The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(87)

She got another job waiting tables, and I stocked shelves for a food co-op when I wasn’t floating around pretending to think about going back to school. On paper I was nineteen, and Ella didn’t want to push me.

But the empty days, all in one place—they made me restless. I walked for hours, from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back again, or down to Coney Island. I started rereading the books I’d loved when I was younger, all those paperbacks picked up in musty shops, off stoops, from library shelves, then shed like leaves on the road.

When I reread Boy, Snow, Bird I remembered Iowa City, living with Ella in a cramped prefab a few blocks from a frat house. Howl’s Moving Castle was the converted barn in Madison where we camped out for three lonely months after the terrifying end to our time in Chicago. As I read the words I felt memories reasserting themselves like letters drawn onto misted glass. On a frozen day in February I carried a pair of tallboys onto the Long Island Ferry and read Wise Child as we chugged through the water. I closed my eyes and remembered the red flowers that grew around our guesthouse in LA when I was ten. Then I opened them and put my tongue out to catch New York snowflakes. They tasted sick and gritty, like chemical rain.

I went to bed in my own room, but night after night I found myself waking up next to Ella, her hands in my hair. I’d shaved the whole brambly mess off when I got out of the hospital, and it was growing back wispy and darker. More like hers.

“Shh,” she’d whisper, the way she always had. “It’s over. It’s over now.”

I saw Audrey once on the High Line. She’d changed her style. Out with the bronzer and the flat-ironed hair, in with precise red lipstick and a pea coat with a Peter Pan collar. I liked it. She looked like Amy Winehouse dressed as Jackie O.

We sat on a deck chair in the sun and shared a cigarette, a French brand with a box that looked like pop art. Because she was Audrey she didn’t ask right away about Ella, or whether I was okay, or what the hell had happened to us since her dad pulled a gun on me and tossed me out into a long, cold night full of things worse than muggers.

I loved her for it.

She smiled when I coughed on the fancy imported smoke, watching me from behind Fendi shades. “Not so tough now, are you?”

I seized onto this piece of intelligence—what I’d looked like from the outside, two years ago. “Was I tough? When you knew me?”

“You were scary as fuck. You know that. You looked like a haunted china doll.” She peered at me over the tops of her sunglasses, eyes lined like Isis. “Now you seem a little … I don’t know. Lost?”

“How’s Harold?” I asked, changing the subject.

“Oh, he’s fine. In love again. As always. How’s Ella?”

I paused, letting the cigarette burn down between my fingers. How was Ella?

“Resolved,” I said, finally. “All that shit with the … all that scary shit. It’s resolved.”

“Good,” Audrey said, with a note of finality. She plucked the cigarette from my fingers and took a last drag, then pinched it out and put it into her pocket. She gave me a hug that was all elbows, then walked away without looking back.

I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t help walking by Ellery Finch’s building, staring up at the windows. Of course he’d disappeared, too, the same time as me, but his father must’ve written him off as a runaway. As far as I could find, he hadn’t even made the papers. Maybe they’d hired a private investigator. Or maybe they really had cared as little as he thought. But I doubted it. I didn’t know how you couldn’t care for Ellery Finch.

I had dreams about him sometimes. In my dreams we did things together that we never did in life—walked through parks, held hands in bookshops. I woke up from a dream in which we’d waded in water up to our knees with the realization that I could picture him now without seeing his near-murder in the trees. It had played and replayed till it burned itself away.

I would’ve gone on like that forever, I think, using paperbacks to shake old memories loose and roaming around as if permanently sun-stunned. But when I’d been home for just over a year, I ran into Janet and Ingrid drinking iced coffee outside an East Village café.

My vision went full dolly zoom, and I stopped so fast a woman ran her stroller up onto the backs of my heels. I got out of the way, muttering apologies but refusing to peel my eyes from Janet’s face. I walked toward her with my arms stretched out like a zombie’s, like she might get away.

She seemed happy to see me, but mildly so. Like it was a pleasant surprise, not a seismic shift in reality as she understood it.

“You look much better without the frostbite,” she said, standing up and taking my hands. Ingrid nodded coolly from beneath the brim of a Mets cap.

“How did you … what did you…?”

“Shh. Sit. Eat something. Ingrid?” Her accent was more British than I remembered it. Less … Hinterlandy.

Reluctantly, Ingrid handed over a square of oily cake wrapped in parchment. It slid like wet sand down my throat, but it did make me feel better.

“How did you get here?” I asked when I could talk again.

Janet reached her fingers down her front and pulled out a flat purse on a strap, like the money belts old ladies wear when they vacation in big cities. Which, I guess, is what they were. But she didn’t pull out a stack of traveler’s checks—she pulled out a flat booklet.