Page 7 of The Hundred Loves of Juliet
It was my dad who finally got through to me. Just a few months before, he’d received a diagnosis for an incurable, aggressive brain tumor, so when he knocked, I couldn’t bring myself to push him away. I wanted space, but I wanted time with him more.
“Hey, kiddo,” he said as he sat next to me on my bed. Dad was so thin by then and had to walk slowly with a cane, but no matter how thin or weak he got, his smile was still the same radiant one he always had for me and my sister, Katy. “What’s upsetting my Broadway star?”
The whole incident with Chad and his awful friends spilled out in a rush. When I finished, I was a mess of snot and tears again. “Don’t just say what dads have to say, that Chad’s wrong and I’m actually beautiful. It won’t help.”
Dad stroked my back. “Okay, I won’t say that, although I think it’s true.”
I buried my face deeper into my pillow.
“Do you know why I likeRomeo and Juliet?” Dad asked. “It’s not because of how reckless Romeo and Juliet are, because let’s face it, those two could have slowed down and made better choices. But that’s not really the point of the play. The point was the failure of the Capulets and Montagues to set aside pettiness, and that failure clouded over the most important aspect of life: love.”
I mumbled in vague agreement.
“Well, I was thinking,” Dad said. “What if you approach your situation with Chad differently?”
I peeked out from the pillow. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t let his pettiness take you down. Focus on the love story.”
“Ugh. With Chad?”
“No. If he can wish for a Juliet who suits his taste, then why don’t you wish for a smarter, sweeter Romeo? When you’re onstage, envision someone else standing opposite you. Think of it like a silent form of revenge, erasing Chad and putting your own Romeo in his place.”
The idea seemed, at first, immature, akin to creating an imaginary friend. But Dad was right—visualizing someone other than Chad onstage got me through rehearsals, and it even made my performance better. The more I developed Sebastien in my mind, the more I fell in love with him, and it showed when I received standing ovations every night during curtain call, because I was acting out the role of Juliet falling in love with the dashing Sebastien version of Romeo, not small-minded Chad Akins.
Dad came to every performance. By then, he was in a wheelchair. But every night, he managed to push himself up to standing with the rest of the audience, and he was always the last one to sit back down. I knew what a monumental effort that was for him, and it made every clap of his hands even more precious.
“It’s like you’re really Juliet,” he said after the final performance.
I blushed. “If I were actually Juliet, I’d be reciting my lines in Italian.”
“You should study Italian, then,” Dad teased. “More authentic.”
Two weeks after the play ended, he died.
Months of grief followed. Mom, Katy, and I hardly slept, hardly ate, hardly even spoke. Dad was the boisterous center of our universe, and with him gone, we floated around aimlessly. The house was too empty, too quiet, even with the three of us there.
Eventually, though, we managed to trudge on. And one of the things that helped me emerge from my sorrow was learning Italian. It probably hadn’t been a serious suggestion, just a one-offcomment Dad made, but still, it was one of his last to me, and I held tight to it.
Maybe that’s also why I never relinquished the idea of Sebastien. I invented him, at first, because Dad suggested it. And then when Dad was gone, Sebastien remained.
Writing stories about Sebastien became an escape. I’d never been a big writer before, but after Dad died, story ideas started popping up in my head, almost fully formed. They were just small, romantic vignettes, but in my mind, I always cast Sebastien as the lead actor. It was probably a survival mechanism, allowing me to focus on something sunny in the face of sadness.
Whenever my real life got tough—a high school breakup, or losing all my money in my first job postcollege that turned out to be a pyramid scheme, or each instance of my husband Merrick’s infidelity—writing stories about Sebastien would sweep me away from the dreariness of reality. I could live vicariously through those tales and understand what it was like to be loved unconditionally, for someone to listen, to care, to keep his soulmate safe.
He had different names in each vignette, of course, but in my mind, he always had the same face. I wrote romantic adventures where the heroine rides on the back of a camel through the desert while he walks through the sand on foot, holding the camel’s lead and guiding the way. My characters have done grand things like sailing on Portuguese caravels and helping Gutenberg with his printing press, and smaller things like attending a Victorian-era horse race. (I love history as much as I love books, which means I have a penchant for writing historical vignettes. Plus, the period costumes! The heroine in the horse race story wore a very fancy hat decorated with a pile of blue feathers and lavender roses.)
Then yesterday at The Frosty Otter, he was there! In the flesh! After all this time of knowing him only in my head.
Had I written him to life?
But that was impossible. So how?
And poor Sebastien. I came at him like a wave of hungry locusts wanting to devour him while he had no idea who I was.
Now I stretch in bed and look at the clock on my nightstand.It’s eight-thirty in the morning, although still dark outside. Part of me wants to curl back beneath the covers, but the new, go-getter Helene pep talks my body into rolling out of bed.
This little cottage is drafty, though, and I immediately regret leaving the blankets. The wood floor is freezing, and I actually yelp; it’s so cold that it almost hurts. My clothes are all still in the suitcases, which means I jump ridiculously from foot to foot while I dig around for socks (I put on two pairs) and an oversized hoodie. Thank god I live alone and there’s no one to witness the new Alaskan Waking Ritual I’ve just invented.
