I tried to work on Light, the collage I’d begun the week before. Of course it was about Lucy, and there was a ton I already loved: the canvas was a huge farmhouse window I bought at a barn sale, I’d mixed sand my mom sent from Rehoboth into the glossy white paint I was laying over the surface, and glass, through which light so often enters our lives, is made from melted sand. I loved knowing this, even if whoever looked at the finished piece never did.
But I was stuck.
I fussed with the collage after I got home from the diner, layering pages from a child’s book written in Braille over paragraphs from a scientific journal on angular momentum and the ability of light waves to torque. I added shards of mirror, stepped back, laid yellow cellophane over the paragraphs, stepped back again. Nothing was right. I stared at a map of constellations, the L page torn from a book of baby names. Frustration lifted inside me. The piece was about grief—but what about grief?
Eva was right: Two hours later, Annabelle was at my door, sobbing and hiccupping. “I don’t [hiccup] know [hiccup] what’s [hiccup] wrong with me.” With every hiccup, her body hitched, as if she were being jerked up by an invisible string.
I tugged her into our hallway as she sobbed like a kid (and she looked like one in her T-shirt, boys’ jeans, and Chuck Taylors) while I kept repeating, “It’s okay,” and “You had every right to be upset.” I felt inept. I’d watched Annabelle comfort Eva, wiping her tears with her thumb, pushing her hair from her forehead, but I wasn’t affectionate like that, except with the kids and Erik. It felt like one more way I didn’t know how to be a good friend, no matter what Eva had said.
We were sitting in the living room by then, side by side on the couch.
“Spencer’s your son too,” she hiccupped, chest juddering as she spoke. “I just get so jealous.”
“Why?” I almost laughed. “You’re an amazing mother, an amazing friend.”
“Don’t say that!” she wept. “I’m the last person anyone would call a good friend. And you know what I’m talking about!” Her words were choked with fury. “You can’t tell her, Claire. I don’t care how angry you are or how much you hate me—”
“I don’t hate you!”
“I will die if she finds out.” She could barely talk, she was crying so hard.
“Annabelle. Please. She’s not going to.”
“I knew you knew about Gabe,” she said. “And I’ve wanted to talk to you, but I’ve been too afraid.”
“I know,” I said. But I hadn’t. Just as she had no idea how often I’d considered telling her my secret. I have a daughter. It was such a fundamental fact of who I was. And I thought then of the afternoon a few weeks ago when Annabelle and I were at the diner waiting for Spencer, and I’d been watching the high school girls in their plaid Catholic school uniforms as they milled around waiting for their rides. One of the girls had wavy blond hair like Nick’s, and she was tall and big-boned with a swimmer’s broad shoulders, and I thought, Oh. Here you are. Everything in me went still. Was this what she would look like? Did she play a sport? Here you are. A crumbling feeling in my chest. And then Annabelle leaned her chin on my shoulder and asked, “Do you know her?”
I shook my head and said something about being glad we never had to go back to high school. But what if, instead, I’d told her, I have a daughter and she’s sixteen, and that girl reminds me of her?
Annabelle had stopped crying, though tears kept leaking down her face. “Every time I imagined trying to explain to you what happened with Gabe…” She was staring down, twisting a Kleenex into a spiral. “It seemed selfish. All that would happen is maybe I’d feel a tiny bit better, and I don’t deserve that.”
“Except maybe you do,” I said. “Maybe ten years is enough time to beat yourself up.”
“I just want to undo it.” Her face crumpled. “That’s the worst part. I can never fix it. No matter how good of a friend I try to be.”
“I know,” I said quietly. “It’s why I don’t talk about my past. Not because I don’t trust you, Annabelle. It’s just…there are things I’m ashamed of.”
Her eyes filled again. “Eva thinks you were raped. Or your ex-husband beat you.”
“Oh God, no! It was nothing like that.” And yet, hadn’t I said just enough over the years to make them think exactly this? My marriage was too painful to talk about; I’d moved across the country to get away; I was afraid to go back. Still, hearing Annabelle say it filled me with shame. It was so far from the truth. I was so far from the truth.
I stared at the sunlight eddying on the floor like water and thought of how I signed my collages with Lucy’s name. It means “light,” and ultimately that’s what art does, focuses a light. How many times had I said this? Enough that I almost believed it. But it was a lie too.
No wonder I was blocked. And on a piece called Light, no less. It served me right. Had my art, ever, been about shining a light on anything? It had always been about hiding. Just layer enough scraps, fragments, and half-truths over one another, and I could convince everyone, myself included, that I was actually saying something. No different from what I’d done with my friendships. Disappointment roared through me. Did I even know who I was anymore?
“I’m glad Eva was wrong about your past,” Annabelle said.
“You never thought those things?”
She lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “I figured it was something you did rather than something done to you. That’s the crap we don’t talk about, right?”
I nodded. I’d underestimated Annabelle.
“Don’t you get tired of it, though? Always lugging it around—whatever horrible thing you don’t want us to know?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “I do.”
