Part of the genius of Merrily We Roll Along is its reuse of melody. Lyrics change as the story moves backward in time, indexing the shifts in relationships. A cheesy showstopper becomes an intimate moment between friends. “Not a day goes by” moves from a cry of despair to a statement of love. The characters are not on a linear slide into hate. It’s a cyclical, recursive shift. The stories that once provoked laughter now bring everyone to tears. “How does it happen? How did you get so far off the track? Why can’t you turn around and go back?” The present is a consequence of all the moments that came before. No single choice, no single failure. You know what you want, you go out and get it; it’s not the thing you want anymore. Not what you thought it’d be. This is the only true story wanting tells.

Edith expected the exhibit to be a small number of forgeries tucked into some well-lit corner. Photos of the originals for comparison. A Walter Benjamin quote on the wall about the unforgeability of a work’s presence in time and space. She wasn’t all wrong: there was the Benjamin quote, there was a fake Rothko from the Knoedler Gallery scandal. But here was Damien Hirst’s shark in a tank, recreated after the original shark rotted in its poorly mixed embalming fluid. Here were all eighteen versions of The Disquieting Muses that De Chirico painted over two decades. The stones Vija Celmins made out of brass and paint, each set beside its real-world referent. Any made thing could be made again.

Tessa caught her eye as they circled the gallery, almost smirking. She was right to; how had Edith not known about this show? In her first book, men with white tents move from city to city displaying expert forgeries. There was no market for new artists, and so if one produced original work, it had to come with an invented history. The details of a new life, a new oeuvre, codified through endless repetition. Maybe there never was a Picasso, a Rembrandt, a Cézanne. They’re all stories everyone has been telling for so long they forget that no such person existed.

People dismiss forgeries because they come with the wrong story. Next to the Rothko, there was an account from the rich person who’d been tricked into buying it. Overnight, it went from being worth millions to worthless. Edith saw the same things in it she saw in other Rothkos: the violence of day’s end, the tension between explosive light and muted dark. She saw a clip of Alfred Molina playing Rothko on Broadway, platitudes given authority by the skill of his acting. If it’s really worthless, she thought, give it to me. I’ll give it a good home.

In the museum café after, Tessa asked everyone what their favorite reproduction was.

Well, I know what yours was. Adam forked a bit of chocolate cake into his mouth. You looked at that shark for close to an hour.

It’s so much realer than in photos. Tessa was eating her biscotti. Edith had coffee and ibuprofen and a red velvet cupcake. You’re like, so what, it’s a shark. But it looks like it could leap through the glass and thrash on the floor. Plus, I realized I’d misunderstood the title.

What, The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of the Living?

The Physical Impossibility of Death, Michael corrected. In the Mind of Someone Living.

I’d always taken it to mean that the living can’t really die. The shark stays preserved as long as society cares to keep it.

Unless you’re a jackass who does a bad job of preserving your shark, Edith said. But if Hirst had done a better job, the shark wouldn’t have been in the exhibit. Accident and incident conspired to make a world.

Really, though, it’s saying that we can’t conceive of death while alive. Pick your metaphor—it’s a black box, an impenetrable veil. I was guilty of the exact thing the work names. Thinking that nothing really vanishes.

Valerie would be so mad if she could see it, Adam said. No one looked at Edith. She put down her cupcake, half-eaten.

Oh I know, Tessa said. “If you’re going to have that Goldsmiths cunt you better fucking well have Tracey Emin too. Gillian Wearing. Sarah Lucas.”

She probably would’ve grabbed a museum guard and demanded the curator come explain himself. “We’re here to celebrate art, not marine biology.”

She could be so maddening.

Never knew when to stop.

She knew, Edith said. Staring down at the tiny café plate. The smears of snowy frosting, cake crumbs like petals of a blood-red rose. None of the others really knew her, was the thing. They’d barely seen her in the years between college and her death. Edith had barely seen her. She didn’t care.

No one said anything. No one knew if Edith wanted to say more.

Here they were, Valerie-less. What was life on a planet minus someone you’d loved? Was it life at all, or only a sham? Worthless overnight.

Do you guys ever forget? Edith said. I do. Such a fucking cliché. Writing a text, getting ready to call her. Any girl at a gas station swinging a plastic sack of sugar-free Monsters might be her. Sometimes she sent the texts anyway. I wish I didn’t.

