Dear Reader

by Mary O'Connell

  “I know where the Cathedral is!”

  The cabdriver was insulted, as if I had mistaken him for a tourist. “I have been there many times, of course.”

  An ID clipped to the plastic partition separating the front and back seats displayed his photograph and his name, which boasted eleven consonants and seemed impossible to pronounce. I scolded myself for my Midwestern phonetic bigotry: Good God, would I never be able to leave Kansas?

  I closed my eyes and thought about the Tallgrass nature preserve, the call of the Eastern Phoebe, and making love to Brandon on a slab of cool rock. I started to cry again. The cab was stopped at a red light. The driver slid open the partition: “Here! Take this.” He tossed a bottle of Dasani water onto the backseat and slid the partition shut.

  I drank half the bottle at once, lavish coldness sluicing down my throat, and then remembered I should save some.

  “Whatever it is that is bothering you, you will triumph over it.”

  He used a scolding tone, but his words were so caring. Dear Reader, by this point I was beyond all pep talks. I was ready.

  “Life is long. There are many second chances, as you will see…”

  “Okay,” I said amiably, mentally insulating myself from his ongoing missive of optimism.

  When he pulled up to the Cathedral, I thanked him for his kindness. I slicked my credit card through the reader and added a big tip.

  “The time when life seems most distressing is in fact the time of personal growth—”

  I slammed the cab door shut and went hobbling along the pavement, and then a second wind sent me sprinting up the steps like a crazed contestant on an ecclesiastical game show—impassioned and righteous—as I followed other visitors into the Cathedral. The guard manning the door warned us that closing time would be in thirty minutes.

  The memory of visiting the Cathedral with Brandon in much happier circumstances didn’t fill me with grief, because I was on a new path. I looked up, as one does in a cavernous church. Dear Reader, vertigo shook me, but gently and just for a second. I looked down and walked over to rows of wooden chairs. The main worship space closer to the altar was cordoned off; reserved, I supposed, for genuine parishioners who baked casseroles and served punch and sheet cake after baptisms. I sat on a wooden chair. I looked at the altar.

  Heath paused. He brought the book to his forehead, lost in thought.

  “Keep reading,” Flannery pleaded. “Or I can.”

  “No, I just want to say quickly: Caitlin Sweeney? She’s so extreme, isn’t she? You, Flannery, can’t let yourself get swept up in all this kind of drama when you are at Columbia. You’ve got to stay focused. If you find a nice group of friends, you’ll be fine. To be a writer, you can’t put yourself through this kind of college drama or you’ll have no energy left to write. And don’t make the mistake of piling all your hopes and dreams on one person. This one true soul mate business is total nonsense. It simply doesn’t work.”

  “Okay! Sage advice. Thanks.”

  “Listen, I’m not just chattering to hear the melodious sound of my own lips flapping. I actually know what I’m talking about; you can trust me on that. Don’t be too extreme about things. Enjoy a little moderation…”

  “Thank you, Heath. Now can you get back to the book, please?”

  Squinting, he held the book closer to his face.

  Flannery rapped on the cab’s partition. “Sir? Sir? Is there a light in here?”

  “What do you need?” the driver asked.

  “No, we’re fine.” Heath switched his phone to flashlight mode, a handy cone of sunshine in the darkness, and continued reading.

  A group of girls sitting in front of me—popular high school types who had gone rogue from their school group—were laughing and taking selfies. I put the water bottle on the chair next to me, took my bottle of Nardil from my pocket, and shook out two pills. I swallowed them with a small sip of water, but they stuck in my throat like little bricks. I drank more water.

  I gazed around at the security guards patrolling the aisles and noted tired-looking families with their backpacks and travel guides, and I saw an actual priest or a woman dressed as such. I downed three more pills, but my stomach started to heave. I wrapped my arms around myself and crouched down, waiting for the nausea to pass. Dear Reader, a bit of humor: I popped back up at the exact second the girls in front of me posed for yet another iPad selfie. I looked over their shoulders at the photograph—laughing, beautiful girls with bright wool coats and glossy hair—and saw myself in the very corner, a suicide photo-bomber and ghastly-looking, to boot: The last vestiges of my morning mascara had smeared into sloppy half-moons beneath my eyes.

