The Hypothetical Girl (5 page)

“I wasn’t actually a member here, but I saw your profile and had to join just to meet you,” he wrote. “I couldn’t get your beautiful face out of my head.”

Okay, let’s just take a moment to breathe deeply and seriously look at that sentence again, as Alana did:

I couldn’t get your beautiful face out of my head.

He had written to her in that first dispatch that he
could not believe
she liked Tom Waits, too. Such a coincidence: “I am also a huge fan,” he wrote. “I love the rawness and fury of his craggy voice. I even like the songs with the most unorthodox rhythms. They remind me of a rattly old truck driving down the road.”

To think, he had written, that there was this beautiful woman who also liked Tom Waits—
what were the chances?

As she had sat before her computer screen and stared at the message, then flipped back to his picture on the bike and the other pictures: Max next to his koi pond; Max on a boat, a warm glow of late sun napping on his shoulders; and Max at dusk, a pleasant-shaped shadow sleeping softly on his cheek.

Guilty pleasure: She toggled Max’s photographs for days.

When it came to writing back, she was very terse. One sentence, cherry-picked words. When he asked her if she
liked the woods (he had a thirty-acre spread he “enjoyed hiking around in”), she wrote back: “Love woods.”

When he asked if she liked nature and mountains and rivers, she replied: “All of the above.”

The reason she had kept her answers so clipped was that she didn’t want to write anything to spoil it all. She had learned from experience that the slightest turn of phrase could puncture and deflate an online flirtation. And here it was: a Happily Ever After that had come right to her door. Well, her virtual door, anyway. It was so precious. But so delicate. After all, it had just come; it could also just disappear.

One wrong move, one wrong word, one wrong step and she could scare that Happily Ever After clean away. So Alana was cautious. Uber-cautious, in fact. She took her time and she was careful. Like a person who wants to pet a silky rabbit that has mysteriously stopped for a moment in a field, she inched very slowly forward. She knew it could bolt.

Okay, so it wasn’t a real Happily Ever After; she couldn’t frame it and send it to her sister or place it on
her
kitchen shelf, for example. But it was a damn good thing and better than anything she had had in a long, long time and frankly, she wanted, really wanted, to keep it.

Potential
Max.

That night, she had another message from Max, a bright-red check mark on her home page.

“Just so you know, Alana, I am a really handy guy. I have built three houses; one of them is an underground house. I can fix anything, so just let me know if you have anything you need fixed.”

She sat there before her computer screen looking at it: Potential Max had offered to potentially fix real things for her.

He had built an underground house! She let the idea of an underground house sidestroke into her imagination. If she and Max were together that would mean she could, potentially of course, live underground, or at least visit occasionally!

Alana had never been in an underground house or even given much thought to underground houses or even being underground for a good long time, but now the idea of an underground house was with her all the time, fully embedded. Sitting in the park, over her bag lunch, she imagined peering out of the side of a hill like a hobbit in Middle-earth. Life in a grass-covered knoll. It would be so cozy to live underground, not to mention safe. If people didn’t know your house was there, right underneath them, they would be so much less likely to rob you. And don’t forget the environmental aspect; it would be so green to live that way, literally.

Then Alana remembered: She had drawn a map of an underground city when she was a child. There were streets, supermarkets, a gym, a swimming pool area,
apartments, and multiple levels of “under” with an underground elevator you could use to get lower and lower down. She had gotten the idea for the drawing after her family visited Carlsbad Caverns, on a vacation in southern New Mexico, where they actually took an elevator down inside the earth. The guide on the cave tour took her family and the tour group, room by room, into the innermost cavern chambers by the beam of an industrial-strength flashlight. Finally they had to crawl a bit to enter one last room, where the whole group stood in total darkness.

“Now, look in front of you, hold out your hand,” the tour guide instructed. Alana, then nine, had held out her hand. Her sister Bree, beside her, just seven at the time, had whimpered: “I’m scared.” She’d caught Bree’s hand and held it tight, whispering to her: “It’s okay, it’s fun. We’re invisible!”

“Hold your right hand in front of your face,” the guide instructed.

