The Unsinkable Greta James(84)
This time, Greta doesn’t hesitate. Not even for a second.
She just smiles and starts to play the fucking guitar.
Chapter Thirty-Four
She reads the book one more time before she mails it back. It doesn’t seem fair to keep something so personal, something dog-eared and marked up and well loved. Still, it’s not easy to part with it. Dropping it into a mailing envelope, addressing it to Ben at Columbia, walking it over to the post office: all of it feels like saying goodbye.
She keeps his sweatshirt. That, she decides, he can live without.
Besides, she’s taken to sleeping in it as the weather has started to turn cool again.
For the last few months, Greta has mostly been on the road, and it feels good to be back to normal: a blur of airports and hotels and venues, but also the clear reminder each night—as she stands before a crowd, guitar in hand—how rare and wonderful it is to get to do something you love.
She didn’t read any of the reviews when the new album came out, but her dad continues to summarize them during their Sunday evening phone calls, a habit they’ve fallen into ever since he came to her show.
“You got a rave in the Times,” he’ll say. “They called it inventive and complicated and they especially loved—”
“Dad.”
“Okay, okay. Well, it’s in the scrapbook now if you ever change your mind.”
The idea of him keeping up her mom’s collection of articles and reviews would’ve been unfathomable only a few months ago. But now Asher tells her that he insists on showing it to anyone who comes over for dinner.
Conrad asks her only once if she ever hears from Ben, and she tells him the truth: it wasn’t meant to last.
“Maybe the point isn’t always to make things last,” he says. “Maybe it’s just to make them count.”
The way she sees it, they did.
Then one day, she finds a package in the stack of mail left outside her apartment door. In the corner is a Columbia University address. She rips it open and finds a small blue clothbound book, with little huskies and snow-covered trees etched into its cover. Tucked inside, there’s a note written on a piece of university stationery. Thanks for sending mine back. Did you read it?
Greta puzzles over that question mark for a while. It’s open-ended; an invitation. She leaves the note on her desk, pausing to read it every so often when she walks by, though she’s memorized each word. It isn’t until a couple weeks later, when she stops by Powell’s Books the morning before a gig in Portland and sees a different edition—this one snowy and simple, a blank landscape with only the shadow of a dog in the corner—that she realizes she’s going to respond.
She considers what to say for a few minutes before writing, on a piece of hotel notepaper: In fact, I read it twice. And then she mails it off with the book.
He sends her another copy a week later, this one a close-up of a blue-eyed husky staring the reader down. His note says: And?
She finds her next one at the Strand, which she wanders into one day after having brunch with Jason and Olivia, which—in spite of the avocado toast—turned out to be more fun than expected. This one has a howling wolf on the jacket, snowflakes coming down all around him, and she dashes off a note on the back of a bookstore postcard: And you were right.
After that, he sends her a leather-bound edition with a message scrawled neatly inside the cover: Welcome to the Jack London fan club. She decides she needs to up her game and returns to a rare bookstore on the Upper East Side she once visited with Luke, who was trying to track down a signed Dylan album. It turns out they don’t have any copies of The Call of the Wild, but there’s a first edition of another book by Jack London called The Cruise of the Snark, which feels somehow appropriate. Inside, there’s an inscription the author wrote to a friend: “Just a few places of a voyage that proved so happy.”
She pays way too much for it and mails it off to him.
And then: there’s nothing. Not for a long time.
All through the fall, Greta is still hopeful each time she gets back into town and picks up her mail. But by December, it’s clear that whatever game this was, Ben is no longer playing. Maybe he’s got other things to worry about, more important things. Maybe he’s gone back to his family. Or maybe he’s simply moved on.
For Christmas, she goes home to Ohio. It’s their first one without her mom, but Helen is still everywhere: from the boxes of decorations they drag down from the attic to the carols that play on a loop. When it’s time to hang the ornaments, Greta and Asher laugh at the ones she saved: popsicle-stick picture frames with thick globs of glue and chains of dried noodles with chipping paint. Each one feels like a gift she’s giving them all over again.
On Christmas morning—much to Asher’s chagrin—Greta gives her nieces a drum set.
Her dad manages to one-up her.
He gets them all guitars.
It’s late at night when she arrives back in New York, the streets rain-slicked and mostly empty. She presses her face to the window of the cab as they come across the bridge, watching the mosaic of taillights, the dancing reds and yellows.
In the hallway outside her apartment, there’s a sloping pile of packages, holiday gifts from friends and family, agents and managers, and, of course, the still-apologetic label execs. As she pushes open the door, a few of them fall inside along with her, and she sees a small brown box with Ben’s address on it. She doesn’t even bother to take off her coat before opening it. Inside, there’s a book. But it’s not The Call of the Wild. It’s not even by Jack London.