Love at First

by Kate Clayborn

  Before he could reconsider, he typed his reply.

  Up for a change of plans?

  Nora had her beach face on.

  He hadn’t taken her to the beach, not again, because once he had the idea in his head—to take her out, to take her on a date—he definitely didn’t want to Abraham-botch it and make it some kind of routine. And while he hadn’t spent many of his years in Chicago—his residency, first, and then his fellowship, and now his current job—exploring places like this, he’d certainly been around long enough to pick up on what people around here thought was worth doing.

  And judging by Nora’s smile, the Garfield Park Conservatory was worth doing.

  He’d lucked out, getting this idea on the one night a week it was open late, though if he could’ve helped it he would’ve gotten here earlier, would’ve been able to spend a whole afternoon with her, watching her walk through the curved, fragrant pathways, her phone in her hand, the camera app open. As it stood, they had only about a half hour before things shut down for the evening, the sky above them through the panes of the greenhouse glass purple-gray with clouds and the coming night.

  Still, it had the feeling of a date, or at least the feeling he thought might be associated with a date—he and Nora for once not dressed for home improvement, not undressed for what always came after. Instead, he’d gone home after work to change, dressing in a version of what he usually wore to the clinic—dark pants, a collared shirt he’d made sure to iron. Nora, of course, looked beautiful—any way he saw her, she looked beautiful—but tonight she’d worn a summer dress, navy and white, a featherlight gold necklace dipping low into the V of her neckline, her long hair down and lightly curled.

  When she’d stepped out of her car, he’d almost forgotten to breathe.

  Of course that they hadn’t come together was a reminder of the ways things were different between them; so, too, was the way they’d both, from the beginning, kept a strained sort of physical distance from each other. Around them, couples strolled with their fingers interlocked, or with hands set gently on one another’s backs—casual, natural touches that all of a sudden, Will constantly noticed. He’d wanted to get Nora out; he was glad to get her out. But now that he had her here, he wanted what they had when they were in, too. He wanted his hands on her while she moved. He wanted to set his mouth against hers every time she looked up at him, delighted by something she’d seen.

  Instead, he kept his hands in his pockets. His mouth to himself.

  But even in spite of this restraint, something about being with her here felt undoubtedly loose, freeing. Away from her apartment, he didn’t think about the way his footsteps sounded beneath him, or the way his voice carried. He didn’t think about the next project they’d use as an excuse, or about what would happen when they finally ran out of them.

  “Oh, look at this,” Nora said, bending over a sign. “Cycads can live for five hundred years! What a plant, huh?”

  Will smiled. Of course Nora would like an old plant.

  “Let me take a picture of this for Emily,” she said, and lifted her phone. When she finished, she looked down at the screen and gave a tiny, satisfied smile that made Will shift on his feet with longing for her. When she turned, he watched her skirt sway, watched it gently catch at the edges of the ferns that draped lazily over the path. He stayed a few steps behind her, enjoying it—the shape of Nora, surrounded by all this living, breathing green.

  When he came even with her again, she was looking up at giant, swaying fronds above her.

  “This is so good,” she said quietly. “I’m going to do more things like this.”

  He felt a strange pang at that I’m, this imagined future of Nora alone, out exploring places that made her feel good. He thought idly, aimlessly, recklessly of a routine: meeting Nora here every month, one night after work. A different dress every time. His hands out of his pockets. His mouth ready and waiting.

  He cleared his throat. “Yeah?”

  She nodded, keeping her eyes up, but he could see something pass over her face, something strained and sad that he knew meant she was thinking of someone specific.

  He waited.

  “At first when I came back, I was so focused on”—her eyes closed, too long for a simple blink, before opening again—“Nonna, and making sure I took care of things the way she had. The way I knew she would want me to. And then it was winter, and I was pretty sad, and then right when things started to . . .” She trailed off, lowering her head, her cheeks flushing.

  “Donny,” he said. “Me.”

  She looked over at him, her expression embarrassed. “I didn’t mean that.”

  “It’s okay,” he said, because it actually was. In her apartment, with the rental two floors below, maybe it wouldn’t have been; maybe it would’ve felt strained or maybe it would’ve fallen silent. But right now, to Will, the past felt safer, more comfortable than the future.

  So he stuck with it.

  “Did you always know you’d come back here?” he asked. “To live, I mean. For good.”

  When she stayed quiet at first, he worried he might have misstepped—that what felt safer to him in this moment didn’t feel the same for her. But after a second, she cast her eyes upward again, and he could tell she was thinking through her answer.

  “When I was younger, I did. I used to talk about it all the time, to my grandmother. And to my parents.” She lowered her head again, and they both continued on the path. A slow stroll, unconscious of closing time. “But I don’t know. I was always going to do college in California, because I could go for free where my parents teach. I still came back here, but not as often, not for the full summer.”

  She paused, and he looked over at her, caught her pulling gently at the ends of her hair before she released it and smoothed her hand down the side of her skirt.

  “And then I guess I got busy, and I got a job I loved. I kept in touch with everyone in other ways, and visited when I could. My grandmother, she was always so supportive of that.”

