Dear Reader

by Mary O'Connell

  The police officer walked Flannery across the street to the Hungarian Pastry Shop. “Let’s go inside,” she said brightly. “I really, really like this place. It is yummy.”

  Flannery wanted to shout, OH MY GOD STOP ACTING LIKE NOTHING IS WRONG! But what she actually wanted was for the officer to do a better job acting like nothing was wrong.

  The café was a crowded haven of light and warmth, of petit fours and baklava and bright sugar cookies. Finding a seat seemed impossible, so they stood by the front windows; the police officer carefully positioned herself so that she was the one with the window view. She took a hand-held tape recorder, a pen, and a doll-sized notebook out of her jacket pocket. As she flipped open the notebook, Flannery noticed the CVS sticker on the back: $1.79. It was just a regular little spiral notebook, nothing special or official at all.

  The officer clicked on her tape recorder and briskly asked Flannery’s name and phone number and age and home address before she resumed her forced naturalness: “Okay, Flannery. Got it. By the way, that’s a pretty cool name. I like F names. My oldest daughter’s name is Felicia.”

  Flannery wondered how the officer’s preference for F names was relevant in an emergency situation. “Thanks?”

  “So … the young woman who was inside the Cathedral? Can you tell me her name?”

  Flannery nodded. “Yeah.” But she stood silently in the bustling Hungarian Pastry Shop, stress causing her mind to retreat into a known pattern. The officer’s dark eyes were lined with a silvery lavender pencil, and she’d fringed her lashes with deep violet mascara. Her irises are highlighted by the precise purple shades of irises, Flannery thought. She waited for Miss Sweeney’s voice to intrude, but when she didn’t offer up a quick corrective to Flannery’s Springtime-at-Sephora description, she panicked. What had the officer just said about Miss Sweeney being inside the Cathedral?

  “The name of the young woman? Your teacher?”

  “Wait.” She flipped up her flattened palms as if she and the officer had just switched roles, and now Flannery was in charge and directing traffic to stop, to hold the hell up! “Miss Sweeney really was there?” Her voice rose, and cracked. “She was in the Cathedral, and you didn’t let me see her?”

  The officer spoke with the calm cadence of someone discussing lunch options. “We’re both just trying to get things figured out here. That’s just what we’re doing. We’re not doing anything but that. So, what’s Miss Sweeney’s first—”

  “Caitlin! Her name is Caitlin Sweeney. Is she okay?”

  “I’ll let you know everything as soon as I find out.”

  Dear God, lie to me if you need to, just tell me she’s fine.

  “How did you know to look for her at the Cathedral? Had you talked to her earlier in the day?”

  “It was all in the book. In Wuthering Heights.”

  “Well, okay.” The officer nodded a tad too enthusiastically, as if now concerned that Flannery wasn’t merely despondent but mentally ill.

  “So you say the book—Wuthering Heights—was helping you locate your teacher?”

  “It’s pretty hard to explain. I wish I had the book.” Flannery heard the caught edge of tears hovering in her voice.

  The officer squinted, tilted her head, and murmured, “Mmm hmm.” Perhaps she was taking a moment to sort it out, even to help Flannery develop a logical narrative. “So, you were—”

  “And Heath has been helping me too. But now we’ve gotten separated. Not like, you know, romantically.” Flannery shrugged. “Well, sort of.”

  The officer put her pen to her doll’s notebook. “Who’s Heath?”

  “A friend.”

  The officer was staring at Flannery. “What’s his last name?”

  “Heath?” Flannery blinked repeatedly and buckled her mouth back and forth, all the odd facial tricks and tics to ward off tears. She would not deny it; she would not deny him. “His last name is ‘Earnshaw.’”

  The officer sighed. “You’ve been spending the day with Heath Earnshaw? With Heathcliff Earnshaw?” She clenched her mouth on one side and tapped her pen on her notebook, exasperated, looking like she wanted to scold Flannery for being such a smartass, but how could she be anything but kind to the distraught girl in front of her? “The dreamy bad boy from Wuthering Heights is the one who is helping you look for your teacher?”

