by Rachel Cohn
Wednesday, December 17th
It was about eight o’clock in the evening on Tuesday night when I received a text from Langston.
Is Lily with you?
I texted back: No.
Then he asked, Do you know where she is?
And I texted back: No.
Then I texted Lily. Where are you?
And I received the response: If she hadn’t left her phone behind, do you really think I’d be texting you?
Which is how I realized that Lily was, like, gone.
Ordinarily, it would be no big deal if a teenager missed her curfew. It’s practically a rite of passage. But Lily had never exhibited even a sprig of rumspringa, especially since she knew how much it would worry her grandfather if she didn’t return home one night.
So we were worried.
I called around to our friends, but nobody had seen her. Langston gave me periodic updates, and said his family phone tree had been activated.
Eleven o’clock, and still no word from her.
Midnight, and still no word from her.
Who’s Edgar Thibaud? Langston texted.
Some jerk, I replied. Then added, Why?
Just wondering if he would know where Lily was.
Why?
No reason.
That seemed weird. I had no idea that Edgar Thibaud and Lily were still in contact—but that was certainly what Langston’s question implied.
I filed that away.
12:30—no word.
1:00—no word.
It was hard to sleep. I dozed on and off, waking up every hour to get word from Langston.
2:00—no word.
3:00—police notified.
4:00—calling around to hospitals.
5:00—no word.
6:00—A sighting! Staten Island.
6:01—I text to Langston: So we’re going to Staten Island, right?
6:01:30—Right.
—
As I got dressed—as I explained to my sleeping mother why I had to skip school today, as I left the apartment and headed downtown to catch the ferry—all I could think was, This has to be my fault. A better boyfriend would have prevented his girlfriend from disappearing. A better boyfriend wouldn’t have given his girlfriend any reason to disappear. He wouldn’t have burned down her Christmas party. He would’ve known how to read her even if she was acting unreadable.
Where are you, Lily? I kept thinking.
—
“It’s all my fault.”
Langston did not look happy to be telling me this. He also looked like he felt he had to.
“Why do you say that?” I asked. We were standing on the deck of the Staten Island Ferry, even though it was really too cold and too early to be standing on the deck. The boat was pushing away from the dock, and our own batteries were just starting to get out of park. While there were plenty of people who’d gotten off in Manhattan to head to their skyscraper jobs, there weren’t that many people heading toward Staten Island at this hour. We were getting everything backwards.
At first, I didn’t think Langston was going to answer me—enough time went by that I started to wonder if we’d actually said anything at all, or if it was just my Lily-is-gone delirium that was inducing imaginary conversations. But then Langston lifted his right hand and showed me a gold ring he was wearing on his pinky.
“Benny and I decided to start taking what we have seriously. Which means moving in together. And moving in together means moving out of the building I’ve been living in most of my life. I told Lily about it yesterday, and she didn’t take it well. I knew she wouldn’t…but I guess I’d hoped that I’d be wrong. That she’d understand. But why would she understand?”
“Are you saying that she couldn’t understand because she isn’t, you know, in the kind of lasting relationship that, say, you and Benny are in?”
Langston shook his head. “Not everything I say is a rebuke to you, you know.”
“No. Maybe it’s just a buke. And then when you repeat it in twenty minutes, that will be the rebuke.”
Langston whistled a note and looked out over the water, as if maybe the Statue of Liberty was going to sympathize with him for being stuck with me.
“The funny thing,” he said, still facing the bay, “is that Lily’s the only person I know who’s as high-strung as you are. Thinking is your favorite thing to do, isn’t it? Sometimes it’s endearing but sometimes it’s completely exhausting.”
It wasn’t like Langston to concede that Lily and I had anything in common. So I decided to take this as a compliment. And at the same time, I decided not to press the point.
I followed Langston’s glance and stared out at the water, too. At Ellis Island. At the receding giants sitting on the downtown shore. Anyone who’s lived in Manhattan all his life always feels torn whenever he leaves it. There’s the satisfaction of breaking free, for a time. But that’s balanced heavily by the feeling of leaving your whole life behind, and to see it from a distance.
I wanted Lily to be there next to me. I knew that made no sense, since if she’d been next to me I wouldn’t have been looking for her—but at the same time, it felt like perfect sense. She was the person I wanted to share life with the most, and it was the moments of noticing that made me feel this most acutely.
I couldn’t tell if Langston was thinking of Benny, or of Lily, or if he wasn’t thinking of anyone at all. I wasn’t sharing this with Lily, but I was sharing it with him. Or at least I knew I would be sharing it with him if we kept talking, if we bridged my experience of the moment and his experience of the moment.
“You want to hear something strange?” I said, my voice a little louder to make headway against the wind. “This is the first time I’ve ever taken the Staten Island Ferry. I always meant to, but it was never a priority. I took a ferry to see the Statue of Liberty on a field trip in, like, fifth grade—but other than that, I’ve stayed away from the water.”
