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Kazran: What do you want?
Doctor: A normal life.
- A Christmas Carol, Christmas Special
(Sometimes she dreams of strange faces lurking in the dark and of forgetting something important. When she wakes, she expects to hear rain.
He dreams of a world painted red – the skies burning and the most overwhelming sense of guilt. He wakes reaching for someone who isn’t there and never has been.)
In university, he can never settle on any particular concentration, flitting from one major to another and always losing interest by the end of the semester. He finds everything fascinating and becomes fully immersed and passionate about it, but only for a short time, and then he’s on to something else. He ends up with enough credits to graduate without ever actually making a decision on a career – the Dean is so exasperated with him that he allows John to graduate without specializing in anything. He rather enjoys telling people he has a degree in everything, when in actuality, he has a degree in nothing at all.
He applies for a position as a clerk at the Newberry Library in Chicago because the responsibility is minimal and it allows him to be around what he loves best, books – and rare books at that. His interests may change on a daily basis, but the written word holds a special, eternal place in John’s heart. Even so, he goes through his days slowly, like walking through sludge uphill, wondering if everyone else feels time passing like he does – every second, minute, hour, day. It’s an uncomfortable prickle beneath his skin, an itch he can’t quite scratch.
John watches people walk through the library doors every day, studying their casual strides, their smiles, their preoccupation with their mobiles, and only thinks surely there must be more. He has a strange feeling he must be missing some vital secret to being satisfied with a slow, linear life – which is silly because what would life be but linear? He saves his paychecks and lives like a miser, knowing that when he has enough, he will leave and go somewhere, anywhere, everywhere. He will find the secret.
John Smith is in stasis until one fateful day walking the aisles of the Newberry and reshelving books, he happens to look up at just the right moment. A flash of gold catches his eye and he pauses, a stack of yellowed, aging manuscripts in hand, to stare. Across the room at one of the heavy, antique oak tables meant for research and study, there is a woman with hair the color of honey. It curls and spirals around her whole head, falling into her eyes as she bends over a blue notebook, scribbling furiously.
John stares at her and for no reason he can understand, thinks of course and where else? Intrigued by the strange sense of déjà vu he gets when he looks at her, he starts walking toward her before he even knows what he’s going to say. The closer he gets, the clearer she becomes and he finds that her hair isn’t the only captivating thing about her. She looks fully focused on the pages in front of her, her brow furrowed and a spare pencil tucked behind her ear, nearly swallowed by the black hole that is her hair. She has a wide nose, full lips and a refined, almost regal bone structure. She’s older than him, perhaps in her late thirties, and though she’s sitting, he can tell by the dress she’s wearing that she’s delightfully curvy in all the right places.
As he approaches, she glances up, reading glasses sliding down her nose, and he sees in her bright green eyes the same restlessness that stares back at him in the mirror every morning. Without waiting for an invitation, John flops down into the seat across from her and she flinches when the chair legs scrape loudly against the floor. “Hello,” he says. “Busy?”
She blinks at him, and then glances helplessly down at her notebook. “I’m writing.”
Not busy then, he decides.
“Writing what? A novel? Oh, is it a diary?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but I’m making notes for my class.”
“Are you a teacher then?” He props his booted feet up on the table, wondering what it is about this woman that makes him want to drive her mad. “What do you teach?”
“Geography.” She frowns at him, sliding off her glasses. “Should you have your feet up on the table like that?”
“Probably not,” he admits, and doesn’t move them. “You don’t look like a geography teacher.”
She raises an eyebrow. “And what do geography teachers generally look like?”
“Less hair,” he admits. “And curves.”
She flushes but narrows her eyes, unwilling to back down. “Blatant stereotyping in one so young. Tragic.”
John grins. “What’s your name?”
“Melody Williams.”
He taps his fingers against his knee. Melody. It’s a beautiful name but somehow, it doesn’t feel right. It isn’t fluid enough, whatever that means. “Like the first name, the last doesn’t suit you at all. Far too boring for someone with hair like that.”
“Oh? And what’s your name then?”
