Read Online For Love by Sue Miller - Free Book Online Page A

with graffiti. Here and there, the stairs’ metal railing has been hammered out of shape. With such great effort!
Lottie thinks. What would make you want to take the time? She’s a little breathless by the time she reaches the top, she’s been going so fast. She knocks on the door, and waits. She
knocks once more and calls out: ‘Cam! Are you there? Cameron!’ She can hear a door open below, and someone is silent a moment, listening for her. She is frozen, listening back. Then the
man’s voice yells up, ‘He ain’t home. Okay?’ A door bangs shut.
    Lottie takes Cameron’s keys out of her purse. She tries several before she gets the right one. The scarred door swings open. There is an envelope lying on the floor a few feet in front of
her. Even from where she stands, Lottie can tell by the bold, nearly calligraphic writing in the center of the envelope –
Cameron
, it says – that it’s from Elizabeth. She
shuts the door behind her and calls Cam’s name again. Her voice echoes in the open space. The inside of Cameron’s apartment is huge: he actually bought two lofts and knocked out the
walls between. To Lottie it has always seemed beautiful. He did most of the work himself, years before. There must be twenty warehouse-size windows, spaced at regular intervals – tall,
narrow, curved at the top. From the middle of the room, all you see outside is air. The floors are painted a light gray; there are skylights. In the far corner of the space, a green cast-iron
Victorian spiral stair climbs to the opening for the roof deck. Though it’s a completely different kind of place from the apartment Lottie lived in with Ryan in Chicago, it reminds her of it.
Everything has the same quality of having been rescued, claimed from old age and heavy use with effort and care.
    She bends over and picks Elizabeth’s letter up. The paper is creamy, heavy. A letter she wrote at home, then, not something composed in haste here. Carrying it with her, Lottie walks
through the open space that comprises the apartment, calling Cameron’s name. The bathroom door is ajar. She pushes it, moves slowly forward. The room is empty, antiseptically clean. Lottie
expels her breath so loudly it echoes in the tiled space.
    She goes into the bedroom last, the only area besides the bathroom that’s walled off in any way. The bed is made. There are full, fat red roses in an old pitcher on the nightstand next to
it. Of course: he must have been expecting Elizabeth. Their erotic perfume floats in the room. The phone machine on the bedside table is blinking steadily. Lottie comes back into the living room
and sits down.
    After a moment she opens the envelope. She feels justified. She’s worried about Cameron. She doesn’t understand fully what happened at Elizabeth’s house the night before or why
he’s disappeared. She assumes that Elizabeth doesn’t know where he is either – what was it she said? ‘I thought maybe he was with you’ – but Lottie hopes the
letter will help her, will tell her something about what he might be doing and why. The paper is creamy too; it matches the envelope. There are four or five sheets covered on both sides with the
big, bold letters.
    ‘Darling Cameron,’ it begins.
    I can only imagine what you’re feeling, what you’re going through right now. The most important thing you must hear is that it wasn’t your fault, and
     it’s worth all the risk I’m taking now – to me, to my marriage – to try to let you know that. Jessica was very drunk, we have learned. I found several bottles under
     her bed, and the doctors feel the blood test will show it too. Dear Cam, she obviously wasn’t thinking straight. I had asked her to stop you, to talk to you – and she was so drunk
     she somehow thought stepping out in front of the car was a not unreasonable way to do that. [There are several words crossed out here.] Forgive yourself, Cameron. You truly couldn’t
     have prevented it.
    And forgive me