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You think of him when it rains.
It reminds you of his turns of phrase, sometimes so startlingly beautiful you couldn't think of a response past the urge to capture it before it floated away. It reminds you of his house, a port in the storm, the light of a ship at sea. It reminds you of the odd quirk of his smile, so fleeting you could never catch it on film or paper with any permanence.
You have too much time to think of him, now.
Instead, you call Clarice one night, the bustle of Amsterdam's lights and people around you, music and speech and the patter of rain all lost in a blur of sound. You are calling from a payphone and you are planning on flying out tomorrow, just in case. She is bright in a way that makes you think of another girl, beautiful and broken and lost, and as such when Clarice says, "Actually, there was a gift for you, at the institution," your mind immediately jumps to him.
"A gift?" you ask.
"It was forwarded on," she says, "to a house in Minnesota."
You think you might be able to picture it, a small brown package, cheap and impermanent, but you have no idea what might be inside. His writing would be a scrawl across the front, barely restricted to the rigid lines, Hannibal Lecter in indelible ink. The package from Baltimore will go to Minnesota, to, you imagine, a villa in Tuscany and halfway across France until it heads back to the States where it will float in some distant limbo, that otherworldly place where mail goes to when it dies. Perhaps in a decade a postman will open it, this worn sealed package with edges frayed and a dozen postmarks stamped across its front, curious as to its contents, but it will never reach you.
"Thank you for the information," you say graciously. "Goodbye, Clarice."
The next year you spend across Europe, in Germany, France, Italy until you settle down, in a house in Athens you are displeased with in a disquieting way. It is a lovely design of bricks and mortar but all you can think of is being on the edge of the wilderness, the crunch of snow under your boots. It is an old fantasy you thought you had given up, a photograph in your mind of some nebulous ideal you once held. He would not take you back now, and you would think much less of him if he did.
After some months in your new house you have furnished it to your liking. You had seen a statue of a wendigo at the market and purchased it on a whim, and now it sits quietly on a shelf. You think you are growing old, in that slow sure way you cling to the past, or whatever is left of it.
Your telephone rings one day, the sound surprising and shrill. You have not given the number to anyone and you are unlisted, so when you pick it up you don't know what you are expecting. "Hello?"
It might be a voice, on the end of the line. Thunder booms outside your curtains and you press the receiver closer to your ear because it stirs something faint inside you, awakens some nugget of familiarity in your mind. "Will?" you chance, but the sound on the other end of the line is garbled, soft and crackling like you haven't heard a phone do in years. Then, it cuts out, as abruptly as it started, and you are left standing there, an empty receiver in your hand.
You close your eyes and breathe out, deeply, and put down the telephone. You haven't said his name in as many years as you have seen him, and it takes something out of you, some great large chunk of flesh lost to Will Graham, once again. You think he owns more of you than he knows, but after you turn the thought over in your head you are almost certain it is wrong. He has, after all, known you almost better than you have known yourself, and would no doubt know this as well. You wonder where he is now.
Instead of searching you go back to your books, your music, your food and your life but you still can't help thinking of him when it rains.
In fact, it is raining when you are taking a taxi down the Champs-Élysées, eyes fixed outside. The taxi driver is polite and quiet and you watch the world blurred under the haze of rain, the glow of streetlamps reflecting off water droplets, people hurrying by under umbrellas or with coats and hoods pulled over their heads. There is a strange surreality to the world outside a window, individuals reduced to scurrying indistinct blurs of life, and so you react too late when you see a face you haven't seen in years and years.
"Stop! Arrêtez-vous!" you say, and pass a too-large handful of notes at the driver because you would know a face anywhere, particularly that one, even older and peaceful and worn, half-hidden under the hood of a coat. You nearly stumble as you exit the car and hurry down the street, ignorant of the rain pelting down, dripping down your forehead and off your nose, the splashing of your boots. For the most beautiful of moments you think you have him, the flash of greying stubble on his face as he looks back toward you, but then he turns back and continues on and you are too far away to follow. The mirage of him is lost in the sea of dark coats and umbrellas, lost in the wet blackness of the street and the halos of gold and neon lights, glittering on the pavement.
You stand there in the rain, water sinking through your coat to your shoulders, and wonder at what you have lost.