Dictatorship of the Dress (9780698168305)

by Topper, Jessica

  “I wouldn’t know,” I admitted. “Allen and I never got that far.” I pulled my panda hat down lower over my ears. I hadn’t opened up this much to anyone about Allen, save for Dani, who had been right there in the trenches with me.

  He looked mortified. “Oh, my God. I have no right to— Jeez, Laney. I’m—”

  “Don’t say it,” I warned. “Use your thesaurus app to find another word for sorry, okay?”

  “No, I’m an idiot. I wasn’t thinking about what I was saying.”

  “You’re allowed to have feelings, Noah. You’re allowed to get angry or upset. Or feel unsure. Don’t censor yourself because of what I went through. Don’t censor yourself, period.”

  I lifted my heels; the white rubber rounded toes of Noah’s All Stars practically cracked in the freezing temperature as I tipped forward and laid a kiss upon his forehead.

  My turn.

  I wished I had the power to erase memories like my favorite comic book heroine, Zatanna Zatara, who was the bomb even though she was DC. I wanted to make him forget he ever knew Sloane.

  Or, at the very least, forget how much she had hurt him.

  I heard his whisper. “I’m afraid to hurt anyone. I’m afraid of what people will think.”

  Dropping down to my regular height, I locked my eyes on his. “Who told me to face my fears? To walk that mile?” Maybe it was silly to compare our situations, but I didn’t care.

  He gave me that stony stare I hadn’t seen since LaGuardia. “I think we’re done walking. I’m going to page Ruel and have him bring the car around.”

  “No, not yet.” I wasn’t ready to give up and go back to the airport and leave him like this.

  “I’ve been in your shoes. I am in your shoes.” I laughed, but this time he didn’t join me. “Come on, no fear.”

  I pulled on his hand, but he didn’t budge.

  “I can’t.”

  “Can’t what?”

  “I can’t just walk away from it all, Laney! I’m not like you. Quitting doesn’t come easy for me.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I demanded.

  “I don’t know. You tell me!”

  I knew a dig when I heard one. I had let my flaws slip out in increments: I had quit the California dream; I had walked away from Allen all those years ago and spent that decade in limbo, letting my mother think for me, get the best of me; and even when it appeared I finally had everything I wanted . . . I had quit Marvel.

  Never lose your dreams, Laney. My dad’s voice was as clear as the stereo speakers in Gus’s fancy Cutlass Supreme, that night he drove us with the Stones on the radio.

  I had lost my dad, I had lost Allen, and I had lost our baby. But I hadn’t quit dreaming.

  My tears had the icy burn of liquid nitrogen; this time they weren’t from laughing, and this time I wiped them away myself.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “I want to see the fountain.”

  “It’s not really worth the walk,” he said, his voice flat. “It’ll be a letdown. I’m paging Ruel.”

  “You said if time permits. We have time.” Why was he being so stubborn?

  “I changed my mind.”

  “Changing your mind is just a fancy way of quitting, isn’t it?” I called over my shoulder and kept walking.

  He caught up with me. “Five minutes, tops. I’ll have Ruel meet us over there. Then back to the airport. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  Noah

  COINS IN THE FOUNTAIN

  Even though it was always a bit cooler near the lake, the wind had died down. We walked in silence for a while; our deal like an unspoken truce. I pointed out the Art Institute, along with some smaller places of interest along the way, and she soaked it all up. It was nice to see the city through someone’s fresh experience. The midday sun kept poking through the clouds every so often, giving us a rare glimpse of the diamond brilliance dusting the virgin snow on either side of the shoveled path.

  Grant Park was an untouched Sahara of white, save for the flocks of pigeons turning in circles like confused old men. The sun shone on their dark iridescent feathers like a shimmering mirage.

  “It was pigeons that made me do it,” Laney said matter-of-factly, staring out at the dotted expanse.

  “Do what?”

  “Quit Marvel.”

