Page 16 of Meet Me In Central Park

For a moment Harry didn’t speak and then he stopped again as we reached the door of the Community Center. ‘I felt it too – that connection.’

Holding my breath, I knew if I made the wrong move I’d ruin everything. I couldn’t risk the fragile happiness I’d found here, that I desperately wanted to hold on to until I boarded my plane home at JFK. Every nerve ending in my body was urging me to reach out and touch him, but the thought of what that might lead to was too overwhelming. His hand was barely an inch away from mine, but I’d never needed to listen to my head over my heart more than I needed to right then. If that meant lying to Harry, it was just something I needed to do.

‘I’m glad, because I felt it with all of you – Dannie, Rob, Paula, even Madison.’ I was desperately trying to backtrack and make it sound like the connection I’d described having with Harry was nothing special. I had no idea if he was convinced, but if I could just make it inside with the others before my face gave me away, it might be enough. ‘We’d better not keep them waiting; I don’t think Rob’s pecan pie is going to last long.’

‘It’s Paula’s favourite, so you’re probably right.’ The tension left Harry’s face, like a man who’d realised he’d had a narrow escape, and I couldn’t stop my shoulders from slumping. It was madness when his reaction to my words was what I’d wanted, to pass the connection between us off as nothing, but I hadn’t expected him to so readily accept it. Suddenly not even the thought of Rob’s pecan pie could cheer me up.

* * *

‘I think I might be broken.’ Dannie massaged his stomach as he pushed his plate away from him, and I knew exactly how he felt. The food had been incredible. Rob and Karly had done an amazing job pulling the Thanksgiving dinner together in the small kitchen of the Community Center and the even tinier one in Karly’s apartment at the back of the building. Their cooking skills must have run in the family, because Karly had taken care of the turkey, stuffing and yams, with her pugs fixated on her every move when they was being served. It was a miracle she didn’t trip over them when she was walking backwards and forwards to the table.

Abbie had contributed a huge bowl of macaroni and cheese, and Madison had made corn bread. Paula and Harry had taken care of the drinks. I felt guilty for not contributing to the party, but they’d all insisted that they wanted to show me a proper Thanksgiving, so I wasn’t allowed to bring anything. After the main course, I hadn’t been sure I could eat any dessert, but, somehow, I’d managed not only a slice of pecan pie, but a spiced apple and pumpkin muffin too.

The four pugs were stretched out snoring after the meal was over, probably because too many slices of turkey had been dropped under the table for them, and it was tempting to join them. Abbie was keen to show off her acting talents, though, and she was trying to rally us into a game of twenty questions once we’d cleared up. But the general consensus was that watching an American football game, on the big TV in the Community Center crèche, was the best way to recover from all that overindulgence. It was one of the few things that still felt like it belonged to an alien culture. American football. I just didn’t get it, and I couldn’t seem to make head nor tail of what was going on, probably because I didn’t want to. So when DeShawn and Paula suggested going out for a walk, and asked if anyone else wanted to join them, I didn’t hesitate. I felt a bit guilty – I was sure they wanted to be on their own really, but I had no intention of trailing around with them for long. I just wanted a reason to get out for a bit, to clear my head. It was great being surrounded by everyone, and they’d all made me feel so welcome, but I needed some time on my own to decompress and process this day meant for sharing with loved ones. When I’d looked at some of the pictures from the parade, my first instinct had been to text Mum and send them to her. I’d got a great shot of the Paddington Bear float and he’d been one of her favourites, but she’d never get to see the picture. It still blindsided me how things like that could hit me so hard, as if the air had been knocked out of my lungs. But I was getting better at coping with it, especially lately, and time outside walking always helped.

‘I’ll come with you.’ Harry was up on his feet before I had a chance to try and put him off. I’d been counting on some time alone to process my feelings for him too, because they’d blindsided me in a very different way. My eyes had kept sliding in his direction all through dinner, and the last time I could remember feeling like that had been when I was about fourteen and I’d convinced myself I was in love with our next-door neighbour’s son, Tom. It was a proper schoolgirl crush, with his name scrawled on almost every page of the journal I used to keep back then. I definitely hadn’t expected to feel like that at this age, and the last thing I needed was my newfound crush walking by my side, reminding me of all the reasons why he’d be more than worthy of filling the pages of my journal, if I still kept one.

‘We could go for a drink somewhere if you want?’ The words came out of Paula’s mouth as we got outside, but her eyes said something else.

‘Not for me, thanks. I fancy a walk up to the Empire State Building. I love seeing it lit up at night.’ I glanced at Harry as I spoke, and he raised a questioning eyebrow. For some reason I nodded. There was no denying that part of me wanted his company, even though I knew I was taking a risk.

