Nonfiction by Heather Campbell
I was afraid to speak to you at the start. You were a writer, I was not. You were accomplished, I was not. People tend to lay down different aspects of themselves, depending on who they are with, but you were always beautifully you. You were kind and thoughtful, and you made me change the way I thought about myself. You were the bridge between my past and the me that could have been, the me that maybe still could be.
We met online at a writing conference. You were my teacher for one week. The pandemic forced us into creative replacements for life, and we watched each other on small rectangular screens for three hours a day. Before I met you, and for as long as I can remember, I’d write a few lines, and then crumple them up and throw them away. I was too afraid to write. I thought to even attempt it was gratuitous, and anytime I tried, I was filled with shame. That time when we were not allowed to leave our homes was awful, but it taught me that most things don’t really matter as much as you think they do. With your encouragement, I wrote. I pretended I was Virginia Woolf, putting rocks in my pockets before stepping into the River Ouse.
During our class you gave us prompts and asked us to write for ten minutes. Once we finished, we read aloud to each other. I watched your face as I shared, wondering if I’d pleased you. As I read on our second day, I saw your head tilt and your eyes soften. I held my breath as you wondered aloud, “People don’t usually do that in ten minutes.” A flush of heat came over me as I took your kind words in. It felt as if in that moment you picked up the pieces of my broken childhood and placed them back together.
After the class ended, I was afraid I would never hear your voice or your careful choice of words again. In a moment of panic, I asked your teaching assistant for your email address. She sent it to me the same day, and I wrote to you that afternoon.
In your first message you wrote, “I am so glad you reached out, if you hadn’t, I was going to contact you, to tell you how much I liked the work you did and see if there was anything I could do to help.” I nearly cried.
The first time we spoke, just the two of us, I was so nervous I nearly didn’t answer the phone, but I knew this might be my only chance, and I took a deep breath, picked up the phone and said, “Hello.”
You said you’d like to meet in person. You asked, “Would that be ok?” It had to be in the late afternoon or evening. Anything before three o’clock in the afternoon was no good. I didn’t understand, but I didn’t ask why. I would have met you outside Penn Station at midnight if you’d asked. But you chose a French café. It became our place.
When we first met, I was still too worried to sit inside, and we bundled and shivered as we sipped our cappuccinos, and you crunched the ice left from the diet soda you always ordered. During our first meeting, you explained that the ice chips relieved the pain from the sores the chemo left behind. You didn’t feel well some days. Afternoons were your best bet. You told me because you didn’t want me to think it was me if you had to cancel at the last minute. You told me you always wanted to see me when you were able. You looked forward to it. I know I blushed then.
One week after we finished our cappuccinos, I read to you about the time my mother blamed me for her latest suicide attempt. “My brother called me that night to say they had finally found our mother in some cheap midtown hotel. I wondered if she had a view of Times Square, one whose lights lit up her room even when the curtains were drawn. The police kicked down the door, dragged her out, and strapped her to a gurney. The sirens blared all the way to Bellevue where she had her stomach pumped, my father by her side.”
You told me I was raised by wolves, and I laughed, but we both knew it was true. You wondered what things would have been like if my childhood had been different. I shifted uncomfortably and said it probably wasn’t useful for me to think about that. Too many people are consumed by their resentments.
Sometimes I worried that my past was the only reason you spent time with me. You read my stories. You knew they were sad. I was afraid you were only there at that café because you pitied me. I also worried that I was in that café because I was looking for a mother. You didn’t have children. Maybe we needed each other. But I tried to push those feelings away because they were dark and uncomfortable. You said you wanted to read what I wrote. I wasn’t very disciplined, I explained. You said we should meet every Thursday afternoon at four o’clock so that I would not stop writing. It was the greatest kindness I have ever been given. Why couldn’t I just leave it at that? I tried hard not to look at you as my mother, as though I were some stray lost bird fallen out of her nest, but it wasn’t easy.
