Always

by Sarah Jio

  We wait for a few minutes, then I suggest we walk up to Fifth. “There’s a homeless shelter up there,” I say, recalling an article I wrote last year, a piece about a hotshot chef in town who had teamed up with a benefactor—off the radar, until the meal preparations somehow ended up as a Food Network special—to cook for the homeless. Thanks to their efforts, soggy grilled cheese sandwiches were replaced with salmon en croute and endive salad with candied walnuts. I’d like to think that my local coverage—more than the onetime TV exposure—led to it becoming a yearly event for charity.

  “We could see if…” My voice trails off. I still can’t believe Cade’s plight. That I could possibly walk into a shelter and find him there lying on some urine-stained cot.

  Tracy pats my arm. “Don’t be scared,” she says. “You can do this.”

  I nod, and together we make our way up the next block to a brick building with peeling black paint on its door. A toothless woman with stringy gray hair stands on the sidewalk, drinking from a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag.

  “You cops?” she asks in a deep, raspy voice, taking a step back.

  “No,” Tracy says. “We’re not.”

  The woman nods and lifts the bottle to her lips once more. I notice an open wound on her left arm, festering and red; I shudder inwardly as Tracy places her hand on the doorknob. “Maybe we’ll get lucky,” she whispers to me.

  I follow my friend inside to a lobby, where a middle-aged man with a goatee and a receding hairline sits at a desk. The air smells of body odor, damp carpeting, and stale cigarettes, but also of sadness, dashed dreams.

  “Howdy,” the man says, looking up. His face is familiar, and I immediately remember the unexpectedly cheerful tenor of his voice. He must remember me, too. “Are you the reporter from the Herald?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Kailey Crain.” It’s been at least a year since I interviewed him. “Forgive me, you’ll have to remind me of your name.”

  “Abe Farrell,” he says, extending his hand. “I figured the two of you weren’t looking for a room for the night.” He laughs to himself, but Tracy and I are too stunned to respond to his attempt at humor. We just stare blankly. “What can I do you for?”

  “We’re looking for someone,” I say quickly, taking a step forward. “A man.”

  “Got a name?”

  I look at Tracy, then back at Abe. “Yes, his name is Cade McAllister.”

  Abe shakes his head. “Don’t think we have anyone by that name, but with our clientele, you never know. Some of them don’t even know their own names.”

  I nod. “He’s about six foot. Thin. He has a beard. He was wearing an army-green jacket yesterday, boots.” The image of him sitting on the sidewalk, now burned into my mind, lingers. I feel unsettled thinking about his eyes—so sad, so lost. “His jeans had holes”—I point to my shins—“right along here.”

  “Sorry, miss,” the man says, smiling again. “That about describes every man in this place.”

  I let out a defeated sigh.

  He shrugs. “If you’d like to show me a picture, maybe I could be of more help.”

  I reach for my wallet and pull out a faded snapshot of Cade and me together, in Big Sur, at a scenic outlook along Highway 1. I smile to myself, remembering the trip in vivid detail. We rented a convertible, and I wrapped a beige scarf around my head Grace Kelly–style. By the time we’d reached that little overlook, each of us was green from car sickness after navigating one too many twists and turns, but you couldn’t tell from the photo.

  “This is him,” I say, holding the picture out to Abe, who squints, then shrugs.

  “I’m afraid there’s no one like that around here,” he says after a few moments. “But if you’d like, I can take you in and you can have a look for yourself.”

  “Thanks,” I say, looking at Tracy, then back at him. “I’d appreciate that.”

  We follow him, a bit warily, down a small hallway and through a doorway to a large room, where bunks line the walls. Three men sit at a central table, immersed in a game of cards. A few others appear to be asleep or passed out in their bunks. Another is muttering to himself in the corner. None of them is Cade.

  “No,” I say with a sigh. “He’s not here.”

  “Sorry,” Abe says. “This man, is he your…boyfriend?”

  I shake my head. “No, no,” I say, rubbing my engagement ring. “He’s just an old friend.”

  “Well,” he says. “This old friend of yours is lucky to have someone like you looking for him.” He smiles. “I hope you find him.”

