The Moment of Everything (17 page)

Sitting in Pioneer Park, I looked up from my book and watched the people scuttling by. Though the apartment complex across the street was quiet—all the Googlers had already shuttled away to their campus to plot to change the way we did everything—the park still buzzed with people rushing back to their offices, takeout in one hand, phone in the other.

Five weeks. That’s all it had taken to reassemble my life. I’d gone from not wanting to admit I was spending time in the Dragonfly to being its co-caretaker. Five weeks ago, I’d been desperately pursuing Avi for her help in finding a job. Now she and I had tea, drinkable tea, in the office of the Dragonfly as we went over financial statements with Robert and looked for ways to firm up the store’s financial ground. Five weeks ago, talking to Jason was like enduring a pesky itch in a place it would be impolite to scratch in public. Now he and I seemed to have struck a truce. He’d warmed up to the website I created and was now manning our blog under the name Lummox. He answered questions about books (yes, we have
Harry Potter
in Spanish), our new hours (10 a.m. to 10 p.m.), and whom one would have to kill to get into the Friday night game night (the list was long). And they asked if we’d ever found out anything about Henry and Catherine (nope…nada…zippo). Five weeks ago, I was still nursing, if not an injured heart, then a disappointed one. And now I sat under my favorite tree on Hugo’s moose blanket, just a few paces from where Henry had waited for Catherine, feeling my senses ripen because I knew Rajhit was close by.

Pioneer Park was just a couple of blocks from the Dragonfly, wedged right in between city hall and the library with side street access so you’d know about it only if you were going to check out books. A small plaque at the entrance to the park nearby told us all this place was originally a nondenominational cemetery donated by Maria Trinidad Peralta de Castro in 1861. But now it was filled with grassy knolls and overfed squirrels. Wide wood benches lined its pathways and oak trees looked down on the buildings around them as if they were company who had stayed past their welcome.

My favorite tree was a large oak with one branch slung low to the ground so, with a little help, it was sittable. As I waited for Rajhit with two lamb shawarmas, I’d spread out on a blanket, shoes off, my toes in the grass, and read a Laurie Colwin novel. (How could I have made it so far in life without Laurie Colwin?) Rajhit was late, not by much, but still a bit late.
Lunch in the park?
I’d left a note in the pocket of his jeans the night before, and when I got to the Dragonfly this morning, a single word on the torn corner of a yellow legal pad was pinned to the inside of my backpack.
Yes.

I stood and stretched and stepped across the nearby path to the fountain. Henry and Catherine’s fountain.
Sunday is the first day of summer. Meet me in Pioneer Park, by
the fountain, noon.
This was the one note I’d kept to myself, a little bit of Henry and Catherine that was all mine.

I’d read Henry’s and Catherine’s notes over and over again, looking for patterns, trying to identify that one moment in which they knew their lives were linked. For the life of me, I couldn’t see it. I felt like I was looking at one of those modern paintings that was all one color, and seeking all the emotions the artist left on the canvas. Instead I just saw a block of purple, and I felt stupid.

The fountain was tucked away in a small Japanese garden close to the back entrance of the library. It was small, modern-looking (no peeing cherubs, thank goodness). I walked the gravel path around it. This was the spot where Henry met Catherine on that first day of summer, in a time when men wore suits and hats to baseball games and women wore pearls in the afternoon and carried clutch purses in white-gloved hands. I imagined Henry there, played by Van Johnson…no, Montgomery Clift, pacing anxiously, trying not to look at his watch. A woman would walk toward him and he would hope that this one would stop at the fountain and he would have at last found Catherine. He would try not to stare, not to grin, not to seem a fool in this small town, at least not until he was sure it was indeed her. But one by one, they would pass him by and he would watch them go with a tip of his hat. Then a slim Elizabeth Taylor would turn the corner and he would know. They both would know. They would be shy at first, having revealed so much of themselves already and now losing the courage of anonymity. And then he would take her hand and, well, all would be spoken.

