East Coast Girls

by Kerry Kletter

  “Anyway,” Maya said. “The reason I’m calling is because we’re going back to Montauk.”

  “What?” Hannah said.

  “Long weekend. You, me, Blue and a twelve-pack of wine coolers—just like old times.”

  Old times. If only. Old times seemed like someone else’s life—that’s how far removed she felt from her carefree youth or their summers together in Montauk. They’d spent two weeks every year there at Blue’s nana’s beach house, staying up late and laughing until they’d cried, playing drunk truth or dare in the kitchen and watching the sun climb out of the ocean by the lighthouse. She thought of them soaking in light over long, luxurious days at the beach, chasing the umbrella they’d failed to secure as it skidded like a leaf in wind across the sand, Maya pretending to drown to get the attention of a cute lifeguard, ice cream and souvenir T-shirts and more laughter. The last time life had been perfect, the last time Hannah had ever believed it could be.

  Now she looked out the window. The evening had turned cloudy with the promise of rain.

  “Before you even think about saying no, we made a vow. Remember? We said we’d go back every year, and now we’re almost thirty. We have to go back before we turn thirty.”

  “I’m already thirty,” Hannah said. “Thanks for the card by the way.”

  There was a pause.

  “Let me tell you something,” Maya said. “I am sick and tired of the postal service. Rain, sleet and snow my ass.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Come on, it’s gonna be great! We’ll rent a convertible and wear our old bikinis, maybe even accidentally run over another fruit stand. Seriously, this is nonnegotiable.”

  Hannah remembered Maya plowing through the fruit stand, bright oranges bouncing like giant hail off the windshield, Nana’s Volvo coming to a stop in the potato field behind it. That was the summer Nana was teaching them to drive, and there had been a moment of shocked silence before Maya said, “Well, I guess that wasn’t the brake,” and Nana said, “It appears not,” and then they all burst into hysterics. Later Nana said the price of paying for all those oranges was worth it just for that one good laugh.

  Now Hannah smiled at the memory. It seemed impossible that the girls were ever that innocent. When they didn’t know what life could do.

  “Where is this all coming from?” she said. There seemed an unusual urgency in Maya’s voice.

  “Stop overanalyzing and say yes,” Maya said.

  “Maybe next year,” she said.

  “We can’t go next year,” Blue said. “We put Nana’s house on the market.”

  “Oh no.” Hannah could hear the sadness in Blue’s voice. It made her sad too. They all loved Nana so much, the one adult in their world whom they’d trusted. But Blue was forced to move her into a home last year when Nana lost the last of her memory. Already, Nana’s apartment in Manhattan had been sold; the Montauk house would probably go just as quickly.

  “Now or never,” Maya said. “It will be so fun!”

  Hannah tried to picture herself on an actual vacation, relaxed, driving with the top down, sea salt and the smell of cut grass on the wind, the rosy sunset blushing across the Atlantic, her lifelong friends beside her. She felt a pressure lift. Then she envisioned all the terrible things that could happen. Their car swerving off the road. Careening into the ocean. All of them going under. What would Henry do without her? “I can’t.”

  “You need to,” Maya said.

  “I have things to do, Maya. I have a life.”

  “What things? You don’t have things. And you definitely don’t have a life.”

  Hannah tried to come up with examples, but the truth was she worked from home and was beholden to nothing. Well, nothing except Henry. She wanted to tell them about how well he was doing lately, how just a few days before she could see his eyes tracking her with understanding as she talked, and then as if to prove it, he had smiled at her. Smiled! At her! And, my God, didn’t they know there was no more important place to be, no more important thing to do than to witness that? But she knew it would be a mistake to talk about Henry. It was the unspoken condition of their friendship that she speak of him as little as possible and definitely never of the night that changed them all. Anytime she’d tried, she’d felt her friends’ walls go up. Maya didn’t like to talk about hard things. She put them away like china in a cupboard, stored them somewhere just out of reach. Blue simply didn’t know how to talk about them, grew uncomfortable and shifty.

  “Really, I want to, but...”

  “Sorry.” Blue made crackling noises into the phone. “I think you cut out there. Did you hear her, Maya?”

  “Sounded like she said yes.”

  “I said—”

  “Hold, please,” Blue said and began humming Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” into the phone.

  Hannah tried to speak over her. Blue hummed louder. Hannah sighed and leaned against the wall and wished she was still the kind of person who could do, who would dare. She wanted to ask them how they went about saying yes, or at least saying it ever again.

  “Listen to me. Are you listening to me?” Maya shouted over Blue’s singing. “You’re coming. Do you understand me? Ask yourself this—when was the last time you were truly happy? You know the answer. Now go pack your bags. We leave the day after tomorrow. Blue and I will even pick you up.”

  “We will?” Blue said.

  “Yes—road trip!” Maya said. “It’ll be great.”

  Hannah chewed her lip. “I’ll think about it,” she lied and hung up the phone before they could argue.

