“Auntie Caitlin!” he yelled, and charged down the stairs and threw his arms around her neck.
“Bear!” Tears filled her eyes as she gripped him as if he were her own. But how … She lifted her gaze and there, leaning against the upstairs hallway and looking defeated, was Finn.
“Finn! Oh, thank God.” Relief cascaded over her. “What are you doing here?”
He held up a house key, one she recognized having given him years ago. “We needed a shower,” he said in an unapologetic tone that was decidedly un-Finn. He was challenging her with his eyes, and her relief began to be displaced by an unsettled feeling that was not unlike real fear. “You might have gathered that this is not a social call.”
Caitlin’s smile faded.
4
AUGUST 2010
Being dateless for George and Caitlin’s wedding wasn’t a surprise to Finn. He’d never planned on taking a date, and hadn’t much cared—right up until there was a specific woman he found himself wanting to have by his side, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. The fact that he caught himself standing on the edge of the dance floor trying to picture what the woman from the beach might have worn to this white-light-strung evening under the stars, imagining what she might have felt like in his arms as the swing band played, that was the part that surprised him. What an idiot he’d been not to at least have gotten her name. All that talk about Camp Pickiwicki and not once had he bothered to ask—it was his own fault, really. He should have known better, that anything could happen at any time to derail things. If losing his parents one after the other so soon after college had taught him anything, that was it.
Caitlin had been the one to step forward and help pick up the pieces then—his male friends were relatively useless in emotional scenarios, which he understood but still couldn’t help privately resenting just a little—and he knew he owed her wedding his full attention now. But he’d never had much control over his daydreaming, and she was used to it. Gorgeous in a fitted lace designer gown that George’s family had to have footed the bill for, breathless from dancing, giddy with happiness, she pulled Finn aside to chide him playfully. “You’re creative,” she told him. “If anyone can devise a way to locate a mystery woman, it’s you. Just devise it tomorrow, would you? You’ve been standing here spaced-out for the entire set.”
He was hopeless. For two weeks now, he’d been unable to stop thinking about that encounter on the beach, to stop looking for her everywhere he went. By the time he’d managed to locate the sick woman’s husband and return with him to the lifeguard, the ambulance was gone, and his fellow good Samaritan with it. The poor husband ran off in such a panic that Finn wasn’t able to ask if he might ride along. It was a long jog back to the penthouse George had rented—Finn must have wandered well over a mile down the beach earlier that afternoon before being pulled to a halt by that familiar yellow T-shirt—and by the time he retraced his steps, begged the keys to the group’s shared rental car, and made his way to the hospital, the woman he’d felt so instantly drawn to was gone.
“She asked about you, though,” the husband told him. When Finn finally came across him in the waiting room, he was less distraught, apologetic for having left the beach without so much as a thank-you, and Finn looked at the little boy asleep in the man’s lap and brushed his apologies away.
She had asked about him. Well, that was something. But it didn’t help.
He knew she lived somewhere in the Cincinnati area, but what had always struck him as a relatively small city suddenly seemed impossibly vast. Whenever he had a moment to himself—sitting in traffic, waiting for a takeout order, riding his road bike, flipping through the channels on his couch alone at night—he ran over and over their conversation, looking for some clue he might have missed to help him find her. But there wasn’t even a hint of what she did for a living, what kind of neighborhood she lived in, how she spent her time, anything. Just as bad, he could not think of anything he’d told her that might have allowed her to find him, if she were so inclined. How was it possible that they’d managed to have such a real connection and yet found out so little about each other?
Finn was used to returning home from vacations dreaming about going back to wherever he’d been. But this time, all he could think of was trying to find that piece of the beach that was somewhere here in Ohio with him.
