Be Who God Meant You To Be

The apartment looks so much bigger with nothing in it.

Meg has never thought of herself as especially sentimental about things, outside of a small handful of objects she's given significant meaning to. If asked, she would have guessed that she would feel the same way about places.

But then, she's never done this before. In her whole life, Meg has never moved out of a place. Not really. Her room at her parents' house still looks largely as she left it when she went off to university, which wasn't significantly different than it looked when she was in high school. And the res hall room she'd spent her first year in hardly counts – it was a res hall room, after all, and she can count her stay there in months.

She's lived in this apartment for almost three years.

She got engaged in this apartment.

In another hour or so, she'll probably never set foot in it again.

And that's . . . strange.

Carrie and Olivia have already gone, Carrie taking most of the living room furniture with her. The few odds and ends of furniture that were Meg's are gone now as well, the desk and the dresser to what she probably needs to stop thinking of as "Alain's apartment," the bed to storage in his parents' basement, the bookcase to the third years in the apartment across the hall for $20.

Alain has taken most of her boxes (neatly labeled, inventoried and cataloged in a notebook as she packed them) over to his -- their apartment. There are a couple still stacked by door, next to the vacuum cleaner and the bucket of cleaning supplies. Meg is, in theory, doing the final cleaning of the place.

The truth of the matter is that there's not a lot of cleaning left to be done. She and Carrie and Olivia had done that the evening before (just them -- no parents or siblings or boyfriends or fiancés or petits amis du jour). They'd carried out the trash and packed up the rest of Olivia's scattered things (haphazard, unlabeled, no inventory or system), scrubbed the kitchen and the bathroom. And then they'd sat in the floor of their empty apartment and eaten pizza out of the box, rather as they had the day they'd moved in.

Meg's furniture had left this morning, and she'd offered to vacuum and do the final pass of cleaning after it had gone.

To finish removing any trace that the three of them had lived here for most of their university careers.

So here she is, in a too big, empty, personality-less apartment, that both does and doesn't feel like some place she belongs.

Meg leaves the living room and goes to the small room in the back of the apartment that has -- had been her bedroom for three years. It's already empty, but she walks all the way around it anyway, and opens the closet door. It has been one of those places the end of the universe has liked to turn up.

Today it just opens onto an empty closet.

She stands looking into it with her hand on the doorknob, anyway.

She hears the front door open, and knows it's Alain even before she hears him call, "Meg? C'est moi."

He and she are, after all, the only people who still have keys.

"I'll be right there," Meg answers.

"I'm going to take these boxes to the car. I'll be right back."

"D'accord."

Meg hears the front door close behind him, and then closes the closet door. She doesn't look back over her shoulder as she leaves the room.

She looks into Carrie and Olivia's room, and the bathroom. Everything is neat and clean and in order.

She reaches the living room just as Alain lets himself back into the apartment. There's a single box (Meg: Bedroom: Box 6: Books: Mysteries) still sitting by the door, with cleaning supplies and her purse. Alain gestures to them. "Is that everything?"

Meg nods. "That's it, yes."

"Ready?" he asks, and she nods again.

Alain leans down to kiss her, once, and then picks up the box.

"Come on, ma belle. Let's go home."

Meg doesn't often wind up in Milliways in the morning. But she did today, and she ran into Laura, and it seemed high time they called their own bluffs and actually went to see a play, instead of just talking about it for months. Meg's roommates aren't awake yet, so there won't have to be any awkward explanations of how Laura suddenly arrived in their apartment, it's a beautiful fall day . . .

The only slight wrinkle is that it's a weekday, and Meg has classes. But it's easy enough to say that Laura is a prospective student, visiting McGill to see if it's a place she'd like to enroll. People do it all the time -- Meg did it, the year she applied. There are tours with students, and brochures about programs, and admissions couselors who are happy to answer questions, chances to eat in one of the dining halls, and Laura can even sit in on a class, if she likes.

