Julia did not regret looking after The Professor while he was drunk, even though her good deed had not gone unpunished. For if you truly believe that kindness is never wasted, you have to hold tightly to that belief even when the kindness is thrown back in your face.
She was ashamed that she’d been so stupid, so foolish, so naive as to think that he would remember her after a drunken binge and that they could return to the way things were (but never were, really) that one night in the orchard. Julia knew that she’d been swept up into the romantic fancy of a fairy tale, without any thought of what the
When she entered her little hobbit hole, she took a long shower and changed into her oldest and softest flannel pajamas — pajamas that were pale pink with images of rubber duckies on them. She threw Gabriel’s tshirt to the back of her closet where it hopefully would be forgotten. She curled up on her twin bed, clutching her velveteen rabbit, and fell asleep, physically and emotionally spent.
While Julia was sleeping, Gabriel was warring with his hangover and fighting the urge to dive into a bottle of Scotch and never resurface. He hadn’t gone after her. He hadn’t run for the stairwell and stumbled down thirty flights to meet her at the lobby. He hadn’t taken the next elevator and raced to the street to catch her.
No, he’d stumbled back to his apartment and slumped into a chair, so he could wallow in nausea and self- loathing. He cursed the roughness with which he’d treated her, not just this morning, but since his first seminar back in September. A roughness made worse by the fact that she had suffered saint-like in silence, all the while knowing exactly who and what she was to him.
He thought of the first time he’d seen her. He’d returned to Selinsgrove in depression and despair. But God had intervened, a genuine
As if that salvation wasn’t enough, the angel appeared to him a second time, the very day he’d cruelly lost the other strong force of goodness in his life, Grace. The angel sat in his Dante seminar, reminding him of truth, beauty, and goodness. And he responded by snapping at her and threatening to push her out of the program. Then this morning, he was cruel and compared her to a whore.
Holding her beautiful, fragile message in his hand, he saw his own ugliness — not an ugliness of body but of soul. Julianne’s note, and even her breakfast tray, confronted Gabriel’s sin in a manner that was stark, convict-ing, and absolutely unrelenting.
She could not have known this, but in that moment her words from a week ago rang true. Sometimes people, when left alone, can hear their own hatefulness for themselves. Sometimes goodness is enough to expose evil for what it really is.
Gabriel dropped her note onto the counter and buried his face in his hands.
When Julia finally awoke it was after ten o’clock in the evening. She yawned and stretched, and after making a very sad bowl of instant oatmeal and barely being able to choke down a third of it, she decided to check her voice mail.
She’d turned her cell phone off when she arrived at Gabriel’s the night before because she was expecting a call from Paul. She was not in a mood to speak with him, then or now, even though she knew he would likely cheer her. She just wanted to be left alone to lick her wounds, like a puppy that had been kicked repeatedly.
So it was with a heavy heart that she checked her messages, scrolling through to listen to the oldest ones first, frowning when she realized that her inbox was full. Julia’s inbox was never full, for the only people who ever called her were her father, Rachel, and Paul, and their messages were always short.
Julia sighed and deleted the first message from Paul and moved to his next one.
Julia deleted Paul’s second message and quickly texted him, saying she’d come down with the flu and was catching up on her sleep. She’d call him when she was feeling better, and she hoped he’d arrived home safely.
She did not tell him that she missed him.
The next message was from a local number that she didn’t recognize.
Julia scowled and deleted his message, not even bothering to save his number. Still wearing her rubber duckie pajamas, she opened her apartment door and walked across the hall. She had no intention of listening to Gabriel; she just wanted to find out if he was still waiting outside in the cold, dark rain.
She pressed her nose against the glass in the front door, smudging it, and peered outside into the inky blackness. It was no longer raining. And there was no Professor to be found. She wondered how long he’d waited.
She wondered if he’d walked to her apartment without an umbrella. Her spine stiffened, and she told herself that she didn’t care.
Before she turned to go, she noticed a large bouquet of purple hyacinths leaning up against one of the pillars on the porch. It had a large, pink bow attached to it and something that looked like a Hallmark card resting in the middle of it. The envelope read
Curling up on her bed with her laptop, she decided to perform an internet search on purple hyacinths, just in case Gabriel (or his florist) was trying to send her a subliminal message. On a horticultural website, she read the following:
