Halfway to You(107)
Maggie selects a festive, rainbow-sprinkled doughnut from the tray, hoping the cheery treat will keep her voice from breaking. “I don’t think I ever thanked you.”
“For what?”
“For being honest with me. For changing my life—” She breaks on the last word anyway.
Ann reaches forward, steadying Maggie’s quivering hands. When Maggie looks up, she sees tears in the corners of Ann’s eyes, too, making their color an even more vibrant amber. “While we’re doing this thanking thing, I think I ought to thank you too.”
“Why?”
“I’ve been trying to write Todd’s story for years, but there was always something missing. You being here, encouraging me, listening . . . you were the missing piece. These interviews are a gift—even the illegally recorded bit.” She winks, and a tear drops into her lap. “I am eternally grateful.”
Maggie squeezes Ann’s hand, then sinks back into her chair. For a moment, they sit in silence. This is their final interview. Best to savor it.
ANN
Rome, Italy
August 2000
After the article dropped and Todd vowed to never forgive me, Rome—the city I once thought had romance in every corner—became a black-and-white noir. I moved through the world as if the world wasn’t there. My correspondence with Keith dwindled; my short stories became thin and unpublishable; I stopped taking article assignments. I spent too much time in my apartment, smoking cigarettes and staring at myself in the mirror, horrified by the wrinkles and gray hairs that had emerged while I wasn’t paying attention. The older I became, the further from love and family I seemed to get.
That was the sad-sack story I was telling myself.
Not even bubbly Carmella could pull me out of my funk. She’d married one of her vendors (a longtime flirtation) and no longer had time to run her restaurant, have a husband, and look after her wreck of a bridesmaid. We still met up for cappuccinos in the mornings, but she eventually stopped asking how I was. She knew how I was: inconsolable. Miserable. So she spoke of other things: the food-tour schedule, fresh produce she was excited about, the woes of acclimating to living with a “messy man.” I listened politely and felt so, so happy for her—and so, so sorry for myself.
Then, shortly after the anniversary of my mother’s death, a package arrived. The brown shipping envelope was torn on one side, revealing the Bubble Wrap interior. I didn’t recognize the name or return address. With care and curiosity, I opened the envelope from the perforation and slid out a book. Upon realizing what it was, I dropped the packaging where I stood in the center of my apartment.
The book was a well-loved first-edition hardback of Chasing Shadows.
Gently, I opened it—the spine creaking as I did—and thumbed through the sun-stained pages. Their state shocked me. Delicate pencil notes crowded the margins like clematis vines climbing a trellis of words. The pencil had bracketed paragraphs, underscored passages, and marked lines as beautiful or wow! There were stars next to key moments, hearts and arrows by the scenes when Jane and Frank were happy, and little cartoon water drops—or tears?—in the margins beside particularly trying mother-daughter scenes.
The graphite appreciation astounded me. Pride blossomed in my heart.
As the pages fluttered through my fingers, I landed on a makeshift bookmark: a receipt. The ink was gray—barely readable—but its origin gave me pause. Listed at the top was the bookstore in Denver where I’d given the final reading of my tour—the reading my mother had failed to attend. The receipt’s purchase date was listed for that exact day.
I traced the waxy receipt paper with my finger, churning this fact through the fallow ground of my mind. Come to think of it, the handwriting in the book looked familiar. Slanted and perhaps more compact, but familiar. I’d seen it on Christmas and birthday cards. Permission slips for school trips. Dollar amounts on bounced checks.
In the rush of realization, I flung backward through the book until I landed on the title page. It was signed by me, a special note written to a random reader in a moment of personal disappointment.
Pam,
Tucked within life’s greatest letdowns are the gold nuggets of love, laughter, and family. May you find all three more often than you lose them.
Ann Fawkes
I recalled writing that special note, the note for a woman who had my mother’s name, who couldn’t make it to the reading, so her husband went instead. He had looked so out of place—a work shirt smudged with grease, a scruffy face.
Could it have been . . . ?
I pinched the thick stack of pages and bent them through my fingers, flipping rapidly through, searching for clues. When nothing else turned up, I set the book down and retrieved the envelope to check for anything left inside. Sure enough, crumpled at the bottom was a single piece of lined stationery.
To Ann,
You don’t know me but I’m William “Bill” Price’s son, Jeremy. My father passed away a few months ago and I found this copy of your book in a box in his attic labeled “Pamela.”
I don’t think you ever met my father, but boy, did he love your mom. He was there through all the chemo and he was there when she died. She was everything to him.
I know you had a rocky relationship with her and I don’t mean to bring all this up to hurt your feelings so apologies if it does, but your mom was always a kind and supportive woman to me and my dad. I was in college when they got together and she turned his life around (they were each other’s reasons for getting sober), and that made my life better, too.