I looked to her. I was in gray cords and a green flannel over an old T-shirt. I wished I’d dressed better and gotten a haircut. My nose was running from the crying and I wanted to wipe it on my sleeve, but no way was I going to let go of her hands.
For weeks I’d been imagining what I was going to say, entertaining the inane notion that I would be able to speed-explain the last three years of my life: where I’d been, what I’d been doing, why I’d come back. There was no place for that. The space felt too sacred to be filled up with banal specifics. I wanted to be poetic, not prosaic. Though what I ended up expressing was mostly just a series of apologetic tangents.
“I guess I should start by stating the obvious. I fucked up, and I’m sorry.” I thought of Cal, of what a looming presence he was in my life, of how his ability to forgive me gave me strength, and I got choked up again. “Fucking up is what I do. Or, what I did. Past tense.” October was listening with so much concentration and attention it stunned me and made me tremble. “I’ve spent a lot of my life taking the wrong turns off the right roads. I feel it when it’s happening, and I regret it every time it does.” I desperately needed to wipe my nose, but all I could do was sniffle. “There’s no excuse for what I did to you. I know that. I’m not here to make excuses. I’m here to acknowledge what a coward I was. I’m here to say I’m sorry. If I had more than five minutes, I’d say it a thousand times.” I ran my thumbs over her knuckles, caressed the tops of her hands. “I hope you can find it in your heart to hear these words and accept them as my truth and my sorrow. If I’ve learned anything in the last three years—and I have, I swear—it’s that I’ll never be any greater than the sum of my missed opportunities unless I stop missing them.” I shook my head, struggled to express exactly what I was feeling, and then collapsed into it. “Fuck, October. I tried so hard to let you go. All this time I tried to stop loving you. But it just dawned on me that I don’t want to stop loving you. I just want to stop missing you.” My affection for her overwhelmed me, and it was all I could do not to dive across the table and pull her into my arms. “Every day I think about what I did to you. I live with that every day. I miss you every day. And the worst part? You were my friend, first and foremost, and I hurt you.”
I started shivering, and seconds later I saw goose bumps all over October’s arms.
“I know that in the grand scheme of things, we spent so little time together, this might not mean anything to you anymore, but it means a lot to me. It always has. Even when I didn’t know how to say it. The way you used to look at me. The way you saw me for exactly who I was but never asked me to be anyone else. You believed in me. You changed me. You inspired me. And if I died tomorrow, I’d want you to know that.”
I figured my time was almost up, and I said, “Listen, I can’t not do things anymore. I can’t not try. So I’m going to ask you something I have no right to ask, but when this is all over, when you get home, do you think I could call you? I’m back in Mill Valley for good, and I’d really like to call you. Just to talk. Could we do that? Could we have coffee or go for a hike or something?”
She didn’t respond. She couldn’t. Or wouldn’t.
“How about this,” I suggested. “Blink once for Yes and twice for No. Yes, I can call you; No, you want me to leave you alone.”
She held her eyes open and didn’t flinch. And then the chime went off.
“OK. I get it.” I nodded. “I understand.”
The security guard looked at me from the doorway.
October let go before I did.
She hadn’t blinked.
I went back the next day. Actually, what happened was I couldn’t sleep, and I drove to the museum at 3:00 a.m., this time with