CHARLESGATE - Chapter ONE
Zylla blinked at the computer screen as she felt the blood in her face pool into her toes. She pushed back her office chair, stood, and turned toward the window. Below her, the sun glinted off bumper-to-bumper cars, transforming Storrow Drive into a river of colored jewels, but all Zylla saw were shades of gray.
“Hey, Zyll, the dean wants you to respond to these letters as soon as you can. I’ll leave them on your desk, okay?”
“Okay,” she said woodenly, without turning to face her work study student.
“Hey, you all right?”
“Sure.” Zylla glanced over her shoulder, forcing a smile at Nicole.
Nicole shrugged. “Okay. Well, call if you need anything,” she offered before shutting the door behind her.
Zylla sank into her chair and reread the email: “I got married this weekend, Zyllie. Kind of sudden, I know, but...”
No, she was not all right. Michael Sullivan was married. Mike, best friend and love of her life for the past thirteen years, was married. All hope that he would someday turn to her with eyes full of longing and lips full of passion was over. And now that the initial shock passed, she felt strangely empty and, she noted as she glared at the bright blue sky outside, slightly cranky.
She would have expected mind-numbing grief at such a disaster, would have welcomed it. Then, at least, she could sob into a pint of pistachio ice cream or entertain a Bukowski moment at Crossroads, the local pub down the street.
Zylla pushed the escape key and watched as the window disappeared from the screen, erasing the news just as easily as it had appeared. She spent the morning answering Dean Pendergast’s letters, then grabbed a sandwich and raspberry smoothie at the Food Court for lunch. As she ate, she kept her nose deep in a Dickens novel, refusing to allow her mind to dwell on her increasingly angry mood.
By the time the clock blinked five o’clock, she had walked halfway toward her home in Cambridge. The April day seemed too hot, and as she headed over the Massachusetts Avenue bridge toward home, she tried to peel off her black cardigan, which stubbornly clung to her left arm, trapped underneath the strap of her shoulder bag. To increase her frustration, a young man in fatigues, who had been walking quietly in front of her, spun around and began to yell at an imaginary cow that followed him and caused all sorts of evil events to occur in his life.
With a grunt, Zylla yanked the cardigan so that the sleeve was finally freed from her arm--unfortunately, she used too much force and managed to hit herself on the nose with the back of her hand and the sweater sailed neatly over the rail of the bridge and into the Charles River.
Zylla vaguely wondered if the evil cow was in fact following her. She sighed loudly and the young man next to her jumped in her path. Zylla frowned and moved to the left, but the man scrambled in that direction also. She passed the cow man nearly every day and he always chose a random person at which to bellow. Of course, today of all days, it had to be her. She sighed again and let her shoulders slump. “Yes?”
The man’s eyes widened. He opened his mouth and leaned toward her as he raised a trembling finger, pointing at her. Zylla rolled her eyes. “Moo,” she said.
At home, she slammed a steak on the back porch grill and went into the kitchen to make a salad. Her roommate’s bottle of red wine beckoned from the counter. Zylla wasn’t supposed to drink wine. One sip would cause a migraine so painful that she would be forced to stay in bed, head pillowed in a bag of ice. But, dammit, she was twenty-nine years old and having a crisis. She wasn’t quite sure what exactly the crisis consisted of, but when she figured it out, a bottle of wine might come in handy.
She uncorked the bottle and sat at the kitchen table. She would drink it straight from the bottle, a sure sign of love lost. Zylla tried to summon a few tears. “Bloody hell,” she muttered and tried harder, without success.
“What is the matter with me? I just lost the love of my life. Haven’t I?” The bottle of wine did not answer her and she recorked it. Even Mike wasn’t worth a migraine.
She had seen Mike for the first time in high school art class. He had walked into Mr. Callet’s room for some supplies and Zylla had stopped breathing. He was Lancelot with black hair and blue eyes in which a girl could swim. All other boys paled beside him. Zylla had followed him relentlessly, but to Mike she was a skinny little wren in comparison to his gorgeous, raven-haired girlfriend.
No doubt his new wife was a super model. She snorted.
Zylla munched on her salad while waiting for the steak to cook, and thought about her friendship with Mike. She was grateful that he had been able to tolerate her mooning stares long enough to get to know her because she couldn’t imagine a world without Mike’s friendship, even if she could never win his love.
But she hadn’t stopped hoping. And waiting.
Zylla ate her steak on the back porch--the hot spring day cooling into a purple evening was the perfect accompaniment to her mood. Twilight always disturbed her, but she never understood why. The sky seemed to change minutely, while Zylla never changed. Always, she was loyal to Mike.
While she dated a few men, her thoughts remained with Mike. She never let herself become emotionally involved with other men, no matter how much she liked them. Zylla frowned and stabbed the last piece of steak with her fork.
She never got emotionally involved in anything, really, except the Charlesgate. She had held the same job and had lived in the same apartment since college while she waited for Mike to come for her. Except now he wouldn’t. The crease between her brows deepened.
There was only one thing for it, then--Sixteen Candles and pistachio ice cream. When her roommate, Anne, came home, they would figure out what to do about Zylla. Anne always knew what to do. She went inside, grabbed a spoon and a pint of ice cream, and put the movie into the DVD player. She plopped onto the couch and was about to press the remote when her finger froze in mid-action.
Something niggled in her brain, something that wouldn’t wait for Anne. She put the ice cream onto the coffee table--she wouldn’t truly enjoy the scrumptious roll of velvet cream on her tongue until she figured it out for herself.
Zylla chewed her bottom lip as the action helped her to think. She had become adept at waiting. All this time, she thought that she was content. Days passed and she was neither happy nor sad, until now. Now, she definitely knew that she was not happy. Mike’s marriage didn’t devastate her, as she would have thought. Instead, his message forced her to realize that she was discontent.
And suddenly, Zylla knew why.
She had waited for fate to give her a life instead of going after happiness on her own.
“I guess I don’t love him after all. Not in that Cathy-loves-Heathcliff sort of way,” she said.
Zylla felt her face drain of color. She wasn’t in love with Mike and hadn’t been for a long time, and she shook her head as she counted all the years wasted while she waited for him.
Well, it’s time to change all that, she decided. Zylla took the pint and scooped a spoonful of ice cream into her mouth, letting the delicate coolness baptize her insides. She was almost thirty years old. It was time to start living her life.