Megan
On a normal Tuesday morning, the world erupted. I was toasting an English muffin when someone screamed in the hallway, the words terrorist and attack sending us running to the television in the communal room. A group of us in our pajamas and sweatpants watched as one of the twin towers leaked a horrible gray puff of smoke, and then a plane flew, as smoothly as if on autopilot, into the other tower. We clutched hands as the buildings crumbled, one by one, into giant balls of dust onto the streets below.
We couldn’t find the words for it. It was horrifying, it was a nightmare, it was, unbelievably, happening.
Keale canceled classes, and we spent Tuesday and Wednesday huddled in student union buildings and common rooms, hugging and crying, watching the TV screens with grim determination. Everyone had checked in with their families, needing the reassurance that we were okay, that they were okay, that our personal worlds were okay. Mom and Gerry had been scheduled to fly to Chicago at the end of the week to visit his brother, and now they were planning to drive. “It’s horrible, it’s horrible,” she kept repeating, and then, although somewhat illogically, “I wish you were here, where you would be safe.”
But it no longer seemed that simple.
Over the next few days, more news trickled in. One Keale girl, Anya Friedman, lost her oldest brother, who had worked for a financial firm in the North Tower. Other connections were more tenuous—a friend of a friend, the brother-in-law of a sister-in-law. Yet everyone was shaken, everyone was horrified.
It was a shock to see Senator Mabrey appear suddenly on CNN that Thursday, dark circles under his eyes, his tie slightly askew. He was speaking in front of the Capitol Building, snagged by a random reporter as he fought his way through tightened security. I looked around for Lauren, but she wasn’t in the room. If I hadn’t been looking at the screen, I wouldn’t have identified the voice as his—it was so fiery and determined, not the mild voice of the man who’d danced with his daughters on New Year’s Eve or jostled his granddaughter on his knee.
“We must call them what they are, terrorists, because they dared to come on our soil to perpetrate this horrible act, and they deserve to be treated as terrorists,” he said, in front of the flash of cameras. There were two deep creases in his forehead that I didn’t recognize. “And we must not back down from this. We must hunt them down, so that they know there is no corner of the world where they are safe to hide.”
The clip played on CNN frequently in those first few days, along with scenes of American flags billowing over the decimation of Ground Zero, and snatches of speeches by presidents and mayors and world leaders. We went to our classes and returned to the news crawl, like we’d been implanted with homing devices. We couldn’t take a break from the story—we needed every detail of lives lost and lives saved, of small acts of heroism against the larger backdrop of a world in turmoil.
Even our professors had seemed shell-shocked and subdued when class resumed on Thursday, giving us grace periods on our reading, extending office hours for those who needed to talk. If they were so rattled, with their fancy degrees and years and years of adulthood, how were we supposed to make sense of it?
Lauren skipped her classes that day, hanging around the basement offices of the Keale Courier instead. The paper was putting out a special edition, and Lauren had been shooting the reactions of people on campus, asking how the attacks had affected them, how they were feeling. “What’s the point of going to class?” she’d asked, and although I’d gone, I didn’t have an answer, either.
My main source of comfort came from the Sisters, most of whom had taken Intro to Political Science last spring and had now joined me in Dr. Stenholz’s hybrid political and literary theory course. Dr. Stenholz—Miriam, she asked us to call her—was intimidating in her slim pencil skirts and black turtleneck sweaters. A dozen gold bangles jangled from her arms, and her irises were magnified behind green-framed glasses. In our first class since the terror attacks, she abandoned her customary spot at the podium and sat with us, our desks pulled into a semicircle. “Let’s just talk today,” she said, fixing her unsettling gaze on each of us in turn. “What’s on your mind?”
There was an awkward silence, and then we all spoke up at once, our words spilling over each other. We were scared about the state of the world. We were scared for what came next. We wondered if it were possible to have PTSD when the trauma was only being experienced second-or thirdhand. One by one we admitted we were scared, we were nervous, we were worried.
At the end of the hour, we spilled into the stairwell, still talking. Miriam offered to continue the conversation, and so we piled into a few cars and followed her to a tiny cottage in Scofield, barely big enough for us to perch on her couch and sit knee-to-knee on the floor. She served us coffee and little chocolate cookies from a dusty tin that might have been left over from the Christmas before, and when we were still hungry, a few of the girls helped her make a giant pot of pasta topped with two jars of Prego. It took every dish in Miriam’s house to feed the twelve of us.
“A toast,” Miriam proclaimed, when we were all seated. She was still wearing her pencil skirt and turtleneck sweater, although she had kicked off her heels, and the seam of one stocking had ripped a small hole near one toe in a way that was endearingly human. We followed her lead and raised our glasses and coffee mugs filled with tap water. “A toast to you beautiful women. May you do great things with your compassion and intellect.”
It was late by the time I got back to our dorm, but there were still clusters of girls in the common rooms, silent in the face of flashing images on the television screen. I didn’t see Lauren there, and she wasn’t in our room, either. I changed into my flannel pajama bottoms and attempted to do the reading I’d been neglecting all week, but my eye kept drifting to the illuminated display on my alarm clock. Eleven-thirty, twelve-fifteen.
I checked the common room again, then called the Sentinel office, where the phone rang and rang before Phil Guerini’s voice came onto the answering machine. Lauren wasn’t in the Courier office, and by one o’clock, when it occurred to me to check the parking lot, I didn’t see her navy Saab, either. Back in our room, I discovered that her camera case was gone as well as her purse and her leather overnight bag, which was usually wedged beneath her bed next to her suitcases.
What the hell? Where could she have gone?
Lauren wasn’t back on Friday morning, when I ran into Bethany in the common room at the end of our floor. She was spooning the last of her milk out of a cereal bowl, and when I asked her if she’d seen Lauren, she stopped with the spoon in midair. “Yeah, I saw her last night around six, heading to her car. I thought she was going home.”
Of course. It hadn’t occurred to me that Lauren might have gone back to Holmes House for some reason. But then I realized what Bethany had said. “So, she wasn’t going home?”
Bethany shook her head. “She said she was going to New York. I told her she was going to get herself killed, but she said she just had to do something.”
I grabbed Bethany’s sleeve when she turned away to rinse her bowl in the sink. “She went to New York? Are you serious?”
“Yeah, I know. She’s crazy. But—well, I guess I have to admire her for that.” Bethany pulled herself gently free from my grasp, and I backed off, shaking.
Back in our room, I looked for any sign from Lauren—a Post-it note that had fluttered to the ground, maybe, a page ripped from my notebook, even a message I might have missed on our machine. But there was no note. There was nothing. What was she thinking? How could she not have told me what she was doing? It was chaos in New York—people were trying to get out, not in, not unless they were emergency personnel. What was she trying to prove, exactly?
* * *
For three days, Lauren didn’t call. I was glued to the news, scanning the words on the crawl, the number of dead and missing, the short blurbs from politicians, the terror groups denying or claiming responsibility—half expecting to see her name there. I wondered if she’d bothered to tell her parents what she was doing, but this question was answered on Sunday afternoon, when Mrs. Mabrey checked in for her weekly call. Her voice was cool, and I imagined her sitting in her office at Holmes House, surrounded by photos of dignitaries and Kat’s framed wedding announcement from the New York Times. “Oh, hello, Megan. Is Lauren available?”
Stupid Lauren. Stupid, stupid girl. Something horrible could be happening to her right now, and none of us would be able to help. I cleared my throat. “She was—just here, but she stepped out. I think she mentioned something about a photo assignment.”
Mrs. Mabrey was quiet on her end, and I wondered if she knew I was lying. I’d never been that great at it—Dad said my whole face was a “tell,” but I was hoping whatever weakness my facial expression held couldn’t be detected over the phone.