I wish I did. Tessa’s voice was soft. Every tall girl in a black coat. Every song she danced to. There’s never a gap between memory and fact. Just her absence.

We should have a toast, Adam said. In her memory.

This kept Edith from crying. A toast wouldn’t honor her any more than a fistful of plastic flowers on a West Texas grave. They should burn down a building. They should host a demolition derby. There should be a catastrophe so large it’s visible from space.

Four cups, mostly empty, came together at table’s center.

To Valerie, Adam said.

To Val, Tessa said. You jerk.

Still leaving us behind.

Valerie had been the only person Edith knew in college who wasn’t rich but had a car. Her first breakup came after she disappeared for their two-week spring break, her girlfriend’s ever-more frantic phone calls unanswered. She’d been working as a boat guide at Niagara Falls; It’s a break, she insisted to her imminent ex, who was still too busy sobbing to be as angry as she would later. What else is a break for? The summer Edith and Tessa worked on campus, Valerie didn’t visit once. You had to go to her, with her, wherever the car took her. To jazz concerts in mapless places; to amateur taxidermy museums and film festivals and fly-fishing trade shows. Val could walk into any place without paying; god forbid you stumble.

It wasn’t fair that she should be buried in a single place, stuck in the parched Texan earth. It wasn’t fair they’d never visited her grave. One day, Edith promised herself, she’d find the graveyard, find the stone—whatever name was on it—and take some of the grave dirt with her. Only a symbol, no matter which part of someone you took. She’d fashion a reliquary, a silver vial hanging between her breasts. That earth going everywhere she did.

*­

It was raining when Michael and Adam drove them to Mount Auburn Cemetery. It seemed the only place to go. A dry run at a new kind of mourning.

I feel like we’re your gay dads, dropping you off at soccer practice, Adam said.

Edith laughed. It might help if you played something other than Peter Gabriel.

The CD is stuck!

Why would we want to help it, Michael said. Let’s lean in.

Rustle up some apple slices and juice boxes for you.

Now remember, kids, it’s not about winning or losing.

Don’t listen to Dad Two, children, Daddy One doesn’t love a loser.

Daddy One only says that because of his own childhood failures on the field hockey team.

Mouse! I told you that in confidence! The car juddered toward the line as Adam shoved his partner. None of them could stop laughing.

This is really normal, you guys, Tessa said, half-breathless. I’m definitely not gonna talk about this in therapy.

There were more juice box jokes as the boys dropped them off. Tessa and Edith walked from the car arm in arm beneath a wide black umbrella. The laughter had subsided, leaving a tombstone void, a monument to silence.

Edith didn’t want to think about what Valerie’s death might mean to Tessa, to Adam. Other people’s grief, like their dreams, is not very interesting unless you’re its object. It was for the best there’d been no funeral; Edith would have spent the whole thing looking around for Val, Tom Sawyering in the balcony.

The rain made a gauzy curtain between them and the graves. It was easy to forget the earth was studded with bodies. Whenever Edith thought about killing herself, she thought of her body mixing with minerals and insects. All her water returning to the sky. An image peaceful enough that it brought her back to herself.

Tell me something nice, Tessa said. Something else to pin to the moment.

Well, why not. I really love you, Tessa.

Of course you do, Edie. Something else. Tell me about Texas.

Edith was still full of the past. The Orange Line out to Jamaica Plain, the lushness of the arboretum. Fire escape, cigarette in the dark, Tessa’s hand on her wrist when she tripped over the railing. All those mornings she’d come home, the day’s writing done, and slid into bed beside a still sleeping Tessa. Bodies trading heat beneath the sheets. In Texas there were power outages and protests. There were Seb and Treats and a twenty-four-hour coffee shop when she couldn’t sleep.

I was the one who picked Texas. Val would’ve been happy to never go back. Don’t talk about Val. There was a part of me that did it to punish her. Don’t. The moment has passed.

Good on you, making choices. Tessa didn’t need to ask: punish her for what? You know part of me thought you’d come back here.

I thought about it. But I’d have been chasing an old life. One we’d both left behind. Edith’s elbow was getting peppered with drizzle and Tessa pulled her closer. Edith’s voice edgy and small as she said, How would you feel? If I did move back?

