by Leah Stewart
By the time I found the apartment, my shoulders were tight with the stress of negotiating directions and traffic. The Cambridge street signs were hard to spot or sometimes missing altogether, as though navigation of this town were a privilege only for locals. I had been honked at more than once, and shouted curses at people who couldn’t hear me. This was not Oxford. But at least I’d found a parking space, just the size of my car, across the street from Sonia’s building. Sonia was in apartment one. For a couple of minutes I watched the dark windows on the first floor like a private detective, waiting for lights to come on, waiting for proof that Sonia was home. I’d tried to call again from the road, but only the computerized voice answered, and the long beep on the answering machine signaled that the tape was full.
The front door to the building—an old house that had been subdivided—was locked. There was a row of five buzzers beside it. Beneath the first, the nameplate read GRAY, in Sonia’s handwriting, which of course I recognized as easily as my own. I rang the buzzer. I stood on the porch with the package in my hand. I waited a long time before I rang the buzzer again.
It used to be that when I found the front door of Sonia’s house locked—her mother often kept it locked, even during the day—I’d go around the right corner to find a green ceramic frog nestled against the wall with the house keys in his mouth. His name was Frank—Sonia had named him that as a little girl. I used to take the keys from him rather than risk disturbing Madame Gray with the doorbell, and then I’d slip quietly up to Sonia’s room, to find her pacing, singing something from The Sound of Music, or sitting at her window doing a careful, intricate drawing of a bird.
I remembered all this, and it seemed to me that if I went around the corner of this building, I’d find that things were exactly the same. I was right—there was Frank, waiting with the keys in his mouth, as if he’d known all along I’d be back. I unlocked the exterior door quietly, like I was still trying not to disturb Madame Gray. I had the feeling that inside the apartment Sonia would turn to me with no surprise on her face, her mouth shaping the words to “Climb Every Mountain,” and that she’d be not a woman but a fourteen-year-old girl.
I stepped into the entryway. Judging from the mail jammed inside Sonia’s box, she hadn’t been home in two or three days. This was odd, no doubt, but certainly no cause for the shot of fear and adrenaline that went through me at the sight. Sometimes Sonia was scattered and impatient. Most likely she just hadn’t bothered to bring her mail inside. Not everybody was going to turn up dead. Still, as I gathered all the envelopes and magazines and newspaper flyers and fumbled with the door to her apartment, I felt like I was watching myself in a horror movie, yelling, No, no, don’t go inside!
The apartment was small but beautiful, with high ceilings, crown molding, shiny blond hardwood floors. There was a small table in the foyer, and on it was a note.
C,
Oliver told me he wanted to send me something—did he mean this package or you? Either way, I can’t be here. No doubt you want to get back on the road, so I suppose you can just leave the package. I know you’ve had a long drive—feel free to spend the night. Clean sheets on the bed.
—S.
For a moment I stared at that last line, Clean sheets on the bed, as though that were the most significant part. How odd that she’d taken the time to make her bed for me, but hadn’t left me a note about the keys. Somehow she’d known I’d find them and come inside. We used to send each other pictures with our minds, trying to develop ESP. We never saw any of each other’s pictures, but still there were times when each knew exactly what the other one was thinking. Now I had the sudden conviction that there was a connection between us I’d never managed to sever after all. Sonia knew what I would do as clearly as if she were watching me.
She was wrong, though, to imagine I wouldn’t wait for her return. I couldn’t abandon the package without seeing what was inside. I didn’t want to sleep in her apartment, but I felt so weary at the thought of braving Boston roads and traffic again that it seemed I might as well. The truth was, I hadn’t really considered what I’d do once I delivered the package, though Sonia was right to think I’d had a vague notion of getting back on the road. When I thought of this now a pit opened in my stomach. Get back on the road to where?
