“All over the sky a sacred voice is calling your name.” – John G. Neihardt, BLACK ELK SPEAKS: Biography section, across from the fireplace.
Standing outside my parents’ house, I stretched my limbs. I had just finished a run and stood, sweat streaming down my brow, with my back to the sun. Spring was in full swell around me, and I looked at the green trees and manicured lawns, wondering what Wigtown would be like now. I imagined the mountains to be green and lush, and flowers blooming in the hanging baskets outside the Bookshop. There would be more people in the streets, the town would be buzzing like the bees which flew from flower to flower in the square. I wondered if any of them asked about me, or noticed I had gone.
Perhaps I had been audacious on the phone with Euan but I had meant what I said. A promise was a promise and if he wasn’t so much of a ditherer, he would have made it to my doorstep on time. That was the whole point. I let the stream of feelings wash over me as I soaked in the day’s warmth like a cat on a hot rock, lazily arching my back as I relaxed.
A bright-yellow cab pulled onto the street and my heart fluttered. This wasn’t happening. Euan had tricked me, the monkey, and he had actually kept his word. My heart thudded in my ears but I watched in disappointment as the cab passed by and disappeared down the road.
My head shook and fell into my heads. I was hopeless. Why, after all that I had been through, did I still think it would be Euan, arriving at my doorstep? The singer Feist, whose album The Reminder had been like an anthem album for me in Los Angeles, has a song about a woman walking through the park and thinking she has seen her lover: “It’s not him coming across the seas to surprise you/Not him who would know where in London to find you…”
I felt the truth of that sink in. Like Feist’s lyrics, I wasn’t sure Euan even knew where in Lexington my parents lived. The final lines of the song chimed in my ears and I felt sad, defeated: “…what makes you think your boy could become/The man who would make you sure he was the one.”
The energy from the day’s run was wearing off and I could no longer feel the endorphins pumping through my veins. Love intertwined with optimism is a powerful union, almost religious in its tenacity, and difficult to separate. We don’t let go easily of hope, but the time had come for me to do so. What was done was done, and Euan, my knight, was not coming. Now the princess had to get down from her ivory tower and get her life together.
As I headed up the stairs back to the house, I focused on the plans for that afternoon: looking at two apartments in Boston. With each step I tried to get excited, and a little murmur of anticipation fluttered in my heart, but nothing more. It didn’t matter.
Suddenly, a blur of yellow caught my eye. I turned around to see the cab reversing back down the road and it stopped suddenly, right where I had been standing. Perhaps the people inside were lost or needed directions, I thought gloomily, so I climbed back down the stairs. As I came closer, one of the passenger doors opened, and a tall, ginger-haired man dressed in corduroys, a jacket and glasses stepped out and stood looking at me on my parents’ driveway.