Field Notes on Love

by Jennifer E. Smith

  Already, she’s spoken to her dads four times and booked a flight that will leave SFO in exactly three hours. She’s checked how long it will take to get to the airport from the train station, and she’s even remembered to give Hugo enough money to last him until his new credit card shows up.

  But she hasn’t cried yet.

  She’s determined not to cry.

  It’s not such a hard trick, in the end. All she’s had to do is avoid thinking about what’s happened. Instead she’s tucked it into a corner of her mind and gently shut the door. Later she’ll open it. Later she’ll think about this absence that she’s always known would come at some point, the loss so big it might swallow her whole.

  But not now. Not yet.

  First, there is a step down from the train. One, and then another. Then there is the platform, and the weight of her backpack, and the door to the station. There is the back of Hugo’s head as she follows him, a sight now so familiar it makes her chest ache.

  One thing at a time.

  This station isn’t grand, like the others they’ve been to, just a squat gray building that could as easily be a post office or a DMV. Mae follows Hugo’s backpack as he picks his way around the rows of metal benches. He hasn’t said much in the last hour; mostly he’s just been there, a solid presence beside her as she made arrangements and sorted out information. He’d known instinctively to hold her hand while she booked a flight and to give her space when she spoke to her dads, and underneath the fog of grief and shock and confusion, she’s grateful for that.

  He pauses at the glass doors in the front of the building to make sure she’s still with him, then walks back out into the daylight. There’s a charter bus idling on the street, and a few cars waiting for people in the circular drive, but otherwise it’s quiet. Four o’clock on a Tuesday in the middle of August, and the world feels slow and sleepy.

  Hugo sets his bag down beside a wooden bench, and Mae leans hers against it. But neither of them sits. Instead, they just stand there awkwardly, an unfamiliar space between them.

  “Have you called for a car yet?”

  She shakes her head. “I’ll do it now,” she says, but she’s hit by a wave of panic when she pulls out her phone. Because the minute she makes her request, there will be a clock to all this. A countdown. And Mae doesn’t feel ready for it.

  Hugo looks relieved when she lowers the phone again.

  “I hate this,” she says, and for the first time in hours, they both smile.

  “Me too.”

  “It’s…rubbish,” she says, which makes Hugo laugh.

  “Well said.”

  She tips her head back. “None of this feels real. I wish we had more time.”

  “I’m okay with it, actually,” Hugo says, but his eyes are shining. “I could use a bit of space.”

  Mae laughs and steps into his arms. She presses her face against the soft cotton of his shirt, breathing him in. Don’t cry, she thinks again, because if she does, she knows, it might be a very long time before she stops.

  “Would you like me to come with you?” Hugo asks, and she leans back to look at him in surprise. “I could, you know. It’s on the way home.”

  For a second, she considers saying yes. She imagines falling asleep on his shoulder on the plane, introducing him to her dads, holding his hand at the funeral. There’s a whole long, dreary trip ahead of her, and the idea of taking along a bit of sunshine is more than a little tempting.

  But she knows this is something she has to do alone.

  “Hugo,” she says, putting a hand on his chest, “that’s probably the nicest offer ever.”

  “But?”

  “But you only have a couple more days before you have to go back. You should enjoy them.”

  He presses his lips together so that his dimples appear, and it cracks Mae’s heart. “How will I enjoy them without you?” he says, then hurries on before she can argue. “I could change my ticket.”

  She smiles at him. “You don’t even have a credit card.”

  “We’ll sort it out,” he says, though they both know it won’t happen. They’re just talking to talk now, knowing that when this conversation is over, so is everything else.

  “I would’ve liked to see that bridge with you,” she says, twisting a piece of his shirt in her hand; before she can say more, he bends to kiss her, and it’s a good one, long and deep and sad and true. It’s an apology and a promise and a wish.

  “I wanted to do that the moment I saw you in Penn Station,” Hugo says, and she rolls her eyes at him.

