27.
“So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.”
—1923
I sit on the small couch in a tiny studio apartment directly above the gallery with the rain pouring down in what seems like a roar compared to the heavy, silent stillness between us inside. I feel like a trespasser, like being here in the tiny space that is obviously hers is an invasion. I try to make myself small, unintimidating, nonthreatening. I don’t want her to think I’m here to out her secret or reveal her if she doesn’t want to be. The quiet between us feels tenuous, and despite the harshness of her dyed dark hair and the heavy eyeliner that’s smudged from the rain, she looks fragile. Like this—me being here—could be enough to break her.
I’m careful with this moment because I want to be careful with her. She moves very deliberately in the small kitchen area—filling a teakettle, setting it on the burner. Avoiding my gaze. I try to reassure her by avoiding hers, too. My eyes trail over the details of her life here—not as Julianna Farnetti, but as Hope, artist who would prefer to remain anonymous. There are canvases in various stages of completion leaned in stacks against the wall facing the couch. An easel. A table near the window, and on it, a single white flower in a cobalt glass vase. On the nightstand next to the bed is a white candle burned down low, and a sketchbook. All objects that add up to a simple life.
From what I can see, it’s also a lonely life. There are no pictures in frames, no postcards on the refrigerator. No evidence that her existence here and now is anything but solitary. I think of Orion in his café, alone, hiding behind walls of work and art, and it strikes me—the sad, poetic kind of symmetry of each of them without the other. The thought of it is enough to give me the resolve not to leave here without trying to set it right. Because I feel like I’m seeing one of the most tragic things in the world—when two people step away from the paths they’re traveling, and those paths go on to cross later, without them. They crossed again the day I found her journal, leaving me as the point of intersection, and I made a choice to try and bring them back together.
The whistle of the teakettle draws my eyes back to the kitchen where Julianna sets two mugs on the counter and pours steaming water into them. She drops a tea bag into each one, and pauses a moment before picking them up. Then she squares her small shoulders, carries both mugs to the sofa where I’m sitting, and sits opposite me, one leg folded beneath her.
I should say something, I know, but I have no voice. We pick up our cups, quiet, like we’re both trying to find the words to begin. Watching each other. She’s not anything like how I pictured, but she’s stunning just the same. Her high cheekbones are more apparent, the green of her eyes deeper than any of the pictures I’ve seen. Her hair is damp from the rain and hangs wavy and dark over her slight shoulders, which makes the streak of blond in the front leap out. In the open V of her tank top I can see a delicate, necklacelike tattoo over her collarbone. She reaches up to tuck the blond behind her ear with a ringed hand, and I catch a glimpse of a tiny bird inked onto her wrist. It reminds me of Orion with all of his tattoos, and I wonder if maybe they both found some sense of solace in having them done—another parallel they don’t even know about.
I take a sip from my cup and glance at her journal sitting on the coffee table between us. When we’d come into her apartment, she’d set it there and retreated to the kitchen like it was something that could hurt her, which I suppose it is. There’s so much contained in its pages. A whole life she disappeared from. The girl she used to be. A love she left behind. She looks at it now too, and though there are so many things I want to ask her, this moment feels fragile, and so I choose my words carefully.
I clear my throat. “It was in a box I was going through for Mr. Kinney. His senior journal project from ten years ago. From your class. I’m his TA. I was getting them ready to send out.” I take a deep breath and look down into my tea, dreading what I have to say next. “When I got to your name, I was . . . I didn’t know where to send it, and . . .”
In all the times I’d thought of finding her, I’d never anticipated how excruciatingly hard it would be to confess that I’d read her journal—words that were supposed to be hers alone, not meant for anyone else to see. It felt like a terrible trespass at the time, but now it feels far, far worse. Like something that can’t ever be taken back, or forgiven even.
The silence stretches tight between us, and I can feel her waiting for me to break it. “Um, I took it. And then . . .” The three words are heavy in my chest, and I have to force them out. “I read it.”
She takes a breath now, the kind you take in to keep from crying out when something hurts. The sound of it sends guilt coursing through every inch of me.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, looking down. “I never thought there was any possibility that you could still be . . . that you were even alive. I mean, there’s a billboard at the edge of town with your picture on it, and a memorial at Summit Lake, and there’s a scholarship at school that I was supposed to write a speech for, and . . .” I shake my head. “I know I shouldn’t have read it.”
I look back up at her, pleading with my eyes, and try to make her understand with my words. “I was seven when you disappeared, and I remember it like my grandma remembers when JFK got shot, or the way my parents remember that space shuttle exploding. Just like that, I remember how you disappeared, and how everyone went out into the storm looking for you. The whole town remembers.”
I pause, hoping my words aren’t making her feel guilty. I’m trying to keep myself from feeling guilty. “And so when I found your journal, with your words in it, I read it.” I pause and chance a look at Julianna. “I wanted to know who you really were.”
She laughs in a forced way that doesn’t have a trace of happiness to it. “I didn’t know who I was then. When I was writing all of that.” She looks at the journal like she remembers exactly what’s in it. It’s the first time I’ve heard her voice, and it’s so full of sadness I feel a lump in my own throat.
I swallow hard over it. “It seemed like you were just finding out,” I say, timidly. She nods, but I can tell she’s far away right then. Back there, maybe. Maybe thinking about Orion, wondering how it could’ve been different. I want so badly to tell her everything, all in one breath, but I hold it back. It seems important that I let her lead.
