“None of us are ever really gone, sweetheart.”
I’d heard that from him a hundred times. My grandmother had been religious. However, Grandpa veered toward angel sightings and UFOs and people communicating with their long-lost Aunt Margie from Topeka. Too much talk radio was probably to blame. He used to listen in his room after midnight while Grandma was sleeping. Sometimes he’d let me stay up with him, reading mystery books and scrolling through my phone while he built model ships at his work desk.
That was the first time I realized how satisfying rebellion could be, even quiet ones.
“Birdie?” Grandpa said. “Did you hear me?”
“Sorry,” I said, mentally wiping away my stray thoughts. “What were you saying?”
“Did you want to walk down to the supermarket with me?”
“Think I’ll just crash, if that’s okay.”
“First days are tough. Tomorrow will be better.” He touched the flower above my ear, a touch as soft as the wind, and the faraway look in his eye told me that he was thinking of my mother. His daughter. The person who kept us apart and brought us together.
“Look at you, being independent. You’re growing up so fast. Too fast, maybe. But you’re handling all of this just fine,” he said. “Your mother would be so proud of you.”
I hoped so.
When Grandpa left to go shopping, I gathered the remains of breakfast and headed up the creaky wooden staircase. The only full bathroom in the house sat at the top of the stairs; my bedroom was next to it. When Grandma died, Grandpa moved his stuff out of the master bedroom and into the spare room, across the landing from mine. That’s where all his books and model ships were, and where he slept. And now that no one was on the other side of my bedroom wall, I finally felt as if I had some privacy.
Gray morning light suffused my room, softening the harsh lines of my canopy bed and brightening the wild colors of the paintings lining my walls. Aunt Mona was an artist—a really good one, who had her work sold in Seattle galleries—and she’d painted me a dozen whimsical portraits over the years. Sherlock Holmes. Hercule Poirot. Nick and Nora Charles. Columbo. And Nancy Drew.
She even painted one of my mother. That portrait hung alongside a couple of old photographs near my bedroom vanity set, next to a framed poster of Billie Holiday circa 1946, with her iconic white flower in her hair. That’s where I got the idea to wear flowers myself. And now I unpinned the stargazer lily from my hair and set it next to a vase filled with a dozen more before tossing my socks in a laundry hatch that led downstairs to the laundry room—one of the perks of an old home. Then I grabbed the laptop from my desk, where it teetered atop my vintage Smith Corona typewriter, and stretched out on my bed.
Daniel Aoki. I pressed enter in the search field and began scrolling. Not much to see. Nothing in images, just some random guys with the same name. A few social media accounts popped up, and one of them may have been his—profile pic was a poster of Houdini and a brief bio: “Stop asking if I’m okay”—but it was private. I’d have to send a request to the account holder to see it, and no way was I doing that. The only other thing I found was his name listed at a Seattle comic shop for winning some kind of gaming event, but that was three years ago.
Who are you, Daniel Aoki?
And who was I that rainy afternoon in the diner, throwing myself at him like I didn’t have a care in the world?
My gaze lit on a wall of bookshelves crammed with mystery novels, their jagged spines like crooked teeth. Most of them were dime-store paperbacks, but I had two complete sets of the entire Nancy Drew series—the original volumes, which used to belong to my mom, with unedited text, in which Nancy was flippant and daring, and the revised 1960s editions with yellow spines, in which Nancy became coolheaded and a little too perfect.
The original ones were the best.
I used to keep my grittier crime novels hidden in the back of my walk-in closet, because good girls weren’t supposed to be reading about serial killers and sex and crime. When Grandma passed, I had a small breakdown over those hidden books, because it felt like I’d been keeping secrets from her. Being rebellious, just like my mom had been—at least, that’s what I’d imagined she’d think if she ever found them.
Grief causes irrational thoughts.
Including me being convinced that the constant bickering I did with Grandma over the fact that I wanted to attend public school during my senior year may have contributed to her heart attack. Rationally, I knew this wasn’t true, but that didn’t stop me from reliving our fights inside my head as some kind of personal punishment. That was another reason I needed the job at the hotel. Living in a lonely house of grief for the last few months had begun to feel like a prison I’d never escape.
Latitude affects your attitude.
Scrolling on my laptop, I thought about the ad Daniel had mentioned, which he’d thought I’d seen. Was it still up? If so, how could I find it? My curiosity got the better of me, so I began combing through local blogs and news sites. Nothing online in The Stranger, Seattle’s local alt-weekly city paper, and the Seattle Times classifieds was a bust. I spent almost an hour looking, until sleep was trying to pull me under. Stifling a yawn, I was about to give up and close my laptop when I stumbled upon a local forum for Missed Connections.
The forum contained hundreds of listings over the last week—how many people crossed paths in the city? I was dumbfounded. Most of them were strangers, spotted on public transportation. A few were just begging for kinky hookups. One woman fell for some guy she saw through a restaurant window—just the back of his head, but she knew it was true love.
Then I spotted a listing that sent my slumberous pulse racing:
Flower girl in Moonlight Diner.
Tuesday night we talked in a booth by the window. You had killer eyes and were reading a detective novel. I showed you some card tricks. We left together in the rain, but you disappeared. Can we talk? I can’t sleep, thinking about you and wondering what went wrong.
I reread it several times before closing my laptop.
And for the remainder of the morning, I lay awake, staring at the ceiling while my thoughts ran in circles, racing the beats of my rebellious heart.
“Fellas, coincidence and fate figure largely in our lives.”
—Special Agent Dale Cooper, Twin Peaks (1990)
5
* * *
Aunt Mona had taken me to Pike Place Market since I was old enough to stroll the tiled waterfront arcade. It was only a few blocks away from the Moonlight Diner, and even now, as we approached the iconic Public Market Center clock in the late afternoon before my third hotel shift, my mind still associated it with pleasure-filled Saturdays: watching fishmongers throw halibut for the delight of tourists; pressing my nose against the window of Beecher’s as cheese was made; rubbing the snout of Rachel, the bronze pig at the market’s entrance, for good luck. The market’s acres of shops spread over multiple floors were a never-ending labyrinth of discoveries waiting to be found.
But this afternoon, I was tagging along while she picked up a check from a stall that sold her People of Seattle prints—quirky drawings of quirky residents.
I’d worked another shift at the hotel last night. A Daniel-free shift, as he wasn’t scheduled. To be honest, after reading his Missed Connections ad, I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or disappointed that I didn’t have to see him. Or what, if anything, I would say when I eventually did. But I thought about it. A lot.