  “You did not.”

  “I did,” he says. “Thank goodness you didn’t have bunions.”

  Mae smiles. They’re still holding on to each other, and though she’s aware of how dramatic it must seem to the other people waiting for their rides—though she can practically see the movie version playing out in her head, sappy music and all—she decides she doesn’t care. She’s not ready to let go of him yet.

  It reminds her of what Ida said, about how young people think they’re the first to do everything: to fall in love and have their hearts broken. To feel loss and pain. She gets it now. Because it seems impossible that anyone has ever felt what Mae is feeling at this moment, a mix of emotions so specific it’s like she’s invented it, like they’ve invented it, the two of them standing here together at the end of a long journey, trying to figure out a way to say goodbye.

  “Thank you for taking me,” she says, her voice thick. “This has felt like more than a week in the best possible way.”

  “Thank you for coming,” he says. “I quite literally couldn’t have done it without you.”

  A taxi pulls up the circular drive, and a man with a briefcase gets out. Hugo and Mae exchange a look, and then he lets go of her to lift an arm, and the driver nods as he steps out of the car. “Need help with the bags?”

  “Just this one,” Mae says, and when he grabs her backpack, Hugo’s—which had been propped against it—tips over onto its side. They watch as the driver carries hers to the taxi and drops it into the trunk; then they turn back to each other.

  Hugo is looking down at her with those bottomless eyes of his, his mouth set in a grim line. “It’s not like we’ll never see each other again,” he says, searching her face. “Right?”

  “Right,” Mae says, though it feels like too great a promise to make when the world is so big and the future so uncertain. “And until then we’ll keep in touch.”

  “And you’ll send me the film when it’s done.”

  “Only if you send me a draft of your letter.”

  He laughs. “You’re a bit annoying, you know that?”

  “I do,” she says with a grin, and then he bends down and their lips meet and she closes her eyes and disappears into him for the last time. The driver honks the horn—two short bursts of noise—but they’re slow to break apart, and when they do, it feels to Mae like she’s left some essential piece of herself behind.

  Don’t cry, she thinks again. Not yet.

  Hugo puts a hand on her cheek. “Good luck at home. I’ll be thinking about you.”

  “I…,” Mae begins, and then stops abruptly, caught off guard by the words that have lined themselves up in her head: love you. She didn’t know she’d been thinking them, didn’t even know she’d been feeling them. But suddenly here they are, big and scary and important. She bites them back and instead says, “I’ll miss you.”

  “You have no idea,” Hugo says, then pulls her into one last hug.

  Afterward she sits in the back of the cab, her eyes burning, her hand curled around the blue button Hugo gave her in Denver. They pass over the Bay Bridge, the glittering water and crowded hills of San Francisco appearing all at once, and she wants nothing more than to curl up and cry, but she doesn’t. Not yet.

  It’s nearly dark by the time sh
e gets on the plane, a red-eye back to New York City. She falls asleep almost immediately, wrung out by the day behind her, and wakes hours later to see the sun rising over Manhattan, the rivers on either side of the island set aflame. It was only a week ago that she was here to meet Hugo, and she can’t help thinking how strange it is to travel so long and so far—to crawl across an entire country—only to return again in a single night.

  Her dads are waiting at the baggage claim. When she spots them, Mae’s heart gives a little hiccup. They both look uncharacteristically rumpled; there’s a hint of a beard along Pop’s jawline, and Dad’s eyes are red and bleary. Maybe it’s that they had to wake up in the middle of the night to pick her up at this hour, or maybe it’s that they haven’t slept at all, or maybe it’s just the grief, which is still so jagged and raw. It doesn’t matter. They’re here now, and so is she, and when she gets to the bottom of the escalator, she launches herself into their arms like she’s returning from some great voyage.

  “I can’t believe I didn’t get to say goodbye,” she says into Dad’s familiar tweed jacket, and they both pull her in tighter. “I wish…”

  She can’t finish the sentence; there’s too much she wishes.

