Chapter 11

The café is busier than when she was here with Lucretia, but they’re able to get a spot along the far wall, away from the register. For the tenth time since leaving Chafee Garden, Saoirse asks herself what on earth she is doing, but she hangs her coat over the chair and takes a seat.

Emmit rubs his hands together. “I’m going with something hot. How about you, Saoirse White, what’s your pick of nonalcoholic poison?”

The waitress appears, and Saoirse orders a hot chai with oat milk.

“Size?”

“Large,” Emmit cuts in before Saoirse can respond. “I’ll have the same.”

The waitress nods. “Is that all, Mr. Powell?”

“For now. Thanks, Jess.”

The waitress flushes, smiles, and hurries away.

Saoirse refrains from commenting on the way he completed her order. If he thinks having a greater amount of tea in her cup will keep her sitting across from him longer, he’s mistaken. She’ll leave when she wants to. She has no intention of seeing this man—talented writer or not—after today.

“So, Saoirse,” Emmit starts. “That’s not a name you hear every day. Are you Scottish?”

“Irish. My father was born there. It was his grandmother’s name, and my mother took a liking to it.”

“Have you been to Ireland?”

“Once, when I was a teenager. It was a family trip. The last before my parents’ divorce.” She isn’t sure why her words come out so easily, but she’d forgotten how enjoyable it could be to converse with another person without putting up walls, without going out of her way to avoid certain topics, her certainty that this relationship is casual and transient giving her the freedom to say whatever she wishes.

“I’m sorry to hear your parents are divorced.”

“It was for the best.” The waitress reappears, places two steaming mugs on the table, and flashes another timid smile at Emmit, but he doesn’t look at her. “What about you?” Saoirse continues. “Do you have a good relationship with your parents?”

Even as she poses the question, she’s trying to remember if there was anything in Emmit’s explosive debut novel that hinted at a writer intimately familiar with warring parents or a turbulent childhood. She read it when it first came out, and while she knows it featured a main character with skeletons in his closet, she couldn’t remember if those skeletons eventually came out and danced, tempting the reader to flirt with the idea that their genesis was autobiographical in nature.

“My father ran out on my mother, brother, sister, and me when I was a year old. My sister was a newborn. My mother died a year later, and I was raised by my aunt and uncle in Virginia.”

Saoirse wishes her tea wasn’t so hot; she doesn’t know what to do with her hands. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “How awful.” Had she ever read anything about his upbringing? She doesn’t think so.

Emmit shrugs. “I got to travel a lot. I lived in London for a year. My uncle and I only had one major disagreement in seventeen years, while I was an undergrad at Johns Hopkins. I wanted to drop out to pursue writing, and my uncle insisted I stayed. We laugh about it now, but at the time, I was certain he was condemning my creativity to an early grave. I became suitably melancholy, of course, as any dramatic, literary type is wont to do. I spent the entirety of my senior year in black, reading nothing but Dickinson, Blake, and Plath.”

Saoirse raises an eyebrow. “You? A Goth English major quoting tortured poets from the back of the lecture hall?” She chances a small sip of tea then nods at his crisp button-down shirt and well-tailored sport jacket. “I can hardly picture it.”

Emmit lowers his head, pushes his chair back slightly from the table, and leans forward. From beneath hooded eyes and long lashes, he recites:

“Gaunt in gloom

The pale stars their torches,

Enshrouded, wave.

Ghost-fires from heaven’s far verges faint illume—

Arches on soaring arches—

Night’s sin-dark nave.”

He sits up straight, scoots his chair back in, and smiles like the impromptu recitation never happened. “What can I say?” he says. “He might not’ve been tortured, but James Joyce could pen a bleak verse with the best of ’em.”

Saoirse has the unexpected thought that the old her, the one who never married, who never met Jonathan, would have laughed off this strange performance. This Saoirse, however, is mesmerized. She studies the man across the table. There is something about him. For a professor, a professional writer, he is so ... what? Unrestrained comes to mind. So does unconventional. Free-spirited and easygoing are too trite. Whatever it is, the effect is one that renders him almost aggressively interesting. Most people who try to be different fail miserably, or else come across as shameless impostors. Emmit Powell is the real deal. But what is his deal? Saoirse can’t be sure. All she can settle on, for now, is that Emmit is not just unlike anyone she’s ever met, he’s unlike anyone she’s ever comprehended.

“Of the three you mentioned,” Saoirse says, forcing an air of casualness, “I’m partial to Dickinson. I like how she balances her interest in death with an exploration of nature. Of light. Death certainly was one of her favorite subjects, but it never slipped into preoccupation.”

