The Dead Romantics (8)
It was still worth it.
And the small hit of serotonin did make me feel a little less murderous. Tucking the books into my backpack, I left for the closest station that would take me back to Jersey. It was about a twenty-minute walk up to the Ninth Street station, but the afternoon was sunny and my coat was heavy enough to protect me from the last biting chill of the season. I liked the long walks in New York. It used to help me work through a plot inconvenience or figure out a scene that never quite worked, but all my walks in the last year couldn’t jostle my brain into creating again, no matter how far I went. Not even today, on the eve of everything coming unraveled.
At Ninth Street, I descended into the bowels of the subway. It was much hotter in the station than outside, and I unbuttoned my coat and tugged down my scarf to keep myself cool as I took the steps down two at a time to the platform.
The train pulled up to the platform and the doors dinged. I elbowed my way into the packed car, shoved myself up against the far door, and hunkered down for the long ride. The train began to move again, rocking gently back and forth, and I stared out of the door window as light after light passed.
I didn’t pay attention to the shimmering transparent woman standing a few people away, somehow inhabiting a free space. She kept looking at me, intently, until the train pulled up to the next station, and I sat down in a newly empty seat and pulled out one of the books I’d bought.
My dad would’ve hated what I just did. He would’ve told me to give her a chance. To sit down, to listen to her story.
All they wanted, usually, was for someone to listen.
But I ignored the ghost, as I had done for almost a decade in the city. It was easier when you were surrounded by people. You could just pretend like they were another faceless person in the crowd. So I pretended, and as the PATH train crossed under the Hudson River to Jersey, the ghost flickered—and was gone.
3
Dead Romance
I DRAINED MY glass of wine and poured myself another one.
I used to be good at romance.
Every one of Ann Nichols’s new novels had been praised by fans and critics alike. “A dazzling display of passion and heart,” the New York Times Book Review called Midnight Matinee, and Kirkus Reviews said A Rake’s Guide was “a surprisingly enjoyable romp”—which, hey, I’ll take as positive. “A sensational novel from a well-loved storyteller,” Booklist wrote, and never mind all of the blurbs from Vogue and Entertainment Weekly and a million other media outlets. I had them all posted on my dream board in my room, cut out from magazines and email chains over this last year, hoping that seeing them all together could inspire me to write one last book.
Just one more.
I was good at romance. Great at it, even. But I couldn’t for the life of me write this one. Every time I tried, it felt wrong.
Like I was missing something.
It should’ve been easy—a grand romantic gesture, a beautiful proposal, a happily ever after. The kind my parents had, and I’d spent my entire life looking for one just as grand. I wrote them into novels while I looked for my real-life equivalent in men at bars wearing sloppy ties or wrinkled T-shirts, and strangers who stole glances at me on the train, bad idea after bad idea.
I just wanted what my parents had. I wanted to walk into a ballroom dancing club and meet the love of my life. Mom and Dad weren’t even assigned to each other as dance partners until their respective partners both came down with the flu, and the rest, they say, was history. They’d been married for thirty-five years, and it was the kind of romance that I’d only ever found again in fiction. They fought and disagreed, of course, but they always came back together like a binary star, dancing with each other through life. It was the small moments that tied them together—the way Dad touched the small of her back whenever he passed her, the way Mom kissed his bald spot on the top of his head, the way they held hands like kids whenever we went out to dinner, the way they defended each other when they knew the other was right, and talked patiently when they were wrong.
Even after all of their kids moved out, I heard they still cranked up the stereo in the parlor and danced across the ancient cherrywood floors to Bruce Springsteen and Van Morrison.
I wanted that. I searched for that.
And then I realized, standing in the rain that April evening, almost a year ago exactly—I’d never have that.
I took another gulp of wine, glaring at my screen. I had to do this. I didn’t have a choice. Whether it was good or not—I had to turn in something.
“Maybe . . .”
The evening was soggy, and the cold rain struck through her like a deathly chill. Amelia stood in the rain, wet and shivering. She should’ve taken her umbrella, but she wasn’t thinking. “Why are you here?”
Jackson, for his part, was equally as wet and cold. “I don’t know.”
“Then leave.”
“That’s not very romantic,” I muttered, deleting the scene, and drained the rest of my glass. Again.
Nighttime on the Isle was supposed to be magical, but tonight’s rain was especially cold and heavy. Amelia’s clothes clung to her like a second skin. She wrapped her jacket around herself tighter, to shield against the biting cold.
Jackson said, his breath coming in a puff of frost, “I didn’t think the ice queen could get cold.”