“Here's my phone number,
if you ever want to call me when you can't sleep,” Deborah's voice
rang over and over through Matthew's excited brain. He stood holding
the napkin with her name and phone number scribbled across it
loosely. This was it, this was his in, the initiatory step into
whatever was going to be between them. He could toss the napkin in
the garbage, a likely story, or pocket it and wait until he got off
work to call her. Happily, he moved through the coffee shop to the
patio to brag to his friends when the door swung open, letting the
cool air blast in and upon him. In a flash, all time seemed to stop,
everything that was slipped away into momentary oblivion. Before
him, framed in the doorway, the cool air flowing around her, stood
Deborah, dressed in completely different clothes than the ones she
had just left in, and quite inappropriately dressed for this fall
weather, a tanktop and short pants.
“Deborah, what the...?”
She quickly moved into the
coffee shop, her eyes aghast and full of wonder, as if this was the
first time in a long time that she had been in this place. She moved
past him, brushing slightly against his shoulder with her arm, a
tingly sensation overwhelmed him with infatuated desire. She moved
through the coffee shop, touching each table, running her hands over
every chair, warming herself by the fire as she stared mysteriously
into the flames for what seemed like a very long time.
“Deborah, I'm confused,”
Matthew said, breaking the silence. “How did you...come back
here...with different...”
Deborah turned to face him,
resolute.
“I don't have a lot of
time here, in this place, this moment, Matt,” she said at last.
“Let me explain. Let's sit down.”
She sighed with melancholy,
moved to a table by the window, and sat. He sat across from her, his
hands folded before him on the table.
“You want a cup of coffee
or something?” he asked, after a moment of silence where she stared
at him in quiet disbelief.
“That would be...so
amazing,” she began and then shook her head. “But, there isn't
any time, I don't think...” Tears welled up in her eyes. “I
can't believe I'm here now, I never thought I'd see it again, never
believed, always hoped...”
“Um, weren't you just---”
“No, Matt, not like that,”
Deborah started to explain. “I mean, yes, I was but not me here
now. That was then, in the past when...oh my god, its only for the
beginning for you...she, I mean, I just gave you my number and its
the moment after...”
“Wait, hold on, what are
you saying?” Matthew blurted out, starting to become worried about
the mental state of this girl he liked. “Why are you wearing those
clothes? What the hell?”
“Matthew, I'm not the girl
I was, the girl that was just here...I'm from a time after...that's
why my clothes are different,” she tried haltingly to explain, her
eyes pleading for him to understand, hoping that he would.
“Wait, are you
saying...like time travel, like you are from the future or some
shit?” Matthew asked, pushing his chair away from the table and
starting to get up. He had had it with these crazy girls.
“Wait, please, Matthew,”
Deborah was pleading, reaching for his arm. “The number I gave
you, on the napkin, where is it?”
He pulled it from his pocket
and held it out to her.
“And...and your phone,
call it now, please,” Deborah begged. He stood there and stared
down at her, searchingly. What the fuck is this shit, he thought.
Deborah blinked rapidly,
searching for some way to make him see.
“Look around you, at the
other people in the coffee shop, the patio,” she thrust her arms
around her to get him to look and her eyes welled up again with
agonized tears as she saw the rest of the boys on the patio.
Matthew looked around and
then looked around again. Suddenly, he saw what she was saying.
“They're...not moving,”
he said at last. “Like at all. What the hell?”
He sat down again heavily in
the chair and she sat across from him.
“So, call me, her, me,”
Deborah said. He pulled his cell-phone from his pocket and looked
over at the number, slowly, deliberately he began to dial. It rang
once and then the voice of Deborah rang out from the other end of the
line.
“Hello? Hello?” Matthew
looked up at Deborah before him and then at the phone with her voice
coming through. The phone went dead as Deborah on the phone hung up.
“Now you see,” Deborah
said with a sigh. “I am at home, in my room, anxious that you
aren't going to call, and when the phone rings I've just thrown it
across the room, spilling coffee all over the place and when you call
me, I don't know who it is, but I'm trying to clean up the mess
and...”
Matthew stopped her by
touching her arm. “It's okay,” he said soothingly.
“You'll never talk about
this, the two of you, we never do,” Deborah responded.