  She shrugged a familiar shrug, the one that communicated the exact opposite of carelessness. Guilt and sadness and doubt, instead.

  “I guess I always had two lives, in a way. Maybe I picked the wrong one, back then. Maybe I should’ve come back sooner.”

  “Nora,” he cautioned gently. “Don’t do that.”

  Even as he said it, he didn’t feel all that gentle. He thought about that dark home office, that tiny space she was allowing herself. He thought about going back to her place and shoving everything that wasn’t Nora’s into one tight, stacked-up corner, so she could see how much room she really had.

  But even that was looking ahead, and he’d resolved not to do that tonight.

  She sent him a wan smile. “I know.” She took a breath, her posture lengthening. “I’m glad I came back when I did. I’m glad I get to be here now.”

  It was a good reminder, that now, and for the next few minutes—while he and Nora and the few remaining patrons made their way around the paths that would take them toward the exit—they only talked about what they saw around them, Nora snapping photos and once asking Will to take one while she stood beneath a gigantic palm, her arms stretched out wide, her mouth opened in an exaggerated O. When he handed the phone back, he joked about how she’d need to make a slideshow of all the photos she’d taken, and instead of laughing she set a finger to her chin and said, entirely without irony, that it was a really good idea.

  “I could use my projector,” she said. “So I could show everyone at once!”

  Don’t think about it, Will, he told himself. Do not think about going to a damned plants slideshow in the backyard of that building. That is not your future.

  When an overhead announcement signaled the conservatory’s coming closing time, they made their way up the steps toward the greenhouse’s exit, Nora ahead of him, her phone already raised.

  “Let me get one more of this one,” she said, not even really to him, and so he stood where he was, wa
tching her climb a couple more steps to get the angle she wanted. He smiled as she bent close, by now knowing that this was one of the pictures where she was trying to show something to Emily about spores. He thought of Gerald and Sally, hoped their date—Will had given his boss three different ideas—would go as well as this one had.

  “They’re gonna kick us out of here,” he said, teasing.

  “I’ll get it done faster if you quit talking.”

  He chuckled at this familiar ribbing, something they’d practiced during their various feuds early on and perfected during their projects over the last few weeks.

  He was looking up at her when it happened—when her brow furrowed, when her lips pulled to one side. When she reached out the hand that wasn’t holding her phone to wave away a fly that buzzed lazily around the very leaves she was trying to photograph. When she clucked her tongue and said quietly, “Get. Get!” with a familiar trace of laughter in her voice.

  When his heart hiccupped.

  Like he was fifteen all over again.

  “This reminds me,” he said, before he could think. Before he could yank himself out of the past he’d lulled himself into thinking was so safe tonight. “Of the first time I ever saw you.”

  She straightened, turning to face him, to look down at him, and he almost wanted to check his hands for cherry tomatoes. But no—they were where he’d left them, still in his pockets, still in control.

  “You mean the morning I knocked my plant over?”

  Unbeknownst to her, she’d given him an out with this, and he could’ve taken it. Of course, it could’ve been that morning. Of course he could’ve said, Yes, when you knocked your plant over. But for some reason, down here like this, Nora above him like that, he couldn’t seem to stop himself.

  So instead he said, “No. Not that morning.”

  She blinked down at him, something seeking and intense in her eyes, and he knew he was going to tell her. He didn’t have to tell it all, but he knew he should tell her this, on this night they were breaking their routine.

  “The day I came with my mom, when I was fifteen. I saw you, up on your balcony.”

  “You did?”

  From where he stood, he could see her chest rising and falling, quicker than normal.

  “‘Saw’ might be an overstatement.” He reached up, touched the edge of his glasses, and her lips curved softly, her eyes still stunned.

  “You were trying to get squirrels away from your grandmother’s tomato plants,” he added. “Nonna, you called her. I’d never heard that word before.”

  He watched her throat bob in a swallow. “Yes.” And then, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I wasn’t sure at first. Not until that building meeting, when you mentioned you came in the summers,” he said, but that wasn’t really true. Hadn’t he been sure, from the moment he’d heard her say Hey? From the moment she’d looked over the edge of her balcony, down to his? “And then . . .” He trailed off, an echo of Nora before. Donny, he could have said again. Me.

  She shook her head, dropping her eyes to her skirt, smoothing it again. “I wish you would have said something.”

  “It felt complicated, with the building.” Another half-truth. He felt complicated. From the second he saw her again, he was all complication.

  “I mean back then. When you saw me the first time.”

  “Oh. Well, I almost did. I almost called up to you.”

  He could remember it so clearly, all of a sudden—all the things his teenaged mind had run through, trying to think of something to say to her while she rained tomatoes down on his head. Hey, did you drop something? That’s what he’d settled on, in the end.

  He felt an unfamiliar tenderness for his teenaged self.

  “I would’ve wanted you to,” Nora said. “I always wanted to meet kids my own age here.”

  “I would’ve been a little older, I guess. Two years?”

  She nodded and smiled. “That would have made it even better. I would’ve bragged when I got back to school. The cute high school guy who flirted with me over the summer.”

  She took a step down, bringing herself closer to him, and it hit him almost as sharp as the moment with her phone and the fly and her laughing frustration. What he would’ve given, to see her up close that day. What he would’ve given, for one more selfish summer before everything had gone to hell.

  Her smile slipped during his silence, and she paused, two steps away. “Then again,” she said, “At thirteen, I was in a pretty awkward phase, so maybe you—”

  “I thought you were beautiful,” he said fiercely, because he wouldn’t let anything else stand.

  She reached up, touched the edge of his glasses like he had only a moment ago. “I thought you said you couldn’t see me.”

  Another out, but he didn’t take this one, either.

  “I could, somehow. Your laugh, your voice. I could see you well enough.”

  One step down, so now she was eye level. At some point, it seemed they’d become the last ones in the greenhouse, though he hadn’t remembered seeing anyone pass them by. He knew they were on short time, that they’d have to go soon. But Nora was looking at him like she was trying to see straight into the past, and he wanted to let her. He didn’t want to think about the words that had stopped him from calling up to her that day. He didn’t want to think about rash, reckless, selfish; he didn’t want to think about the future.

  He took his hands from his pockets, reached out to link his fingers with hers. When she stepped into him again, he kissed her, like he’d wanted to do all along. Not since this date started.

  Since before, since before.

  And when the final announcement sounded, when they pulled apart and smiled at each other in sheepish delight, he didn’t notice the way he held on to her as she turned away, her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright.

  He didn’t notice that he kept holding on, right up until the second her fingers trailed away.

  Chapter 15

  It was possible she’d taken it too far.

  In the backyard, Nora stood beside Mrs. Salas, staring down at the six boxes she’d set out this morning, all but one full up, sorted by type: kitchenware, linens, clothing, books, electronics, and decor. In thirty minutes, the time limit she and Mrs. Salas had given to their neighbors would be up, and in an hour a van from a neighborhood mutual aid organization would come by to pick up their contributions for an upcoming charity sale that Nora had read about only a week ago.

  “The thing about that lamp is,” she said, and Mrs. Salas made a sympathetic noise—a tiny hum that was neither curiosity nor assent. Knowing that Mrs. Salas had heard a lot of Nora’s ruminating back and forth today, she tried to quiet herself, but soon enough her unfinished thought swirled inside her like smoke, hot and uncomfortable, until she had to open her mouth again to let it out. “It’s from Italy.”

  Mrs. Salas did the hum again, and Nora sighed.

  This was difficult, that’s all there was to it, and she had no one to blame but herself.

  And maybe also Will.

  Nora couldn’t pinpoint what had changed since that night in the conservatory, but something absolutely had. Between them, certainly, things had changed—a layer of caution removed from their interactions, a layer of freedom added in. They no longer only saw each other inside the walls of her apartment, no longer made such a production of the secrecy when they did. If Nora’s neighbors had noticed Will come back to her place that night after their first real date, when the sun hadn’t even gone down fully, no one had said a word. And if they’d noticed that Nora had been going out more than she had in—well, ever—no one said much about that, either.

  That she wasn’t stressed over this—that she wasn’t lying awake, worrying over being disloyal—was the change she saw in herself. It wasn’t quite like the smoke that had forced her to declare the provenance of a (actually quite ugly!) lamp she’d inherited from Nonna, but it wasn’t all that different. This feeling, too, wanted out, wan
ted expression. But it found its way to the surface in other ways: ignoring Austin’s calls when they came in after eight. Telling Dee about LA. Painting that tiny bathroom all on her own, before Will even had a chance to come over and join her. Packing up her laptop and doing a half day of work at a coffee shop five blocks away.

  Reading about a neighborhood charity sale and deciding to let go of a few things.

  I guess I always had two lives, she’d told Will that night, and ever since she’d said it, she hadn’t quite been able to let go of it. When she’d come back to Chicago, she thought she was settling in to one of them, finally and for good. But everything that had happened since she met Will all those weeks ago now suggested something different to her—that she hadn’t so much settled into her own life as she had settled into someone else’s. That had been comfortable, and comforting, because it’s what all her summers here had always been: patterning out the days like Nonna did, loving all the things Nonna did.

  Of course she’d started to know all this before the night at the conservatory; maybe she’d even started to know it sooner, during those lonely golden hours way back in the winter when she’d started to work through her grief. Something about what Will had told her, though—that he’d seen her, all those years ago, that there was some alternate version of her summer stories here that might have included Will Sterling—it had crystallized everything.

  Two lives wasn’t what she wanted anymore.

  She wanted one. With more patterns she would make for herself. With more loves she would choose for herself.

  But it was easier to want things than it was to do them, sometimes.

  “Maybe I should keep it,” Nora said. “If it seems like no one would buy it.”

  “Someone’ll buy it,” said Benny, stepping up to drop a brightly colored throw pillow into the decor bin. “Probably the same kind of person who’d buy this pillow.”

  “I bought you that pillow!” gasped Mrs. Salas. “For Secret Santa, two years ago!”

  Nora stifled a laugh. Secret Santa was rarely a secret in this building. Plus that pillow had There’s No Place Like Home embroidered on it. It could only have come from Mrs. Salas.