Then there's a very quick not-quite-a-dinner before the play. "Just a snack, really," Meg says. "Alain's going to meet us back at the apartment for dinner after." (He's seen this production somewhere in the neighborhood of a dozen times already, and he has work to finish that evening.)

They have good seats, especially considering Meg only called to reserve them this morning, and the play goes well -- Meg's heard the horror stories about the night the understudy for Goneril forgot half her lines, and the ones about the night the power went out in the middle of the storm scene. There's just time to introduce Laura to Luc afterwards before he has to run, and they have to get back to Meg's apartment to meet Alain.

Meg steps out onto the sidewalk in front of the theatre, pulling her hair free of her jacket. "Do you want to walk? It's not that far, really, and I don't think we'd save much time by taking the Metro."

"Alain asked me to tell you that you might want to dress up," Carrie says, coming into Meg's room while Meg is looking through her closet, trying to decide what to wear for whatever it is that Alain has planned for her birthday. "So, not that sweater."

"What do you mean, 'Alain asked you to'?" Meg asks, hanging the sweater back in the closet.

"Oh, and I'm supposed to give you this," Carrue says, handing her an envelope.

The note inside says, "Meg, You said I was allowed to conspire with your friends. Joyeux anniversaire. À bientôt. Alain"

Meg rolls her eyes. "Green dress, then?" she asks Carrie.

"Wear the tiara," Carrie suggests, with a wave towards the plastic crown on Meg's dresser, and leaves Meg to change.

Alain arrives, as ever, exactly at six.

Carrying grocery bags.

And Olivia and Carrie, laughing, take their bags and their coats, and promise they won't be back before ten.

"So, we're staying in?" Meg asks, when her roommates are gone, with a nod towards the bags.

"Yes. Happy birthday."

"So, exactly what we're doing tomorrow?"

"No, tomorrow we are cooking. Tonight, I am cooking."

"I stand corrected," Meg says. "So almost exactly what we're doing tomorrow?"

Alain laughs and then kisses her. "It's a good plan, ma belle. We both thought of it."

It is a good plan. Because given that she has two roommates and he lives with his parents, four hours of privacy is just about the best birthday present she can have.

But . . .

"You could have told me that we were planning the same thing--almost the same thing, for two nights in a row."

"But that would have ruined the surprise."

"And why did you have Carrie tell me to dress up?"

"Well, partly to, ah, what's the word?"

"Mislead?"

"Yes, mislead you. And partly because . . . you look very beautiful in that dress, ma belle."

Alain is not, truth be told, much of a cook, but he can make crepes; his uncle taught him. And while no one would mistake Alain's for the ones that Sylvain makes and that are written up in guide books, they are still very good.

"I almost forgot," Alain says, after dinner, as they're settling in on the couch. He pulls a small box, wrapped in green paper, from his pocket and hands it to her.

"Liar," Meg says. "I doubt you even came close to forgetting."

"You are, of course, right. I was in no danger of forgetting about it."

"You already gave me a car," Meg points out.

"But this is your real present. Open it."

There's another box inside the first, a deep burgundy velvet box. And inside it is a ring, a gold filigreed band set with an amethyst.

"Alain . . ."

"Don't say I shouldn't have. And don't say it's too much. Because I wanted to. And it's not enough."

Meg had been about to say at least one and possibly both of those things. Which leaves her kind of at a loss for words.

"It's . . . it's beautiful. Thank you."

"You're welcome." He takes it out of the box she's still holding, and takes her right hand. "Let's see if it fits."

It fits the third finger on her right hand perfectly. "It's beautiful," she says again. "But you have to stop giving me jewelry, Alain. I'm running out of places to wear it."

"Now I think you're the one who is lying," he says. "There are still plenty of places. Like right here," he says, mouth against her ear for a moment before he moves to kiss her neck, and her collar bone, and the hollow of her throat. "And here."

