The writer concluded the article by musing that Theo’s last comment was likely a reference to joining a different band, and threw out a few possibilities of which bands it could be. “Or perhaps we’re looking at the next Bone Sifter supergroup. This reporter, for one, would be in the front row.”
But I felt a jolt of hope when I read Theo’s words. Maybe not alone. I hope not. Because I felt just the same.
“Fuck,” I said, sliding the phone back to Huey. “I didn’t know he’d gone through with it.”
“Oh?”
Sometimes I played a game with myself to see how many one-word responses Huey could throw into a single conversation. The record so far was two hundred, but that had been a long night of talking.
“We had a fight. A bad one. My fault, mostly. No. Entirely. My fault entirely. And I came here to ask you a favor. But now…”
I did a scan of what it meant that Theo had gone through with this, and what I came up with, if I were honest, was relief. Because if he’d chosen to do this on his own, then it couldn’t be my fault if he regretted it. He couldn’t hate me for it.
“Now?”
“Okay, I still need your help. And a really big dolly.”
Huey raised his eyebrows at me and grinned.
Chapter 21
Theo
On my way to the meeting with Riven and every lawyer in the city of New York, I’d taken the subway and it had been so, so bad. I’d gotten off at Thirty-Fourth Street because people kept talking to me on the train, only to get mobbed outside Penn Station because I walked past it, like a bonehead.
It had been so bad that, after the meeting, I’d taken Dougal up on his offer of a driver. But faced with the prospect of home, I’d asked the guy if he would mind just driving around for a little while. He’d been really nice about it, clearly able to tell I didn’t care where as long as we were moving.
As we crossed 181st Street, I asked the driver if he’d been heading for The Cloisters, and he said it was his wife’s favorite place to be alone but not by herself. His name was Dave, he told me. And if I wanted to go wander through for a bit, he was happy to wait. I told him he should come in, if he wanted, and paid for us both. He kept his distance, but I could sense that he had an eye on me from afar.
In front of The Unicorn in Captivity, he said softly, “This is my wife’s favorite.”
It was a lot of people’s favorite, I knew, and I nodded. Then I kicked myself for being rude after telling him to come in. “Why does she like it so much?”
He smiled fondly. “She came here for the first time when she was a little girl. And she saw all the placards talking about history and what things were like in medieval times. So, when she saw this tapestry, her first thought was that unicorns were animals that had been alive in medieval times, but were extinct now. She thought that for years.”
He shook his head and laughed.
“When she was in high school, someone was talking about imaginary creatures, and she said it just struck her suddenly that she’d been thinking it was true all those years. And when she thought back on it, she could remember all these moments when she should have seen they were imaginary, but that moment here, in the Cloisters, was so strong, and so influential, that she’d ignored the signs and just held on to what she thought was true. She was embarrassed when she told me that,” he went on, and his voice was warm and full of love. “But I thought it was about the sweetest thing I’d ever heard. We came here for our third date. That’s when she told me that story. And, man. I was gone over her.”
He gave me a smile, then walked away. I wandered outside and sat down on a bench in the garden, pulling my coat around me against the cold.
How strong the stories we told ourselves were. What power they had to shape how we saw the world, even when confronted with evidence to the contrary. Caleb told himself the story that no one could depend on him because he’d break their trust. Clearly based in some truth, it was a story he told so many times he’d finally taken it as unassailable. It hurt me to think that part of his recovery, part of taking responsibility for the very real pain he’d caused, was carving deep the groove of that story.
And what stories had I told myself? That I was unlovable. That I had to earn the right to be cared for. That unless I made myself indispensable, I would be tossed away.