CHAPTER 4

NEW YORK CITY, EIGHT YEARS AGO

Jane Dalton’s boy meets girl story could be titled, Girl Meets Daniel Fletcher and Totally Blows It. It spanned five hours on a perfect spring day during her sophomore year of nursing school when she fled campus for Battery Park, bought a bag of popcorn, and threw most of it at the pigeons.

College in New York was Jane’s first significant attempt to escape her family. She’d been allowed to go to college halfway across the country only because she was the first one in her family to do well enough in school to qualify for scholarships that made such a thing affordable. That she’d been allowed to attend a secular school instead of a faith-based institution was due to the fact that she was dangerously close to being considered a lost cause after dumping her high school boyfriend, Seth, the man who would later become her husband, the man half the world now thought was a terrorist and the other half thought was a hero. In a world where even teenagers dated with the intention of marriage, Jane was a social and moral disaster of the kind only Puritans could appreciate.

The transition from her home bubble to a secular college dorm had been troubled. She’d become Jane, her middle name, instead of Rachel, in a naïve belief that changing her name would somehow help her belong. Most students lived day to day without any clear direction. They went to parties where they had sex with strangers and drank so much alcohol they had to be taken to the ER. They complained about bad grades on papers that they’d written for two hours in the middle of the night before they were due. They wanted all the good things in life, but they didn’t want to work for them. They left Jane bewildered and just as isolated as she had been at home.

That fall, Jane had applied to transfer to a music academy in Boston. Most of her life, music had been the one thing she’d felt truly belonged to her. It also had the added rebellious benefit of being a degree her family had been stringently against. A week earlier, she’d called home to announce her acceptance into the academy. She’d been determined to assert her right to this decision, had believed there was no way anyone could talk her out of it. Now, Aaron, her oldest brother and the man who had raised her after her father died, was flying to New York to do just that.

While she waited to meet him, Jane aimed her popcorn at pigeon tail feathers. She aimed at heads. She flung a handful up into the air and watched the pigeons kill each other for the stale kernels. Her next projection was released with such blind rage, Jane accidently hit a skateboarder gliding into the line of fire.

At this point Daniel Fletcher was not the suave young movie star who would be vaulted from an unknown indie talent into teen idol stardom about five months down the road. He’d filmed three movies, two small budget productions and one high school drama, SLUT, a Love Story, slated for wide release that summer. It would be a surprise breakout hit. He still thought of himself as more of a professional surfer than an actor. He wore board shorts and a Billabong cap and T-shirt, not usual garb for Manhattan. But anyone who bothered to take a second look would’ve recognized the same features that made his blockbuster star brother People’s Sexiest Man—dark eyebrows framing recessed eyes, oversized lips, a slight cleft in the chin. Each feature a perfect cut waiting for a stylist’s polishing touch.

“Did you just throw something at me?” he asked.

“No.”

“Liar.”

“I didn’t.”

“I can prove it.” Quick as a cat, he bent down and scooped popcorn off the cement. Jane preemptively let fly the remainder of her bag into his face.

“See? You did it again,” he said.

“That’s a cheap trick.”

“Serves you right.”

Her laughter was short lived as Daniel sat down on her concrete bench and she was suddenly fighting to keep her attention on his words rather than his unexpected nearness.

“Why are you throwing popcorn instead of eating it?” he asked.

“I’m feeding the birds. What’re you doing here?”

“Had some time to kill while the older bro was at work, so I came to see what east coast waves looked like.”

“There aren’t any waves.” Jane laughed. “There’s no beach.”

He shook his head. “There are always waves. The ocean is the most powerful force on Earth.”

“God is the most powerful force on Earth.”

“Unless he doesn’t live on Earth.”

She was ready to argue until she saw his eyes laughing at her, then she wanted something else to throw at him. As the second youngest of four children, all the rest boys, Jane was most comfortable with violence. She knew the importance of being able to aim and throw because a brother’s strength and size could not be stopped once it got going. If Daniel had been one of Jane’s brothers, she’d have had her fist in his kidney, but something told her that wasn’t the way to go.

