Love Story(37)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“The night of the Derby he did something nice for me,” I choked out. “I hoped we were starting over. And then he stole my farm.”

She stayed quiet for a few minutes. Finally she said, “You are a phenomenally bad communicator. I’m surprised you want to be a novelist. Or maybe that’s why you want to be a novelist.”

I sat up, wiping the hair away from my wet face. “I love you,” I said.

She snorted. “I’m easy to love.”

“No

” I leaned forward and hugged her, just like that. My stomach twisted again as I did it, but I hugged her. Squeezed her hard.

She rubbed my back soothingly and said into my shoulder, “I love you, too.” Then she held me at arm’s length. “Let’s go to a midnight movie. You never get out.”

I shook my head. “I have to read for history.” Then I looked toward the ceiling again. “You go on upstairs. Manohar is waiting.”

It took me a while to convince her, but she did eventually go. I moved to my room and unloaded my textbooks from my bag. But the loneliness of the empty room was overwhelming tonight, and the very thought of wandering alone across the ancient battlefields of my history chapters made my head throb. I took a quick trip down the hall to the bathroom to remove my makeup and cleanse myself of the coffee smell. I was so sick of spending long evenings standing up and serving lattes in the coffee shop that I would have preferred the odor of Thai garbage. I stretched out in bed, half asleep already.

Hunter’s footsteps echoed in the stairwell and through the wall at the head of my bed. Suddenly wide awake, I flipped over and stared at the wall, ready to defend myself if Hunter burst through it. I leaned forward on my fists, head down as the noise descended. The front door of the dorm squealed open and thudded shut. I hopped to the other side of my bed and peeked out my window as Hunter walked away down the sidewalk, open overcoat blowing behind him.

Enough was enough. I had to know.

I jerked on the clothes I’d worn that day, slipped on my shoes, and shrugged into my own overcoat. Running out the door, I grabbed a scarf from my bedpost. Scarves were in fashion and I hadn’t yet needed it for warmth. Tonight it was functional. As I dashed down the stairwell, I tied it around my red hair.

When I shoved open the front door, he was still visible one block up on the almost empty sidewalk. I hurried after him, as fast as I could go without running and drawing attention if he happened to glance around. I did run when he turned a corner, and I half-expected him to be waiting to startle me when I rounded the corner myself. Instead, I glimpsed his blond hair as he jogged down the steps to the subway.

I’d ridden the subway a lot when I first arrived in New York—why not, when a monthly card bought unlimited rides? I was amazed that it would take me anywhere in the city. Then it had broken down on me a couple of times. There had been a period when construction was awful and I kept getting on the wrong line and it would always spit me out in TriBeCa. Lately I’d hardly ridden it at all. When class had started in September, my Manhattan had shrunk to a tight circle of dorm, class, coffee shop, library, dorm.

Now I stepped onto the escalator and descended into the bowels of the city. From this angle, the staircase seemed to smooth out into a conveyor belt. That’s what my life had become, and, judging from the dark circles under Hunter’s eyes lately, maybe his life, too—a relentless machine, chewing us to pieces.

At the bottom of the escalator, he walked forward into the light of the subway platform and disappeared from my view beneath the edge of the curved ceiling. He would have to look behind him while I was following in order to spot me. If he did, he would see me. There was no way around this. I had made myself as unobtrusive as possible, but he would still see me unless I was actively hiding behind a pillar, which would arouse the suspicions of the other passengers and the police. I didn’t know where he was going, so I didn’t know what would be there and why I might want to go there alone late at night. I would be busted. And when I was busted, I would have no excuse, only the truth: “I am going to die unless I find out about your secret love.”

I stepped off the escalator just as the northbound train was pulling alongside the platform. I watched him board, and I ducked onto the same car through the rear door. The subway carried enough passengers for me to blend into the mass of dark overcoats, but not so many that Hunter had to stand and give his seat to an elderly lady. He sat and opened a book. From half a car back, I watched him read.

As a stop approached, he pocketed his book, stood, and reached for the bar overhead. I lowered my chin, bracing myself for discovery. He didn’t look toward me. He closed his eyes, gripping the bar hard to keep his balance in the swaying car.

Doors slid open. He filed out with the crowd. I stayed twenty paces behind, my heart throbbing harder and harder as we climbed the stairs up to the street. If the trek ended at a cocktail lounge, I would know as he slipped inside that his most recent story for class was not fiction after all. If he entered a fortune-teller’s storefront, I would stand in the cloud of incense smoke that wafted outside and know I should let him go.

What worried me was ambiguity. As I hurried up the dark sidewalk after him, I hoped he would duck into a drugstore so I could spy on him as he made out with the blonde from the beach party who worked as a sales chick behind the counter. At least then I would know. But if he used a key to an apartment building and the door locked behind him, I would stand in the street rebuffed and thwarted, never to know whether he was picking up a clandestine game of poker or buying Ecstasy or carrying on an affair with his forty-something anatomy professor.

Ahead of me he stopped at a busy intersection. I hung back, advancing to the corner only when the light changed and he crossed. The thought occurred to me that his destination might be the building directly in front of me. It could not be, I decided. I waited for him to veer to the side and continue down the sidewalk beside the building, toward his real destination.

A hospital loomed ten glassy stories over the intersection, its bright emergency room carved out of the corner, ambulances blinking ominously, blue and red in the driveway. The lights danced through Hunter’s blond hair as his silhouette crossed the driveway, edged between ambulances, and disappeared into the brilliant lobby.

My eyes stung with tears for the second time that night. My heart knocked against my breastbone. My mind ran frantically through the possibilities, each more awful than the one before. Hunter was dating a beautiful brain surgeon with a taste for younger men. Hunter was devotedly visiting his blond girlfriend from the shower, who had fallen ill. Hunter was ill himself. He was dying slowly. He wanted the rest of his short life to be as normal as possible. That’s why he couldn’t let me know where he was going. He didn’t want my grandmother to snatch his college education away now that he couldn’t fulfill his obligation as her heir.