Then, to put an even finer point on things, I told him that I loved him. Which I had never said before.

He said no to me that night—very sadly, but it was still no—and so I gathered what was left of my dignity and went back to my apartment—this apartment, this very kitchen, in fact—and I told myself I had to give up on him. That he would never be ready. I already knew by that point that Blix had wanted us to be together, that she had done spells and magic to bring our love about. That she had peered into the future and had seen that we were perfect together. I’d seen things she’d written in her spell book: our names linked over and over again. So not only did I feel sorry for myself and for Patrick, but I felt sorry that Blix had failed, too, at the thing she most wanted.

But sometimes it hits you that you can’t go about life forcing everybody to do the thing you think they should, even when it’s perfect for them.

So over the next few days I made up my mind to sell the brownstone and move back to Florida. Patrick had already decided to move back to live with his sister in Wyoming. At the time we had the argument about love, the U-Haul truck was parked outside the building for him to put his stuff in it.

I don’t think I can really explain what happened next, except to say that I had given up on him, and sometimes when you surrender to things, all the energy changes.

The next day we awoke to a foot of snow, and school was called off, so I took Bedford and Sammy, the kid who then lived in the apartment where Patrick now has his studio, to the park. And Bedford got lost. Sammy and I searched and searched, but it was snowing so hard, and we couldn’t find him anywhere. My cell phone had no power, so I couldn’t even call for help. I just kept calling and searching for Bedford, frozen through to the heart and feet of me, and fearing the worst.

But then I looked up and there was Patrick coming toward me, holding out his arms, like a mirage coming through the blizzard. It was like seeing a Saint Bernard with a keg of brandy, only better. He, who disliked dogs almost as much as he hated being out in public, had gone out looking for my dog, and he’d found Bedford injured in the street, hit by a car. Patrick had taken him to the vet in his U-Haul truck, and then he came and found me in the park.

There he was: a man with snow on his eyelashes and in his eyebrows, a man with crinkly, smiling eyes and a sad, lopsided grin, a man who loved me. Who had saved my dog.

Until that moment, I don’t think Patrick really did know that he could have love in his life. Or that he could save a dog’s life by striding into a vet’s office and authorizing surgery. Or even that he could go after a life that he yearned for but which had seemed impossibly far away for him. But after that—well, maybe he figured out that resistance was futile, that there is love out there for all of us. He loved me. And I loved him, and I, for one, was sure that love was all it really took to make something work.

We had a talk. He said he’d make a deal with me: he wouldn’t go home to Wyoming if I didn’t go home to Florida. We’ll see what happens, he said. Then, being all Patricky, he gave me all kinds of warnings about how hard it was going to be to drag himself permanently away from the planet My Lover Died in the Fire, but he hoped I wouldn’t give up on him. And he was going to try, too, he said. He’d at least try to stop parking his spaceship at that planet’s parking lot, he said.

And so we started living together. It was wonderful. We took long bubble baths together with candles perched all around the tub, and both Bedford and Roy would curl up on the bathroom rug, watching us (and each other) with suspicion. We’d sit up late at night around the firepit on the roof, with my head on his shoulder, just talking and talking. He told me all about Blix and her outrageous shenanigans. He told me how she made him believe in magic.

That first summer, we bought a hammock and two ukuleles, and we learned four songs that we’d sing at the tops of our lungs, so badly out of tune that we were sure the cars honking on the street were trying to drown us out. We read the New York Times in bed on the weekends, fighting over the Arts and Style sections and not getting up until noon. We discovered Blix’s treasure trove of recipes and cooked them all, slow-dancing in the kitchen while we waited for the pasta to boil.

And in the classic tradition of lovers everywhere, we felt supremely sorry for anyone who wasn’t us.

I’ll always believe that it was Blix, who was really the champion of the two of us, who somehow made sure that things straightened out for us. He and I have laughed about all the things she had to arrange just for that one moment of a change of heart for him: a snowstorm, a snow day from school, a stray dog taking off and getting lost, an accident that was bad but not too bad, the urgency of a U-Haul truck that needed to be packed. Oh, sure, she was dead by then—but let’s face it, Blix wasn’t the type to let a little change of address upset her plans. She stepped right in, and guided Patrick right smack into love.

And now . . . well, here we are again. While I haven’t been paying attention, Patrick has gone off in the spaceship to his old familiar planet. I can feel this big old chunk of empty air where he used to be. No wonder my own faith in him has been wobbling; no wonder I’ve felt bereft as hell while I wait to see what happens. He’s been out in space for too long.

Go to him. I hear her voice in my head. Go find him. Show him again what it means to love.

So, I square my shoulders and put on the equivalent of my own space suit, grab my oxygen tank, and walk over to bring him back to Earth.

CHAPTER THIRTY

MARNIE

His paintings are lined up in the front room. Ten of them, each one a fragile, heartbreaking meditation on desolation. Like the formless monsters that show up in your nightmares.

I stare at them for as long as I can stand it. It’s not that they’re sad—sadness I could take, I respect sadness. It’s that they are so unspeakably bleak. Browny-green colors spread about in shapeless blobs. There is no Patrick in them.

I don’t quite know what to say when he appears at the door, drying his hands on a towel.

“Don’t even look at these,” he says. “They’re not going in the show.”

“They’re not?”

“No. Too awful. And speaking of awful, I suppose you saw the story.” His voice is clipped, businesslike.

“Yeah.”

“What did you think?” He’s wearing an old black-and-blue plaid shirt and sweatpants, both of which seem to hang on him. The morning light makes him look haggard.

“Well, I know it wasn’t what you hoped it would be. But the guy said a lot of nice things about you. True things even. You came out looking pretty good, in my humble opinion. It’ll bring people in to the gallery, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, well, in a perfect world, I’d say he didn’t absolutely need to go mentioning the damn police report just to write about an art show, for God’s sake. And all that hero stuff—bah!”

He scowls, and I see in his eyes that he’s so much worse than he was a few weeks ago. He’s not only boarded his old spaceship, he’s already crash-landed back on the planet My Lover Died in the Fire, and he’s built himself a fort there. My palms feel sweaty. He is looking at me as though from a long distance, but I am nothing if not determined to save him, and so I make myself meet his eyes.