“You’re from California?” she asked.

“Originally from Hawaii, but now California. What gave me away?”

“You look like you live on a beach.”

“You don’t look like you’re from anywhere.”

He was still playing, but Jane had become somber, remembering how Aaron was on his way. Being from California pretty much guaranteed that Daniel’s family didn’t have a moral imperative against music school. Where Jane came from, her decision to transfer was probably being discussed at church and the grocery store, while well-meaning friends brought her mother sympathetic hot dishes, and told her that one wayward child out of five was forgivable in God’s eyes.

Interventions were supposed to be for addicts and bad dating decisions. The New York natives in Jane’s dorm staged interventions almost every week. Dawson’s Creek interventions, and chocolate interventions, and study interventions during finals. None of them had an older brother who flew halfway across the country to prevent them from changing schools.

“Do you get along with your brother?” Jane asked.

Daniel’s laugh came out like a cough. He stood and tested his foot against the end of the skateboard like he was about to leave. The ocean suddenly seemed more interesting to him than she did.

Somewhere in these silent moments, while Daniel toyed with his board and looked out at the bay, Jane fell in love with him. Maybe not Daniel exactly, she barely knew him. Rather, she fell in love with the possibility of someone like him. Someone who cared about things she knew nothing about, but who was also not driven by the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure like her roommates were.

This was the realization of eight years of meditation. At the time, all that Jane could articulate was an awareness of the exotic and of a life governed by rules entirely different than those that governed her community. Scruffy and slouching, with the air of an unemployed beach dude proud of his poverty, Daniel oozed an intimate connection to the salty grime of the ocean. He felt as foreign as visiting India. He was exactly what she’d come to New York to find, someone who didn’t follow the rules of her world, but still lived with respect and reverence. He valued beautiful things, but he didn’t have to justify his interest in them by ascribing them with a higher purpose.

Daniel’s silence lasted so long that Jane worried she’d ruined their grand beginning. It was the first conversation she’d enjoyed in months. Unlike her roommates, Daniel didn’t seem full of inflated ideas about his importance in the universe. He was thoughtful when he spoke. He seemed to care about what he said when he finally made up his mind to answer her question.

“My brother mostly gives me advice. He got married last year, so now all he can do is give advice.” A sly grin slid around one side of Daniel’s mouth, part rogue, part boy. “You’ve probably heard of him. Steve Fletcher. He’s an actor, likes to play hero types.”

“I don’t watch many movies.”

A thick ungroomed eyebrow arched in surprise. He turned and faced her. She’d presented a challenge, but in a good way. He wasn’t going to make fun of her like her roommates. He was interested. “Steve’s breakout role was Poseidon: The God Rises.”

“Haven’t seen it.”

“The Last Centurion?”

Jane suppressed a giggle.

Daniel’s eyes slanted like he suspected she was lying. “Lord of the Rings.”

“People I know have read the books.”

“Die Hard.”

“Sounds familiar.”

“Star Wars.”

“Your brother was in Star Wars?”

“He hasn’t been in the last three.”

“Oh.” Jane tried to laugh, but the noise that came from her throat sounded like she was imitating the pigeons. So often since starting college she’d been embarrassed to have the gaps in her pop culture acumen pointed out, but with Daniel, ignorance felt okay. Maybe a bit sexy, not that she had any idea what was sexy.

He leaned forward and scratched the scruff on his chin. “I don’t understand. You look like a normal person. Do you just watch girl movies? What about The Devil Wears Prada or You’ve Got Mail?”

“I saw Juno,” she offered. “The one about the teenager who chooses life rather than an abortion. My church youth group went to see it.”

“Ah-ha?”

Jane watched Daniel revise his initial impression. She couldn’t tell if this revision worked in her favor or not. She certainly wasn’t going to say that her youth group consisted of fifty kids who doubled as homeschooled classmates. They’d gone to Juno on a field trip. Afterwards everyone wrote a rhetorical essay on the pro-life argument of the movie.