“So, we become a we,”
Matthew said with a hopeful smile. Deborah stared out the window
wistfully. “So, if you are from the future, then right, what do
you want? Why are you here?”
“Huh?” was all Deborah
said as she stared outside lost in thought.
“Well, you came back for a
reason so...,” Matthew urged her to speak.
Deborah looked around at the
cafe and sighed.
“This place is so cozy.
I've missed it so much...no matter how hard I try, I can never find
another place like it...but...its not the place that makes it so
special, really, I just realized that.”
“Deborah?” Matthew
looked over at her. “What happens to this place?”
She looked over at him and
into his piercingly warm blue eyes.
“Everything's going to
change and fast,” she began, a tear trickling down her face. “You
know back when I was younger, when I was here, I lived in this magic
little bubble of my own little world, my own little reality, and I
thought, I really wanted it to go on forever and ever...but what I
have learned is, nothing ever lasts, you've got to hang onto those
moments of happiness for as long as possible, hold those shreds of
peace in your heart before...”
Matthew opened his mouth to
speak but then shut it, remaining silent, watching her, waiting for
her.
“And even now, its not
what it seems, not as perfect as I thought,” Deborah smiled sadly.
“I went into this cafe seeking....seeking love, answers to all my
doubts, solace from the world's scariness...and it...it found me
here, even here.”
Matthew's eyes flew open.
“What are you talking
about?” was all he could say.
“I just wanted to...be
here one last time, with you, with everyone,” she said, tears
streaming down her face. “Just to feel the fire's warmth and
crackle, absorb the atmosphere of this place, see you as you are
before...Matt, don't trust what you see on the outside, all is not
what it seems now.”
With that, she started to
fade right before his eyes. He reached for her, calling her name.
“Deborah, Deborah, wait,
don't go!”
She responded to his
calling, her voice trailing off further and further into an echo.
“Matthew, come and find me
whatever you do.”
And, then she was gone. The
rest of the world around him in that cafe returned to normal. He sat
back and let out a huge breath. Did that really just happen? He
stood up and moved down towards the patio, pushing the door open.
“She gave me her phone
number!” he exclaimed.
“Nice,” said James yet
Matt thought he heard a hint of jealousy in it. Yet he shook it off.
This was good news and nothing was going to damper his happy moment.
Deborah pulled out her keys
from her book-bag and stuck them into the lock of her small
apartment. She unlocked the door and pushed it open, revealing her
small one bedroom apartment, the living room a-mess with dirty dishes
on the coffee table, books strewn about, nail polish and left over
clippings from her last self-imposed beauty night. She sighed, she
had never been this much of a slob in past years, but with the onset
of grad school and the weight of the three years had brought on a
sense of lethargy and impassive care for her surrounding environment.
She set her bag down in the hallway and reached for the keys to her
mailbox, hanging on a hook on her hall table.
She moved through the open
hallway of her apartment complex, down to the first floor where the
mailboxes were located. Unlocking the small door that opened to her
mailbox compartment, she expected only to find the usual bills and
ads that she would most likely toss in the garbage, well, the ads not
the bills, she'd get in trouble if she did that. But, what she found
as she pulled out the mail, standing there shivering in the half-cold
of October leafing through, yes, the bills, ads, was a personal
letter from him...from Matthew. Her heart skipped as she read his
name again, how long had it been since they had spoken to each other,
let alone seen each other? Deep inside herself, she felt a stirring
within, the emptiness that had so consumed her in recent years
started to dissipate with a sense of longing...and could it
be...perhaps, love, at least of some sorts. She hurried back up the
stairs to her apartment.
She sat on her sofa, a mug
of tea in both hands, her legs pulled up to her chest, staring at the
unopened letter sitting atop her coffee table. She'd cleaned up a
bit, the dirty dishes were in the sink, the nail polish and its
sundry items were placed back in the bathroom so merely before her
was the letter sitting alone by itself. As she stared at it, she
took it in fully, its loneliness resting there on the coffee table
echoed the loneliness within her. In her mind's eye, she saw Matthew
alone at a coffee shop, lonely like her, staring down deep into his
coffee mug, his hands wrapped around it, not unlike hers around her
tea, a cigarette dangling out of one hand, waiting, hoping, longing,
maybe.
