The Austen Escape

by Katherine Reay

  “I’m happy for her. There’s so much healing in that, and in going to England.” Dad gave me a small smile. “Her father will never go back there to live. After moving here, he stopped all work with BP. It’s a good bit of emotional and physical distance she’s set up. And that man—”

  “Grant.” I supplied the name. “He’s a keeper, Dad, and she loves him.” I reached for his hand. “He’s everything you’d want for your daughter . . . your other daughter.”

  I didn’t tell him about Nathan.

  Now that we were outside, the differences between England and Texas struck me anew. “You wouldn’t believe how green it was, Dad. Shades I didn’t know existed. Cool too. The temperature, I mean. Dressing in clothing that went out of style a couple hundred years ago will probably never be called cool. But if Isabel stays, you know you’ll have to go someday. Maybe for her wedding. You’ll love breeches. And those neckcloths? Very you.”

  Dad chuckled. “We’ll see.”

  “I might get used to a cooler climate. I got to wear sweaters, and a very nice waxed coat, and I loved all the fires.”

  “You’ll get plenty of chances in Boston. You can have fires like this starting in September and probably continuing through April.” He added another log to the fire pit.

  “I doubt I’ll find an apartment with a fireplace, and certainly not a yard with a fire pit.” I rolled my head on the chair’s high back to face him. “Dad? I have no idea what I’m doing.”

  I’d arrived home Thursday and hadn’t called anyone or done anything for two days. No one knew I was back except Isabel, Dad, and Nathan. Dad hadn’t called; he’d assumed I was busy doing whatever it was young people do, and was delighted when I showed up. I didn’t expect Isabel to call. We shot off some texts, hers full of heart emojis, but she was happy and occupied with Grant and Gertrude—as she should be.

  But Nathan didn’t call either, and I wasn’t sure what to think about that.

  The idea that one’s happiness can depend entirely on a particular person—it is not possible . . . Austen’s line had returned to me over and over during my two days of sleeping and moping. I hoped she, again, was right.

  To be fair, it hadn’t all been sleeping and moping, I’d also sent and received a flurry of e-mails with MedCore. Interviews were scheduled for Wednesday, and they booked me a flight out of Austin Tuesday afternoon.

  “You can always change your mind?” Dad’s statement tilted up into a question laced with hope. He leaned forward with his hands on his knees, as if eager for my answer. Eager for a new answer.

  “Too late for that. I’ve got a hotel booked for Tuesday through Friday. They sent me terms this morning, so I expect Wednesday’s interview is a formality. They even hired a relocation firm to help me find an apartment. So next weekend it may come down to packing and going.”

  “You accepted then.”

  I shook my head. “I made it clear I was not accepting. When I say it’s too late, I mean at WATT. It’s changing and my new boss . . . Well, it’s time for me to go. But I do need to talk to Craig first. Despite anything else, everything else, I owe him that. I was wrong to just send an e-mail. He gave me ten minutes on Monday.”

  Dad chuckled. “The same lightning bolt, eh? I’m surprised he gave you more than five . . . But he’s going to miss you. Don’t forget those days in the garage. Garages are special places.”

  I smiled. Garages were Dad’s treasured places. If you needed to talk to him about something serious or had bad news to relay, you did it in the garage. He had a workbench set up in a corner and it was his creative home. It was also where we connected—Dan, Curt, Scott, and me. If there was one room in the house that had formed us the most, it was the garage.

  “Did Dottie order you a cake?”

  I snorted and caught myself. “Didn’t call to find out . . . I forgot you knew Dottie.”

  Dad knew all WATT’s staff, at least the ones who were part of that original garage bunch. Dottie came on board a couple weeks before we moved into the office building. She had been hired as an office manager, but Craig needed a “garage manager” first, so he brought her on board early. She and Dad had co-managed the packing.

  I watched a star shoot across the sky, then realized it was an airplane. It made my eyes prick. I swiped at them. “You wouldn’t recognize WATT now. It’s got over sixty employees and layers.”

