Page 3 of Margins

With the two duffel bags on his shoulders, he doesn’t bother taking the long way around the neighborhood like he might have otherwise, content to head directly back home and into the quiet of his house. It doesn’t have to stay quiet, though, Alex still thinking about what he’d said about the vinyls, and before he even unpacks the bags, he puts a record on and makes more coffee.

By that afternoon, Alex has accomplished more than he has in a long time, even if none of it is particularly interesting or likely to matter for longer than a day. He gets the house cleaned, which isn’t all that hard, but he also gets some of it reorganized, spreading out what he has to help disguise how much is suddenly gone. Or not suddenly exactly, not when Cassidy’s departure had already been a long time coming by the time it happened, but watching her leave had still taken Alex by some surprise, and he’s been ignoring the most obvious reminders of it ever since.

He misses her, or he tries to convince himself he does, but sometimes he doesn’t know where the ache comes from and whether her returning would ever have a chance of making him hurt any less. At the end of it all, she just couldn’t pretend it would be good for her to stay, and for someone who so often has all the right words, he couldn’t argue that she was wrong.

So, Alex has cleaned in between one too-tender memory and another, and he’s reorganized until it feels like he’s safely reined everything in, and somewhere in between it all, he even remembered to eat lunch. Then fueled by both music and the caffeine he had on either side of some leftover soup, he got caught up on bills and a handful of other things he’d left piled up on the desk in his little home office, and he talked to both Cass and Elena for a few minutes to check in about plans for the upcoming week. After that, he worked out on the second-hand exercise equipment he has set up in his garage, and he took a second shower, and now he’s at his kitchen counter, weirdly rested and relaxed and thinking about ordering some Thai to be delivered for dinner.

Being lazy about dinner is nothing new, but it feels different tonight, an active choice to treat himself on a quiet Saturday night and not a default forced upon him by hours of nothingness and an inability to do better than that.

It’s fine, and maybe even pleasant, until it gets to be just a little bit later. The sun’s gone down, and he thinks he’s run out of worthwhile household feats, a touch of sorrow returning when he finds himself missing the sounds of his family and wishing they could play any of the games he’d bought that morning. But that’s enough, actually, to remind him to get off his ass and sort through the duffel bags he’d set aside earlier. The games are simple, pulled free and added to the shelves containing over a dozen others, as at home here as they might have been at his neighbor’s house before. Alex struggles with what to do with the books a minute longer, first separating out the ones he thinks Elena might want to keep here or there, taking a couple he picked up just because he thought he might like to read them someday, then stacking all the beautiful classics he’d like to give to Cass.

He still doesn’t know if that’s weird, planning a Christmas gift for her, but he has a few months to figure it out and he sighs in an attempt to shed himself of a little of the worry now. His finger runs back and forth over the spine of A Room with a View, the same novel he’d opened at the garage sale—the one he’d read in high school and vaguely remembers liking even if that wasn’t a thing anyone was supposed to admit at age 15—and he picks it up again now. Alex makes himself comfortable on the couch and pulls the throw blanket from where he’d folded it neatly against the back, and then he carefully opens the book and accidentally smiles at the memory of Hoodie teasing him about the smell of it that morning.

If liking any of it is a guilty pleasure, Alex isn’t sure he cares.

He flips through the first couple of pages until he pauses to read “Chapter 1” in a misleadingly modest typeface for a story more resonant than that, and he finds it underlined, the word “perhaps” handwritten in faded ink just next to the printed words. Alex grins, something so softly mysterious about it, and he wonders if this might have been a gift of some kind many, many years ago. A school graduation or a new job or an engagement or marriage or birth of a child. All the possibilities of someone’s beautiful beginning are enough to make him happy, and he starts to read.

He doesn’t pay much attention to what time it is when he begins or how long he reads before he sees another handwritten note, he only knows he’s not all that far into the book when he finds something scribbled into the margin and turns the entire thing sideways so he can read it more easily, though the ink is just as light as the first word he’d found.

E, such a clever idea you’ve had. Or perhaps it’s so many other things I couldn’t possibly describe yet, though I want you to know I feel them all the same.

Alex reads it a couple of times before he slows the thump of his heart and rights the book in his hands again, musing about what the message might mean after the hope suggested by the single word he read a short time ago. He already thinks there must be more messages somewhere, though—that it’s unlikely someone took the time to write this one note to a person they’ve called E, and then left it alone from that point forward—or maybe he just always wants there to be more to the story.

He goes back to the novel itself and tries not to get carried away about something done, or not done, long ago.