I don’t know. There was no surprise in it. We’re both older, Edith.

You’re older; I’m a child again. A stupid little girl with stupid little girl problems.

Yeah. I guess.

There had to be some redemption in this graveyard. She’d come back to Boston; she’d seen Tessa, and Adam, and even fucking Charlie. There was a circle that was closing. No way could it end without Val. No way could it finish without death. A body is only a few trace minerals once it’s lost its numinous flare.

Is it hard? Being there without her?

I was there without her all the time.

And when she was there?

You don’t want to hear about this.

What you mean is, you don’t want to talk about it.

Both those things could be true. Edith had always hated how easily she cried. Standing in her doorway, watching Valerie’s dark green Subaru vanish down the drive; walking in the cemetery, looking as far from Tessa as her head would turn.

Sometimes things were good, sometimes they were bad. She had a habit of vanishing when I needed her. But up until that point, she’d do anything.

I could never picture you guys together. I knew that each of you had to have changed so much for a thing like that to happen.

Edith didn’t know why this was what broke her. If it had been any other place on any other day, she would have kept walking, would have found something to say to disarm Tessa like Tessa had disarmed her.

She knelt. Graveyard mud stained her tights, her too-thin black dress. There had to be a way to get this sob under control. This viscous, soppy hiccoughing that she’d dragged down into the earth. The umbrella fell from Tessa’s hands as she held Edith, and they were bathed together in rain.

I’m so fucking angry, she managed.

I know, Edith, I know.

At herself. At Valerie—not for dying, but all the things before. All the things after.

Tessa pulled a handkerchief from a jacket pocket. Edith laughed snottily, made a joke about Tessa being a country dandy. Since when do you carry a handkerchief? But Tessa didn’t rise to the bait. She didn’t offer the cloth to Edith, didn’t wipe the snot from her face. Only the rainwater and tears. Both soon replaced, both soon wiped away again.

Edith didn’t know how to express her love for Tessa in this moment. It could have been six years ago, or ten. It could have been a hundred years in the future.

There were graves strewn with plastic flowers and piled with stones. Neither of them stood. Tessa wiped the rain from Edith’s face.

The last time I saw her, Tessa said, was at this queer lady picnic. I had no idea she was in town, but she must’ve known I’d be there. Valerie went back once a year to get her hormone levels taken at a free clinic. Sometimes she stuck around. It was the oddest thing. Everyone I was sitting with had met her before, but when she called out my name and walked over, everyone looked at me like, who’s this? New lady in your life? The rain was petering out. I knew you guys had been dating or whatever. And I just—didn’t care anymore. I’d been so frustrated with you both, more than makes sense. I really loved you, Edith, but that kind of love was a long time ago. It took a superhuman effort for Edith to not press on this, to not ask, Did it really fade so much for you? What would’ve happened if I had come back? If I’d been a girl then the way I am now? I realized that while the two of you had been living it up down south, I’d been right here with the same girls, on the same ratty picnic blanket Colleen always brought. I knew that was all correct. That nothing needed to be any other way.

The rain paused. Edith’s face was dry, or close enough.

People were going around introducing themselves—Hila, Vex, Meghan. And Val was humoring them, acting like they’d never met before. Later she’d pull out the little details she remembered like a magic trick—where their brothers lived or which stone fruits they were allergic to. But when the circle got to me, I did it too. I said, “Hi, I’m Teresa.” Even though she’d called out my name. Even though we all knew she knew. The others sort of laughed it off. Val, though—I could tell it hurt her. “Hi, Teresa.” That moment of ice between us. Waiting for the thaw.

She never said.

It was only a moment. She sat with us, doing the charming Valerie thing where she talks like a Katharine Hepburn movie. Valerie would have owned the moment—but only a moment. At day’s end, she would have gone back to whatever floor she was crashing on, and the next morning she would leave. Tessa would still be here, and no one would ever forget they’d met her before. It probably didn’t matter to her. We might’ve laughed about it later. If there’d been a later. Grief was narcissistic that way: it all ended up about you. You ready to keep walking?

Edith was. Her dress and tights were probably ruined. It was worth the embarrassment to feel the soft pass of the handkerchief, again and again, across her face. Tessa retrieved the muddy umbrella. They didn’t need to shelter under it anymore. They still walked arm in arm.