  “Layers, huh? Rungs on a ladder.” Dad sat back in his chair and joined me watching the stars again. “Don’t sell yourself short. No matter how much it has changed, that company will miss you. It’s made up of all your friends. You were the first engineer; you designed all those gizmos, that kiddie robot that was so hot a couple years ago, that battery, and the—”

  “You’re right. It was good work.” I cut him off. I didn’t want to hear about it.

  I also didn’t want to hear that “the company” was going to miss me. That wasn’t true. The company had no feelings, and with its growth rate, WATT was no longer an idea, an enterprise, or a start-up. It was a company. Besides, wasn’t that the whole point of It’s just a job? There was no “missing”—on either side.

  “Are you running?” Dad whispered the question.

  “Every morning.”

  That’s not what he was asking, and I knew it. He knew I knew it, because he didn’t comment or clarify. He waited. I waited too and watched the stars. A few flickered and the sky felt like music. Music required honesty.

  “Yes,” I whispered back.

  Dad reached out and covered my hand with his own, just as I had done to him moments before. He didn’t pick it up or squeeze it. He just rested his on top of mine. It was warm and solid and the perfect weight, that reminder that I couldn’t escape unseen. I swiped at my eyes again with my free hand.

  “I accepted a job to rewire Mrs. Harris’s new kitchen.”

  “Okay . . .” I choked on a laugh. I had not expected him to follow up with that. “But she’s got to pay you more than a chicken. We talked about this.”

  “She is. I printed cards with the pricing schedule you designed and she accepted it. I standardized the whole thing like you suggested. But I wondered . . . What would you think if I invited her out to dinner sometime?”

  “You’re asking Mrs. Harris on a date?” I heard my tone. It was almost offensive in the amount of surprise that rippled through it.

  I sat up, faced him, and tried again—this time as a sentence, and I smiled as I said it. “You’re asking Mrs. Harris out on a date.”

  Dad kept his eyes trained on the sky. “I don’t know that I’d call it a date, but I care about her. She and I have gotten to talking over the past several months, and I’m thinking dinner is a good start—dinner and maybe a movie. Maybe that’s too much for one night?”

  “I think you could squeeze it in.”

  “Perhaps I’ll take her to La Buona Vita in LaGrange. We went there for your birthday a few years ago, remember?” He slid me a glance. “Isabel ordered that huge cake with the sparklers.”

  Isabel. She’d seen my dad, my “relational” dad, as she’d called him, better than I had.

  “I remember.”

  “It’s a little fancier than what I was thinking for a first date, but the drive will be lovely this time of year.”

  I leaned back and watched the music. “I agree, Dad. Do that first and save the movie for your second date.”

  Dad’s machine doled out a bag of Skittles every two hours. I let several drop before I circled back each time and swiped the colored rainbow from the catch bowl.

  After the third bag, I stood in the center of my studio apartment and surveyed the scene. From the living room, one 360-degree turn exposed every square foot of my home except the shower, which resided behind the bathroom door. The kitchen had been stripped of all superfluous stuff—perishables I couldn’t eat, nonperishables I wouldn’t, and redundancies. I refused to pack and move six strainers or twenty-seven empty Mason jars.

  I’d hesitated over the
jars. My old piano teacher sent me three jars of jam every August. The day they arrived always felt like my birthday, and I practically licked each jar clean—all the while pushing aside, and yet cosseting, that little nudge, that pinprick, of the something lost that they evoked.

  It was always the music. I could now name it and enjoy it. After my dinner with Dad, I’d driven home and pulled my Lanvin shoe box from the top of my closet. I had also pulled the last jam jar from the fridge, sat on the floor, and thrashed a spoon around its farthest edges. It was delicious.

  I turned again. The bedroom was set. Books on the bedside table straightened and every drawer cleared out. The living room, the bathroom, and the small alcove that served as my office—one desk and one chair—were cleared of every broken pencil, every leaky or dry pen, every unnecessary scrap of paper. Three garbage bags and four boxes for Goodwill. Two bags for the Dumpster.

  Six hours to clean an apartment. Six hours to ready it to move across the country. Six hours to ponder Dad’s question.

