A Magical First Date

Excerpted from The Girl Who Walked Into The Light by Patrick Rogers

Belfast, Northern Ireland, Ardoyne District
East Coast Bagel, Crumlin Road
June 1999

I’d bicycled past East Coast Bagel countless times on my way to school, but until now I’d never been to the place. It was located among a block of stores in west Belfast, and, as far as I knew, not near the east coast of anywhere. After ordering hot tea, I went back outside into the cool morning, parked myself at one of the outdoor tables, and, wrapping both hands around my tea for warmth, waited for my date to arrive. Well, sort of a date. I wasn’t sure what defined an actual date, having never been on one, unless hanging out with Brogan counted. Which it probably didn’t.

But I’m pretty sure Luke had asked me on a date.

Shortly after I’d met Luke at Anna’s, he’d called me to ask if we could meet sometime.

Excited, I’d agreed, and we’d set it up for the day after my school let out for the summer. Now I was having second thoughts. I wondered what I was getting myself into, and why, exactly, he’d reached out to me. I’d asked Anna, but she had laughed and said he had no secret motives.

“Plus, he will let you know where he’s coming from,” she added. “Don’t worry, devushka, he finds you . . . interesting. Just enjoy the time. In Russia we say, ‘Enjoy your journey, and you will arrive in good health.’”

“We say something like that too, Anna. And, ‘where he’s coming from?’ Where did you pick that up? You’re starting to sound like homegrown Irish.”

Anna just smiled in response. Her advice made sense, but I couldn’t help but worry that Luke wouldn’t come. Why would he? Anna and Claire and all the others were so much more interesting than me. Why would world traveler Luke Song want to get breakfast with a kid?

I sipped at my tea, trying to convince myself that he would, in fact, show up. And then there he was, drinking me in like a parched pilgrim. Handsome in his casual way, he offered a playful smirk.

“Howdy,” he said, his eyes sparkling. Or maybe it was just me being sparkled.

“Hi,” I replied shyly.

“You know, normally it’s polite to at least let your date offer to pay for your food,” he said, raising an eyebrow at my green tea. “I’m not so terribly late, am I?”

“I’m sorry, are we in the Middle Ages? I can get my own breakfast tea.” My voice was stern, but I smiled at him to show I was kidding. Well, not at him. I smiled at his shoes.

He’d actually come.

“I did it again — bad manners. I apologize. It’s nice to see you, Jian.” Luke slid into the seat across from me with the disarming smile that I’d already learned was a Luke trademark. I nodded in reply, only briefly meeting his dark eyes — for fear of falling into them, perhaps?

Buying time for my emotions to settle, I tended to my tea. Get a grip, Jian.

“You hungry?” he asked. “They’ve got a great breakfast, if you like bagels.”

“Yeah, a little,” I replied. Actually, I was famished.

What’s with the demure act, Jian?

“Actually, more than a little,” I admitted. “What do you recommend?”

“Well, my usual is the East Coast: it’s egg and cheddar on a rye bagel. With coffee.”

“I’ll go for that too, but wheat, if they have it, instead of rye. And I’ve already got my tea.”

Luke winked at me. I probably blushed and he probably noticed, but if so, he was polite enough not to kid me about it.

“Got it. Be right back.” He got up to order. “I’ve been looking forward to this, by the way.” That charmer’s smile again.

Breathe, Jian. Just be yourself.

“Me too,” I replied.

Better.

Luke returned momentarily with his hands full — two bagel sandwiches and a coffee in a to-go cup. We ate greedily.

Luke wiped his mouth on a napkin. “The reason I asked if we could do this — well, I’m not sure I have, like, an exact reason,” he began nervously. “I thought it might be — no, scratch that, I thought it would be — fun to get to know you better.”

Luke’s color was high, and he was stammering like the shy kid asking a girl for her phone number. I was taken aback. Though I was no expert on the opposite sex, I’d seen this scene before. There was a boy in school I’d been casual friends with, but that was as far as it went. And he knew it, or at least I thought he did. Well, you can guess what happened. One day after school, red-faced and sputtering like Luke was now, he asked me out to dinner of all things. I couldn’t believe it! I let him down as gently as I could, telling him my grandmother didn’t allow me to go on dates, which was the gospel truth.

“I’m sorry, really sorry, that I came on too strong, before,” Luke said. “I’m harmless, actually.”

I couldn’t suppress my grin. I put my hand over my mouth.

“What’s so funny?” he asked, a puzzled frown creasing his brow.

“You,” I replied. “One minute you’re stumbling over your words like a schoolboy and the next you’re apologizing for coming on strong.”

Luke’s face flushed again.

“You caught me,” he finally managed to say. “I guess I’m part schoolboy when it comes to you.”

He offered a wan smile, then retreated into his breakfast, which was fine with me because now I was scarlet. His momentary infatuation with me, schoolboyish or not, had warmed me. Plus, I was starting to relax enough to begin to discern the person behind the attraction, and that was nice.

“I think you’ve got a special something, Jian,” he announced, punctuating his assertion with a bite of his sandwich. The outspoken side of Luke had reappeared.

“You uh… you’ve got something too,” I parried, pointing to bagel crumbs on his shirt. I needed to deflect the spotlight. I flashed on the embarrassing scene at the co-op. I was taking no chances on a repeat.

“Thanks,” he mumbled as he brushed himself off. “Yours good?”

“Mmm!” He seemed to have taken my hint. Good!

“The owner here is an expat American from south Boston. And even though Texas is a couple thousand miles from Boston, this Yankee place still reminds me of home.”

“And now you’re even farther from home.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Must be a story there.”

Luke flinched. “Yeah, I guess there is.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to . . .

” I really didn’t want to dig into Luke’s personal life, at least not this soon. I was already swimming in deep enough waters with him. Besides, he might return the gesture, asking more about me, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for that. Sharing an overview of an experience to a group of people was one thing, but to dig deeper with someone one on one? I got sweaty palms just thinking about it.

“It’s fine, really,” he said after a pause, but the look on his face said otherwise.

We sat in awkward silence. I again took refuge in my tea while Luke did the same with his coffee. He seemed to be deciding whether to tell me more about the nerve I’d inadvertently struck.

“Just one of those things,” he said at last. “I’m sure it happens all the time. But . . . each time I remember, it’s like . . .” Luke was struggling. “If you haven’t guessed, my coming here involved a girl — who I’m no longer with, obviously.”

The charmer’s smile had turned rueful, the pretty eyes sad, but it was my reaction that surprised me most. I was jealous! Of his obvious affection for this girl in his past. Where was that coming from? Sheesh, Jian! I tried to banish the annoying feeling, but it wouldn’t go away.

Luke caught my reaction, but I don’t think he knew what to make of it.

“She’s Irish, then?” I managed to ask.

“Yes, from Belfast. Just like you. But I met her at UT — the University of Texas — my junior year. She was just a freshman in a brand-new place, but not fazed one bit and full of life. We were so different, but we clicked. Different cultures, different family styles — she wasn’t raised religious at all, can you believe that? For a time, we had something rare. One day driving home, it hit me. She was all I’d been thinking about for two hours straight. It was one of those epiphany moments. Wondrous. Joyous. But also scary, as if it was unbalanced. And it was. I was.”

Luke stared off into the distance. The morning rush in and out of East Coast Bagel had slowed. Thoughts were ping-ponging through me, and my emotions weren’t all that calm either. People didn’t talk about old flames on first dates, did they? Maybe this wasn’t a real date, though. Maybe it was just friends talking. But he’d called it a date, hadn’t he?

I flashed on another date that was not really a date and how that had turned out. How its last chapters were yet to be written — or if they had been written, I hadn’t yet managed to hunt down the book. In my mind’s eye, I recalled a beautiful Chinese girl no older than me boldly flirting with a young American GI.

I like you too, Sean-jun.

The dark-eyed girl’s words had penetrated to the most vulnerable place in a warrior’s supposedly hardened heart, deep within where love lives. And dies too, sometimes.

Luke’s next words brought me back. “I really liked being with her. Oh.” He must have seen a look on my face, one that I apparently hadn’t managed to hide. He flushed. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“I didn’t mean to lay this on you. This isn’t what I’d planned at all.”

“It’s OK. And you didn’t lay anything on me. You loved her. There’s no sin in that.”

The stupid jealously I was feeling was still there. Sheesh! Waste of energy, Jian.

“Let’s change the subject,” Luke said. “Really, I’d like to hear about you.”

“We need to finish your story first,” I countered.

Luke looked at me crossways. “You don’t really want to hear this.”

“Sure I do,” I lied. Actually, it wasn’t a total lie. I did want to get to know the intriguing Luke Song. I just wasn’t too keen on hearing more about the girl who’d stolen his heart. But this was obviously a subject that weighed heavily on him, and if he needed someone to talk to . . . I could be that person.

Luke just sat there for a while, his mind obviously elsewhere. Finally, he shook his head, as if trying to clear his thoughts. “We don’t need to finish my story because I know the ending, and you can imagine it too. It’s a sorry place to linger.”

By now, my bout with jealousy — another sorry place to linger — had thankfully ended.

