20
Now
Felix is quiet on the drive except for the tap, tap, tap of his fingers on the steering wheel. He isn’t usually fidgety.
“So Bridget was being weird, right?”
I glance at him, but I don’t think he’s heard me.
“Felix?”
His eyes flick to mine. “Sorry, I missed that.”
“I said, Bridget was being weird.”
“With the texting?”
“Yeah, with the texting. But she didn’t seem upset. Do you think they’re
working it out?”
Felix shrugs. His tapping resumes.
“Is everything okay?” I say when we’re pulling into the parking lot.
His brow furrows. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
Tap, tap, tap.
“You seem nervous.”
In seconds, the tips of his ears blush rose.
“I hope it’s not me.”
Felix shuts off the engine and turns to face me. His eyes are hooked on mine. “You don’t make me nervous, Lucy.”
“Okay,” I say. I know there’s something else coming. I want to drop his gaze, but it’s impossible to look away. That speck of brown isn’t just brown, I notice. There’s a little green in it. That speck is hazel.
He leans in. “You make me a lot of things, but nervous isn’t one of them.”
My jaw drops, but then Felix pulls back with a one-sided grin and says, “I do get a little anxious on competition day, though.”
“So,” I say, regrouping. “I don’t make you nervous, but oysters do.”
He laughs and opens his door. “Exactly. Never underestimate a bivalve.”
• • •
GREEN GABLES HERITAGE PLACE IS A WHITE FARMHOUSE WITH A GREEN ROOF AND shutters, sitting atop a grassy hill. There’s a barn and a little trail that runs through the trees, and the rooms of the home are done up to look like they would have in the late 1800s, with flourishes inspired by the Anne books. The house was owned by Lucy Maud Montgomery’s cousins. When she wrote Anne of Green Gables in 1905, Lucy was only thirty-one, just two years older than me. She drew on her childhood visits here for the setting.
You enter the property through a visitors’ center, and Felix and I take our time wandering around, reading the placards about the author’s early life. Her mother died of tuberculosis before Lucy was two and she was raised mostly by her grandparents.
“I forgot how sad her story is,” I say to Felix as we leave the building and step into the sun. Lucy’s best friend, her cousin Frederica, died of pneumonia at age thirty-five, and Lucy’s marriage to a Presbyterian minister was a challenging one—both struggled with their mental health and addictions to prescription drugs. Lucy is believed to have taken her own life.
“But look at this,” Felix says. We gaze over at the farmhouse. There are people everywhere—picnic tables where families stop for snacks, a couple taking turns posing in front of the building, and a stream of people waiting for a turn to walk through the home. Felix nods toward a lanky teenage girl.
She’s holding a periwinkle blue hardcover of Anne of Green Gables to her chest and openly weeping. “Look at how many lives she touched. This is a happy ending.”
It’s so bright, I have to cup my hand over my forehead so I can see Felix properly. “You’re right,” I say. “I like your way of looking at it better.”
He grins. A big one. A single, perfect dimple one. “Let’s go explore.”
Still, I’m feeling a little blue. I’ve seen the eighties CBC film and its sequel at least twenty times, half of them with Bridget. It would have been nice to have come together. I miss her. I’ve been missing her since she moved out of our apartment. But as we shuffle through the house, Felix whispers into my ear, “ ‘Tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it.’ ”
I look at him, surprised.
“I’ve read the book,” he says. “And when we were kids, Bridget made me watch the movies a thousand times.”
It’s amazing how small the rooms are, how outlandish the wallpaper.
Even though I know the movies weren’t filmed here, I picture Megan Follows as Anne and Colleen Dewhurst as Marilla, churning butter in the dairy porch.
“ ‘I’m in the depths of despair,’ ” I say as we tour the kitchen.
“ ‘My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes,’ ” he replies.
Soon my cheeks begin to hurt from smiling.
“Would you rather be ‘divinely beautiful or dazzlingly clever or angelically good’?” I ask Felix as we head upstairs.
He chuckles, then says quietly, “ ‘Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think.’ ”
The bedrooms are decorated to make you feel like you’re snooping through the Cuthbert home—a man’s vest and hat in one room, a dress with puffed sleeves hanging in the closet of another.
Outside, Felix and I trek down the slope, down Lover’s Lane, and over the wooden foot bridge through the Haunted Wood. We don’t speak, but the silence is comfortable. The path is narrow enough that, every so often, our shoulders brush, but Felix doesn’t jump back at the contact and neither do I.
The feeling of wanting to hold his hand seems to come from nowhere. It startles me how strong it is. It’s almost all I can think about as we meander through the forest. It’s like I’m twelve all over again, that summer at camp when I had an epic crush on a sixteen-year-old counselor. He sat beside me on the bus that took us to the river for swimming, and I put my hand on my
knee, making it available for him. When we got off the bus, my hand still unheld, he said, “Nice riding with you, Lisa.”
