Beautiful Sorrows (5 page)

That night the girl walked down to the river. Even the stars around her wrist seemed lonely. She sat by the water, who, for the first time, had absolutely nothing to say.

“Say something. Anything!” pleaded the girl.

The water tried very hard to help the girl.

“Nutmeg,” it said. “Squeakriot. Gimberschnickel.”

“Thank you,” said the girl, and she was grateful.

The water didn’t say anything again for a long time, and then it suddenly piped up. “You’re crying!” it yelled.

“What?” said the startled girl.

“You’re crying for the broken-handed boy!” The water sounded triumphant.

“No, I’m not!” The girl was indignant.

“Then what is this, then?” The river popped something round and smooth out of the water toward the girl. She caught it and held it in her hands. It was a large, white pearl.

“It’s a pearl,” she said.

The water waited expectantly.

“You giving me a pearl doesn’t mean that I’m crying!” The girl was getting angry. Suddenly she noticed that a tear slid down her cheek, fell into the water, and turned into a pearl. In fact, there was quite a large pile of pearls beneath her in the river.

“Oh,” she said softly.

The water snickered.

The baby stars around her wrist seemed absolutely delighted at the pearl, and swarmed around it. They pulled it out of her hand and started to chase each other around her wrist, bouncing the tear-pearl back and forth between them like a ball. It was the cheeriest that they had been in days.

“Find him,” said the water, and it began to hum.

The girl wanted very much to find him, but she didn’t know how. They had always flown to the nest, and she didn’t know how to get there from the ground.

“I wish to find him,” she said. “Very much.”

Suddenly she saw a bright light, and heard a familiar sound. She turned around to see a cascade of stars falling from a tall tree not too far away. The stars clinked and glittered and chimed as they landed on the ground and in the water.

“Wishing stars!” she said, and ran as fast as she could toward the light. There were more stars than she had ever seen, and on each one she made her wish. “I wish to find the boy! I wish to find the boy!”

When she finally reached the tree, she blinked the stars out of her eyes and looked way, way up. She thought she saw a nest at the top of the tree. Taking a deep breath, she started to climb.

The tree was higher than she had originally thought, and difficult to climb. The branches tore her dress and skin, but she kept climbing. The stars continued to fall, much more slowly, and they got caught in her hair, and eyelashes, but she didn’t stop to shake them out. She was concentrating too hard on making her way to the very top of the tree. Finally she reached the nest, and using the last of her strength, she pulled herself inside.

She lay gasping for a minute, and then looked around. There lay the boy.

“Hi,” he said. He looked too weak to move. “I’m glad that you came.”

“Hi,” said the girl. She was too weak to move, too, and smiled at the boy. “I’m glad that I didn’t kill you earlier.”

“It kind of felt like you did,” said the boy. He didn’t sound at all mad.

“I’m very sorry,” said the girl, quite honestly. “I thought that I was doing the right thing, and maybe I wasn’t.” She took a deep breath and managed to crawl a little closer to the boy. She lay down again, and looked at him. “Are you all right?”

“I think so,” he said. “I’m feeling much better today. It was quite bad for a while, and I was so angry that the ice started to come back. I got rid of it myself, though, you see.”

The girl was surprised. “Yourself? But with what?” The girl didn’t see any sharp sticks around. The boy looked sad.

“I used this,” he said, and put his hand weakly up to the necklace that she had made him. The stone was shattered in half. “It broke,” he said needlessly.

“That doesn’t matter at all!” said the girl. “How is your heart? May I see?”

The boy nodded and the girl moved his shirt and peered at his heart. It was beating a little weaker than usual, and it seemed larger. The ice was nowhere to be seen. The girl touched it with her finger, and it was very warm. She smiled.

“I think that maybe you don’t have to worry about the ice coming back,” she said. The boy looked pleased for a bit. He didn’t seem to notice when the stars hopped off of the girl’s wrist and swarmed around his neck.

“So did you see the wishing stars?” he asked.

“Yes!” said the girl. “I was hoping to find you, and I was pleased when I saw them! I wouldn’t have found you otherwise, you know.”

“Yes, I thought that you would see them. What are they doing? Hey, wait a minute!” The boy noticed that the little stars had taken the shattered stone out of the necklace and had tossed it out of the nest. The boy tried to grab it, but it slipped through the hole in his hand. One of the stars said something to him quite firmly, and the boy quieted.

“What did it say?” asked the girl.

