Field Notes on Love(66)

    “Just this one,” Mae says, and when he grabs her backpack, Hugo’s—which had been propped against it—tips over onto its side. They watch as the driver carries hers to the taxi and drops it into the trunk; then they turn back to each other.

Hugo is looking down at her with those bottomless eyes of his, his mouth set in a grim line. “It’s not like we’ll never see each other again,” he says, searching her face. “Right?”

“Right,” Mae says, though it feels like too great a promise to make when the world is so big and the future so uncertain. “And until then we’ll keep in touch.”

“And you’ll send me the film when it’s done.”

“Only if you send me a draft of your letter.”

He laughs. “You’re a bit annoying, you know that?”

“I do,” she says with a grin, and then he bends down and their lips meet and she closes her eyes and disappears into him for the last time. The driver honks the horn—two short bursts of noise—but they’re slow to break apart, and when they do, it feels to Mae like she’s left some essential piece of herself behind.

Don’t cry, she thinks again. Not yet.

Hugo puts a hand on her cheek. “Good luck at home. I’ll be thinking about you.”

“I…,” Mae begins, and then stops abruptly, caught off guard by the words that have lined themselves up in her head: love you. She didn’t know she’d been thinking them, didn’t even know she’d been feeling them. But suddenly here they are, big and scary and important. She bites them back and instead says, “I’ll miss you.”

“You have no idea,” Hugo says, then pulls her into one last hug.

Afterward she sits in the back of the cab, her eyes burning, her hand curled around the blue button Hugo gave her in Denver. They pass over the Bay Bridge, the glittering water and crowded hills of San Francisco appearing all at once, and she wants nothing more than to curl up and cry, but she doesn’t. Not yet.

    It’s nearly dark by the time she gets on the plane, a red-eye back to New York City. She falls asleep almost immediately, wrung out by the day behind her, and wakes hours later to see the sun rising over Manhattan, the rivers on either side of the island set aflame. It was only a week ago that she was here to meet Hugo, and she can’t help thinking how strange it is to travel so long and so far—to crawl across an entire country—only to return again in a single night.

Her dads are waiting at the baggage claim. When she spots them, Mae’s heart gives a little hiccup. They both look uncharacteristically rumpled; there’s a hint of a beard along Pop’s jawline, and Dad’s eyes are red and bleary. Maybe it’s that they had to wake up in the middle of the night to pick her up at this hour, or maybe it’s that they haven’t slept at all, or maybe it’s just the grief, which is still so jagged and raw. It doesn’t matter. They’re here now, and so is she, and when she gets to the bottom of the escalator, she launches herself into their arms like she’s returning from some great voyage.

“I can’t believe I didn’t get to say goodbye,” she says into Dad’s familiar tweed jacket, and they both pull her in tighter. “I wish…”

She can’t finish the sentence; there’s too much she wishes.

“She asked me to give this to you,” Pop says, leaning back to reach into his pocket. He pulls out a small piece of cardboard: an old train ticket from New York City to New Orleans.

It’s then that she finally begins to cry.





Hugo sits in the back of a taxi, his hand clasped around a bluish stone he picked up outside the station. He unzips the front of his rucksack and slips it inside one of the pockets, where it’s safe beside the others he’s collected along the way. It’s not quite as impressive as the building in Chicago, but it’s something. And anyway, they mean a lot more.

As the car crosses into the city, he can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong. It’s not just that he misses Mae, though he does. Already he misses her more than makes sense. But there’s something else, the answer just out of reach, a prickly feeling in the back of his skull.

It comes to him as he’s checking into the hotel, which is miraculously willing to change the name on the reservation. As the clerk looks to see if his credit card has arrived, Hugo drums his fingers on the desk, and he realizes all at once that he should’ve offered to go to the airport with her. He rocks back on his heels and groans, because what kind of idiot suggests going all the way to New York for a funeral before thinking about the airport? That would’ve made far more sense. But now she’s there and he’s here, and that’s that.

“For you, sir,” the clerk says, returning with a thin white envelope that has the logo of his credit card company in the corner, and Hugo breathes out a sigh of relief. Finally. “Can I get you anything else?”

    “Just a key, thanks.”

The whole place has a nautical theme, the walls covered in paintings of buoys and seagulls, presumably because of the hotel’s proximity to Fisherman’s Wharf. There’s even a captain’s wheel hung over the bed, which is draped with a blanket that says S.O.S. in huge block letters. Hugo drops his rucksack on top of it, then heads out again, too anxious to sit still.