Luke smiled at me again. “An old country song I used to sing says it best:

‘And the drifter shuffles down the highway, headed for the next town down the line.

‘He don’t care about tomorrow, cause it’s yesterday where he’s stuck in time.’”

The words hit me. I flashed on the lost boys drifting on Crumlin Road, slaves to dark events in their yesterdays.

“Ever been stuck in time, Jian?” he asked. His tone was light, but it was a serious question.

I took a long sip of my tea. “Mm-hmm.”

“Your family?”

“Aye, but I’d rather not go there, not now at least.” I changed the subject as quick as I could. “Anna told me about your mother. Sounds like she was special.”

“Sorry, didn’t mean to pry. My mom was something special, yes ma’am. Mama was a teacher by trade, and she didn’t stop teaching when she came home from work. I was her sounding board and her student, I guess because I was the only one of us kids who’d sit through her lessons without ants in my pants. I loved listening to her. She’d discuss what she was learning with me, even when I was just knee high to a grasshopper.”

“What! Ants? Grasshoppers?”

“Sorry, Texanisms. We’ve got lots of bugs in Texas.”

“Funny.”

“The fire ants ain’t funny. But yeah. I read too, quite a lot, but no way was I at her level. Mom was like a walking encyclopedia, especially about history and spirituality. I got much of what I know about spiritual subjects secondhand from her — but also firsthand on occasion with personal experiences, like what I mentioned a few weeks back.”

“Heaven firsthand, you mean.”

“Yes. Like your trip.”

Yes, like my trip. In a blink I was back in the sparkling alabaster room, remembering the shining saint and being held in her light. Then I blinked again, and I was back in the cool morning. There was a lady on the nearby pavement pulling her shopping trolley. The traffic whizzed by. I tilted my head back and drank in the marvelous blue sky. Would just a slight twist of my dial open invisible worlds to me? It seemed like it already had.

Luke hadn’t seemed to notice that I’d left. I scooted closer to the table and asked, “Did anything like that ever happen to you, like I talked about at Anna’s?”

The café’s morning rush hour seemed to be petering out, though a handful of older gents lingered over their teas and coffees. One guy was hunched over a newspaper crossword puzzle.

Luke sat a while before answering. “Not anywhere near as detailed as you describe, but I do wake inspired sometimes.”

“Do you feel like you’re being taught while you sleep?” I asked excitedly.

“I do. That’s what I meant by inspired.”

I hesitated, not sure how much deeper I wanted to dive into the subject. But then again, who else besides Anna could I tell about what was happening to me? I hadn’t even started telling her about my trips into the akashic and wasn’t even sure I would.

I felt a prompting. I hoped it was from the saints, because then and there I’d made a decision.

“Luke, I’ve seen other things too.”

Luke perked up a notch.

“OK,” he said, treading carefully.

“They were scenes of my father — real scenes, not dreams. He fought in Vietnam. I saw it, the ambush he was in. And I saw when he first met my mother in Taiwan, as if I was right in the room!”

Luke gawked at me. “Really? I imagine . . . actually, I can’t imagine. Real, like history real?”

“Yes, like what really happened then, I’m sure of it. The details were too rich to be anything but a perfect record of what happened.”

“Wow,” Luke said reverently. It was the right thing to do, to tell him. He was as amazed as I was and showed no apprehension.

“Lots of feelings,” I continued. “Lots. Still trying to sort them out. Two things, though, I’m pretty sure of. One, these are gifts I’ve been given for some purpose. The saint I met said I’d be allowed to see certain memories, or words to that effect.”

I looked deep into Luke’s expectant brown eyes. I wanted to make sure he knew how important this was to me. “The second thing is that they’re precious treasures to me, gifts in more ways than one.”

He nodded his understanding.

“I’d love to take a walk. Can we?”

“We can,” he said. “You ready?”

“I am.”

We spent the rest of the morning meandering down the familiar streets of my childhood, sometimes in silence, sometimes chatting like two old friends who hadn’t seen each other in who knows how long. I learned about his Texas roots and his childhood as a surprise baby born late to hardworking Mexican-American parents — both recently passed. His mother had passed within a year of his father’s untimely heart attack, as if she just couldn’t bear to carry on without her husband of forty years. The Songella family, including his older sister now living in San Antonio, had ground out a living on a “hot-as-blazes” cattle ranch not far from the Rio Grande River. He was now the ranch’s conservator, the land rented out to a local rancher.

I marveled at how different our upbringings were, yet how we seemed to just fit, our conversation easily ebbing and flowing like the in-and-out tides of Belfast Harbor