She did.

“Wiggle your fingers.”

She did.

“You can’t see your hand at all, can you, or anything in this room … That is because right now you are in complete, total darkness; there’s not one drop of light in here. You won’t experience this again, because up there above, you are never in this kind of darkness. This is real darkness, actual darkness, rare in our world.”

Then the guide snapped his fingers, and well-concealed colored lights snapped back at him from above, revealing a gorgeous, nearly baroque scene, brightly lit stalagmites and stalactites, crystals gleaming from the ceiling, bejeweled walls. They were standing in a jewelry box, a treasure trove of sparkling light. But Alana would always remember thinking that the real treasure was the darkness that the room had held before: not fake but
real
dark.

S
he answered Max’s note carefully, in the sparsest of prose:

“It is great to be handy and be able to fix things. An underground house sounds lovely; I imagine it as very safe and tight, cool in the summer and warm in the winter.”

T
he days went on and Alana felt better and better about life, about herself, everything. She carried the thought of Max, whom she still hadn’t met, around with her like a secret. To the store, to the bank, to the gym. She had a potential mate. He could even fix things in her house, like that leaky pipe in the basement. But she dared not really ask him to fix it, because to do so might somehow mar this fragile connection they had going. And she loved this slipknot of affection they were tying with their typed words; she looked forward to the missives and the promise they held of real-world interactions in some future someday.

Max seemed excited about her, too:

“In the summer I can show you all around the mountains on my Harley. There is no better way to see the Adirondacks than on the back of a Harley!”

“I am very creative,” he wrote on another evening. “I could make things for you in stained glass.”

Having a potential gift of stained glass was almost as good as a real gift of stained glass, maybe even better, Alana thought, as real stained glass might break. It was such a lovely thing that Alana thought about it the entire next day, which happened to be Valentine’s Day.

When she went to her bank to cash a check that morning, she was immediately assaulted by the sight of bouquets of flowers on all the secretarys’ and tellers’ desks. An indoor rose garden.

In the past, such a sight had made her a bit sad. Everyone loved, everyone remembered. Happily Ever Afters on every desk, all over the world, from bosses to college interns. But on this particular Valentine’s Day she did not feel such an affront. The potential lover on her computer—just a click away—buffered her usual despair. The teller gave her a smile and a little pink candy heart enclosed in a plastic wrapper with her money. The candy heart was stamped with the mauve words “Truly Yours.”

She smiled back. She didn’t need to feel excluded from Happily Ever Afters today, as a facsimile of them was waiting at home. Handy fix-it Max. His sentences.
His underground house. The Harley he would drive her around upon, someday, to see the Adirondack mountains.

Her sister Brianna called that night. “Hey, sis, happy Valentine’s Day! Come over and have some pie; the girls and I made chocolate cream pie as a surprise for Peter. And I am making your favorite for dinner … shepherd’s pie!”

“Oh, I think I’ll stay in,” Alana replied. Rather than head over to see her sister’s family—the kids were really so cute and sweet and even fought over her, like she was a shiny, irresistible toy—she wanted to stay home and look again at Max’s photographs and missives.

“C’mon!” Brianna said. “We haven’t seen you in weeks. You’re becoming a stranger!”

Which was true: Alana had stopped visiting them, or going anywhere much, come to think of it.

“Okay,” she said. A drive would be good for her. And it would be nice to see how it felt to be
Alana in an almost couple with Max
, in the presence of her sister, who didn’t mean to be cruel but always did manage to rub her happiness in Alana’s face.

“Peter and the girls and I are thinking Aruba this year,” she might call to report.

Or:

“You should see the naughty little thing Peter got me!”

Or:

“I think this weekend will be a stay-at-home-and-play-board-games family weekend.”

Brianna rarely called to ask about how she was doing, or talk about the news or a book she was reading or a special story about just one of the girls. Or even the weather, and everybody talks about the weather. Somehow, everything she said always had a subtext:
I am the proud owner of a Happily Ever After family. (And you are not, alas. So sorry, dear sister.)