It had been three years
since that night at the bar. Three years since Matthew had called
the police and the investigation and subsequent trial. The police
having disregarded her re-telling of her visions as evidence but had
discovered that the necklace itself with DNA evidence of both James
and Eve was sufficient enough evidence for booking. Deborah had not
been able to attend the trial, work was her excuse but really it was
due to her not wanting to acknowledge the truth of the state of
James, that even though she had witnessed per her vision the murder,
she could not, did not want to, believe he was capable of such
atrocity. The jury had found him guilty, a psychiatrist had found
him mentally unstable and labeled him with paranoid schizophrenia.
He was up north in jail now in a psychiatric unit. Shortly after the
trial had concluded, Deborah moved closer to her parents house for
graduate school, in none other than, psychology, leaving all of them
behind, trying to run as far as possible from them which was proving
to be impossible. The faces of Shaggy, Thomas, Ray, Matthew, and
even James swam up at her. The happier times, hiking, drinking at
the bar in the crow's nest, the long talks and joking days over their
coffee mugs and cigarettes at the cafe...it all refused to disappear
from her thoughts but was there like an ever present and insistent
companion in every moment of her days, waking and otherwise.
Alone in her apartment, a
tear trickled down her face. She had managed, she rationalized, to
stem the tide of emotion on this whole matter as far away from the
fore-front of her heart as possible but now with the letter before
her the emotion began to flow. Slowly, she set the tea mug on the
table before her and picked up the letter. Holding it, the envelope
felt heavier than what it should, heavy with the weight of memory.
Reluctantly, she opened it and pulled the sheets of paper from
within.
“Dear Deborah,” Matthew
wrote. “Its been awhile since we talked and I just thought I'd
reach out, say hi, see how you are doing...I am not sure why but I
think about you from time to time, a lot. Anyway, Shaggy, you
remember, he went up north to Portland for college and then randomly
he ended up getting up an internship for NASA. Its true! You
remember how he used to rail away about the government, all those
conspiracy theories with NASA...Life is ironic, huh? He says that
sometimes the best way to fight is by joining the ranks, or something
like that. Ray joined some gay hippie commune, doing fine, me and
Shaggy visited him a few times when he last visited. Thomas even
visits him sometime, which is weird, because...well, they had a thing
for awhile, I suspect. Yeah, random, huh? Anyway, he got married
again, is living up in northern Idaho or something like that, and
calls me almost every weekend railing against his wife...Feel like
I'm going to have to go on a rescue mission to save him!! And, me,
well, I got a job as a waiter at this local restaurant and I've been
seeing someone new...”
Deborah gasped at that,
unconsciously threw down the letter into her lap, picked her tea up,
took a long sip, and wiped a tear from her eye. She picked the
letter up again and although her eyes were wet with grief and
resignation began to read again.
“I'm not sure where it is
going, if its anything serious,” Matthew continued. “But she's a
fun girl, her name is Denise, you'd like her, I think...I hope. So,
what else? Yeah, James is still up in prison, heard he's doing fine,
they got him on meds and he's seeing a therapist, that's what I
heard. I guess Thomas visited him a few times, until he got married
and moved. And, the coffee shop, well, I guess you were right when
you predicted it would close...after the arrest and everything that
happened, people didn't come in as much, I guess they didn't want to
associate themselves with controversy or something, so we had to shut
the place down...but the city, they tore the whole building down
after they bought it...and you know what is going in there now, I've
heard a fancy new restaurant. Wonder what the restaurant next door
thinks of that! Like my city needs a new tourist trap...city
improvement at its possible! Ha, ha, maybe I should try to get a job
there! Anyway, that's pretty much all the updates up in these parts,
what's new with you? Still in school? Please keep in touch. Much
love, Matthew.”
Deborah put the letter
gently in her lap, half noticing the tear stains where her wet
fingers had smudged some of the words. She pushed any thought of
what that sadness and regret could mean. She clasped her mug in both
hands again and stared straight ahead, wanting to silence the
thoughts swirling in her head, memories calling back to old times she
wished she could forget. Times that were filled with joy and love
but then shadowed with heartbreak, fear, agony, and painful
good-byes.
