I saw Olivia after that, after I’d left her note on her parents’ car. She moved lightly in the twilight woods, her green eyes making her instantly identifiable.
She was never alone; other wolves guided her, taught her, guarded her from the primitive dangers of the desolate winter wood.
I wanted to ask her if she’d seen him.
I think she wanted to tell me “no.”
Isabel called me a few days before Christmas break and my planned trip with Rachel. I didn’t know why she called me instead of just coming over to my new car; I could see her right across the school parking lot, sitting in her SUV
by herself.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m okay,” I replied.
“Liar.” Isabel didn’t look at me. “You know he’s dead.”
It was easier to admit on the phone, rather than face-to-face. “I know.”
Across the frosty gray parking lot, Isabel snapped her phone shut. I heard her put her SUV in gear and then she drove it to where I stood by my car.
There was a click as she unlocked the passenger-side door and a whirr as the window rolled down. “Get in. Let’s go somewhere.”
We went downtown and bought coffee, and then, because there was a parking place in front, we went to the bookstore. Isabel looked at the storefront for a long time before getting out of the car. We stood on the icy sidewalk and stared at the display window. It was all Christmas stuff.
Reindeer and gingerbread and It’s a Wonderful Life.
“Jack loved Christmas,” Isabel said. “I think it’s a stupid holiday. I’m not celebrating it anymore.” She gestured to the store. “Do you want to go in? I haven’t been in here in weeks.”
“I haven’t been here since —” I stopped. I didn’t want to say it. I wanted to go in, but I didn’t want to have to say it.
Isabel opened the door for me. “I know.”
The bookstore was a different world in this gray, dead winter. The shelves, blue and slate, had taken on a different hue. The light was pure, pure white. Classical music played overhead, but the hum of the heater was the real soundtrack. I looked at the kid behind the counter — dark haired, lanky, bent over a book — and for a moment, a lump rose in my throat, too thick to swallow.
Isabel wrenched my arm, hard enough to hurt. “Let’s find books on getting fat.”
We went to the cookbook section and sat on the floor. The carpet was cold. Isabel made a huge mess, pulling out a stack next to her and putting them back in the wrong order, and I lost myself in the neat letters of the titles on the spines, absently pulling the books out so that they were flush with one another.
“I want to learn how to get fat,” Isabel said. She handed me a book on pastries. “How does that look?”
I paged through it. “All the measurements are in metric. And no cups.
You’d have to get a digital scale.”
“Forget that.” Isabel put it back in the wrong place. “Try this one.”
This one was all on cakes. Beautiful chocolate layers bursting with raspberries, yellow sponges smothered with fluffy buttercream, cloying cheesecakes drizzled with strawberry nectar.
“You can’t take a piece of cake with you to school.” I handed her a book on cookies and bars. “Try that.”
“This is perfect,” Isabel accused, and set the book aside in a different pile. “Don’t you know how to shop? Being efficient isn’t a good thing. It doesn’t take enough time. I’m going to have to teach you the art of browsing.
You’re clearly deficient.”
Isabel taught me browsing in the cookbook section until I was restless, and then I left her behind and wandered through the store. I didn’t want to, but I climbed the burgundy-carpeted stairs to the loft.
The snow-clouded day outside made the loft seem darker and even smaller than it had before, but the love seat was still there, and the little waist-high bookshelves Sam had searched through. I could still see the shape of his body curled in front of them, looking for the perfect book.
I shouldn’t have, but I sat on the couch and lay back on it. I closed my eyes and pretended as hard as I could that Sam was lying behind me, that I
was secure in his arms, and that any moment I would feel his breath move my hair and tickle my ear.
I could almost smell him here, if I tried hard enough. There weren’t many places that still held his scent, but I could almost detect it — or maybe I just wanted to so badly that I was imagining it.
I remembered him urging me to smell everything in the candy shop. To give in to who I really was. I picked out the scents in the bookstore now: the nutty aroma of the leather, the almost perfumey carpet cleaner, the sweet black ink and the gasoline-smelling color inks, the shampoo of the boy at the counter, Isabel’s fragrance, the scent of the memory of me and Sam kissing on this couch.
I didn’t want Isabel to find me with my tears any more than she wanted me to find her with hers. We shared a lot of things now, but crying was one thing we never talked about. I wiped my face dry with my sleeve and sat up.
I walked to the shelf where Sam had gotten his book, scanned the titles until I recognized it, then pulled the volume out. Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. I lifted it to my nose to see if it was the same copy. Sam.
I bought it. Isabel bought the cookbook on cookies, and we went to Rachel’s place and baked six dozen thumbprint cookies while carefully not talking about Sam or Olivia. Afterward, Isabel drove me home and I shut myself in the study with Rilke, and I read and I wanted.
And leaving you (there aren’t words to untangle it) Your life, fearful and immense and blossoming, so that, sometimes frustrated, and sometimes understanding, Your life is sometimes a stone in you, and then, a star.
I was beginning to understand poetry.