“It chastised me, and told me to let them finish. Stars, even baby ones, can be quite firm, you know.”

The stars continued to swarm around his neck, and when they had finished, the boy had something new and whole hanging from the silver chain. It was a large white pearl.

“Where did this come from?” he asked.

“Well, um...”

The girl didn’t really want to say, but the stars hopped all over each other to tell the story. The girl was very embarrassed, and looked at her hands.

“I think,” said the boy, “that this makes me very happy.” They both looked down at his heart, which was swelling bigger and bigger. The boy put his hand over it. So did the girl.

It was a beautiful feeling. It didn’t hurt at all.

UNTIED

The crazy man outside of my office window had been threatening to jump for at least two and a half hours. His ex-wife had remarried, he said. She had moved on. Her new husband was a doctor. Said doctor had written a novel. He worked closely with Operation Smile, Habitats for Humanity, and picketed for women’s rights. He knitted sweaters for cold, underprivileged children.

“How could he do all that if he’s a
doctor
?” I shouted, kneeling on my desk so I could hang my head out of the window. The crazy man paused. He thought. He allowed that maybe his wife—
ex
-wife—had allowed a few half-truths to surface, in order to make the new doctor-husband seem extra stellar. This seemed to perk the crazy man up some. “Maybe he’s just a really lousy doctor,” I said, and the crazy man smiled big.

“I like you!” he declared, and then he whistled cheerily for the next half hour. A little disappointed, I sat back at my desk to work.

It was impossible. The crazy man was distracting. He wore a horrible, flesh colored tie that did absolutely nothing for his blond hair and rosy coloring. It snapped in the wind like a pirate’s flag. It pranced around his neck, pressing its face against my window and
nya-nya-nyaed
at me like an ill-mannered school boy. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. It noticed this, and began to undulate around, running its tongue over its lips and wagging its eyebrows suggestively.

I climbed back up on my desk, knocking my folder to the ground in my haste.

“Your tie,” I yelled.

“What?” He jumped about a foot; not a good thing to do out on a window ledge fourteen stories over Manhattan.

“Your
tie
,” I practically screamed. The tie looked at me in confusion. So did the man.

“My tie?” he shrieked back.

“Yes, your tie!” Silence. “I hate it!”

The man looked hurt. “You hate my tie?”

“Yes!” My throat was starting to hurt. “It’s...it’s...” The tie glared at me. “It’s obscene. It’s the wrong color. It’s lewd and suggestive...and I think it’s trying to pick me up.”

The man looked shocked. The tie looked bored. I looked stupid.

“Well, okay, I’m going back in,” I said, and did just that.

The man was silent for a long time. The tie was obviously enraged. It beat against the window, snarling. It made threatening gestures. It danced provocatively around and then shook its finger as if to say, “No no, you can’t touch.” I threw my hands up in exasperation.

The man, his back still toward me, knocked tentatively on my window. I sighed, climbed back up on my desk, and leaned outside. “Yes?”

He said something quietly that I couldn’t hear.

“Come again?”

“I said, my wife gave it to me.”

“What?”

“The tie. The tie! I said that my wife—
ex
-wife—gave me the blasted tie! I knew it was horrible. It was much too bland. But she gave it to me, so I wore it, and now here I am, ready to greet the pavement, and I’m still wearing this...tie...” Thankfully, a good part of what he said was lost in the wind. The tie, however, looked appalled.

“So ditch the tie,” I said. My attention was on my leg, which was cramping up.

He turned his face away and closed his eyes haughtily. “You’re not taking this seriously,”

I rubbed my knotted calf furiously.

“Look,” I said. “I work a horrible, soul-crushing job with a lascivious rat for a boss and a glory hound coworker who steals all of my credit. My chair is broken, the “Y” on my keyboard sticks, and all I have to look forward to is some lousy steamed vegetables and a crossword for lunch. I’m sorry that your ex-wife moved on. I’m sorry you’re so distraught over it. I’m especially sorry that you’re so good-looking, single, and obviously so deranged. I have a very busy schedule, and you and your harlot of a tie have put me far behind. Now either jump or crawl back inside because I don’t have the time to be kneeling here hanging out of my office window like this.”

He was silent, but only for a minute. “What’s your name?”

“Absinthe.”

“It fits.”

“Shut up and jump.”

“Now that’s not very nice.”

I gritted my teeth and crawled back into my office, vowing not to speak again until I was identifying his body to the policemen downstairs. I slid off of my desk and hopped around on my leg to ease the cramping, cursing colorfully in my head while I did so.