“I can make sure she calls you,” I offered. “I mean, she might not be back for quite a bit, but I’ll leave her a message.”
“That would be wonderful, Megan. I assume she knows my number?”
I laughed, hoping it was a joke.
* * *
Some of the Sisters and I had made plans to see a matinee in Litchfield that afternoon, but I canceled at the last minute, knowing I would spend the whole time worrying about Lauren. She was coming back, right? Instead, I paced around our room, picking things up and putting them down—the framed picture of the Mabreys out on their island, the three-by-five photo of Lizzie on our bulletin board. I looked through her closet, then her chest of drawers, touching her belongings reverently, as if she were in fact gone for good. Was that how it would work if she didn’t come back? Would I have to help someone from the housing department pack up her belongings, the same as I’d done for Ariana?
Underneath my worry, an emotion competing for my attention was anger. Didn’t we tell each other everything? Didn’t we know each other’s deepest secrets, our trust marked by solemn pinky swears? I’d told her what I had done to my father; she’d told me what happened to her first boyfriend, Marcus. At the time, with tears leaking out of her eyes, it hadn’t seemed possible to me that Lauren could have left him to take all the blame for the pot, that she could have just walked away. Now I thought I could see it, though. Hadn’t she left Keale without so much as a note for me, leaving me to deal with the outcome if she never returned?
But she did return, finally. It was after ten when she burst through the door, filthy and exhausted and exhilarated. She caught me in a tight hug, and I inhaled the smoke on her hair. “You will never believe it,” she told me. “I have a million things to tell you, I don’t even know where to start.”
You could start, I thought, with an apology. Or at least an explanation.
She released me and went to the top drawer of her dresser, grabbing for a clean pair of underwear. She shed her clothes on the way into our bathroom, and I followed her there, sitting on the toilet and straining to hear her voice over the roar of the water pressure. Dirty rivulets spattered against the frosted plastic. Had she not showered since Thursday?
“It was amazing. I mean, it was terrible—you couldn’t believe the destruction and the extent of the damage. I literally walked for miles and everything was coated in dust, windows blown out. It was like it looks on television, but so much worse. I kept running out of film, and then—it’s going to take me weeks to look through all of it...”
The water came to an abrupt stop and she reached out a dripping hand. I tossed a towel in her direction and she came out wrapped in it, her tangled hair a mess, her eyes shadowed with dark circles.
“Your mom called this morning. I didn’t tell her where you were, but you’re going to want to call her.”
“I’ll do it in the morning.”
I took a deep breath, trying not to let all my anger out at once. “You could have called me, you know. I had no idea where you were.”
She was pulling a hairbrush vigorously through her knots, clumps of hair clinging to the brush after each stroke. “I couldn’t find you before I left, and it was too much to explain in a note. But I ran into Bethany—”
“Right,” I said. “She told me.”
“Oh, good. I thought I would call, but it was seriously chaos. I drove as close as I could get, and then I took public trans to get down by Ground Zero. Everything was roped off for, like, a mile, but—”
“Lauren,” I snapped. “I was worried. You didn’t call for three days. Anything could have happened to you.” She looked at me as if she were just now seeing me, and I could feel my cheeks burning. I felt like a jealous lover, angsty and embarrassed and ignored.
“Okay,” she said, setting the hairbrush on the rim of the sink, where it balanced unsteadily. “You’re right. But I told you—I waited around for you after your class on Thursday.”
“I had dinner with the Sisters. Miriam—Dr. Stenholz—invited us to her house.”
“Well, you didn’t leave a note, either.” She caught my eye in the mirror, and I thought how strange it was that we were looking at each other this way, with the mirror like a liaison between us.
“That’s not the same thing,” I said, but I was losing steam already, the anger beginning to fade. Now I was just relieved. She was home, she was fine, things were okay.
“What do you want me to say? That I’m thoughtless and selfish and a horrible friend?”
“Sure.”
Lauren sighed. “All right. I’m thoughtless and selfish and a horrible friend.”
I grinned. “Much better. Now, tell me everything.”
She left the bathroom and I did my typical post-Lauren clean-up—a quick mopping of her wet footprints with the bathmat, a swipe of the sink with a wadded up clump of toilet paper. By the time I joined her, she had changed into a T-shirt and sweatpants, and was sitting cross-legged on her bed. Her towel was a damp puddle on the floor, and wet hair left a dark stain on her shoulders.
“I just want to get everything down before I forget,” she said. A notebook was open on her lap, and she was holding one of the pens from the jar on my desk. But then, instead of writing, she told me, “You can’t imagine the destruction, the terror. It’s been days, and people are still looking for their missing relatives. There were literally a hundred fliers on every window. All those people missing, presumed dead.”
I nodded, although I didn’t really know, beyond what I’d experienced along with the rest of America while I was watching CNN.
She leaned forward, abandoning for a moment the scribbles in her notebook. “This is my best work, Megan. I can feel it. This is real, it’s important, and I did it.”
And then, ridiculously, I felt a stab of jealousy. I wouldn’t have wanted to go, and if I’d been around when Lauren got the idea, I would have tried to stop her. It was enough to sit in front of the twenty-four-hour news, my brain racing, heart firing. But I was jealous of the sense of purpose the trip had given her, the manic energy she had that night, scribbling in her notebook long after I turned out my light. We were miles apart, I thought, no matter that Keale had thrown our lives together.
* * *
For the rest of the month, Lauren was a ghost—leaving early in the mornings and returning late at night, attending classes haphazardly, forgetting our plans. She reminded me a bit of my mom when she’d had too much caffeine and went on one of her cleaning and sorting streaks, except that Lauren didn’t show much sign of slowing down. One night, after I couldn’t find her in the dorms or the offices of the Courier, I biked downtown and met Phil Guerini at the Sentinel. He appeared to be packing up his desk for the night, shuffling through scraps of paper and spiral-bound reporter’s notebooks.
“Ah,” he said, gauging the situation before I could ask the question. “I was wondering if anyone had sent out a search party for her yet. You’d better knock before you go in.”
Lauren opened the door to the darkroom. She didn’t seem surprised to see me, as if we’d had plans all along to meet here. Behind her, hanging from metal clips, were dozens of black-and-white portraits—men and women of all ages and races, their faces contorted with grief or creased with worry, cheeks tear streaked or sweat stained. They were vulnerable and raw, people as I’d never seen people before.
I shivered.
Lauren said, “I’m thinking of doing some kind of collage, some tribute to the humanity in the face of a terror attack—something like that. I haven’t figured it out yet.”
“Lauren...” I hesitated; what I was about to say wasn’t the kind of thing we said. We complimented each other, sure, but there was always an edge, a teasing underside. Mostly our friendship operated on the level of glib and funny, sarcasm and gibes and inside jokes.
“Yeah?”
“It was really brave of you. Going to New York, taking all of these...”
She wiped her hands on a stiff black apron. “Go ahead. I’m waiting for the punch line.”
“There’s no punch line.”
“What about the giant but? You know, ‘but maybe this isn’t the sort of thing you should be wasting your life doing?’”
“There’s no giant but. This is the exact thing you should be doing.”
She broke into a grin, her teeth a white flash in the semidarkness. “When I was out there, no one knew who I was. Except me. For the first time, I knew who I was. Is that crazy?”
I shook my head. It wasn’t crazy.
It was great.
It was what I wanted, too.
* * *
Although I’d breezed through Dr. Stenholz’s introductory class last spring, I was floundering in her seminar, where I could hardly form a coherent thought. In the company of the Sisters, I was content to let most of them do the talking, amazed by how insightful they were, how much better they phrased things than I could have done. When Miriam called my name, I stammered a response. I’d begun to dread her comments on my papers, which confused rather than clarified things for me. How can we push you from summary to analysis? she’d written once, and another time But is this really what you think?
