When I got home, Bark greeted me at the door, tongue out, tail wagging, like a normal dog. Nan followed, carrying Bark’s stuffed blue monster, Murray. “We were playing catch,” she said, grinning.
“In the house?” I said in mock horror. Nan had always been after Mo about catch being an outside game.
Bark jumped up, pulling Murray from Nan’s hand. She let him.
“Your friend is a good catcher,” she said to me, giving Bark a head scratch. He dropped the toy and yelped at her until she picked it up and threw.
Bark caught Murray in his teeth, shaking his head like a madman.
“Why aren’t you at mermaid class?” I asked.
“Bitsie can handle it,” Nan said. “It’s your first morning back.”
“You don’t have to miss class for me.”
“I missed you,” she said. “Do you want breakfast? There’s scrambled tofu.”
“I’m good.” I willed my stomach not to growl. I should have bought a donut at the gas station. Tofu Nan was going to require new survival strategies.
Nan was staring at me. It’s possible she was only trying to assess my feelings about tofu, but I worried she wanted to have a talk about Eric and everything I gave up. I crouched to play tug with Bark, avoiding her gaze.
Bark growled, pulling Murray away, only to shove him right back into my hands to keep the game going.
Nan took an audible breath like she was about to say something of great importance.
“Hey,” I said before she could get a word in, “should we look for your mermaid friends on Facebook? I’ll go find my computer.”
“Oh, you don’t have to—”
“It’ll be fun,” I said, letting Bark win. “I’d like to see your friends.”
“I don’t think we have internet, Kay,” Nan said, pulling her phone from her pocket. “I’ll just use this. You can read the small print for me.”
I pointed to the wifi signal on her screen. “That says you do. Unless you’re piggybacking on Ruth’s service.”
“Ruth still has a flip phone,” Nan whispered gravely.
“Did someone come over and set up wifi for you?” I asked. “Is there a box with a flashing light and an antenna?”
“Oh! Yes!” Nan said. “Over by the TV. I thought that was the cable.”
“Who set it up?”
“The guy from the company, I guess.”
“You don’t remember?”
“I’m not getting dementia, Kay,” Nan said.
I would have worried, but the corners of her mouth quivered. It was her tell. I don’t know why she was lying about wifi, but she absolutely was.
* * *
I dug my laptop out of the closet and set it up in my bedroom on the desk that had been my father’s before it was mine. While I watched the update bar inch toward black, I traced my finger around the smiley face carved into the soft pine. As a kid, I pretended my father knew I’d have his desk someday and he left me the carving as a message.
My computer ran like someone spilled molasses in the gears, but it did work. When it finished updating, I found Lorna Griggs on Facebook again and called to Nan. She sat on the bed behind me and watched as I clicked through Lorna’s profile. There was an album of pictures from the weekend before. A party on someone’s deck.
“That’s Woo Woo!” Nan pointed to the woman with the fluffy white hair sitting on a lounge chair, a chubby baby in her lap. They were clapping together, laughing, and the lines of their smiles had a sweet sameness.
“She looks so good!” Nan held her hand to her mouth. “She looks so good, Kay.” Her eyes teared. “I worried. She was my favorite after Bitsie.”
“Should we send her daughter a message?” I asked.
Nan’s eyes lit up. “Yes.”
I typed what Nan said, verbatim. She told Woo Woo about my dad dying, raising me, that she felt blessed to have me and Bark home. She talked about the swimming class she taught with Bitsie, describing every routine they did. Then she asked a million questions. “Do you still swim?” all the way to “Who is that beautiful cherub on your lap?”
I thought about suggesting we send a short note first, but the way she wanted her friend to know her again was vulnerable and pure. It would have been wrong to edit her love letter.
“Now what?” Nan asked after I hit send.
“Now we wait.”
Nan stared at the screen like she expected something to happen right away.
“Should we look for the others?” I asked.
Nan’s phone chimed. She glanced at the screen and smiled. “Shoot! I have to—I have errands,” she said, standing up, tucking her phone in her pocket.
“Oh, okay,” I said, waiting for more of an explanation. Nan usually overshared every detail of her day with anyone in her presence.
“Not sure when I’ll be back. Couple hours?” She didn’t volunteer anything else. Just kissed me on the cheek and said, “Go to Bitsie’s later, okay? She was hoping you could finish the set of curtains Bunny . . . Bunny was working on. Do you mind?”
Before I could even answer, Nan was out the door.