It took Daniel longer than Jane liked to figure out what to say next. He rode his skateboard back and forth in front of her, only an extra push away from zipping down the sidewalk. Each time Daniel flipped his board around and came back for another pass by the bench, her heart beat a little faster, small hopes multiplied and piled on top of each other.

Finally, he dropped down and sat on the board, braced his feet on either side of hers and rolled back and forth. He looked up at her and asked with a grin, “So … if no movies, what do you like?”

Jane floated among the clouds. She believed anything she said, no matter how out of context, would make sense because Daniel hadn’t gone running at the mention of church, or burst out a bunch of expletives and said something like ‘oh you’re one of those’. She imagined this was what doing drugs felt like. What being drunk felt like. “A perfect fifth,” she said.

“I don’t know what that is.”

Earth to Jane, please return to Earth. “Oh, right. Sorry. It’s a music interval. Sometimes called the patriotic interval. If your brother had a theme, it would involve perfect fifths because he’s the hero.”

“Are you a musician?”

“I’m a nursing student.”

“Oh.”

“Actually, I’m hoping to move to Boston next semester. There’s a piano performance program that wants me.”

“I always thought piano would be fun.” Daniel drifted back into thoughtful mode, studying Jane as she basked in the glow of his miraculous attention. “If you ever start watching movies, you could choose them by score composer. I’m really into James Horner. He does a lot of movies that sound like water.”

Jane nodded as though she understood, but she was thinking, movie music that sounds like water … right.

“I suppose you haven’t heard of Titanic. Horner won an Oscar for the music. Or the Perfect Storm? There’s this awesome guitar—”

“Hang on, you need to write these down.” Jane dug in her backpack. There were too many formulae and definitions and the names of all the bones in the human skeleton running around in her brain to add anything extra.

On the back of a library check-out slip, Daniel wrote ‘James Horner’. He added another name below it, and then another, until most of the slip was covered with his cramped manuscript scrawl.

“Now, when you go to Boston, you’ll have some new tunes for your new life.”

He said it like the move had been decided. He’d taken her at her word about Boston. No argument, no having to state her case, no feeling guilty for wanting something that was forbidden. This gift of acceptance had never been granted by anyone else. It made whatever would come next more significant. The stakes felt higher. They both sensed there was something there. Unsure of what to do about it, they watched the tourists board the ferry to see the Statue of Liberty. They each waited for the other to speak first.

The ferry returned from its tour and disembarked bucket hats, walking shoes, and cameras with lenses the size of Jane’s arm. And those were just the white people, a minority in the load of mostly sleek Asians with their top-of-the-line cell phones with talismans hanging from the ends.

Jane was about to say something about New York being every tourist’s dream of a hometown, when she thought she saw her youngest brother, Tommy, in her peripheral vision, standing beside the ice cream vendor. She turned her head. Whoever it was had gone. She wanted to dismiss it as her imagination, but she knew better than to underestimate her brothers. They were part of the Vanguard. Surveillance was a family hobby.

She was searching for him in the clusters of people swarming the park when a sharp wail pierced the air. Jane’s attention swiveled back to the ferry just in time to see a girl’s inflated souvenir ball fall into the water below. She was instantly inconsolable, stopping the line of passengers with heaving wet sobs punctuated by wailing pleas in Mandarin. Her thoroughly embarrassed parents could not convince her to move.

“Five bucks says you can’t get that kid to stop crying,” said Daniel.

Jane was already shaking her head. “I don’t do kids. You get her to stop crying and I’ll give you the five bucks or …”

“Or what?” He handed her his phone and wallet. He took off his shirt.

An embarrassed heat crept up Jane’s cheeks. She looked away. “Or you’ll have to buy me ice cream.”

“Deal.”

Leaving her to sit with his sandals, Daniel jogged barefoot across the cement onto the wharf, unaware of the stares, the swiveling heads, the Japanese obaachans talking behind their hands. And then he was gone, over the railing into the water. Several of the twenty-odd people trapped on the ferry simultaneously cried out in surprise.

