But another intern—Amanda, their hardest worker of the summer, one who’d actually helped to cover for Finn while he was in Sunny Isles—brightened. “Craigslist’s Missed Connections, he means! That’s brilliant.”
Finn hated these moments when he felt out of touch. Surely he wasn’t that old, was he? He still stayed up all night sketching some weekends, drinking Red Bull and smoking pot. He always went to the MidPoint Music Festival, and knew all—well, most—of the must-see bands. He didn’t tuck in his shirts. “Never heard of it,” he admitted.
The students talked over one another in their excitement to explain the wonders of the Missed Connections page, as if they’d stumbled upon a senior citizen who had never heard of Facebook. (Not that Finn was on Facebook—the whole principle appealed a lot less once you’d hit the find-out-who-your-friends-are crossroads of being orphaned—but he knew what it was.) The idea of placing a personal ad of sorts for a person you’d missed sounded simple enough. They recounted the legendary posts that occasionally went viral for their cluelessness or their poetry.
“Have you ever answered one?” he asked the group.
A chorus of nos was punctuated by an “I wish!” Blood rushed to Amanda’s cheeks.
“So people actually read these things?”
The students looked around at one another and sort of collectively shrugged.
“Right.” This time, he went ahead and rolled his eyes.
“What do you have to lose, though?” It was Amanda again, smiling hopefully.
“Dude, if no one answers, so what? You don’t, like, post it under your full name. No one has to know it’s you. Besides, you got a better idea?”
Finn did not. Still, he waited a few days, until the students were all back on campuses far-flung across the state, in hopes that they’d forgotten about the conversation thoroughly enough to not get curious and check the Cincinnati Craigslist Missed Connections page. The last thing he needed was these kids passing the post around to their roommates, laughing at how pathetic he was, boasting about how he hadn’t even known what the page was until they’d told him. Finn believed in … well, not karma, exactly, but vibes. Good ones. He wanted the universe on his side.
Finally, on a night when the rain pelted his windows in sheets and his beer tasted like liquid courage, Finn sat down at his computer and drafted a post.
You on the beach in the Camp Pickiwicki shirt: If you’re reading this, the third coincidence is the charm. Care to pick up where fate left off? My name is Finn, by the way. It’s pretty obvious by now that I should have told you that.
If he had posted that, just as it was, everything would have turned out differently.
But he didn’t. And it didn’t.
Because as he was about to click the post through, something held him back. The words had sounded right in his head. They sounded like him. But maybe his voice wouldn’t come across on-screen. Maybe she’d think he was being flippant, more friendly than romantically interested, not as genuine as he felt. Maybe he should try to be a little more romantic, less open to interpretation. Besides, maybe those interns wouldn’t forget to check. They’d spot his name right away. So he wrote instead:
If you are an attractive young woman who recently returned from a vacation during which you had a conversation with a stranger that ended rather abruptly, through extenuating circumstances beyond your or his control, causing that stranger to seriously question his mental wherewithal not to have gotten your name the first chance he got, then you might be the woman I can’t stop thinking about, and I may be that stranger.
It wasn’t the most natural-sounding thing in the world, but at least it was clear that he was being flirty, not interested in a brotherly sort of way.
He clicked Publish; he told himself there was no possible way that she would see it anyway. He went to bed.
For the next seventy-two hours, he checked his in-box obsessively, keeping his smartphone on full volume so that he’d be sure not to miss the chime announcing the arrival of what could be the e-mail he was waiting for. Nothing. Each time he saw that it was empty, his heart sank a little. Why did his hopes always manage to get up even when he tried not to let them? And then, on the fourth day, he awoke to find, to his complete amazement, a brief message sent through the anonymous Craigslist e-mail relay:
Okay, stranger, I’ll bite. Let’s see if I am your me and you are my you. Fountain Square, Saturday, 7:00?
5
AUGUST 2016
How many times had Violet sat or lay in Bear’s bed with her arms wrapped around him, her fingers tousling his hair, a book open on their laps, his fortress of stuffed animals walling them in on three sides? She pulled them all around her now as she curled up as tight as she could under his Thomas the Train comforter, squeezing her eyes shut against the unstoppable tears as she tried to conjure something of him. She missed his little boy smell, always a bit sweet and a bit sour. His tiny, infectious laugh. His slow breathing when he’d only just drifted off to sleep, so dramatic that she often suspected at first that he was faking. His soft singing along with the old-timey songs she liked to sing as lullabies, “Time After Time,” “All of Me,” “Moon River,” “Walkin’ After Midnight.” The faint tinkle of him calling “Mommy” from another room.