I visited her office in the political science department several times, trying to work up the courage to knock on her door. Even her office was intimidating—tiny and book lined and intimate, the sort of small space where not much could be hidden.
Then one day she caught my eye as I passed and called out, “Megan! Do you have a minute to chat?”
I pretended to consult my watch, although my next class wasn’t for two hours. “Sure.”
She gestured for me to come inside. “Can I make you some tea? I’m about to have a cup myself.” I nodded, and listened to the clanking of her bracelets as she readied a teapot in one tidy corner. It took me a moment to realize why she seemed different—her black heels were tucked under her desk, and she wore in their place a pair of loafers with tiny, swishing tassels.
While the water came to a boil, I worried my hands in my lap, wondering whether I would be on the receiving end of a lecture about my lackluster performance, or whether the tea was a sign of gentle pity. Maybe it would be handed to me along with a suggestion that I drop the class.
Instead, she settled in across from me, blowing across the surface of her cup. We smiled at each other for a long moment before she prompted, “Why don’t you tell me something about yourself, Megan?”
“I’m—an English major. I’m from Kansas...” I shrugged, trailing off. I was about as interesting as a doormat.
She shook her head. “No, no. I don’t need the vital statistics.”
I hesitated, not sure what to say. “There’s really nothing—”
“Right now I’m not your professor. We’re just two women having a conversation over tea.” Her smile was encouraging, but I glanced in the direction of the open door anyway. The hallway was quiet, the other office doors closed. Was it too late to escape, to claim I had a class? Maybe I could head to the registrar’s office before it was officially too late to add or drop. Surely there was another literature course I could take, one where I could comfortably escape into the texts without facing this kind of scrutiny. She was smiling at me, like I was a curious specimen who had floated into her lab. “We’re a month into the semester, and I don’t know who you are.”
“I’m...”
Her smile was almost pitying. “I feel the same way about your writing. I wonder if you’re thinking about what I want to hear, rather than what you want to say. It’s almost like you’re afraid to really think.”
A flush had crept up my chest, and I knew it lingered on my cheeks. “I know that I’m not doing very well—”
She waved this away, the gesture causing some tea to slosh over the rim of her cup, and she dabbed at it with a tissue. “Indulge a nosy woman. Tell me about yourself.”
I glanced at the door again, but there was no getting out of this. Miriam apparently had all the time in the world. I began haltingly, telling her about my life at Keale—my classes; Lauren, who had just learned that she would be exhibiting her photos in the spring; the summer I’d spent at the admissions office, marveling at the young girls who were so smart and bright and hopeful—all smarter and brighter and more hopeful than me. It was like peeling back the layers of an onion, getting to the core. I told her about Joe Natolo, his name bringing up a near-forgotten ache, and about Ariana Kramer and the bottle of pills, about leaving Woodstock, about refusing Kurt Haschke’s marriage proposal. Miriam listened, nodding; there was no judgment. I went back further, to my mom and Gerry Tallant, to my dad and his mesothelioma and the months he’d sat in his recliner. I stopped there, guarding the secret I’d only shared with Lauren.
Miriam passed me the box of tissues, and it was only then I realized I was crying.
“This is stupid,” I sniffed, wiping my nose. “I’m sorry. You didn’t ask for every horrible thing.”
She frowned. “Why is any of this stupid?”
“Because...” I stood up, banging my knee. Miriam grabbed for my tea reflexively, steadying it before it could drench the papers on her desk. I’d taken only a sip, letting the rest grow cold. “You’re not a therapist or a counselor, and I’m blabbing everything...”
Miriam waved me back to the chair, and I complied, too stunned to refuse. “You’re right. I’m not a therapist, and I’m not a counselor. But I’m someone who cares. And I’m someone who recognizes potential.”
I dabbed at my eyes with a fresh tissue. “So you’re saying I’m like a diamond in the rough?”
She laughed. “Not so very rough.”
* * *
I began stopping by Miriam’s office more often, and she always waved me in, setting aside the papers she was grading or the text she was marking in the margins with her fine, exact cursive. We read through my essays, and I began to see her comments as part of a back-and-forth dialogue, one that might leave off there and resume elsewhere. When she passed back my paper about the threads of new socialistic theory, I flipped to the back. Beneath the stark B+, she’d written: “Now this sounds authentically you.”
When she mentioned graduate school, a simple phrase dropped into our conversation, I laughed. Some of the Sisters referenced graduate school at every turn, like it was a foregone conclusion, the next logical move. It seemed far from logical for me. Miriam frowned. “Aren’t you planning on continuing?”
I hesitated. Dad’s life insurance covered four years of Keale, and I would have to fund whatever came next. A job, I figured—not that I knew what or where.
Miriam’s eyebrows rose slightly over her green frames. “Let me look into a few things.”
A week later, she suggested that I look for a better job—the switchboard, she said, wasn’t going to look that impressive on a CV. “What if you found a TA position? I’m teaching an introductory course in the spring.”
“Really? But some of the other girls get straight A’s—they would probably be better.”
Miriam shook her head with the same fondness she probably gave her housecat. “Megan Mazeros. I’m not asking the other girls. I’m asking you.”
I grinned.
That semester, with everything I was reading and learning, after all my long talks with Miriam, I’d finally figured out a few things about Megan Mazeros. I loved my parents, and I’d inherited their preferences like genetic traits—hamburgers and pizza, the Chiefs, the Lutheran church. And I’d been influenced by Lauren, deferring to what she liked and knew. I’d created my “Kansas” alter ego to be what she wanted me to be, rather than what I really was. Now when I told one of my wild stories and she laughed, I wondered what she would think if she knew the real me, stripped of fake boyfriends and horrible invented catastrophes. More than anything else, I wanted to be myself.
Lauren
After our finals, we made quick trips home—me to Holmes House and Megan to Kansas, so we could return to Scofield at the beginning of January to set up for my show. My show. Every day, there was a moment when I woke up happy without knowing why, and then I remembered the details and let out a squeal of excitement that was drowned by my pillow. Phil Guerini had been impressed with my 9/11 portraits, and he’d talked to Dr. Mittel, and the two of them had arranged for gallery space in downtown Scofield through friends of friends. During the third week of January, the first week of spring semester classes, the space would be mine.
I tried to interest my family in the details, showing them a few of the prints I’d brought along with me, but the visit felt rushed for everyone, a quick break from our real lives. Mom had been furious ever since she learned about my going to New York—exactly the sort of reckless behavior we’ve come to expect from you, Lauren—and Dad could only take a short break from his Senate duties. At Christmas dinner, the talk was about war, the inevitability rather than the possibility. By the time the turkey carcass was dumped in the trash, Dad was out the door, stopping to kiss the top of my head like I was still a little girl.
Everything, it seemed, was changing. Lizzie was in full-blown toddler madness, tripping herself on table legs and knocking into Christmas decorations that were decidedly not baby-proof. “Where’s your friend this year?” Kat huffed, trying to calm a screeching Lizzie. “I should have hired her as a babysitter.”
MK was only there for a brief time, too—he was clerking for a judge in the spring and needed to get back before court resumed. There was only the faintest scar under his eye—a thin white line that disappeared into the crease of his smile. The Sophie scar, I called it.
I spent two days alone at Holmes House with Mom before Megan’s flight came into Hartford. It was a relief to pick her up at the airport and make the snowy drive back to Scofield, stopping for coffee and giant, crumbly scones that we ate in the car. Megan looked at me when we passed the turnoff for Simsbury, which would have taken us to Holmes House, and I only shrugged. She chuckled into her coffee.
“What’s so funny?”
“I was just thinking that I felt the same way about going home,” she said.