Driving her car, Alana flipped on the radio. The deejay was playing songs that had been dedicated from one person to another. “This one goes out to Alyssa from her man, Ray,” he said, followed by the poppy, happy Romantics tune “What I Like About You.”

“And this next one is for Samantha, from a secret admirer.” It was that Elvis song “Blue Velvet.” How campy. She wondered if Samantha was listening and if she knew who this secret admirer was, and what the song meant to her.

But she, too, had a secret now. And while it still wasn’t a real live man that she could cook breakfast for or walk on a beach with, per se, it was real, right? Her computer was real, for example, wasn’t it? And the messages she received on it were real, actual words, from an actual somebody. Who happened to be very cute and, p.s., currently the builder of an actual underground house.

When she knocked on the door of her sister’s house, Alana heard the stampede of little feet. “I got it!” “No, I do!”

A battle was breaking out. “I get first dibs on Auntie Alana.”

Megan, the smallest of the three children, liked to brush Alana’s hair and put multitudes of colorful barrettes in it, all over. There were many pictures documenting this: Alana at Hanukkah, with barrettes; at Easter (yes, they were Jewish but celebrated all holidays for the girls—they were an equal-opportunity holiday family), Alana with little duck barrettes all over. Halloween: Alana with black skeleton barrettes all over.

Megan greeted her, hair brush at the ready, her small hands immediately pulling her down to her level. “Hi hi hi, girls, hello hello!” Alana said, swaying over in Megan’s oddly strong grip … then handing over her traditional gift of organic lollipops.

“Yay!”

“The green one is mine.”

“I wanted the green one, you took it!”

“I got dibs on that one. I’m telling Mom!”

Another skirmish.

“Break it up, break it up,” said Peter, policing through the tiny mob. “Hello, dearest sister-in-law,” he said, hugging her. He always smelled of Old Spice and cookies, whatever the occasion, every day of the year. He was a handsome guy, this husband of her sister. In the past
his good looks and affable, bright personality had often stung her with pin pricks of jealousy. But on this occasion, it was different. She felt not a whit of it. In the cage in her heart where jealousy had hummed and rattled was a warmth, the humming, spinning warm thing of potential Max pushing old jealousy out the door. It had unpacked its baggage of really good cycles and underground houses and moved right in.

“You look different somehow,” Peter remarked.

“New shirt,” Alana answered,

“No, you really do,” said Brianna, entering the room with a masher in one hand and a bowl of potatoes in the other. She walked over and planted a kiss on Alana’s cheek.

“Did you do something new to your hair?”

“No, but I have a feeling Megan has something new in mind for me.” Megan jumped up and down beside her. “Just a few minutes, sweetie,” Alana said. “Let me hang out with Mommy a bit first. Go and play.” She walked into the kitchen, where a gigantic bouquet of roses on the island in the middle of the room nearly assaulted her. “Wow, feeling guilty about something, is he?” Alana laughed.

Brianna did not find this funny. She frowned. “Don’t act so jealous.”

“Oh, I’m not, really, they’re gorgeous!”

On the counter was an open laptop with a recipe for shepherd’s pie on the screen. Alana fought the urge to
walk over to it and check her e-mail for a new message from Max.

“What’s new?” she asked.

The kitchen actually was the new thing, a brand spanking renovation, and a Valentine’s Day present to Brianna, with granite counters, a giant Cadillac of a stove, and a refrigerator that could chill the entire country of Paraguay. Alana had seen it as a work in progress, and a bit excessive, to be honest. The sort of gift one should get for a twentieth anniversary, or some really big celebration.

“I mean aside from all this,” she said, gesturing around. “It looks amazing, by the way.” Alana thought, despite all the newness of it, the sparkling showroom quality, it seemed slightly less cheery than usual. Since the remodel, Brianna had taken down all the little drawings and paintings the girls had done over the years. “I miss their art, though,” she said.

“Oh, we’ll get plenty more soon,” Brianna said, “don’t worry. We’ve got three little artists living here.”

“Well, send some art my way when you get a surplus. My house is looking a bit dingy, it could use some cheering up. Smells good in here, Bree.”