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Ellie left once I showed her the exact contents of the folder. Actually, it was probably the scroll bar on the side of the folder view that really did her in. My mental state aside, I was the sort of person who did well with tasks, and this was a hefty one.
But before I got to it, I called her a cab, so she wouldn’t be stuck uptown. Certain trains and buses ran less and less as the night went on, and hers was the quintessential example. The demand for her route was so high that we always hoped that would change. But in the interim, we couldn’t reliably judge when they were coming outside of rush hour, and that was long over.
Her being stuck uptown so late was my fault, so I offered to pay as genuinely and as sincerely as someone can when they have no interest in or need to worry about money, only settling a perceived score. When she refused, which should not have been a surprise, I snuck the money into her bag when she wasn’t looking. Ellie wasn’t the best at keeping track of her cash, stemming from her desire to keep multiple “emergency stashes” throughout her belongings. I didn’t know if she ever knew how much she had exactly, but extra was something she could dismiss, or at least not mention to me. But even if she did, I would just deny it. It was nothing, after all. Just an attempt to do right by a friend.
But as she hugged me goodbye. I still felt guilty about the small act of well-meaning deception. Or maybe it wasn’t guilt, per say. Maybe it was something else entirely. On the whole, it never felt good to watch Ellie leave. During those moments, there was always some unexplained storm cloud brewing in my core. Its rain washed away unnamed bits of me as the winds blew my innards about. It all left me feeling shallow and empty. Not entirely unlike my apartment.
Except my apartment was not so empty now. It was full of sadness, the one companion I could never fully chase off. But I could ignore it with enough effort. So I sat down at my laptop and started sorting through the mess in the infamous folder, sending hefty emails to Erika with somewhat vague explanations of where one would think a synopsis should go. It was a repetitive task that I could lose myself in. And I did. I worked diligently and robotically late into the night, until I eventually laid my head down on the desk, claiming that I would only need to nap for a few minutes before I could get back to work.
But of course, it wasn’t only for a few minutes. I was out for the night. I needed to be.
And while the story-me sleeps, I can explain how I can say I was not writing when I was clearly producing written works as evidenced by the contents of this now infamous folder. Fair enough as far as questions go. It must certainly look like a contradiction, but the situation was more complicated than that.
Let me point out a distinction you know but aren’t aware of. Consider a scenario in which I bang my hands on the keyboard, including the space bar, and am able to create bunches of what look like words but definitely aren’t words in any language. Even if I make enough of those bunches analogous to words to create something analogous to a coherent novel or short story or middle grade book series, you wouldn’t call it that. You would call it nonsense, no matter how many bunches of characters someone was able to make in this way. And therein lies the complication. Writing isn’t just the collection of characters but the creation of something coherent. I thought I wasn’t making anything coherent, so what I was doing couldn’t actually be considered writing. Sure, it might retroactively become writing later once I fixed everything. But then I wouldn’t fix anything. Those were attempts to edit, but editing had proved to be a herculean task that I clearly couldn’t handle.
But now that was Erika’s problem. Or it had increasingly become Erika’s problem as her inbox gradually filled until I fell asleep and couldn’t send her anything else. Then she must have breathed a sigh of relief, assuming I was right and she actually never slept, as ill-advised as it was. Or maybe on that particular night, she couldn’t sleep because whoopsie daisy, I dropped A LOT of work on her desk. Or maybe it wasn’t her desk. She had her own agency and that included plenty of employees to help her sort through my mess and the ability to hire more employees if need be. Regardless, I didn’t need to feel guilty about it at all because this was how that agency earned its money, and I was essentially helping the economy by keeping people employed.
But on the other hand, I could have actually given her things as I finished them across the many years she was bound to me by a contract that wouldn’t be impossible to break but was more trouble to break than it was to keep, especially considering how normally low maintenance I was and how easy it would be to overlook the part of my ‘low maintenance’ status that came from my not doing the thing that I was contractually bound to do: writing.
