Old Testament dreams, Jordan had said when I called him one month. Your old men will dream dreams and your young men will see visions, he’d quoted.
(“Which kind of man am I?” I’d wondered aloud.)
No amount of prayer, no amount of hard, exhausting work during the day, made the dreams go away. And I had no idea what they meant, except that Poppy was still very much inside my heart, no matter how much I distracted myself during my waking hours.
I wanted to see her again. And it was no longer the wounded lover who wanted it, no longer the anger and the lust both demanding to be satisfied. I just wanted to know she was doing okay, and I wanted to give her the rosary back. It had been a gift, she should keep it.
Even if she was with—fuck—Sterling.
Once I had that thought, it was impossible to shake, and so the idea became completely embedded into my plans. I was moving to New Jersey, and New York City wasn’t far away. I would find Poppy and I would give her the rosary.
Along with your forgiveness, came a quiet thought out of nowhere. A God-thought. She needs to know that you’ve forgiven her.
Have I? Forgiven her? I nudged one arm of the crucifix to set it spinning again. I suppose I had. It hurt—deeply—to think of her and Sterling together, but my anger had been poured into the African dust—poured away and sprinkled down, sprinkled as sweat and tears and blood onto the soil.
Yes. It would be good for both of us. Closure. And maybe once I handed off the rosary, the dreams would stop and I could move on with the rest of my life.
The next day, my last day home, Mom took scissors to my beard with an almost creepy glee.
“It didn’t look that bad,” I mumbled as she worked.
Ryan was hitched up on the counter, for once without his phone. He had a bag of Cheetos in his hand instead. “No, dude, it really did. Unless you were trying to look like Rick Grimes.”
“Why wouldn’t I? He’s my hero.”
Mom clucked. “Princeton students don’t look like Paul Bunyan, Tyler. Hold still—no, Ryan, he can’t have Cheetos while I’m doing this.”
Ryan had shoved the bag in my outstretched hand after hopping down to find his phone (“This is so sick. I have to Periscope it.”)
I sighed and set the Cheetos down.
“I’m going to miss you,” Mom said, out of nowhere.
“It’s just school. I’ll be back to visit all the time.”
She finished with the scissors and set them down. “I know. It’s just, all you boys have stayed so close to home. I’ve been spoiled by having you all here.”
And then she burst into tears, because we weren’t all here, hadn’t been all here since Lizzy.
“Mom…” I stood up and hugged her tightly. “I love you. And this isn’t permanent. It’s just for a few years.”
She nodded into my chest, and then sniffed and pulled away. “I’m sad because I’ll miss you, but I’m not crying because I want you to stay.” She met my eyes with her matching green ones. “You boys need to live your lives without being chained down by obligation or grief. I’m glad you’re doing something scary, something new. Go and make new memories, and don’t worry about your silly mother here in Kansas City. I’m going to be just fine, plus, I still have Sean and Aiden and Ryan.”
As much as I wanted to scoff, I couldn’t. Sean and Aiden were attentive in their own ways, never missing a family dinner, carving out time to call and text during the rest of the week, and Dad was here. Still, though. I worried. “Okay.”
“Sit down, so I can finish up on this monstrosity of a beard.”
I sat, thinking about leaving home behind. I’d seen enough grief as a priest to know that people never really moved on, at least not in the linear, segmented way our culture expected people to. Instead, Mom was going to have good days and bad days, days where she circled back to her pain and days were she was able to smile and fuss over things like beards and the cost of Ryan’s car insurance.
Mostly, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to carry her pain for her, even if I stayed here. We’d each have to find our own ways of living with Lizzy’s ghost, and we’d have to find them in our own time. I felt like I’d already started, and maybe Mom had too.
“Now, go shave,” she ordered me now, brushing at my face with a dry towel and dropping a light kiss on my forehead. “Unless you’ve forgotten how.”
Moving wasn’t so hard. I found an inexpensive apartment not too far away from campus and used my dwindling savings to put in a deposit. I’d be a teaching assistant as well as a student, and the stipend was enough to cover room and board, even if I would have to take out a few loans for tuition. I didn’t have much to move, really, all of my furniture having belonged to the rectory and my weights being left in Kansas City. Clothes and books, and then a futon and a table I scrounged from Craigslist.
After settling in, I spent a long day or two trying to hunt down a new address for Poppy on the internet, even just a place of work, but there was nothing. She was either very careful or very quiet or both—the last mentions of her that I could find were around the time of her graduation from Dartmouth, and a handful of campus dance performances from her time at the University of Kansas a few years ago.
I could find no trace of her, and I even went as far as calling her parents, using numbers I found online for her father’s company and for her mother’s non-profit. But they were well-guarded by rings of assistants and receptionists, none of whom seemed inclined to give up any information about Poppy or forward me on to her parents. Not that I could blame them; I probably wouldn’t give out information to a strange man either, but it was still frustrating as hell.
Why did she have to leave Weston? Why did she have to leave the rosary? Maybe if she hadn’t, I wouldn’t be consumed with the idea of giving it back…
There was one person who I knew would almost certainly be willing to talk to me about Poppy, and the thought of seeing him again filled me with immense distaste, but I was running out of options. The semester would start soon and I wouldn’t have time to gallivant about the eastern seaboard looking for my ex…girlfriend? Ex-lover? And I couldn’t imagine having this kind of idealistic, ultimately hopeless quest on my plate until Christmas.
After two hours on buses and trains in various states of over-crowdedness, I was in Manhattan’s Financial District, staring up at the large steel and glass structure that belonged to the Haverford family. I wandered inside, surrounded immediately by marble and busy-looking people and an overall air of industry, and this persisted even when an elevator took me to the central office sixty floors up. No wonder Poppy chose Sterling. I’d never be able to offer her anything like this. I didn’t have fleets of black cars and portfolios of investments, I didn’t have a marble-floored empire. All I’d had was a collar and a home that didn’t legally belong to me—and now I no longer even had those.
God, I’d been such a fool to think I could have kept Poppy Danforth for my own. This was the world she’d come from—of course this was where she would return.
The receptionist inside was a pretty blonde girl, and asshole that I was, I wondered if Sterling had slept with her too, if his life was just a parade of money and infidelity, a parade without any consequences, a parade without a single concern other than how to get what he wanted.