The wedding ended in a blur of tossed flower petals and downed champagne, Caitlin and George left for their honeymoon, and normal life resumed, as it always seemed to. Finn’s college friends had been systematically relocating to other cities since graduation—it never took much to lure bright-eyed young adults away from Cincinnati, so long as they were romantically unattached—and aside from Caitlin he mostly hung out with coworkers these days. Or with himself. There was a fine line, it turned out, between being a dreamer and being a loner. He minded it only sometimes. The week dragged by, and when a group at the graphic design firm where he worked took their summer interns out for a good-bye happy hour, Finn went along. Anything beat another solo Friday night at home. He wasn’t entirely sure the students were all twenty-one, but the bartenders knew Finn and his coworkers brainstormed projects here after hours, and they weren’t about to start carding people at a work function. Two pints in, Finn confessed his trouble.
“Dude,” said one of the interns prophetically. He was a frat guy type who spent his lunch breaks smoking in the parking lot and talking self-importantly on his Bluetooth. Finn had been unimpressed. “Craigslist, dude.”
“I’m not looking for a cheap couch,” Finn said, trying to refrain from rolling his eyes. “Or a cheap date.”
But another intern—Amanda, their hardest worker of the summer, one who’d actually helped to cover for Finn while he was in Sunny Isles—brightened. “Craigslist’s Missed Connections, he means! That’s brilliant.”
Finn hated these moments when he felt out of touch. Surely he wasn’t that old, was he? He still stayed up all night sketching some weekends, drinking Red Bull and smoking pot. He always went to the MidPoint Music Festival, and knew all—well, most—of the must-see bands. He didn’t tuck in his shirts. “Never heard of it,” he admitted.
The students talked over one another in their excitement to explain the wonders of the Missed Connections page, as if they’d stumbled upon a senior citizen who had never heard of Facebook. (Not that Finn was on Facebook—the whole principle appealed a lot less once you’d hit the find-out-who-your-friends-are crossroads of being orphaned—but he knew what it was.) The idea of placing a personal ad of sorts for a person you’d missed sounded simple enough. They recounted the legendary posts that occasionally went viral for their cluelessness or their poetry.
“Have you ever answered one?” he asked the group.
A chorus of nos was punctuated by an “I wish!” Blood rushed to Amanda’s cheeks.
“So people actually read these things?”
The students looked around at one another and sort of collectively shrugged.
“Right.” This time, he went ahead and rolled his eyes.
“What do you have to lose, though?” It was Amanda again, smiling hopefully.
“Dude, if no one answers, so what? You don’t, like, post it under your full name. No one has to know it’s you. Besides, you got a better idea?”
Finn did not. Still, he waited a few days, until the students were all back on campuses far-flung across the state, in hopes that they’d forgotten about the conversation thoroughly enough to not get curious and check the Cincinnati Craigslist Missed Connections page. The last thing he needed was these kids passing the post around to their roommates, laughing at how pathetic he was, boasting about how he hadn’t even known what the page was until they’d told him. Finn believed in … well, not karma, exactly, but vibes. Good ones. He wanted the universe on his side.
Finally, on a night when the rain pelted his windows in sheets and his beer tasted like liquid courage, Finn sat down at his computer and drafted a post.<
br />
You on the beach in the Camp Pickiwicki shirt: If you’re reading this, the third coincidence is the charm. Care to pick up where fate left off? My name is Finn, by the way. It’s pretty obvious by now that I should have told you that.
If he had posted that, just as it was, everything would have turned out differently.
But he didn’t. And it didn’t.
Because as he was about to click the post through, something held him back. The words had sounded right in his head. They sounded like him. But maybe his voice wouldn’t come across on-screen. Maybe she’d think he was being flippant, more friendly than romantically interested, not as genuine as he felt. Maybe he should try to be a little more romantic, less open to interpretation. Besides, maybe those interns wouldn’t forget to check. They’d spot his name right away. So he wrote instead:
If you are an attractive young woman who recently returned from a vacation during which you had a conversation with a stranger that ended rather abruptly, through extenuating circumstances beyond your or his control, causing that stranger to seriously question his mental wherewithal not to have gotten your name the first chance he got, then you might be the woman I can’t stop thinking about, and I may be that stranger.
