I replay his words a few minutes later, after I’ve found a bottle of club soda behind the bar and am blotting my dress with paper towels. I’m huddled in my old office, back behind the hive of activity out front. The chair squeaks when I sit down—
welcome back!
—and then I survey the furnishings from my former life. The desk is cast iron—spare but both antique and modern at once. There are stacks of papers neatly piled on the left corner, contracts, I’m sure, and a tumbling pile of mail scattered next to the printer. I can tell this is the slush pile—solicitations from aspiring artists who for some reason think that Rory and I can change their destinies, offer them open space on our walls, and alter their futures in doing so.
I flip through the desk calendar parked in front of the computer.
Six weeks ago, there it is:
San Francisco. Hope Kingsley.
The following week, I’ve scribbled,
9-week ultrasound.
My chest seizes in grief, grief I wasn’t even aware I was carrying around until I see it. Here. Confirmed. This lost child is like an apparition, something that I never had, never held, can’t even fucking remember, but still, when I allow it to, it haunts me. Just because I can’t remember it, like everything really, doesn’t mean that it can’t cause me pain. Because here, faced with proof, I’m eviscerated. I want to reach into those dark corners of my brain and pull out answers:
What was I going to do? What we were going to do? Become that cliché and hope that a baby can repair our relationship? Become a single mom? Not have it at all?
Peter, in vague terms, has implied that we were working it out, that I was aiming toward forgiveness. But a niggling part of me wonders how much of this is true. Now, with my mind washed clean and without the memory at the outrage of his betrayal, maybe I can—can forgive him. But back then? Really? Was I capable of such a thing? Of forgiveness in the grandest of scales? I sigh, wondering how
much it matters what I was going to do before. I flip the calendar a few weeks back and forth to see what else there is, what other bread crumbs I’ve left myself to follow.
Mostly, it’s empty, but there. There it is: something. Something small, and who knows if it’s anything.
Probably a dead end.
But I commit it to memory anyway.
Tina Marquis. 11 a.m.
Fifteen letters that mean nothing to me.
Peter pops his head through the door, breaking me free.
“Hey, you okay?”
I pat my dress. It’s still damp and looks like a ruby reddish gray mosaic, but it’s presentable enough. The stain almost looks intentional.
“I’m okay,” I say. I stand and reach for his outstretched arm, and then I shuffle back toward the beckoning crowd.
Three hours later,
the guests have scattered themselves out the front door and into the warm New York City night, and I am too tired to move. Really. So tired that I don’t know how I’m going to make it home. Peter will take me, but I am oh-my-god-I-can’t-even-walk-to-the-town-car tired.
“This was too much for her,” my mom hisses at Rory, like I’m not perfectly present and can’t hear her perfectly well.
“You’re the one who told me to do it in the first place!” Rory replies, and I wish they would both shut the hell up and let me go to sleep right there on the bench underneath
Still Life with Purple Chair
by Antonio Molinero, an artist Rory discovered last year in Barcelona. The lights of the stark gallery are burning my pupils: too much white, too much brightness, all contrast and glare in here. It is hip, it is fabulous, and I can’t take one second more of it. If I had
an ounce of energy left, I’d use it for the new me to chastise the old me at being so quick to abandon her promises. As it is, I lie back, resting my head on a faux-glass bench, and accidentally knock over a wayward plastic wineglass.
“I’m here, you know. Right in front of you. So you can stop talking about me like I’m not,” I bleat.
“Yes, of course you are, dear. We’re only trying to sort out what’s best for you,” my mom says, kneeling to mop up the spill.
“Who died and made you my keeper?” I answer, until I realize that 152 people died. And then we all just shut up. Finally, I say, “Can someone please just take me home?”
“Yes, we should go,” Peter says, until Rory gives him a stare that could wither a flower. I’ve seen how she eyes him now—distrustful, distasteful, but when I ask her about it, she usually just hiccups and says, “He has a lot to prove,” which is true, so I let it rest.
“You can stay and help clean,” Rory says. “Anderson can take her home.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m taking her,” Peter says.
“Don’t be ridiculous my ass,” Rory says back. “Half of the drunks here were your friends, and I’m not cleaning up their mess by myself.”
