Page 23 of I Need You to Read This
She hesitates. “Why don’t you give me yours?”
“Fair enough,” he says. He digs around in his bag and finds a pen and a napkin. Before she knows it, he is leaning against the window scribbling down his number. Her palms are clammy as he hands it to her. She notices the expectation in his eyes. She tucks it into the pocket of her shirtdress and gives him a smile. “Great, thanks. I’ll send you a text,” Alex says, not sure if she means it.
“Great.” He grins. “In the meantime, I’ll look for your name in the paper.”
He smiles, that one-sided dimple flashing at her before he turns away, pulling his headphones over his ears. As she glances back, she sees him duck into the Excelsior Bank Building, and an unfamiliar flutter rises up into her chest. She fights hard to extinguish it, but as she rides up to the forty-ninth floor, she imagines meeting Tom for dinner at one of the cafés nearby, talking into the night at one of the tables that spill out onto the street. The ones she always walks past alone.
TWENTY-TWO
“Well, that’s nearly everything from one bin!” Lucy chirps. Alex gives her a weak smile. Her fingers are covered in paper cuts and her eyes throb from reading all of the letters on her desk, a full-on mountain of them but nothing that is right for her first column.
“Thanks,” Alex says. As Lucy begins to stack fresh envelopes on her desk, the basket of letters tips, spilling all over her office floor.
“Shit. I’m so sorry,” Lucy says, dropping to the floor and scrambling to gather the letters, stacking them in neat piles.
“It’s okay, really.” She joins Lucy on her hands and knees. “This is probably not in the job description you imagined for yourself when you applied here.”
Lucy rocks back onto her heels, blowing a piece of hair out of her face. “I don’t mind this at all. Truly. I’m from a small town. I never dreamed I’d get to work in an office like this, at a place everyone recognizes when I go back home for Thanksgiving. Even if they might not all like theHerald,they respect it. It means something. This job has been such a good experience for me. I like being an assistant. It’s better here than where I’m from. There’s nothing there.” Her face darkens with some memory of it. Alex swallows. She can relate.
“Have you foundthe oneyet?” Lucy asks.
“For this week? No, not yet. It’s making me a bit nervous, honestly.There are a few here that I feel so connected to, but so far nothing that seems just perfect. And I really want this first one to be the best I can make it.” Alex is tempted to ask her assistant more about Francis. Did she ever have trouble choosing her column each week? Did she just reach in and pick one, or was she more deliberate, more calculating? But she remembers the grief that transformed Lucy’s features when she spoke about her former boss. She should tread lightly.
“Maybe I’m overthinking it,” she says instead.
“It must be a lot of pressure,” Lucy says. “Big shoes to fill and all. But I’m sure you’ll find something soon. I believe in you.”
“Thanks, Lucy,” Alex says, not feeling certain at all. The tapping of footsteps in the hall makes them both pause and look to the door until the sound recedes. “Every time I hear something out there, I keep thinking it’s Howard Demetri.”
Her assistant glances back at the door. She’s gone pale, Alex notices, at the mention of Howard. “Lucy? Is there something wrong?”
“No. Nothing at all,” Lucy says quickly, then stands up and brushes herself off. “I should go get some more letters for us! I’ll come back up later and see if you need anything.”
She gives Alex a bright smile as she leaves. Does it seem a bit forced? Alex wonders as Lucy backs out of the office, glancing along the hall before letting the door close behind her.
She turns back to the letters, now stacked in precise rows on her desk. She selects one from the top of her pile and slides out the single page.
Dear Constance,
I don’t know where the years have gone. When I look back it is hard to remember them all. I had a bit of a life before, at least I think I did. But I let it lapse, to roll over day after day into a blur of sameness. Once I had a woman I loved dearly. I was afraid that if I chose her, I’d be giving up on everything else, all the other dreams I had and ways I saw myself, that all those exciting doors would close to me. I haven’t ever been to Italy like I always promised her. I had many things I said I’d do one day, many plans for the future, and somehow here I am, sixty-five years old. I don’t even know if I would go to Italy now given the chance, but I would have married Hazel. I guess that’s how it all goes in this life, and I shouldn’t feel sorry for myself. But I wake up each day with a deep well of regret that nothing around me can fill. And now I realize that I’d rather have been standing in a hallway of closed doors all this time with her than all alone with all the options in the world. It is far too late for Hazel and me. But I don’t want to live like this anymore. Nothing was ever good enough for me to commit to, and now that I’ve committed to nothing, I have nothing.
Something made me wake up recently and realize that things could be different. I guess what I want to know is how do I live the rest of my years without this ache of regret consuming me whole?
I’ll wait for your answer. I hope I have time.
Misgivings
TWENTY-THREE
Alex’s skin prickles with goose bumps. She rereads the letter quickly and then, before she can lose confidence, she begins to type a response.
Dear Misgivings,
Regret can come in many forms.
Once she has committed, the words come fast. Everything else falls away and she disappears into a sort of trance. Alex is back in the same place she went to just a couple of weeks ago, sitting on her living room floor, writing the answers to the application in her sweatpants. As she writes, her eyes sting with tears. There is so much she wants to say to Misgivings. She becomes immersed in their problem, completely transfixed by the solution as it unspools before her on the screen. She watches the words land on the page as though by divine intervention. She thinks that this must be the feeling writers talk about, where something that almost feels outside of yourself takes over. The writing feels urgent and necessary, and as she nears the end of her response, she realizes that the advice is something she needs to hear too.
We can never get back time—it’s one of life’s biggest tragedies but also one of its greatest motivators. If things were not finite, there would be no need to ever evaluate what is most important to us. You thought you were being true to yourself by keeping your options open, but all that time you were living in fear. If you are not mindful, you can spend a whole lifetime weighing your options. Commitment to anything, let alone another person, takes bravery.