It wasn’t the most natural-sounding thing in the world, but at least it was clear that he was being flirty, not interested in a brotherly sort of way.
He clicked Publish; he told himself there was no possible way that she would see it anyway. He went to bed.
For the next seventy-two hours, he checked his in-box obsessively, keeping his smartphone on full volume so that he’d be sure not to miss the chime announcing the arrival of what could be the e-mail he was waiting for. Nothing. Each time he saw that it was empty, his heart sank a little. Why did his hopes always manage to get up even when he tried not to let them? And then, on the fourth day, he awoke to find, to his complete amazement, a brief message sent through the anonymous Craigslist e-mail relay:
Okay, stranger, I’ll bite. Let’s see if I am your me and you are my you. Fountain Square, Saturday, 7:00?
5
AUGUST 2016
How many times had Violet sat or lay in Bear’s bed with her arms wrapped around him, her fingers tousling his hair, a book open on their laps, his fortress of stuffed animals walling them in on three sides? She pulled them all around her now as she curled up as tight as she could under his Thomas the Train comforter, squeezing her eyes shut against the unstoppable tears as she tried to conjure something of him. She missed his little boy smell, always a bit sweet and a bit sour. His tiny, infectious laugh. His slow breathing when he’d only just drifted off to sleep, so dramatic that she often suspected at first that he was faking. His soft singing along with the old-timey songs she liked to sing as lullabies, “Time After Time,” “All of Me,” “Moon River,” “Walkin’ After Midnight.” The faint tinkle of him calling “Mommy” from another room.
Oh, God. Was he calling for her, crying for her now? She felt so helpless, it was all she could do not to claw the hair out of her own scalp, not to scream and scream until she had no voice left, not to heave her sobs deeper and deeper into his pillow until she couldn’t breathe. Low, sorrowful moans escaped her as she clutched her fists around wads of blanket and clenched the stuffed dalmatian and alligator puppet and train pillow and polar bear and all the other remnants of her son that failed to comfort her but that she could not resist holding because she had nothing else to hold. It hurt, dreadfully, being surrounded by his things. She might have managed to get a bit more sleep—any sleep, really—in her own bed. But lying here seemed like a protest, a prayer, sent out into the universe. I am supposed to be with Bear, she was saying. Bear is supposed to be with me. Every hour of the day or night that she wasn’t curled up here in Bear’s place—and those hours were as few as she could make them, though Gram was starting to get more insistent about propping her up, marionetting her through the motions of a human being’s day—she felt as if she was ticking down the minutes until she could return. She wanted only to bury her head and focus every bit of her energy back on the useless task of wishing with all of her heart that she would wake up to find that this was all just a bad dream.
The physicality with which Violet missed Bear was the most unbearable component of her pain. She felt his absence like a phantom limb. He had been cut from her without anesthesia, the act as shocking and abrupt as it was absolute, and her wound was laid so bare for the world to see that amputation didn’t seem like a far-fetched comparison. She felt the space where he used to be as an emptiness that could not be described as mere yearning or longing. It was painful. It was ugly. It was unnatural. And yet in spite of how horrifying it was, in spite of the fact that she felt nothing but his absence whether she was awake or asleep, somehow her cruel subconscious mind could not stop from a hundred times a day turning her head to look for him, tuning her ear to listen for him, or opening her mouth to speak to him before realizing with a start that he was not there.
She’d gone from being a full-time mom to being a mom who was unable to actively mother. She was acutely aware that mother was both a noun and a verb, and left without the ability to take action, the reality struck her that it was no longer possible to be who she was without Bear. Not even a little bit. Not even for a moment, let alone days, a week—how long would it be? How long could she go on this way? How long could Bear? How long could Finn?