In any event, I woke up after a couple hours. It wasn’t enough to be fully rested, but it was enough for the muscles of my neck and back to coordinate a protest against me for sleeping in that hunched over position. I was in pain. It sucked. It was also too late in the morning for me to go back to my actual bed. If I did, I was not going to get up in time for work, and I was determined to make it into the office if there was any way I could do it without being Patient Zero to an epidemic. And this was not me being a good employee. This was me not knowing how to call in sick, and at that point, it was too late for me to ask.
Also, if I didn’t go in, then I wouldn’t see Ellie. And I wanted to see her. I always wanted to see her.
So I stood up and unplugged my phone from the charger I couldn’t remember retrieving from my purse. I must have, but when exactly I did so was unknown to me. And yet, I was looking at the proof and a notification telling me that Ellie had texted me.
Text me when you wake up, she said. I just want to know you’re alright.
And I had woken up. Currently, I was awake, and per the spirit of the message, which meant that I needed to text her to check in and give her the assurance that I had made it through the night. But waking up this early would just shift her concern. After all, she knew I wasn’t a morning person. She knew I wouldn’t willingly be dragged out of bed so early. Which meant telling her I was awake would only lead to more questions and concerns. So I had to wait.
It was five am, which granted, was not that early by some standards. Some people like to spend that hour running or doing something similar. However, I wasn’t like that, and I had never been. It would be less worrisome for Ellie if she got that text while I was physically at work. Maybe when I first got to my desk and followed immediately by a text complaining about Perry. That would be in character for me, so in character that she would just sigh and send me some British idiom about things being back to normal. And that would be that.
But that opportunity was hours away. I kept that notification active just as a reminder to get back to it later and swiped through the rest of the clutter of my screen: emails, game notifications, pleas to give some company money, etc. etc. But then there was another text; this one was from Professor Evory.
At the sight of his name, my heart tore in two, one half succumbing to the impulse to rise and the other dropping to the depths of the hell that rested in me. I always wanted to hear from him, but I knew what this was about.
He simply said, Your agent said there was a chance you’d take the fellowship but needed to think about it. And talk, maybe?
The timing of the message made sense. Professor Evory was the type to go running first thing in the morning. In fact, he once said that was his favorite time to run, and I had assumed it was because of something nondescriptly poetic about doing so: that you could race through the world while it was still painted in that uncompromised newness of this upcoming day with an unstifled glow of opportunity and potential. But that was just speculation on my part. Regardless of why, he had woken up early–in his time zone that was one hour ahead of mine–and he clearly had enough time to hear the non-news about the fellowship.
The text came mere moments before I read it. So in theory, even if it was generally inappropriate to call him at that hour, I had a reason to think it was okay. He was awake and had his phone in his hands.
So I could just do it, I thought to myself. He started this talk, or so I could pretend. Continuing it with a phone call wasn’t as inappropriate as it could have been. Maybe that didn’t make sense, but I wasn’t going to give myself a chance to think any more about that. If I did, I wouldn’t call him at all, and I needed to call him. I just needed to hear somebody’s voice. Better yet if it could have been his voice: the voice of someone who constantly used it to cheer me on in life, who consoled and encouraged me, and who was the sort of mentor everyone needs in their lives but so few people get. So I hit the button and lifted the phone to my ear.
Once autopilot shut off, I was struck with a realization about the burden I was potentially becoming, disturbing someone at what should have been a peaceful hour. At the thought, my body went into a full mutiny. My heart was pounding, my palms grew cold, my head was spinning, and my aching muscles suddenly just started screaming. All of this was what I would normally call the physical manifestations of my anxiety, which was partially caused by the mere act of being on the phone and partially because I was always expecting him to ask for some sort of accounting of the life he helped me build, also known as the life he saved.