  I took four more Nardil, and Brandon reached over and put his hand on my knee.

  Heath stopped reading. “God. Flannery?”

  She was silent, staring ahead at the back of the cabdriver’s head.

  He reached across the seat and squeezed her hand.

  “Thanks,” Flannery said, her voice high and hoarse. “Keep reading.”

  “Brandon,” I whispered. “You’re here.”

  “Hey, you,” he said shyly, smiling down at the Cathedral floor before he tilted his head and looked at me.

  “Brandon. I’m so, so sorry for everything.”

  “Don’t worry about any of that.” He kissed my temple. “I’m sorry too. Mostly I’m just so happy to see you.”

  A cellist was warming up, perhaps for a wedding, and the music filled me. Brandon let out a sigh of contentment, and I detected the smell of chilled red roses. There was no more water, so I chewed up my next batch of Nardils, a generous handful, enjoying the chalky crunch, so reminiscent of a childhood candy—Pez, perhaps?

  I closed my eyes, and there was the soapy smell of warmth.

  I saw a shoe: astronaut silver and cobalt blue and black, with thick, safe, silver treads enclosed in a thin layer of black rubber. I kept my eyes shut, the luxury of sleep, of letting go, after my frenetic journey.

  A little boy was sitting in a metal folding chair, one leg tucked under, and one leg swinging back and forth, his silver tread flashing. Oh, I thought, it’s you. I didn’t actually know him. My junior year at Columbia I lived in an apartment with no washer and dryer, and so I frequented the Laundromat. One night I was doing laundry and watching TV, the loneliness of a Sunday night pierced with the anxiety of CNN reporting on Afghanistan—helmeted soldiers, the quake and boom of gunfire in a land that looked entirely yellow and gold, baked by sun—Oh, where was the remote control?

  A woman around my age had walked in with her little boy. Her metal trolley, lined with a wrinkled trash bag, was piled high with laundry. She put a twenty in the metal bill-changer and out came a cache of quarters, loud as a drum machine. She put her quarters in a Ziploc bag. The little boy, on a different mission, ran across the Laundromat to the empty table in front of the TV. He flipped his Incredible Hulk backpack onto the table, as if to call dibs, and then went racing to the vending machine, his little face tense and focused as he ran his finger along the glassed-in rows. And then he raised his fist in the air: Yes! “Mama!” He hopped from foot to foot. “Mama!”

  “Hold on, hold on,” his mother said, her voice slow and fatigued. She was pulling her laundry—sheets and pillowcases, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles towel, striped shirts, and jeans—from the trolley, but she stopped and walked over to the vending machine.

  “Skittles, Mama! Can I get the Skittles? Please!”

  “No, baby, those are so hard on your teeth. Get the cheese crackers—you like those too.”

  “The Skittles aren’t hard on my teeth. Skittles make my teeth feel great.”

  He kept campaigning until the mother shut him down with a firm: “Stop. You aren’t getting the Skittles. Period, end of story.”

  His lips trembled. He held his arms stiffly to his sides and stared down at the linoleum. The mother sighed; she put quarters into the machine and punched the buttons.

  The little boy plunged
his hand into the hollow area beyond the metal flap and let out a joyful sound. He hugged his mother’s leg. “Thank you, Mama!” He ran back to the table with his Skittles and sat down. He looked up at the Afghanistan footage. “Mama?”

  “I’m coming,” she said. She walked down the row of washers, to the remote control, which was attached to the wall, and changed the channel to Nickelodeon.

  “SpongeBob! Thank you! Thank you!” The little boy ripped open his Skittles and sorted them in color-coded circles on the table.

  The mother stood behind his chair, watching. “You’re doing a good job getting all those colors together. Getting them all organized.”

  He arranged the Skittles into red, green, yellow, orange, and purple blooms, concentric and cheerful.

  She put her hand on her little boy’s head. “You enjoy your Skittles and your SpongeBob.”

  He looked at the TV, pulled one leg up, and started to carefully eat his Skittles in a pattern, one from each pile. He was going to make them last. His face was radiant; his leg swung back and forth.

  The mother went back to her laundry. She checked her phone as she sorted her clothes. When SpongeBob broke for a commercial, the little boy turned around to make sure she was there. She crossed her eyes and stuck her tongue out, and the little boy laughed and popped an orange Skittle into his mouth, and for the first time in my life I thought: I could do that.