I picked up the note and stacked the mail on the table as neatly as I could. I looked at the note again. “I can’t be here,” I read aloud. What did she mean by can’t? I’d thought she was eager to see me. The note even suggested that I was Oliver’s wedding gift, as though my presence continued to be something she wanted. Had she changed her mind and decided to avoid me, or was something else keeping her away? I wanted to believe that she had a pressing need to be elsewhere—for all I knew she might already be on her honeymoon—but something told me she just didn’t want to see me anymore. How ridiculous, when I’d been the one to ignore her attempt at contact, that this should make me feel abandoned. I’d never spoken to Sonia, never told her exactly when I was arriving, but it seemed I’d nevertheless expected to find her waiting here.
“Sonia?” I called, just in case, and waited. There was nothing, although I had the haunted feeling that the place itself was listening to me.
Above the table on the wall was an old mirror with a wide frame on which someone—Sonia?—had glued, at artistic intervals, tiny black-and-white photos of women wearing 1920s clothes. I looked closer and saw that they were all the same woman, here posing in a fur, here in an evening gown, here in a swimsuit with a boardwalk behind her. The mirror, hung at Sonia’s eye level, cut off the top of my head, and the glass was slightly warped and blackened at the edges. It seemed a strange, imperfect mirror for Sonia to use, as I knew she did, for checking her face and hair every time she left the house.
I went to the living room and put the package on a fan of magazines on the coffee table, which matched the end tables, just as the couch pillows matched the rug. The room could have been a catalog picture. It was pin neat, with a blanket thrown over one arm of the couch as if to prove someone inhabited the place. I touched the magazines—they were all, every one of them, about architecture. This did not seem to be the home of anyone I knew.
The kitchen was small, the cabinets full of items for someone who didn’t cook but did entertain—white and red wineglasses, tumblers, champagne flutes, martini glasses, but only three pots, stuffed haphazardly under the sink, their lids in a drawer full of takeout menus. In the refrigerator I found Diet Coke, eggs, and, strangely enough, a box of sugar cereal and one of yellow cake mix. The front of the refrigerator was a riot of snapshots, fanned out in a way that both looked chaotic and suggested much time and thought had been given to their arrangement. I skimmed them for someone I recognized. I saw Sonia on a sailboat with another girl—Suzette, her sorority sister. They were smiling, squinting into the sun, the wind whipping their hair. There were, of course, no pictures of me, but there was a picture I had taken, of Sonia and her high-school boyfriend, Will Barrett, on the night of a homecoming dance. She was laughing, looking at the camera—at me—as Will looked at her, a smile of adoration on his face. I had an urge, which I repressed, to turn that picture’s face to the wall.
The bedroom door was closed, and when I opened it, after knocking first, I found that the room was empty. It wasn’t empty of things—there was a bed, nightstand, dresser, television—just empty of Sonia. She was really gone.
The bedroom was as neat as the living room. I circled the room, running my fingers across the top of her dresser, over the seams of her white bedspread. After what must have been at least a dozen laps, I sat down on the bed, dizzy. I was no judge of furniture, but it seemed to me the things Sonia owned were expensive. Perhaps I’d been right in my first vision of her life. After all, she’d moved here after college with Suzette, a honey blonde with plucked eyebrows who, Sonia reported not long after meeting her, had a wedding fund of eighty thousand, established by her wealthy father when she was only a baby. Suzette was not a nat
ural blonde, but she spent enough money to achieve a convincing simulacrum, and Sonia hadn’t been in the sorority a month before Suzette persuaded her to do the same. I remembered how Sonia came into the room, exuding a sharp chemical smell, so excited she leapt onto the end of my bed and bounced there, shouting, “It’s true, it’s true! Blondes have more fun!”
I told her I liked it, but what I really felt was bewildered—my friend had been replaced by a changeling. I was relieved when she tired of the look a month later. That time, I went with her to the salon, where the hairdresser said, dubiously, “I’ve never made a southern girl’s hair darker before.”
I said, “We’re not southern.”
“How dark do you want it?” the hairdresser asked, but she seemed to be addressing the question to me, and Sonia caught my eye in the mirror like she wanted me to answer.
“All the way back,” I said. “Match her roots.”