  But the thought was like an earworm the way it kept wiggling its way back into her consciousness. She missed her friends. She missed fun. She missed herself—the girl she’d once been with them, the one who would’ve already had a suitcase packed. She thought of the fortune-teller at the Bridgehampton fair all those years ago with that fountain of white hair and that pointy jaw that jutted out like an accusation, whose face had startled when Hannah sat down before her and let her palm be read. She still wondered what would’ve happened if only she had listened to her warning, how different her life, all of their lives, might have turned out.

  Pointless to think about, she told herself. Besides, I can’t leave Henry. She climbed into bed, convinced, and fell asleep with the TV light flickering across her closed eyes.

  Even in her sleep Hannah could sense the storm when it came, beating at her windows, thundering around the building, making the city its drum. She was restless inside all that rain, inside Maya’s question about happiness, and in her dreams the storm got inside her apartment, the water rising higher and higher. She woke at one point with the sheets so drenched that she decided she had leukemia and spent an hour online both confirming her diagnosis and discovering several other deadly afflictions she had, as well. She could practically hear Maya’s voice in her head saying, “I’ll give you a diagnosis. Batshit crazy.”

  In the morning the sky was the color of loneliness, and in the jaundiced light of her bedside lamp, the walls seemed to close in on her like a migraine. The phone call from Maya and Blue had latched like an infant to a breast at the back of her mind, a small incessant tug, a hunger. She made instant coffee in the microwave, turned on her laptop and sat on her couch with both, hoping to distract herself with work. There were so many letters to answer. It was something that Hannah both loved and hated about her job. So many people sought out her counsel, and most of the time it amused her to be perceived as someone who knew things, and perhaps in moments, she believed that she really did. Other times the sense of being something she wasn’t made her solar plexus ache like someone had hurled a baseball through it.

  Henry’s mother, Vivian, had given her the job at the paper. Even before disaster had struck, Vivian had always been kind to Hannah, intuiting, Hannah suspected, that her parents were...not very loving. Now that the
two of them shared the bond of pain, Vivian was even kinder.

  “It doesn’t pay much, I’m afraid,” Vivian had said, “but nothing is easier and less taxing than dishing out advice—which is why everyone feels the need to give it so freely.”

  Hannah had secretly wanted to write obituaries instead. She’d thought there might be something in the reviewing of a life that might reveal the secret of how one went about having one. Or at least on her better days that was why she had wanted the job. On her not-so-better days, Hannah wanted to know all the ways a person could die so she could know what to avoid.

  Now Hannah opened the first letter of the morning and sighed. Dear Miss Know-It-All: My neighbor’s dog barks incessantly. I’m going crazy! What should I do? Not for the first time, Hannah wondered what kind of people took the time to write in to an advice columnist. She decided that most of them were probably like her, reclusive and frightened, hoping that seeing their words in print might offer proof of their existence, something they could cut out and tape to their fridge the way an Everest climber marks their place in history with a flag. They often signed their letters “Anonymous,” which Hannah suspected was more an attempt at accuracy than privacy.

  Most of the letters answered themselves, the writers already knowing what they wanted to do but looking for permission to do it. People were always looking for permission to be who they were, to feel what they felt, which was, of course, always the thing that scared them. She tore through a few more letters, trying to pick out the most interesting ones—but they all seemed like the same problems, the same answers. Why didn’t people ever change? Always stuck in ruts that made them unhappy but unwilling to give them up. She caught her reflection in the mirror beside her bed, frowned, looked away. The clock said 10:00 a.m.—it was time to go see Henry. She got up, got dressed, buttoned her raincoat against the day.

  It was cold for summer, and the rain was dirty, splashing from its puddles up into her shoes. On the way to the Metro, she saw a group of girls, four of them, laughing as they raced down the street, reminding her so much of Maya and Blue and Renee, of those times when even rainy days felt sunny. Hannah watched them live inside the hug of friendship, her longing like talons inside her.

  By the time she reached the care facility, her pants were plastered to her skin. An image of the beach popped into her mind, its warm sand, the rupture of ocean spray, a vibrant sun spoked with shiny beams. She buried the thought, or tried to. The long-term care facility, usually strangely comforting in its familiarity, today seemed as cold and sterile as an autopsy suite. The sound of her footsteps down the empty hall echoed in the aching hollow of her chest.

  Henry was in his wheelchair, eyes glazed and fixed on the wall. She’d fallen for those eyes back when they were fourteen and she’d walked into her favorite bagel shop one morning and there was a new person behind the counter—Henry. She recognized him from school, though they never talked and rarely crossed paths. He’d taken the part-time gig to pitch in for his college tuition, though his parents were against it, said he didn’t need to. He was so responsible like that, so determined.