In reality, the only thing I’ve done is become painfully aware of all the cracks in the foundation and the shoddy craftsmanship in the walls. From that comes some sort of disappointment, you would think, but I wasn’t really disappointed. Not in my life, anyway, but maybe in myself.
He picked up, and I was immediately greeted with his typical, “Hi Mia.”
It always sounded like he was happy to hear my voice. So every time I heard it, there was a rush of relief.
But I still felt compelled to apologize “I know I should have at least texted you before calling. Or something.”
Professor Evory dismissed my concerns. “I texted you first,” he assured me. “And there's never really a bad time to hear your voice, when I have the chance to.”
That would normally be hard to believe, but he hadn’t heard my voice in quite some time, so I had that going for me. Not that I had planned for that. Quite the contrary, I was trying to not completely disengage from him or disappear, but emails were easier for me than phone calls. He was happy to oblige this unexpected and unnegotiated compromise that was a quick email or two every other month or so. However, there’s a comfort that only the sound of one’s voice can provide.
This wasn’t a new concept to me. I certainly felt it when he spoke. I just wasn’t good at putting it into practice.
“Thanks,” I said. “And yeah, my agent told me I was up for consideration.”
With a breathless chuckle, he replied, “A bit more than that. Honestly.”
Beyond that comment, he didn’t dive any deeper into the dilemma he and his colleagues found themselves in. Maybe he thought it was nothing, or maybe he assumed I hadn’t been told that part. I didn’t know. But frankly, I was happy he hadn’t brought it up. I could appreciate his attempt at protecting me, at keeping me at arm’s length from the storm.
I would never pretend that That Shitty Guy didn’t do some heinous things, but they were things not everyone knew about despite how heinous they were. Consequently, mistakes were made. Those mistakes were understandable. However, proving that someone didn’t know was the hard part. But I knew the truth, even if I couldn’t convey it to someone else. I knew Professor Evory. He would never tolerate someone like That Shitty Guy, particularly when that person would be around his students. But lately, he’d been disconnecting from the social internet, also known as the most common vehicle to bring such information to the wider population. He really couldn’t have known, and if he had, things would have gone differently.
However, that was all assuming he was involved in this decision. Once internal politics get involved, who knows why things happen the way they do. I only knew that I couldn’t ask, and if I did, he wouldn’t tell me.
But there was one line of questioning I could take. “She also told me that you were the one to put me forward.”
He chuckled nervously. “I thought it would be a good opportunity for you. Not that you need one.” He paused, taking a slow deep breath. The sound of which seeped into the phone. “And I wanted to see you again. I do miss having you around here, seeing you at events. All of that.”
“I don’t mean to worry you,” I apologized.
“It’s not that,” he said. “But regardless, it was still a bit of a conflict of interest. I knew it almost immediately after I nominated you, so I respectfully recused myself.”
There was an awkward pause after that. He typically didn’t let conversations drop. Instead, he was quick to compensate for my inability to maintain my side of things. So there wasn’t usually silence, just him. But right then, we were silent.
“Do you think I should take it?” I suddenly asked.
He didn’t want to answer that. I could hear his silent but gentle admonishment. I needed to do what was right for me, he would say. I understood that. But it was complicated, and there were parts of this mess he didn’t know about yet.
“I had to break off my engagement,” I explained. “George was cheating on me with my sister. I mean, what choice did I have? It wasn’t the first time, but even if it was the first time, that’s supposed to be the breaking point, right? It would be for most people.”
“You did the right thing,” he said, falling effortlessly into that role of caring advisor he had always been to me. “He crossed boundaries that you had every right to assert.”
“I know,” I replied. “I had to do it, but it still hurts though.”
Just not in the way everyone’s expecting, I wanted to add, but I didn’t.
“Of course,” he said. “There were good things about him that you’re going to miss, and that’s the part that you can grieve. But when did you break it off?”
“Yesterday. Which was also the day I found out he was still seeing my sister,” I started cracking again. “Oh and on the sister front. It turns out I have another one. I don’t know anything about her. Maybe Dad didn’t even know, but the private investigator digging into my life found her, and well, the news reached me yesterday.”