In the pictures on the refrigerator, Sonia’s hair was still dark, but what did that tell me about the life she was leading now? If it weren’t for those photos and the note she’d left me, I’d have had no evidence that it was Sonia and not Suzette living there.
“Who are you?” I said out loud.
Then I thought to look under the bed. There it was, the chaos of books and clothing and paper I should have known I’d find. Sonia was still in some way the girl I knew.
In the living room I sat on the couch and stared at Oliver’s package. I could hear cars passing outside, the creaking of a floor as someone moved around upstairs—sounds that only increased my awareness of the silence inside the apartment. Here in her home, surrounded by her things, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that Sonia didn’t exist, that this place was my own imaginary rendering of her life. Only a few days ago I’d been in Oliver’s house, sorting through his things, trying to imagine what they meant, and yet he himself was gone. And if they didn’t exist, these people who’d at least left some evidence of their presence behind, then did I? I had no job, no home. No one on earth, not even Ruth, knew exactly where I was.
When I got my father on the phone, he said he had been reading—I could picture the glass of single malt beside him on the table, the paperback mystery in his hand—but he seemed happy to hear from me. I told him about my mission. I described the package and said, “What do you think could be inside?”
There was a long pause. I waited for his theory. He said, “Remind me who Oliver is?”
I wanted not to feel it, the familiar drag of disappointment. “My boss,” I said, as calmly as I could. “The one who wrote the Civil War book.” I had given him the book one Christmas, with an inscription from Oliver that read: To Cameron’s father, with much gratitude for her creation. I wish she were mine. “Think that will make your father jealous?” Oliver had said.
“Oh, right,” my father said. “That old guy you lived with.”
“Right.” I swallowed. Strange, when I was working so hard to diminish my own sorrow, how much it hurt to have him diminish it.
“I always thought that was kind of weird.” My father chuckled. “It wasn’t some kind of Anna Nicole Smith situation, was it?”
“You bet,” I said. “You raised yourself a gold digger.”
My father laughed. “Well,” he said. “I tried.”
After I hung up, the apartment seemed even quieter than before. I treated the place like a crime scene, trying to disturb nothing. I drank from a glass and then washed it and put it away. It seemed too strange to sleep in Sonia’s bed, so I lay down on the couch, even though I had to curl up tight to fit, with only the blanket and a fat, square pillow for bedding. From outside came the distant sound of sirens. I couldn’t shake a betrayed, abandoned feeling. Every night, before Oliver went to bed, he used to kiss me good night, chastely, like a parent, but also like a child. A day seemed incomplete without that kiss to signal its end.
Many times I had been the new girl in the cafeteria, holding her tray, searching the room for that face that will smile, that will say, Sit here, you’re welcome—and will do it before the moment goes on too long, before she and the whole room see that nobody wants her, that she doesn’t, and never will, belong. Still, lying there on Sonia’s couch, that might have been the loneliest moment of my life.
In the middle of the night I woke up cold, with a terrible crick in my neck. I stumbled through the door to Sonia’s room, and, moving as if in a dream, I got into Sonia’s bed.
10
Sonia and I used to call ourselves Cameronia, and Sonia drew a logo for us, a wreath of flowers, in the center a C and an S intertwined. It was beautiful, the fantastical shapes of the flowers, the extravagant loops of the C and the S, so long they almost didn’t look like letters anymore. They ran together in unbroken curves, our two identities made one.
That was how it was when we were fifteen, when every experience was something we shared. We even wrote each other into our memories, so that Sonia would make reference to something that had happened two years before and be surprised when I reminded her I hadn’t been there, I hadn’t even lived in Clovis then. “That’s so crazy,” she’d say, because it no longer seemed possible that there had been a time when we weren’t friends.
We both reached the age of fifteen without ever having kissed a boy. Even this was a problem we confronted together. When we imagined ridding ourselves of this embarrassment, we thought of finding two acceptable boys who would kiss us at the same time—it never occurred to either of us that one of us could go it alone.
