Love by the Book (27 page)

We sailed along, letting the tide pull us where it wanted us to go. We floated into Islington and then King's Cross, where we waved at the customers sitting outside the Rotunda. Bike Guy finished his first joint and rolled another while I polished off my fourth beer. We picked at the strawberries (the cream had curdled in the sun). Occasionally, one of us would stick an oar into the water and make a halfhearted attempt to propel us in a direction, but mainly we just meandered.

Bike Guy was in his element, skin turning pink in the sun, blond hair all tousled in the breeze, the laugh lines from his forty-two years seeming to deepen in the light. By Camden, I was feeling mellow and happy and leaned across to kiss him. We nearly capsized.

By teatime, we'd reached Regent's Park. I found the Thermos languishing under the bag full of salad leaves and poured us each a cup of tea. We threw most of the Jaffa cakes to the ducks floating lazily alongside us.

In short, it was a glorious, glorious day. And it almost stayed that way.

“Do you ever think about your ex-wife?” I asked as I licked the chocolate off the top of a Jaffa Cake. I was lying back in the canoe, six beers down, staring at the clouds as they floated past.

Bike Guy picked his head up slightly and looked at me. “Sort of. Not really, though. I know she's set, which is all that matters. Got her fella and the house and all. Happier all around, I suppose.” He lay back in the boat and took a long drag.

I sat up, reeled in another beer and lit a cigarette. “I have a husband.”

He sat up. “Sorry?”

“I mean, I had a husband. We're separated.”

He lay back down. “Oh. Right.” There was a long pause, in which I could tell he was trying to determine just how much he was obliged to ask about it. But he was a decent guy, so after a few minutes he said, “Want to talk about it?”

“Not particularly.”

“Cool. That cloud looks like an octopus.”

I stared up at the multitendriled cloud. Two things were clear: it
did
look like an octopus and I
didn't
want to talk about my ex-husband. I really fucking didn't. But since I'd got Dylan's letter, it was like something had opened up in me. Like when you pee for the first time when drinking keg beer: the seal had been broken. I didn't want to talk about it, but suddenly I wanted very badly to acknowledge it, and I wanted other people to acknowledge it, too. “I was married!” I wanted to scream. “I took fucking
VOWS
.”

Instead, I took a sip of the new beer and lay back down, watching my cigarette burn to a perfect column of ash. I stared at the sky and thought of Dylan sleeping under the same sky. The song from
An American Tail
started playing in a loop in my head—you know, the one the mouse sings on the rooftop? And, to my horror, I felt a tear leak out of the corner of my eye and fall into the hollow of my ear. “Fuck,” I said softly.

“You all right?” Bike Guy was propped up on his elbows and was looking at me worriedly.

I scrubbed my cheek and smiled. “Just some ash in my eye. Let's dock this baby and go to the pub.” We'd reached Little Venice and a place called the Summerhouse was winking promisingly at me. “I'll bring dinner and we can eat it at one of the picnic tables.”

Bike Guy peered at the gray-looking steak stir-fry that had been moldering away in the Tupperware container beneath him and grimaced. “Tell you what: I'll buy us some dinner.”

We rowed to shore and hauled the boat onto the bank. I felt sticky and dehydrated from all the cans of beer I'd drunk, and my clothes were embedded with Jaffa Cake crumbs and bits of cigarette ash. Bike Guy didn't look so hot, either: the weed had caught up with him, and his face—which had been a rosy pink in the sunlight—was a disturbing yellow color in the shade of the trees.

We looked at each other for a minute and seemed to come to the same unspoken decision: forget the pub, let's just go home. We nodded in agreement.

“Right, how are we getting back then?” he asked, looking around to see if I'd hidden a car or a jetpack somewhere in the shrubs.

My heart sank: in all of my frantic menu preparing, I'd forgotten about the whole “getting back” thing.

Bike Guy read the look on my face. “Fuck the canoe: I'll buy the bloke a new one.” He grabbed my hand and started pulling me up the embankment. “Let's find a cab and get home.” I had to hand it to him: for a pothead, he could be remarkably clear-sighted.