* * *
Half of Scofield had crowded into the tiny upstairs gallery on Fifth Street for opening night, the overflow spilling into the reception space downstairs. My entire dorm was there, it seemed, along with the staff of the Courier, Phil Guerini and his family, and Dr. Mittel and the rest of the art department. Megan was there, of course, wearing a dress she’d borrowed from one of the Sisters for the occasion, black and tight with a back that dipped almost to her waist.
“Too much?” she’d asked, modeling it for me in our dorm room, twisting her hair into a knot on top of her head to give me the full effect. “I’ve never been to an art show.”
“No,” I’d promised. But seeing the rest of the crowd in their V-neck sweaters and boots, I thought, Yes.
We’d spent a full week on the installation and the final effect was stunning: faces starkly black-and-white, their eyes boring into spectators from everywhere in the room. Megan had used an old typewriter in Phil’s office to write the labels—names, locations and dates. Katie, Battery Park, September 15, 2001. Jezzie, 47 Broadway, September 15, 2001. Armando, Wall Street, September 16, 2001.
Along the back wall of the gallery was our masterpiece, a ten-by-ten-foot three-dimensional collage, picture upon picture, edges overlapping. From anywhere in the room it was stunning. Individually, they were stories I remembered, people I’d stopped on the street in the midst of searching for family members, people who wanted to talk about their brushes with death, about windows blown out and inches of dust burying their furniture. Together, they told a story of resilience and survival.
It was warm in the gallery, and I was unused to being the center of attention with no other Mabreys to take the limelight. As I chatted, I could feel the flush on my cheeks, the sweat gathering in a long drip down my spine.
The compliments kept coming: beautiful work and important and compelling. Toward the end of the night, Dr. Mittel took me by the elbow and led me to a quiet corner, where he told me that he’d arranged for the three-dimensional collage to be housed in the upstairs hallway in the art department for the rest of the semester.
“Really?” I squeaked, looking around for Megan so I could share the news.
“You deserve this,” he said, his hand heavy and warm on my arm. “Don’t ever doubt that.”
The crowd in the gallery had thinned, but there were still voices echoing from the stairwell although the show had officially closed half an hour ago. From the landing, I spotted Megan at the bottom of the steps, the pale skin of her bare back, a glass of wine in her hand. She was talking with someone in dark jeans, the collar of his leather jacket up to shield his neck from the cold.
I recognized him from the gallery, where he’d stood in front of one portrait in particular for a long time, until I’d come over and told him the story of Marco, the vendor who had given away hundreds of free hot dogs in the days following the attack. “That’s amazing,” he had said, shaking his head. “Incredible.”
I’d thanked him for coming, and we’d shaken hands. Mine were sweaty, an extension of my overheated body, and I was grateful when he didn’t wipe his hands against his jeans.
Now other voices echoed through the reception area, and I couldn’t hear what Megan was saying, although I caught the general tension between them. I stepped onto the stairs, feet aching in my heels, hoping Megan would spot me and both of them would turn and one or the other would say something to include me in their conversation. Instead, he reached out a hand to touch Megan’s face, and she slapped it away. “All right, all right,” he conceded, hands raised in defeated. A moment later he had exited out onto the street.
Megan’s jaw was set, her cheeks flushed. She spotted me at the top of the stairs and said, “Oh, hey. Are we about done here?”
“Yeah. Everything okay?”
She nodded, her expression unreadable. “Can I help with anything?”
“Everything stays for tomorrow, except a bag or two...”
Megan shrugged on her flannel jacket and helped me carry a few things to the Saab, which was waiting in the lot behind the gallery. Under the lamplight, snow fell in damp, fat flakes. We shivered in the dark interior while I blasted the heater. Megan wound a scarf around her neck and angled a heating vent to blow toward her nylons.
“I can’t believe how many people were there. At least a hundred, but I think probably more,” I said, holding my hands up to the vents.
“Yeah, easily,” Megan said.
“A lot of people were asking about buying the pictures. I mean, Dr. Mittel had mentioned the possibility, but I didn’t think it through seriously. I’m not sure it seems right. And what would I charge?”
Megan shook her head, partially unwrapping the scarf from her face as the temperature rose.
“But the best part is the collage—the art department wants to display it after the show. Isn’t that amazing?”
Megan smiled. “Amazing.”
“Seriously, thanks for all your help. I would never have finished in time without you.”
“No problem.”
The windshield wipers had cut through the sludge, creating a small, circular field of vision. I backed out of the parking space and we navigated our way through the quiet streets. It was like driving through the scene in a snow globe, the flakes coming down heavily on the windshield, reducing visibility until they could be whisked away.
I glanced over at Megan, who was uncharacteristically quiet and was clearly not going to volunteer any information. “So. What was going on with that guy?”
“What guy?”
“Come on. The guy you were arguing with in the foyer.”
She shook her head. “He’s someone I know well enough to avoid.”
I racked my brain, trying to remember if anyone fitting that description had appeared in any of Megan’s escapades. He seemed like a detail she’d conveniently forgotten to include. We reached campus, and I began the process of circling the lot outside our building, trying to get close to the entrance. “Did you two go out or something?”
Megan snorted. “Or something.”
I pulled into an empty spot in the fourth row and slid the gear into Park. “What happened?”
Her seat belt zipped back to the holder and she was out of the car, the door closing emphatically behind her. My heels struggled for purchase in the snow.
“Hey, wait. I’m just curious,” I called.
She turned around, half her face buried behind the scarf. “If you want him, he’s all yours. Just consider yourself warned.”
* * *
He came back on the second night of the show and again on the third, each time with questions about specific portraits. He was waiting for me on the fourth night with a bouquet of flowers still wrapped in florist’s plastic. The envelope said “Lauren,” and the note inside said simply “Joe.” On the fifth night we kissed in the alley behind the gallery; on the sixth night I followed his black Honda through Scofield’s residential neighborhoods to his apartment above a detached garage.
I waited in the parked car, lights off, long enough to ask myself what I was doing, but not long enough to give a proper answer. I hardly knew anything about him, only that he’d been in Michigan for the last year, he was Scofield born and bred, an employee of a machine shop owned by his uncle. And of course, that he wasn’t Mabrey material.
When Joe flicked on the light in his apartment, I felt like his whole life was laid out for me—a full-size mattress on the floor, sheets tangled, a table with two chairs, a couch that must have been as old as both of us combined. He reached to kiss me again, one hand on the back of my neck, and I said, “Wait.”
He pulled back.
“I have to tell you something first,” I said.
He held up a hand, his fingers gently touching my lips. “I have to tell you something, too. I know who you are.”
My heart seized. “You do?”
“Yeah. You’re Megan’s roommate. We went on a couple of dates. It was nothing serious.”
My heart released, like a fist opening.
“And,” he added, “I know your dad is a senator, which means you should probably not be here.” He gestured around, pointing to the carpet stains, the molding ceiling tile, the mattress.
I stepped back.
“It doesn’t matter to me who you are. If you want to know, I didn’t vote for your dad. Nothing personal. I just don’t see the point in voting.” He stepped closer, cupping my chin in his thumb and forefinger.
“That’s okay,” I said, feeling weak, like I might crumple to the floor if he didn’t kiss me, fast. “I guess you know everything about me, then.”
His other hand was on my back, finding the bare skin beneath my sweater. “Not even close to everything.”
* * *
Joe and I saw each other several nights a week through that spring, sometimes starting out at the Denny’s in Litchfield, usually ending up at his apartment, the dusty plaid curtains drawn. After our first time, I planned to tell Megan, to lay out all my cards on the table.
It’s nothing.
He’s cute.
We’re just having fun.
Joe insisted there had only been a flirtation between them. “Unrequited,” he said.