The blond man was watching me. I looked resolutely away and pretended not to care. His tie was equally enamored with my performance. I hopped around a few more times and then sank gracefully into my chair as though nothing had happened.

All of the hopping and crawling and hanging out of the window had forced my hair from its careful, neat-yet-not-prim updo into a crazy mass of curls that hung in my face. I blew them out of my eyes and began typing. Ignoring the crazy man, of course—

Who had turned around completely so that he was facing the window with his palms pressed against the glass. Not that I was looking. Because I wasn’t.

I stared hard at my reports. Something about the Traevoli case wasn’t fitting together, and I gnawed nervously on my pen as I tried to figure it out. Oh! I think I know where I saw this before. I dragged my heavy briefcase onto my lap and snapped it open. Digging around, I finally pulled out a paper with a ring of coffee and a lipstick smudge on the top. Hey, when you gotta blot, you gotta blot, okay? One day I’ll keep wonderful, immaculate files. I just know it.

Holding the paper up to the screen, I squinted at it for a while until I came to the source of the problem. Ugh, that’s it. I must have mistyped it while concentrating on the crazy ma—I mean, while being distracted by nothing at all.

It took seconds to delete the wrong information and retype the correct names and numbers. There. I leaned back in my chair and sighed happily. I have saved the firm from certain disaster! Imminent destruction! They shall all laud me and shower me with gifts and a toe-curling raise. Or at least a decent paycheck. I shook my hands over my head like a champion.

“Good heavens, you’re absolutely insane.”

I stiffened in my chair, and whipped my head up. My hair obscured my vision for a second, but I tossed it out of my eyes with a practiced jerk of the head.

“You!” I pointed at the crazy man, who had inched closer and was now standing in my window. “Haven’t you jumped yet?”

He shook his head, not at all hurt. “Not yet.”

“Are ya gonna?”

“Now that doesn’t seem like a very neighborly thing to say to somebody. Didn’t your mama raise you better?”

I kicked my shoes off, put my feet on the desk and crossed my ankles. “My mama would have pushed you off herself by now. You are incredibly frustrating. In or out.”

“What’s that?”

“In or out. You can’t hover in my window all day like a maniac. It’s poor form.”

I could see him thinking about it. In fact, I could practically hear the wheels turning in his head. He eyed my stark, gray office, and then glanced almost longingly over his shoulder at the ledge.

I felt my eyes narrowing. “Hey, you. I see the way you’re looking at the place. You really think jumping would be preferable?”

He shrugged and leaned in a little farther. “Well, it is pretty dreary. I mean, maybe if it were more welcoming, or something. Out here, I can see the people and the birds. There’s a lot to look at. But your office...” He trailed off mercifully. Then he added, “You need some art.”

I felt crestfallen. “I don’t have any art.”

“That’s apparent.”

“I don’t even know how to go look for art.”

He was taken back. “Really? It’s not hard. You just wander around and find something that speaks to you.” He was looking at me in a new light.

I pulled my formally jaunty feet off of my desk and tucked them under my chair. “I am an art loser.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Yes, I am. There is not an artsy bone in my body. I know nothing about color and light and movement and shape. I’d pick out a poster and somebody with taste would shame me into putting it back. It’s just too daunting.” My stomach growled. “And now I’m hungry.”

He almost smiled. “For your steamed vegetables and the daily crossword?”

I groaned and dropped my head on the desk. “Move over, fella. I’m jumping with you.”

I heard him moving around, felt the desk shift under his weight. I looked up. “What are you doing?”

“Coming in. We’re going to go get you some lunch.”

“But your glorious plans to end your life. I’d hate to mess them up!”

He shook his head and hopped off of the desk onto the floor. “I’ll get over it,” he said. He held out a hand. “Ready?”

I reached out to take it, but drew my hand back again. His tie was watching me with wide eyes. It was drooling a little bit.

He followed my gaze, and then pulled the beige tie from his neck. He held it outside of the window. The tie gasped and then started to scream out some very crude language. I ran to the window to watch.

Beautiful Crazy Man winked at me and let the tie go. The tie whooped and hollered and shrieked as it drifted almost to the ground before being hit by a speeding taxi. I smiled. Served it right.

“So,” he said casually, looking not at all guilty about his nasty tie murder. “Lunch?”

“Lunch,” I said.

“And we shop for art?”

“Don’t push it.”

He reached out and took my hand.

Well, maybe a little art.