  Flannery nodded, imagining Heath taking the Cathedral stairs two at a time, searching for her. Would he be shouting out her name—her real name this time—and holding out Miss Sweeney’s copy of Wuthering Heights?

  “Yes, Heathcliff has been helping me. You know, just in the way that characters from books help you.”

  It was a bit of a Judas kiss, but now Flannery was desperate to get back to the Cathedral, to see if Heath had come back for her.

  “You know how it is.” Flannery smiled at the officer, as if confiding in a fellow Wuthering Heights fanatic, and maybe she was. “Certain characters seem to reach out from the page to offer you their hand and show you how they’ve triumphed over their own sorrows and difficulties.”

  It was a phrase both so incongruent with Heathcliff’s experience in Wuthering Heights, and so ripe with clichéd crap that she listened for the scorching red-pen voice of Miss Sweeney, but Flannery’s mind was quiet.

  The officer answered her cell phone (“Sorry,” she mouthed to Flannery and gave her a companionable eye-roll) and spoke softly: “Okay. Alright … well. Uh-huh. Hang on, will you?” She muted her phone and asked Flannery if she had transportation to get home.

  “I’m actually meeting my parents in thirty minutes.” The Eloise books from her childhood gave her the knowledge to add “At the Plaza Hotel.”

  “Make your parents buy you the lobster mac ’n cheese.” She handed Flannery a business card embossed with a police badge. “I’ll be in touch.” But she stalled a bit: “You feeling okay now?”

  Along with her iris eyes, she wore festive carmine-red lipstick, and Flannery envisioned her applying it carefully in the rearview mirror of her squad car, blotting it with a tissue, a Kleenex kiss.

  “I’m fine, thanks! Thanks for your help.” Flannery walked over to the pastry case and drummed her fingers on her chin as if confounded by an excruciating cookie choice—humble chocolate chip or lime basil shortbread? The officer put her phone to her ear, took one last forlorn glance at Flannery—who avoided her gaze by staring directly into the pastry case, as if hypnotized by the lure of sugar and wheat and her wolfish appetite—and walked out the door.

  Finally. Flannery waited at the counter and counted to twenty before she went outside, hoping to put some space between herself and the officer. The ambulance was just pulling away from the Cathedral, the flashing lights a new and terrible starlight, aggressive and insistent. The cold air stung her eyes and open mouth as she watched the ambulance, as her thoughts flurried in a circular pattern of terror and good wishes. Hurry!! Oh God, please! Get her to the hospital as fast as you can! Save her! You can do it! Hurry!

  She needed to tell Heath what was happening, and so Flannery automatically tore through her backpack looking for her phone. When she found it—Yes! She wasn’t losing everything! She wasn’t going completely crazy!—it took her a second, her index finger hovering over the screen, to remember that of course she didn’t have Heath’s number.

  And then the flashing lights of the ambulance went dark at the intersection. Flannery’s entire being buzzed, as if she were being electrocuted with dread: silver Christmas tinsel unspooling in her veins, lightning strikes zigzagging through her limbs. Because the problem with knowing a novel so dearly that passages came to you unbidden—normally a whimsical pleasure, a reward for your close reading—presented itself to Flannery as she watched the quiet ambulance. The words of a devastated Heathcliff were in her heart as Flannery stared at the illuminated rear window and saw the profile of a paramedic sitting all too still: “‘Did she die like a saint? Come, give me a true history of the event. How did—?’ He endeavored
to pronounce the name, but could not manage it; and compressing his mouth he held a silent combat with his inward agony.”

  Dry-mouthed and breathing harshly, yet giving herself an inner pep talk, Flannery walked across the street to the Cathedral: Miss Sweeney could be fine. She might be fine. She’s probably fine. She’s just sleeping, and they didn’t want to disturb her with the lights and sirens and such!

  God, where was Heath? As she climbed the Cathedral steps, Flannery’s mind bloomed with an OCD daisy chain of prayer: Please bring her back to me; please bring him back to me; please bring her back to me; please bring him back to me. She swanned her neck back as far as it would go and stared up at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. Though no one was asking her to choose, she thought to strike a nonsense deal with the devil or the literary gods or Jesus or any icon or entity able to shimmy through the ambulance doors and save Miss Sweeney: I will give up Heath.