“Doesn’t that mean you’re still pining for her, or that she’s still pining for you?”
“Nah,” he said. “Wrong word, then. I just mean, unconsummated.”
I could, without too much imagination, picture the two of them together. Megan and Joe were more alike than Joe and I were. And that was partly why I didn’t say anything, not at first, when I wasn’t sure where it was going or how long it would last. Also, I wanted to avoid the judgment that would inevitably come, the charge that I was only slumming with Joe, that it would never be serious. For the moment, I was enjoying myself too much to admit this was true.
It was funny, when I thought about it. Mom had sent me to Keale to avoid the exact sort of man that Joe was, that Marcus might have been. For two-and-a-half years, her strategy had worked. Keale had been a safe haven for most of us girls, a refuge from the boys we’d known before and the men we would know later, the ones we would marry and have kids with, the ones who were part of our futures as surely as mortgages and carpools and summers on the Cape. Joe wasn’t part of the Lauren Mabrey I had been before, and we never talked about the future, not let’s get married or we’ll live here or we’ll buy that. He existed only in the present, and the present was wonderful.
Each time I drove away from Joe’s apartment, blasting the air-conditioning to dry my sweaty hair, I told myself that there might not be a next time. Impermanence, I thought, proud as if I’d invented a new philosophy. Happiness in the moment. And then two days later, I’d be back on his street, climbing the rickety stairs to the apartment over the garage.
By the time I realized how permanent Joe’s presence was in my life, it was too late to tell Megan. Joe and I had been together for weeks by that time, and to manage that, I’d had to invent a number of lies, claiming that I was working in the darkroom at the Sentinel or heading out to shoot pictures of a school board meeting. One Saturday morning, I told her I had to drive back to Holmes House for a family thing, and instead I met Joe at a roller rink two towns over. He was a horrible skater, as I suspected he would be—reckless and rough, taking lunges and leaps and crashing to the floor, then shaking himself off, mostly unscathed. Afterward, we went to a mall forty-five minutes away, since he needed a new pair of work boots. It felt funny at first to hold hands with him, like we were fully domesticated, just another couple at the mall. That night I paid cash for a cheap motel in Litchfield and we spent the entire night together, laughing every time someone used the ice machine outside our door.
There were all sorts of words to describe sex, some which you could find in a thesaurus or learn at summer camp, others mentioned slyly at Keale parties by girls I suspected were virgins. And then there was sex with Joe, the kind that went beyond language to invented vocabularies, that answered questions I had never asked.
Joe said into my ear, “I bet they can hear us in the next room.”
“There’s no next room,” I told him. “There are no other people.”
Later, I settled into the crook of his arm.
This is what it could be, I thought. This is what I could have if life was different, if I wasn’t Lauren Mabrey, if Joe was someone else.
When I returned to Keale the next day, Megan was on her bed, propped up on an elbow, a textbook open in front of her.
“How did it go with the family?” she asked.
“Oh, it was fine,” I answered, flopping onto my bed. I could still feel Joe’s lips on my neck, his tongue tattooing circles on my skin. “Typical Mabrey melodrama.”
* * *
I wished that winter could have lasted forever, but spring came in a sudden warm rush, the days hurtling closer toward summer. Joe and I spent lazy evenings with the windows open, so we could hear the sound of lawnmowers and weed whackers. When I wasn’t with him, I was with Megan and the Sisters, watching the free movies projected onto the side of the Fine Arts Auditorium. Joe was my secret life, one that felt more and more like my real life.
At the beginning of April, Kat left a garbled, tearful message on our machine, and Megan and I played it a dozen times, trying to make sense of her words. The upshot of it was that my mother had a tumor in her breast. Kat had sobbed through the words biopsy, cancer, surgery. Megan hugged me, saying all the right things. There are all kinds of amazing advancements in cancer treatment. It sounds like they caught it soon. She’ll have the best medical care possible. I knew all this was true, even filtered secondhand through Megan’s experience with her father, but still I was racked with a horrible guilt for the dozens of ways I’d been a bad daughter.
I went back to Holmes House for a tense weekend, and early on the morning of her operation, we drove in three cars to the Yale–New Haven campus, following each other on the predawn freeway like members of a funeral procession, Dad and Mom, Kat and me. Mom handled the operation with her customary precision, arriving at the hospital with a list of questions and shoving a practical to-do list into Dad’s hand in case she didn’t make it through the surgery. We stayed with her in the crowded pre-op space, sidestepping nurses and machinery and IV poles. With her face free of makeup, her nails unpolished and vaguely yellow, Mom was almost unrecognizable.
We said, “It’ll be okay,” and she didn’t answer. That was typical, though—an official no comment.
In the waiting room, Dad paced in his jeans and Red Sox hat, for once refusing to look at his laptop or phone. Kat called MK with periodic updates—this close to graduation, he hadn’t been able to break free to join us—and left messages at work for Peter and his parents, who were watching Lizzie. I went across the street in search of coffee, and when I came back, balancing three stacked cups under my chin, I spotted Kat in the window, an unconscious hand circling low on her belly. How far along was she? Was she waiting for Mom to recover before telling anyone?
It was hours before the surgeon came out, still in blue scrubs, a mask hanging from his neck. I took notes, the way Mom would have wanted, more diligently than I’d ever taken them for any class. The tumor was encapsulated, its removal successful. Following Mom’s wishes, the surgeon had performed a double mastectomy. When we were able to visit her in the recovery room, she looked ancient and weak, her eyelids fluttering, her pale hand limp in Dad’s grasp. Her chest was puffy with tubes and bandages, hiding temporarily the fact that her breasts were gone.
I kissed her on the temple and stood outside in the hallway to cry. More than anything I wanted Joe to be there, to wrap his arms around me and say something soothing, even if that wasn’t our typical pattern of behavior. I wanted it to be typical, I realized. Maybe, after all, I wanted to have both a present and a future tense.
Dad, Kat and I made a plan in the hallway, something we hardly knew how to do without Mom. Kat would stay in the hospital while Mom recovered, as long as Peter’s parents could watch Lizzie. Dad had to be back in Washington for an important vote, but he would return on Friday morning. I had to go back to Keale—even before missing days for Mom’s surgery, my grades were hovering at C’s. Still, I offered to stay, to do my part.
Dad shook his head. “She’s going to need you more this summer, after the chemo and radiation. We’ll need you to stay with her on The Island.”
“Of course,” I said, nodding fast. I wish I would have suggested it myself, the moment I learned about the cancer. “Anything.”
“Actually, we should all go to The Island this summer,” Dad said, looking pointedly at Kat. There was weight behind his words, as if he were making an important announcement, one that didn’t require a vote or majority approval. “It would be good for her to have everyone around. And who knows? This might be the last time.”
“Dad,” Kat protested, “Mom’s going to be—”
He raised a hand, silencing her. “I only mean, with Michael graduating this spring and Lauren next spring, who knows when we’ll all be there again?”
Kat and I glanced at each other.
I hadn’t really thought of it that way, but everything was changing for the Mabreys. We were splintering off the stem, veering off course. This might in fact be our last summer.
Megan
Miriam gave me the news that spring, unable to contain her smile—a PEW scholarship, four weeks at Harvard, all expenses paid, plus a stipend that was more than I’d earned all last summer as a campus tour guide.
I made her repeat the details three times, sure I wasn’t understanding.
She passed a folded letter across her desk, and I read “Dear Ms. Stenholz, Based in part on your generous recommendation, we are thrilled to offer Megan Mazeros a position in our summer pregraduate study program.”
“This is just the beginning for you,” Miriam said, her eyes brighter than normal behind her green frames. She was crying, I realized. She was so happy for me, she was actually crying. When I sprang out of my chair to hug her, she didn’t resist.