“Private inv— I meant to ask you about that,” he replied nervously. “I had a voicemail from someone claiming to be investigating you. For some... agency? I didn’t want to return that call until I could talk to you about it.”
I winced. Should have seen that coming, I thought. Erika warned us that the investigator was really going to get into the weeds of our lives. Maybe he wouldn’t talk to everyone at my alma mater, but it only made sense to look into Professor Evory, someone listed as one of my greatest supporters in my book’s acknowledgements.
“Yeah, I should have warned you. Uh, you can talk to him. Basically, my agency is doing deep background checks on everyone, so there... won’t be any surprises later,” I muttered as delicately as I could.
He hummed. The meaning of such did not come through clearly. That was deliberate.
Instead, he picked up on a different thread. “Sister, you said?”
“A surprise one. The PI found her through the groundskeeper at the family cemetery,” I said, recounting a story that still felt raw. “He was able to give me some details about her, and I found her online but...”
I was trying to be polite about it. I was trying to keep some air of decorum, but there was no use. I bit down on my lip and drew out the words I really wanted to say. “Screw it. Her daughter looks just like me. Apparently. The PI said it, and the groundskeeper said it. Like, that’s my niece. And my sister kind of looks like me too. That I could see. She’s... She’s my sister, and I don’t know what to do about it.”
Calmly, he corrected, “Biologically, she is your sister. That’s fair to say, especially if you both decide you don’t want to do paternity or sibling testing.”
“Should we?” I asked.
“That’s not my place to decide.”
And he was right. That had to be between this new sister and I, but it also seemed irrelevant. The resemblance was strong enough to be its own argument.
I shook my head as I walked over to the window and its still open curtains. I probably needed to be in the habit of closing them. Maybe there was still a reason to despite how high in the air I was. But as I saw it, no one could peer in, so what did it matter? And the sunrise helped wake me up on time, during certain seasons. Right then, however, on the 22nd of June in the year of the Lord 2018, the sun was starting to rise over the horizon as I stood there, and I wished I didn’t have to see it yet. I just wanted to crawl back into bed and forget the whole day, reclaiming it as payment for the terrible day that was the 21st of June. It was a Friday anyway. Not much work got done on Fridays with the weekend looming overhead. What was the harm?
Being in this apartment, alone. That was the harm, which I also didn’t want. Frankly, I felt like I was stuck between a rock and a hard place, as irrationally as that sounded.
“I guess I can’t help but think I should just know what to do,” I finally said.
There were many aspects of that statement that needed to be unpacked, but true to his character, Professor Evory locked in on the only one that mattered. He asked me, “Why do you think that?”
“Because we’re sisters, and sure, I’ve never had a good one, but like... I don’t know. Other people don’t struggle with things like this.”
“You mean, siblings who were brought up together don’t struggle like this?”
I shook my head to no one in particular. “Yes and no, because Charity and I were raised together.... Somewhat. And she’s been the other woman with my fiancé. Or am I the other woman? I don’t know; this is just devolving. But–”
There was no way to finish that thought. There were thousands upon thousands of things to say, but I didn’t know how to speak anymore. Constructing a sentence was beyond me and maybe had been for a while. Whatever the verbal equivalent was for keyboard smashing, that’s what I seemed to be ready to do, but Professor Evory stopped me.
“I want you to think of it this way,” he explained. “You’re still going to be strangers who are more likely to have certain traits in common. You’re strangers with a good reason to not be, but the typical getting to know you exercise that siblings normally skip will still be something the two of you have to do.”
“I guess so,” I agreed softly.
“So have you spoken yet?”
“No,” I confessed. “I don’t think she even knows that I know about her.”
He inhaled sharply. “Sheesh,” he pseudo-cursed. “Well, Mia, such things aren’t all that uncommon, even if they are kept hidden.”