It was if the times before
that night at the bar when the police had been called and the gang of
them had been ushered down to the station to be sequestered in
separate rooms before James had been booked was the last time she
felt truly happy and free. The times when her and her boys sat
drinking their coffee, laughing over Shaggy's crazy conspiracy
theories, commiserating over crazy exes, pontificating on the meaning
of life and the possible existence of God, and all the while trying
to figure themselves out and to find a sense of direction for this
life were the last shred of her youth now gone in the painful memory
of the realization that it hadn't exactly been true. That at least
one of her companions, a man that she believed to have been her
soul-mate and first love, had proven to be false, hiding a darkness
that left her reeling with a sense of distrust ever since. And, now
with the confirmation of the demise of the coffee shop, she felt even
more a sense of loss, was there anything left for her to believe in
this world? Was there anymore love, faith, connection to be found
anywhere? She sipped her tea and let her eyes stray out the sliding
glass door of her porch to the grey skies and waited...waited on a
prayer and a wish for some answer to the darkness crowding into her
neat little world.
Deborah woke with a start.
She was in her bed, it was late at night and she thought she had
heard something in her living room. Cautiously and quietly, she got
out of bed without turning the light and moved down the hall. In the
living room down the hall, she saw the blue light of the television.
'I must have just left it on, that's all,' she thought trying to calm
and reassure herself. She moved with a little more determination and
strength into the living room and stopped at the end of the hallway,
frozen and speechless.
Before her, standing
directly in front of the TV, was James.
“Deborah,” James said in
a soft whisper. He opened his arms, inviting her to come to him.
She stood, unable to move, stupefied and speechless.
“Are you really here?”
She asked at last.
James smiled at her,
understandingly.
“Remember I used to say to
you, I'll meet you in my dreams tonight,” he explained
reassuringly.
“You look like you used to
look...so long ago,” was all Deborah could say as a sob caught
itself in her throat.
“It's how you wanted to
see me,” he said with a sad smile. And, the dam broke. Deborah
collapsed onto the couch, sobbing.
Brokenly, she said, “Right
here. You are still right here in my heart. Even after everything
that happened, you are still right here. Even if I tried to forget
you, I can't forget...that I love you. You once told me that I needed
to find a love more than fire, bells, and whistles. I needed to just
know that I am loved. With you, I have that, when its all said and
done. Even when you are far away...I still know. But, there is still
this loneliness because I can't see you---
James crossed over to her
and sat by her side on the couch, not touching her. But, she felt
him and it wasn't fear like she was used to, like she thought it
would be. It was just as it had been before, she felt a sense of
peace restoring itself to her life. She looked up at him then and
their eyes met, studying each other, taking each other in again.
“When I look into your
eyes, I see the reflection of my own soul,” James exclaimed with a
contented sigh.
“I do too,” Deborah
admitted. She looked down at her hands, twisting in her lap.
“What are you thinking
about?” James wanted to know, placing his hand atop hers and gently
stroking her fingers.
“Just thinking about...,”
but Deborah couldn't go on. She looked down at their hands entwined
with each others.
“Just say it,” James
said. She looked up into his eyes and saw that he did truly know her
thoughts.
“The old times, what life
was like, how simple it was. I can still see it, in my mind, almost
like I'm still there but its just starting to fade...the cafe. And
you. And all of it. I don't want to let go but still...Thinking of
what I wanted back then, the foolish young girl I was, trying to
paint the picture of my life and love. The fairy-tale life, you know.
And its just that...I'm angry, when it comes down to it. Angry at
myself for believing in that, and not seeing. But, we can never
really see. We only see what we want to, with rose-covered glasses.
Its not black or white, bad or good. It just is. I'm angry at you
because you left me and said you wouldn't. Couldn't,” She spoke
quickly, letting all the years of pent-up emotion and unanswered
questions full of doubt pour forth out of her.
James thought a moment and
then soothed the hair out of her eyes.
“I still can't. Remember,
"Love will last forever," was all he said.
“James!” Deborah
exclaimed and turned away from him.
James laughed to himself and
then said, “You know, I looked up the meaning of our names
recently, in the library in jail. You know what my name means?
Supplanter. But, your name, Deborah, means Honey Bee. And, your
middle name, Ruth, means loyal friend.”
“So?” responded Deborah,
glaring at him.
“You are a loyal friend
that brings sweet things,” he explained at last. He smiled and
pushed her hair out of her eyes again, stroking her hair down her
back.
“Tell me what to do
now...I'm tired of...fighting,” Deborah pleaded haltingly, tears
began forming in her eyes.
