Page 84 of A Series of Rooms
On paper, it was the perfect plan: a fresh start in a new city, and a place to lay his head until he got back on his feet.
In reality, Jonah had been conditioned to look for the fault lines in kindness. The weak spot that exposed the ulterior motives. But in the end, the choice was simple.
He was in no position to turn down an extended hand. That sort of prideful naivety wasn’t possible for someone like Jonah, who knew what it was like to lose everyone you ever thought was on your side. He wouldn’t let that happen again.
Two hundred dollars in cash burned a hole in his front pocket, and there was a bank card with his name etched into the bottom in his wallet, which his mother had helped him set up before he left. Her way of showing support for his plan, he supposed. She had even driven him to the airport herself, teary-eyed and white-knuckling the steering wheel the whole way.
When she pulled him into a hug in the departures lane, she’d told him she loved him. She gave him the apology he needed and the one he deserved, and she said that she understood why he needed to leave, but that she would always be there if he wanted to return.
It was a start, Jonah thought. Maybe someday they would get there.
When the car ramped onto an elevated highway, Jonah got his first glimpse of the skyline in the distance. It was further away than he expected. He wasn’t familiar with thecity’s layout, but now it made more sense why Ellis described his neighborhood as a “suburb in the city.” Still, the view was nice. Jonah pulled his phone from his pocket and snapped a photo.
Meet me in the fall?He typed, then sent the message off to Liam.
From the back seat, he watched the dot on the GPS draw nearer to his new address, hugging his overstuffed backpack to his chest. It was hard not to think of the seventeen-year-old kid in the back of the Greyhound to Chicago, nearly two years ago to the day, freshly wounded and desperate for a soft place to land. From this perspective, it was easier to give that boy some grace for the things he had done when his back was against the wall.
Jonah was older now, and this time he was running forward instead of away. He wasn’t responsible for creating the environment from which he’d fled, but he had left of his own volition. He had the opportunity before him to build the kind of life that he had already begun to mourn, and he wasn’t going to waste it.
After twenty minutes, the car pulled onto a street lined with Tudor-style houses and brick driveways. He paid the driver with a wad of cash from his pocket and stepped out onto the sidewalk.
Looking up at the old house, with nothing but a small suitcase on wheels and a backpack slung over one shoulder, Jonah pictured a hundred different ways this could go wrong.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out to reveal Liam’s reply.
It’s a date,it said.
Jonah smiled.
Despite it all, he wasn’t quite willing to write off the possibility that this was exactly where he was meant to be.
EPILOGUE
LIAM
On the morning of Liam’s twenty-third birthday, he took the downtown train from Fordham University to 28th Street in Manhattan. He slung several large portfolio cases over his shoulder and trudged west, toward the Hudson River.
The space was part of an old industrial building, sectioned off for short-term rentals. Because of its distance from the train lines, it was one of the cheaper options, which also meant it was small. But Liam didn’t need a lot of space, and even if his forehead was beaded with sweat from the long walk, nothing could dampen his good mood.
He shook hands with the venue coordinator, handed over the second half of the deposit, and then the space was his.
Once he was alone, he took a moment to just walk the perimeter, scraping his fingertips along the worn brick interior. The age of the place was apparent. There were divots here and there, little chunks that had been chipped away overtime, and the wood floorboards creaked underfoot with every step.
It was perfect.
Liam dropped his bags in the corner and retrieved his phone and a Bluetooth speaker, scrolling until he found the playlist he had made for the occasion. Title:“Baby’s First Art Show.”
When the music started to play, he folded into a crouch and began pulling the canvases carefully from their bags.
The setup took him about an hour. It was in his nature to be indecisive, so he went through several rounds of arranging and rearranging every piece around the room until they fit just right. The paintings told a story, and that story just so happened to be one of the most important chapters of Liam’s life. He felt duty-bound to tell it in exactly the right way.
Over the course of the hour, it became increasingly difficult to ignore the swell of nerves in his stomach. More than once, he had to ward off the compulsion to walk his paintings to the river’s edge and throw them in, where they would never have to be viewed by the public eye—or one set of eyes in particular.
In the end, rationality won out. When the final canvas was displayed, he stepped back into the center of the room and spun in a slow circle, taking everything in.
For a moment, he was rendered breathless. Not by the paintings themselves, which he had stared into the face of for the better part of a year, but by the culmination of all of them, here, in this place, where he had dreamed of standingfor so long. Nearly two years to the date since the idea had been born.
Over a year in the city, and Liam still wore the rose-colored glasses he’d had on the day he’d arrived. Something people never told you about watching your dreams come true was how surreal it would feel most of the time. Sometimes it was hard to believe he was actually here, but it was in the quiet moments, like this one, that he could believe he’d made it.