  She started going every day, and when the tinkling doorbell announced her, he would glance up from beneath a flop of bangs with this shy, delighted grin, almost like he’d been waiting for her. Each time he looked at her like that, she’d get this acrobatic tickle in her stomach, a kind of intense internal smile. Soon, she noticed he was tucking in his shirts, his hair began to have comb streaks in it and he was taking more time to select her bagel—always choosing the biggest ones. Then an extra packet of cream cheese began appearing in her to-go bag.

  He had a boss that ordered him around with mumbling, indecipherable words, and one day Henry did a perfect imitation of him just loud enough for Hannah to hear. She’d erupted in giggles, the sound surprising even her, and he had beamed at her with such unabashed glee—as if making her laugh was the best thing he’d ever done. A week later he wrote a note on a napkin and tucked it into her bag with her order. Do you want to go to a movie with me? He’d supplied check boxes with preset answers: (1) Yes. (2) I’ll think about it. (3) Ha ha not in a million years, and even then still no. The following day when she bought her bagel, she handed him the note back with her cash. She’d checked yes.

  That first date she was so nervous, but when he tripped over his own shoelace and crashed into a cardboard cutout of Tom Cruise and sent their popcorn flying, she realized he was way more anxious than she was. “Meant to do that,” he’d said and proceeded to bump into multiple objects, including her, until they reached their seats. She’d loved his desire to make her laugh and his efforts to win her—his cologne and scrubbed face and ironed shirt. She’d relaxed until the lights dimmed and her breath caught being next to him in the dark. They’d sat with their arms slightly touching and her skin tingled every time he shifted, his crisp shirt brushing against her bare arm. Her hyperawareness of his nearness was something new to her, so magical and distracting. The movie was some stylish indie that was clearly meant to impress her, but she had such trouble concentrating on anything other than him that she couldn’t have named a single character or plot point. Afterward he walked her home. The rain had just let up and the bright glow of streetlights echoed off wet roads, the sky washed clean and glossy. He put his jacket around her shoulders, and they bumped teasingly into each other the whole way home just to have that contact. He told her about his dreams and plans for the future and she told him about hers, and already it seemed like they were talking about theirs. They reached her building and he lingered in her doorway, working up his courage. She was so excited at the possibility he might kiss her that she shook with adrenaline. Finally, he leaned in, his pupils dilated and shiny with what looked like love. The moment their lips touched felt like a match against a striking surface, friction and heat turning her whole body into a spark. She’d never been so purely alive or so happy to be so.

  They were nearly inseparable after that. Everyone said they were too young to be so serious. That it was puppy love. That it wouldn’t last. She was so glad she didn’t listen. It was almost as if they sensed that their time together would be interrupted. Even when they were apart each night, they Skyped until they fell asleep and then kept their laptops on so they could wake to each other in the morning. She always woke up earlier than he did so she could see his soft expression when he blinked awake and realized she was there. How seen she had felt in his gaze, how beautiful. He couldn’t have known what that meant to her, just to be looked at, just to see in someone else’s face that she affected him. Just a reaction, any reaction at all.

  To lose that expression in his eyes was a raw, unending grief.

  But she’d get it back someday. She would.

  Now she adjusted the blanket around his shoulders, wiped his mouth, smoothed back his hair. Her fingers grazed the scar. Even after all this time, she could still see the memory of the smile in his face, still hear his voice, hear the laugh now locked away. She sat down beside him.

  “I talked to Maya and Blue yesterday,” she said, shivering in the air conditioning. “They’re going back to Montauk. They want me to go with them. Some sort of turning-thirty-even-though-I-already-am trip. So stupid, right?” She searched his empty eyes. Not that she thought he’d actually respond. But sometimes it seemed like she could see the answer there. Or maybe it was in his eyes that she got permission to see the answer she already knew. “Obviously I’m not going.” She could hear her voice sounding strange, sped up. “I would never leave you for that long.” She waited. “I’m just saying that I know you need me.” She scanned his face again, looking for a reaction, one clue, anything. The rain outside was coming down harder, sounding like a constant blast of radio static. “You do need me. Right?”

  His mouth was slack, his glassy eyes staring into some world she could not see.

  “I just need a sign.”

  Some stupid machine behind her in the hall
would not stop its monotonous beeping.

  “For God’s sake, just say something!”

  Hannah sat back, startled. She looked behind her, terrified that her voice had carried into the hall. Then she turned back to Henry, somehow expecting to see rage on his face, but the lights were still out. There was not even the courtesy of anger.

  “Oh, Henry, I’m so sorry.” A small sob choked her. “This isn’t what I meant to do at all.” She stood up, nearly knocking over her chair. “I don’t know what got into me.” But Hannah did know. She was going to do it. She didn’t know how, but she was. “I think I have to go. Or want to go. I’m not sure which. On the trip, I mean. Please forgive me. I’ll be back in three days. Just three. I promise.” She bent down and hugged him. “I love you, Henry,” she said. “Please don’t be sad. I’ll be back before you can even miss me.” She knew if she lingered a moment longer, she’d change her mind. With one last look she rushed out and down the hall.