EPISODE TWO: A GIRL WHO SMELLED LIKE A FLOWER
I told myself, on the walk over, that I was only going back to the bus stop to confirm what I already suspected, which was that I had imagined the entire thing, that grief does occasionally rearrange a man's mind in ways medicine has not yet found words for, and that Saturday would be the day I proved it to myself and went home relieved. I have never been a good liar, least of all to myself, but I have always been a persistent one, and I held onto that particular lie for the full length of the walk, three blocks, which is not very far to hold onto anything.
She was already there when I arrived, four minutes early by my count, which I did not mention because I suspected she would make something of it.
You're late, she said, before I had even sat down.
"I'm early," I said. "By your own standard. You said four o'clock, and it is currently three fifty six."
You say that like a man reading out a bus schedule.
"I work with schedules for a living. I find them soothing."
God. No wonder you sound like an answering machine. Do you always talk like this, or is it a special occasion?
I considered being offended, and then decided, against my better judgment, that I preferred whatever this was to the silence I usually kept on Saturdays, and so instead of defending myself I said, "You talk enough for both of us. I've simply adjusted my output accordingly."
She laughed, that same unguarded laugh I had already, in four days, come to think of as a small, specific event worth waiting for, and something in me settled the way a house settles once the last person has come home for the night.
We spent that first proper Saturday building, without either of us quite naming it as such, a set of rules. Sophie proposed them, mostly, the way a person proposes rules for a game she has already decided she wants to keep playing. No real names, she said, because a name was a door and she wasn't ready to open it and wasn't sure I was either, whether I admitted it or not. No lying about how we felt, even about small things, because the whole arrangement was already strange enough without adding ordinary dishonesty on top of it. And no promises, because a promise assumed a future neither of us could actually see past six o'clock on any given day, and she said this last one lightly, the way you say a thing you have decided not to examine too closely.
I agreed to all three, and did not ask why the third one mattered so much to her. I regret, now, not asking. I also understand, now, why she would not have answered.
She told me she liked watching strangers, that this was, in fact, most of what she did in the park during the week, not just on the weekends when the line between us opened. She said everyone who walked past was carrying a story you could see if you paid attention, a woman's shoes worn down more on the left than the right, a man practicing an apology under his breath before he reached his front door. I told her about the bus routes back home, how I had lived in this city long enough to know it by the sound of its brakes before I knew it by its skyline, the particular sigh of the M15, the shorter, more irritable screech of the crosstown local. She said that was the saddest thing she had ever heard a man say about a place he claimed to love, and I told her love rarely announces itself as anything but ordinary, which surprised both of us, me for having said it, her for not immediately laughing.
At some point, in the unhurried way conversations drift when neither person is trying to steer them anywhere in particular, she mentioned her hair. She said it was too many colors to be considered tidy by anyone with conventional taste, coral at the crown, something closer to peach through the middle, and a pale gold, almost cream, at the ends, like a flower that had not entirely made up its mind what it wanted to be when it grew up.
I looked it up that same night, after the connection closed, sitting at my kitchen table with a bowl of cereal I did not finish. Protea, it turned out, is a flower that looks faintly dangerous, all spiked bracts and strange architecture, nothing like the soft, apologetic flowers people usually mean when they say the word. It grows, according to the first three articles I read, in some of the harshest, most unforgiving soil on earth, and does its best blooming there. I do not know why that detail did the thing it did to me, sitting alone at eleven at night with a spoon going soft in cold milk, but I found myself saying the word out loud, quietly, as if trying it on.
The following Saturday, I told her.
"Protea," I said. "That's what I'm calling you, if you're going to insist on staying anonymous."
Where on earth did you find that?
"You told me. Coral, peach, cream. It's a flower. Bit aggressive-looking, actually, for something that grows out of nearly nothing."
Aggressive, she repeated, with the particular delight of someone who has just been insulted in a way she has decided to enjoy. Wonderful. My secret admirer thinks I look like an aggressive flower.
"I said it was a compliment."
You said no such thing. You said 'bit aggressive-looking, actually.' That is not the sentence structure of a compliment.
"It thrives where almost nothing else can," I said, more seriously than I meant to, and there was a pause on her end that told me she had heard the shift even before I had entirely admitted it to myself. "I thought that suited you. You seem like the sort of person who does that."
She did not make a joke out of it, which was, I would learn, rarer for her than laughter, and more telling.
Protea, then, she said, quietly enough that I had to lean in, uselessly, since leaning changed nothing about how well I could hear a voice that lived entirely in my own head. I suppose it's better than being called nothing at all.
It was during that same conversation, weeks later than I am making it sound, though the two Saturdays have folded together in my memory the way early days of anything tend to, that I made my first real mistake. We had been talking about small things, the way we usually did, and I mentioned, without meaning to, a game two children used to play on a fire escape in the summer, guessing which car on the street below would turn left and which would go straight, keeping score on a chalkboard that got rained on more often than it got used. I said the word we before I had decided whether I was ready to, and then I stopped, the way you stop walking when you realize too late that the ground in front of you has changed.
Sophie did not ask who we had been. I have thought about that silence more than almost anything else from those months, the particular grace of a person choosing not to open a door you have accidentally left ajar. Instead, without any visible seam in the conversation, she started telling me about a man who sold balloons outside the tube station near her flat, how he had once let a whole bundle of them go on purpose, just to see the faces of the children who happened to be walking by, and how she still thought about it sometimes when she needed reminding that not every loss is a tragedy, some of them are simply a man deciding, for no reason at all, to let something beautiful go.
I understood, listening to her, that she had heard exactly what I had not said, and had decided not to make me say it. It was the first time I suspected she was not merely clever, which I had already gathered, but something closer to careful, in a way that cost her something I could not yet name.
We talked, that day, until the ordinary six o'clock ending, about smaller things again, safer things, and I found myself grateful for her in a way that had nothing to do with the strange miracle connecting us and everything to do with the plain, human fact of being handled gently by someone who had no obligation to bother.
That night, after the line went quiet, I sat at my desk longer than I needed to, turning a search bar over in my mind the way I had turned the word protea over on my tongue a week earlier. I told myself I only wanted to see if the flower looked the way I had pictured it. That was true, as far as it went. It was not the whole truth, and I think I knew that even as I typed, because what I actually searched, after a long minute of pretending I would not, was not the flower at all.
I typed protea, London, artist, and watched the results load, half hoping to find nothing, half hoping for something I could not yet name, and when a single account surfaced, unverified, its owner unnamed, its most recent post showing nothing but a close, careful drawing of a hand holding a paper cup of tea, I sat looking at it for a long time without clicking anything further, aware that I had just done the one thing we had agreed, without quite saying it aloud, that neither of us would do.
I closed the laptop before I could decide what that meant. It did not stop me from opening it again three days later. But that, I suppose, is a different Saturday, and this one had already given me enough to carry.