We didn’t always eat when we were at our café, but when we did, you ordered a side of ratatouille. It did not look good to me, but you once told me that if there were kibble for humans, you’d buy it, and then the ratatouille made more sense. The day we ordered food for the first time, I ordered escargot, and you seemed pleased. It felt good to have your proud eyes looking at me. I laughed and said, “It was nothing, the dish is really just a vehicle for butter.”
This made you happier. “That’s just what my boyfriend says!”
You loved your boyfriend very much. You had been together for sixteen years and you used words like enthralled and rapt and your eyes did a melty sort of thing when you talked about him. I was amazed. I did not know these feelings were possible after sixteen years. You shared two dogs, your Labrador retriever and your mother’s standard poodle who you inherited when she passed away. I met your Labrador one day when we were at our café. He was walking by with the dog walker, and they came over to say hello. I got down low and cooed to the dog so he would love me as much as I loved you. I wanted to have a love in common. I remember you were surprised by how much he seemed to like me, and I was glad, but I was also worried that I was trying too hard and that you would notice.
It was cold out and finally one week I said it was okay to sit inside. You were more at ease with the state of the world than I was, and the other patrons did not bother you. I always got there first and tried to find a table away from others. I hated when people sat too close to us. It was four o’clock. Why was anyone else there? I wanted them to leave. You were sick enough already. I did not want you to catch what they might have.
The café was small, and the kitchen was open, so our clothes always smelled like hot butter when we left. The tables were dark wood and tacky, a reminder to keep my elbows off the table. Sometimes the kitchen smoke burned my eyes. “Read me your pages,” you’d say. You always asked me to read aloud. You never took the pages in your hands.
I read to you, worried that I would disappoint you, worried that you’d come to think this was all a waste of your time.
But then you asked me to read a second time. “I’d like to hear it again if that’s okay?” I’d barely made it through the first read, my face was flushed, but I couldn’t say no. I tried to breathe as I began again.
You always wore a beautiful scarf and often a crisp white shirt. I invariably dressed for you. I wanted to look like someone that you wanted to be sitting with in a French café every Thursday at four o’clock.
One rainy Thursday the music was too loud. “I can’t hear you reading,” you said. I got up and asked them to turn the music down a little, please. I hoped very much that you would be impressed by my bravery.
Before I read to you each week, we’d share parts of our lives. I was on the edge of my seat as I listened to stories about your best friend, the poet, and your dear friend who was ninety-three and said anything she liked. You had plans for us all to meet and to see a film together, maybe on a Tuesday afternoon. I loved when you made plans for us that were in the future. Sometimes you told me about people in your life who were unkind. Only once did you mention some of your accomplishments, and it was in defiance of them that you whispered. “Well I did write two best sellers … translated into dozens of languages. Coppola bought my film rights! Sold over a million and a half copies. Still, they act like I have no business being at their dinner party.”
If only I’d been in the room. What I would have told them about how to behave kindly to others. But you just walked away. Your absence was their great loss. These stories allowed me to try the same. It turns out saying “no more, thank you very much” to those who are unkind frees up quite a bit of time.
One week you called moments before we were to meet and said you were in too much pain. You could not make it.
“That’s all right. Please don’t worry,” I said.
“Unless you want to come here, to me,” you suggested.
My heart skipped a beat. To your home? I asked.
“Only if you’re comfortable,” you said.
I am. I am. I am. I told the doorman who I was there to see, and he smiled as I entered your elevator. I knocked on your door and then you were there framed in orange. I did not know what to expect, but I loved knowing that about you … that you would paint your walls orange.
“Come in,” you said. You wrapped a blanket around your shoulders and took the armchair and I the couch. You offered me a soda. “It’s the good kind,” you said. I declined and you got yourself one. When you came back you were holding a Schweppes diet ginger ale in a small glass jar and this made me smile. “I never let anyone into my home,” you told me. “As you can see it’s sort of like the inside of a drawer.” I very much liked this description, and I tried to take in as much of the room as I could without being rude. I could have stayed in there all day, turning over every object in my hands. That night you gave me a copy of The Friend. “I have my own copy and I found this in the free book depository of my building, so please don’t worry about giving it back to me,” you said. The book was brand new, and I wondered whether you’d bought it for me but didn’t want to say.