* * *
I told anyone who would listen, from the Sisters to my professors to the cafeteria workers to my mother. I’m going to be studying at Harvard this summer. It didn’t seem real, even when correspondence from the PEW committee began to arrive on thick, creamy letterhead.
“My little girl,” Mom said, when I called to tell her the news. “Harvard! I can’t even imagine. It’s like a movie.”
It did feel that way, like I was on the set of Megan Goes to Cambridge, or some documentary where a small-town girl went from waitressing at the local diner to an Ivy League school. Of course, I wasn’t attending Harvard itself, but a program on its campus—a technicality that was lost on my mother.
“What about the rest of the summer?” she asked next, her enthusiasm deflating. “You’ll be coming home, right? If you only need to be at Harvard for four weeks, you could spend the rest of the time with us. There’s an indoor pool in the new health club, isn’t there, Gerry?” In the background, I heard the sounds of Jeopardy!, the rise and fall of cheers from the studio audience. Gerry’s muffled response might have been an answer to Mom or one of the game show questions. Lauren entered the room, tossing her backpack on the ground and plopping on my bed next to me. I gestured that I was wrapping up the conversation and she smiled, resting her head against my pillow.
“I don’t know,” I told Mom, thinking of Gerry’s beige house and the windowless room in the tax office, not to mention the chance encounters I didn’t want to have with Becky Babcock or Kurt Haschke. I pointed out the expense of airfare, the fact that I would need to buckle down in order to prepare for the seminar.
“Well, you’ll have to study somewhere,” Mom pointed out. “It might as well be here.”
“Or maybe you and Gerry could take a vacation out here. We could even rent one of the cabins on the lake in Scofield, and I could show you around.”
“But we’ll be out next summer, for your graduation,” Mom pointed out. “I don’t know. I’ll have to talk about it with Gerry.”
“Yeah, ask him,” I said.
When I returned the phone to its cradle, Lauren was looking at me.
I laughed. “What’s up?”
Sometimes it seemed like we hardly saw each other anymore, between our classes and Lauren’s job at the Sentinel. At least a few nights a week, she returned so late that the sound of her key in the lock woke me up. “I lost track of time,” she would whisper, kicking off her shoes and her jeans and sliding half-clothed into her bed. We were too busy to make grand plans for the future, like we used to do; instead, we talked about things that were happening at that moment—the papers due or past due, the regular Keale gossip about who had done what and with whom, and how Mrs. Mabrey was faring after her latest chemo treatment.
She grinned. “What if you came with me to The Island? It’s only a few hours from Boston by train.”
I laughed. “Seriously? We’re talking about six weeks.”
“Why not? There’s plenty of room.”
I reached out to retrieve one of my notebooks, the pages bent backward under Lauren’s thigh. “Your mom is sick, though. She’s not going to want a guest hanging around for the whole summer.”
Lauren considered this. “Well, if you feel bad about it, you can help me handle her. I think mostly she’s going to be resting.”
I stared at her, half smiling.
“What?”
“I’m just trying to figure out if you’re serious.”
“Why wouldn’t I be serious? You came home with me for Christmas, and we all survived, didn’t we?”
I shrugged. We had all survived, but the trip wasn’t without its awkwardness—the sniping between family members, the feeling that around any corner I might intrude on someone’s private moment.
“It’ll be perfect,” she continued. “I want to take about a million pictures, and you can bring all your books and get ready for the seminar. I promise you uninterrupted hours of study, except when we’re swimming and sailing and clamming and having bonfires on the beach...”
I grimaced, thinking of my pale, out-of-shape body doing any of those things. “I’ll have to buy a new swimsuit. And some decent sandals.”
She nudged me, her elbow digging into my upper arm. “Those are not insurmountable odds.”
“And you know for a fact that it’s okay with your family?”
“Are you kidding? If they had a choice, they’d take you over me.”
I had to hand it to her; Lauren drove a hard bargain. From that moment on, I was picturing myself on The Island already, no matter that I’d never been there and could only gather a few details from the snapshots in Lauren’s photo album. I pictured myself with sand squishing through my toes, a lick of wind tousling my hair. I would be the perfect guest, I promised myself. The Mabreys wouldn’t even know I was there, unless they needed my help.
In the end, I convinced Mom to start looking for hotels in or around Boston, for a weeklong, last-hurrah-of-summer vacation before school started. “We’ll see,” she said, and I knew in general what that meant. She’d said we’ll see when I’d wanted to have my birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese’s, and we’ll see when I asked for new soccer cleats and we’ll see when I asked if Dad’s doctors might be wrong, if there was any way he might outlive his prognosis. None of those conjectures had ever become reality.
“Really see, though,” I said. “We should do this.”
She laughed. “We’ll see.”
* * *
When I wasn’t studying for finals, I sorted through my closet, deciding what to pack in the giant box I would keep in Keale’s long-term storage for next fall, and what to bring with me to The Island and later to Harvard. If there was any doubt that our lives were entangled, it was obvious when I tried to separate my things from Lauren’s, which had spread to every corner of our room like a creeping vine—socks under my bed, shoes in my closet. Digging in her drawers, I found a shirt I’d been missing for a month. She returned one afternoon when I was agonizing over my packing decisions and flopped onto the bed with her backpack still strapped to her back.
“I’m just going to throw my swimsuits and shorts and tank tops into the car, and shove the rest into a box,” she yawned. “It’s very casual on The Island. You won’t need much.”
I stared at my clothes, most of them faded and threadbare—shorts of the athletic variety that made rare appearances at one of the treadmills in the rec center, stretched-out two-for-$10 tank tops. Somehow I suspected that the Mabreys’ brand of casual would include bright sundresses and lots of linen and wedge-heel espadrilles.
“Hey,” I said, tossing a pair of warm socks into the Keale box. “What are you doing later?”
She sighed. “Studying, so I don’t fail my freaking art history class. I’ll probably go to the library. Why?”
“Some of the Sisters are getting together for dinner one last time before we all head out. You’re welcome to come.”
“Thanks, but I’d better not,” she said, sliding her backpack off her shoulder.
“Well, if you change your mind, I think we’re trying that new Thai place.”
“Cool,” Lauren said. In a minute she was curled up on her side, eyes closed, and I suspected she wouldn’t be doing much studying after all.
* * *
There was a twenty-minute wait at the Thai restaurant, so the Sisters and I met at Slice of Heaven, where we devoured two vegetarian pizzas and talked about our summer plans and final exams. Marley, one of the more outspoken members of our group, had written a paper about the latest Updike novel, which she dissected for us with feverish glee. Allison got up to refill her Diet Coke and came back to the table, announcing in her best imitation of Miriam, “What do we think of Updike, ladies? Mommy issues? Daddy issues? Penile penetration issues?”
A couple at the next table looked over at us, and we collapsed into giggles. I excused myself to hurry to the bathroom, my full bladder threatening public embarrassment. As usual, the paper towel dispenser was empty, and I was still wiping my wet hands on my jeans when I came out of the bathroom and found myself face-to-face with Joe Natolo.
We’d bumped into each other in January on the night of Lauren’s opening at the gallery. At first, I’d thought it couldn’t possibly be him, that I was seeing some kind of Joe-shaped mirage. He’d smiled when he saw me, cornering me for a chat as if nothing had ever happened between us. Shaking, I told him about that night with Ariana, my bottle of pills. He’d grimaced, offering a weak explanation. When you didn’t come down, I thought maybe you’d changed your mind, that the whole thing was a mistake. The next week, he’d taken his friend up on the job offer in Michigan. He didn’t mention that he’d missed me or that he’d thought about me—probably because he hadn’t. Apparently, I’d done all the missing for both of us, scanning the coffeeshop and squinting to make out every driver of a black Honda for months afterward.