“Me too. Deborah, my honey
bee,” James agreed reassuringly. He took her hand. “I'm sorry
that I never believed in you. Maybe there is one soul-mate for all of
us, maybe there is more than one, pushing us to the great love. Who
knows? I only know that, you have to go on and you will...without
me.”
“But--”
James silenced her by
placing their hands on her heart.
“Deborah, don't let me go,
no matter what. I"ll be right here, always,” he soothed.
“I'll live on forever in your heart, your eyes, your dreams. Write
my story, our story. And, Cafe-Girl, I love you. And, good-bye.”
He leaned over and kissed
her, sweetly, serenely, and for the last time. When she opened her
eyes, he was gone. Deborah looked frantically around the room before
she said out loud,
“Will I ever see you
again?”
The rest of the night she
barely slept but tossed and turned as she went over and over what had
just transpired. What would the psychiatrists think of this? Would
they call her crazy too? What would all the good little Christians
friends of hers say? Would they call her demon-possessed?
The next morning she
stumbled out of bed early, brain foggy more from the confusing jumble
of unresolved emotions swarming up inside of her. She dressed
quickly in warm outdoor clothes and laced up her hiking boots.
Grabbing her backpack, she stuck her wallet, water-bottle, and
journal inside of it. Out the door, she swung, keys in hand, down to
her car. But she passed it and just started walking, heading to the
nearest trail that would lead her outside of the cement confusion
that was the town she currently resided.
She stopped at a local
coffee shack and bought a cappuccino, hoping that the taste of that
would quiet the painful memories. She kept walking when she found
the trail as high and as far a she could go. After about twenty
minutes, she stopped, catching her breath, and turned to face the
city, awash with the morning sunrise of pinks and fresh yellows. It
was a new day, could it be, at last? She looked around her, and
suddenly realized she had no idea where she was or really how she had
gotten there. Directly above her was a large rock. She climbed up
to it and sat down, pulling her journal out of her backpack,
rummaging around inside she located a pen. She turned the pages to
find a blank page and stared hard down at it:
“So, what's the story
about?” She asked aloud to the trees, plants, valley below. “A
story of what...of too much caffeine?”
From somewhere far back in
the reaches of her memory, she heard Thomas's voice echo through to
her core:
“Seen you at the coffee
shop, sometimes, Deborah.”
“Youth? The Golden Road?”
Deborah asked, looking around to see if he had heard her. In
response, she heard Ray's voice echoing back to her from the past:
“King of the lawn gnomes,
they call me.”
She looked out over the city
and screamed, imploringly:
“How does the story end? A
story of a journey? Of friendship? Tell me please.”
She fell silent then as the
next voice rang through her entire being shocking her completely.
Matthew said, “First snows
are the best times for walks.”
She collapsed inside
herself, wrote something in her journal, then read it aloud:
“A story of regrets? A
story of the search for true love?”
“I'll meet you in my
dreams tonight,” James responded as clear and present as the rock
she sat upon and the birds awaking from their nightly revelries.
She wrote again in her
journal and without thinking, read it aloud:
“A story of pain, or
strength?”
She looked around, hoping
for an answer from some place, someone.
“You're all right,
yourself, Deborah,” came the reassuring answer from Matthew.
Again she scribbled in her
journal, then spoke these words in a whisper:
“A story of hope, or
nothing?”
“Live your life, Deborah,
and be happy, no matter what, be that,” was Matthew's answer from
the far away distant past.
She cocked her head and felt
the wind push back her hair. For the first time, she realized she
had been crying, so used to it she had become, with the wind touching
the tears stained against her face.
“A story of truth?” she
asked the universe or the city below her, hoping somehow for an
answer.
“Never give up the fight,”
Shaggy chimed in from far away in the distant past. She laughed out
loud, then wrote in her journal, reading it as she wrote:
“A story of forgiveness,
of letting go? a story of redemption? "I started going to a
coffee shop recently, never thought I'd be a cafe girl, you know, but
I always wanted to be....I just wish there was some book, something
to explain and help navigate. I just wish it didn't hurt so bad.
Endings."
She looked up from her
journal, taking it all in and felt a presence beside her, on the
right side. Turning, she saw no one, nothing. Then, came the voice
of James:
“When I look into your
eyes, I see the reflection of my own soul.”
