Mrs. Miller was sitting in her usual spot in the doorway. “Leaving so soon?” she called as Hannah neared.
“I’m... Yes,” Hannah stammered, pausing as she reached her, not wanting to be rude. “I’ll be going away for a little while. Just the long weekend.” She stared at her shoes. “I’m...” She took a deep breath, willing herself to say it, to try it on. “Uh...my friends and I are going on a trip. To the beach.” She glanced up, daring to meet Mrs. Miller’s eyes, fearing judgment. Instead, the corners of Mrs. Miller’s mouth curved into a smile.
“Oh, how wonderful!” she said. “I always loved a good adventure! Bring me something back, would you? A lifeguard perhaps. Preferably a young one. They’ll need to keep up.”
Hannah smiled with relief, with permission, and Mrs. Miller put up her delicate arthritic hand. “High five.”
MAYA
Three states away in northern New Jersey, Maya stood in the middle of the ER and asked, “Where is everybody? It’s too freaking quiet in here.” The last two hours of her shift were always the deadest, the ones Maya liked the least. Being busy was one of the things about the job that worked for her, the constant running around. She liked to say it kept her thin, though of course it didn’t, because she wasn’t. Not that she cared. She was a firm believer in conscious self-deception as a life philosophy.
She’d gotten her job as a patient transporter through Blue and her endless connections right after she was fired from her last job. Which Blue had also gotten her. At the time, it had seemed like the worst idea in the world.
“I don’t do hospitals,” she’d said.
“You don’t have a choice,” Blue said. “Just be happy you have a job.”
“I am happy to have a job. I’m just not happy that I actually have to do it.”
Blue had sighed in acceptance of the fact that Maya was hopelessly irresponsible and that deep down this was one of the things she loved most about her. Or at least that’s what Maya decided the sigh meant.
Now Maya slipped into the locker room for her purse, hoping to scrounge up enough change for a snack. She pulled out her wallet, which was empty, of course. It was always slightly surprising to find no money in it, such was the extent of her optimism. The foreclosure letter she’d received was jammed in the bottom of her purse, unopened. She’d known it was coming. But the sight of it still made her stomach sink anew. She stuffed her bag back into her locker, paused at the single, fraying picture she’d taped to the inside door—the girls in the photo booth at the Bridgehampton fair that last summer, their smiles so big, so easy. She glanced at the small mirror she’d hung above it, fluffed her hair, noticed the first signs of wrinkles under her eyes. She smiled to brighten her face. Still the prettiest, she said to the picture. She laughed to herself, imagining her friends giving her the finger as they always had when she said that.
The month of July always snuck up on her, skipped her thoughts and went straight into her body, like a quiet ache in an old broken bone before rain. She refused to give energy to memory, sure that this was why her friends were all screwed up now. They couldn’t climb out of its dark well. But sometimes she could still feel it slipping under her closed door, not in words or images, but as a sense of dislocation, as if that night had done more than traumatize them all; it had ejected her from the only sense of home she’d ever known. Considering the letter in her purse, she felt that dislodgment now more than ever. Carefully she untaped the picture, tucked it in her bag, closed the locker door and returned to the insult of harsh lighting in the ER.
Two nurses were sitting at the station, chatting in low voices. Steve, a first-year medical student and world-class pain in her ass, was flipping through a chart, ever eager to find an exciting diagnosis, a patient with something other than the flu or chest pain, an opportunity to be a hero.
“Another day without a rare deadly virus to cure. How will you go on?” she said.
He stared unamused from beneath a mop of hair overdue for a cut. In return, she flashed him her most winning smile. Just to annoy. He gave her the finger. Victory!
“Seriously, though, where is everybody?” She glanced at her watch. She was antsy for work to be over so she could run home to pack. She’d planned on doing it last night, but then she’d bumped into the twenty-one-year-old who’d come in for a follow-up on his broken wrist. She wondered now if he was still in her bed and, if so, if she could borrow a twenty from him when she got home. In a matter of hours, she would be hopping the bus to Blue’s and she needed some snacks for the road.
“I’m hungry,” she announced to the room.
One of the nurses picked up the telephone; the other got suddenly busy with paperwork. Steve flipped a page in the chart as if he hadn’t heard.
“Oh, come on, just a dollar for some chips,” she said. “I promise I’ll pay you back.”
“If that was true, I’d be a rich man,” Steve said.
“You’ll be a rich man soon enough,” Maya said. “Then we’ll marry, and every night you’ll come home to a freshly ordered-in meal.”
“Quick reminder that I’m gay. Also, I’m not supporting your junkie habit.”
She pouted in an obvious way, but he was immune.
He put the chart down, walked over, leaned against the wall, scrunching his shoulders to minimize the height gap. A patient was being rolled by. He waited until they passed, pushed his bangs back. “How’d it go at the bank?”
“Oh, fantastic.” She pulled a lip balm out of her back pocket and applied it. “An absolute party.”
In truth, her meeting with the loan officer had been more uncomfortable than she’d expected. Despite having an appointment, she’d had to wait in the lobby for half an hour watching a nature show play silently on the flat-screen, a hermit crab vulnerable without its shell scuttling across the exposure of beach toward some elusive shelter. She’d wrapped her arms around her stomach, smiled at the woman next to her. “They should serve cocktails and play a movie. If this was a flight, we’d be halfway to Los Angeles by now.”
