How to End a Love Story(99)
He spends his afternoon reading Helen Zhang’s writing. He thinks he can hear her voice sometimes in the best friend character, and her love interest. It feels like the most he’s held of her in a long time and he savors the feeling, though it aches too.
The sun is low in the sky by the time he leaves the library, and he walks slowly back toward Penn Station.
He’s about to drift off to sleep on the train, when he looks out the window and his heart stops.
Standing there on the platform, just disembarking from an opposite train—surely it isn’t, except yes, it is—it’s her.
Helen, in the flesh. She’s wearing a familiar gray wool coat and a sling for her arm. Her hair is down and she looks annoyed and he knows in his gut it’s her.
The train whistles and she looks up in his direction just then, as if she knows exactly where to find him. He registers the surprise on her face, the way her mouth drops a little, and her brow furrows.
He stands immediately and moves down the train compartment.
She walks toward the train too, and the motion is so smooth, he realizes the train is already leaving the station. He feels a certain panic rise, that he might never see her again, that she’s not really even there and this is just an apparition of her he’s conjured up from haunting her old haunts.
But she sees him too, and he knows it’s real. He slams the window when he reaches the end of the train and watches as she reaches the end of the platform. She grows smaller and smaller, and he thinks he sees her pick up her phone, and he looks down to see his own has no signal. A voice on the intercom tells him “This is the 4:13 p.m. Raritan Valley Line, bound for Secaucus.”
When they leave the tunnel and the electric-blue light of the sky filters into the train, he pulls out his phone and dumbly stares at it, waiting for bars of reception to appear. Nothing. As the train carries him farther and farther away, he becomes less and less sure he saw her at all. He doesn’t have any missed calls or voicemails or texts appearing with his increasing signal. By the time he reaches Westfield and has three full bars of reception, though, he doesn’t care anymore and—fuck it—calls her.
“Hello, this is Helen. Please leave your message after the tone.”
He registers the fact that it rang twice before it went to voicemail and feels the brutal sting of rejection. He swallows.
Enough.
When he gets off the train at Dunollie, he deletes her number from his phone.
Helen shoots an apologetic look to the librarian of the New York Public Library, then checks her phone. Missed Call—Grant Shepard.
She hasn’t seen the shape of his name on her phone in so long, she almost has a heart attack. It was him, on that train on the too-hot platform with too many people and too many millimeters of glass for her to be sure she hadn’t just seen a ghost. She shoves her notebook into her bag with a trembling hand and fumbles with her coat. She walks out of her favorite library in the world as fast as she possibly can, which, as it turns out, isn’t very fast at all.
By the time she’s finally on the ground floor, her breath is coming out in panicked spurts and when she gets outside to Fifth Avenue, people glance at her like maybe they need to call someone for her.
She pulls up her call log and her thumb hovers over his name.
He’d pick up, she’s sure of it. She’d call, and he’d pick up, and she’d tell him she’s moved back into her old apartment in New York that doesn’t feel like home anymore, and she misses him so much her heart hurts all the time, and she loves him so much she sometimes can’t fathom a world where she’s ever truly happy again. He’d come back and she’d blow off her plans for a reconciliation dinner with her parents tomorrow, and she’d be able to touch him again, and—and—and . . .
. . . she would make it impossible for either of them to move on.
Let him go, she reminds herself sharply. He deserves a happy, normal life with a happy, extraordinary someone.
The kind of woman who deserves Grant would have found him on the right coast, the one he calls home, and he would have opened his arms and she would have fallen into them for the first time and known it was her favorite place in the world right away. She wouldn’t have had to fight a terrible, confusing mixture of compulsions to flee and burrow at the same time, choosing ultimately to flee. The kind of woman who deserves Grant would have known what she had when she had it, and wouldn’t have waited until weeks later to weep and wallow over the loss of him in a bathtub for so long, she now knows what her toes would look like if she drowned. The kind of woman who deserves Grant would be capable of the kind of love that keeps little sisters alive.
Grant Shepard deserves a Hollywood movie ending, with swelling music and sweeping camera movements and kissing in the rain. This movie would have an epilogue with warm lighting and dad jokes and family dinners in a summer garden over the end credits.
And Helen Zhang has never been built for that kind of uncomplicated happily ever after.
Thirty-One
Helen shows up to dinner at her parents’ house with cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery, and she remembers trying to re-create the buttercream frosting in their kitchen with Michelle one Christmas morning, the air sweet with the scent of warm vanilla. Helen isn’t staying here tonight, she’s decided boldly to branch out into the world of Airbnbs in her old hometown.