The only college that accepts me is in Vermont, a place I associate with death, and the first year is a disaster. Just when I’ve stopped doing drugs, everyone else has started. They drop acid and try to burn down dorms. They take mushrooms and crucify animals. I call Aram and Jonathan every day. Aram makes me feel better on the phone, but each time we hang up I am alone again. When I invite Jonathan to come visit he refuses, citing each horrendous incident I’ve described over the last three months. I agree to accompany him to the AIDS clinic for testing over Christmas break. He’s worried, and I don’t think he should be even after he confesses the myriad escapades around the city to which I’ve been ignorant. Every few weeks I write Taylor nasty, vile letters I never send, blaming him for who I almost became. I imagine the not knowing, the squirm of discomfort as he tries to make sense of what happened, why I stopped talking to him, and the reversal of power fills me with a charge, reminding me I’m nobody’s bitch. I wonder if that’s how he felt with me, when he used to have the upper hand.
As the end of December nears, I realize that Jonathan hasn’t called me back in a few days—last we spoke, we were trying to make plans for the trip to the clinic. When I call I get his machine. I tell his machine when I’m coming home and tell him to let me know when and where to meet him. For the next week and a half, I call Jonathan and leave him messages, each one increasingly more concerned and mad.
“Why aren’t you calling me back?” I ask. “Are you okay?”
“Did you die?”
“Oh my God, maybe you died and I’m yelling at your machine for not calling me back, when you can’t call me back because you’re dead and now whoever hears these messages is going to think I’m a terrible friend for berating a dead person for not calling me back. Call me back!”
I call Paul and ask if Jonathan’s okay. He is. I ask if he knows whether Jonathan made an appointment to get tested for AIDS. He did. Paul thought I was going with him. He agrees to call Jonathan and see what’s going on. Paul never calls me back. Now I’m leaving messages for both brothers to call me back, and neither does. Why are they ignoring me? I can’t figure out what I did wrong.
Finally, I’m home, and soon so is Aram, and we do our tradition of going to Rockefeller Center to watch the tree lighting and go to a movie and eat chestnuts from street vendors. He doesn’t know either why Jonathan isn’t responding, so he leaves a message, too.
“I bet he’ll call me back,” Aram says, confident. I wonder if this is karma for dropping Taylor. Is this payback for unceremoniously cutting someone out of my life? I feel sorry for putting Taylor through this, but not sorry enough to reach out to him. And besides, I didn’t do anything to Jonathan; I’m hardly a bad influence. But Jonathan doesn’t call Aram back. He is just gone.
* * *
It takes me a year and a half and three colleges before I settle on a school. After the horrors of my first school, I decided to take classes at the New School and live at home, but that’s no better: I fight all the time with Mom, who treats me like four-year-old Nina’s full-time nanny. Finally I land at the University of Rochester, which is bland and generic, but I’m tired of transferring around and decide to stay put.
In the spring of 1991, Aram and I are in France. He has just finished his junior year abroad at Oxford, and we’ve decided to spend a week together in Paris before our summer jobs begin in New York. We have spent the past year dating other people. Or rather, he has spent the past year dating other people, while I waited for him, white-knuckling through the year, hoping that every phone call was not our last. Now that he’s had his interactive experience with the physical landscape of British girls, and relieved me of my fears by choosing to remain monogamous, the idea of dating others has stuck in my head and I wonder, Should I do the same thing? I love Aram more than I thought a person could love, and while we have amazing conversations, and laugh more than we fight, there’s an entire body of things he’d rather not talk about, things having to do with me.
While I’ve spent my entire life living in fear, Aram, it seems, has fears as well, and they are in contradiction to mine. Mainly, my problems are too big for him. They frighten him. He didn’t want to hear about Taylor in high school, and he doesn’t want to hear about Taylor now, in the aftermath. Any party I mention I’ve attended or person I’ve encountered whom he wouldn’t choose as a friend threatens him, and he doesn’t want to know. He’s the person I’ve come closest to explaining my terrifying worries to, but whenever a thought or worry of mine is too dark, it triggers in him a fear that my troubles foretell something about me he doesn’t want to know.
“Better left for your therapist,” he tells me, which makes me feel decidedly crazy and not worth knowing. If I can’t share my true self with Aram, the healthiest, safest, and most intelligent person I know, without scaring him, who in the world is left for me to tell? My therapist is nice enough, but she just wants to talk about my sex life, which I don’t want to talk about, so we wind up making small talk while I chain-smoke in her office.
When we got together, when I was a senior and he was off already to school, no one could seem to believe it. Aram and me? Clean-cut, academic Aram? Who won the NEH? He’s with me, the weird, artsy little freak who hangs out with that strange older man? No one could wrap their heads around it. He was so normal; I was so not. While I resented feeling that judgment from the outside world, I never felt it from Aram, but the more time passes, the more I sense that he agrees with them: He is normal and I’m fucked up. I’m tired of hiding who I am to protect others from their distress. Am I going to have this problem forever?
One of our last days in Paris, we’re walking through the Place de la Concorde and we pass a mother with two little girls. One of the little girls, I realize with a start, looks just like Melissa, the way Melissa did when we were kids together. As we pass one another, I turn around to see the little girl has also looked back at me. She’s staring at me with recognition, like she knows who I am. We both walk like that for a bit, staring back at the other, recognizing one another although we’ve never met. Is that Melissa’s blue dress? Did I just see Melissa? Did she come back as herself, but in Paris? I call home that night and tell my mom about the strange encounter, and she tells me that Sharon, Melissa’s mom, moved to Paris a few years ago and has two children; one of whom would be around the age Melissa was when she died.
I can’t stop thinking about this. The last time I saw Melissa, she was not-Melissa. Her face was swollen from steroids. A bandanna snugged around her bald head, dethroned by chemo. I never saw her again as the girl she was, until just now. Only, who was that? And how did she know to recognize me? I don’t believe in ghosts because they scare me, but now I kind of do. Was that girl Melissa? Did she not die? Did she do the thing I feared my mom would do, and pack everything up and move to Europe and not tell anyone? Because here we are now, in Europe, and there she is, not sick at all. Still eight, and healthy, like she’s been given a second chance. I used to think the world should stop when people died. That we should wait until enough time has passed and we’re all caught up with our mourning, but if Sharon—Melissa’s own mother—had two new children, then she continued on; she didn’t wait. She gave herself a second chance at being a mom. She gave Melissa younger siblings, and those siblings grew, which creates the illusion that Melissa grew also. Etan is kept alive by the news and by lore, by age-progression images and new developments, so maybe Sharon is keeping Melissa alive by having new children she could tell Melissa-stories to, and they can carry with them memories of their sister they never met.
When everyone else was moving forward, even Sharon, I waited. Maybe that little girl turned not because she recognized me, but because she saw in me a trapped little girl, just her age. I am twenty-one, but on the inside I am still eight. Everyone else has moved on, even, in some ways, Melissa herself, the person I’ve been waiting for. And here I am, still waiting to be known, to be solved. Aram doesn’t want to solve me. He wants the undiscovered part of me to remain a mystery, but I’m beginning to think the unknown part of me is actually who I am. And I think I want to know her.