We left Paula and DeShawn to their own nighttime stroll, and walked in silence towards the Empire State Building. Weirdly, it didn’t feel awkward. When I’d first started working in the shop, with Madison and Betty, the three of us had talked about anything and everything, just to avoid that awkward silence that could arise when you were getting to know someone. But I could be with Harry and say nothing, and he seemed to instinctively understand when that was what I needed to do. If I’d written a list of pros and cons about him, the way my friends and I used to do about boys when we were teenagers, the only thing on the cons side would be that he lived a six-hour plane ride away from where the rest of my life was.

‘I love this building.’ I was the first to speak in the end, and I smiled at the memory that always came back to me when I saw the building that was lit up in front of us. ‘The first time I was in New York, I didn’t have a lot of time for sight-seeing, but the one place I was determined to see was the Empire State Building. I followed the Google maps app on my phone, and I was on Thirty-Fourth Street but it was such a misty day that I couldn’t see it at all. So I stopped and spoke to a police officer on the corner of Fifth Avenue, and asked him where it was. He laughed so hard that he could hardly point out that I was standing right in front of it.’ The top of the building had been shrouded in mist and, standing right next to it, without being able to see the iconic pinnacle from where the King Kong movie had created such an iconic image, it looked like the bottom of any other skyscraper. It had given the police officer a good laugh at the time, and it seemed to be having the same effect on Harry.

‘Not big enough for you to spot then?’

I nudged him in the ribs and he caught hold of me and spun me round to face him. I should have stopped him when he kissed me, but I didn’t want to. The lid had flipped off the box that was never supposed to be opened in an instant, and it turned out I had no intention of slamming it shut again. Being rational about our situation and what the future held was proving much more difficult when it came to Harry.

‘I’ve been wanting to do that since the first day I met you, and you admitted that The Smurfs was your favourite movie.’ He laughed softly, his breath warm against my cheek.

‘I did not say it was my favourite!’

‘And there I was thinking I’d met my soul mate.’ I couldn’t tell if he was still joking, but he had to be. We’d known each other for less than a month, and he knew as well as I did that I was almost halfway through my stay already. For all I knew, he did this all the time, meeting girls whose time in New York was limited from the start. Like a waiter in a holiday resort, finding his ‘soul mate’ each time someone new got off the tour bus, hours after the ‘soul mate’ before her caught the plane home again.

‘Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I’m sure your Smurf loving soul mate is out there somewhere.’ I laughed, but something inside me twisted at the idea of Harry finding his person and it not being me, which was insane given that I’d barely known him for a month. Still, I’d be long gone by then and, if I kept in contact with him, I’d eventually hear about it on Instagram or something. Hopefully my feelings for Harry would be long gone by then too. Although I had to admit that the kiss hadn’t helped on that front. Ideally it would have been awful, but it had been sweet and gentle at first, building to a promise of more to come and I hadn’t wanted it to stop, despite the fact that public displays of affection were definitely not my thing. I’d seen Sleepless in Seattle far too many times, that was all. It was the Empire State Building’s fault, for helping put the idea of romance back into my head when I’d been so determined to push it out.

‘Okay so we might not be soul mates and your membership to the Smurf fan club might be revoked forever, but will you at least let me show you what Christmas in New York has to offer?’ Harry waited for me to answer, and, somehow, I found myself nodding. I had no idea what was going on with me. I had to back off – I needed to back off for self-preservation – but something kept stopping me. It was like I’d picked up the wrong script for a Broadway play, and ended up in a scene from one of Abbie’s alternative theatre shows instead. I knew what I was supposed to say, but the words didn’t fit the scene, and I ended up ad-libbing, saying yes, when I should be saying no. I had no idea how it was going to end, I just knew that it was.

‘I’d like that.’ I closed my eyes as he kissed me again, letting myself pretend for a minute that this was my life and that if my feelings for Harry turned out not to just be a schoolgirl crush, we had the option of seeing where it went. I wanted to take up his offer of seeing New York through his eyes, for me and my parents, even though I knew there was every chance of it hurting like hell when I had to say goodbye. I’d promised not to let myself risk that kind of hurt, but as I leant into him, I didn’t care. If losing my parents had taught me anything, it should have been that the biggest regrets were for the things you never got to experience. Whatever happened, I knew for sure I’d regret not spending the next four weeks with Harry. So, I’d just have to deal with the consequences when it was over.

8

A week after Thanksgiving, New York had gone into full Christmas mode, and December had arrived with the first flurry of snow. I’d been on a couple of low-key dates with Harry: the first was at an improv comedy night that Abbie had hosted at the Community Center, and I’d invited Dannie and Rob along to our second date, at a restaurant in China Town. Despite taking the decision to spend more time with him, in the knowledge that I’d regret it if I didn’t, I was still desperately trying to stop myself from falling for Harry in the way I suspected I could. But I couldn’t keep using other people to protect me from that. I just had to keep reminding myself that, in four weeks’ time, New York would just be a distant memory, and there was every chance that Harry would be introducing himself to someone else at Belvedere Castle. The trouble was, I envied that someone already.

