations, but when he lied, I wasn’t having anymore.
“Scott,” I snapped. “You loved me. Don’t say you didn’t.”
“Ali, I’m not saying that I didn’t—”
“But you don’t anymore.”
“Ali—”
“I can’t do this right now.”
“That’s fine,” he said, trying to soothe me. “I don’t want to be strangers. I really don’t want that.”
That line did it. Because it was a line, a platitude, and I was done. “You don’t get to choose,” I snapped. “And I can’t talk about this anymore.” I ended the call before I let him have another word.
Anger coursed through my body. Why did he wait until I was home? Why did I wait? Because it was over. We were over long before this weekend. But if I’d gotten that position at UC Irvine, would we be engaged? If I’d taken that job that I didn’t love, would we be married? Would I be married to him and then only years later find out that he really didn’t love me? That I really didn’t love him? That we were convenient, but weren’t worth any sacrifice? Not even worth the minimal hit to my own pride by taking a good position with a nice private practice rather than the job of my dreams?
I didn’t even pretend to salvage the rest of the day. I crawled into my bed and stayed there, alternating worrying over what I had done and fretting over what I was going to do.
Thirteen
Alice
September 1915
Her roommate answers the knock at the door. “Alice,” Francine calls down the short hall of their shared apartment. “A delivery for you.”
Alice sets her teacup down in its saucer, the fog of sleep lingering at the edges of her thoughts. She stands, unties her apron, and smooths her hands down the skirt of her simple dress. At the open door to the apartment, a delivery boy stands, a bouquet of pink roses, tied with a blue ribbon, in his arms.
“Miss Alice Hirshhorn?” he asks, extending the flowers to her. She nods and gives the boy a dime and her thanks in exchange for the bouquet.
“Your new beau?” asks Francine.
A small envelope is tucked in the green waxed paper, held in place by a slender straight pin.
He was leaving. Or he had left. She wasn’t quite sure of the time, but he had to be gone. Ignoring Francine’s excitement, she unpins the envelope with care and then tucks her bouquet under her arm so that she can open the note.
A simple, rich, cream-colored calling card, his name embossed in black. Elliott Gustav Keller. And above, written in what she assumed was his hand, a simple Good-bye, E.
Seeing the ink, his familiar initial—in that moment, she knows. Her face crumples as her heart does. She has made a mistake. A horrible mistake. Why were they saying good-bye? They had just said hello.
“Take this,” Alice says, thrusting the bouquet at her roommate. “I hope my hair is fine.” Alice bends to shove her foot into her boot. “Where is my other boot?” she shouts at the world in a panic. The sleepiness from a few moments ago is erased by the need to get to him, the need to fix this, to right their wrong.
“Behind you,” says Francine, who grabs Alice’s pocketbook and places it in her hands as soon as her boots are laced.
Alice shoots out the door and down the stairwell.
“Good luck! And if you go to the Orient, at least send a message so I know you’re alive!” Francine calls after Alice’s departing figure.
At the waterfront, Alice isn’t sure what to look for or where to go. She isn’t sure who to ask. Men hustle and shout amid the gull cries. It’s midmorning and that’s when his steamer departs. She doesn’t have time to lose. It’s a Japanese boat he’s booked on. That she is certain. Vancouver then Japan. Maru. Something Maru.
She runs to a longshoreman. The man is wrapped in a waxed canvas coat with a cigarette caught between his teeth.
“Pier three, I think,” he answers out of the corner of his mouth with a shrug. Throwing the spent cigarette on the gravel and crushing it with his heavy boot, he continues. “Almost all of the Japanese ships have Maru in their name. And half of everything out of here is headed to Vancouver.”
“A Japanese steamer named Maru headed to Vancouver this morning?” she demands, staring him down.
The burly man whistles at a group of men loading crates onto a dolly. “Japanese steamer headed to Vancouver? Maru something. You know it?”
“There she is.”
Another man points to a boat in the bay, slowly cruising north.
“You missed your boat, ma’am,” the longshoreman states before lighting another smoke and turning his back to her.
“No,” she says, stopping herself before she can say more because if words tumble out, then her tears will follow.
