“I guess I thought it would make me feel different. I was surprised at how many people came in today to talk to me. How many people commented on my change, implying that they had seen me before? I guess I thought I would feel a sense of relief, a sort of validation?” She shook her head once. “Really, it just made me realize I didn’t need the whole town to see me.” As she spoke, her shoulders went to her ears. Finally, she took a deep breath, dropping them. She turned to me and said, “I just needed one person to really see me.”
My heart beat a heavy, hard thump once in hope. “I see you,” I said softly.
“I know. You always have. I don’t know why—” She cut herself off and leaned forward and kissed my cheek. “Thank you, Owen.” She pulled herself closer, and I could see her thoughts gathering. “I thought people knowing my name, wanting to talk to me might make me feel … Well, as silly as it sounds, I thought it might make me feel important. Loved. I don’t know. It wasn’t a conscious desire, in hindsight. Not any more than you actively seek food or rest, just something you long for on an instinctual level. I never thought that I would be worthy of a romantic sort of love.” She blushed furiously and met my gaze. “I thought that I was too forgettable or different, too whatever, to have anybody really notice me that way. Not that I should have derived myvalue from that either. I just …” She sighed and stretched out her fingers, seeming to collect herself.
“I spent a lot of time in jail thinking, you know. And I think that the thing that I really wanted was to feel that I had something to offer the world, and maybe I found that just by existing. Because all the attention that I got from town today was nice, but it was like eating cotton candy when you’re really hungry, when you really need a good meal of steak and potatoes. And trust me, I have had many meals that consisted only of cotton candy.” I wasn’t surprised at all. “I thought that would change me. But I understand that none of those people really saw me today. It was nice, sure, I think because I might just be chatty by nature, but I didn’t really feel like anybody cared. Not like when I talk to you. When I talk to you, I feel like I don’t have to try, that bits of myself just pour out, and you are waiting there with a little butterfly net to catch them all.”
I swallowed, my throat too tight to talk. But I nodded to show I understood.
“I’m sorry about the tram. I’m sorry you had to come get me and all the dumb stuff I did because I thought I needed some sort of validation,” she finished, fully depleted of her thoughts and feelings.
How she’d come to trust me in such a short amount of time was truly a gift.
I grabbed her hands, and emotion swelled in my chest. “Do you remember how you told me to look through your eyes if I needed to see a better version of myself?” I asked her.
“I’m so wise,” she said with quiet awe.
I laughed softly. Her features lit up as her gaze moved from my mouth to my eyes and around my face. “You are wise, Bee. And I want you to know that it’s the same for me.” I lowered my forehead to hers. “If you need somebody to see you, to hear you,to listen to you, let it be me. Tell me your stories and your bad jokes. I would love to share your food and lint roll your cat hair.”
“It’s a real problem.” She flicked off a stray hair.
“Let me be that person,” I said, but the wobble of my voice made it a question. “I want to be the person who shares the load with you.”
Her large eyes welled with tears, expressive eyebrows contorted with joy. “Only if you let me give you all the love that you needed in the past,” she said, voice tight.
“I’d like that very much.” I kissed her freezing knuckles before I pulled her sleeves down to cover them.
We held each other, and I kissed her face and cheeks and neck. “You’re so cold.”
“I have lost a lot of insulating hair.” She leaned back and sniffled. “No offense, because I’m loving this, but why are we out here in the freezing cold? I thought we’d had our fill of that.”
I kissed her one more time and turned to gesture to the side. I didn’t follow her gaze because I knew what she would see. I only watched her reaction as her eyes took in the scene, and she gasped. “Oh my God, you cleaned up Jane Smith.”
She shot up, elbowing me in the chin in the process, and went to the larger-than-life bronze statue.
“We got a few volunteers to trim the vines and cut back the weeds. I owe some people for working out in the snow,” I explained.
“It looks so good! She’s so shiny,” she said. “Wow, are those lights new?”
“Yep. Little spotlights so she’ll even be seen at night.” I grabbed her hand and brought her closer. “But this is really what I wanted to show you.” I pointed at a small, printed sign. “I was just going to clean Jane up, but as I was doing it, I saw a name I recognized engraved on the side. Fled.”
“As in Ned Fled? Resident centenarian?” She gasped.
I nodded. “Who just happens to live down the hall from Ivy, as you may recall. His great-great-grandfather was one of the gold rushers who came to settle Slippery Slopes back in the day. It was his father who erected the statue in the thirties on the centennial anniversary of Slippery Slopes. He had a lot more to say and would love to talk to you. He said he was sorry that your meeting slipped his mind, but that happens sometimes.”
Her chin quivered as she nodded. “I would love that. I already plan to make more visits to Golden Sunset. Oh, maybe I could bring the cats.” She waved a hand like putting a pin in the thought for another time. “How did you find all this out in such a short time?” she asked. “Seriously, I’m like ten percent frustrated because I really did look.”
“I asked Ivy, and she had some ideas. Ned had old articles in his room, and a story passed down in the family. Someone at the Santa Fe clerk’s office confirmed some details, and here we are.”
Bee went quiet, her hand covering her mouth as her other gently pressed her fingertips against the words. She gasped and snorted. “No way,” she said.
I knew what she had just read and chuckled. “Yep. That’s her actual name. Or at least the one she provided when she moved here to Slippery Slopes.”
“Jane Smith.” Bee laughed as her eyes softened, and she looked into the distance. “I really am psychic.” She brought her focus back to the statue and started to read the paragraph that would be the future plaque that would mark the woman.
“We don’t have the full story yet, but we have narrowed it down. Some speculate that she made her name up when she moved here because she was hiding from her abusive husband or ex-lover. I’ve heard two versions of her story. One’s a love story, and the other was a tragedy.”
Bee stared up at her face and smiled, her eyes gleaming. “It was definitely a love story.”
