The Look of Love: A Novel (23 page)

I walk home along First Avenue with an undeniable feeling of heaviness. As I step into a crosswalk, the loud crash of metal on metal jars me from the depths of my mind. I stop, heart racing, and look up to see two crushed cars only a few feet in front of me. Smoke billows from a blue SUV, which is crumpled, accordion-style, into the side of a white Volvo station wagon. The woman beside me lets out an ear-piercing scream. “Oh my God!” she says. “I’m calling 911.”

A middle-aged bald man in the Volvo springs from his car unscathed, though he’s clearly horrified by what we all see: the spray of bright red blood on the windshield of the SUV.

I run to the side door, where a woman lies unconscious in her seat. The man beside her, presumably her husband, is awake, moaning something unintelligible. I open the passenger-side door, and his eyes flutter. He sees me. “Please, help us.”

“Help is on the way,” I say. “Just hold on.”

“Is she hurt?” he cries. “My wife. Is she hurt?”

Blood drips from her nose, and I can’t tell if she’s breathing, but I don’t say that. “Yes,” I say. “But she’s going to be fine. Just be still. Try not to move.”

“We were fighting,” he says. “Before the crash. She told me she was through with me. I . . . I . . . I did a terrible thing. I broke her trust.”

“No, no,” I say. “Don’t think about that now. Please.”

“This is my punishment.”

“No, it’s not,” I say, looking over my shoulder, praying an ambulance is coming.

“She said she didn’t love me anymore,” he cries. “And it makes sense. After what I did, I don’t deserve her love.”

His wife sits lifeless in the seat beside him. Will the medics be able to resuscitate her? The faint sound of sirens is now in the distance, and I take a deep breath. “Help is coming. Just a few minutes more.” I think of Cam and Joanna. I think of the desperation he must have felt after her accident. Did they also have an unresolved fight? Do these memories still jar his heart? Is it her face he sees when he closes his eyes each night?

The ambulance pulls up beside us. I step aside as paramedics rush to the scene. I watch as they extricate the woman’s bloodied body from the vehicle and set her on a stretcher. The man, now in a neck brace, walks around and kneels beside his wife. “Please, honey, come back to me!” he screams. “I’m so sorry. So, so sorry.”

And in that moment, through tears, my vision clouds. I steady myself and approach the tragic scene before me.

“I’m sorry, sir,” a paramedic says. “We lost her.”

“No, no, no!” the man cries. “No, it can’t be. Try harder. Try again.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the paramedic says, standing up and stepping back. “I’ll leave you with her for a few minutes if you’d like. To say your good-byes.”

“Dana,” the man cries. “Dana, I’m so sorry. Honey, I love you. I love you. You are the only woman I have ever loved, the only woman I could ever love.” He looks up at me then, tearfully. “I didn’t tell her that enough. I did so many things wrong. And now it’s too late. She didn’t know how much I loved her. And how could she have loved me, after my betrayal?” He lays his head on her chest and weeps.

“She knew you loved her,” I say in a faltering voice.

The man lifts his head. “What do you mean? How do you know?”

I kneel beside him. “Just take heart in knowing that she loved you, up until the end. And she felt your love, just as you feel hers. Keep that with you always; let it overshadow the pain. Love is bigger. And the two of you had it.”

He lays his head back on his wife’s chest, and I turn to the sidewalk, providing space for the moment he needs. For his good-bye.

I think of Mary’s observations about beginnings and endings as I walk back to the market. Cam’s ending with Joanna might have broken his heart, but I pray that there’s still room for a new beginning. With me.

“Well, don’t you look fancy tonight,” Bernard says as I step off the elevator. I’ve had a few hours to rest, shower, and decompress after the dramatic scene downtown.

“Cam’s taking me to Canlis for dinner,” I reply, eyeing my black dress in the large wall mirror.

“Lucky you,” he says. “I took my wife there on our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. It’s a special place.”

I’ve learned to be cautious, when going to restaurants, especially nice, special-occasion restaurants where love is prone to lurk, sometimes in every square inch.

I see Cam’s BMW pull up outside, and he waves as he jumps out, dressed in his tailored suit and skinny tie. Time feels frozen as I watch him fiddling with his windshield wiper. A simple, everyday gesture. A moment that stands in stark contrast to the accident I witnessed earlier. And it gives me peace, somehow.
Cam
gives me peace.

Bernard grins at me. “You look stunned, like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“That’s Cam,” I say, collecting myself.

“Have you ever heard that old quotation?” Bernard continues, “True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.”

“True love, huh?” I force a grin as I walk to the door.

We’re seated side by side at Canlis, on an upholstered bench seat, which provides a complete view of Lake Union. I watch as a sailboat glides across the water and wonder about its passengers. A couple? A family? Two old friends shooting the breeze?

Our waiter pours the wine, then leaves us alone. I turn to Cam. “I’ve always wished I had some way to disguise my gift.”

He grins. “Cloak-and-dagger?”

“Yeah, some way to throw a trench coat and glasses on and not have to face what I see, or just have the freedom to see what I want without the constant worry of an episode happening.”