I wondered if there was anything left of them on the ground they’d walked on in the park. Maybe I could organize an archeological dig. I would find DNA evidence that we could feed into a supercomputer, one of those fictional ones in the movies that make impossible leaps of logic to get the hero the data he needs. I could piece them together and give the Dragonfly’s followers what they craved.

But I didn’t want to know what happened to Henry and Catherine. I wanted the knowledge of their fate to be slipped into a bottle and tossed at sea. They weren’t characters in one of my paperback romances. Chances were that if they had gotten together, they were somewhere nursing the wounds of decades of betrayals—some small, some big. Against my better judgment, I hoped they weathered them and had found some happiness together.

I shook my head, trying to clear out those thoughts.
Rajhit. Rajhit.
This was me and him, not my parents, not Henry and Catherine, not me and Bryan. This was me and Rajhit. I focused on the water, the sound of it pouring into itself, the sparkles in the sunlight. I circled it slowly, chanting our names under my breath, focusing my thoughts on where they belonged.
Maggie and Rajhit. Maggie and Rajhit.
“We decide who we are,” he’d said to me. “There’s only me and you.”

As I came back around to the front of the fountain again, the heat of the day was starting to get to me. I bent down to dip my hand in the water and splash a bit on my face. And that’s when I saw the small plaque bolted to the fountain.

I stood. I must have misread it. It was hot. I was bent over. Must have been a little dizzy. I stooped down and read it again and then again.

February 2009? Five months ago? That must have been just the date of the dedication. The fountain had to have been here for longer, like decades, for Catherine and Henry to have met here. I looked more closely at the fountain. Fresh-cut granite, clean lines along the ground, no moss and hardly any dirt on it. Then I noticed a small black wire running into the back of it. My eye followed it to a solar panel in the bushes that must be running the pump. The fountain was new.

Help. I needed help. A woman walked by in a brown City Parks uniform, carrying a litter harpoon like a walking stick. Under a wide-brimmed ranger hat, silver hair framed her tulip face, which was adorned with bright pink lipstick. A badge on the front of her shirt read “Gray Badgers Volunteer Ranger.”

“Excuse me,” I called after her. She turned, her face beaming. “Can you please tell me how long that fountain has been there?”

“A few months, I guess, more or less,” she said. “Lovely ceremony. Not many people, but the cookies were from that new Indian bakery on El Camino Real. The one that doesn’t use eggs.”

“And there wasn’t another fountain in the park before then? Maybe in the sixties?”

“Oh, no, dear. There’s never been a fountain here before. This was still a cemetery then. My children used to play hide-and-seek here on Halloween night. Better than egging people’s doors, I thought. My husband, Albert, though…”

She was still talking, but I wasn’t listening. I was chewing over what I’d just learned. The fountain was installed in February. There wasn’t anything here before then. There was no fountain until
February of this year.
The park was a cemetery in 1961. I pulled out my phone and scanned through the pictures, looking at the ones I’d taken of the notes. There was one of the title page of the book, the one with the date on it.
1961
. I’d always wondered which of them had written the date on the title page. And as I zoomed in on the date in the photo, I finally knew the answer. Neither of them. The ink was different. The handwriting was different. Neither of them had written the date. Henry and Catherine weren’t writing the notes nearly fifty years ago. They were writing them this summer.

“…but after Albert died, I didn’t give a rat’s ass what he thought anymore…” The Gray Badger was still talking.

“I’m sorry, but can you tell me when the first day of summer was this year?” I asked.

“First day of summer, first day of summer,” she muttered, tapping her temple with her gloved hand. “Oh, wait. We can check the calendar.” She pulled a small leather backpack to the front of her.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve got my phone.”

“Hold this, dear,” she said, ignoring me as she passed me two lipsticks, a packet of tissue, and a coupon book to hold while she dug around in the well of the bag. “Ah, here we are.” She pulled out a booklet calendar and riffled through the pages. “There, June twenty-first. Of course. Summer solstice. I remember now. We had a lovely ceremony, just me and the girls you understand, out on Brenda’s property up in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Built a big fire, danced around naked, gave blessings to the Goddess Gaia. At least, I think it was Gaia. Anyway, wonderful night. Not like the old days though, when we were all couples. That was a time. Are you all right?”