  “Me too,” I say.

  As he turns to the door, I place my hand on my right shoulder. “Wait,” I say, taking off my jacket and lifting up the sleeve of my T-shirt. “This tattoo—he has one just like it. Does it look familiar to you?”

  “No, I’m afraid I haven’t seen any tattoos like that one.”

  Just then I notice that one of the men who’s playing cards, older and with a long gray beard, is looking up at me.

  “All right,” I say dejectedly, slipping my arms into my jacket as the bearded man stands up from the table.

  “Excuse me,” he says, walking toward me, a fan of cards in his right hand. I notice the ace of spades, and I think of the time I taught Cade to play Thirty-One, my grandparents’ favorite card game. Cade won. “That tattoo. It looks like…Mitchell’s.”

  I shake my head. “Mitchell?”

  “Yeah, he’s a strange one. Doesn’t speak. He’s in and out of here, but he spends most of his time up on Fourth by that fancy Frenchy place, what’s it called—”

  “Le Marche?” I ask eagerly.

  “Yeah, that’s the one.”

  My eyes widen. “Are you sure you recognize the tattoo?” I slip my jacket off again to show him.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he says, peering closer.

  “Please tell me. Why do you call him Mitchell?”

  He shrugs. “Hell if I know. Mitchell is what’s printed on that army jacket he always wears. I guess everyone just assumed that’s his name. Maybe it is; maybe it isn’t.” He chuckles to himself. “My name’s Frank, but everyone calls me Mad Dog.”

  “Mad Dog,” I say. “Well, thank you.”

  He nods and begins to walk back to the card game; I think about Cade, wearing an army jacket with the name MITCHELL stamped over his heart. How did this happen?

  “Pardon me for being nosy,” Mad Dog says, turning to face me once more. “But how’s it that someone like you and someone like him have the same tattoo?”

  Tears sting my eyes. I take a deep breath, my lower lip trembling a little. “He and I are not different. We are the same. And I once loved him, very much.”

  I feel Tracy’s hand on my arm. “C’mon, honey, let’s go.”

  Numbly I walk out behind her to the street.

  —

  The rain has picked up again, and when we make it back to the sidewalk in front of Le Marche, Tracy and I duck under the awning.

  “What next?” she asks.

  “I think I’ll stay here for a while,” I say. “See if he comes back.”

  Tracy nods as she reaches into her pocket to pull out her ringing phone. I wander a few steps ahead and have another look down the alley beside the restaurant. Vacant, aside from a pigeon pecking at the pavement in the distance.

  “That was the hospital,” Tracy says, walking toward me a moment later. “Patient crisis. I’m so sorry; I have to go.”

  “I’ll be okay on my own,” I say as the pigeon startles and flies off farther into the alley, desolate and gray.

  I stand on the sidewalk for a few minutes, then begin walking up the block to a Starbucks, where I order another coffee and slide into a chair by the window. It’s raining harder now, and the window is foggy, like my mind. I use the sleeve of my jacket to clear away a spot so I can see the passersby. Any of them could be Cade, but none is.

  I leave the café. An hour passes, and then two. Ryan calls, and I tell him I’m doing some field r
esearch. Another white lie. He asks if I can make risotto for dinner. I say yes, and ask him to pick up Arborio rice at Whole Foods. Our conversation is easy, effortless. It ebbs and flows as if each of us has a script. But right now, I don’t love the script. I hate that I am talking about Arborio rice and Whole Foods when Cade is somewhere in the city, cold, probably hungry, perhaps slumped over in some alley in the rain. I hate it all. The rice and the rain and the way life has unfolded.

  I lean against the brick wall of the restaurant, which has just opened for Sunday lunch. Through the windows, I notice an attractive couple at the bar. She’s wearing a flouncy ivory linen dress, straight off the rack of Free People. She twirls her long brunette hair and leans in flirtatiously toward her date, a clean-shaven man with dark-rimmed glasses. I imagine their conversation.

  “I love oysters,” she is saying.

  “Me too!” he replies.

  “But not mussels,” she adds, daintily sipping her chilled rosé.