It wasn’t just the prospect of leaving Harry and the rest of my friends that made it feel as though the days were whizzing by far too quickly. I’d come to love working in the shop more than I’d ever have dreamed possible and I was beginning to wonder how I’d ever settle back into the slow pace of life at the micro-pub. We were run off our feet during opening hours, and today was no exception. I didn’t have time to unpack the latest delivery until after I’d finally served the last customers of the day – a Dutch family, who were buying decorations for various family members, and had spent twice as many dollars in an hour than I’d earned since I’d been in New York. I’d sent Betty and Madison home and, once I opened the box, I was glad I had.

It was a delivery of snow globes, and I wasn’t sure whether to expect tacky plastic Statues of Liberty encased in the glass, or something else entirely. Most of the decorations in Candy Cane Lane were high end, but my great aunt had long since cottoned on to the need to cater for all sectors of the market, and so there were those kinds of decorations too. But the snow globes were definitely not tacky. Each one contained a beautiful, hand-sculpted Christmas tree, and the detail on the decorations was exquisite. Some of the trees were very traditional and hung with red, green and gold decorations, and others looked like they’d been dressed with homemade decorations, with strings of popcorn and gingerbread men. They made me want to climb inside the globes, especially the one that was decorated to celebrate family life. It had a tiny pair of ballet shoes hanging from one branch, mittens, and snowmen that looked as though they’d been made from cotton wool balls. It reminded me of the tree we’d had at home when I was a child. Mum had hung whatever decorations I’d made at school in pride of place, no matter how awful they were. I remembered one: a polystyrene cup, with a few bits of glitter stuck to the side, and a fluffy green pipe cleaner rammed through the middle with a bell on the end, that would never ring against the side of the cup. Anyone would have thought it had been made by Tiffany, the way she looked at it. Maybe it was because I’d ended up being a miracle only child – despite being a surprise early on in my parents’ relationship. They’d had tests to see why they couldn’t have more children, and they’d been told that they should never have been able to conceive at all. Mum had told me later that they’d never even thought about going through treatment to have another child, and they’d just counted their blessings every day that they had me. It was another of those unexplained feelings, but it felt as if the snow globe had captured my childhood and that, if I could just get inside it, I could go back. I shook myself as I set the last of the snow globes on the shelf.

Unpacking the delivery had made me cry, but they weren’t tears of sadness. I knew if I’d seen that snow globe back in a shop in Canterbury, I’d have run out into the street, tears streaming down my face, only able to think about what I’d lost. But something had irrevocably shifted in me since I’d come to New York. I thought about the good times with my parents now far more often than I thought about their deaths. Every time I met up with Harry, it seemed to lead to me telling him another story about them. When he’d mentioned wanting to take me to China Town, we’d laughed together when I told him about the time my parents had gone to China Town in London, for their anniversary. Dad had struggled to chew something in one of the dishes he’d ordered, only to swallow it whole to avoid the embarrassment of spitting it out. When one of the waiters had started looking under the tables for something he’d lost, Dad had asked what was wrong. It turned out that the rubber thumb he used to count the notes when he was tilling up had gone missing. When Harry had asked if Dad had been worried that he’d swallowed it, I’d told him that my father’s only reaction had been relief that he hadn’t accidentally ordered the sheep’s penis soup that was a delicacy on the restaurant’s menu. It had been a running joke between my parents afterwards, that whenever Dad asked what was for dinner, my mother would say sheep’s penis soup. Telling the story, I could picture them so clearly – Dad rolling his eyes and saying ‘not again, I had that last night’ – and it felt like Harry was getting to know my parents too, and I loved that feeling.

One of the things I’d thought about a lot after they’d died and Ryan had decided we were finished, was that if I did eventually meet someone, my parents would never know him. Worse still, he’d never know them. But talking to Harry had made me realise I had the power to fix that last part and to bring my parents back to life, a little at a time, until the person I ended up with could picture them almost as clearly as I could. It was another reason I’d always be grateful that Nan and Aunt Dottie had tricked me into coming to New York and that I’d met Harry, someone who’d given me the space to realise that talking about my parents could really help me to heal. It was part of the reason why I decided to keep one snow globe back. And I was just taking the money from my bag, to put in the till, when Aunt Dottie arrived.

‘Surely things aren’t that bad, that you’re having to top up the till?’ Her voice made me jump. She was definitely getting better – I hadn’t even heard her unlock the door, let alone come in, and her foldable walking stick was still hanging from her wrist, in its folded-up state.

‘I was just putting the money in the till for one of these snow globes.’ I’d have been mortified if Aunt Dottie thought I was taking something from her.

‘Why on earth are you doing that?’ Her hair was back to its purple best, and she had a shiny purple coat on too. She looked like a giant Quality Street sweet.

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