I had to sit down. My heart felt like it was going to beat right out of my chest. I thanked her and sat on the bench facing the fountain. Two small children were running around it, swiping their hands through the streams, laughing, flinging handfuls of water at each other. I tried to piece everything together.

Okay, I told myself, you can figure this out. The first day of summer was June 21. The SVWEABC meeting was…when? I woke up my phone again and checked the blog. June 20. So Hugo brought me
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
out of the Dragonfly the night before, the nineteenth. How many days before the first day of summer did Henry leave the note? Four? Five? A week? Had Catherine had enough time to see it before Hugo brought it to me? What is enough? And if not?

“For fuck’s sake, why couldn’t they do Match.com like normal people,” I said a little too loudly. The kids playing in the fountain stopped and stared at me. “Yes,” I said to them. “I’m a bad woman who ruins people’s lives and curses in public.” I waited for the maternal units to swoop down on me, but they seemed too busy gossiping on a blanket nearby.

I had to put
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
back where Hugo had found it that night. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe Catherine came to the store every day hoping the book would reappear. I tried to remember the Dragonfly customers from before its renaissance. There hadn’t been that many. It shouldn’t be hard. Was there a woman who came in a lot? Hugo would remember. I had to talk to him. And for heaven’s sake, I had to take down the website. I had to take down everything. I thought of those notes—those dear, tender notes—I’d broadcast to the entire world.

I jumped up, ready to grab my things, but then I saw Rajhit walking toward me. Rajhit. He would help. I wasn’t on my own. Rajhit would help. He saw my face and walked faster over to the bench.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, his hands on my arms, guiding me to sit back down. I felt like he was holding all my parts from spilling out.

“I have to go back to the Dragonfly,” I said. My hand grabbed at the front of his shirt.

“Sure,” he said, but not moving, his face more worried. “Tell me what’s wrong first. Are you okay? Did something happen?”

“I have to put the book back,” I said. “I have to talk to Hugo.”

“He’s not there,” Rajhit said. “I ran into him as I passed by the store. Said he had an appointment. Maggie, please, tell me what’s wrong.”

“Henry and Catherine,” I said. “They’re real. I mean they’re here. Today. Those notes weren’t from 1961. They were from this year. Just a few weeks ago. They’re out there. And I don’t know if she saw it. His last note. What if she didn’t? What if she just thinks he abandoned her? I cannot believe this is happening. What did I do?”

His hands loosened around my arms, and I watched his face as his next breath came much harder than the one before. Why wasn’t he more surprised? He just looked so sad. And in that moment, I knew everything was worse than I thought.

“How do you know?” he asked.

I stood and took him to the plaque on the fountain.

“We have to go,” I said, pulling at his arm, but he stood still, holding on to my hand to keep me with him.

“Maggie, wait,” he said, not looking up at me.

There was something in the vacant way he held my hand that made me stop. And when I turned to look at him, I knew I was in the moment right before everything was going to change.

“I’m Henry,” he said.

He looked up at me, holding my hand in both of his while I felt the blood in my body scatter, not knowing which way to go. The moment hung in the air like a paper airplane that had flown too high before resolving itself to gravity. He tugged on my arm to guide me back to the bench. All the park sounds around us disappeared.

“But I’m not Catherine,” I said, trying to fit all of the new values into the same old equation.

“I thought you were,” he said. “That night in the backyard with the cigars. The book had disappeared, Catherine never showed up at the fountain. And then there you were, the day we were supposed to meet, with the book, and I thought,
She knows who I am
. But you didn’t say anything, so I asked you about the title.
Tenderness
. And you said exactly what she had said, and I thought,
Here she’s been this whole time
.”

My brain raked through scattered bits of memory. That night with the cigars, the Laundromat, the party at Hugo’s. There had to be something there, something that I could show him.
See, this is why you should have known I wasn’t Catherine. This is why you shouldn’t have…just shouldn’t have.