HAPPY PLACE
WEST VILLAGE, NEW YORK CITY
WYN’S AND MY first place, just the two of us. A hissing radiator. A ghost who never does much, other than open a window when it’s cool out or knock a book off a shelf. Sitting on the floor, eating noodles straight from the take- out boxes because we don’t have a couch yet.
Side tables found on curbs and repaired to perfection by Wyn. A shelf installed above our bed, lined with the James Herriot paperbacks Hank used to read Wyn and his sisters when they were small. Plus one particular romance novel, whose origins neither of us even recall. (Wyn says it probably belongs to the ghost.) Our first place together, just the two of us, and it’s bittersweet.
Weeks ago, as the end of the lease on the Morningside Heights apartment drew closer, Cleo sat us down in a row on Parth’s squashy couch to announce she was moving.
Not just out of the apartment, or even New York. To Belize, to work on an organic farm.
It’s called WWOOFing, she explained. You live there for free in exchange for some work.
And at first no one said anything. Until then, we’d been in a suspended reality. It had felt as if we’d stay like this, together forever, and nothing would change.
It’s only temporary, Cleo said, a six-month contract, but she was crying. We all knew: this was the end of an era.
So we sat on the rug, our arms wrapped around her like we were a giant artichoke, her as our heart.
The night before she left, Parth organized a slideshow send-off, putting our favorite memories from the last three years up on the wall, and we cried some more, but in the morning, we put on brave faces and hugged goodbye outside JFK. See you soon, we promised.
We tried to find a new place to accommodate the remaining four of us. We couldn’t.
Instead, Parth moved in with a friend from Fordham, Sabrina took over an Armas cousin’s vacant Chelsea loft, and Wyn and I scrounged up enough to rent the tiny apartment over the bookstore he’d been working at.
The whole first night we were there, I had to keep shutting myself in the bathroom for crying jags. I missed Cleo so much it hurt. I was afraid this was the end. That my friends would prove to be passing figures in my life, family becoming strangers.
After my last crying fit, I came out of the bathroom to a cry of “SURPRISE!”
Wyn had called Parth and Sabrina. They came, with pizza and champagne. “We had to christen the place,” Parth said.
“Plus, I want to see if this place is as haunted as it looks,” Sabrina added. After that night, the apartment becomes home.
We’re happy here.
Parth and Sabrina come over once a week for dinner, and even though we’re alleged Real Adults, sometimes they sleep over on the couch and air mattress, and in the morning we get diner breakfast before heading to our separate programs or, in Wyn’s case, down to the bookstore.
And it doesn’t get boring, just the two of us. Every bit of Wyn he gives me is something to treasure, to examine from every angle.
The last words I hear every night are I love you so much. Sometimes he gets to say it last, but sometimes I do too. Sometimes we compete, saying it back and forth like we’re fourteen-year-olds: No, you hang up first.
Medical school ramps up. I start TAing for my favorite professor. The sex slows down, but not the touching, not the affection. His love is steady, constant. Easier than breathing, because breathing is something you can overthink, to the point that you forget how your lungs work and get yourself into a panic.
I could never forget how to love Wyn.
Sometimes, lying beside him in our bed, my ice-cold feet tucked between his warm calves, the words flit through my mind, like they’re coming from somewhere else, like my soul hears his whispering in its sleep, You belong here.
On Saturday mornings, we drink coffee on the sofa next to the window and do crossword puzzles. Or we start crossword puzzles. It becomes something of a tradition, starting and abandoning them.
Every week I try to make it through at least one more clue than the week prior, while Wyn tries to derail us earlier and earlier.
“Eight across,” I tell him, while he’s kissing his way down my neck, “is
The Weakest Link.”
“Isn’t that the one where they dropped people through a trapdoor when they got eliminated?” he hums against my collarbone.
“I never watched that,” I say, “but I swear, the moment I said it, that’s what I pictured. But that seems impossible, right? It’s too ridiculous.”
He shrugs, pulls me over his lap, but I keep my hold on my laptop, type
weakest link trapdoor into a Google search.
The first few hits are from message boards. People who remember the show exactly how we do, though everything else online confirms there was never a trapdoor.
“How is it possible we all remember it wrong?” Wyn asks.
I tell him about the Mandela effect, the idea that sometimes huge swaths of the population misremember something precisely the same way. Scientists explain the shared false memories as confabulations, or examples of fuzzy-trace theory, where memories are malleable and unreliable, while others wonder if the Mandela effect proves we live in a multiverse.
Grinning, Wyn twines one of my curls around his hand. “I like how you talk to me like you expect me to understand what you’re saying.”