  She rubbed a mitten across the bridge of her nose, and I held my breath, waiting to hear more.

  “I was taking my lunch break around the corner from the office, in Bryant Park. You know, right behind the New York Public Library? It was a few months into Allen’s treatment. And there was this old woman, alone on a bench. She was feeding the pigeons bread from her sandwich. You could tell people were annoyed with her; the birds were swooping everywhere. But she was smiling, happy. I wondered what it would be like to be that old, and that alone.”

  Laney squinted into the sun’s glare off the snow.

  “But then a little old man came shuffling up and joined her on her bench. They were married, you could just tell. There was that unspoken comfort as they sat together. He had a book under his arm that he offered her. And she gave him the rest of her sandwich. And then he started eating and tossing crumbs as she read aloud to him. And I realized, I knew then: I was going to lose Allen. We weren’t going to get to grow old together, like that couple. But what little time we did have together, I didn’t want to waste another second of it. I didn’t even go back into the building after lunch. Left the project I had been working on, and that was that.”

  She smiled at me. “It was the best eight months,” she finished quietly.

  I was blown away. I knew it took a lot for her to tell me.

  I needed a moment to find the perfect words. But when I told her I thought she did the right thing, she smiled, and I knew I had.

  “Hey, whoops.” She stopped in her tracks to pick something up. “Your poppy!”

  I must not have wired it on tight enough back in the hotel room. Laney dusted it off with her mitten, then pulled her fingers free from it so she could rewind the remembrance flower through my buttonhole. “Don’t want to lose that,” she murmured as she tightly worked the wire around and around. The panda hat pushed her long bangs even lower, but I could still make out her golden lashes below them, as they fanned across her rosy-red cheeks.

  “Thanks, Laney.”

  “No problem.” She grinned up at me, and then she was off again.

  “I’m telling you, you’re going to be in for a big bowl of disappointment,” I warned, as she skipped ahead of me. “It’s definitely shut down for the season.”

  “I don’t care,” she called over her shoulder. “You don’t travel all the way to Chicago and not see the Love and Marriage fountain!”

  Her breath huffed little clouds of locomotive steam behind her. With my hands crammed into my pockets, I halfheartedly jogged to catch up with her. “It’s called the Buckingham Fountain,” I corrected, just as the structure came into view.

  She halted in her tracks.

  “Definitely more impressive when it’s on,” I added, apologetic.

  Laney shook her head and smiled. “I don’t know,” she said, taking in the sight of the dry basins. “I’m sure all the lights and water are nice, but”—she placed her mittened hands on one of the loops on the waist-high iron and copper fence—“they’re probably a little distracting.”

  I laughed. “Distracting? A fountain is designed to pump a stream of water into the air and then the water falls down. What could that possibly distract you from?”

  But when I followed her gaze, I saw what she saw. The unique patterns in the granite, the intricate details of the Georgia pink marble. And the majestic seahorse sculptures, sitting patiently amid the bronze bulrushes and waiting for the next low tide. Their blue-green patina lent itself well
to their mythical aquatic qualities.

  “Aren’t they gorgeous?” Laney breathed.

  She had her sketchpad out and the tops of her mittens turned over so the tips of her fingers were bare and better able to hold her pencil.

  “You’re going to freeze,” I said, because I knew I already was. We had clomped through enough snow to numb my ankles, and I knew those Converse high-tops she wore were not exactly water-resistant.

  “Look, there’s Ruel, waiting.” I pointed to the black car idling along South Columbus.

  “Just another minute,” she pleaded, as she stood rod-straight, her pencil moving like lightning.

  I stood back and snapped a picture of her at work. I made sure to capture the Chicago skyline in the distance, with only the red neon of the Congress Hotel breaking up the gray expanse of the background.

  “There are probably millions of pictures out there,” she called to me, “of people posing in front of the fountain when it’s running.”

  I couldn’t argue there. I had even hired a professional photographer to capture my big moment with Sloane.

