The Dinner List

by Rebecca Serle

  It was early December now, and we were creeping into winter. Christmas lights were strung around the city. The window displays were up at Bloomingdale’s, Bergdorf’s, and Barneys. Going up and seeing them was something Jessica and I used to do together. We’d get hot chocolates at Serendipity on Third Avenue and then make our way through the city, hitting all the big department stores. Sometimes we even made it all the way down to Lord and Taylor. We never made it inside the stores; we were broke anyway. It was just to look at the windows—the spinning displays of confetti silver and gold, life-sized candy canes, winter wonderland scapes.

  I was folding one of Tobias’s shirts when I heard it. It was an old UCLA one, soft cotton, that I’d taken to sleeping in. He hadn’t taken it, and when Matty came for more clothes I purposefully left it out.

  I heard the screech of tires and the crunch of metal and the shattering of glass through my closed window. I ran to it and looked down into the street. Someone had been hit, that much was clear. People were outside shouting. I grabbed a down vest off my bed and ran down into the street.

  I was barely out my front door when I saw him. Just a leg, to the right of the car. It was his shoe, though. This old pair of Dr. Martens with the soles worn in. I would have recognized them anywhere. I ran.

  His body was half under the car. Later the driver would argue that he had come out of nowhere, that he had practically run into the street. But now his body was mangled. His shoulder was crushed, his leg bent at an impossible angle.

  “Call nine-one-one!” I screamed. I bent down next to him. His body was warm. I could smell him, those cigarettes and that honey. I put my hands on his head and held them there. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I whispered over and over again. I bent my head down low to his mouth to check, to see where the air was. I couldn’t find it. It’s strange the tricks adrenaline plays on you. The need to fix, to rectify. In the moment of impact we think it’s possible to go back. We’re so close to the previous minute; how hard would it be to just turn back the clock? To just quickly undo what has just been done?

  I stayed that way, my face pressed to his, until the paramedics arrived. Getting him unhooked from underneath the car was complicated, and more than once they tore at his limbs further, but I didn’t look away. I had the feeling that if my eyes left his, even for a moment, he’d be gone. That the only thing keeping him there was the fact that I was, too. Please. Stay with me.

  I rode with him in the ambulance. I must have called Jessica at some point, although I do not remember that. I remember him being rushed into the operating room. And I remember her being there, hours later, when the doctor came out. I’m sorry. We tried. Too much damage.

  He never woke up.

  Jessica started to cry next to me, but I felt blank. Like an empty white room with no trace of a door. I wanted to see him, but they told me I couldn’t. Family only. But I was family. We had been together for nine years. I was the only family he had, and he needed me. Even if he was no longer there.

  “We have to call his parents,” Jessica said. All I knew about them was that they lived in Ohio and had once taken us to an Olive Garden in Times Square.

  I sat down in the hospital waiting room. I didn’t want to leave. Where would I go?

  I found their number in my phone. His mom answered on the third ring. I counted. I told her there’d been an accident. She kept saying she was sorry, like I was the one who had lost something. Maybe that was her defense, to believe I had lost more, that I could shoulder more of the burden. I found out later he’d never told her we were taking time apart.

  She said they would get on the next flight out. We would need to plan a funeral, she guessed. She choked on the word. Did I know where we could get some flowers?

  They gave me his effects on the way out. A plastic bag, zip locked at the top. I couldn’t bring myself to open it.

  “We need to go,” Jessica said.

  “No,” I said. “We can’t. We can’t leave him.” I started to scream it, the sobs tearing through my body. “We can’t leave.”

  Jessica held me, her pregnant belly between us. “Okay,” she said. “We’ll stay.”

  We sat in that hospital waiting room until three o’clock in the morning. Jessica took me home and stayed with me until Tobias’s parents arrived the next day. When I saw his father I broke down again.

  The last thing Tobias had ever said to me was over the phone. “Do you know what my T-Mobile password is? I need to change my plan.”

  I told him I’d see if I had it in my password folder and I’d text if I did.

  “Sabby?” he’d asked.

  “Yes?”

  “Five.”

  “Tired,” I’d said, and hung up.

  11:47 P.M.

  TOBIAS AND I GO BACK TO the table. Audrey is becoming fidgety. My father looks tired. Conrad is yawning, tapping his breastbone like he’s readying to curl up by the fire with a scotch and close his eyes.

  “Thank you all,” I say. “I have no idea how this came to be, but I’m glad it did. I hope it’s real.”

  “It’s real,” Jessica says. “My boobs don’t lie.” She points to her milk-crusted shirt. “Plus,” she says. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  I feel my heart pull toward her, Jessica Bedi, my best friend. Somewhere deep in there, below the trappings of her life, is a woman who still believes in magic.

  Anything is possible.

  “I dare say it is,” Conrad says. “I feel a slight hangover coming on.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ll have to find your way back,” Audrey asks him. She seems, all at once, concerned.

  “Perhaps,” Conrad says. “But I know how to hail a taxi.”

  I look around the table. This dinner began as a reminder of all I had lost, but as I watch them now all I can feel is profoundly grateful. For a father who never stopped loving me, for a movie star who gave a generation her grace and who gave us one dinner tonight, for a professor who challenges his students, and for a best friend who is still here.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  Conrad nods; Jessica clears her throat. Across the table, Audrey blows me the most delicate of kisses.

  “Well, shall we?” Audrey asks. “It’s about that time.”

  I look up at the clock. Twelve minutes to midnight.

  “How should we do this?” I ask the group.

  Conrad claps his hands together. “I’ll go first,” he says. He pushes back his chair and stands up, adjusting his suit jacket. “I expect a lengthy e-mail and perhaps a telephone call this week. I’ll wait for it.”

  “You can count on it. Thank you for being here,” I tell him. “We needed you.”

  He turns his attention to Audrey, who doesn’t seem to know whether to remain sitting or to stand. Conrad takes her hand. “It has been my supreme pleasure, Ms. Hepburn,” he says, kissing it gently.

  “Oh,” she says. “Oh.”

  Conrad shakes Robert’s hand, pats Tobias on the back, and gives us a little salute. He walks out the door. I follow his silhouette until it is lost down the street.

  Next it’s Audrey. She stands and loops her little Chanel sweater over her shoulders. “It’s gotten chilly outside,” she says. She seems nervous now, without Conrad, and I feel a wave of affection for her, that she stuck this out until the very end.

  “It has been an honor to spend the evening with you,” my father says. He stands with her. “I’ll walk you out.”

  He looks back at me, and I want to tell him I’m not ready, that this should be the start, not the end. But our time is up.

  “I’m thankful I got to know you tonight, Sabrina,” he says. “I’d say I’m proud, but I hardly feel responsible.”

  “Say it anyway,” I tell him.

  He comes over to me. He leans down so he’s right next to my ear. “My daughter,” he says, like he’s savoring the word.

  He kisses me on the cheek, and then he’s gone with Audrey, out the door in the night air.

  �
��And then there were three,” Jessica says.

  “It’s always been a crowd,” Tobias says.

  Jessica smiles. “I’ll go,” she says. She looks at her watch. “The baby will be up in forty-five minutes. Maybe I’ll make the feeding.” She slings her bag over her shoulder. “I’ll call you later,” she says. “Okay?”

  “Yeah. Hey, Jess?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Thank you for coming tonight.”

  “It’s our tradition, right?” she says. “Although next year is in trouble. I’m not exactly sure we can keep this one up.” She turns to Tobias. “Be good, okay?” She puts a hand on his arm. I see her eyes well up with tears.

  “I got nowhere to go but up.” It’s a joke, but none of us laughs.

  “I’ll see you,” she says, and leaves, the bells on the door jingling after her.

  We’re alone.

  Tobias turns toward me. “Should we walk a bit?” he asks.

  I look at the clock. We have six minutes left.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  We put on our coats. Tobias holds the door open for me as we stroll out into the night. The white wicker bench is there, perched by the door. I wish we could sit on it, even for just five minutes more.

  “I’ll walk you back,” he says.

  “We won’t make it,” I say.

  “Even so,” he says, and we head toward home.

  TWENTY-SIX

  IT TOOK ME A WEEK TO open the personal effects bag the hospital gave me.

  We had the funeral on a Sunday, at the church in Park Slope where we were supposed to be married. Tobias’s parents picked up bagels and Jessica wrote and read a poem. We all wore color because I thought it’s what you do when you’re not trying to be somber, when you’re trying to celebrate life. But I was mourning. I was wearing a red dress, one Tobias had liked, but inside I felt black.

  Matty came and sat next to me, and then after we walked the city for twelve hours, barely speaking. He seemed to understand that there were no words to make it livable and didn’t bother trying. We were together in that grief, and that was something. I was grateful for that. To be with someone else who had really known him.

  Afterward I sat on the floor of our bedroom and slid the manila envelope out of the plastic wrapping. I took a breath in and held it, like I was preparing to go underwater. Inside was his cell phone, wallet, a subway card, and a ring box. I opened it immediately. It was not the ring I’d given him back but the other one, the first one we’d seen. The one we fought over, that was too expensive. He’d gone back and bought it.

  The thought that still felt too hot to think, like if I gave it any time it would burn me alive, was what he was doing on my street corner. He came running out of nowhere, the driver had said.

  He was running to me. And now, I knew, he was running across with this ring in his pocket. It could only mean one thing: he had come to get me. Our time apart had come to an end just as he’d decided he wanted us to be together.

  My heart seized. I thought surely I’d die right along with him. In that moment, I wanted to. Because the alternative was just too cruel. To know, so clearly, that he was coming back to make it work. That he had saved up, presumably, over our time apart and bought this ring, the first we’d seen, to make a new promise, a bigger one—I didn’t know how to live with that.

  The ring was beautiful, just as I’d remembered. I slipped it out of its black velvet seat and put it on my hand. It fit perfectly. It was dazzling—it picked up the afternoon light and sent it cascading everywhere—on the wooden floor below me, off the white walls. “It’s beautiful,” I said out loud.

  I couldn’t explain why, in that moment, I thought about the old ring and what had happened to it. Had he brought it back to Ingrid and traded it in? Did he pawn it? Was it still somewhere buried underneath his stuff? Matty hadn’t gone through his things yet. We said we’d do it together, but I didn’t know when either of us would be ready, or if we ever would be. The thought of folding his jeans, taking down his shirts, sifting through his photos? Impossible.

  I wore the ring all day, and then I put it back in its box and hid it under my bed where his photograph used to be.

  12:00 A.M.

  TOBIAS STOPS. NEITHER ONE OF US has said anything for a minute, and now here it is, upon us.

  “Well,” he says. We haven’t yet made it home, but there’s one thing I have left to ask. It’s the question I’ve been waiting to ask him all night, since we first arrived at this dinner nearly four hours ago. It’s the only one left. But of course I know, don’t I? Even so, I need to hear him say it.

  “Why were you there that day?”

  He exhales and nods, like he knew it was coming, of course he did. “I was going to re-propose,” he says. “Set a date. Call our parents. Have a big wedding.” He smiles and lets out a small laugh. “I wanted the right ring.”

  I think about the fight we had that day in the store. The way his pride was damaged. “It’s a beautiful ring,” I say.

  His features are lit up in the moonlight, and I see him as that nineteen-year-old kid on the beach in Santa Monica. Beautiful and stubborn with everything ahead of him. “It wasn’t the right one, though,” he says. “I was still getting it wrong. The one we picked out together? That was ours.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “You were the great love of my life,” he says. “That’s just how it happened. But I won’t be yours.” He isn’t sad, not even a little bit. “I don’t want to be.”

  “Tobias,” I say. I feel my eyes sting up again.

  “Not forever. Okay?”

  I nod. “Okay.”

  “Here,” he says. “I want you to have this.” He hands me the pocket watch, the one that was my father’s, that I gave him.

  “It was a gift,” I say.

