“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 c
atastrophes. 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.
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