On leaden legs she trudges the mile uphill to her boarding house. She’d flown down these streets as if on fire not half an hour ago, the minutes and seconds far too critical to spend waiting for a trolley. Her mind set to jump on a ship, to ask him to stay, to say yes to his unasked question.
Utter insanity, she chastises herself on the brutal walk. Eloping with a man she barely knows, who she met less than a week ago. She’d noticed him watching her while she sketched on the train. His gaze across the observation car warmed her skin. She’d snuck a shy smile in his direction, but his head was turned away, allowing her a lingering look at his profile.
She turned a page in her sketch book, the still life she’d been sketching out of boredom no longer of any interest.
His face would be too obvious, so she drew his legs and shoes in their various positions as he shifted about in his reading chair, never quite settling down or relaxing. And when he would look at her, she felt it and she would pause her pencil, her breath catching and her cheeks warming.
After what felt like hours, he folded the newspaper he was reading and placed it on the side table. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched his feet shuffle to a stand, and watched his feet walk toward her. Her pulse raced. Was he going to introduce himself?
The train lurched around a corner and the accompanying jerk of the carriage sent her charcoal pencil rolling toward the edge of the table. She’d shot out a hand to grab it, clasping it against the tabletop, her hand landing an inch away from the man’s hand, his palm flattened against the table for balance. Alice lifted her head to his face and found kind, delighted eyes land on hers.
“Pardon me, miss,” he’d said, straightening. He turned from her and with a few quick strides was through the door to the small viewing platform at the end of the train.
His nearness, for however brief a time, flustered her. She wanted to flee, she wanted to stay in place and await his return, she wanted to join him on the platform. Indecision was a stranger and she didn’t know how to respond to him.
She watched the door intently, her drawing forgotten. “Alice,” Francine had said from her nearby club chair. “Shall we freshen up before dinner? Our seating is in twenty minutes.”
Alice had turned to her friend, her roommate since their first year at normal school. “Yes.”
Throughout dinner, she’d wanted to tell Frankie about the man she’d crossed paths with. But what could Alice say without sounding foolish? There is a man on the train. He is so handsome and he was looking at me. I was looking at him. Our hands almost touched. He said “Pardon me, miss” and I thought my heart was going to beat out of my chest.
No, none of it sounded right. It was far too fanciful. At twenty-eight, Alice and Frankie are not schoolgirls. They are independent women who had jumped at the chance to teach and live thousands of miles away from their Midwestern homes.
And now, taking one step at a time, up the stairs to their third floor apartment, Alice doesn’t know what to say to Frankie yet again.
“I’m back,” she calls as she enters the apartment.
Frankie spins around, a pen dangling between her fingers, her face surprise then sadness.
“Well, I’ll have to start over.” She picks up the stationery in front of her and crumples it into a ball. “I was writing Josie and telling her about your whirlwind romance with Mr. Keller and how you were on a boat to the Philippine Islands as I wrote.”
“The boat left before I could get there,” says Alice, falling into a chair, untying the laces of her boots, and kicking them into a corner in frustration. Sulking, pouting, and utterly exhausted, Alice is thankful that Frankie lets her brood, and doesn’t intrude on her scattered thoughts and aching heart.
“Can I ask if you were truly going?” Frankie says after long minutes of quiet.
“I don’t know. I don’t,” answers Alice, standing to gaze out a window, toward the direction of the sea, before turning toward her bedroom. “I’m going to lie down for a bit.”
“You look exhausted. And I won’t tell anyone about last night.”
Alice turns on her heel. “Or any of it,” she says, her voice wobbling.
“Or any of it,” pledges Frankie.
Alice closes herself in her bedroom, her trunk propped open against the wall. How easy it would have been to have thrown in the quilt she’d pulled from it last night and have boarded the ship with him. Passports and plans be damned.
She unhooks her dress and slips into her nightgown. It’s barely lunchtime, but a day in bed, pulling herself together, is what she needs. Before the meetings and preparations for the school year begin. She takes out her sketch book and flips through the pages, staring at the imaginary vase of dahlias she’d been drawing on the train. Before the world was different.