He smiles loftily. “John Smith.”
“Oh yes,” she says dryly. “That’s much better.”
John laughs, and he doesn’t realize until he’s walking away with her number in his pocket that for those brief moments with Melody Williams, time hadn’t dragged at all. In fact, when he looked at Melody, time didn’t exist.
(He can’t quite remember having a grandfather, but he carries around his broken fob watch in his jacket pocket.
Melody wears hers on a chain around her neck. She fiddles with it constantly but for some reason, it never occurs to her to open it.)
Since childhood, she has always felt like all the pieces of who she was were scattered to the wind, and she has spent her life trying to gather them all back up and make sense of them, like an archaeologist with only half the facts. When she meets John Smith, a floppy haired man with a boyish grin and too much confidence for his own good, she feels the pieces beginning to fall into place. He dresses like a hipster in his tweed jacket and bowtie, and he is far, far too young for her. Melody loves him instantly.
She gives him her mobile number and he calls her the very same day, smiling into the phone when he brags that he makes the best Coq Au Vin since Julia Child. It’s how she finds herself wandering about his cluttered little flat with its eccentric furniture, listening to the crashing of pans in the kitchen and his muffled curses. “Need any help?” She calls, sliding a fingertip over the spines of the books littering his shelves.
“No!” He shouts hastily. “I’m fine. More than fine. I’m brilliant. And you, Melody Williams, need to prepare to be impressed.”
Another crash. Another muffled curse.
Melody smirks but stays out of his way. Colorful plastic sticking up out of the back of the bookshelf catches her eye. Curious, she begins to move aside The Sound and the Fury and The Art of Paper Mache to retrieve it. Pulling out a pair of pistol-sized nerf guns, she raises an intrigued eyebrow. What kind of grown man keeps nerf guns hidden behind his books?
Eyeing them with the beginnings of a smile, she decides that whatever kind of man John Smith is, he’s exactly the kind she likes. Depositing one gun on the coffee table, she carries the other one with her toward the kitchen. She peers around the doorframe and finds John poking at his special dish with a frown.
Melody takes aim and fires, launching a nerf across the room. It lands right in the Coq Au Vin and John squeaks, jumping backward with a gasp. She dissolves into giggles at the girlish reaction, and only laughs harder when he whirls to face her and she sees the apron.
“Oh, you’ve done it now, Willams.” He starts toward her and she stumbles back, still laughing. “I am not normally a man of violence, but for you, I think I can make an exception.”
He lunges and Melody shrieks, turning to run through his living room and down the hall. John doesn’t follow immediately, and she’s just about to come out and search for him when she hears the faint strains of Frank Sinatra drifting from his speakers. Shooting each other with nerf guns to the gentle croon of It Had To Be You. Melody has never been quite so utterly charmed.
Hearing his footsteps coming closer, she darts into his bathroom and peers out from behind the door, watching him creep by with the other nerf pistol in hand. She waits until he walks past, his back still turned, before shooting again. It’s a dirty tactic but all is fair in love and nerf gun shootouts. The shot gets him right in the back of the head and with a groan of agony, John sinks to his knees, clutching his head and the imaginary wound there.
“Felled by a geography teacher,” he groans, and falls onto his back. “Oh the shame.”
She pretends to blow smoke off her gun, sliding it into her belt loop. “Any last words?”
He nods, holding out a weak hand and rasping, “Come closer, Melody.”
Cautiously, she kneels at his side and she’s quite sure he’s getting a spectacular view down her blouse, but he looks so adorable in the throes of death that she doesn’t really mind. “Before I go, tell me. Would there have been a second date?”
She hums thoughtfully. “Perhaps. Depends on whether the Coq Au Vin turned out.”
“You are a beautiful and fair mistress,” he murmurs, gripping her sleeve, and then promptly drops his head back to the floor with a thud and shuts his eyes.
“Dead on a first date,” she whispers, smoothing his hair back from his forehead. “Not going to look good on my record.” Somehow, even in death, John manages to pucker his lips suggestively. She fights back a snicker and rolls her eyes. “There’s nothing for it, I suppose.” With a put-upon sigh, she lowers her head and presses her lips to his in a soft kiss.