They paused on their way to the bus stop so Tessa could catch her breath.

Sorry. Too many cigarettes.

Edith felt better than she had in a long time.

Flip your coin, Joan.

Spent it on gum.

Chew your gum, then.

Don’t tell me what to do, Joni. She pulled out a green pack of Orbit, offered Edith a piece.

The bus stop was translucent with raindrops. A million little gems, distorting the world.

What should we do now? In two days, Edith would be gone. The flat spread of Texas was waiting. The strip malls, the big sky, the river.

I probably need to go home, Tessa said. Get dry, warm up.

Tessa’s home would be plastered with silk-screened posters and photos cut from magazines. There’d be ten different plants hanging in the windows. There’d be a beautiful assortment of mugs—all the same ones she’d had six years earlier chipped with the excesses of use. She’d have the bed, the same bed, still holding little particles of Edith.

I’d love to see your place. If you’d have me.

Look at you, asserting your desires. A tiny squeeze at her biceps. I’m proud of who you’ve become, Joni. I really am.

You can just say “no,” you know.

Edith. She paused—not thinking better of the question, only holding the moment before she asked it. Are you seeing anyone back in Texas?

There was a time Edith would’ve been idiot enough to interpret this as flirting. Her throat was sharp edges and sour pennies. Not since Val. If that counted as dating. If that counted as life. What’s her name, Tess?

Devin.

Pretty name. Had she really thought Tessa might be as loveless as her? That they could come back together and—what? Not fall in love again. But share in something. Prove that their lives were not so far apart. She must have missed a thousand hints, a hundred tiny pauses marking elisions. So, what, you live with her, bicycles hanging side by side on the wall, homebrew kombucha fermenting on the kitchen counter. You take cross-stitching classes and read Audre Lorde to each other in bed.

Not exactly. Tessa did not flinch. Devin’s a guy.

A cis guy?? Tessa looked at her. Okay, so you sit in bed reading, what, Chuck Palahniuk.

You’re really white-knuckling that umbrella.

I hope you and Dave are real happy together, Teresa.

This isn’t about you.

You were so fucking self-righteous yesterday about me and Val and for what?

Tessa fumbled her pack of cigarettes from her jacket, lighter clicking without fire. We were both going through shit back then.

What, yesterday? Tessa didn’t humor her. The lighter sparked: click, click. You really wanna compare? Not knowing you’re a trans girl to being slightly less gay than you thought?

Goddammit. The lighter clattered to the wet pavement and sat there like a stray bit of light. White lighters, Valerie would scold, were unlucky. Edith, things between us were good, they were really good. It’s tempting to act like they got out of control. That we passed a point of complication that we didn’t know how to deal with. But they were always complicated.

We could have worked through them.

Maybe we could have, but there was shit you needed to take care of. Edith made a sweeping gesture at her lately feminized body. Shit you still haven’t taken care of, if I’m being honest. I don’t know if you remember this but we were friends—friends for a long time before we ever dated. We were better then.

You said we were “fundamentally incompatible in a core way.”

You also thought we should break up! We weren’t happy, Edith.

Well at least one of us is now. In a nice, happy relationship with a guy who probably has never sucked a dick in his life.

I don’t know how to spell out more clearly that you do not have a monopoly on crises of identity­— ­And in her frustration, in returning to the symptom of that complication, she did not call her Edith, or Joni, but by the name she’d been given at birth. A name that no one in Texas knew.

This didn’t especially bother Edith. How often had she mentally referred to Adam by the wrong name? The brain was plastic, but the tectonic furrows of the past ran deep. Even Val had fucked up from time to time. The melodramatic language of “deadnaming” did nothing for her.

It was, however, extremely easy to exploit.

Fuck, Edith, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean.

All right. She held out the umbrella in false sacrifice.

I’m really sorry.

A mistake. The name slip. The argument itself. Spending so many hours together and thinking some essential closeness had surpassed time, and distance, and all else the years brought.

Tessa held the umbrella in one hand, unlit cigarette in the other. Edith walked down the road without looking back. Look, I said I was sorry. Tessa’s voice rising to keep up with the distance. You can be mad but don’t walk away. The sky was the sort of dark that might promise more rain and might only promise sunset. Edith kept walking.