One Saturday, when her mother went to bed at three o’clock, Sonia was finally able to put into motion the plan we’d been making for weeks, by asking her father for permission to go out when her mother wasn’t around to say no. That evening we sat at Sonia’s kitchen table while her father made dinner—spaghetti and meatballs, which was his specialty and Sonia’s favorite. She was sketching my portrait, intermittently frowning at it and erasing furiously, refusing to let me see. The smell of tomato sauce filled the house.
We had our driver’s licenses by then, and my father had bought me an old car, a stick shift he’d spent all summer teaching me how to drive, shouting obscenities when I ground the gears and then screaming at me to relax. He said if I knew how to drive a stick, boys would respect me more, but this was the least of my concerns when it came to boys. In seventh grade I’d had a huge crush on a boy named Mitch, but he had a friend named Ronnie who used to tease me, calling me Green Giant, asking me in a loud voice in the hall what my cup size was. One day in the cafeteria Ronnie came up to me and said Mitch liked me and wanted to go with me. I assumed this was just another plan to humiliate me, so I said no, and Ronnie turned, cupped his hands over his mouth, and shouted, “Mitch, Cameron doesn’t want to go with you.” Only then, when I saw the way Mitch flushed, the way he blinked, as though trying to hold back tears, did I realize my mistake. I wanted to leap from my chair and run to him, but fear and embarrassment kept me in my seat. He pushed back his own chair and took his tray to the conveyor belt. He never spoke to me again. The next year we went to different schools.
This was the story I told Sonia when she asked why I was so nervous around boys. I assumed they wouldn’t like me, that they’d be intimidated by my height. I assumed that if by some chance they did like me, I’d screw it up somehow. That night, despite my nerves, we planned to cruise Main with the rest of the high-school population, and to meet up with two boys, seniors and football players, who’d told Sonia they’d look for us there.
Mr. Gray had the radio up loud, on an oldies station. He was still wearing his tie, but he’d loosened it and flung the ends over his shoulder. His light blue shirt was dotted with red from the spitting tomato sauce, but he didn’t notice, or if he noticed he didn’t mind. Every once in a while he sang along to “Second Hand News” or “Stand By Me.” Whenever he did, Sonia would look at him and smile, and once, in the middle of a Simon and Garfunkel song, he turned down the radio and said, “Harmonize with me, Princess,” and S
onia did. Mr. Gray’s voice was low, pleasant, and unremarkable, but Sonia’s was beautiful, clear, and open, with none of the pinched, nasal sound of the school chorus star who always sang at pep rallies. Normally Sonia was self-conscious about singing, critical of her voice the way she was of her drawing, her piano playing, her French and Spanish, which all seemed perfect to me. She had brought these talents to her mother like offerings, but none of them was good enough, and so Sonia dismissed them as well—her French was adequate, her playing and singing so-so, her drawing embarrassingly bad. Not until we got to college and she started to take photographs did she ever admit that she had a skill beyond cheerleading and charm.
But when her father asked her to, Sonia would sing. Mr. Gray was broad-shouldered and sweet, with a large, comforting mustache and a patient smile. Once, torn between exasperation and gratitude, Sonia said that if she blew up the school her father would find a reason she’d been right to do it. When he was home, and his wife was sequestered in their room, their house could seem like a happy place. It was easy to pretend Madame Gray wasn’t even there. Yet at the same time I went on feeling her presence, just up the stairs in the one room in the house I never entered. She was like the little voice in your head that describes for you, while you’re having the time of your life, all the possibilities for trouble and regret, everything that might go wrong. I often wondered what it was like for Sonia to live with that voice all the time.
Mr. Gray crossed from the stove to the table to admire Sonia’s handiwork. “That’s excellent, Sonia,” he said.
She held up the sketch pad, leaning back, and for the first time she looked as if she approved of what she saw.
“You two should write a book,” I said. “You can write it, Mr. Gray, and Sonia can illustrate it.” Sonia had told me about the bedtime stories her father used to tell her, tales that took weeks to complete. He described castles and moved his hands through the air like he could touch them. In these stories Sonia was always a princess, so beautiful the stars were jealous.