“I do too.”
“I loved Gabe,” she said. “I would have done anything for him.” Tears welled and she pressed a soggy tissue beneath one eye. “I made such an ass of myself.”
“Because he didn’t love you?” I was surprised. I’d always assumed he chased her.
“I groveled, begged, practically stalked him. Even after it was over, I…I followed him on a business trip to Minneapolis. Showed up at his hotel. Sexy underwear, the whole bit.”
“Oh, Annabelle.”
“After Erik found out, Gabe fell apart. All he cared about, and I mean all, was that Eva never know. He was beside himself. Even if she found out and left him, he said, he still wouldn’t want to be with me.” Tears streamed unchecked down her face. She looked like a waif, tiny and miserable, her fingers, with their stubby chewed nails, clutching the Kleenex. “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done, Claire. I still can hardly explain it even to myself. I mean, yes, Erik and I were fighting nonstop, Spencer had just been diagnosed, and Gabe was…he was in a lousy place too. But I took advantage.”
“Why was Gabe in a lousy place?”
“He hated being a lawyer—God, he hated it—and he felt trapped. Three years of school, another year studying for the bar, plus all the debt. It’s not like Eva makes anything acting.”
How could I not have known this? Not once in six years had anyone, including Gabe, ever hinted that he hated his career. Oh, he whined about the hours and talked about retiring while he was still young enough to do something else, but that he was doing a job he’d been miserable in from day one? “Does he still hate it?”
“With a passion.”
“And Eva knows this?”
“I’m not sure.”
“But he talks to you?” I felt as if I were on a seesaw. Outside the day felt too bright and too green; trees, grass, bushes, even the sky seemed green. I couldn’t look at Annabelle. I didn’t want to know even as I was asking, “But it’s over with him, right? You love Scott?”
“I adore Scott.” She started crying again. “And I would never—” Her voice broke. “I would never do that to Eva again, Claire. God, I can barely live with this.”
“You need to forgive yourself,” I said gently.
“I can’t.”
For a moment we didn’t speak. I wished Annabelle hadn’t told me any of this. It didn’t make me feel closer to her, and it definitely didn’t make me feel closer to Gabe. If anything, I felt like we didn’t know him at all. And I considered, as I had more times than I could count, that maybe the greater act of love for another person wasn’t in confiding a secret but in not confiding it and carrying that secret alone, no matter how burdensome, so the other person wouldn’t have to. Was this what Gabe was doing by not telling Eva how much he hated the job that allowed her to pursue the career she loved? Could they have had the life they had without his job? Would it have been a better life?
A fresh wave of tears was streaming down Annabelle’s face. “If I ever lose Eva…” She started crying again. “I’m not like you, Claire. You told us once that as long as you had your art and your running, you’d be okay. But you guys, Scott, and the kids—that’s all I have.”
“Oh my God, Annabelle. You took what I said completely wrong. Of course I need you.”
“No,” she said. “Maybe you wish you did, but you don’t.”
She was right, and I didn’t know what that said about me. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure I needed Erik. The second I thought it, I wanted to unthink it, but deep down, I knew it was true.
As shattered as I’d have been if something happened to him, there was a part of me I’d tucked away years ago and held in reserve, the way survivalists stored canned goods and bottled water. They did it because when the economy crashed or terrorists took over or a pandemic wiped out half the population, they—by God, they—would be prepared. I was no different. No matter that Erik knew about Lucy, no matter that he loved me and believed in me, and was unequivocally in my corner—no matter. I held part of myself back just in case he ever changed his mind, just in case something happened and I was alone again, just in case.
The realization was a stone falling through me. I don’t want to be this person, I thought. There was a time when I’d needed to be her, a time when not depending on anyone was the only choice I had. Those months in the hospital, those months after I gave her up, those first years living here. But now?
I glanced at Annabelle, her face splotchy and eyes swollen, and I knew she really believed she couldn’t go on living if Eva found out what she’d done. I envied her. Because wasn’t it better to believe you couldn’t live without someone than to believe, as I did, that you could? And it struck me that although Annabelle could be a mess—controlling, reactionary—she was also more real than anyone I knew. Watching her yank a Kleenex from the box and try to blow her stuffed-up nose, I felt such love for her. Was I capable of being so vulnerable? Had I ever been?
“I don’t really know how to need people,” I told Annabelle. My throat felt swollen.
“Just talk to us.”
“I’ll try.”
“Try?”
“Okay.” I smiled. “I will.”
But would I really? Could I?
She left soon after. Scott was with Spencer, so she needed to get back. She’d stopped crying, though she kept hiccupping, her breath shaky. “Do you forgive me?” she asked at the door.
“Oh my God, Annabelle, there’s nothing to forgive.” But she insisted. Her sinuses were clogged and she kept trying to breathe through her nose, which made a sad honking sound. She was beyond exhaustion, so I told her yes, I forgave her.
Though if anyone needed forgiveness, it was me.