Miraculously healed, John lifts his hands to her face, long fingers stroking her cheeks as his mouth moves against hers gently. His lips are soft and full, and when his tongue darts out to stroke hers teasingly, Melody whimpers. How can a man she just met feel so much like home?
“I seem to have recovered,” he whispers when they break apart.
Melody leans her forehead against his and smiles.
(Late at night, with Melody curled around him in the dark, he whispers secrets he has never told anyone else, even the embarrassing middle name he likes to pretend he doesn’t have.
She confides in him about her dream of becoming a professor someday. He doesn’t know why, but the mere thought fills him with crippling fear.)
Even with Melody in his life, brightening his days with her naughty smile and her dizzying kisses, John’s wanderlust is too great to ignore. He has enough money saved up for a plane ticket to Budapest and lodging when he gets there, and he decides he’ll figure out the rest once he arrives. Not having a plan is half the fun. It’s what he’s wanted all his life, to be free. Still, he hesitates.
And the reason for his hesitation is the woman sitting behind her desk, head bent as she grades papers with a red pen. John leans against the doorframe of her classroom and watches her fondly, the frown on her face whenever she has to give a student a bad mark, the way she rakes a hand through her curls and doesn’t seem to notice that they tumble back into her eyes again right away. At one time, traveling the world was all he wanted, but that was before he met Melody.
“Going to stand there gawking all night?”
He starts out of his daze and finds her smirking at him from across the room. “I’m working up a good pout,” he says firmly. “Since you heartlessly abandoned me. Honestly Melody, what kind of person chooses grading papers over disco bowling night?”
She laughs softly, fiddling with the chain of the watch around her neck, and the set of her shoulders tells him just how tired she is. “I would rather have been with you, dear, trust me. But these things won’t grade themselves.”
“So forget about them.” He drops into the seat directly across from her desk and folds his hands in front of him on the table. “Quit.”
She snorts. “And do what?”
“Travel with me.”
Melody glances up, obviously expecting to find him grinning at her mockingly, but freezes in place when she sees the solemn expression on his face. “What?”
“I’m leaving.” John leans forward, meeting her gaze steadily as he says, “Quit your rubbish job and come with me.”
She swallows, her fingers flexing around her pen. “Where?”
He smiles. “Anywhere you want.”
Melody blinks at him. “Alright.”
Two weeks later, they’re on a plane to Budapest. They’ve known each other all of three months. It’s mad and ridiculous and stupid. They are too in love to care.
(Melody catches him doodling on napkins and in the margins of paper, intricate circles within circles within circles. He tells her it’s a language he made up as a child, and she insists on learning it. When she picks it up as quickly as if she’d always known it, John decides it’s just another sign that Melody Williams is the only one for him.
Almost as if she had been made for him.)
Traveling fits them like a pair of worn boots, as if it’s all they’ve ever known rather than a dream finally realized. They soak in the famous Budapest baths until their skin begins to prune and Melody nearly gets them thrown out for indecent touching in a sacred place. They stay in Paris for a while, where John earns more money by getting a temporary job at a café and Melody sells sketches in Montmartre.
John hangs a padlock at the Milvian Bridge in Rome and Melody kisses him breathless and laughs when he blushes. They visit a monastery in Hong Kong and Melody refuses to let him nick one of the traditional robes, insisting that him dressed as a monk is not what she’d had in mind when she suggested roleplay.
There is always a new sunset to see, a narrow street to explore, a set of steep stairs to be climbed or a bus to hop on. Every day is an adventure, especially with Melody, who seems to thrive away from the confining walls of her classroom and develops a bad habit of getting them into trouble. She carries danger in her eyes and in her gait, and he stumbles after her through crowded markets in foreign cities, all the more in love with her because of it.