She looked outward over the
city and beyond, she sighed resolutely, at last beginning to
understand. In her mind, she heard her boys that one night at the
lithium fountain chanting:
“One of us, one of us, one
of us!”
She smiled and whispered, “A
story of love.”
She sat watching as the sun
rose higher into the sky, watched as the city became alive with cars
and people just starting their day, their lives afresh. Resolved,
she put her journal into her backpack and stood up, looking around
her. She remembered that she didn't really know where she was or how
to get back. Reflecting back, she remembered all those hikes with
them, her boys from the cafe, how she always trusted that no matter
how high and how far, they'd get her home. She shivered because now
she was alone, all alone. With as much determination as she could
muster, she hopped off the rock and began cautiously heading down the
mountain, hoping to come out near where she could make herself home.
As she made her way down the
mountain, the path became more and more clear to her, she was going
in the right direction. The laughter of hikes long ago echoed back
to her and kept her moving forward. Pushing through a low hung bush,
she emerged outward on the street and before her was the street
leading to the little coffee shack and her apartment beyond.
“Oh,” she exclaimed.
She had done it, she had made it back home and all by herself. With
a sudden relish and revelation, she understood that this was all they
had ever wanted for her. To be herself, to be brave, to be
unabashedly fully alive and true to herself, without apology. It was
then that she knew what she must do and do quickly.
It took awhile, the drive
backwards into time always did. She made it back into her old town
where it all had happened in mid afternoon. Checking into her hotel,
she dropped her bags on the bed and sat with a thud beside them,
hugging her knees to her chest. Was she really going to go through
with this? Was it, in fact, at all a possibility? Was this really how
it would end? She picked up her phone and willed herself to dial but
then set it back down on the bed.
The rest of the day and into
the night she wondered aimlessly through the town, looking into the
store windows, into the faces of tourists and the locals as the
darkness descended both outwardly and inwardly. As her stomach began
to grumble with hunger pains, she realized how lonely she in fact
was.
She found herself
quickly entering into the town bookstore and noticed the lights of
the coffee shop upstairs still lit. She hurried up the stairs in
search of a bite or a drink or...maybe. When she reached the top of
the stairs, she stood motionless in the doorway. Directly across
from her, he entered the coffee shop from the other entrance,
stopped, and stared at her.
Without seeing anyone else,
they crossed to face each other, not taking their eyes off of each
other.
“What can I do for you?”
he asked, breaking the still silence.
“I think I'll have a
cappuccino if..,” she began.
“If?”
“If only you would read my
fortune please,” she said laughing. They moved over to the counter
and she ordered her cappuccino from the much younger barista (she
realized). Matthew flung down some money on the counter before she
could get her card and said, “Make that two please!”
“So---” they both said
at once. Matthew nodded for her to continue politely.
“You from around here?”
She joked.
“Yeah, I'm a townie,” He
chided her.
“Ah, my first townie!”
She played along.
“Yeah,” he said,
suddenly serious. “Yeah, I was.”
The barista took the money,
handed back the change, and deposited their cappuccinos onto the
counter before them.
Deborah looked into her
drink and then up at Matthew, teasingly.
“Well?”
He looked down at her drink
and smiled, “Well, looks like you are in need of a walk--”
“It looks like snow,”
Deborah noted musingly.
“Its the first snow,”
Matthew informed her.
“First snows are the best
time for walks, or so I have heard,” Deborah smiled back.
They crossed down to the
exit that Matthew had entered in previously and out into the inky
darkness descending onto the town. Deborah reflected that she felt a
lightness that she hadn't felt for a very long time. They walked
beside each other quietly through the city, into the park, the snow
starting to fall softly in drifts around them, sticking to their
hair, their clothes, the ground beneath them.
In the park, their shoes
crunched gravel thrown down to ensure the safety of pedestrian
travelers. They kept walking side by side, Deborah looking up and
all around her, a calm sense of peace erupting throughout her whole
being. They stopped by the creek and looked down over the rushing
cascading water, the fullness of the winter river healthy with the
fall of rain and snow. Deborah breathed it all in, looked at him,
released everything. His piercingly warm blue eyes caught hers and
she saw for the first time:
“Sometimes you fall in
love at first sight, sometimes it takes awhile.”