  “But how many pictures while it’s sleeping, like this?”

  She smiled, glancing to her left and her right. “We are practically the only ones here. In this moment. Right now.”

  I walked back to join her, but she was already stowing her drawing supplies. “Can I see?”

  “It’s rough. Needs some more work. I’ll do it from memory, later.”

  Later, I mused. When this moment is only memory. And no more.

  The thought of that struck me sharp and sad. I crammed my numb hands into the pockets of my overcoat, and they touched upon something hard and cold. A penny for those thoughts, I mused. Pulling it out, I flipped it into the basin, where it sunk into the snow, out of sight. I wish . . .

  “Is Mr. Numbers Guy wishing on a coin?” she teased, her eyes wide.

  “Laney,” I started, but an enormous gust of wind shushed me like an icy finger to the lips. It teased her hair across her ruddy cheeks and threatened to play keep-away with her panda hat. We both gave chase.

  “No fear!” I thought I heard her yell, but perhaps it was the wind in my ears as I ran, playing tricks on me.

  Laney dashed toward of the sea of pigeons and they scattered, taking flight southeast. There had to be hundreds of them. Suddenly they seemed to change their collective mind and swooped west. She lifted her head in wonder to watch them go, and two things struck me:

  Next to my father, Laney was the bravest person I knew.

  And I wasn’t going to have a chance to grow old with Sloane.

  I was going to grow old, and she would keep operating to stop the clock, locking herself in some time period she considered her prime. Without considering me.

  She never once considered me.

  “I know Chicago is called the Windy City”—Laney laughed, catching up with me—“but because the politicians are full of hot air, not because of the weather!”

  “Where’d you hear that?” I offered her the wayward hat, and she crammed it back on her head.

  “Read it. On a Snapple cap.”

  She grinned up at me, that smile brighter than any light display, and I felt my hopes shoot higher than the water in the fountain ever could.

  “Politicians, huh?”

  My brain made a beeline back to watching TV with my dad at ten years old. I couldn’t understand why my dad was so upset, watching the president’s speech. After all, he had voted for the guy. “It’s because he wasn’t honest, son. He lied to the people. And then he lied to himself, to make him feel better.”

  His words had concerned me; at ten, I had already told my share of fibs. But I was a kid. Weren’t adults supposed to know right from wrong? “How do you know the truth from a lie?” I asked him.

  “You’ll know the truth by the way it feels, Noah.”

  My father’s words rang clear then, and I heard them now, despite the winter wind whistling in my ears. And standing in this very spot, while looking down at Laney that very moment, brought them full circle.

  Things with Sloane had never felt right. No matter how hard I had tried—had lied—to convince myself. And things with her weren’t going to get better. No amount of turning back the clock or slowing down our engagement could deny that fact.

  And yet here I stood with Laney, freezing my ass off in the last possible place I wanted to be, listening to her talk about Snapple caps and why the fountain was better off dry.

  And yet I felt happier than I had been in a long time.

  That was the God’s honest truth.

  I had treated my love life like a spreadsheet, trying to solve problem after problem with reason and logic. Cramming my emotions into equation after equation that just didn’t add up. I had experimented with every variable I could think of to find the formula for happiness between Sloane and myself, and none were valid. We were like a #NULL! error: the message that occurs when two or more cell references are not separated correctly in a formula.

  “You were saying?” Laney was back on her tiptoes now, leaning against the wind, close to me.

  There was so much I wanted to say to Laney.

  But first I had to put things to rights. No more walking on eggshells, trying a wait-and-see approach. No more “don’t ask, don’t tell” nondiscussions. I had to call Sloane. And her father.

  It was time to quit. For good.

  I reached for my phone.

  And that was when Laney kissed me.

  Her lips, utterly refreshing, brushed up against mine in a cold whisper. I felt the warm shock of her tongue and I tasted cherry Pez for a brief moment, all too brief, before she reeled back.