  “Never mussels,” he says in instant agreement. “Those are the questionable mollusks.”

  She laughs, taking another slow sip of her wine, which is the color of the MAC blush she applied to her cheeks earlier. She wonders if she’s put on too much. And whether she’s met her soulmate.

  A car speeds by and I narrowly miss the spray from a mud puddle. I clutch the gold chain around my neck, letting my fingers trace the familiar path to the locket at its base, gold, with my initials engraved on the back. It was a gift from my grandparents for my tenth birthday, and I’ve worn it ever since.

  “What are you going to put inside?” Grandma asked me when I first slipped it on.

  “I don’t know yet,” I said, imagining that the object I’d choose above all others would have to be very special.

  That very day, Grandpa pulled out an aged cigar box and sorted through old coins, photographs with scalloped edges, postcards, and yellowed snippets of paper until he’d selected a tiny object, which he held in his hand.

  “The prettiest shell, for the prettiest girl,” he said, planting a kiss on my forehead.

  I turned it over and over in my hand, beaming.

  “Would you like to hear the story of how I found it?” he asked.

  I nodded, keeping my eyes on my new prized possession. I had always loved Grandpa’s stories.

  “It was August 1944, and we’d all but liberated France,” he recounted. “It was hot, I remember that. Muggy. A few of my buddies wanted to go down to the beach for a swim. We’d listened to Eisenhower on the radio that morning. Everyone was in a good mood, so the commander didn’t bat an eye when we left camp for the beach, though we’d been warned to be careful of land mines and holdover enemy troops hiding in caves or in the homes of villagers. Still, we wanted to go to the beach. And what a beach it was. We wandered up past Omaha, where all the fighting had gone on, to a little cove along a rocky bluff lined with beach grass, cypress trees, and a few old craggy-looking apple trees, where Captain Raines and I picked and ate every last piece of fruit.” He stopped talking, showed me a smile. “It’s funny, whenever I sink my teeth into an apple, even now, I’m back on that beach.” Grandpa’s eyes were distant.

  “And then we kept walking,” he continued. “The surf got heavier down that stretch of beach. There was a dangerous riptide. Raines nearly got swept out by it.” He chuckled to himself. “I just sat there on the shore as the waves rolled in and out. And that’s when I noticed something wash up. At first I thought it was a rock, but when I inched closer I could see that it was a shell. But not just any shell. This one glistened in the sun. It was the color of jade, iridescent, unlike anything I’d ever seen.

  “When Raines sat down beside me, I showed it to him. ‘That’s a special one,’ he said. ‘How do you know?’ I asked. He went on to tell me that he’d met a French girl with a shell just like this one attached to a necklace. Apparently they’re rare and only wash up on that beach once in a blue moon, and only on that beach. The locals say that if you find one, you’re lucky, that it’s a good omen, a sign of love, happiness, and protection.” He smiled again. “I’ve kept it all these years, and you know, I have had a happy life. A wonderful one, in fact. And now you get to keep it.”

  I couldn’t believe my good fortune, and I proudly kept Grandpa’s shell on my bedside table, until my friend’s annoying little sister took it one day, and in a scuffle on the sidewalk it slipped from her hands and hit the pavement, shattering into a dozen pieces.

  I cried; sobbed, really. I mourned that shell more than I’d mourned the day my best friend had moved away in the second grade. How could I face Grandpa? How could I tell him that in my care, the shell had been destroyed, his treasured memories shattered, all with the flick of the wrist by a thoughtless neighbor kid? But I did tell him, and he forgave me, as I knew he would.

  I saved the largest shard of the shell in the top drawer of my dresser, beside my Wonder Woman underwear and rainbow-striped bikini with the ruffles on the front, until I tucked it inside my locket, where it remains today. I pat it, thinking of Grandpa, who passed away two days after my twenty-sixth birthday. “Do you still have your shell?” he asked me the last time I saw him.

  “I do,” I said.

  “Good girl.”

  I look up, jarred from my thoughts, when I hear a male voice ahead. “Don’t you listen?” he says sternly.

  It’s a man from the restaurant in a white half-apron, tied at the waist. He’s obscuring the person on the receiving end of his interrogation, so I strain my neck to make out the scene.