She’d once read a description of new motherhood that had struck her, at the time that she was returning to work after maxing out her maternity leave allowance, as a beautiful metaphor for her own days back at the office. It was that mother and baby are like a ball of yarn, and when the mother leaves the baby’s side, it’s as if the baby grabs hold of the loose end, a tug that both mother and baby feel in their every fiber. As they both move through the hours spent apart, the string unravels more and more, and then just when each is starting to feel diminished, barely even a ball of yarn at all anymore, it’s time for the mother to make her way back. Together again, they need only a bit of time to wind the string back up, and then it’s as if they had never been apart, right up until they wake up and do it all over again.
Whenever Violet had picked up the infant Bear from day care, he always wanted to nurse first thing when they got home, even if he’d just had a bottle. She’d thought of this as Bear’s way of winding the string back up. Where had she read that? She was almost certain it had been in a novel. She always had preferred fiction—a fact that had not struck her as grounds for self-analysis until precisely now.
As Bear became a toddler, Violet thought less and less of that metaphor. But now she knew that it wasn’t something they’d outgrown. Because Violet was completely, unequivocally unwound. And the only thing worse than being unwound herself was the knowledge that wherever Bear was, he had to be unwound too. Where did he think she was? Did he understand that she couldn’t get to him—not that she wouldn’t, but that she couldn’t? What had Finn told him? She’d read online that a lot of parental abductions involved the abducting parent informing the child that the other parent was dead. She couldn’t imagine Finn being so cruel as to do that to either Bear or her. But then again, she couldn’t imagine Finn being so cruel as to take Bear from her at all.
She had conducted her own investigation, of course, left to her own devices within the walls of their home. But they hadn’t lived here long enough to amass much to go through. The fact that her husband had not brought to their relationship much in the way of worldly artifacts, and did not lead much of a digital life, had never struck her as anything other than a part of his character. Having lost his parents in showstopping medical emergencies, he’d had to sell the house where he grew up, along with nearly everything in it, to pay the bills not covered by insurance. His relatives, all of them distant, tried to help, but his independent streak brushed them away. A recent college graduate at the time, apartment bound, he hadn’t had room to hang on to possessions for sentimental reasons in any case. He
loved the outdoors; he loved art; he had what he needed to be happy even when he had nothing at all. He spent too much of his days at the computer screen to spend his nights there too. He was not overly social beyond his close, trusted circle, and so why would social media have appealed? She had loved her husband not in spite of but in part because of these qualities. She resented the implication that she should have ever thought them strange.
The not knowing why he had done this or where he had gone was enough to make her feel as if she might be on the verge of something essential coming loose in her mind. And of course she couldn’t let that happen. Bear would need her. Bear did need her. She knew it as sure as she knew that her husband was not at all the man she had thought he was.
6
AUGUST 2010
Long shadows stretched across Fountain Square as the sun streamed hazily between the high-rise buildings from its position sinking lower in the sky. The tall bronze statues showering the brick and stone with mist always reminded Finn of the iconic fountain in Savannah’s Forsyth Park, and he caught himself pining for the Spanish moss–lined squares of the historic district there, instead of this one in the decidedly unatmospheric Midwest. It had become a bad habit, wishing things away, longing to be somewhere else. He reminded himself that he was here in search of someone who just might help him break it. He didn’t know if he could shake it on his own. He suspected that having become so entirely on his own was part of the problem.
Finn had been hoping she’d wear the Camp Pickiwicki shirt again—he hadn’t exactly been worried he wouldn’t recognize her without it, but he hadn’t exactly been confident he would either. Now that he was here, though, he felt certain the woman from the beach was not among the people milling about or perching around him. None of them remotely resembled her. He pressed the button to illuminate his cell phone screen: 7:20. Traffic had been awful for some unknown reason, but still, it struck him as out of character that she’d be more than twenty minutes late. He immediately recognized the thought as ridiculous. Of course he knew nothing about her character. Why would he feel like he did?
Almost Missed You Page 4