  Are you running?

  Nathan had asked the same question. Do you ever feel like running away? Isabel had asked it too—Isabel had lived it. Are we always between moments of running away?

  Are you running?

  I answered the question. Not enough.

  I grabbed a pair of shorts and my San Antonio Marathon T-shirt from the perfectly organized drawer, changed quickly, and headed to the Town Lake Trail, my usual route along Lake Austin—which was really a renamed section of the Colorado River. I turned south on Exposition Boulevard, relishing the burn of every hill, and dropped down onto Lake Austin Boulevard to pick up the Town Lake Trail under MoPac.

  I passed the Stevie Ray Vaughan statue. Single-handedly revived blues in the 1980s. Dad loved that statue and always gave it a salute when we passed. I wondered if Nathan had seen it. He’d love it . . . I ran on.

  I cut back over the river on the Congress Avenue bridge, right over those two million bats. They, too, would be moving soon. They’d head south to Mexico City; I’d travel north to Boston.

  It felt as if everyone and everything was on the move. Gertrude. Nathan. WATT. Dad. Time was not static.

  I stalled at the end of the bridge. Large white canvas umbrellas covered the patio at the Four Seasons Hotel. They reminded me of Braithwaite House. It felt very close and, in the same breath, a lifetime ago.

  And that’s when they flew. I looked up as almost two million bats rose into the sky. They came out in waves, an undulating pattern rather than a steady stream. It made me think of Golightly and the power problem. It made me think of WATT: all these individual bats working at the same time, in the same direction. A surge of them rose in the air so tightly I couldn’t make out the individuals; it was just a mass of black.

  The stream slowed, dark descended, and I ran home.

  Chapter 27

  The first thing I noticed was the hum. I’d been in my apartment all weekend—the upstairs guy had moved on from Macklemore to Hoodie Allen, my AC unit had chugged away to keep the apartment below eighty degrees, and MoPac had provided its ever-present white noise. But it was here at work that I felt it inside me. There were a variety of computers operating at different frequencies, the AC units, soft chatter drifting in the open space above our cubicles, even a radio somewhere playing Carrie Underwood.

  And it was Monday. I secretly loved Mondays. People worked hard at WATT, and it wasn’t until Friday they loosened up and relaxed across the cubicles or in the break room or headed to a brewpub to unpack the week. On Mondays we were warming up, heads down and serious, full of promise. This was the week something great would happen.

  I felt displaced as the morning passed by. Moira wasn’t at her desk. No one needed me. No one stopped by. It was a typical Monday, but I no longer felt in the mix. I had no projects to pursue. This was what I’d wanted, why I’d sent Craig an e-mail, and yet . . .

  After about an hour staring at my wire animals, I began cleaning out my desk. It took no time, but more Skittles than my apartment had. Without Dad’s controlled distribution system, I power-chomped my way into my third bag before I cleaned my stash from my bottom desk drawer and dropped it all on Moira’s neat and still empty desk.

  By midafternoon I was stir-crazy and on a sugar high.

  “I heard, and not from you, by the way.” Moira draped herself over the divider between our cubicles as she always did upon arriving to work. Her now copper-colored hair puddled on my top shelf. “I hate you.” Her tone held notes of sarcasm and bravado. Her eyes held hurt.

  “Where have you been?”

  “I had meetings downtown. I would have told you, but you aren’t supposed to be here and you’re certainly not supposed to be quitting.”

  I twirled a finger at her hair. “In my honor?”

  “As if. I’m doing nothing in your honor. Copper is simply a good fall color.” She hiked her chin. “Everyone was talking about you Friday. Word got out about your e-mail. Really, Mary? An e-mail?” She reached over the wall and dangled a Starbucks cup in my face. “I brought you this. An afternoon pick-me-up. I shouldn’t have. But I did, so drink it.”

  I took the cup, set it down, and walked out of my cubicle and into hers. I hugged her.

  She hugged me back. “What’s going on? Why’d you do it?” She dropped into her chair and scowled at the packs of Skittles. She didn’t comment as I perched on her desk.