“I’m helping,” my mom says, still on her knees. “And Tate’s here, too. And Hugh.” Rory rolls her eyes, and Hugh, as if on cue for his boyfriend-of-the-year award, strolls from the back office with a box of garbage bags, ready to man up. If he didn’t love my sister so much, he’d make me sick.
“Great, then the five of us should get it done in no time,” Rory tuts, retreating to the office, extinguishing the argument.
Peter starts to disagree but I see him reassess and opt not to push it—it being what? His luck, Rory’s nerves? Instead, he plucks his keys from his jeans pocket and stuffs them in Anderson’s hand.
“Thank you, Ror, it was fun,” I say, righting myself from the bench, kissing her cheek.
“Did it…help? Jog anything?”
I shake my head no. “But it was fun all the same.”
“I’ll be home right after you,” Peter says, pecking my forehead.
“No hurry.” I’m already dreaming of my bed, of swaddling myself in the down comforter and tumbling to sleep. Besides, Peter is still banished to the couch, so it’s not like I’ll notice that he’s gone.
“I drank too much,” Anderson confesses once the town car has pulled away and we’re coasting up the West Side Highway. “I shouldn’t be drinking with my meds.”
“I’ve told you as much,” I say, trying not to sound judgmental, though judgmental might be the old me’s natural setting, my autotune. But I get it. I do. If I were brave enough to wash this all with a pill or a few drinks on top of a pill, I might, too.
“Thanks again for coming. I know you have fancy places to be.”
“Nowhere fancy to be at all. New York in August?” He laughs. “All the cool kids have left anyway.”
“But you’re a cool kid.”
“Less cool than you’d think. Or trying to be anyway.”
“How’s that going?” I’ve read Page Six. I know that he was out at some underground club two nights ago, know that he went home with a Victoria’s Secret model, that the lead gossip story the next day read “Crash and Yearn!”
The town car cruises over a bump and Anderson winces, giving him an out. “You’re still in pain?” I ask.
“Not that much,” he says. “Well, psychological. The nightmares. They don’t stop, not with therapy, not with a girl, not with anything. I’m trying to wean myself, you know, off the meds, but then my brain goes into overdrive. Night sweats, heart palpitations…My
therapist says it might take a year to stop thinking about it, and even then, it might come back in fits and starts.”
“That will be weird, too, though, right? I can’t even imagine what we thought about before we thought about this.”
“I can,” he says. “I thought about landing my next job, pushing my career to the next level, breaking up or hooking up with whomever I was with…I don’t know, ridiculous stuff. But still, I’d give my balls to be able to just think about all of that.”
I reach over and squeeze his hand.
“You’re still doing well with the breaking up–hooking up stuff.”
He accepts the jab. “Medicinal balm.”
“In addition to the meds.”
“In addition to the meds,” he says, then smiles. “Can’t hurt.”
“Old habits die hard.”
“Something like that.”
“Did I tell you,” I say, letting go of his fingers, “that I remembered something?” His eyes pop but he burps into his hand as his way of saying no. “It was almost like a dream, but it wasn’t. Even though I don’t really remember it, and even though my mom and sister tell me otherwise, it happened, I know it. Or so my therapist says.”
“That’s my new favorite line,” he says. “‘So my therapist says.’ Mine’s the only one I trust anymore.”
“Well, there’s me.” I rest my head on his shoulder.
“Well, there’s you. That’s true. The girl who saved my life. But you’re as fucked up as I am.”
We both laugh, and I straighten myself up.
“But anyway,” I say, “I did, I did see something. I just don’t know what it means yet.”
“Our brains are strange beasts.”
“That’s helpful.”
“Sorry,” he says. “Too actorly. Ugh, what a stereotype I’ve turned into. I’m trying not to be, though—not to be such a stereotype.”
“Stumbling around drunk isn’t exactly breaking the cliché.”
“I know.” He hangs his head. “My shrink says the same thing.” He catches himself. “There it is again.” We both go quiet. “Oh, so here’s some good news,” he says finally. “All of this excitement has significantly upped my Hollywood stock.”
“Ha ha.”
“I’ve been offered a Spielberg film. We start shooting in North Carolina just after Thanksgiving, if I accept.”
“If you accept? You can’t say no to that.”