I had to agree. “I mean, we live in an age of at-home DNA testing. So they won’t stay hidden for long, will they? But this wasn’t as much of a surprise as you might be thinking. Conceptually, at least. It’s just facing it that has been hard.”
“The timing wasn’t great either,” he reminded me.
And at that point, I was tempted to do the hair split of pointing out that I found out about the existence of this sister in the morning and before the revelation of George’s continued infidelity, but then again, my major breakdown about it had happened afterwards, only when I saw my sister’s face for the first time. Consequently, this was the definition of a pointless thing to argue. Maybe if I could have drawn any sense of empowerment or self-righteousness from the act, it would have been worth it, but I stood to gain nothing, so I didn’t bother.
“And now you’re waiting, right?” Professor Evory asked. “Unless you have a way of getting a hold of her?”
“I found her on social media, so I could just click a few buttons, but my friend told me to wait because who knows what she’s going through, and maybe I shouldn’t take away this one bit of agency from her,” I explained.
I expected him to agree. He was a good person, after all. He understood compassion and taught students about ethics. This had to be the sort of slam dunk question on whatever figurative quiz life really was.
But then he didn’t, though he didn’t disagree either.
Instead he asked, “What about you?”
His question sent me reeling. “What do you mean ‘what about you?’ This isn’t exactly about me. Or it shouldn’t be. She has it so much worse. At least I knew who my dad was. And he’s gone now, so she’ll never get to know him at all.”
“All that’s true,” he replied with a firm but measured voice, “and this may be uncharitable of me, but I don’t care about that. She has people in her life who care about her. You care about her. So I’m not going to worry about her. But I am going to worry about you. So I ask again, what about you? What about what you want?”
The answer to that question seemed both simple and profound. The conclusion was easy to reach, but I didn’t know how I had gotten there. Fortunately, that was not the sort of answer Professor Evory expected me to have.
So I just said, “I want a relationship with her. I want a decent sister who doesn’t sleep with my fiancé for any reason. Never mind just to prove that she can. But I don’t know how. That’s the hard part. How do I get there? I never know how to get what I want.”
When I know what I want, I almost added. But that point was irrelevant because I did want a relationship with my sister. And what a rare occasion indeed that I should know anything with a sense of certainty.
Professor Evory let my words hang for a moment before he responded with a deep and heavy breath. “I wish I could tell you,” he confessed. “But Mia, this...”
He stopped and reconsidered his strategy for a moment. Then he went on, “You could have had the best possible relationship with your other two sisters, and you still wouldn’t know how to handle this. There is no good way to handle this. You are sisters, biologically, but you don’t have the luxuries of that shared childhood: of knowing each other from a young age, the related trajectory, and the shared memory bank to pull from. Never mind the bonding that can only happen when you’re young. So navigating this will be hard. Just don’t sit in it, alright? I know you, and you have that tendency to stay in your own head too much. Talk to people. Talk to me. And keep what I told you in mind. You are technically strangers who have a great reason to change that.”
I sighed, and even if it didn’t seem like it, I felt a lot better for what he said. I liked hearing that it was okay that I didn’t know how to get us to that magical point of sisterly bliss. It was the adult version of “everything’s going to be okay” despite all parties knowing that no singular person or entity can guarantee that. Nothing might work out. Everything might fall well below the threshold of “okay.” But if so, it would not be my fault, Professor Evory seemed to be saying. If things go wrong, well, this just wasn’t a great situation, and there was no instruction manual to navigate the storm or prevent any of the problems that might arise.
And that was comforting, I have to admit.
“Thanks,” I whispered. Louder, I asked, “What did you hear from my agent?”
“Hmm?”
“About the fellowship,” I clarified.
He exhaled sharply. “I don’t know. It’s all second hand, but oddly enough, she wants to help do some damage control in case you do take it. She’s looking out for you, Mia.”
