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“I said I decided to write the book.” She looked surprised. For how long had I debated with her whether this was a story worth telling, whether it was fair and right and proper of me to tell it. A measure of autonomy, I had decided.
“Have you told him?”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of. What does that even mean?” How much I had put off and how much I had left unsaid: she knew.
“Actually, I wrote it already. It’s done. Signed and sealed. So, I didn’t tell him I’m writing a book, I told him I wrote one. Forgiveness rather than permission, that kind of thing.”
“I see,” already Stacy looked concerned, and she didn’t know the half of it yet.
“I overnighted an advance copy to him a few days ago. And I sent him an email just before it would have arrived and told him I thought he might want to read it. That he should read it.”
Her eyes grew wide, but our time was always short, even when I didn’t lob such surprises her way. Expertly she parsed the wheat from the chaff, setting aside her own astonishment.
“What made you decide?”
“I think I always knew. Boys come and go, but books are forever.”
A look of sadness replaced the shock of a moment before. More than once she had asked me if I wrote this story and didn’t tell him, if I wouldn’t simply be repeating the pattern I had established all those years ago, the one where I unilaterally make moves, oblivious to the consequences.
Obviously, my next move was not even to tell her that I had secured an agent. I did not need her reminding me that I was doing my best impression of a below-average human. Or, that I was possibly even slipping from impersonating one into becoming one.
She drew a deep breath, again, and waited for me to continue.
“Ink on paper is a rare form of permanency in an impermanent world. Boys?” I shrugged.
“Will your name on the cover keep you happy?”
“If you mean will it keep me warm at night, we both know the answer to that.”
She laughed lightly.
“You ask questions I can’t answer except with more questions, Stacy. What is to say what made me happy today would keep me happy next month or next year? And what’s a little happiness in the scheme of the universe, after all? The planets keep spinning no matter how those of us pinned to the earth’s crust by gravity feel, whether we are living and breathing or serving as matter for the next iteration of civilization. But at the end of the day, we are who we are. At least I am who I am. Unvarnished and flawed, but wholly me.”
That part, I am certain Nao Kao understands. We cannot, either of us, any more than most people, change how we are wired. It is what draws us together and pushes us apart, two magnets circling, our poles shifting through time and space. I will not know his secrets; now he cannot stop knowing mine.
“There is something else I should tell you,” I said to Stacy. “I’m at the airport, Detroit, in the Club,” I picked at some lint on the chair, this last bit arranging itself in my mind.
“I’m on my way to Vientiane. To see him. Sort of. And for work. And vacation. Today. The flight boards in an hour.”
Probably I could have waited, but first after so many years, and then after so many messages and emails pinging through space, it seemed enough time had passed. And the world is a big place: I’ve got places to go and people to see, but I wouldn’t have been able to concentrate on any of them until I made this trip.
Silence. Absolute, utter silence.
“Does he know? Is he pleased?”
“I had to tell him. Business and pleasure,” I reminded her. “I think he was surprised. I’m not sure about pleased.”
Completely and utterly stunned was more like it. I imagine he felt the need for a stiff drink – or two – when that message popped up on his phone. And possibly regretted ever planting the seed in my mind.
“And?”
“He promised not to shout at me.”
Stacy looked at me closely, as closely as she could through the screens that were connecting us, perhaps truly appreciating for the first time the depths of the steeliness – the stoicism, even – that I once described to her as my defining characteristic. I wasn’t Rachael Zick’s daughter for nothing.
“I shouldn’t have expected anything else. Good luck, Liss. Whatever that means.”