Jane couldn’t see into the water. She tried standing on the bench, but the added height wasn’t enough. She considered picking up his sandals and walking down to the water. Her brothers’ shoes were always gross. But these were not her brothers’ sandals. The thought of touching them thrilled her. She was just about to cross this physical barrier when the runaway ball suddenly flew straight up into the air and landed on the wharf just past the gangway entrance. The waiting passengers cheered as the girl rushed forward and claimed her souvenir. A pair of bucket hatters helped Daniel up over the railing. Not that he needed it. He made quick work of receiving the broken-English thanks from the child’s parents, then he came at Jane with arms outstretched.

“Want a hug?” He chased her around the bench, bouncing, laughing, so full of energy she imagined he could swim the length of the bay and not be tired.

“You have any idea how gross that water is?” Jane gasped between bursts of laughter that she liked to remember as less high-pitched than they probably were. She hoped her disgust hid her disquiet as he stood before her, dripping and half-naked, his shorts clinging to his thighs like a second skin.

They bought ice cream sandwiches and found an unoccupied square of half-dead grass in the sunshine. He waited until she finished eating to vigorously shake the water from his hair into her face. She mashed her creamy wrapper into his arm. He was ready to get her back with his own wrapper but stopped short. In his gaze, Jane saw that she was as much of a revelation to him as he was to her. She sensed he wanted to know her as much as she wanted to know him. No one, especially not her high school boyfriend, had ever seen her as someone worth exploring as an individual.

“Last year, I had what I think is a perfect day,” said Daniel. “Family vacation in Bali. Usually we surf together. But this day I went out alone. The water looked like greasy sea glass. There was a breeze just strong enough to lift the waves up and hold them for a few extra seconds before they peeled over into white water.

“I didn’t just ride those waves. They carried me through a tunnel to another place.”

His fingers traced her face as he spoke. A small voice at the back of Jane’s head reminded her about the girls she’d known in high school, the ones who’d ended up with broken hearts, and in one case, a baby. Their mistakes had begun like this, allowing some boy to squander away the treasures reserved for a future husband. What that small voice didn’t understand was how much Jane liked Daniel’s gentle hand and his steady gaze absorbing her every move, every facial twitch, the blades of grass she’d been plucking and how her hands had become still. She imagined he read her the same way he read a wave, tracking its ever-shifting power beneath his feet as it rose around him and over his head. His hands explored her forearm, grazed the fine hairs along her neck. He maneuvered with confidence, his right pointer finger moving from forehead to nose to lips, like a surfer dropping from the lip of a wave into the barrel to glide through a magical, ever-shifting, tunnel of water.

She felt his heat rising. He moved to kiss her.

Jane drew back and made up an excuse—studying; and then another, promises to roommates—to sound her retreat. Her sudden rejection banished the magic from the fading afternoon. They became what they were, two almost-adults who had nothing in common. Daniel was slower to give up than Jane, saying, “After Steve gets done with his shoot tomorrow, we’re driving up to Montauk Beach to check out the waves. Why don’t you come with us?”

A tempting offer. But what then? Jane imagined the arrival of the moment when she had to admit she was saving herself for marriage, that dating in her world was a chaste gauntlet of do’s and don’ts, how she’d promised the grave of her father that her first kiss would be on her wedding day. It all felt silly and insubstantial compared to the very solid presence of a boy who came from that other world called California, a place where people followed their feelings rather than some impersonal set of rules.

Still, Daniel didn’t give up. “We’ll only be there a few days. I could meet you here, at this exact bench on Monday.”

On the Metro riding uptown, Jane thought she might return to Battery Park that Monday to meet Daniel. She’d explain where she was coming from, and if Daniel still wasn’t scared, maybe there was a possibility they could try it for a while as long as she didn’t tell her family. She imagined if they could make it work, she might never have to go home again.