And there was absolutely no reason for us to unpack that statement. Really. He didn’t need to know all the backstage shenanigans that had transpired between the two of us or that her offer of assistance was likely a stalling for time, specifically the stalling I had requested. None of that was relevant. Technically, she was looking out for me, just not in the altruistic sense that he was inclined to view it as. Erika was far too pragmatic for that. But if I corrected him, that would only be cause for concern and maybe disappointment.
Besides, Erika was going to take care of me. It was her job.
“Yeah, and she wants me to take the fellowship. More time for writing and all that,” I told him. “And that leads to a different question, doesn’t it?”
“It may,” he answered.
“So do you think I should take the fellowship?” I asked again, point-blank.
Professor Evory had never been the type to lead me to any conclusions, and he had been the first person in my life to act that way. However, ninety-nine times out of one hundred, I needed him to be the person who made the choice. I, who had never been taught to decide for myself, needed someone else to take the reins of my life, preferably someone who actually cared about me like he did. Right then, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to make a decision, and so it would have been great for him to do it. But he wouldn’t.
“I think you need to do what you think is best,” he finally said. “Visit us, of course. I’m not the only one who wants to see you. But you need to be the one to make this decision.”
With a hefty sigh, I said, “I knew you were going to say that, but I hope you wouldn’t. I don’t know what I want.”
“Well, it sounds like you want someone else to make the decision,” he half-heartedly joked.
I didn’t laugh. “Yeah, I do because I feel stuck,” I confessed. “And I keep trying to lift myself up or to pull my legs out of the muck, but I can’t. I really can’t. And everything I try hasn’t worked, so why shouldn’t I try something else? Oh because I don’t know what else I can try.”
A bit of self-charity, Ellie had said. I remembered it right then, and I wasn’t sure why. Maybe because that was the answer to my question on a technical level, but it was something I knew I couldn’t put into practice, so why even bother thinking about it?
“Mia, I’ve known you for years. I remember all of our conversations. So please believe this is as informed of a statement as one could ever make. You need to think about what you want. Not about what other people want you to do or require of you. Just you. That’s all that matters in this. If you have any questions about the details, I can answer them, but I can’t tell you what to do.”
The conversation was slowly approaching its natural end, but I didn’t want it to end. So I asked, “Okay, do I get an office?”
He chuckled. “You’ll get a kick out of this. Did I tell you that my department and some others moved to the newly constructed Thrane Hall?”
My lips twisted as my mind strained to remember if he had. “I know about that, but I don’t remember how I found out.”
“Well, the new office for the Murtagh Writing Fellow is my old office,” he said. “I tried to leave it as nicely as I could, but after twenty years in it, there was only so much I could do.”
My heart leapt at the thought. “Seriously?”
“Seriously. They replaced all the furniture and repainted the walls, but yes, it’s my old office.”
I laughed. I didn’t know why. There was just this energy and joy that overcame me in that moment. I was happy without rhyme or reason, and it pushed me forward in just the right way.
So I said, “Honestly, I think I want to take it. Just because I don’t want to be in this situation anymore.”
It sounded like he was smiling when he replied, “I think a change of pace... Or a familiar pace... will be good for you. And it would make me so happy to see you again, Mia.”
Even though he couldn’t see me, I nodded. It was probably just something to make myself feel better. But for his sake, I verbally expressed what was on my mind. “I’m going to tell Erika later today. Not sure when. I dumped a lot of work on her desk, and I probably need to give her some time to recover from the shock.”
“Work?”
“Stuff I wrote that she can sell,” I replied.
“Life of an agent, I suppose.”
Fair enough, you could say, but he had absolutely no idea what I had done. Erika didn’t even understand the full extent of it.
When I walked back over to my computer, there was a new message from her waiting for me in my inbox. It’s hard to pick up tones across text, but I thought I heard hers plain as day, even across the miles between Chicago and New York.
Is this it? she was asking, likely through gritted teeth.
And no. No, it wasn’t. That was fun news to deliver.