Now he was in front of me, grinning, a bookend to my semester. “Megan! Are you here for dinner?”
I gave him an icy smile. “That is what people do in pizza parlors.”
He laughed. “So I’ve heard.”
“Okay, then,” I said, sidestepping him.
“So you’re going to stay?” he asked.
I stared at him, not comprehending. Was he delusional? Did he expect me to slide into a booth like we’d done once before, our knees deliberately bumping under the table?
A woman came down the hallway just then, pulling a toddler-aged girl by the hand. I used this as an opportunity to back away, putting more distance between Joe and me before I turned and headed back to the table. When I glanced once more in his direction, the door to the men’s room was swinging shut.
The Sisters were clearing up the last of our plates and napkins. I grabbed my denim jacket off the back of my chair, and Danielle fished her keys out of her jeans. “Riding back with me?”
I didn’t turn around, not wanting to see if Joe was finished in the bathroom, if he was watching me. Danielle’s Taurus was across the street, now crammed tightly between two other cars. I recognized one as Joe’s black Honda, a vanilla air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror.
Danielle began the navigation for a complicated seven-point turn, craning her head to see if she was blocking traffic. “Hey—isn’t that Lauren?”
I turned just in time to catch a glimpse of what was unmistakably Lauren—her dark hair brushed and glossy, hanging down to the middle of her back. Earlier, it had been up in her traditional messy ponytail. She’d changed clothes, too, and it looked like she was wearing lipstick. The last time I saw her, she’d been snoozing on her bed, an arm draped over her face to block out the light streaming through the window. The door to Slice of Heaven opened, and the woman from the hallway exited, holding her toddler with one hand and a pizza box in the other. I watched as Lauren slipped past them into the restaurant.
“Dude,” Danielle said. “She blew us off, didn’t she?”
“Whatever,” I said, fighting down the nausea rising inside me, propelled by a tidal wave of pepperoni and Diet Coke. She’d blown me off to meet him. I knew it. That explained his questions—you’re here for dinner? You’re going to stay? He’d thought I was joining them.
Them.
Joe and Lauren.
* * *
The first thing I’d done after dinner, once Danielle dropped me off, was to race up the stairs, wedge a chair under the door the way I used to do back at home when I wanted absolute privacy from my parents, and dig through Lauren’s stuff. At first, I found only her usual junk—books she didn’t open often enough, haphazard lecture notes, more clothes on the floor of her closet than on hangers. I looked through her desk drawer, finding only odd scraps of paper with photo assignments and withdrawal receipts from the ATM. I looked through the pictures in her giant art portfolio, marveling again at her talent. None of the prints seemed new, though—the most recent additions were copies from her art show in January. Then I went for the box of prints that she kept under her bed, and I thumbed through them quickly, careful not to disturb the original order. There were dozens of pictures of buildings at Keale, of the two of us, of her family at Holmes House. And there, on the bottom, the pictures slipped into an opaque paper sleeve, was Joe—laughing, smiling, goofing.
My hands shook as I sifted through the prints: Joe at a booth in a restaurant, a plate of pancakes in front of him. Joe in a plaid shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Joe in his leather jacket and Doc Martens, standing on the riverbank. Joe on a bench at a roller rink, lacing up his skates. Joe cooking at a stovetop, spatula in hand. Joe shirtless, a swath of dark hair trailing down his chest, a sheet bunched up near his waist. In each one, he was engaging with the camera—with Lauren, behind the camera—teasing her, talking to her, encouraging her.
This was what it had come to, then. Here we were, and where we were was full of lies.
She’d been lying all semester—her busy class schedule, her hours in the darkroom, maybe even the weekend trips back to Holmes House. Had it been going on since the night of her opening in January, or even before then, the two of them planning and plotting and laughing behind my back?
I sat on my bed for the better part of an hour, trying to figure out what to do. Part of me wanted to get on my bike and pedal like mad back to Slice of Heaven, to catch them in the act of being together, to throw my realization in their faces. But of course—they already knew about each other, and I would be the one who looked foolish, the jealous roommate and jealous would-be lover, causing a scene.
In the end, I repackaged the photos of Joe and arranged everything as Lauren had left it, more or less. And then I waited.
* * *
Lauren’s hair was once again in her tangled ponytail when she entered just after eleven, the lipstick rubbed—kissed?—off her lips. “Hey,” she said, dropping her backpack to the floor. She hadn’t been wearing it when she met Joe. Of course not—the backpack was for my benefit. It was her alibi.
I closed my notebook, which had been open on my lap for the better part of the evening, although none of the terms had registered. “I couldn’t find you in the library,” I said, and watched as Lauren froze, a half second of hesitation, before recovering.
“Oh, sorry. It was too noisy, and I ended up reserving a private room on the second floor.” She kicked off her shoes, Lauren-style, and one of them ricocheted off the box I’d been packing earlier that day. “Why, did you need something? What’s up?”
I shook my head. “Nothing. Just wanted to talk.”
I watched as she undressed, pulling her shirt over her head, unhooking her bra behind her back. She squinted at her reflection in the mirror, rubbing a dab of lotion on her arms, and reached for her pajamas. There were no physical signs of Joe Natolo—no hickies, no red blotches or impressions. A crime scene tech, dusting for fingerprints or swabbing for saliva, might have found him everywhere, but he wasn’t visible to me. Finally, she flopped down on the bed next to me, pulling a pillow onto her lap.
“You know what sucks?” she asked.
Being lied to? “What?”
She sighed. “All that studying, and I hardly feel like I know anything.”
* * *
Lauren was asleep before me that night, apparently unashamed, so used to her lie that it no longer caused her to lose sleep—if it ever had. I seethed in my bed, watching her breathe in and out, but eventually I reasoned myself into a type of calm. I had no claim on Joe. I wasn’t pining away for him; I’d moved on, and most of the time when I did think of him, it was to be embarrassed that I’d almost fallen for the first guy I’d met in Scofield, when I hadn’t allowed myself to settle for Kurt Haschke in Woodstock. It didn’t surprise me that Joe fell for Lauren. Any guy would go for her, given the chance. She was pretty and talented and funny; she was the kind of rich that people like Joe and me only saw from a distance. What Lauren saw in him was less clear—except that because she was a Mabrey, anything she wanted was hers for the taking.
I remembered that she’d once told me never to trust anyone in her family. At the time, I thought it was a flippant comment, unserious and self-deprecating, but now I wondered if she meant it after all. Maybe she’d even been warning me.
Lauren
I visited Joe the night after my last final, when I really should have been packing and eating one last pan of brownies with Megan and the girls from our dorm.
Joe and I had agreed to keep it like any other night—nothing fancy, no elaborate goodbyes. Still, he surprised me with an apartment that had definitely been cleaned at some point over the last forty-eight hours. I raised an eyebrow when he produced four cartons of Chinese food and two clean plates. “I thought you said nothing fancy.”
He grinned. “I even snagged us extra fortune cookies.”
“And we’re using a tablecloth,” I pointed out. “That’s a definite upgrade.”
“And eating before sex,” Joe countered. “Like perfectly civilized people.”
We smiled at each other, and Joe dished the fried rice and chicken chow mein from the cartons. I handed him a set of chopsticks, and he fumbled with them gamely before retrieving two forks from the dish rack. Watching Joe with a grain of rice stuck to his chin, I felt a yawning emptiness opening up inside me, as if I were standing in front of a giant canyon and Joe was so far away that he might not have been on the other side of it at all. Later, the sex felt desperate and sweaty, each touch wrong in a way that was impossible to quantify.
Afterward, we sprawled apart, the sheets twisted between us. Joe traced my collar bone with his thumb and asked if I was sure I had to leave in the morning.
