I let that word reverberate in my head.
Time.
It clangs and echoes loudly in my mind. It insists on being heard. It tells me it knows something. Time is what we were missing. That’s what Lane and Amanda have in their potential favor; that’s what Noah and I lacked.
I swivel around as an idea shoots through me, landing like a meteor in the backyard, exploding open with possibilities. “Do you have a pencil? Or a pen?” I ask the bartender.
He fishes for one in his pocket and hands it to me. I grab a napkin, and begin writing. Or really, I finish writing. Because there is a letter I never sent. A letter that only had a beginning. It had no end. And so I finish it.
Our Stolen Kisses
At prom, I think of you, and I find the answer.
The answer is time.
What if we were one of those couples that met out of time? What if I’d been two years older, or you were five years younger, or we met at work, or in Europe, or on the subway? Would we still have fallen so hard, and so far? We’ll never know, will we, what would have happened if the time was right?
They say time heals all wounds. But does it close the gaps too? Maybe it can. Maybe in a year it turns an eight-year time gap into dust. Maybe it turns a girl who didn’t know what she wanted into someone who became certain. Maybe it turns twenty-one stolen kisses into endless given ones.
Then I write the final line.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Many Months Later:
Kennedy
My mom invites me to take a trip to Italy with her over winter break. “Florence is irresistible to any art history student,” she writes in an e-mail that promises fabulous dinners too as she tries to lure me with reminders that the country’s plethora of pasta is calling my vegetarian heart. “We’ll fly first class and it will be divine! Say yes, please!”
I keep waiting for her to tell me she’s done, she’s changing, she’s in therapy. But those words haven’t come, and this is all we have now. These e-mails, the occasional phone call.
It’s been several months since I moved out of her place for good. I live in the dorms, but when I go “home,” it’s always to my dad’s. Like me, he’s making changes too. He stood up to Jay Fierstein, and Jay backed down, dropping the breach of contract lawsuit. I’m proud of my dad; it’s been so much easier for him to seethe inside, to just take it. This is progress for the iceman.
But as for Jewel, she is still my mom. And it is almost Christmas. I relax my rules temporarily and reply. “Have a Merry Christmas, Mom. Let’s meet for lunch before your trip,” I write. But lunch is as far as I’ll go.
My mom has a new agent now. I know this because I looked it up online. Plus, she mentioned once in a phone call that Noah hadn’t even tried to win her back. I ignored the comment, but secretly I was glad to know he hadn’t gone crawling to her after I was out of the picture. He’s moved on professionally and I read in the trades that his new agency is soaring.
No surprise there.
I close my laptop, tuck it inside my dark-pink messenger bag, and place some bills on the table at my favorite diner on campus. The coffee here is good, and it fuels my final exam prep.
I leave and a cold December wind whips by. Tightening my scarf around my neck, I hunt for my gloves. I find them inside my computer bag and pull them on to warm my cold hands. New York is having a particularly harsh winter. Shivering, I cut across Washington Square Park, where even the hardy street performers have packed up for the day. I walk past the main NYU offices, with Christmas decorations up already, then push open the door to the library. The whoosh of ventilated heat is like a car in a black-asphalt parking lot in August—the complete opposite of the Arctic outdoors. I unwrap myself from my coat, sit down at a table, and pull out my Survey of Art book.
I pore over sculptures and artists and paintings. When I come across a Fragonard, my heart tugs, like an old wound flaring up, as I remember one of my first dates with Noah at the Frick and how he made me laugh at the art, how we kissed like the painting. I peer more closely at the image in my book as if this representation can wipe away the aching inside me. But half of my heart is still hurting, still missing. I hope it will hurt less and maybe soon it will hurt a quarter, then an eighth, then one-sixteenth, then I won’t even feel the aching. It’ll just fade with time.
Or maybe it won’t. Maybe I’ll always miss my first love.
“I walked past Noah’s building the other night,” I say to Caroline later that evening. We’ve worked through a lot in our time together. I’m pretty sure it’s helped, all the talking. But all the listening is what’s helped most.
“Did you go in?”
My lips quirk up, like I’ve been caught. “Well, not in exactly.”
“Then what exactly?” she asks, but she’s not mad, she’s just curious.
“I just wanted to see if my name was still on the list with the doorman.”
“And was it?”
I nod.
“And what do you think about your name being on the list?”
“I guess I hope it’s always on the list,” I say softly. If my name hasn’t been crossed off, then perhaps the invitation remains open for a someday down the road. “Because every day I feel more ready.”
She raises an eyebrow, eyes me curiously. “For?”
I glance sideways, like she should know what I mean. “You know. The thing you don’t think will work out.”
“I never said it wouldn’t work out, Kennedy,” she says, correcting me. “I said it rarely works out.”