They’re in Egypt when he makes a decision. He doesn’t plan it, isn’t even thinking about it, but he wanders away from Melody’s side where she stands haggling with a man over the price of a scarf and finds himself at a table of jewelry. Most of it is old, dusty and cheap but the man behind the table tries to convince him it has come from the tombs of pharaohs and queens. John tunes him out, scanning the table idly and waiting to feel Melody slip her arm into his and pull him away. She doesn’t and if he listens closely enough, he can hear her telling off the scarf-peddler.
Smiling fondly, he is just about to leave the table and pay whatever the scarf costs when he spots it. A tiny cross bent into the shape of a ring and covered in black stones.
The peddler spots John eyeing it and says, “Ah, the ankh. Symbol of eternal life. This piece belonged to Nefertiti herself.”
John very much doubts it, ignoring the man in favor of studying the ring. It’s a bit dusty but there is a shine beneath it that even a little dirt and Egyptian sand can’t hide. And it looks small enough to slip onto Melody’s finger.
Snatching it up from the table, John looks up and says, “I’ll take it.”
(That night in their room, with the windows open to let in the warm night air and the scent of ancient sand, Melody ties him to the bed with his bowtie and whispers husband into the dark.
John closes his eyes and thinks of water.)
They’re staying in India when she scrambles out of bed and heaves up the contents of her stomach into the toilet bowl, but she blames it on the food, letting John rub her back and fetch her tea until she feels better. By the time they make it to Saudi Arabia and she’s still spending her days weak and nauseated, John is a fretful mother hen, hovering near her constantly and clearly terrified there’s something seriously wrong with her.
Melody waits until he goes out one night to scour the land for the ginger ale she’d asked for before she takes the pregnancy test. She isn’t hoping for any particular outcome and she doesn’t know what to feel when she sees the result. It’s sitting on the bathroom sink when John arrives home an hour and a half later, ginger ale in hand and triumphant grin on his face.
“Drink up, sweetheart,” he says, and opens a bottle before handing it to her with a fond kiss pressed to her curls. “I can’t go snorkeling by myself tomorrow. And I was so looking forward to wearing the gear. You get a mask, Melody.”
Smiling weakly, she sips at her drink and it settles oddly in her nervous stomach. “You might have to go on your own, dear.”
He frowns, settling onto the edge of the bed next to her. Wrapping an arm around her shoulders, he tugs her gently into his side and Melody shuts her eyes, resting her head in the crook of his neck and letting him pepper her temple and cheek with kisses. “You’re going to be fine,” he whispers. “Right as rain. Not quite sure what rain has to do with being right but that’s what people say so it must be -”
“I just mean,” she interrupts, pressing her lips to his throat and affectively shutting him up. “That I’m not sure pregnant women can go snorkeling.”
“Well neither do I,” he says, shrugging. “But what has that got to do with us?”
Melody sighs. “You tell me, daddy.”
Arm still around her shoulders, John stiffens and she shuts her eyes, waiting for him to push her away and panic – the end of their carefree life, of going where they want when they want, the end of their freedom. Instead, he buries his face in her curls and holds her just a little tighter. “When? I – thought we were being -”
“We were,” she says, and licks her lips. “Except in Brazil.”
John is silent, probably remembering that rather wild night in Rio de Janeiro when the last thing on their minds had been protection. “Right,” he says slowly. “Okay.”
“John, say something.”
“I just did.”
“Something helpful.” She scowls. “Some sort of reaction would be nice – positive or negative.”
“Do you want it?”
“We don’t have to -”
“Melody,” he says softly, sternly. “Do you want it?”
She smoothes a hand over her flat stomach and is horrified to feel tears stinging her eyes. She nods wordlessly, clinging to his shirt, and whispers, “Yes.”
(They call her Amelia.)
Going back to their normal, everyday lives would have been a death sentence. Maybe not physically, but mentally and emotionally, it would have killed them both. The normal life is not for them anymore and they both know it, know they’d be eternally unhappy that way, even with a child and each other. They need the adventure, the excitement, the unknown.
“We’ll settle down somewhere nice, like Scotland,” Melody says. “Just until she’s old enough to travel. And then we’ll be off again.”
