EPISODE ONE: FOUR O'CLOCK
There is a particular kind of tiredness that has nothing to do with sleep. I had been living inside it for twelve years, and by the third week of March I had stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing a hum in the walls of an old building. I noticed it again only because I finally asked for a day off, which was, for me, a small act of rebellion.
My manager did not ask why. People at the office had learned not to. I think they assumed grief has a shelf life, and that mine, being twelve years old, should have expired long ago. It is easier to let a man keep his silence than to find out what is underneath it.
I left the apartment without a plan, which was unlike me. I walked past the coffee shop where I always ordered the same thing, past the dry cleaner who knew my name but not my face, past a woman arguing into her phone about a delivery that had not arrived. New York did not care that I was having a day off from myself. It kept moving, the way it always does, indifferent and enormous and, if I am honest, a little bit of a comfort for exactly that reason.
I ended up at the bus stop three blocks from my building. I do not know why I sat down there instead of anywhere else. Perhaps because it was a place designed for people who were waiting for something, and I liked the honesty of that. Perhaps because it was four in the afternoon, and four in the afternoon has always been the hour I am least myself, the hour when the light goes a particular shade of gold that used to make Claire say the day was finally starting to apologize for itself.
I was thinking about that, about Claire and her strange, generous way of forgiving even the weather, when I heard someone humming.
It was a low, unhurried tune, the kind a person hums when they think no one is listening. I recognized it after a few bars. Nothing's Gonna Change My Love for You. An odd song for a Tuesday afternoon, sentimental in a way most people my age had learned to be embarrassed by. I looked around for the source. No one at the bus stop had earbuds in. No radio played from any of the storefronts. A woman two benches down was reading a paperback, entirely unbothered by music that, as far as I could tell, did not exist.
I told myself I had imagined it. I have a talent for explaining away the things that frighten me, usually by insisting they never happened.
Then, without deciding to, I said, out loud and a little foolishly, "You have a nice voice."
I expected nothing. I expected, at most, a stranger giving me a wide berth on a public bench. What I did not expect was an answer arriving inside my own skull, clear as a thought I had not had.
Who said that?
I sat very still. The city carried on exactly as before, buses sighing at the curb, a dog barking somewhere behind me, none of it acknowledging that something impossible had just happened three feet to my left, or perhaps three thousand miles away, though I did not know that yet.
"I did," I said, and then, feeling absurd for speaking aloud to no one, I thought the words instead, the way you might if you were praying and did not entirely believe in the thing you were praying to. I did. Who are you, and where are you, because you are certainly not on this bench.
There was a pause long enough that I thought I had frightened her off, whoever she was, wherever she was. Then, faintly amused, faintly unsteady, the voice came again.
I'm on a bench in a park. In London. It's nine o'clock at night here, which means either I've fallen asleep and I'm having the strangest dream of my life, or you're about to tell me you're a very committed prank caller.
I looked down at my own hands as if they might explain something. They did not.
"It's four o'clock in the afternoon where I am," I said, or thought, I was no longer sure there was a difference. "New York."
That's not funny.
"I'm aware," I said. "I don't think either of us is laughing."
We spent the next several minutes doing what I can only describe as two frightened, deeply skeptical people trying to disprove a miracle. She asked me to describe the bench I was sitting on. I asked her to describe hers. She asked what color my shirt was, an old test, the kind you'd use on a phone call to prove you weren't lying about where you were, and I told her, and she went quiet in a way that felt like disbelief finally losing an argument it had been having with itself.
"I'm Sophie," she said, and then, immediately, as if she had startled herself, "no. Wait. I don't know you. I don't know anything about you except that you can apparently hear my head from across an ocean, which is not, generally, information I give to strangers."
"That's fair," I said, and I meant it, though something in me, something that had been asleep for a very long time, felt a small, unreasonable disappointment.
"You can call me something else," she said. "Not my real name. Just, I don't know. Something."