"Alain . . ."

"And here," he says, touching the base of the ring finger on her left hand. "I have plans for this place, someday, Meghan Margaret Ford. If that is all right with you."

And that leaves her utterly at a loss for words. For a second or two, it's like she's forgotten even how to breathe. And then she nods. "Someday, yes."

"Someday," he says, lifting her hand so he can kiss it, too. "I love you."

"Je t'aime, aussi."

They're silent for a moment then, fingers entwined, until Alain says, "What are you thinking about?"

"I am thinking," Meg says, "that this has been the nicest birthday of my life. And I am thinking that you are going to have a very hard time topping it, next year."

Alain laughs. "Then I better start planning now."

Her trip home from campus Tuesday night is almost surprisingly uneventful.

(When you're half-braced for something to happen, even when it's a relief that nothing does, there's an odd feeling of incompletion, energy that will spend itself in cleaning the kitchen, in restoring order, not because the kitchen needs it but because Meg does.)

She declines Carrie's invitation to run out for a quick dinner, saying she has work to finish. Calls her parents, calls Alain, to talk about nothing of any importance, to find a way back to something like normal.

And then she sits at her desk, and she makes lists and she makes plans and she deals with Roe-bear McCrory, without making it any less, or any more, than it is. And by the time she goes to bed that night, she knows exactly what she's going to do.

On Wednesday morning she gets up, makes coffee and muffins, and summons her roommates to a breakfast meeting. And while they stir milk and sugar into mugs, Meg moves her glass of orange juice two inches from the edge of her plate, and then says, "Roe-bear has been following me."

"What?" Olivia says.

"Roe-bear. Your leaves-a-lot-to-be-desired ex? Has been following me. Since Halloween."

"Oh my God," Carrie says. "Meg, are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine," she says, and this morning, it's true. "But this is a problem, and it needs to be addressed, so I'm addressing it."

"Wait," Olivia says. "My Roe-bear has been stalking you for almost three months? And you're only telling us now?"

"I told you he was bad news," Carrie says.

"Whatever," Olivia says, with a literal wave of her hand. "What are we going to do about it?"

"I'm going to go talk to campus security, and see what they say. And if he calls, don't tell him I'm here, don't tell him I'm not here, just . . . hang up. If you see him hanging around, let me know."

"If I see him hanging around, I'll--" Olivia starts, and Meg shakes her head.

"Just ignore him, Olivia. I suspect any reaction is just going to encourage him."

"Don't give him any satisfaction," Carrie says. "You know, pretend you're still dating him."

Olivia throws a piece of her muffin across the table at Carrie. "Are you sure, Meg?"

"Yeah. I just want to avoid him."

"Does Alain know about all this?" Carrie asks.

"Not yet. I'll see him Thursday, and I'll tell him then. I think it's better in person, and when I can say that I've got things in hand."

"So Roe-bear doesn't wind up in the hospital?" Carrie asks.

"And so Alain doesn't wind up in prison," Meg says.

"Okay," Carrie says. "When are you going to talk to security?"

Meg looks down at her watch. "I don't have a class till one, so maybe in about a couple hours."

"I'm really sorry, Meg," Olivia says.

"It's not your fault."

"Yeah, but, still."

"All right," Carrie says, getting up to get the coffee pot and refill her cup. "Tell us everything that's happened."

It takes about an hour to go over everything, to answer all her roommates' questions, to make sure everything is covered. Olivia, remarkably, is the one with the early class on Wednesdays, and breakfast breaks up when she has to get ready to leave for campus.

Meg spends more time than she wants to admit trying to figure out what one wears to ask for security's help in dealing with a stalker. She's just finished braiding her hair when the doorbell rings. "Can you get that?" Carrie yells from the bathroom.

"Are we expecting anyone?" Meg asks.

"Yes," Carrie calls.

Meg looks through the peephole in the door and then amends, "Are we expecting Ed Marriner?"

