Resemblance

In this college town, the coffee shop is an unlikely sanctuary from the sprawl of co-eds. Students need caffeine as much as any other sleep-deprived human, but for whatever reason, be it their still-developing frontal lobes or a commitment to a nocturnal lifestyle, the local coffee shop is a ghost town before 9:30am.

Dawn is a confirmed middle-aged woman, thank you very much. One of the disadvantages of being a middle-aged woman is the inability to consume caffeine after 8am or else there’s a restless night in store. So, when her daughter, in her second semester at the local university, suggests they meet for coffee sometime around 11ish, it's essential that Dawn arrives three hours early.

She's prepared to wait. Waiting is second nature to parents; it became essential from the moment Dawn saw the plus sign on the pregnancy test. Waiting for her daughter's birth, for the early developmental milestones. Waiting in the school pickup line, waiting through all the other kids’ performances at ballet recitals. Waiting for the SAT scores, for the college acceptance letters, and now waiting for holidays or rare in-session breaks for a chance to see her child.

In her experience, a good book goes a long way. Matcha in hand, Dawn chooses a seat at the communal table and opens her latest guilty pleasure. It’s a sword-and-sorcery epic that doesn’t quite fit her usual reading profile. There was something magnetic about it that caused her fingers to brush right past the whodunnits and slip the first three installments under the library barcode reader. This is the fourth in the series, and after each one she remembers Holden Caufield and wants to call up the author, whomever they are, and chat like old friends.

The female main character, Emery, is in the process of disarming a masked assassin. She’s having a surprisingly easy time of it, too. The assassin is pulling his punches for some reason.

“Look at his weapons,” Dawn whispers to the pages.

Lo and behold, in the next line, some fine detailing on the hilt of his dagger catches her eye. Emery knows this assassin. She grew up with him.

“Huh. Maybe I should take up writing during some of this waiting,” Dawn mutters.

“Excuse me?” someone says. Dawn jerks her head out of the book, a hand pressed to her racing heart.

A young man is seated across from her, a college student, his laptop partially obscuring his face. A pair of gray eyes peers out, a small furrow between his brows.

“Sorry,” she mutters. “It’s a good part.”

“Must be,” he says, not unkindly. He returns to his screen.

Dawn would like to return to her book, but she's transfixed. Those eyes behind the laptop strike a chord in the deep recesses of her brain. She's seen them before, in another man’s face.

Before she knows it, her mind's eye is filling in the details tattooed on her heart. An angular jaw, a blunt chin. Ears that stick out ever so slightly, but don’t mention them, or he’ll be embarrassed. If she could see his laptop keys, she’d recognize the exact shape of his hands; their squared off fingers and generous palms.

The young man lets out a sigh, somewhere between a huff and a hum. She recognizes the sound instinctively; something isn’t going his way. She wants to rest her chin on his shoulder and puzzle it through with him, the way they did on his parent’s couch, or in the hallways between classes. His eyes flick up from the screen again, meeting hers.

Oh right, Dawn chastises herself. I'm staring at a twenty-something. And not the man she loved more than twenty-something years ago, but a very convincing doppelgänger. Nothing but a big coincidence.

Her hand shakes, threatening to drip verdant matcha on the tabletop. The edge of the mug bumps her lips and she slurps as a cover for her less than surreptitious stare. Tenting the book on the table, she tries that fire breathing thing she learned in yoga and forces herself back into the narrative.

“Have you gotten to the part about Onyx yet?” the young man says. He’s shifted his laptop to see Dawn better and clocked her book’s cover. Either he needs a distraction from his studies, or he’s trying to determine if she's a total creep.

“Onyx is the horse, right?” Dawn knows very well that’s the horse’s name in this series. She's addicted to it, finished the first three and grabbed the next installment before they were due back at the library. She just wants to keep him talking.

She compares the polaroid photos of her memories to the blueprint in front of her. A shiver runs the length of her spine when she notices his jaw and the ears. She was right—they are the spitting image. The voice is a close match, though a little hoarser. The mouth is completely different. It’s wider; lips thinner. He’s more generous with his smiles. Evidence of a good upbringing.

“Yeah, he’s the horse. Funny thing, when I was a little kid, like real little, maybe in diapers, we used to have a pet tortoise named Onyx. I’d sit on his shell and try to ride him around the yard, but of course, tortoises go like, less than two miles an hour,” he says.

“A tortoise named Onyx,” she says shakily. Dawn scrunches her toes in her loafers, scratching the itch of Bermudagrass on the arches of her feet.

Suddenly, the air smells like hamburgers on the grill. She's standing in cutoff shorts on much younger legs, engaged in a staring contest with an impossibly large black tortoise.

“He’s not going to get you,” he said. Not this young man in front of her, but the version in her memory. They were barely seventeen at the time, but she felt grown up when he slid his hand through her belt loops.

“They don’t bite?” Dawn asked.

“Not unless you’re a head of lettuce,” he laughed. “You’re thinking of snapping turtles. And I happen to know you have way more going on up there than lettuce.”

Dawn taps her feet beneath the table and the itch is gone. How long do tortoises live, anyway? The numbers skitter across her brain. Math is not her strong suit, but she supposes it’s plausible they're talking about the same tortoise.

If it is the same Onyx, the tortoise lasted longer than their relationship. It was a good one, built on mutual respect and admiration. There was laughter, and passion tinged with obsession. What she remembers most is the fascination. The head-concussing idea that someone so exceptional had taken an interest in her.

Ultimately, it came to an end. They weren't enough for each other, or maybe they were too much? To this day, she wasn't clear on the reason. Unable to give that relationship its postmortem, Dawn let the love live on.

“Are you a student here?” she asks, fumbling for a topic rooted in the present.

“Yep, studying English. People say it’s an easy major, but—,” he pauses for a breath, then the rest of the words come out in a jumble, like his mouth is rushing to catch up with his brain. “— We read seven to ten books per class, and with a full load of four classes, that’s around thirty-five books a semester, and the grades are only based off two essays. At least the science majors have quizzes, exams, and curves to pad their GPA.”

“An English major.” Dawn smiles at him. There’s the solid ground she was looking for. “A reader! No wonder you’re a fan of this series.”

“Oh, I’ve been a fan forever. Longer than most, actually.” He returns her grin. “My dad wrote it.”