Seventeen years later, I’m attracted to a guy I probably shouldn’t be attracted to, wondering how disastrous it would be if I reached out and took his hand. He held mine so briefly last night, and I want to twine our fingers together, feel his large palm in my small one. But this is never happening.
Holding hands with Felix would be bigger than anything we’ve done.
Holding hands is for boyfriends, not former lovers.
By the time we’re climbing the knoll to the house, my left foot is throwing a tantrum. My right isn’t great, either. In a moment of style rebellion, I decided not to put my running shoes in my suitcase—I’m so sick of wearing them every day at work.
“Do you mind if we rest for a bit?” I gesture to a patch of lawn beneath a tree.
We sit, legs stretched in front of us. Felix is in jeans, per usual, and I’m wearing a yellow spaghetti strap sundress with buttons down the front and
gloriously generous pockets.
“Tired?” he asks.
“My feet are.” I lift an ankle and point to my strappy silver sandals. “I love them, but they don’t feel the same about me. Horrible, beautiful shoes.”
Felix tips his head, studying them. “They’re very pretty,” he says. “The pink buckles are a nice touch, and they look good with your dress. But they’re probably not worth losing a foot over.”
There’s something about Felix assessing my footwear that’s deeply funny.
“What?” he asks as I’m laughing. His smile is mystified.
“Felix Clark, fashion critic—I had no idea.”
“I’m full of surprises.” He motions to my foot. “Let me see it.”
“You want to check the quality of the craftsmanship?” I ask, shifting so that I’m facing him, my knees folded up and my feet next to his thigh.
“Something like that.” His hand wraps around my ankle, and he brings my left foot onto his lap. He unfastens the buckle, fingers grazing my skin.
When I shiver, he lifts his eyes to mine.
“That was involuntary,” I tell him, and he smirks.
He takes off the shoe, setting it on the grass. When his hands close around my foot and begin rubbing the arch with his thumbs, I tell him my feet are gross. They’re dirty from our little hike.
“Shush,” he says.
So I shush. I lean back on my elbows, and let Felix have his way with my toes. I close my eyes, and tilt my face to the sun, because Felix is about to give my foot an orgasm, and I can’t look at him or what his hands are doing.
“Other one,” he says eventually, taking hold of my right ankle, unbuckling the strap. Both feet are in Felix’s lap, and even though I’m consciously making an effort not to shudder, I haven’t felt this relaxed in a long time. I haven’t had such a fun day since . . . since the day I spent with Felix on the beach a year ago. My bones are liquid gold. The tightness in my chest, gone. It can’t just be the coastal air. Or the massage.
“This is nice,” I say, prying an eye open to gaze at Felix. And even though I know I shouldn’t, I picture another, impossible world, where Felix and I belong to each other. His useful hands. Oysters on ice. Nights in his solid embrace.
He looks at me curiously. “Prince Edward Island?”
Umm. “Prince Edward Island,” I repeat. Sure. “And resting for a minute.
I’m probably working too much.”
“So why don’t you rest for a minute?”
I look at the sky, squinting. “I can’t. It’s not the time. I feel like I’ve been running a marathon at a sprinter’s pace, only there’s no finish line.” There are hardly any clouds today. Just a few wisps of white in the distance. “We have this huge opportunity at work—a contract that would mean big things for us.
Getting everything set up so we can pull it off is going to be . . . a lot.”
“You can do it.”
I meet Felix’s gaze. So steady. So sure. So like his sister in that way. “I
can.”
“But you’re not sure you want to.”
“How can you tell?”
He shrugs a shoulder. “I know you, Lucy. I know what you sound like when you’re excited about something.”
“You know what I sound like when I’m excited.”
He laughs. “I know both those things. I know more than that, too.”
Felix holds my eyes with his for a moment. “What would it feel like if you said no to the contract?”
“Terrible,” I tell him. “Impossible. I’d feel like I’d failed the business, failed Farah—she’s really excited about it. I’ve always wanted to prove myself with In Bloom. I’ve always wanted it to be a success, but it felt so much more important after my aunt died. Like if I lose it, I’ll lose her altogether.” I feel myself getting choked up, so I smile. Sometimes the act alone can make me more cheerful. “But I won’t lose it. I’ve got Bridget in my corner, and she’d never let that happen.”
A flicker of something crosses Felix’s eyes. “You’ll never let that happen.
I’m sure Bridget has been a huge help, but you don’t need her.”
I’m about to protest, but he picks up my left foot again. “I had no idea you were so good at this,” I say, closing my eyes once more.
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Lucy,” I hear.
On our way out, we walk past a display of small white cards with messages from visitors, standing in metal holders. English. French. Japanese.
German. Childish scribbles. I pause when I come to the one that reads, I am
here now, and everything is okay.
It feels like it’s written just for me.
From the corner of my eye, I see Felix pick up a pen and write something on a blank card. He sets it in an empty holder.
This is Lucy’s happy ending.
I look at him, and then at the dozens and dozens of messages.
I am here now, and everything is okay.