  It was pure arrogance, as I knew nothing about how to take care of anyone, let alone an actual child. I’d never had the slightest desire for a cat or a dog, and as a child I’d once stuck my Pet Rock facedown in my underwear drawer because I didn’t like the expectant gaze of his googly, glued-on eyes. Yet in the warm, bleach-clean world of the Laundromat, the words repeated in my brain, unbidden, urgent: I could do that.

  Never mind that my pregnancy scares—one with Brandon, and one a few years back with the nice guy who’d cut my custom blinds at Home Depot (Dear Reader, don’t judge)—both had ended with the transcendent peace denied to so many of my friends, and that the sheer randomness of life accounted for the fact that I had gratefully stashed tampons in the pocket of my purse and resumed my regular days, while they had scheduled the grim appointments. Never mind that I deeply pitied the two people I knew with children: my cousin Emily, who had gotten pregnant her freshman year in college, and my friend Brogan, who gave birth to twins the summer after our senior year in high school. Their lives of drudgery and bleak routine allowed no time to gorge on Doritos and daydream, to walk into an afternoon movie, just because. My beautiful cousin nursed her skinny baby—who flailed his arms without warning and looked like a bizarre little dinosaur about to take flight—all day on the couch before changing into her “dress-up” sweatpants for a quick trip to the grocery store. And Brogan’s twins had once had the stomach flu and head lice AT THE SAME TIME, and her apartment was a tornado of toys and random plates of halved grapes and crackers, of neon-bright, tyrannical preschool notes—no gluten, no nuts, no dairy in the snacks, please—beneath La Leche League magnets on the refrigerator, which also served as an art gallery: every inch crammed with taped-up drawings of crayoned lines and dots and squashed circles. I could only pray that Emily and Brogan wouldn’t fall into the trap of searching for self/societal respect via mama-centric bumper stickers that espoused various viewpoints but shared the same I’m awesome and my beliefs are awesome aesthetic: MOTHERHOOD: IT’S A PROUD PROFESSION! EVERY MOTHER IS A WORKING MOTHER! A MOTHER’S PLACE IS IN THE HOUSE … AND IN THE SENATE! Oh. Snap?

  Any thought of children I’d ever had was accompanied by the mantra: I will never let myself get trapped. I will never let myself get trapped.

  Dear Reader, I was right.

  But there at the Laundromat, my old ideas vaporized, and I thought: I could do that!

  The little boy laughed at SpongeBob and chewed his Skittles. The mother finished loading all the clothes into washers and now had a moment to enjoy a game on her phone. Her finger swiped at the screen, but now and again she paused to watch her son watch TV. He was smiling—old SpongeBob was quite a character—and eating in a rainbow pattern, one color at a time.

  I could give a child their Skittles victory.

  The mother noticed me admiring her son and gave me a shy smile. For me, at that moment, she was not just the Holy Mother, but also the archangel Gabriel heralding miraculous news: I could make someone happy.

  Back and forth the little black-and-silver shoe went, hitting the rusty leg of the folding chair, the sweetest metronome—click, click, click—as the Cathedral closed in around my body. I shut my eyes and New York City pigeons and the Eastern Phoebe of the Tallgrass preserve and music and city lights and traffic and the faces of my students, especially your face, my Dearest Reader, formed a final collage.

  But perhaps this is a disappointing close for one so enamored with the splendid drama of Emily Brontë? Perhaps we both assumed my ending would burn incandescent, mirroring the glorious fever dream of Wuthering Heights, Cathy in all her Goth glory: “Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.”

  But not so much. Yes, Brandon was next to me, and Neil Young, accompanied by cello and birdsong, sang about a silver spaceship flying up to the haze of the sun, but mostly it was the little shoe swinging from sharp close-up to blurry slow motion, soft, softer still, a memento of love. Brandon put his arms around me, and I rested my head on his shoulder, and as I entered into peace, I allowed the words from Brandon’s e-mail to print across my mind in all caps, just as he had typed it years ago.

  CAITLIN I JOINED THE MARINES. IF I GET MY FUCKING HEAD BLOWN OFF IT WILL BE ALL YOUR FAULT.

