Victoria Sees It, Carrie Jenkins [best classic books TXT] 📗

but it’s small, and there’s a risk that they will talk to me. In the Starbucks Reserve they know my name and they want me to have a good day, and that’s absolutely all. Very safe.

I’m never ready to meet another person. If I see an acquaintance in town I try to pretend I didn’t see them. Even when I’ve arranged a meeting myself, I always hope they won’t come. So the day I saw The Cop, with a laptop of her own, in the Starbucks Reserve, I immediately tried to pretend I hadn’t. It was a self-preservative instinct. It’s a very specific kind of shock that kicks in. You know when you’re on your own in a quiet room for a long time, but then you suddenly realize actually there’s someone else in there, and they’ve been there for god knows how long? Without warning you are flung into a different universe. This new world’s resemblance to your previous surroundings is creepy, superficial, uncanny. Worst of all, the old reality never existed.

The Cop didn’t belong here. For fuck’s sake, my last words to her had been you’re not real. Perhaps I actually was crazy. Then again, this could just be one of her doppelgängers. We all have them; several, not just one. When you consider how much we have in common genetically, it’s not surprising. If so, all I had to do was keep walking. Act as if nothing is unusual, and eventually nothing will feel unusual. This is magic that works. Keep moving. One foot, the other foot. One foot…I didn’t notice I was humming until I was past her.

“Oh. My. Fucking. God. Victoria?”

The Cop wasn’t in uniform. Of course not. That quaint British outfit would have looked as ridiculous in the U.S., where cops mean guns, as Sherlock Holmes in his deerstalker. It was a brisk October day, and she had on a navy sweater and a red scarf. I wasn’t under arrest. Could I just keep walking? One more foot…

“Holy shitcakes!” She was up, and moving towards me. “You still hum that tune when you walk along?”

I was looking right at her now, right into her face. Her face was beaming. It was beautiful. She wanted to hug me, I could see it. I nodded she could, and I took a breath. As she moved in for the hug, all at once I was inhaling the earth of Wimpole Hall, the windy field at Steeple Bumpstead, the chill of the Lido at Jesus Green, the burned-out interior of Cindies, her tiny apartment and the spattering soup on her hob. I was rushed through these moments in a narrowing, swirling tunnel of lights and sounds, spiralling me down into the shutter of a camera as it closed click on one scene. Myself, sitting on the ground, staring up into her warm eyes on a cold day, the moment we first met.

The Cop’s voice wrenched me back to a Starbucks Reserve in Seattle. “Hey, hey, babe, are you crying?”

I checked. The shoulder of her jacket was damp. I nodded and put my face back into her neck. I suddenly wanted to hide there. (Hide from what? The past doesn’t care where you go.)

“What are you…why are you?” I asked her epaulette.

“Oh, my brother’s out here now. You remember Elliot?”

I did.

“Took a bullet in Iraq. Now he’s a mechanic. Set up a garage in Capitol Hill, wife and two kiddos. I took a bunch of my annual leave this year to hop over and see them all.”

She kept me in close, while she went on for a while about her family. This was a kindness. She was giving me time. Her voice sounded intensely English, and I realized I had never noticed that she had an accent. How stupid of me. Her hair was still straight, and her body too. It was all so familiar, but so strange.

As she babbled on, she mentioned a “Jo.” The name started to pop up a few times, and I gathered that Jo was her current partner—someone she was living with, maybe had been for a long time. But then there was a word that didn’t fit: husband. I missed the next few sentences. There it was again. Husband. Jo was perhaps Joe.

“Joe…I thought…” I said, then stopped abruptly. Was that rude?

She laughed and said, “I thought, too! You think you know someone…”

—

“It’s my last day in Seattle,” The Cop said eventually. “Elliot’s family drove south this morning. Going to see their other granny. Want to get dinner with me?”

I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t know what to say. So she went on.

“It’s okay either way. I only want to say one thing. It’s fine if you don’t want to see me after that. I just have to say sorry, babe. I’m so sorry.”

I frowned and took half a step back. “Why? What? For what?”

“For what?” Now she was frowning, too. “I should have believed you, I suppose. About Deb.” Then she paused. “No, I don’t mean that exactly. What I mean is I should have told you I didn’t believe you. We could have talked about it. But I lied to you and it ruined everything. I just…I didn’t know I was the one who was lying. You know?”

Her voice was so soft. So warm. So easy to follow. She made sense.

“Yes I know,” I said. Then, very quietly, “Sometimes I can’t tell if I’m the one who’s lying.”

We did go for that dinner. I brought her to a low-key pizza place I knew, and I paid for both of us. When she left to walk back to her hotel, I hugged her for a long time. She gave me her current address in Cambridge and her email address, and I said I’d write to her soon. She looked at me with her head on one side and smiled as she said, “You aren’t on Facebook.” It wasn’t a question, she was already sure. I told her Facebook freaked me