“I’ll talk to my neuroscientist friends,” he says playfully, “and see if we can design a pair of specially patented sunglasses.”

I laugh, then drift back to a thoughtful state. I tell him about the accident earlier today.

He looks out to the lake beyond the window. “I know what it feels like to watch someone you love slip away.”

“I know.” I reach for his hand under the table. “And I thought of you today in that moment. I thought of your loss and, well, how moved I am that after all of that, you’re willing to begin again.”

He turns to me, and his eyes search mine for a long moment. I feel a flutter deep inside. “I am, Jane.” He smiles. “And I have this vision for a new beginning, for a new life. I lie awake at night thinking about it. About us.”

“Us,” I say, grinning. “We’re an ‘us.’”

“We’re an ‘us,’” he repeats, grinning back. “Tell me what you want, Jane. Tell me your vision for the future.”

“What do you mean, exactly?”

“I mean, do you want a house, kids, a flower garden in the backyard? Do you want travel and adventure? Do you want security, to have and to hold, till death do us part, and all of that?”

“That’s a huge question.”

“It’s an important one,” he replies. “I want to know everything I can about you.”

I let my eyes search his for a long moment. “Tell me first.”

He nods and takes my other hand in his. “I want to play and laugh and fight. And have great make-up sex. I want to dream and grow and travel, but always come back to the same walls, the same person. I want to hear my children’s laughter. I want to play catch on a freshly mowed lawn, with the smell of dinner on the barbecue in the backyard. I want to go to bed happy and wake up happier.” He smiles. “And I’d like to have all that with you.”

I feel an emotion I can’t describe cropping up in my chest. It washes over me like a rush of adrenaline. It grows stronger when I look into Cam’s eyes, when I squeeze his hands tighter. It’s love; I know it’s love.

“Now your turn,” he says, smiling.

I blink back tears as I think of all the days of my life that have brought me to this place. Doubt. My mother’s tears. Every flower I have ever placed into an arrangement. Every look of love I have ever seen on the faces of friends and strangers. And now I’m seeing my own love. He sits beside me, and he loves me in return. I know it, and I feel it. For so long, I have been on a journey, a race, that has been long and grueling, lonely at times, and uncertain. And I have made it to the finish line, tired and weak, but whole and grateful. “Exactly what you said,” I reply, searching Cam’s face and seeing our shared future in his eyes. “Every single word.”

After dinner, we decide to go back to Cam’s apartment, where I kick off my heels and curl up on his leather sofa, draping a soft throw blanket around me.

“Glass of wine?” he asks, heading to the kitchen.

“Sure.”

He returns with two glasses, then sets the bottle on the coffee table beside us. “My editor gave me this bottle. It’s supposed to be a pretty rare Bordeaux.”

I glance at the year: 1984. “I was barely alive when this was bottled.”

“I can’t remember exactly,” Cam says, eyeing the bottle, “but there’s some story about why this was a really good year for wine in that region. Some sort of full moon harvest, during a freak fall snowstorm. I don’t know.” He eyes his laptop on the coffee table. “We could look it up.”

I nod. “A full moon snowstorm? That’s a coincidence. I was just talking to Colette—you know, the French woman who told me about my . . . gift.” I pause for a moment. Even now, after months of getting to know each other, I feel self-conscious talking to Cam about my vision, as if he’s evaluating the logic of it at every turn.

He looks interested. “What did she say?”

“Something about the fact that if we—I mean, I, or she—failed at love, there is always the possibility of a second chance, but only on the night of a full moon, when it is snowing, or about to snow, or something along those lines.”

He grins. “Do you believe that?”

I smirk. “Well, you certainly don’t.”

“You know I’m a science guy,” he says. “Your story, and how your gift came to be a part of you, is one that defies reason. When I want to understand a situation, I report it until I can articulate every nuance.” He smiles, as if he’s in the midst of an interview.

“Why would you put it that way? I’m hardly one of your subjects.”

Cam reaches for my hand. “Listen, Jane, maybe I need to switch gears. I . . . I want to nurture what we have. I want to grow it. I guess what I’m trying to say is that . . . I love you.”

I swallow hard.

“And it’s not some sort of mystical thing. There are no stars or hearts floating over my head. Cupid hasn’t shot me through the heart with his arrow.” He smiles again. “I just know how I feel when I am with you and when I’m apart from you. It’s love. Jane, I love you.”

“You do?”

“I do.”

I want to tell him that I love him too, that, just as he said, I’ve felt it in his presence and in his absence, that I’ve imagined our life together—how we’d wake up in each other’s arms, walk to Meriwether for coffee and croissants in the morning, stopping at Mel’s on the way to pick up a newspaper or the latest edition of
Time
, where I’d point to Cam’s byline and brag to everyone within earshot that my husband is a famous writer. My husband. The vision is beautiful and vivid.

I open my mouth to speak, but Cam’s cell phone is buzzing in the kitchen. “I’m so sorry,” he says. “That may be my editor, and she’s been pressuring me for answers. It’s important, about a story. Sorry. I’ll just be a second.”