“I beg to differ,” Emmit says and sips his chai. “Respectfully, of course. I think she forced herself to tackle bumblebees and metaphorical mermaids because she knew death was everywhere. I mean, death is everywhere.” His tone isn’t flippant. It’s sad and awestruck and full of deadly solemnity. “It’s a wonder any writer anywhere ever writes about anything else.”

Saoirse freezes at this declaration, knows that the shock at hearing her own private thoughts spoken out loud, at being seen by this stranger, is written all over her face. She tries to loosen her muscles, to arrange her features into some mixture of amusement and apathy, but it’s too late. Emmit is staring at her with maddeningly genuine concern.

“Why do you look like you’ve seen a ghost?”

“It’s just that—” Is she really going to say this out loud? Unburden yourself, a voice in her head says. It could be Jonathan, setting her up to make a fool of herself, but maybe not. Maybe it’s her own tired mind, jumping at the chance to connect. “I’ve had this same thought every day since my husband died nine and a half months ago.” She takes a shaky breath. “I’m the one who found him. It’s why I haven’t been able to write for that same amount of time.”

Emmit opens his mouth, but Saoirse cuts him off. “No, that’s a lie. It’s been longer that I haven’t been able to write, but not for the same reason. Not exactly. Before my husband died, I was dead. How the hell was I supposed to write about relationships or the complexities of the world or the limits of possibility when I saw Death in the mirror every day for months before I saw him in the lifeless face of my husband?” Before Emmit can ask the next logical question— Why did you feel this way? —Saoirse adds, “Please don’t ask why. It’s too much to get into in a crowded café.”

“I won’t,” Emmit says. “But, more to the point, you’re not.”

“I’m sorry?”

“No, I’m sorry. About your husband. And I’m so sorry you’re the one who found him. But you’re not supposed to write about anything else. Not in the wake of something like that. That’s why you’ve been blocked. Because you’ve refused to allow yourself to write about the one thing your mind’s been screaming for. It’s like denying yourself water. No, that’s not acute enough. It’s like denying yourself air. And I’m not being hyperbolic. You’re suffocating. Believe me, I know.” He pauses, takes a sip of tea, looks forlornly out the window. “I’ve been suffocating too.”

He says this last part so softly, Saoirse has to lean forward to hear him. “ You have writer’s block? The great Emmit Powell?” As soon as she speaks the words, the first of their conversation that have been anything but naked and honest, she winces at the rift the sarcasm causes. Emmit visibly pulls away from her, pressing himself against the back of his chair and turning his upper body toward the wall. His eyebrows furrow and his mouth turns down, making the melancholic amalgamation of his features decidedly more pronounced. Saoirse’s not sure how he comes across as attractive as he does; it’s like the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts.

She surprises herself by laying a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry. You’ve been nothing but open with me since we sat down. I shouldn’t have been so dismissive.” She catches the waitress’s eye, and when the woman walks over, asks if they could have a couple of glasses of water. It’s too warm in the coffee shop; Saoirse wishes there was a window nearby they could crack.

They sit in silence while they wait for the waters, and after the waitress brings them, Saoirse forces Emmit to look her in the eyes. “Let me try that again,” she says. Weird that she’s apologizing for not being intimate enough with him, this man she’s just met. “I think your theory has merit. I wrote last night for the first time since Jonathan—he was my husband—passed. And the subject matter was dark. Really dark. I think it’s safe to say that, while abstract, the poem was certainly about death. So, I’ll turn the question to you. With earnestness. What essential thing are you denying yourself that’s causing the block, and, I suppose more importantly, why?”

Unexpectedly, Emmit blushes. “Have you ever known something was going to happen before it did?” he asks.

“Like a premonition?” She feels the spiders again, the ones that love to scuttle up her back whenever she feels nervous. “I suppose.”

“I’m not talking about something small, like grabbing an umbrella on a sunny day when there’s no rain in the forecast only to get caught in a downpour. I’m talking, you intuited something momentous, something soul-crushingly significant, before it happened, and both the event itself and the knowing of it beforehand simultaneously changed your life?”

Saoirse doesn’t like the question. Not because something like this hasn’t happened to her, but because it has. It’s just not something that she can share, no matter how forthright she’s been with Emmit up until now. “For conversation’s sake, let’s say I have,” she responds.

“What if I told you that this happens to me all the time?”

Saoirse scrunches up her mouth. “How often do ‘soul-crushingly significant’ events happen to you?”

“I’m the Goth English major quoting Joyce from the back of the lecture hall, remember?” he says, and smiles. “I’ve got a tendency to lean toward the dramatic.”

