Furnishing the apartment was equally painful, although sleeping on a real mattress after enduring two years on a sofa bed was sort of nice. Beds were the first thing we bought and it was much easier since it truly didn’t have to be a joint decision. When we entered the store, we went opposite directions. I couldn’t decide on which one I wanted and needed so badly to get Harper’s opinion but couldn’t dredge up the nerve to bother her. She already knew I was in love with her, no sense in making myself look more pathetic.
For the rest of the apartment, namely the living room, we went to the Ikea in Brooklyn, deciding that fishing for ‘cool pieces’ was too much work since we were in the thick of school and the whole John Bell thing. Plus, we would never be able to recreate our old apartment because firstly, that took two years to accomplish, hunting little used furniture stores and the weekly trips to the flea markets and secondly, and most importantly, the old apartment was a piece of the old Callum and Harper. The new Callum and Harper were reserved, neither having an opinion anymore and therefore creating an Ikea explosion in our living room. A one stop shop. I have to admit, it was really nice looking but we basically took a catalog room, pointed to it and said, ‘we want this’ to a sales associate and had it delivered.
Also, since we had to replace both our wardrobes, we gave one another five hundred a piece and visited a few stores on our own. In a rare moment of unusual friendliness, after Harper came in to our Ikea vomited living space, we took one look at each other in our clothes and burst out laughing. Both of us had feet clad in red Chucks, distressed jeans, and vintage t-shirts. She went to change so it wouldn’t be weird and came out in a freaking skirt, which I’d never seen her wear before of her own volition and wish she hadn’t started since her rejection of me that night at Charlie’s. Any headway we had made with our moment was completely gone when I saw her in that skirt and boots, effectively sending me to my room for the rest of the evening.
We put the apartment in a completely different name from ours. That was a recommendation from the police department. It was harder than I thought to list the apartment in someone else’s name but somehow we managed. We also couldn’t go to one of The Ivories’ biggest shows because John had yet to be caught. I was prisoner in a torturous cell that week. I was Loki and she was my snake.
When it was time to return to campus, Harper became extraordinarily chatty, chattier than even before our incident and I found myself venturing to her side of the apartment, leaning against her door jamb as she explained to me how she was going to be walking to her classes now, since a new route had to be determined. I had yet to see her bedroom. This was a lot more feminine than her old room, lots of textured fabrics, velvet, Dupioni silks, crazy patterns, a lamp I noticed from our old apartment that must have survived the fire.
I entered without asking and stopped short. “Can I come in?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said, sighing. “You don’t ever have to ask.”
I smiled sadly and walked over to the lamp.
“It survived, did it?”
“Yeah,” she said, walking over and running her hand along the fringe. “I didn’t tell you?”
“I knew some stuff did but I never bothered to find out, too depressing, I guess.”
“It’s depressing but at the same time makes me feel a little bit better knowing he couldn’t destroy everything.” Yeah, he destroyed the only thing that really mattered, though, I thought. She stopped talking but continued twirling her fingers in the fringe. “I - I never really thought you would forgive me for what John did to us.”
The blood rushed to my face in frustrated anger. “Think about what you just said, Harper, it’s what John did to us. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you this, but I don’t blame you for his craziness. Shit happens. He fixated on you and that’s not your fault. Please believe me when I say this, Harper, because I don’t want to keep reassuring you about it. You need to start believing it yourself.”
She nodded, giving me a half-smile.
“Are we ever going to go back to normal?” She asked after an awkward moment of silence.
I stepped back a bit and fell into her bed, sitting down and placing my hand on the edge of the foot board. “I don’t know, Harper, but I sure as hell am going to try.”
She stepped beside me and sat next to me, not as close as she would have before but close enough for me to know she was trying. “I promise, I’ll give it my darndest.”
“So, school,” I said, changing the subject.
“Yup, I’m nervous about it. I’ll be by myself most of the day.”
“I know you’re nervous but I’ll still walk you to every class and there will be that hour we have for lunch. I promise it’ll be okay. Just make sure you always stay in a crowded area but where I can find you.”
“And work?” She asked.
“Already took care of that. You and I have the exact same shifts for the next six weeks. Laura said she can arrange the same schedule as long as needed if they don’t find him within that time frame.” Harper shifted uncomfortably. “You don’t need to be worried about being alone there. Besides, I think that’s the one place we’re safest as he isn’t aware we even work there.
“Plus, and I know you hate it, but I had her put us on a lot of the one a.m. shifts to organize the stacks.”
“Blech!” She said, making me laugh. It wasn’t long until she joined in. “Alright, that sounds okay, I guess.”