I started the book that night and was pulled through the story of a woman who loses her friend and writing mentor to suicide. After her mentor dies, the narrator adopts the deceased’s beloved Great Dane, Apollo, who no one else will take in. She develops an unusual relationship with Apollo, and it seemed to me that the woman talks to him as if he were the lost mentor. She lives in New York City and is not allowed to have dogs in her apartment, never mind a Great Dane, and so she almost loses her home and arguably her mind as she unravels. Well the back of the book describes her as unraveling, but I didn’t really agree with that. I thought she seemed perfectly sane. I tried not to read too deeply into the plot. You liked the book. You gave me a found copy. Simple. But were you going to give me your dog one day?
Four months before I met you I was locked in my house, like much of the world. I left the city with my family for a home with a yard and a pond. When we first pulled up that day in March I had a plant on my lap because I knew that we were going to be there for a while. The first thing I noticed were two geese in the yard. My five-year-old daughter chased them back into the pond each day because I told her that I did not like them on our grass.
When I was young, my grandfather used to shoo the geese off his yard and back into the lake near their home. “If I had a gun, I’d shoot them,” he’d say. I was horrified … shoot them for making a mess on his lawn? But it did not stop me from shooing those geese off my own lawn those days in March, although I didn’t think I would ever shoot them.
But one day the geese did not run away. They came straight for my daughter. I ran screaming from the kitchen, slippers in hand, arms flapping wildly. I tried to look big, like someone once told me to do if I saw a bear. The geese ran back into the pond, and my terrified daughter collapsed into my arms.
Within the week the geese had six babies. Only then did it occur to me why they were there. Every morning I looked out my window as the six goslings floated round and round after their mother, who sometimes led them in a row up onto our yard to peck at the ground. They were only there for a few days, and then suddenly the babies were gone. The parents remained, but the babies were gone. A hawk? someone suggested. I couldn’t bear it. The parents stayed a couple more days and then they too left us all alone.
The summer after we met, I went back to the writing conference where we first met. We were supposed to go together, this time in person, but you were too sick to go, and you urged me to go on without you. I was alone at dinner one night after my second day of class when you messaged. I am at our place, you told me. I am imagining you sitting across from me. You had just gotten back from the hospital after having your blood drawn. I knew you were tired, but you still asked about me. How do you feel? Have you made any friends yet? It can feel quite lonesome at the beginning. I can’t wait to see what you come up with. I wish I were there with you.
That was the last message I got from you. Your boyfriend told me you kept thinking you’d get strong enough soon to call me yourself. “Don’t call her. She doesn’t have to come. I’ll see her soon,” she told him. He was so sorry when he called that morning. I was sorry too. I knew how hard it must have been for him, your rapt love.
Sometimes it feels like a hawk took you. You were here for a moment. You were unexpected and lovely and terrifying because I didn’t think I’d ever have someone like you to love. I didn’t know that I deserved it, but you assured me that I did, and I had to believe you. I believed everything about you.
I went walking after I got the news, reflecting on that short year we had together. I thought back to one talk in particular, when we discussed the problems I had with memoir. How can we write about what we are in? How do we know when we are changed enough to make the story worth putting on the page? You smiled and said kindly, “Just keep going, you don’t need to worry about that now.”
Every year two geese arrive at the pond in mid-March and stay a while. I imagine it is the same geese, but I have not seen goslings since that first year. One night I sat at the edge of the pond thinking of you. I was watching the geese and considering the absence of their children when a blue heron glided down and settled beside them in the still, dark water. I watched it silently and realized that a story doesn’t have to end to write about it. I don’t really know the story of the geese, but here I was, year after year, watching it begin anew.
Heather Campbell is a writer living in New York City. Her work has been published in HerStry and The Coachella Review, and she is honored to be included in the current issue of The NightWriter Review. You can follow her on Instagram at @hacwrites.