Saoirse didn’t know she missed his smile until she sees it again. She’s happy he’s opening up to her, but she can’t help but enjoy the pleasant, charming Emmit better. Both versions are intense, but this deeply philosophical one is almost unendurable, like lying on the launchpad for a fireworks display or viewing a famous painting through a magnifying glass. The emotions that her medications fill in and shave down in equal measure are now jagged peaks and dizzying valleys inside her.

“Okay,” Saoirse says, “so you’re good at listening to your gut, is that what you’re telling me?”

“It’s more than that. For example, with Vulture Eyes ,” he says, naming his debut novel, “I didn’t know what I was going to write about—mainly, a man who’s tortured by the things he’s done in his past in order to get ahead—right up until the moment I started the book. Not just the plot, but the characters, the themes, they came to me in—and I know it’s inexcusably cliché—but in a flash, like a gift from a benevolent god. Like a goddamn vision.”

Their conversation has reclaimed its earlier rhythm, so she’s taking a chance when she says, “But couldn’t that be said of a lot of writers? Maybe you’re someone to whom inspiration comes fast and furious, and you have the talent and motivation to act on that inspiration quickly.”

He shakes his head, frustrated. “That wasn’t the right example.” He sighs and stares into his drink. When he raises his eyes to meet hers, his expression has changed. It’s the look again, the one from the Athen?um. The one that says he knows every thought she’s ever had, every secret. Saoirse resists the urge to squirm out from under that penetrating glare, to stand up and run out of the coffee shop.

To say he’s making her nervous is an understatement. She wants to shrug into her jacket, to cover every inch of herself. She wants to stitch up her lips with a darning needle and heavy thread so he can never elicit another admission from her, to pluck out her eyes so he cannot read her thoughts in the movement of her lids and the dilation of her pupils. At the same time, she wants to stare into the deep pools of his dark-brown eyes for an eternity.

“Today, at the career fair,” Emmit says. “I wasn’t lying when I said that I thought you were stalking me. But, watching you walk along the garden paths, considering each table, making the decision to speak with someone or move on, occasionally taking the time to finger the petals of a beautiful flower, more tempted by present beauty than future prospects, I knew I’d been wrong about something. Like I said, I’ve been blocked. Ever since Vulture Eyes . And I owe my publisher the next book. They outbid everyone to work with me again, and I’ve already requested two extensions on my deadline, and I’m close to having to ask for a third. It’s a terrifying, helpless, hopeless place to be in. But lately, I’ve had the feeling the block was nearing its end. That any day now, I’d be struck with another Great Idea.

“‘Something is coming,’ a voice in my head told me,” Emmit continues. “No, not a voice. That’s too orderly. This was nowhere near that buttoned-up of an experience. This was like a drug that, once in my veins, shot to my brain and exploded over every inch of my body. I waited for whatever was going to happen. And waited. First patiently. Then desperately. And finally, despairingly. This morning, I threw a coffee cup across the room. It shattered against a bookcase. I cried myself ragged in the shower. After that, I dressed and resigned myself to returning to the brainstorming process for the new, nonexistent novel. ‘I was wrong about the feeling,’ I told myself. And that was that.”

Emmit looks at her expectantly. Saoirse goes over every turn of the story he’s just told her, but she’s not sure which admission he’s expecting her to comment on. When several more seconds pass, and he still doesn’t say anything, Saoirse says, “I don’t understand. Wasn’t this supposed to be a better example of your uncanny intuition?”

Emmit smiles, and this time, Saoirse sees the specter from her basement the night before, sees Emmit’s features rearrange themselves like jumping fish, his flesh stretch and reform, psychic energy doing its best interpretation of a living, breathing man. She shakes the image away.

“It is the better example,” Emmit says. He places his hands on the table and leans forward. “I wasn’t wrong. Something was coming. It just wasn’t the next Great Idea, like I’d thought.”

A fly buzzes past Saoirse’s right ear. A moment later, she feels one crawling along the collar of her shirt. Using every ounce of self-control she possesses, she refrains from swatting the air, from slapping at her skin. “What was coming, Emmit?” she asks. Her voice is low, hardly more than a whisper. “What momentous, soul-crushingly significant thing?”

There are people in the coffee shop, but their voices have fallen away. The clang of spoons against teacups, an espresso machine whirring to life, a barista calling out an order—they are nothing more than the far-off whoosh of a passing train.

Emmit’s smile widens. She didn’t notice before, but his teeth are very, very white.

“It was you, of course, Saoirse,” he says. “ You are the momentous, once-in-a-lifetime thing.”