I thought about it longer than the question deserved. "Mr. Glenn," I said finally.
Mr. Glenn. I could hear, even without seeing her, that she was almost smiling. Why.
"Because of the song," I said. "Glenn Medeiros. It seemed only fair, since you're the one who started this by humming it into an empty park like a woman in a film."
I was not humming it like a woman in a film.
"You were humming it exactly like a woman in a film," I said, and for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit, I felt the corner of my own mouth move without my permission.
She told me, eventually, about her hair, in the offhand way people describe themselves when they don't yet know it matters. She said it was too many colors to be tidy, coral and peach and something gold at the ends, like a flower that couldn't decide what it wanted to be. I did not tell her that I was already turning that description over and over, the way you turn a coin you've decided to keep for luck. I only said, "I'll call you Protea, then," and she made a sound of protest that did not sound entirely like protest.
We tested the edges of the thing between us as if it were a room we'd woken up in without windows. It did not care about time zones, which made no sense, and it did not seem inclined to explain itself, which made even less. We could hear each other and, more unsettlingly, we could feel the shape of each other's moods, the way you can tell someone is smiling on the phone before they say anything funny. We could not see one another. We could not touch. The whole of it, whatever it was, seemed to exist only in this narrow window, four o'clock where I was, nine o'clock where she was, an accounting I would come to know by heart.
I asked her name. Her real one. I told myself it was only curiosity, though even then I suspected it was already something else, something with roots.
"No," she said, gently enough that it did not feel like a door slamming, only a door being closed with care. "Not yet. Maybe not ever. I don't want to be a person you can look up, Mr. Glenn. I want to be a voice you like talking to. Those are different things, and I've found that people rarely let you keep both."
I did not understand what she meant, not fully, not that day. I understand it now with a clarity that costs something to hold.
I was, I confess, childish about it. If she would not give me a name, I decided I would not give her mine either, and I told her so with more heat than the moment required. She laughed, honestly laughed, a sound that did something to the muscles around my ribs that I had not felt in years and did not have a name for.
Fine, she said. Mr. Glenn it is. Though I have to say, for a man hiding behind a joke name, you sound remarkably sad underneath it. Why is that?
I opened my mouth to answer her. I am still not entirely sure what I would have said, whether I would have told her the truth or found some clever, deflecting half of it instead. I never got the chance to find out.
The voice simply stopped. Not faded, not trailed off. Stopped, the way a radio cuts to static when the signal is lost, except there was not even static, only the ordinary evening noise of New York rushing back in to fill a space I had not known was empty until it wasn't.
I checked my phone. Six o'clock, exactly.
I sat on that bench for a long time afterward, long enough that the woman with the paperback finished her chapter, closed the book, and left without once looking at me. I did not mind being alone with it. I had, after all, been alone with far worse things for far longer.
What I felt, sitting there while the light went from gold to grey to the flat blue of a city evening, was not grief, though grief and I are old, familiar companions and I know its shape well enough to recognize when it is not the thing in the room. What I felt was closer to hunger, if hunger could be aimed at a single Saturday four days away.
I walked home. I made dinner I do not remember eating. And before I went to bed, for the first time since I could not tell you when, I took out my phone and circled a date on the calendar the way other people circle anniversaries or deadlines, not because I needed the reminder, but because I wanted, absurdly, to see the promise written down somewhere outside my own head, as if that would make it more likely to keep.
Three thousand miles away, in a flat above a flower shop that smelled faintly of cut stems even through closed windows, a young woman sat cross legged on her bed with a sketchbook open on her knees. She drew, in small, careful letters in the corner of an empty page, two words she had no immediate use for and every intention of keeping.
Mr. Glenn.
She did not yet know why she wanted to keep them. She only knew, the way you know some things before you can explain them, that she would need the page later, and that whatever came to fill it would matter more than anything she had drawn in a long time.