“I once dated a boy in Staten Island,” Langston replied. “I met his parents on the first date. And the second date. And the third. So I tend to associate the borough with guys who don’t particularly want to get away from their families. Unfortunately, by the time the fourth date came around, I wanted to get away from his family.”
“When you broke up with him, did you do something drastic? Like, say, burn down their Christmas tree?”
Langston didn’t smile. “What kind of madman would do that?”
“A madman in love?”
Now he smiled…a little. “That, sir, is a very interesting point.”
“We always torch the ones we love—”
“—the ones we shouldn’t torch at all.”
“Precisely.”
Full stop. More wind. More wake. The Statue of Liberty behind us now, no longer greeting us, but instead looking like we’d left her to fend for herself, waiting for the guy she’d met on the Internet whose first words to her would be “You looked smaller in your profile pic.”
Langston turned to look at the island we were approaching. “The answer is: I didn’t burn down his tree. Or his house. Or his heart. I just stopped talking to him. I disappeared back into Manhattan. I imagine he’s found a nice boy from the neighborhood, and their families have dinner together every Sunday at five.”
I couldn’t help myself—I had to ask, “Is that a family trait? Disappearing?”
Now he turned back to me. “Yes. But you have to understand—Lily’s not like the rest of us. Lily’s the best we’ve got.”
“I hope you don’t mind if I agree with that point. Although she does seem to have disappeared.”
Staten Island was clear to us now, its houses and hills a contrast to the land we’d left. I’d thought it would take longer to get there. I had to remind myself that we were still in the same city. If our information was correct, Lily was that much closer. But she was still gone.
“It’s all my fault,” I found myself saying to Langston.
He leaned on the ra
iling, put his hands in his coat pockets. “Why do you say that?”
“I haven’t been able to reach her. And if I can’t reach her, there’s no way to keep her from being lost.”
The blast of a horn drowned out any possible response. The ferry sputtered, as if it was having second thoughts. Then it pulled into the dock.
“Come on,” Langston said.
I followed him down the plank, into the terminal. When we got to the door leading to the street, I asked him, “What now?”
“I honestly have no idea.”
This was not what I wanted to hear. I imagined he’d have a serious plan, involving the triangulation of coordinates, the canvassing of neighborhoods, the cross-examining of samaritans.
“Well, where was she last seen?” I asked.
“By my exile uncle at his garage. But that was many hours ago. And Staten Island is much bigger than you think it is. Most people here have cars.”
“Cars?”
“Seriously. Cars.”
“Then what should we do? Take a cab around? Look for her?”
“I’m not sure. I mean, it would be one thing if there were favorite places we could check, or if we had some idea what she was doing here. But I’m not sure where she’d go. And it doesn’t seem like it would be all that helpful for us to split up and wander around. We’ll only get lost ourselves.”
“So what are we doing here?”
“Trying to make ourselves feel better. That’s what guys do.”
I sighed. The more I thought about it, the stupider it seemed to wander around Staten Island in search of a girl. It wasn’t just a matter of pinpointing the needle—we couldn’t even find the right haystack.
“She’s going to come back,” Langston continued. “And when she does, it’s going to be on the ferry. So maybe we should ride it until she comes on board. We’ll find her then.”
“But what if she’s been abducted? What if she needs our help?”
“When was the last time you got your detective license renewed, Sherlock? I don’t think we’re the best hounds to sniff out this particular Baskerville. And every brotherly instinct in my body is telling me that Lily hasn’t been teen-napped. I think she went for a wander. I don’t know if she wants to be found, but I also think it will mean something to her to know we were trying to find her. So let’s carry on.”
An announcement was made: The ferry was about to leave again.
“All aboard,” I said.
—
We didn’t talk for three stretches across the bay. By the fourth go-round, the novelty of the windy deck had worn off, and we’d found ourselves a bench inside. At first, I occupied myself by looking at our fellow travelers. When the boat was heading to Manhattan, it was full of people crowded into their own routines, like they had timed their newspaper reading to every league traveled, their cruller consumption paced so the last crumb was licked just as it was time to stand and leave. On the trip back to Staten Island, the people looked more like me and Langston—the non-commuters, temporarily unmoored and slightly unnerved. There was one man in his fifties who rode back and forth with us, reading a Jonathan Franzen novel at a pace usually reserved for glaciers and drunk children. At one point he looked up as I was looking over, and I forswore eye contact as quickly as I could…which was still too late. I was afraid to aggressively people-watch after that.
I found myself staring instead at the ring Langston was wearing. I thought about him and Benny moving in together, taking that step. Langston caught me staring and raised an eyebrow.
“How did you know?” I asked him. “I mean, what told you that you were ready to make that leap?”
I half expected him to tell me it was none of my business, or that there wasn’t any way for me to understand. But instead, he looked at me seriously and said, “I don’t think it’s a matter of ready—I mean, not in an all-the-way sense. You’re never completely ready—you just get to the point where you’re ready enough. With us, we didn’t decide to move in together—we just slept over at one another’s places enough that we’d practically moved in together, and then realized it would be much more practical to actually do it.”