  “We can’t talk here,” I said. “We’ll talk tonight. For now, let’s say I need a change.”

  “Seems to be a thing around here. We all got called into the staff meeting Friday to say good-bye to Nathan.”

  “Nathan was here on Friday?”

  Moira narrowed her eyes. “Why does that surprise you?”

  “Later. But I thought he was finished here a week ago.”

  Moira nodded. “He came in to wrap something up, but he’s gone now. I think. He and Craig were closed up all Friday except for that good-bye meeting.” Then she smirked. “He got cake.”

  “Word is Dottie got me one too. Ten minutes with Craig and cake.”

  Moira scoffed. Craig’s eccentricities bugged her at times. “One of his best employees quits and he only gives you ten minutes? He probably won’t even ask why you’re going. Why are you going?”

  “Later,” I reminded her. “And you know him; I’m honored to get ten whole minutes. If he didn’t respect me so much, I might only get two.”

  Moira matched my sarcasm. “Whatever.”

  “Hey . . .” I shoved at her shoulder. The gesture reminded me of Nathan and his constant happy shoulder-bumping. My false buoyancy faltered. “It’s for the best.”

  “Whose best? You love this job. No one else has got your geeky enthusiasm for everything about this place.”

  “Mary? Mary?”

  I stood. Moira stood too. We found Benson standing in my cubicle looking around as if he might find me hiding.

  “He does,” I whispered to Moira before calling out, “Over here.”

  “Oh . . .” He blinked. “Can I talk to you?”

  “Sure. Be right there.” I turned back to Moira. “Are you busy tonight?”

  “All yours.”

  I put my hand on my heart and left her cubicle. “I’m touched.”

  “I still hate you.”

  Benson started talking before I sat. “I’ve been here all weekend. How are you here? I thought—Have you been here all morning? I would’ve called you, but I thought you were gone, then Lucas said he saw you. I need to show you this. It’s incredible. It works.”

  Short, compact, and crackling with energy, Benson was my definition of a live wire. He was also the kindest man I’d ever met. He crossed the little hall, pulled a chair from another cubicle with a “Sorry, can I borrow this?” and tucked close to me. “You’re brilliant.”

  I caught back a half laugh and returned the compliment. “And so are you.”

  He sat straight. “I’m serious.” He opened his laptop and pushed it onto
the desk in front of me. “I had no idea you were so far along, and then—your idea about the bats.”

  After my run, I’d sent Benson an e-mail. I’d sent him my notes, but this was more. I wanted his help. There was something about the bats and the waves in which they flew from beneath the bridge that struck me as relevant to Golightly.

  “The bats were a great analogy. They come out as individuals, but we see them as waves. Our eyes can’t differentiate—mass creates power. I watched a video, and they launch in surges too. You caught the ebb and flow—the sequencing. We need to run the power in dual pure sine waves at alternating rates.”

  My jaw dropped. It was so simple. Nathan had said it would be. Nathan—

  Nathan was gone.

  “Here. I came in around four and worked up the schematics for a prototype. The lab guys are ready when you give the word.” He tapped on a different view, then, swiping his finger across his screen, he flew through several diagrams. I barely kept up.

  I flicked his hand away to pause on the data sheet. “You did all this since last night?”

  “I don’t sleep much, and when you sent all your files I got curious. Then last night when you asked for my help . . . You help me all the time, but you’ve never shared this. I was honored.” A red flush climbed his neck. He tapped his screen again and again. “It’s all here. Look . . . And this . . . And here.”

  I glanced at him. Benson was nodding so hard his glasses lifted off his nose. “Maybe you were too close and needed another set of eyes.”

  “I guess I did.”

  He poked his screen so hard the colors distorted. “We can do this. You need to talk to Craig.” He popped up and looked toward Craig’s office. “Is he here today? You’ve got to take this to him. I haven’t seen him. It is Monday, right?”

  “It’s Monday and he’s here.” I tapped my phone. “In one minute I’ve got ten minutes with him. But I sent all this to you because I thought you’d appreciate it. Karen has no interest in it.” I stood to go. “We’re not going to build it.”