  Embarrassment and hurt passed over her face, faster than a bullet from a gun. She turned and ran, kicking up snow as she went. I stood shocked, silent and still, no better than a weathered statue in an empty basin. My reaction had been a nonreaction, my head lost in the lies I had fallen for in my past.

  The truth, and my future, was receding in the blowing drifts of snow.

  “Laney!” I roared.

  Cut and Run

  “Laney, wait!”

  By the time I reached Ruel’s car waiting by the curb, my lungs were on fire. Every breath in was like a thousand tiny ice needles. I slammed the door of the Lincoln Town Car, shutting out Noah and his pleas. He could go to hell. And GoToHail and find himself a new cab.

  “Airport,” I choked out, “now!”

  “But, miss—”

  “I don’t care! I’ll pay you double. Go!”

  I pushed the button on the privacy partition, sealing myself up in my misery. Pulling off my panda hat, I shoved the dumb thing in my bag and closed my eyes as we lurched away from the curb and into traffic.

  God, was I stupid! The day with Noah had been no more reality than my silly comic book sketches. What the hell was I thinking? I should’ve never left the airport, I should have slept there and taken the first available plane out, not even caring where it was going. Ten layovers to Hawaii would’ve been preferable over this.

  I no longer wished to have Zatanna Zatara’s power. Sentry’s would be far more preferable. The most powerful character in the Marvel universe, Sentry could erase the memory of himself from the entire world.

  My ego had taken a direct hit, and I was flooded with nonstop feelings of shame and worthlessness. Punishment, I fumed, for allowing myself to be distracted from my goal. How would I ever prove to my mother—hell, to myself—that I was capable of doing something right for a change, if I kept making the wrong choices? Reading the wrong signals. I would’ve had more reaction had I kissed one of those stupid seahorses.

  Despite all his issues with Sloane, Noah clearly still had, as he had sworn in the bar the day before, zero interest in me. So we bonded over a few drinks. And he showed me around his t
own. I had let my imagination and my impulsive nature get the best of me.

  My phone was roaring for my attention in my shoulder bag, but I ignored it. Noah had my number now, I thought dully. In more ways than one. I must seem like some pathetic female to him. Desperate for attention, starved for affection. Ughhhh.

  Could it get any worse?

  A horn blared behind us, and I turned to see a yellow cab. It toot-tooted again, as if to get our attention. I cringed. If Noah was pursuing us, it was only because I had made off with his bag and his precious computer. I remembered his big flowchart of bachelor party fun. He would be back on track and in Vegas before nightfall, where he would delete any memory of the ditzy broad he had passed time with during his day from hell.

  And I would be heading to Hawaii. No lessons learned. One wrinkled wedding dress in my possession and a mouthful of mumbled excuses to those I had, once again, disappointed. Same old Laney, waiting on standby for her real life to start.

  The green-and-white airport signs were coming into view now, as well as the sprawling buildings of O’Hare snaking across the flat Illinois landscape. The same yellow cab was still riding our bumper as we merged and headed toward the lane for departing flights. I blotted my cheeks with my palms and composed myself. It had been childish to run from Noah, but now that I had had a few moments of alone time, I felt better equipped now. We could divide our stuff up and part ways. Different airlines, different gates. Totally separate destinations. I would hand him his Bozo shoes at the security checkpoint, and he wouldn’t have to deal with me again.

  Noah

  WAKE-UP CALL

  “I’m on my way to an appointment, Noah. I don’t really have time to deal with you right now.”

  I heard a horn honk impatiently back in Manhattan, matching my fiancée’s tone.

  “I’ll make it brief, then.” Gripping my phone with one hand and the taxi’s headrest in front of me, I didn’t take my eyes off the taillights of the car carrying Laney.

  If anyone had told me one day earlier that I’d be ending my engagement, by phone, in a hired car driving way past the speed limit toward the Tollway in pursuit of another woman, I would have said they were out of their fucking mind.