“But do you love him? I mean—rings.”
Langston smiled and started to play with the ring, rotating it back and forth on his pinkie as if to prove that it wasn’t coming off.
“Of course I love him. And I might even love him enough to stop being so afraid of it. That’s what we have to find out. And this is the way to find out—to wake up each morning and start each day together, to be the continuity for each other even when everything else is discontinuous or fickle or cruel. I know in my heart that I can live without him and I know in my heart that I don’t want to—that’s a good place to start, right?”
I agreed…and wanted to know more. “But how do you get there? How do you get to that point?”
Langston let go of the ring, leaned back in his seat. “Are you talking about you and Lily?”
“I guess.”
“You guess?”
“I mean, yes. I mean…I feel we could have that, you know? In some way. At some point. But every time we get close to it, we get shy. I don’t mean with each other. It’s more like we get shy with ourselves. I don’t think about me and Lily being good enough together—I think about whether I’m good enough for Lily. I try to be a bright spot. And sometimes with the two of us, it is bright. But a lot of the time, I’m just a spot. It all feels so big, and I’m just a spot.”
“And only intermittently bright.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“No—that’s cool. Too much brightness is damn hard to look at.”
This wasn’t a comfort. This wasn’t anything, really. I didn’t even know what I was saying anymore. I was restless. Talking about Lily usually made me feel as if she was there in some way, in the same way that thinking about her made her feel closer. But that wasn’t working now.
“This is pointless,” I said.
“What?”
It frustrated me that I had to explain—didn’t he feel it, too? “Waiting here. Talking. Thinking. It all feels pointless. She’s going to do what she wants to do, and she’ll come home when she wants to come home, and ultimately she’ll be with me if she wants to be with me.”
“And you want to be with her?”
“Yes.”
“Does she know that?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
Oh, great, I thought. That is hardly reassuring. And then I felt stupid for wanting reassurance when I didn’t feel I deserved it.
Langston went on. “It’s the paradox, isn’t it? The people you know the most, the people you love the most—you’re also going to feel the parts of them you don’t know the most. I can tell you the cereal Benny eats, the pair of socks that’s his favorite, the part of a movie—any movie—that will make him cry. The way he knots a tie. The nicknames he has for each of his cousins. The third-worst heartbreak he ever had. And the seventh. And the tenth, which shouldn’t even count. But there are times when he will fall into this deep incomprehensibility, when he will like something or need something or not need something that I can’t believe he’d like or need or not need, and I will be frightened that I have gotten every single thing about him wrong, including us.”
“Then what do you do?” I asked. I really, really wanted to know. There wasn’t anyone else to tell me. None of my friends had reached that point. And my parents had reached that point, then fell from it hard.
“I wait,” Langston said. “I remind myself that I don’t need to know everything, that there will always be essential rooms within us that will be unknown. I loosen my idea of him, and he becomes recognizable again.”
“It’s not that Lily’s unrecognizable. It’s just that she’s…not there as much.”
Langston sighed. “Well, there’s been a lot going on.”
“I know that. Really, I do.”
“I didn’t say that to m
ake you feel bad. I actually said that to make you feel better.”
“I’m not sure you were successful at either.”
“Look, I’m worried, too. When Benny and I made our decision, the hardest part was imagining how it would leave Lily. I almost said no—I honestly wasn’t sure I could do it. But Benny—Benny asked me a really good question: Who exactly are you helping here? Which means: Lily’s going to need to find her own way, and she’s going to need to grow up beyond our apartment and our family. I’m not going to like it when she makes her own way, in the same way that I’m sure she’s not liking the fact that I’m making my own way. But if we don’t, we’ll stay in the same place our whole lives.”
I had enough distance from the conversation to know that the idea of Lily going her own way was not an indictment of the idea of her staying with me. I knew that Langston was talking about him and her, not me and anyone.
“I should go to school,” I said to Langston.
I wanted him to argue and I didn’t want him to argue.
“That’s probably a good idea,” he said. “This job doesn’t require four eyes. And when I find Lily, I will be sure to convey your efforts.”
This was the difference the day had made: Before, I would have thought this was sarcasm. Now I knew it was sincere.
How crazy would it be, to have won over Lily’s brother but to have lost Lily?
I tried to prevent myself from thinking about that.
I wasn’t very successful.
—
The next time we docked in Battery Park, I disembarked. As the ferry pulled away again, I spotted Langston on the deck.
I nodded to him.
He nodded back.
Then the ferry was gone, and all that was left was waves.
—
Another person might have skipped out on school. He might have taken the day off, gone back to bed. But I wanted the distraction of people talking about winter-break plans. I wanted the last round of classes, the last round of time killing.
Or at least that’s what I told myself I wanted. But once I got there, I couldn’t really get there. I kept checking my phone. Word of Lily’s disappearance had hit the news, and so many people were using me as an outlet for their concern. Friends asking if they could help. Friends asking if I wanted to talk. Friends wondering where she’d gone, as if I was keeping it a secret but would tell them, just them, nobody else but them.