Her fingers drift along the lines and shadings, smudging and working the charcoal. She finds her pencil and begins to work again, losing herself in the task.
She tears the page from the book and writes on the back of the sketch:
Dear Elliott,
You said to write. That there couldn’t possibly be too many letters from me. I’m not sure how to start, so I will simply begin.
There is something that you should know, but I’m not sure if I’ll ever tell you—at least not until you come back to me. I would have said yes. I would have said yes to going to the moon with you. The Philippine Islands are at least here on Earth.
I’m saying it now, here, on this paper, that I am certain that I will never send you. Because while I would have said yes, you may not know the question. (I’m not talking about whether I like ice cream. I do, by the way.) And if I was wrong, if that question was not on your lips as you bid me good-bye at my doorstep at two o’clock this morning, then I don’t want you to pity me.
But I think it was on your lips, lingering there but never pushed out into the world, bitten back by some reason. Maybe this is why I’m certain that you’ll be back as soon as you can. Regardless, I am confident in your return.
Is next summer too much to dream of? A year will be easy. I’ll gird myself and be strong and noble and proud and confident and think of how a year apart isn’t such a big thing. It will be terribly romantic. You on a tropical island in the middle of the Pacific, setting the stage for a life for us. Me, teaching this year’s class and filling my trunk with a trousseau and a pink dress.
A pink dress for the roses you sent me. I cannot thank you enough for them. And perhaps that is why I know you’ll be back for me. You must have had a thousand things to attend to this morning, and to send me flowers… Well, to be frank, I’ve never been sent flowers before.
But also thank you for leaving a thing with me. That’s what I was mulling over this morning before the flowers arrived—I realized that I had no physical remembrance of you. At least for now. I hope that some of the photographs we took with Frankie’s camera will turn out. I will send some your way, if they do. Until those photographs are developed, I don’t have a thing to prove your existence.
When I woke this morning (it was very late and I was very groggy, by the way), I fixed a cup of tea and a slice of bread, and sat in my tiny kitchen and wondered if you really did exist. If this past week hadn’t been some sort of fantastic dream.
The flowers are in a vase next to my bed. Frankie put them there while I shot down to the waterfront to see if I could catch you (yet again another thing I won’t share until I see your face again). When I returned, she asked me if I would have gone. I would have. Ask me next time, Elliott. Ask me to go with you. Ask me to adventure with you. Ask me to marry you. I will say yes.
You never asked (among many things you didn’t ask), but I was sketchin
g a still life when I first noticed you on the train. Flowers in a vase. Nothing imaginative or grand. I started this letter with the idea that I would send you the completed drawing as a keepsake. But this letter has taken a rather unforeseen turn and I can’t send it to you. I will now write one that I can.
Until we meet again,
Yours for always and forever,
With great affection, and
Love,
Alice
She doesn’t even read through the letter before she balls it up and throws it into her wastebasket where it disappears from sight. Regret sweeps over her again. A second time this day she has thrown something precious away. Up from bed, she collects the paper from the wastebasket and smooths the creases with her palms, the words smudged but legible.
Fourteen
Alice
September 1915
Dear Elliott,
The new school year begins tomorrow and I have been busy preparing in the week since you left. This year I’ve been assigned a fourth grade classroom of girls and boys. Long division looms. My third year of fourth grade and I hope this is the year that I finally feel that my feet are under me.
With the start of the school year, the splendor of the Seattle summer comes to a close and then gray days and long dark nights will settle in around me, but in a way, they are already here. You left a week ago. I’m eating, I’m sleeping, but I feel drab. Like the colors of the world have been muted.
My thoughts are often with you, somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. Far from my little apartment and classroom.
I haven’t had the heart to send you letters yet, even though I gave you my word I would. I worry that I won’t be charming enough or witty enough and, being honest with you, I don’t want my letters to tarnish your thoughts of me.
Today after finishing the first month of lesson plans and straightening my classroom, on my way home I noticed a postal box I hadn’t noticed before. It is a few steps away from the trolley stop near my apartment, and I have vowed that I will keep my word and send you words. And here they are—words, from me to you.