  Dear Reader, we were teenagers.

  Thirteen

  Heath touched her shoulder. “Flannery, I’m so sor—”

  The cab was stuck at a red light, but she was already opening the cab door and running up Amsterdam Avenue, her backpack thumping with each footfall. What was Heath in the midst of saying? Oh my God, was he offering her … no, no, no. But the word appeared in her mind in the cursive watercolor font of the grocery store sympathy-card section: Condolences? Flannery whispered, “Please God please God” to the rhythm of her feet striking the pavement. Amped up on shock and adrenaline and shame—while Miss Sweeney despaired at the Cathedral, her brain chemicals betraying her by sentimentalizing some stupid shoe into a guidepost, a rubber-soled soothsayer, Flannery had been kissing at O’Kelleys—she ran so fast that, by the time she reached the Cathedral, she could hardly breathe.

  Two police cars and an ambulance were parked out front, and the gossipy buzz of people gathered on the sidewalk—their faces raised, perplexed—terrorized Flannery further as she raced up the steps. A security officer called out: “Miss, the Cathedral is closed for the evening.” But Flannery bolted past and raced straight to the two uniformed NYPD officers—a middle-aged female and a younger male—guarding the entrance.

  “Please, please, may I go inside just for a moment? This is an actual emergency.”

  “Miss, no one is allowed inside right now as the security guard just told you.” The male officer raised his hand, indicating the long flight of steps. “You need to exit the area.”

  “But you don’t understand,” Flannery panted. “You just don’t…”

  The female officer said: “You’re okay. Take a breath, hon.”

  “My teacher’s inside, just right inside, just sitting inside the Cathedral right now.”

  The officers nodded slowly, and in unison, as they looked at Flannery.

  “Oh, please! Oh my God! You have to let me in! She’s in such terrible trouble.” It took her a second to realize—the sound echoed in her ears—that she was screaming.

  The officer put his hand on Flannery’s shoulder. “It’s okay,” he said. Flannery heard the cautionary tone embedded in his voice and knew she need
ed to pull herself together. And so she smiled, the evolutionary response of the good girl, though smiling made absolutely zero sense in this particular situation. “I can show you. Because it’s all in the book. Just one second, please.” Flannery held one finger in the air and offered up another shrill “Please!” before she squatted down and rummaged in her backpack for Miss Sweeney’s copy of Wuthering Heights. “Just a second, please!” Her voice carried the repetitive anguish of a pet store parrot: “Just a second please! Just a second please!” She searched through each zippered compartment. “Just…!”

  But the book was gone.

  She looked up at the officer and opened her mouth to speak, but she coughed instead—a harsh, violent bark—and began to sob.

  The police officers exchanged glances. The female officer squatted next to Flannery and spoke softly: “If you’ve misplaced a book, you’ll probably find it later. Don’t worry.” Her voice sounded both compassionate and loaded with purposeful casualness: “Let’s you and I take a walk for a moment, shall we?”

  “Oh, no. I can’t leave.” Flannery shuddered. “I have to help her.”

  “I get it.” She stood and then reached down to help Flannery up, a hand gently under her elbow. “I understand what you’re saying. But let’s just take the quickest little walk.”

  As the officer led her down the Cathedral steps, Flannery kept looking over her shoulder, all her synapses firing, wondering if she should just turn back, if she should storm the Cathedral. And then—his absence realized suddenly, a new tornado of knives in her gut: Heath?

  Her brain swirled in midnight carnival mode, jumbled sirens and strobing lights and sharply cold air and concocted comfort: Heath will find me. I shouldn’t have jumped out of the cab so quickly. He’s probably so worried. So worried and searching!

  Flannery looked for him, but found only strangers with an air of giddy expectation, as if waiting for a bejeweled unicorn to gallop down the Cathedral steps. Miss Sweeney, Miss Sweeney. She thought back to her AP Biology class, where they had just finished up a unit on the brain. During the class discussion about the length of time a person could survive without oxygen to the brain, her teacher had given the stereotypical example of a chicken with its head cut off still dashing around the farm yard in a herky-jerky manner: The brain stem, in its innocence, could still function for about sixty seconds, unaware that it was sending neural messages into the ether.