Harper and I worked at Bobst, or the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library. It’s the main library of NYU but we usually worked on the third floor at the Fales Library, a rare collection of books and manuscripts in English and American literature. Harper loved it, seeing as her favorite thing in the entire world was reading. She had a healthy respect for all things literature.
The Bobst is a daunting place, housing close to three and a half million books and journals, a twelve story square building, home to one of the largest academic libraries in the nation. When you step onto the black, white and gray marble stereo-grammed floor, your gaze shoots straight up to the ceiling. There’s glass as far as the eye can see, surrounding the lobby in a translucent square cocoon. The library fits within a square ring of sorts, all glass interior walls, allowing you to see through the lobby and into the other side, a magnificent sight especially to those first visiting.
A particularly creepy fact about the Bobst is that a six foot Plexiglas wall had to be installed on all its open air crosswalks because there were two suicides in the same year a few years back. I remembered reading about them when I was in high school. I shudder to think the stress those poor students had been under. It made me wonder what things were being put in place besides barricades to prevent further deaths.
The first week we returned to class, I walked Harper to all her classes without incident though they hadn’t caught John yet. The second week was our last before Christmas break and we were swamped with finals and work, both grateful for the distraction since the detective handling our case had called to inform us that yet another woman fitting Harper’s description was reported missing that Monday. I stayed particularly close to Harper that week and by Thursday, finals were over, and we only had to work that night in the stacks before we had the next month off.
Friday was Christmas Eve, we’d planned on visiting my uncle in Seattle before our ‘incident’ but hadn’t talked about it since. I never bought the tickets and she never brought it up so I never bothered either. I did write Ames and he basically gave me an open invite to visit, letting me know he was aware that I had a few weeks off and that I could stay as long as I’d like. I told him I’d think about it, knowing the answer was most likely no. I would never leave Harper alone without John caught and would never risk John Bell following us to Ames’, getting my only surviving family member mixed up in my craziness.
That night, the night before Christmas Eve, Harper and I shared a silent train ride to organize the stacks for the last time until the break was over, both of us hiding from one another by immersing ourselves in our iPods. I had Pinback’s Boo on repeat. It just felt appropriate. I wore a simple thermal and t-shirt under my utility jacket. It was especially cold that late at night so I threw on my wool cap, tucking my longish hair behind my ears and wrapped a scarf around my neck. I glanced Harper’s way and couldn’t help but take her in. She didn’t wear anything unusually different that night yet she looked completely different to me. Her faded jeans hugged her legs well, her bright red military jacket with the large black buttons was buttoned all the way to her neck, her chunky blue knitted beret covering her ears. She decided to wear her black combats, probably because the cold here in the city could penetrate even the thickest sneaker. The concrete just held the cold better than anywhere else. As I watched her, I realized that it had been weeks since the declaration and I was still in love with her, nowhere close to getting over her.
We had agreed to continue wearing our rings to keep up appearances but it made me ill to look at mine. My eyes followed the line of my arm until it met the ring on my finger. It was a huge lie, that ring. I suddenly felt tired, not from the late hour, but from carrying the massive burden of our lie and the heavy weight that she didn’t love me as I loved her on my back. As much as I hated to admit it to myself, I didn’t think I wanted to be married to Harper anymore. I knew I couldn’t have her so why torture myself any longer? As soon as John was caught, I’d divorce Harper, that was already decided, but I needed to take it one step further than that. We hadn’t agreed to separating our friendship as I think we both wanted to remain friends, even after the divorce but I knew that if I ever wanted to have a semblance of normality, I’d have to cut myself off from her, completely.
I looked down at my feet, a stinging, burning sensation overtook my eyes as I realized I was on the verge of losing it. I sucked it up, not wanting to alert Harper to any sudden change. I rolled my head onto the back of my neck and stared at the ceiling, relieved when the speaker announced our arrival as it sobered me quickly. Both Harper and I walked quietly to Bobst, entered the building and went to work, never removing our headphones.
This was it. The beginning of the blasted end.
Harper
Callum and I walked into Bobst surrounded by the terrible unspoken words the last few weeks’ had given us. Words like ‘grief’, heartache’, and ‘rejection’ rolled off my back and onto the warm floor. I desperately walked faster, throwing a secret glance over my shoulder, trying to shake their relentless pursuit. The phrase ‘he doesn’t love you, Harper’ crept down the walls, crawled over the tile, and invaded my body. It pounded against my head, making my temples throb.
We entered the elevator and hysteria crept into my throat as the doors closed. An overwhelming sense of finality hit me like a blast of freezing air as we rode the elevator to our floor, forcing me to lean against the wall for support. I almost choked on the regret pressing down on my body from all directions and just when I thought I would collapse from the weight, the doors opened and that building pressure burst through its barrier, spilling out into the stacks, relieving a bit of the panic residing in my chest.