  “I’ve told you before that you need to go,” he continues. My heart beats faster. Could it be…?

  “Wait!” I call out as a man slowly strides away. I can only see his back, and his army-green jacket. “Please wait.”

  The man from the restaurant clears his throat. “Please accept my apologies if that man was bothering you.”

  I don’t respond, and race ahead to the next block, following the man in the army-green jacket as he turns the corner. I run faster, but when I round the block I see that he has slipped into the plaza in front of Westlake Center. It’s thick with people—mothers and daughters holding umbrellas over Nordstrom shopping bags, college kids with earbuds attached to iPhones. A street violinist plays “Happy Birthday” in the distance. And then I catch a glimpse of army green.

  “Cade!” I call out. He’s a few hundred feet away, and I know he hears me because he immediately stops and looks right, then left.

  “Cade!” I say again, slowly walking closer. I’m fearful that if I move too quickly, I might frighten him. So I take careful, measured steps, the way one might when trying to lure a scared, injured puppy into safety. Just a few more steps. “Cade, it’s Kailey,” I say.

  He turns around to face me. When our eyes meet, it’s as if the world, once a rushing waterfall, has slowed to a trickle. I do not hear the buzz of conversation around me. I do not see the people fluttering by. I do not feel the rain on my face. There is only Cade. And he sees me.

  MAY 25, 1996

  “How do I look?” I ask Tracy, twirling in our apartment’s kitchen so she can get the full effect of my dress. Blue, with crocheted edging on the hem and sleeves. I picked it up at The Bon on my lunch hour. “Is it too much?”

  “No,” Tracy says, “it says ‘I’m a professional, but also secretly a beguiling artist.’ ”

  I scrunch my nose. “Beguiling artist?”

  “Yeah, the artsy mysterious type,” she says. “Men love intrigue.”

  “Hmm,” I say, tugging at the waistline and trying to make out my reflection in the glass of the microwave. “I’m not so sure.”

  “Don’t worry,” she continues. “He’s going to love it. But not if you don’t cut this tag off.” She reaches for a pair of scissors on the kitchen counter. “Here, let me help you.”

  I shrug. “Man, I hate dating.”

  “Everyone hates dating.”

  “Why do we put ourselves through all of this, then
?”

  Tracy smiles. “Well, despite that armor you put up, you’re an Aquarius, and that heart of yours secretly idealizes love, believes in soulmates, the whole nine.”

  “Well,” I say in a sober voice, “even though he asked me to dinner, I’m committing for one drink, and maybe an appetizer. If it’s weird, I’m out.”

  I reach for a black cardigan as Tracy rummages through her bag. “Here,” she says, handing me a quarter.

  I give her a confused look.

  “Tuck it in your purse,” she says. “If you need reinforcements, find a pay phone and call me.”

  I smile. “All right.”

  —

  I sit at the bar at Wild Ginger, where I nervously stab my straw into the lime in my vodka soda. He’s late. Just ten minutes, but still.

  “Care to see the menu?” a sympathetic bartender says, looking my way.

  “No,” I reply. “I’m waiting for someone.”

  “First date?”

  My cheeks redden. “Yeah.”

  He nods. “I kind of thought so.”

  “How can you tell?”

  He smiles. “Occupational hazard.”

  I exhale. “I admit, I’m a bit nervous.”

  “Why?”

  Before I can respond, I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn toward it.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Cade says, stepping in to face me. “Staff meeting ran over, and of course I got into it with my business partner, for the thirty-seventh time this week.” He rubs his forehead. “A little tip: Never go into business with your best friend.”

  “Noted,” I say, unable to stop grinning.

  “Hi,” he says, smiling.

  “Hi right back,” I say. He’s wearing jeans, a gray sweater, and a pair of well-worn Converse high-tops. He’s just as I remembered from that night at the Crocodile. A little random, a little irreverent, completely fascinating.

  “I hope you won’t hold my tardiness against me.” He grins as though he knows I won’t.

  The bartender winks at me as the hostess leads us to our window table toward the back of the dining room. We both sit down.