“I’m sure.”
He ran a finger from the hollow of my neck down my chest, through the flat valley between my breasts.
I propped myself up with an elbow. “You’ll miss me, right?”
“Absolutely. For at least a day or two.” He laughed and pulled me closer, so that my head was resting beneath his, and his expression was hidden.
I wanted to ask him what happened next, if we would pick up the pieces at the end of August when I came back to Scofield. But I could hear his answer, as sure as if I’d phrased the question. Yeah, sure. If that’s what you want. Noncommittal, unattached, impersonal, flexible. In other words, he wasn’t going to fight for me, but if I showed up on his doorstep, he would open the door.
“You have my number, right?” Joe teased, and the hand resting on my stomach moved lower, in a way that signaled the end of reasonable conversation.
I stayed with him late that night, only breaking away when the television went from the late show to an infomercial to dead air. Back at Keale, I cried in my car in the parking lot, watching the shadows of girls pass in front of the dorm windows. For most of them, it was their last night on campus until the next semester, and there was a flurry of packing and binge-eating the last of the Pop-Tarts and the extra-butter microwave popcorn, all those pantry staples that would otherwise go in the trash.
I had Joe’s number, but I wasn’t going to call it, not from The Island, not with a horde of Mabreys passing through the house, not with Megan there, not with my mother examining the long-distance phone bill, wondering who it was I kept calling in Scofield. If he’d been an email kind of guy, we could have kept in touch that way—but Joe didn’t have a computer, and he hadn’t been interested in anything I’d shown him on my laptop.
Megan wasn’t in our room when I went upstairs, tears wiped from my cheeks. I threw the last of my textbooks and school supplies in my storage box, extinguished the overhead light and crawled under the covers. What if I’d invited Joe to The Island with me, instead of Megan? We could have slept together in my childhood bed, limbs never not touching. We could have waded into the surf each day, pant legs rolled to our knees. We could have suffered through dinner together, holding hands under the table and smirking at inside jokes. But of course, for more reasons than I could count, none of that would ever happen.
* * *
In the morning, Megan and I loaded the Saab for the drive to Holmes House. She chattered on about the fun I’d missed the night before—some cheesy ’80s movie, a bottle of something called Purple Passion, and the fire alarm that had evacuated the building next to ours when someone burned a pan of pizza rolls.
“I heard the fire alarm,” I murmured.
She laughed, her glance darting in my direction. “What’s wrong with you, anyway? Missing Scofield already?” The top half of her face was hidden by an oversize pair of sunglasses with red frames. She’d worried they made her look too much like Sally Jessy Raphael, but of course they didn’t. On Megan, they were adorable. She’d bought quite a few new things over the last few weeks from the Target in Litchfield; the neatly clipped tags with their sharp plastic ends had lined our wastebasket—a surprise, since Megan almost never spent anything on clothes, unless it was musty-smelling secondhand things from the Scofield thrift store.
I yawned. “Just tired.”
“Yeah, I bet you couldn’t wait to get out of there. I know I couldn’t. I’m looking forward to seeing the ocean, getting a tan, eating lobster rolls...” She ticked the items off on her finger, as if from a list she’d memorized.
I pressed down harder on the gas pedal, and the Saab gunned forward.
* * *
We spent the night at Holmes House and repacked the car in the morning following Mom’s directions. In five weeks of treatment, her hair had gone from full to papery thin to nonexistent, a fact concealed by a short blond wig and carefully penciled eyebrows. She wore a tunic that floated around her body but couldn’t disguise the fact that she was puffy all over from water retention, an effect of the chemo. When she gestured about which bag to load next, I noticed that her wedding ring bit into her flesh, like she was wearing a child-size trinket.
The drive from Simsbury to Yarmouth was uneventful. Mom dozed in the back seat, a scarf wrapped around her wig and tied under her chin. From the passenger seat, Megan peppered me with questions about The Island, as if we were heading to some all-inclusive resort.
“I keep picturing those tiny islands from cartoon strips, the ones with only a single palm tree,” she confessed.
“It’s bigger than that, but no palm trees. They’re mostly evergreens, I think.”
She persisted, “But how big are we talking? Like the size of Bermuda?”
I laughed. “I have no idea how big Bermuda is. But I’m pretty confident that The Island is bigger than what you’re picturing on the cartoon and smaller than Bermuda.”
She smiled. “That’s not very helpful.”
“Okay,” I sighed. “It’s probably like five acres. But—you’ll see—a lot of it is rocky and steep, so it feels smaller. There’s the main house, and then some cottages, a gazebo, the dock and a whole lot of trees and rocks.”
Megan was quiet for a while, looking out the window. It was the sort of perfect late-spring day that promised happiness. Then she said, “I actually have no idea how big five acres is, either,” and we laughed so hard that Mom stirred in the back seat, before collapsing back onto a pillow.
We were somewhere in Massachusetts by then, and I could feel the pull of it already—summer was beckoning, The Island was calling. I told Megan everything I knew, cobbled together from family stories, probably part truth and part exaggeration, but which part was which, I didn’t know. On a map, it was officially named Codshead Island, although the Mabreys never called it by that name. Mom had inherited it from her parents, who had inherited it from the Holmes patriarch, that scion of steel manufacturing and what I suspected was exploited labor. According to one version of the story, he’d bought it to impress a woman who had turned down his proposal, after he’d rowed her all the way out there with a wedding ring in his pocket. In another version, he’d inherited it himself as part of a business deal or a bribe.
“My dad once won five hundred dollars in a poker game,” Megan said, but my laugh felt hollow. I was missing Joe, and rushing to cover that with as many words as possible.
“When my parents married,” I continued over her interruption, “they tore down the old house and built the current one.” I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that Mom was sleeping again, her mouth falling slightly open. In a lower voice, I told Megan that my parents had seen The Island as a political asset—there was enough room to wine and dine, to house guests, to throw parties. I remembered summers where we entertained all sorts of people in government and business, who’d temporarily shed their suits for polo shirts and khaki shorts. But accessibility was a definite problem—the only way to The Island was by boat or water taxi, and once you were there, you had to be able to move on foot. And this summer, with Mom sick, there weren’t any plans to entertain visitors.
“Except me,” Megan murmured.
“That’s not what I meant. Plus, they’ll probably put us to work running errands.” I told her that we had some kayaks and Jet Skis stored on The Island, and that we had an old fishing boat for getting to and from the mainland. “Do you know how to operate an outboard motor?”
Megan shook her head. “I can barely go underwater without plugging my nose.”
“Well, I’ll show you. It’s not that complicated.”
* * *
It was midafternoon by the time we reached Yarmouth and found a spot in a parking garage near the wharf. Mom rallied, producing her credit card for the weekly parking rate and summoning enough energy to tip the man who lugged our bags to the boat. We sat on different benches in the empty water taxi, Mom huddled against the center beam with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. Next to me, Megan said, “It’s beautiful. It’s so beautiful.” And that was before we even left the wharf.
Out on the water, my nostrils stung with the scent of salt and brine, a smell that I wouldn’t notice after a day or two. I brought out my camera and took the first of a thousand shots for that summer—the sky wide and blue, the water immense and endless. I shot Mom with her eyes closed, Megan with one hand on the side of the boat for balance, the other hand holding back the hair that whipped into her face.
The Island was only a few miles from the mainland, but it always felt like it was a world away, as if time were being manipulated as we crossed the water, expanding and contracting. And then it was in front of us, first a gray spot in the distance, then a towering cliff with a white house perched on top—just a single speck of civilization under a wide sky, surrounded by miles and miles of bluest blue.
Looking around, I remembered what Dad had said, back in New Haven when Mom was coming out of the anesthesia. This might be our last summer on The Island, and we needed to make the most of it.