The book pulls him back in, which is exactly what he needs, and he thinks back to high school, when he first met Cassidy and was somewhere between being a jock and a nerd and nobody at all, enjoying school and pretending not to. In hindsight, Alex assumes he was a lot like other kids, not quite fitting in anywhere and not knowing why, on a constant search for a way to be like everyone else because it was easier than feeling any different. And when it didn’t quite work, when even hanging out with Cassidy felt just a little bit off, he always had books to turn to, and everything about being here on his couch now is comforting him in a way he’d almost forgotten.

He reads for a while and gets expectedly drowsy after another half hour or so, figuring he’ll get up from the couch soon so he can head upstairs and get some sleep before he has a whole other weekend day to waste tomorrow. Only a couple more pages, just to a good stopping point, and then it’s bedtime.

And then there it is again, another message, and Alex feels himself exhaling, having held his breath for a while for a reason he's yet to understand.

E, you were standing so close when you handed me this book today, and then you brushed against my hand with your finger. I hope nobody saw us because I’m afraid it must be so clear what that small touch made me feel, but no matter how scared I am, I hope you do it again. Please do it again.

Alex blinks down at the page for several seconds before he forces himself to look away from a private moment that he can’t actually see. Someone wrote about a finger touching a hand and it seems like so much more than that, something intimate shared and meant to be kept from other people’s eyes. A young love, frowned upon perhaps. Or something just new enough that it was embarrassing at the time. Maybe the breathtaking sensation that comes with a crush and the butterfly beginnings of something more.

He groans in the otherwise silent room, finding himself a little silly for reacting like he’s the one with the damn crush here, but Alex thinks he’s always been something of a romantic, and however implausibly, separating from his wife has only made that worse, not better. He pauses for a moment, concerned too that maybe it’s none of his business, no matter when these messages were written or where these people are now—if they’re alive at all. It’s still their story, not his own, only the novel itself meant for his eyes while the rest was for an audience of two. He really isn’t sure what to do, but he finds himself reaching for page after page, tender but too curious to stop until he comes to the next one, handwriting filling the margin like it had the others before.

E, I am so scared, so often. I don’t know whether this is the right thing to do, but I cannot make myself stop either, if only because it’s one more reason to see you, and these books are the only thing we can give each other. I think you must know how much more I would give you if I could.

It wasn't just the newness of a crush, then. There was something keeping these two lovers apart, but the possibilities are probably endless, regardless of when the notes might have been written. People have faced so many struggles for so many reasons, heartache a natural consequence of too much of the past. Alex grabs one of Elena’s bookmarks from the basket she keeps on the end table and he makes himself close the book after reading the passage one more time, tossing the blanket aside and pushing off from the couch to stretch before he double-checks the locks, turns off all the lights, and makes his way upstairs to his room.

The book lands on his nightstand, on top of one that’s already had a place there for too long, and it’s only when Alex is in the middle of brushing his teeth that he realizes something has been missing from everything he’s found in the margins so far. And maybe he’s just overlooked a couple of pages somewhere, but he doesn’t think so, and he hurries to finish up in the bathroom so he can get back to the book just to study it one more time. He can’t let himself get too involved in this love story, but he wants to know.

The embossed cover of the book has become familiar to his hands, and he’s careful as he flips through the pages he’s already read, then Alex moves ahead to the next couple of messages he can find, intrigued when he confirms what he was sure of a minute ago.

Every one of them is addressed to E, but Alex can’t find anything from E.

Not a back and forth then? Unrequited love? Something still too forbidden to make it any further than the margins of a novel? Were the margins acting as a diary of sorts, all these confessions meant for nobody to see, maybe especially the one person addressed in each one?

His head tilts sideways, as though the new angle might help provide an answer, but he’s so tired, and whatever else he’s missing, Alex can’t keep going right now. Besides, there’s one person who might be able to help him tomorrow, if he just happens to be back to hold another garage sale for all the Sunday morning neighborhood shoppers. One person who might recognize the handwriting and know exactly who E is, and who may laugh at the idea that there is any mystery to be solved. One person who probably deserves to know about this anyway, since the books may have belonged to a family member and should probably be returned instead of being pored over by a stranger.

Alex nods to himself and sets the book back down, crawling into bed and promising himself he won’t spend all night obsessed with a novel, or the love story hidden inside.

He’ll try to find Hoodie in the morning.

Chapter Two

Alex is an early riser and always has been, he thinks. He’s so rarely at peace with himself, even when there's no reason to keep up a fight, and maybe that's the first thing to rouse him each morning. But also, there's something about the quiet of those early hours that lures him out of bed for a few tender moments, a gentleness that carries him into a difficult world, and even he has to let a few battles go while everything around him is still waking up.

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