I woke up covered in a fine layer of silt, with a godawful hangover and a sudden acute awareness that we'd left Lucy's cousin's canoe in Paddington Basin, where it had presumably now been commandeered by a bunch of tramps.

I pressed my face into the pillow and then took a peek at Bike Guy, who was starfished across the majority of the bed. I had a quick look around and saw an ashtray heaped with cigarette butts and half-finished joints, and a bottle of Jack Daniel's propped up against a framed photo of Bike Guy with little Poppy balanced on his shoulders.

This definitely wasn't what Mrs. Humphry had in mind.

I pulled on my still-damp clothes and crept out of the flat. Thankfully it was early enough that Poppy and parents had yet to stir. I slipped out the front door, closed it as quietly as I could behind me and hurried down the street to the bus stop.

It was strange: I was dating someone well over a decade older than me, and yet I'd never lived like more of a teenager. As fun as Bike Guy was, I wasn't sure how much more my liver could handle. And I definitely wasn't keen on doing another walk of shame through middle-class bliss.

I got back to my flat by
7:30
and went immediately back to bed. I woke up to the sound of Lucy shutting the door behind her as she left and heaved a sigh of relief; at least I wouldn't have to explain the canoe yet.

I checked the time on my phone—
11:34
a.m.—and saw I had six missed calls, all from Meghan. I sat up and hit redial. It was still incredibly early in Maine, so it must have been an emergency.

She picked up on the first ring. “Kid? That you?” Her voice was thick and choked.

“What's going on? Are you okay?”

“It's Sue. She's gone.”

My heart dropped. “What do you mean?” An image of a car crash flashed through my head.

“I mean she's
gone
.” I heard her stifle a sob on the end of the line. “She left.” I felt a little twinge of relief knowing she wasn't dead. “We had a huge fight and she packed her stuff and left and now she's
gone
.” Meghan broke down and started to quietly cry. “What am I gonna do, bub?”

“Oh, Meg. Don't worry, she'll come back! She's probably just gone somewhere to cool off for the day. It's you guys! You guys are solid.”

Meghan made a noise that sounded like a wounded animal. “We're not solid, though. She's been working super long hours at the hospital, so we never see each other anymore, and when we do, we just argue. And last night, I found all these texts between her and some nurse and when I confronted her about it, she said she'd been having a
flirtation
or some bullshit. She promised me nothing had happened but how am I supposed to believe that when she's never fucking home? We had this huge blowout, and we said all these awful things to each other and now she's fucking
gone
.”

It sounded like she'd started to hyperventilate. “Meg, you've got to calm down. Deep breaths. It's going to be okay, I promise.”

I listened to her cry and felt a helplessness I had never experienced before. What the fuck was I doing here, in this shitty flat in this godforsaken rainy city, while my sister had her heart stamped on? Why wasn't I there to give her a hug? I was useless here: a disembodied voice murmuring platitudes down a piece of plastic. I made my mind up immediately.

“I'm coming home. I'll tell work on Monday and I'll book the first flight I can get. I haven't had a vacation yet this year so they can't get pissed off about it.”

“You don't have to do that, kid. I'll be okay.”

“No. I want to. It's been too long and I miss your Meghan-face.”

Meghan sniffed and took a deep breath. “Really?”

“Really. Now, go to bed—it's too fucking early where you are—and when you wake up, take a hot shower and go for a run. And call me. Call me whenever you want and as much as you want. It's going to be okay, I promise.”

I hung up the phone and hoped to God that what I'd said would be true.

Home meant a whole lot of shit I wasn't sure I was ready to deal with. But home also meant my sister, and that's where I had to be.

I packed a bag this morning. My flight wasn't until late afternoon, so I went for a run, wandered around the empty flat, drank too much coffee, smoked too many cigarettes and, when I had checked and double-checked that I had my passport, locked the door behind me and set out.

I'd booked a return flight for two weeks later, but something heavy inside me suggested that date could be stretched and stretched. It scared me.

