There was a sad landmark on every block of that town:
The bench they’d sat on, watching the other students walk by—backpacks, short skirts, iPods. The tree they’d stood under in a downpour, laughing, kissing, chewing cinnamon gum. There was the bookstore where he’d bought the collection of poems by Pablo Neruda for her, and the awful college sports bar where they’d first held hands. It was called something else now, but from outside it looked the same. There were the pretend Greek columns that pretended to hold up the roof of the Llewellyn Roper Library, and Grimoire Gifts, where he’d bought the amber ring for her—set in silver, a globe of ancient sap with a little prehistoric fruit fly trapped in it forever.
And the Starbucks where they went to study night after night and never opened a book.
Craig’s father, beside him, said, “Son, slow down,” and Craig said, “Sorry, Dad.” His father had been blind for years now, and one of his worst fears was getting into an accident he couldn’t see coming.
Craig just wished his father could see it with him. The beauty of it was the strangeness, the familiarity. The girls in their short skirts. The guys with their weird hair.
“You won’t recognize the place,” Debbie had said. She still lived there, worked at the university hospital. She’d become a doctor, and over the years had remained Craig’s best cyber-friend. They emailed every week, although they’d seen each other only a handful of times in the last decade, when they’d met up in various places they happened to be flying through. Her husband was a doctor, too. Back in New Hampshire, Craig had a wife and two kids and a little house that backed up to a little mountain. He’d built his father a small, solid cabin on the property.
“Just stay away, Craig. I mean, I’d love to see you. But you have no idea. It’ll freak you out—not because you’ll remember it, but because you won’t.”
Craig had a family now. He’d written a book, published it. He’d traveled the world promoting the book, and had never come back here.
Now he was back.
And Debbie had been wrong.
He remembered it all. Not a thing had changed. He could have been blind like his father, or closed his eyes, and found his way to Godwin Honors Hall, or to the apartment he’d shared with Perry.
He’d open the door, and there Perry would be, book open on the table beside a sandwich. Perry wouldn’t bother to look up. “Hey, man,” he’d say. And Craig, older and astonished, would just stand in the doorway and stare, grateful and terrified at the same time to find Perry still there, still alive.
He drove more slowly now, rubbed his eyes, so he could look around. He was looking for Perry, Craig realized, but on every corner, it seemed, a girl was crossing the street with her arm hooked into a boy’s, and the sidewalks were shining and the sky was the same pale nothingness it had always been that time of year, and the old man who had become his father was coughing into a Kleenex, and Craig, forgetting that his father couldn’t see, said, “Look,” as yet another beauty crossed in front of their car, listening to something on her earphones, mouthing the words to herself.
The motor of the car hummed around them, and Craig’s father continued to cough—and there she was, that beauty, flipping her hair over her shoulder, glancing at Craig, making eye contact briefly, and then looking away.