"Yes."

Meg opens the door.

"Meg. Hi."

"Hi."

"Carrie called," he said.

"Carrie called?" she repeats.

"Yeah. She said you needed someone to walk with you to campus."

"Did she?" Meg says. "Ed, would you excuse me for a moment?"

"Ah, sure," he says.

"Make yourself comfortable," Meg says, with a wave at the sofa, and heads back to the bathroom. "Carrie, what have you done?"

"Look, Olivia's in class, I have to get to work, and you cannot go traipsing around Montreal by yourself right now."

"Traipsing?"

"You didn't want Alain to know until you could tell him, which I totally respect, but you need someone to go with you, in case Olivia's Biggest Mistake is out there, lurking. So I called Ed, and told him what was going on, and asked him to come over."

"Carrie!"

"Humor me, okay? And let him walk you to campus?"

It's a little awkward, conversation is stilted, but Meg would be lying if she said she wasn't a little relieved to have him there.

"Thanks," she says, when they reach the security office.

"I'll wait," he says.

She talks to a security officer who is very nice, who takes her seriously, who makes notes about what she tells him. He tells her to keep her eyes open, stay in groups, avoid shortcuts, not engage with Roe-bear if he turns up, and to let them know if anything else happens, no matter how minor or innoculous it seems. It's about what Meg expects, but again, it's helpful just to have someone treat it all like it's not in her head.

Ed Marriner is waiting when she leaves.

"How did it go?" he asks.

"Fine. I really appreciate your coming with me."

"Any time," he says.

"So, can I buy you lunch or something?" Meg asks.

"How about a cup of coffee?"

"Sure."

She quite literally collides with Roe-bear McCrory outside the cafe Ed recommends, and the only reason she doesn't fall is that Ed catches her elbow.

"You okay?" he asks, and she nods, but she can already feel herself tensing.

So she's startled when a slightly wild-eyed Roe-bear says, "This is an accident. You know that, right? I didn't know you were going to be here."

Meg doesn't answer.

"You tell your friends this was an accident."

"My friends?"

"Your friends," Roe-bear says. "The creepy one with the dark hair, and the psychotic blonde. Tell them this was an accident. And just . . . stay away from me," he says, and takes off down the street.

"That was him, wasn't it?" Ed asks. "The drunk guy from the party who's been harassing you?"

"Yeah."

"And . . . is he drunk right now? Because that made very little sense. Who was he talking about?"

Meg shrugs. Because she has a very good idea who he might have been talking about, but not one she can share with Ed Marriner.

If she's right, though, she's pretty sure that was the last she's going to see of M. Roe-bear.

And as final images go . . . she'll take it.

Meg can't quite remember how she got talked into letting Olivia and Carrie throw a Halloween party in their tiny apartment.

Especially since Olivia's contributions to planning have mostly been making wildly impractical suggestions and then leaving the details to Carrie and Meg.

But Meg did get talked into it, and so Saturday night finds her in an orange shirt and bat-shaped earrings and a Santa Claus hat.

"Meg?" Olivia asks, coming into Meg's room half an hour before guests are due to arrive. "What are you wearing?"

Olivia is in a very short red dress and has devil horns on a headband. No need to ask her the same question.

"I'm what's wrong with this picture?" Meg says.

"Oh. I guess that's funny, but it's just not really a very sexy look," Olivia tells her.

"That's pretty much the idea. Oddly enough, I wasn't really going for a come hit on me look three days after my boyfriend told me he loved me. Especially since he's off at his cousin's wedding this weekend."

Olivia shrugs, and further conversation is cut off by Carrie's yelling something from the kitchen about chips and sodas.

The party goes about as Meg expected. She spends most of it refilling bowls and putting out more toilet paper and making sure that her bedroom is not being used for . . . well, anything at all.

