Page 96 of In What World

And So Are Priscilla and Marlowe.

“We can’t write our names!” she says.

“Of course we can,” I assure her. “I send this place lots of money. They just approved my request to name the theater the Dallas Winthrop Auditorium. They can handle five inches of permanent marker on the bottom brick beside a bed of flowers.”

I take my phone out of my back pocket and snap a picture.

“Get in,” I say, gesturing for Marlowe to join the next one. She throws up a peace sign, and it makes me laugh so hard I almost start choking.

“Excuse me, ladies. Are you causing trouble?”

The voice wipes the smile off my face. He’s behind me, in Marlowe’s view, and I don’t need to turn to know who it is.

“You’re…here,” Marlowe says, rushing forward to tackle him in a hug.

Dallas Winthrop has returned.

“You look lovely, dear,” he says, coming over to kiss me on the cheek. “Don’t think I got to tell you that when I saw you back in ’95. But you two are the first sights I’m seeing after getting out of the Memory Machine. What luck I have to find you here, my dearest and my darling.”

He’s warming up the runway for our usual airplane of compliments and kindness to take flight. Cilla Cove would have taken that path willingly. But Cilla Cove isn’t here anymore.

“All my life, the people I love have abandoned me. But not you. Never you.” My words are warbly, same as my hands. Nothing comes out half as composed as I wish, but I have to get it out. I can’t bury this and pretend everything’s fine. Not anymore. “I trusted that you’d never do that. But then you roped me into this. You made me the last person you spoke to before you disappeared. I thought maybe you were sending me a message or something. I came here for the first time in sixteen years to find you. Never did I think it would be because you left voluntarily.”

“Iwassending you a message,” he insists. “Not to come find me, but to walk into a different life. You forget that for all the years you’ve known me, I’ve been teaching you. It’s a different kind of lens, that of a mentor. You see people through enough seasons, and you start to recognize when the leaves aren’t changing the same way they used to. You’d forgotten yourself, and I thought that me sharing my excitement with you might remind you to find it again inside you, too. That you could start again.”

“Why’d you have to say it like that? Of all the times to use your little riddles!” Marlowe argues on my behalf. It’s not anangry delivery. She plays it for the joke, and it blunts the edges of my anger.

“I know,” Dallas admits. “I was trying to fix the wrong things. I was a mess. I still am. But seeing you two had more of an impact than you know. I never thought I’d live to see the day when you two realized what you are to each other. You planted a seed of hope in me I didn’t know I could have anymore.”

“Well, you missed a hell of a show,” Marlowe tells him. “I played your part to great success. Critics are calling it the best non-Dallas adult actor in a high school production they’ve ever seen.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t come back sooner,” he says. “There’s no excusing it. But I can only hope you’ll find forgiveness in your heart for me the same way you’ve found it for each other.”

He’s got me. And he knows he’s got me. But I still hold out.

The art of expectation.

“If you hold too tightly to the pain of your past, you’ll miss out on all the amazing things waiting for you in the future,” he says. “Someone very wise told me that.”

“Verywise,” I confirm.

“I want to find that future now,” he says. “I want to see what this old life can be like for me without hiding behind teaching or obsessing over the Memory Machine. I want to know myself in the present tense, not cling to my pain in hopes it will finally start to love me back. I know I can’t have my Teddy. I have to be okay with missing him so much I know I’ll never be whole, but not so much that I’m running on empty.”

“God damn it,” I say, giving him the biggest hug I have to offer. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he tells me.

Marlowe joins us.

As all three of us hold one another, I draw us in the shapeof a triangle in my mind. The three of us have always moved that way. But even the most fixed points can move. Nothing is permanent.

We can change this shape whenever we want. The best I can hope for is that we will change together.

Three MonthsLater

37

Marlowe