  “Still is,” he tells me. “Like Robert said—I can’t take it with me.”

  Tobias wraps his arms around me. I drop my face into his neck, but then I open my eyes, because I don’t want to miss seeing him, not a moment of him.

  “I didn’t tell you,” he says. “I remember now.”

  I look up at him. “What?”

  He pauses, like he’s taking me in. His eyes drift over my face like it’s a lazy Sunday afternoon. Like we have all the time in the world in which to gaze.

  “You were wearing a red tank top and denim shorts. Your hair was down and you kept swinging your arms by your sides. I thought you were going to knock someone over.”

  I think about the two of us, standing in the sand, no idea how entwined our lives were already—and would be.

  “That’s how I see you,” he says. He gives me a little salute, and then he’s gone.

  Just like that. He doesn’t so much disappear as he leaves. I imagine he’s off to the corner deli, picking up cigarettes and a bottle of off-brand seltzer.

  I walk the rest of the way home alone. I find my keys at the bottom of my bag by an old piece of dried-out gum and a lip gloss. I climb the stairs to my apartment. It’s dark, and I flip on a light. There are remnants of birthday cake on the counter, and I drop my bag down next to them—a slice of frosting, chocolate crumbs. I head into the bedroom.

  I take the shoebox out from under my bed and rifle though it—photos of Tobias and me, keys to our old apartment, Broadway Playbills, movie stubs, the wrinkled Post-it, the ring—until I find what I’m looking for. It’s a letter, addressed to me, from Alex Nielson, dated 2006. I open it and read.

  Dear Sabrina,

  It’s strange to be writing you this, although I suppose stranger for you to be reading it. My name is Alex and I’m your sister. We share a father, Robert Nielson, who gave me your name, and I looked you up. It’s really cool that you’re at USC. I’d love to go there someday, although I’m not sure I’ll get in. I’m only in eighth grade but my grades aren’t very good. I love to write though.

  I’m the older of two. I have a younger sister, Daisy. We don’t really get along. Sometimes that makes
me wonder if you and I would and other times it makes me convinced I have to know you. I guess that’s why I’m writing.

  Dad talks about you. Not a lot, but sometimes. When I ask he always will. He told me that he hasn’t seen you since you were a little girl. He said he doesn’t want to disturb the life you have now and I understand but I also sometimes wish he would. He’s a good dad. It makes me sad to think you don’t know that.

  He told me a story about you the other day. Daisy was carrying on about her name. She doesn’t like it. She thinks it’s too girly. She’s all goth right now—total rocker chick. She asked why they gave her that name and my mom (her name is Jeanette) said it was because daisies were the first thing she saw in the hospital room when she had her. Daisy thinks that’s lame. Anyway after dinner I asked about you. I wanted to know why they named you Sabrina. Is that strange? I’ve never even met you before. All I’ve seen are photos of you when you were very small.

  He told me he loved Audrey Hepburn. He said she was his favorite actress. On his first date with your mom he took her to see Sabrina. It was playing at a black-and-white theater and they got popcorn and milk duds—this is all him, btw. He told me the details. Sabrina was his favorite of Audrey’s movies. He thought it meant something that the heroine isn’t a shrinking violet—that she goes in search of a life for herself and returns stronger for it. He told me when he met you he thought that’s the kind of woman you’d be.

  I bet he was right.

  Love,

  Alex

  P.S. If you’d ever like to get together let me know. Dad promised to take me to an exhibit in Santa Monica next week. It’s on the beach. Maybe we could meet there.

  There are many ways stories can unfold, and now I see this one begin to take shape. Something different in the space where there used to be just the one thing. I put the watch and receipt in the box, proof of the night, of the decade—of what was once and is no longer—but when I go to close it the lid won’t fit. There is something stuck up against the side. I let my fingers thread in between the cardboard until they find the foreign object. I unhook it and hold it in my hands, and that’s when I see it’s the photograph. Not Tobias’s, not the one I lost, but the one we stood in front of on the beach that first day. The little boy and the eagle. It’s a print no bigger than a postcard.