  “She asked me to give this to you,” Pop says, leaning back to reach into his pocket. He pulls out a small piece of cardboard: an old train ticket from New York City to New Orleans.

  It’s then that she finally begins to cry.

  Hugo sits in the back of a taxi, his hand clasped around a bluish stone he picked up outside the station. He unzips the front of his rucksack and slips it inside one of the pockets, where it’s safe beside the others he’s collected along the way. It’s not quite as impressive as the building in Chicago, but it’s something. And anyway, they mean a lot more.

  As the car crosses into the city, he can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong. It’s not just that he misses Mae, though he does. Already he misses her more than makes sense. But there’s something else, the answer just out of reach, a prickly feeling in the back of his skull.

  It comes to him as he’s checking into the hotel, which is miraculously willing to change the name on the reservation. As the clerk looks to see if his credit card has arrived, Hugo drums his fingers on the desk, and he realizes all at once that he should’ve offered to go to the airport with her. He rocks back on his heels and groans, because what kind of idiot suggests going all the way to New York for a funeral before thinking about the airport? That would’ve made far more sense. But now she’s there and he’s here, and that’s that.

  “For you, sir,” the clerk says, returning with a thin white envelope that has the logo of his credit card company in the corner, and Hugo breathes out a sigh of relief. Finally. “Can I get you anything else?”

  “Just a key, thanks.”

  The whole place has a nautical theme, the walls covered in paintings of buoys and seagulls, presumably because of the hotel’s proximity to Fisherman’s Wharf. There’s even a captain’s wheel hung over the bed, which is draped with a blanket that says S.O.S. in huge block letters. Hugo drops his rucksack on top of it, then heads out again, too anxious to sit still.

  Outside, the air is thick with salt, and he walks straight down to the water, which is dotted with ships. Beyond them, he can see the rocky silhouette of Alcatraz, and in the distance, the faint outline of the Golden Gate Bridge. He should be excited right now; he’s always wanted to see this place. But instead there’s a sour feeling in his stomach because he was supposed to be here with Mae, and everything feels a little bit dimmer in her absence.

  It’s not until he’s started to walk down to the pier with the sea lions that he realizes he was actually supposed to be here with Margaret.

  He stops to text her back.

  Hugo: Coffee tomorrow morning?

  Margaret: Brill. I’ll look up some places and let you know?

  Hugo: Sounds good.

  Nearby two seagulls are squaring off over a crust of bread, and all that squawking reminds Hugo that he needs to text his mum too:

  Got the credit card. Thank you for sorting it out.

  Love, Paddington

  He looks out over the bay again, realizing he’s made it almost all the way across America without any money, which is either hugely impressive or entirely idiotic. His parents would probably choose the latter, and he wonders if maybe they only sent him off and wished him well because they knew all along that he’d come back to them like a boomerang.

  He once read a story about a zebra that escaped from a zoo. For a few hours, it had a grand old time, zigzagging down the motorway and dodging the police. But eventually it was captured again, and that was of course considered a happy ending. Because there’s no way it would’ve survived on its own.

  Besides, everyone knows zebras are pack animals at heart.

  He decides to skip the sea lions.

  Instead he walks until the bridge comes into sight—a brilliant shade of red, like something out of a postcard—and then he keeps going until he reaches a small beach that overlooks it. He sits on the cold sand and watches the colors fade, moving from gold to pink to purple and finally to gray. When the sun has slipped away entirely, he gets up and walks back to the hotel in the growing dark, tired and lonely and ready to fall sleep in a bed shaped like a boat.

  Somewhere in the middle of the night, he wakes up, the imaginary movement of the train beneath him. He reaches for his phone, hoping for a message from Mae, but there’s nothing. Instead, there’s a text from Alfie.

  Alfie: I’ve been elected to find out how it went with Margaret Campbell, Part Two.