  Flannery would give him up in return for Miss Sweeney; she would. Please bring her back to me; please bring her back to me. Flannery envisioned the rest of the school year at Sacred Heart: Miss Sweeney would continue to be her teacher, and Flannery would continue to endure the mockery of the popular girls—a problem which now seemed so minimal that she hardly recognized the old, angsty Flannery, who had taken the minutia of the day to heart. Oh, how Flannery longed to be sitting in AP Lit class studying the roses and the crosses in the crown molding and looking forward to zipping out at lunch for a caramel Frappuccino. How she wanted to glance out the window and see Miss Sweeney running late, rushing though the parking lot with her hair wet at the ends and tapping on lip gloss with her finger and then smashing her lips together purposefully: Okay, day. Let’s do this thing. Of course Flannery was sorry to lose Heath; she believed she would never know the sublime communion of dance floor kissing again. Yet to save Miss Sweeney? See ya.

  But as she sat on a cold Cathedral step and looked up at the dark sky, romantic sorrow came to her in the quotidian old way of shock chased by heartache. What? What? I will never see him again in this lifetime? He’ll never come back to me? But I still have his jacket, Flannery thought, her absolute correctness about this fact the briefest tactile reassurance. She touched the jagged metal teeth of the zipper finger and the silky, well-worn lining of the inner cuffs. Heath. It seemed a given that Flannery would never meet anyone like him again.

  And she was certain that she wouldn’t meet anyone like Miss Sweeney again. Flannery imagined Miss Sweeney wide awake and bantering with the attentive paramedic; Flannery pictured him as good-looking and affable and totally charmed by Miss Sweeney’s quick wit. Caitlin Sweeney, he would think, you are just … wow. Their burgeoning ambulatory romance would be a done deal before they reached the hospital.

  The doctors would adjust Miss Sweeney’s medicine; her equilibrium would return, and with it the realization that of course she hadn’t been Brandon’s murderer—God, the weight of that for Miss Sweeney!—and that Brandon was not ghosting around Manhattan but definitively dead and gone, God rest his soul. She would stop feeling so terrorized by nostalgia and regret, and remember that romantic mayhem was an essential component of a well-lived life, that is, a life touched by Wuthering Heights.

  Flannery envisioned Miss Sweeney sitting in the Hungarian Pastry Shop with the paramedic, coffee cups and shared sweets on the table between them. Miss Sweeney would be alternating between laughing with her new love and frowning at the real-estate section of the Times. But who could put a price on the life she and her handsome paramedic would enjoy in the City of Dreams? Oh, Miss Sweeney, say hello to Manhattan happiness, your sequel will be superior to the original.

  But now the night was cold, the night was dark, and Heath was nowhere to be found.

  Flannery stood and walked down the Cathedral steps. Dizzy, she bent from her waist, her backpack thunking her in the head as she kept imagining the dreamscape coffee shop scenario; she would concentrate on that because the potential reality was too dire to contemplate. Besides, anything could still happen! Heath might reappear, prayed for or not, and the day could assume its bizarre trajectory with the implicit promise of any adventure story: twists and turns, why, of course, but everything will turn out just fine in the end!

  * * *

  From the dark street, the Hungarian Pastry Shop looked swarming and luminous as a Christmas Day migraine. Flannery wasn’t sure where to go, so she went back inside. Should she buy a brownie? An éclair? Did anything matter? She felt grateful for the proximity of other bodies, for the boisterous girls waiting in line behind her, who reeked of lavender body spray and were passionately debating song lyrics: “No, it’s not ‘All the other girls are stars, you are the Northern Lights’; it’s ‘I saw you standing at the bar, you looked hot in nasty tights.’”

  Flannery ordered water and a petit four, stumbling over the petit; she took Spanish not French—was the second t silent, and how, she wondered, could silent consonants matter if Miss Sweeney was no longer in the world. But she is, she told herself brightly, I know she is. She stared at the top, pearlized layer of the petit four and deciphered an upper-case H swirled into a dark chocolate fleur-de-lis. Heath. Flannery rolled her tongue around in her mouth and licked her lips, hoping she could still taste him.