I frown. “I don’t like how you always downplay your own intelligence.” “I don’t,” he says.
“You do,” I say. “And not knowing something doesn’t make a person stupid, Wyn.”
“Oh,” he says, amused. “Then what does?”
After a moment’s thought, I say, “An unwillingness to learn.”
“I’m willing.” He sets my laptop aside and pulls me closer, hands settling on my thighs. “Tell me about this multiverse and what it has to do with The Weakest Link.”
“Well, if there are multiple universes, then maybe our consciousnesses move through them sometimes. Maybe we spend years in one reality, then jump to another where only one tiny thing is different. Like a certain reality show used a trapdoor to eliminate contestants. And there are infinite universes, where everything that ever could happen has and will.”
Wyn brings one of my hands to his mouth, his expression serious. “How many universes do you think we’re together in?”
“Higher than either of us can count.”
His mouth quirks. “And you can count very high.”
“It’s true,” I say. “That’s how they decide who gets into medical school. You stand in front of a committee of doctors and count as high as you can.”
His lips twitch. “Do they let you use your fingers?” “None of the good schools do.”
He flattens my hand between his palms. “I’m glad I’m in one of those,” he says. “I feel bad for all the Wyns in universes where you’re with guys like Harvard Hudson. They’re so miserable right now, Harriet.”
“Or the Harriets in universes where you’re with the Dancers Named Alison of the world,” I say.
“No,” he says quietly. “In every universe, it’s you for me. Even if it’s not me for you.”
That isn’t how it works. I don’t care.
Wyn—my Wyn—means it.
I am happier than I’ve ever been. Don’t yet know that there is a level of happiness even deeper, one so intense it hurts, almost like loss or grief. A happiness so bright and hot you feel like it could incinerate you. That comes later that night, when Wyn goes out to pick up Chinese food, comes back drenched from the rain.
At the sound of the door clicking shut, I look up from the crossword I’ve gone back to, jump up from the couch, and pad over to help him with the rain-speckled paper bags. I flick the stove on to make tea and take the bags from his arms, and as I’m setting them on the counter, he catches me by the wrist and looks down at me with such softness and vulnerability that I’m afraid, sure something terrible has happened. Quietly, then, a murmur, he says, “Marry me, Harriet.”
“Yes,” I say on a breath.
He stills. He blinks, like he’s trying to puzzle out what I just said. The teakettle has started to whistle. I catch his jaw. “Wyn, yes.”
His brow tenses. “Wait.”
“I don’t want to wait,” I say.
He fumbles in his jacket. “Shit. Give me a second. Don’t move.”
He turns and runs back to the bedroom, and I stand there shivering, listening to the scrape of dresser drawers. When he comes back, he’s holding out a blue velvet box, his hand quivering.
It’s an old white gold ring with a square sapphire mounted in its center. “I thought it looked like you,” he says hesitantly, “but it wasn’t expensive. So if you don’t like it, we’ll replace it, as soon as I can afford—”
His face blurs behind my tears. “You just had this?”
“I was trying to wait for the perfect moment,” he says, almost apologetic.
“Now,” I say. “Now is the perfect moment.”
“I just couldn’t keep waiting,” he says, still a little rueful.
The tiniest bit of doubt creeps in. I whisper, “What if you get sick of me?”
“Harriet,” he says, gently chiding and tender all at once. “What if you get bored with me?”
My laugh is so teary it sounds like a sob. “Never.”
He cradles my face in his hands, his mouth soft and brow stern. “Then marry me.”
“Done,” I say.
He kisses me, all teeth and tongue and raw emotion, our hands scraping over each other in eager fits, bodies pulling together, determined to become one thing.
I never pictured my proposal, but if I had, it would’ve looked nothing like this.
It wouldn’t have ended with us eating the same Chinese takeout we get once a week and making love on the rickety Ikea couch, laughing every time his head collided with the wall but not moving to the bed.
This is better. Everything is better with him.
When we go back to Maine that summer, Sabrina, Parth, and Cleo— who’s managed to get back from Belize—throw us an engagement party, complete with a slideshow covering our relationship (largely illustrated by stick figures Parth drew in MS Paint).
It doesn’t matter how busy life’s been, how long the five of us have gone without seeing one another: meeting at the cottage is like pulling on a favorite sweatshirt, worn to perfection.
Time doesn’t move the same way when we’re there.
Things change, but we stretch and grow and make room for one another. Our love is a place we can always come back to, and it will be waiting,
the same as it ever was.
You belong here.