  Hugo: She left today.

  Alfie: Wow. You must’ve really bungled that apology.

  Hugo: No, her grandmother passed away.

  Alfie: Oh—sorry to hear it.

  Hugo: Yeah.

  Alfie: So what now?

  Hugo: Nothing. She’s gone.

  Alfie: Right, but you like her, yeah?

  Hugo: Yes. A lot.

  Alfie: Then that can’t just be it…

  Hugo: I think it is. She’s gone and I’ll be home in a couple of days.

  Alfie: Hard luck, mate. I’m really sorry.

  Hugo: Thanks. Me too.

  Alfie: Did she feel the same way at least? Did anything end up happening?

  Hugo pauses, staring at the glowing screen of his phone. After a moment, he writes, Long story.

  But what he’s really thinking is Everything.

  Everything happened.

  They stop at a diner on the way home from the airport, where they all order blueberry pancakes—Nana’s favorite.

  “The doctors said she probably didn’t feel anything,” Pop says. “She was taking a nap, and she just didn’t wake up.”

  His eyes are damp, but there are no tears. He’s usually the crier of the family, but Mae can tell he’s completely tapped out. He gives her a weak smile, then returns to his pancakes, and Dad picks up the thread. This is what she loves best about them, the way they carry each other, silently and automatically, when the other needs it.

  “But I think she knew somehow,” he says, putting a hand over Pop’s, who clasps it back. They exchange a look. “After the first stroke, the way she was talking, it was almost like…”

  “Like she was saying goodbye,” Pop says.

  Mae puts down her fork. “I wish you’d told me,” she says, her throat tight. “If I’d known, I would’ve been here.”

  What she doesn’t say is this: that she should’ve been there.

  That the only reason she wasn’t, the reason she was thousands of miles away at the time, was because she lied to them.

  “She knew that too,” Dad says. “And that’s not what she wanted. You two had already said your goodbyes.”

  “Right, but not for—”

  “Mae
,” Pop says, looking at her over the bottle of syrup and the napkin dispenser and the mugs of coffee leaving rings on the table. His voice is strangely calm. “That’s the thing. You almost never know when you’re saying goodbye to someone forever.”

  Mae nods, lost for words.

  “It’s okay,” he says gently. “She knew what was in your heart.”

  On the drive home, they listen to the movie score from Titanic, which was Nana’s favorite. The rest of them always complained when she put it on, but she was unabashedly, stubbornly in love with it. “You cretins wouldn’t know great art if it bit you in the behind,” she’d say, to which Pop would roll his eyes and remind her that he runs an art gallery and Dad is an art history professor. Still, she wouldn’t budge.

  Now Mae listens to the swells of music and feels the emotion in every single note. Maybe Nana was right, she thinks, and suspects it won’t be the last time.

  At home she walks from room to room, running a hand over various items: Nana’s chair at the kitchen table; her favorite coat, which is still hanging near the back door; the green mug she always used for her afternoon tea. In the guest bedroom, where Nana lived for the better part of the past year, Mae lingers near the door. She doesn’t realize anyone is behind her until Dad clears his throat.

  “I loved her,” he says. “I really did. But oof—that perfume.”

  Mae laughs; she can smell it too. It’s not the scent itself, which is lavender with a hint of something else, minty and herbal; it’s how much she used to wear, the cloud of it that would trail her around the house.

  “Best smell in the world,” Mae says, breathing in deeply.

  Later, after they’ve all had a nap, they sit around the kitchen table, painfully aware of the empty chair, and go through what else needs to be done for the funeral tomorrow. Pop reads through the final list of appetizers for the reception, and when he’s done, Dad grins at Mae.

  “Better than train food, huh?”

  “Actually, it wasn’t so bad,” she tells him. “They had a pretty good menu. And we got some good stuff when we were off the train too. The best was the deep-dish pizza in Chicago—we absolutely demolished it.”