John runs a hand through his hair, cradling his infant daughter, barely hours old, in a humid hospital in France. Amelia’s hair is ginger, bright copper like a penny. Must have gotten it from her grandmother, Melody had said. He has no idea why he’s so pleased by that. “And what about schooling?”
“We’ll teach her ourselves.” She leans against her pillows, exhausted but content. “We’re certainly better suited than the limited instruction she’d get elsewhere. And a cultural education is just as important as a formal one, my love.”
He caves, of course, because settling down permanently scares the hell out of him, and because Melody is always right – though he’ll never, ever admit such a thing out loud. Her smugness would be epic and maddening. They spend four years in Edinburgh with Amelia before the itch to see something new cannot be contained any longer and they have to move before they both burst out of their skin.
Travel book open on the table in their tiny kitchen and Amelia in her lap, Melody strokes her fingers through their daughter’s curls and asks, “Where would you like to go, darling?”
Standing at the counter and watching fondly as Amelia flips through the book with tiny fingers and a frown of concentration, John murmurs, “Amy’s choice.”
Amelia’s little face lights up suddenly and she stops, pointing at the page in front of her. “The lions,” she says, and turns to look at Melody. “Like mummy’s hair.”
John snorts. “Excellent choice, poppet.”
They settle in Tanzania for a few months and John gets a well-paying job taking wealthy tourists on safari. Sometimes Melody and Amelia tag along with him, looking adorable dressed in safari hats and khaki. Amelia is awed by the wild animals, clinging to his hand as he shows her lions and giraffes, and lets her pet an elephant’s trunk. Her face is delighted and her laugh is like the tinkling of a bell, as treasured as her mother’s.
A trip to Tel Aviv is only a thousand dollars away from being theirs and John works overtime to make it happen, driving his battered jeep back to their little cottage just as night falls. The lights inside are on, emanating a warm glow from the open windows, and he smiles as he climbs out of the jeep and stretches, looking forward to seeing his girls after a long day.
“Honey, I’m home,” he calls out, expecting to be greeted at the door with a roll of Melody’s eyes and a kiss on the cheek from his daughter. The moment the words are out of his mouth, the door to the cottage bursts open and Melody comes rushing out, Amelia toddling behind her. She looks… different. She’s the same, of course she is, but there’s something in her face and in the way she’s looking at him that unsettles John. She looks wilder, exultant and heartbroken all at once.
“Melody?” He asks, a little terrified. She’s beaming as she throws herself into his arms, tears streaming down her face. He catches her around the waist and holds on tight, bewildered as he strokes her hair. “Sweetheart, what -”
“Amelia broke my pocket watch,” she whispers.
John glances down at Amelia, tugging at his trouser leg with the chain of the watch Melody always wears wrapped around her little fist. She blinks up at him, looking entirely unapologetic. “Well, we’ll get you another one, okay? Please don’t cry. You know I’m absolutely rubbish when you cry.”
Melody laughs, a choked, watery sound that does not reassure him at all. “Oh, my lovely idiot,” she breathes. “Where is yours?”
“Mine?” He frowns, digging into his pocket without releasing her. “It doesn’t even work.”
“I don’t want it, my love.” She laughs again, bending to scoop up Amelia, who clings to her neck. “I want you to open it.”
“What on earth for?”
“Please?” She bites her lip hopefully. “For me.”
John glances down at the scratched and battered fob watch in his palm. It’s nothing special and despite knowing that it had belonged to his grandfather, he has no attachment to it at all. He doesn’t even know why he still carries it around with him. In all honesty, he and Melody could have used the money he’d have gotten from pawning it over the years but the idea never occurred to him. The watch is a part of him, a fixture as permanent as Melody and Amelia.
He hesitates, eyes lifting back up to his wife again, suddenly unsure.
Their daughter settled on her hip, Melody looks at him with unadulterated, ancient love shining in her green eyes and he has the strangest feeling she knows something he doesn’t. He could never stand being two steps behind her, never happy unless he’s by her side and holding her hand. So with his breath caught in his throat, John flips open the watch.
And remembers.
“River.”
(“Hello sweetie.”)