And then, about two hours into the event, Olivia and Roe-bear break up, at high volume and in front of everyone. As far as Meg can tell, Olivia is upset because she has been flirting like mad with some guy named Jerry who is dressed like a sideshow strongman, and Roe-bear hasn't gotten upset.

Olivia flounces off to her room in tears, Roe-bear flings himself onto the couch. Jerry beats a hasty retreat out the front door.

Meg looks at Carrie. Carrie looks at Meg. "I'll deal with Olivia," Carrie says.

Leaving Roe-bear for Meg.

Great. This is not exactly what Meg thinks of as her forte.

What would Parker do?

"Hi," Meg says, as quietly as she can and still be heard over the music. "Um, do you need anything?"

"No," he says. "I'm fine."

"Okay, well, if you need to talk or anything--"

Apparently, he does. And does. And does. Fifteen minutes later, Roe-bear is still talking. Meg hasn't heard some of it over the noise around them. She hasn't necessarily understood everything she has heard -- Roe-bear is, like a certain learned constable, occasionally too cunning to be understood.

Also, he is far from perfectly sober.

"I thought we had connected on a deeper level, man, you know? Like we had transcended the mundane and we didn't need to posture and all that shit. We'd found a rhythm like, like when a jazz band improvises and attains a perfect level of truth and music. There was veracity and . . . veracity and . . . and all."

"Right," Meg says, though what she means is honestly, I have no idea what you're talking about.

"Anyway, I'm through with her. I'm over it. I don't need her. I don't need anybody, right?"

"I'm sure you'll be fine," Meg says. Eventually.

"Hey, you're really pretty," he says, abruptly.

"Um. Well, thank you."

"And you're nice, too." Roe-bear reaches out and grabs a half-finished beer out of the hand of a guy standing behind the couch and drains it.

Meg looks up to apologize to whomever has just had his beer stolen, and there's Ed Marriner. And that would be absurd enough even if he weren't wearing a cowboy hat and a silver star and a pasted on handlebar mustache.

"Need help?" he mouths, with a nod towards Roe-bear.

Meg hesitates for a fraction of a second and then nods.

"All right, buddy," Ed says, coming over and pulling Roe-bear onto unsteady feet. "I think that's enough."

"She's really pretty," Roe-bear tells him.

"Luminous, even," Ed says, glancing at Meg over the top of Roe-bear's head. "Time to tell her good-bye and thanks, now."

"Good-bye and thanks now," Roe-bear says. "Are we leaving?"

"Yep." Ed looks back at Meg. "I'll get him downstairs; you call a cab." And without waiting for her to answer, he starts steering Roe-bear towards the front door. Meg looks up the number for a cab company, and gets Roe-bear's coat. And finds his wallet in the pocket. There's no way she's paying to send him home, or asking Ed Marriner to, either.

Ten minutes later, they've gotten Roe-bear into the back of a cab, given the driver $40, and watched as Olivia's latest ex-boyfriend is driven off into the night.

"Thank you," Meg says.

"Sure, no problem," Ed tells her.

Meg sighs and looks up at the windows to her apartment.

Ed follows her glance. "You want to, I don't know, walk around the block or something before we go back up there?"

"A break would be nice, yes. It's not really my kind of party."

"So why are you throwing it?"

"It was Olivia's idea. Never again."

"Well, with all due respect to Carrie, I think I'm going to ask her to stop trying to set me up with Olivia."

"She'll probably keep trying until you do," Meg says. "So, if you're not interested--"

"I'm really not," he says.

"Then I'd tell her, yes. Especially since Olivia seems to be back to officially on the market."

"I will," he says. "So," he continues, and his tone is sudden ever-so-carefully casual, "where's your boyfriend?"

"Alain is out of town," Meg says. "His cousin's getting married in Quebec City this weekend."

"Oh," Ed says. "Well, he seemed nice. When I met him."

"He is."

"Maybe a little possessive . . ."