Finally, after what seems like forever, she speaks again. This time, she tries to keep her voice calm, but her eyes are full of fear. “How did you find me?”
This is the big moment. This is exactly the question I want to answer, because it’s why I’m here. Orion is why I’m here. The two of them being brought back together is why I’m here.
“Your painting,” I say. “Acquainted with the Night. It’s hanging on the wall of a café back home.” Her eyebrows rise in surprise. I nod. “I know. It seems crazy. That one of your paintings somehow ended up back there.” If she thinks it is, she doesn’t say so. And I realize, as I’m about to go on, that that’s not nearly the craziest thing I’m going to tell her.
“I recognized the spiral of the signature from the pages of your journal. You started putting it on them after . . .” We both glance at the composition book on the coffee table and she nods like she knows what I mean without me having to say it. She raises her cup to her lips, and I take a chance. I say it anyway. “After the day you wrote about Orion’s tattoo.”
She freezes at the sound of his name, and I can’t tiptoe around it anymore. I clear my throat. Again.
“It’s his café that your painting is hanging in. His café called Kismet, which is so perfect because it means fated. And he doesn’t even know. He has no idea it’s yours, but I saw it, and I knew.” The words spill out fast, landing haphazardly. Julianna’s not looking at me anymore. I keep going.
“He doesn’t go by Orion anymore, and he barely talks to anyone. He’s been there ever since you—since you disappeared. But he’s kind of a ghost, too. He came back to help look for you, and he’s been there ever since, and after I read your journal and figured out he was who he was, I asked him about you.” Now she looks at me, and when she does, I see something in her eyes besides sadness and regret. She’s gone white, and the teacup, still at her lips, begins to tremble.
I reach out and take it gently from her. Her hands fall to her lap, but she keeps her eyes on mine. “He doesn’t know,” I say quickly. “He doesn’t know you’re here, or that I came to find you, or any of it. I didn’t want to get his hopes up until I knew for sure because—” I stop, realizing that I was wrong seconds ago, thinking it was the big moment. It’s now. It’s what I’m about to say.
“Because?” she whispers.
“Because he still loves you. He’s never gotten over you. He went back hoping to find you, and he’s been there ever since, and he’s sad. He’s alone, and sad, because he’s loved a ghost for the last ten years.”
She lets out a breath and looks down at her hands in her lap. They’re paint speckled, just like she wrote about his being, and I want to point it out to her, how perfect that one thing is. She’s crying now, and I’m sure they’re happy tears, because after what she wrote, and after finding her living the same kind of sad, lonely life, she has a second chance. I’ve just handed it to her.
“It’s why I came,” I say. “So you would know, and you could come back, and the two of you can be together, because you’re supposed to be. There’s no other reason why it would’ve worked out like this. There are so many pieces that came together just perfectly, and I didn’t think these things actually happened in real life, but they do, and I found you, and now you can go back.”
I stop, out of breath.
And here we are, in the moment I’ve pictured since I saw the painting and realized it was hers. This is where she jumps up, tears of joy streaking her face, and says “Let’s go back.” This is where we leave her apartment without bothering to turn the lights off or blow out the candle because she can only think of getting back to Orion. And this is where we drive through the night and the rain, and we end up in Summit Lakes just as the sun is rising over the razor peaks, splashing warmth and rosy light into the cold granite. This is where the background music rises and swells and we get to Kismet just as Orion is unlocking the door. And he sees her. And she sees him. And it’s perfect. I’m so happy, and so caught up in imagining it all that it takes me a moment to notice.
Julianna’s shoulders are shaking, and the tears that are now rolling down her face don’t look like happy tears. As soon as she brings her green eyes to mine, I see hurt, maybe even anger.
The picture in my mind breaks apart and clatters to the floor of her lonely apartment. “You never should have come here,” she says through tears.
I don’t believe her. And it makes me want to cry because I don’t understand. I don’t understand at all. I try to explain it better. Maybe I got too carried away. “Of course I should’ve come. Don’t you see? The two of you had something—had that thing that everyone hopes for, and then you lost it, but now you have another chance, and . . .” It’s not working, I can tell, but I keep going, pleading now. “You can go back, and he’ll be there, and I know he’ll still feel the same way about you, I know it. It’s not too late. It can still be . . .”
I can tell by the look on her face she doesn’t think so. I don’t finish, and we fall silent. Even the rain outside fades into the silence while I wait for her to say something. And then finally, she does. “I can’t ever go back there.”
She leans in and takes my hands in hers, looks me in the eye, and speaks forcefully. “And nobody can ever know about me. Especially Orion.”
I pull my hands away. “What? WHY?” Now I’m angry. “Don’t you see?”
“Don’t you?” she fires back at me. “Shane died ten years ago, and it was my fault.” She pauses. Makes sure she’s still looking me in the eye for what’s next. “I ran away,” she says. “Like a coward. I let a whole town think I was dead too. There’s no coming back from that.”
I don’t say anything. It’d been there, in me, this worry about what had happened to Shane. First I’d hoped that he had made it out too somehow, that maybe they’d agreed to go their separate ways, start new lives, fresh. But really, I knew that didn’t make any sense. I knew there was probably something else, and I’d pushed that thought away. I’d wanted to find Julianna more than anything, but I wanted to find her as I thought of her before. A perfect, beautiful mystery. And I thought I wanted to know what really happened that night. But now, the way she’s looking at me, I know I don’t. I don’t want her to tell me the rest, because I want her to be innocent.
I want her to stay golden.