“You can’t just give up, Angus, my boy,” Margo snips at me through the phone. I’m so distracted that I can’t remember calling her, but I guess I must have? “This can end only if she loves you, so it depends on you to make that happen. Consider it your solemn duty, and soldier on.”
I’m walking so fast that the night seems to blur and jostle around me. I can’t face going back to Carmen’s warehouse, can’t face sitting alone in that room with those candles, with all the imminence that I feel in them, or in myself.
If I’m alone, I might light another one. I think.
“I get that,” I say, or maybe whine, if you want to be technical. “I get that, if she’s ever going to love me, it’s on me. I understand.”
“Not well enough, you don’t,” Margo snaps. “Apparently.”
“You’re supposed to be on my side! Margo, seriously, do you think I’m a beamer? Is that why she doesn’t want me?”
“What a preposterous question! What does that distasteful term even mean, I might ask?”
“I thought you’d know? I was starting to wonder if there was something actually wrong with me, and everyone here except me knew what it was. Like, maybe some kind of—of existential disease?”
“Angus, sweetheart, I’ve known you since I could marinate your right foot in a shot glass full of bourbon. There’s nothing wrong with you that a freight train’s worth of common sense couldn’t fix. So get some sense, and go get your girl.”
“But if she won’t even talk to me again, then—”
“Then what a phenomenal waste of effort you represent, eh? Find a way, won’t you? It’s too soon to resolve this attempt. Much too soon.”
For a moment it’s like I’m back in that city, the one I saw from Lore’s car. Diffuse glow sifts through the walls and ceiling and I can hear the photons tink tink tinking like hail against a pair of patent shoes.
“So what am I supposed to do?”
“Oh, start by telling her absolutely anything she’ll find beguiling. Your behavior was presumptuous and entitled. You want to thank her for helping you recognize how much you have to learn. Surely even you know the sort of things you’re supposed to say in these situations?”
Margo’s voice breaks through the dream glow. A vertiginous jerk pulls me up short. I can still see my hand afloat on a surface like liquid pearl, a stray curl of dark hair.
“But what if she never loves me? What if everything I say is wrong?”
“Well, if it comes to that, you can always kiss her. But we’re not ready for extreme measures.”
What’s that supposed to mean? I’m about to ask, but she’s hung up on me. Right when I need her most, when my heart is one messy collision in my chest.
I need someone to explain why Geneva acted like my memories must be a joke. Like I’m an imposition, a scrawl, an irreality. That’s the first thing I should have asked Margo, I realize: to confirm what I know I know.
That I’m Angus Alaric Farrow, nineteen years old. That I was born in Clayton, Missouri, and raised in a coldly elegant house with too much beige and dull celadon green and nothing on the walls but prissy family photos in expensive frames and no books anywhere. Dad in finance, mom in internet publishing. Frank and Trudy. Chilly, sensible, authoritarian types. My childhood was rich in material things but emotionally and imaginatively impoverished, so it’s no wonder I’ve repressed a lot of the details. What’s worth remembering about a past like mine, anyway? All the times my mom didn’t take me sledding, all the stories my dad never read to me?
It was a depressing childhood, but it’s mine. No one can take it from me.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more I remember. The moon is surrounded now in a haze like glowing dryer lint, and all sorts of things start coming back to me. The specific way my mom would hike her eyebrows to signify that I had strained her patience beyond mortal endurance, before she went back to fretting about toxins. The way my dad tried to get me interested in spreadsheets when I was, like, six. And some bright spots too: a sweet, vivid memory flares in my head, of taking little Vivian ice skating for the first time. I see myself navigating slowly backward, bent at the waist to cradle her tiny red-mittened paws in my hands while she advanced, stroke by stroke, wobbling like a colt. I can even remember the huge rainbow pom-pom on top of her white hat. The shy way she smiled at me. Darling Vivie!
Or is it Sylvie?
I’m losing the thread. It squirms around me, loose and bright, writing words I can’t understand.