I'd spoken to Meghan every night, just letting her cry on the phone and murmuring what I hoped were comforting words. She still hadn't heard from Sue, and I found that the little seed of hatred I'd felt toward her the moment Meghan told me she'd left had now blossomed into a full-blown arboretum. Sue was now Public Enemy Number One.

Work had been totally fine about me taking time off—Cathryn gave me a hug (our first) and practically pushed me out the door, chattering about how pale and exhausted I looked and how a break would do me good. I wasn't proving to be much use at work under the circumstances, anyway. Yesterday, I'd completely forgotten about the group of twenty-five fourteen-year-olds coming in for a tour of the Large Hadron Collider exhibition and it fell to Cathryn to lead them around. Apparently she'd found two of them doing some heavy petting in one of the detector caverns. I'd bought her a bottle of wine to say thank you, but I think she was still a little shaken by the experience.

Lucy had been great about it, too. After reading Dylan's letter, she seemed convinced that my destiny was to get back together with him, so she could hardly contain her glee when I told her that I was going home for a few weeks. When I went to get the milk this morning, I found a note from her taped to the fridge: an enormous
GOOD LUCK
surrounded by little hearts. I tore it off and stuck it in my wallet: I figured I needed all the luck I could get.

Bike Guy and I had our final date last night: a long cycle along Regent's Canal and a pint at the Palm in Victoria Park. I told him I was going home for a few weeks, and when I talked about meeting up when I got back he started getting all hazy-eyed and evasive.

“Let's not make any promises,” he'd said. “Two weeks is a long time.”

I'd rolled my eyes and explained that I wasn't looking for a betrothal, just a pint or two when I was back in London, but it was too late: he'd been infected with The Fear.

“I think you're ace,” he'd said, “but I'm not looking for anything serious.”

So apparently neither prostitution nor Victoriana put him off, but the thought of making a vague plan two weeks in advance was enough to send him running for the hills. I cut my losses and mentally detached, though I still took him back to my place for a good-bye roll in the hay. He didn't spend the night. I told him I had to pack (which was true) but, really, I just wanted the bed to myself.

I got off the tube at South Ken and made a pit stop at the bookshop to buy something to read on the plane.

It had been sunny when I left the flat, but by the time I surfaced onto Onslow Square, the skies had darkened and fat raindrops had started attacking the earth. I ran into the bookshop, closing the door behind me just before the hail began.

The young bookseller was sitting, as ever, at his little desk in the back of the shop, engrossed in a tattered old paperback. He was wearing an enormous gray knit cardigan and baggy reddish corduroys, a pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses balanced carefully on his nose. I paused in the doorway and watched as he pushed his hair out of his eyes. Looking at him like this, I could almost forget all his withering comments and grumpy demeanor. In fact, from where I stood, he looked sort of . . . adorable. My mind started wandering. Take off the glasses and maybe . . . I leaned on a stack of Penguin Classics and sent them flying to the ground. He started out of his chair and scowled at me. The spell was abruptly broken and I felt myself blush deeply.

“You're dripping all over my floor!”

I looked down at my sodden jacket. “It's not exactly like I can help it.”

He tutted to himself and got up. “Let me get you a towel. But stay where you are and don't touch anything! You'll make everything damp.”

I followed his orders, turning only slightly to the left so I could look at the first edition of
Black Beauty
that was under glass. One day, I thought, you will be mine. Even if I have to steal you.

The bookseller emerged from the back of the shop carrying a surprisingly fluffy towel. “Here, sort yourself out.”

“Thanks,” I said, toweling myself dry.

“So what tome from the literary canon are you after today?
Bastards and the Women Who Love Them
?
Barbara Cartland's Twenty Rules for Love
?”

“Actually, I'm looking for a novel that was written in
1897
.”

“Oh?” he said, softening slightly. “Can you remember the title? The author?”

“Oh, no. I don't care what it is—I just want any novel that was written in
1897
.” I knew it was unlikely I'd be able to continue following Mrs. Humphry's advice when I was in Maine, but I figured I could at least maintain the Victorian spirit through my literature choices.