"A little, maybe, but not excessively so." She would say there was a lot of testosterone running close to the surface in that meeting.

"I should change the subject, shouldn't I?"

"Probably," Meg says.

"So why a Santa hat?"

"It's supposed to be what's wrong with this picture," Meg tells him.

Ed shakes his head. "Meg, you tell a guy something like that, and you are just asking him to come back with 'there is nothing wrong with this picture.'" His delivery is over the top and not remotely serious, and Meg laughs. "Which is an exceptionally cheesy line, we know, but it's set up so well, you have to take the opening."

"Oh, I see. I'll remember that."

They've gotten back to the steps to her apartment building, and Meg casts another wary look up at the windows.

"You want to go around the block one more time?" Ed asks her.

"Once more around the block," she agrees.

"Or close the wall up with our English dead," Ed says.

She guesses that was another opening he just had to take.

And there's really only one reply she can possibly make.

"Cry 'God for Harry, England, and St. George,'" Meg says.

There's a certain amount of paperwork that accompanies being a university student, and while Meg is the sort of person who hands things in early, one of her professors is Mr. Last Minute. Which is why she's spent the last forty five minutes, waiting to get something signed.

It was bright and sunny when she got there, but night falls pretty early in Montreal in January, and it's already getting dark and colder when she leaves. The sun-melted snow that dripped off roofs today is freezing into treacherous icy patches on walkways.

And stairs.

The young man is in a hurry, going up the steps, when he moves to avoid one icy spot he manages to push her onto another.

Meg is not quite sitting and not quite lying at the bottom of the steps. There's no pain, not yet, but she's pretty sure that once her brain has processed the flood of information coming from her ankle, it's going to hurt a lot. Because she's also pretty sure she heard the bone break.

And, yes, okay, that hurts in a breath-taking, eye-watering, oh-my-holy-good-God sort of way.

"Oh my God," says the young man, hurrying back down the steps. He has the bag she dropped when she fell. "Are you all right?"

She shakes her head, slightly. "I think my ankle's broken."

"Broken?" He drops back on his knees near her feet. "Which one?"

"Left," she says, "but please don't--" she breaks off in a hiss of indrawn breath as he touches it.

"Sorry," he says, and straightens up. "Probably shouldn't move that, then."

Meg shakes her head. "No."

"Right," he says. "I'm going to go find someone and get them to call for help. I'll be right back."

He takes off his coat and drapes it over Meg, over her protests.

"Right back," he says, again, and starts back up the steps. And then stops. "I'm Brian," he says. "Brian Reed."

"Meghan Ford," she says. "Meg."

He smiles. "Meg. Don't go anywhere, okay?"

Meg doesn't see herself as having a lot of choice in that matter. She tries to get comfortable, but given that she's sitting on an ice cold sidewalk with throbbing pain in her ankle, it's kind of a lost cause.

She doesn't wait long, though, before Brian is back with help, and someone who knows what he's doing splints her ankle, and they can get her inside to wait for the ambulance.

She's surprised, a little, when Brian announces he has no intention of leaving her alone at the hospital, and more than a little surprised when he actually sticks around for the whole process of x-rays and explanations and a having a cast put on and getting a refresher in the use of crutches. But he does. And she's glad to have him there, because he's easy to talk to and a good distraction from everything else.

He makes sure she gets back to her residence hall, and hands her off to the care of her roommate, but not before he's gotten her to agree to meet him for lunch in a couple of days, so he can check up on her.

Carrie and Olivia want to hear everything, but pain killers and sheer exhaustion are taking their effect, and so Meg promises to fill them in tomorrow and goes to bed.

She's almost asleep when it occurs to her that this a heck of coincidence. If she were the sort of person who believed that sort of thing, she might even have said she jinxed herself. She's not, of course, but still. It's going to make for an interesting time explaining things, if she winds up in That Place in the next six to eight weeks.

(And what are the odds that she won't?)