* * *
I knew I should finish unpacking, but Bark was sprawled across my unmade bed, snoring. I pulled the laptop power cord as far as it would go and climbed back into bed next to him. He snuggled into my side as I scrolled through my Facebook feed.
Normally, I avoided Facebook. Other people’s pictures had the capacity to gut me, even when they seemed benign. A high school friend celebrating her mom’s birthday. A meme that said, Repost this if your dad is your best friend. Babies. So many babies.
I hated being saddened by other people’s joy, but the more I tried to deny my sadness, the worse it would hit when it eventually did. A feed full of Father’s Day posts could mess me up for a week. Pictures of happy daughters and dads, arms around each other, beaming. The dads all had gray hair, deep lines on their faces. My father was thirty-two when he died. He never got to age. Twenty-seven is not that far from thirty-two. The idea of life ending in a few years would start to echo in my brain, getting louder until all I could think about was dying before I’d gotten any of the things I wanted. Soon, I’d be sobbing in a bathroom stall at the theatre with no idea what hit me until I connected the dots back to those happy pictures.
But today was not a holiday or a milestone, and my feed seemed low on babies. Some guy I barely knew from high school was waxing philosophical about bacon. Political rant from one side. Political rant from the other. Vacation pictures. Everyone seemed to be on vacation. I wasn’t interested in any of it. I wanted to see Luca.
There weren’t any posts from him in my feed, so I typed Luca Pelayo into the search bar. We were already Facebook friends, but after he accepted my request years ago, we’d said nothing to each other. Merely friending him felt disloyal to my marriage. A scarlet A, even if it was lowercase. Messaging would have felt like too large a transgression, and he’d never reached out to me. We only had six mutual friends from Ithaca College. There wasn’t enough crossover in our lives to run into each other unintentionally, online or otherwise.
In his profile picture he was red-nosed, breath forming a cloud, snow in his hair. The caption read: Sundance. It was from three years ago, when New Durango won best documentary. His film was about a boy named Marco growing up in foster care after his mother was deported. The same thing happened to Luca when he was in fifth grade.
At Ithaca, Luca studied TV production. He wanted to run cameras and sound for a news station, but after graduation, when his foster mom took Marco in, she begged Luca to help her tell his story, and as he did, he told his own. I went to see New Durango by myself at The Little Theatre in Rochester the night it opened, and sobbed into my popcorn. It was beautiful and poignant and perfect.
I’d seen his profile picture before, done the full stalk when I first friended him, but this time I wasn’t overwhelmed by guilt. I was free to zoom in, study his face for signs that he’d changed too much from the person I’d known, so I could click away and put him out of my mind. But then I noticed that the black wool scarf around his neck was the one I’d knitted for him in college. A complicated herringbone stitch I’d taught myself from a library book. I combed his page, looking for anything familiar in his pictures, any other sign that maybe Luca missed me the way I missed him.
He didn’t use Facebook much. The most recent post on his page was a photo someone tagged him in. Messy chin-length hair pushed behind his ears as he balanced a handheld camera on his shoulder. Captioned: The director in action. Most of his photos were shots other people posted. On set. At an awards presentation. Backstage before his interview on The Daily Show, headphones on his ears in a radio booth with Ari Shapiro.
His own posts were few and far between. Pretty, but impersonal. A sunset from three months ago. A macro shot of frayed shoelaces. The U-shaped arches of a saguaro cactus silhouetted against a starry sky. I looked at every photo, waiting for my old computer to load them, one at a time, blurry, then clear. None had anything to do with me. No more signs. But he still had the scarf. He’d worn it to something important. Did it mean he still cared about me? Or did he like the scarf enough to divorce me from its history? “This old thing? Some silly girl made it. I can’t remember her name! Cathy? Kerry?”
I went back to look at the photo of Luca in his scarf, the sweet curve of his mouth resting on the cusp of a smile.
When I closed my laptop, Bark woke, jumping at the noise. “It’s okay, buddy,” I said, prying my legs out from under him. He yawned and wiggled back to a comfortable position as soon as I got out of bed.
In the drawer of my desk, way in the back, I still had the braided leather bracelet Luca made me. He’d swiped snaps from the costume shop to finish it, and told me to close my eyes while he fastened it on my wrist. That bracelet was not divorced of memories of Luca. I knew that every single moment we’d shared could come to life if I stared at it long enough.
I wrapped the bracelet around my wrist, holding my arm against my ribs to keep it in place while I pushed the sides of the snap together until they clicked.