Page 41 of Finders Keepers
Edlo is a kingdom made of magic and mayhem. There are fantastic trees of every color, and they grow any food one could wish to eat. All of the birds are granite statues until the exact moment you glance upon them, when they animate for a time until you look away again. The seltzer river that makes up the eastern border launches bubbles into the air, and they drift, drift around the kingdom, immune to bursting for quite some time. If you’re quick and careful, you can slip inside one and use it to travel around—if you have no destination, of course, since they cannot be steered. And sometimes there are fearsome monsters who must be vanquished. But usually all they need is a bit of a tickle and a mild scolding.
Old as I am, Issy grown, I find myself visiting Edlo rather less frequently than before. Besides, I know the way by heart. So perhaps I should hand it over to you and your boy, so that he may grow upknowing what it is to float above the trees in a perfect, iridescent bubble.
Where is it located? Well, right here, of course! On the other side of yesterday, with a sharp right before you reach tomorrow.
17
Quentin’s car ismissing. Or rather, it hasn’t been parked out front for the last several days. Not that I’m watching for him or anything. Just something I noticed, along with the complete silence emanating from the other side of the duplex since we spoke Monday night. Like maybe he’s gone missing too.
My anxious mind keeps imagining him in various scenarios ranging from innocuous to disastrous. Mostly it oscillates between him being dead in a ditch somewhere and having accepted the Chicago job and left without a word. They both feel like worst-case scenarios. A best-case with him suddenly absent from my life again is hard to land on, and I don’t want to examine why.
I’m sure it’s just the strangeness I’ve been feeling since our most recent window conversation. That’s the closest we’ve come to discussing the fallout from that summer since Quentin’s half-hearted apology that first night on the porch. It didn’t help; all it did was make that dull ache in a long-ignored corner of my heart turn into a sharper twinge.Sometimes not intending to hurteach other isn’t enough to keep it from happening anyway.Was he saying that he knows I wasn’t trying to hurt him when I went rogue that night, but that I still did? Or was he acknowledging that he hurt me, but claiming it was unintentional? Whichever way he meant it, it’s a reminder that we managed to wound each other deeply and that the scar left behind might never fully fade away.
All this remembering makes me feel small and vulnerable and young—things that, as Ambitious Nina, I thought I would never feel again. She was a suit of armor I got used to wearing, and Quentin’s reappearance in my life at a time when I’ve been left unprotected feels like the universe has an unfair advantage over me.
As a distraction, I’ve thrown myself into preparing for our tour of Sprangbur that’s coming up this weekend. That’s why I’ve spent so much time staring at the events gallery this week, thinking about the people in those photos. And I guess all of those images of weddings against the setting of the Castle are really messing with my brain, because I’ve decided thatsomethingis wrong with them. I just can’t put my finger on it. They look…weird. Off. At first I thought they’d been Photoshopped. But now that I’ve spent the last hour reviewing them all again (hey, don’t judge), I think I’ve finally figured it out: The people in them look happy. Like, genuinely, trulyhappy. Especially in the photos where the couples are together.
That’s what my brain is having trouble comprehending. And, god, that’s sad.
Because I’m realizing that the reason it looks so foreign is that I have zero pictures of Cole and me looking even remotely that happy. I even check to make sure I’m not—what’s the opposite of sugarcoating? Salt-coating? Citric acid–coating?—the truth. Ignoring the bubble of nausea that floats up inside my stomach, I open the digital folder filled with all the photos of the two of us. There are a couple from early on where there’s a slight hint of it. Maybe. If you squint. But especially in the most recent one, from a grad school classmate’s wedding we went to in October, we look like we might not even know each other. There’s a noticeable amount of space between our bodies, and his hand hovers near my shoulder without touching it. If I didn’t know better, I’d think we’d just met an hour before the photographer asked to take our picture.
That releases a whole bunch of stuff I kept in a corner cupboard in my brain. Because now the memories of countless instances where it was clear we weren’t working but I insisted we continue soldiering on in some attempt to force it are spilling out, threatening to bury me. It’s the conclusion of a long, drawn-out epiphany that started the other night as I was talking to Quentin. Cole and I weren’t interested in each other as much as we were invested in creating an idealus—one that he envisioned but that I wanted just as much. As soon as it became apparent that I was falling behind, that I wasn’t going to have the career we both expected of me, he started losing interest. I think I saw the signs but didn’t want to accept them. Breaking up with Cole would feel too much like giving up on myself. Admitting defeat. And that’s what’s hurting now—not that I lost someone I care about when we split, but that I lost the version of myself I’d grown so used to being.
Ambitious Nina was so wrapped up in Cole’s expectations, and the expectations I had for myself because of him, that I’m not sure she can exist outside of those confines. I’m not even sure I want her to.
I send a message to Sabrina even though it’s late in Belfast:I don’t think I was ever really in love with Cole, just the idea of who he thought we could be together.
I get a response about thirty minutes later:Didn’t your therapist suggest that last year and you got really indignant about it?
Oh. Right. That did happen. I guess I was unhappy for a lot longer than I wanted to acknowledge.Yes, but it’s rude to bring that up when I’m in the middle of a breakthrough.
Sabrina sends back a kissy face emoji, followed by a heart.
It sounds terrible but…I don’t know if I know who I am without him, without my job. As soon as I press send, my pulse races as I recall that Sabrina was friends with Ambitious Nina, not this lost, sad version of me. What if she doesn’t like whoever I become next? What if she can’t relate if we’re no longer on the same path?
Reading my mind as any good best friend does, she immediately responds with,It doesn’t sound terrible. Those things were major parts of your life for a long time. But they were just that: parts. They weren’t YOU, Neen. And I know it’s scary to feel like you’re starting over, but isn’t it exciting too? The world is your oyster!!
My heart slows slightly as I read Sabrina’s supportive words.But I don’t like oysters, I type but don’t send, because just then I hear a quiet thud on the other side of the shared wall. Quentin. He’s back?
Unless it’s only someone coming to gather his belongings. A moving company or his family, depending on if he’s vacated or dead, I guess.
No. It’s him. Something in me recognizes his presence, even through the wall.
My heartbeat revs familiarly as I go to the window, which I already opened earlier when my room got too stuffy.
There’s a good chance he won’t know I’m here without my window’s distinctive siren call. Or maybe after the other night, when I didn’t have anything to say in response to his cryptic pronouncement, he won’t want to talk at all. “Hello there, Moon,” I say, only half expecting an answer.
I guess he must already have his window open too, because I hear a few noises that sound like him coming closer, followed by a tired “Bonsoir, Nina.”
“I’ve missed you,” I say before I can think better of it, “these last few nights.”
“Oh? Zee, uh, zee feeling is mutual,” Quentin says, sounding distracted. There’s another little thud.
“What the heck’s going on over there?”
He replies, dropping the Pierre Escargot impression for a moment, “Taking off my pants and almost fell over, if you must know. I’m about to hop in the shower.” I have the immediate mental image of him standing there naked, water sluicing off his skin, darkening that trail of hair on his stomach, leading lower…He picks the accent back up again, pulling me out of the fantasy. “Ça va, mon amie?”
“I’m fine,” I say, digging deep into the one semester of high school French I took after I exhausted their German offerings and hoping I’ve responded correctly. “Spent the last few days being dragged to every flea market in the tri-county area by my father. What about you? Where have you been?”