  “Next!” The woman working the register waved Flannery away and beckoned the laughing girls to zip it and order, all in one swift back-and-forth motion, her multi-ringed fingers and silver nail polish glittering.

  Flannery looked around for somewhere to sit. The rows of wooden tables were packed together so tightly and the air felt so overheated and humid that she wished for some airy, sprawling mall restaurant; she wanted to jettison the quaint. Her brain kept sending out aftershocks. Miss Sweeney. Miss Sweeney. Miss Sweeney. The voice in her head, ready to call Flannery out for her desire to “jettison the quaint,” remained silent.

  But she didn’t have to wallflower around hoping someone would offer her a chair, because right away two girls waved at her with an openhearted friendliness so foreign to her girl-world experience that it startled Flannery more than if they had flipped her off.

  “Here! Come sit with us! We have an extra chair. Go for it. It’s always so crowded in here, right?”

  Flannery nodded. She guessed that it was. “Oh, thanks.”

  She slid the backpack off her shoulder and took a seat. She drank and drank; she drained the glass, and still her mouth felt dry.

  Please bring her back to me.

  The girls smiled at Flannery as if her thirst was unexceptional. One had on a North Face jacket and jeans, her long, sand-blonde hair secured into a hasty ponytail, low and loose. But the girl sitting next to her wore a celery-green vintage cocktail dress, and her thick, dark hair was coiled into a chignon. Dark lipstick and a generous and impeccable application of cat eyeliner furthered her 1940s starlet look, and the brown mink stole hanging over the back of her chair sent it right over the top.

  She noticed Flannery looking and ran her hand over the fur. “It’s fake! Don’t call PETA!”

  Her friend laughed. “She’s already been hassled once today. Somebody in a passing car SCREECHED: Only stupid animals wear fur!”

  “Which would have been embarrassing enough on its own.” She made eye contact with Flannery, including her in the conversation. “But I misheard it. I thought they said, Only stupid animals wear fear, so I was like, well, Megan and I need to walk in a more confident manner because we are apparently getting heckled for our strides, of all things. I’m Jolene, by the way, and this is Megan.” She touched her friend’s arm.

  Flannery nodded and swallowed. It was challenging to hold back tears with Miss Sweeney in an ambulance, Heath missing, and two random girls being so nice to her.

  She swallowed again. “I’m Flannery.”

  The boy at the next table, who had looked to be asleep, jerked upright. His hair was buzzed, and he wore geek-chic glasses, but right now his most pronounced feature was an intense grimace. “Flannery? Oh my G
od, how awful. I feel your pain. I feel your pain on a cellular level.” He folded his arms on the table and rested his head.

  Megan shook her head. “Don’t listen to him!”

  Flannery opened her mouth to say something, but her throat felt so tight and swollen from this constant vigilance to hold back her tears that she offered up a tight, trembling smile instead.

  Jolene nodded and addressed the boy: “You shouldn’t have stayed up all night watching Dr. Who. That’s why you’re so crabby. Sterling told me when he woke up this morning you were still watching in some kind of trance.” She turned back to Flannery. “I love your name.”

  Megan nodded. “Me too. I never knew a single Flannery until I came to Columbia and you’re the third one I’ve met.”

  Three Flannerys?

  She felt her freak factor plummet, the smallest spike of happiness in her heart, but God, how could that be? “Oh, I don’t actually go here,” she said quietly. “I’ll start in the fall. But, you know, not yet.” Her voice pitched, then thickened: “I just came for the day.”

  Jolene nodded. “I was kind of wondering, because of your skirt! I recognize the plaid.” She lowered her voice: “Connecticut Catholic girls. We are legion.”

  Flannery smoothed her skirt, feeling both exposed and accepted.

  Megan shuddered. “Are you going to do a secret handshake next?”

  She smiled broadly at Jolene and Flannery. “You are some creepy ladies.”

  “I know! Flannery, you will be so happy to never wear pleats or plaid again. I burned all my skirts from Saint Theresa’s, but unfortunately the memories are burned in my brain, so it was merely freaking symbolic. Still, it helped to see all that plaid go up in flames.”