After her shift, Jane drove home and made herself a TV dinner. She played the album of movie soundtrack highlights that she had compiled from the music recommendations Daniel had given her at Battery Park. The soundtracks were the foundation of what had, over the years, become an immense collection, a guiding compass, the place she went when there was nowhere else to go. As she ate her Salisbury steak and half-frozen mashed potatoes she was transported, not just to those hours in Battery Park, but to other worlds, and times, and places. She listened to James Horner and heard the ocean. At the very least, she hoped Daniel came to the hospital so she’d have the chance to tell him what a gift he’d given her.

That next night, when Jane did her rounds, Rhea was back in her room on East 7.

Usually morphine made people sleepy, but when she saw Jane, she cried out, “My savior! Come, sit. There’s nothing on TV. It’s all who’s been having sex with who, and Congress fighting over the value of our lives.” Rhea waved her hand with exasperation towards the wall-mounted television. “And then there’s this poor woman …”

A former Vanguard trial defendant was being interviewed because she’d written a self-help book, Living with the Brand. She wasn’t talking about the about the Vanguard’s mission to help people make better choices, but Jane was used to people missing the point. She propped pillows under Rhea’s full leg cast and tried to act natural.

“That necklace. It suits you.” Rhea reached forward like she was in a trance and stroked the obsidian pendant that sat in the gully of Jane’s breastbone, strands of blue, and purple, and green glass beads extended out on either side.

“It was a gift.”

“Someone you loved?”

“It wasn’t a good kind of love.”

“No shame in that. My husband and I used to fight all the time. Now he’s never home, and we have the best marriage I know.” Rhea laughed. The laugh turned into a grimace. She braced her chest with her hand.

“Mrs. Fletcher, you need to talk less … vigorously. You’ve just had a very serious procedure.”

“You don’t know what this body can do.” She matched Jane’s serious tone. “I have more scars than a Florida manatee. Do you have any?”

Jane was working hard to concentrate. Her fight or flight instinct had kicked into high alert and she wasn’t sure why. Goosebumps rose along Jane’s arms. It felt like something was watching her. Do I have any … “What?”

“Scars.”

“Excuse me, I need to check other patients.”

Rhea leaned towards Jane as far as she could with her leg propped up, her eyes comically wide as she tried to focus on Jane’s face. “When I get out of here, you’ll have to come visit me at home and tell me about your scars. Don’t say no.”

The watcher was behind her, real not imagined. Jane felt the shift of a body in the doorway. With it came a light waft of lavender. Jane knew him before she heard his voice.

“Come on, Mom. Don’t tell me you’re that desperate.”

Rhea grabbed Jane’s hand as she tried to run. “You must meet my youngest.”

In long sleeves, long pants, and sunglasses, Daniel looked like he’d been transported from some other place instead of walking off the streets of LA’s October heatwave. The sunglasses stayed on even as Rhea introduced him. There was no way for Jane to tell if he recognized her.

“Daniel, this is Jane, the best nurse in the whole fucking world.”

“Nice to meet you.” He didn’t smile. “I’d like some privacy with my mother if you’re finished.”

Jane ran from the room.

Alma had left a trail of tin foil pill tabs at the desk. Jane picked them up and shredded them to bits with her nails. She rearranged the charts. She picked up all the stray pens. She wiped the dust behind the computer tower. The AC switched on and rustled a wall of construction plastic at the end of the hall with its invisible breath. Jane watched its restless twitching. She imagined the shadow of a man behind it. After all this time, it was impossible Daniel remembered her. She needed to calm down, be professional. She wanted to stop feeling like the world was about to betray her at the exact moment it was offering her the fulfillment of her dreams.

When Alma returned to the desk, Jane retreated to the rec room. Each in-patient floor had a lounge with board games and a piano keyboard. Jane had been carrying her new Elton John piano book in her purse hoping for a chance to come and play. She went through a ritual bending and creasing of the spine to make the book stand up. The city glow through the rec room windows provided just enough light to read the notes, no need for the harsh intrusion of florescent overheads.

She tested the opening chords. Their isolation drew sadness from the night. It reached into the seamless eastern void beyond the city to where Jane’s family lived, and beyond, to New York, where she’d buried the cloying loss that concluded her childhood rebellion under the cement of a city that absorbed all the hurts of the world and turned them into something new.