He shrugs. “Like I said, I’m reprioritizing.”
“Don’t abandon your life because of this one terrible thing that happened to us, Anderson. I thought the whole point of the two of us surviving was that we got our second chance, our chance to live the lives we were meant to be living.”
I consider the promise I made to the new me.
Isn’t that it? Isn’t that the entire purpose?
“That’s it exactly!” he says, clapping his hands together. “What if this isn’t the life I’m meant to be living? I mean, this acting thing is so flimsy—it’s me dressing up in costumes and saying someone else’s words!”
“But don’t you love it?”
“Sometimes,” he says. “Sometimes it just seems like life.”
The car stops abruptly at a light, and we both—too tensely—grab the other’s wrist. When we finally let go, I’m certain he can feel the imprint of my grasp, as I can his. Holding him, just like I had outside the gallery, feels solid, like I’m finally sinking into something
that won’t ebb out beneath me. He says that I’m the girl who saved his life, but what if he’s the one person to understand me, the one person to save mine? I shake my head and shrug this off. No, there’s also Peter.
“Aftershocks,” he says once we’ve started moving again. “Even with the therapy and medication, there are always the aftershocks.”
10
“Every Breath You Take”
—The Police
J
amie, Peter, and I decamp to my mother’s house in Bedford for the weekend. Jamie, because we’re forging ahead with
American Profiles
and this is our initial background research. They’d announced the exclusive just yesterday; Page Six had covered it this morning with the headline “Whoa, Nelly!” I actually laughed when Anderson called to tell me. Peter, because, well, we can use a weekend away, even if that means enduring my mother and Tate.
My mom is right about both my so-called memory and the house: there’s no wraparound porch, no lanterns at the entry. Still, though, there is a sweeping expanse of lawn, and it seems entirely feasible that while parts of my recollection were indeed conjured up, parts of it could certainly be plausible. The late summer night on the grass with my sister. Well, why not?
Jamie is staying in the guesthouse behind the main house, while I’m in my childhood room and Peter is in Rory’s. My mom twirls around like a holistic whirlybird: she knows better than to be swirling around in a fit of nervous energy, but she can’t help herself.
Just calm the fuck down!
I want to yell at her, like she shouldn’t know about energy transference and Zen postures and
blah, blah, blah
—how she’s making the rest of us tense—but I clamp down and shut it. Maybe there is something to be learned from her kindness, her generous spirit, even if that same spirit irritates the hell out of me. I tell myself to force a smile whenever I feel like snapping. Eventually, she turns on the living room stereo and seems to decompress, almost visibly, at the lilt of the classical music. I stand in the door frame and watch her, until she catches me and says, “I’m sorry. I know that I’m a nut. This helps.”
She walks over to me and kisses the top of my head. “You got that from me, you know. People said that you got it from your dad, your love of music, but it was from me. He couldn’t sing to save his life.
“You’ll have to forgive the guesthouse,” she says to Jamie, after we’ve made our way out back, as he drops his duffel onto the creaking farmhouse floors. “I had it cleaned but it’s still a little musty, I’m afraid. It hasn’t been used for guests in years. But with all the company we’re having this weekend, it’s the only way to make it work.”
Rory and Hugh are taking the train up this afternoon, and since Peter and I aren’t currently sharing beds, the two of them were now deposed to the extra bedroom on the third floor. The house itself is huge—too big for my mom alone—but she’d long ago tossed out the ancillary family rooms and bedrooms to make way for her yoga room, her sewing room, her “quiet” room where Tate could write poetry and nary a word could be spoken, though sometimes, she whispered, as she gave me a tour, “we like to make love in here without any sound.”
My old room, much like my apartment with Peter, is nothing like I would have pictured for myself. Where are the teenage heartthrob posters? Where are the old record albums and drawers full
of letters to camp friends? Instead, there is a collection of tennis trophies on a bureau, a ceiling-high bookshelf stuffed with fraying guitar sheet music and old high school textbooks—physics, biology, French, European art—a barren white desk, and a wicker rocking chair adorned with faded flowery pillows better suited for an old-age home. If you were to look around here—a detective in search of whom I would grow up to be—there’d be no signs: my teenage self is a generic whiteboard, a canvas with no color. I feel a pang of sadness for her, for me.