The woman didn’t respond, and suddenly Maya wished she’d brought someone with her, someone more competent who could speak on her behalf, or at the very least make her laugh while she waited. She remembered that time Hannah had accompanied her on her first trip to the gynecologist when they were both sixteen. That was right around the age Maya started having sex, and Hannah suggested the appointment, then invited herself along. It was what her friends did. They occupied the space where a parent would be. It was never talked about, it just was—ever since the day Maya’s mother had called her a good-for-nothing piece of garbage in front of her friends because she’d accidentally tracked mud onto the kitchen floor. Maya hadn’t even flinched at the words, inadvertently telegraphing how often she heard them. That was when her friends knew how alone Maya really was.
There was so much a girl didn’t know about the world when she didn’t have a mother to teach her. How had her friends, so young themselves then, intuited this? Perhaps because they, too, were motherless in their own ways. All of them helping one another to fill the gaps. She wondered if that had been the original draw between them. Had they subconsciously sussed out one another’s orphan needs? You find what you know—isn’t that the theory? Either way, Hannah had taken Maya to Dr. Sheridan, the two of them giggling so hard at the absurdity of the stirrups and the cold cruelty of the clamp that she forgot to feel the pain.
How much she’d taken those friendships for granted. No one told her how much harder it was in adulthood to build a family out of nothing. How unmoored a person could be without those connections. But then, who would have?
It wasn’t that Maya didn’t have friends—she had plenty of them. But not like those ones. Not people who’d been the building blocks of her entire personality, who shaped her heart, made themselves her home. Not friends who would drop everything if she needed them, would accompany her to
an icky appointment, be the grown-up when she didn’t know how to be. They used to be her net. Now, in adulthood, with both Hannah and Blue in different cities and Renee who knows where, she was being asked to be her own net. It sucked.
Maya had considered mentioning this to the random lady sitting next to her at the bank when a man in a suit introduced himself as Donald and summoned her into an office.
“So,” he said, taking a seat behind his large desk. “How can I help you?”
Maya stammered, tried to be charming, to find warmth in the person sitting across from her. If she couldn’t get this loan, she would lose her house. And though she never liked it much—a dinky one-bedroom shack in a less-than-safe New Jersey neighborhood—it was also the only security she’d ever been given by her mother. Her mother had left her with no life lessons, no wisdom, no basic tools of living, but she’d left her enough money to buy that place, and she needed to keep it. It was the only stability she had.
The problem was she couldn’t keep up with the property taxes. She hadn’t even bothered to open the bills after the first one. Somehow she’d convinced herself no one would notice. What else could she do? She didn’t have the money. That was another thing that screwed you when your parents sucked—no one taught you things like money management. And when you don’t get taught money management or self-soothing, well...it could be a bad combination for your bank account. She knew it was a problem, but once in a financial hole, fixing it was a whole other level of difficulty.
The loan manager had nodded patiently, then smiled that well-practiced, placating smile. “Let me pull up your account,” he said.
He tapped at his keyboard, peered at his screen, leaving her to stare at the bone-colored walls, a set of framed awards, a series of pamphlets about credit cards and business accounts and money markets. The minutes swelled into tiny lifetimes. The room felt refrigerated and she, pink and raw inside it, a chilled shrimp.
“So, I’m looking at your credit score, and it’s just... It’s going to be hard to get you approved. Is there someone who can cosign? A parent? Or relative?”
Maya shook her head, swallowed on something hard.
“Okay. See, normally I would suggest a home equity loan, but I have to be honest... With your FICO score that’s going to be tough. My advice really would be to try to clean up your credit. You have a lot of credit cards, a lot of credit card debt... If you bring that down, pay some of that off, you can—”
“Wait, how can I pay off debts if I... I mean, that’s the whole reason for the loan. If I could pay off the old debts, I wouldn’t need to—”
“Or you can develop a history of on-time payments. We just have to get your score up, because—”
Maya pushed against the threat of tears. “But I don’t... I need this money now! Like right now. I don’t have time to...to...to develop a history. I’ll lose my house! Do you understand?” Her voice was rising, her grip on calm slipping.
“I do. I do understand. I’m sorry, but I can’t just... See, we have rules for...”
A wide abyss blossomed inside her, a dark internal bleed.
“I have a job now,” she heard herself say. “I’ll probably be getting a raise very soon.” A lie, but whatever. “All of the bad credit was from before. Look, I just need a few months. I need to keep this house. I... I don’t have anywhere to go.”
He smiled at her with compassion. Maybe even attraction.
She relaxed a little bit.
“Let me mess around with these numbers,” he said, “and talk to my supervisor. I’ll call you this week.”
She leaned forward. “I don’t have a week.” A sudden dazzle of panic.
“I’ll do my best,” he said.
“Thank you,” Maya said standing, moving toward the door. “I would appreciate that.”
“Miss Marino?”
She turned.
“I’m going to do everything I can. But don’t get your hopes up.”
“Hope is the only thing I have,” she said. And it was. It would work out. They would give her the loan. She was sure of it. Then she’d just have to figure out how the hell to pay it back. But that was for another day.
That night she’d gone home and called Blue. It wasn’t pride that stopped her from asking Blue for the money. It was that she’d asked so many times before that she wasn’t sure Blue would say yes. And the thought of her saying no—she couldn’t even think about what that would do to her, how deep that rejection would cut.
“Everything all right?” Blue had asked.
“Why wouldn’t it be?” she’d said.
They’d chatted for a few minutes, and then Blue had mentioned that her mother put Nana’s house in Montauk on the market. Maya was surprised to find her eyes well with tears. But she’d loved that place and their vacations together there. Nana’s beach house was the last place they were innocent, the last place they’d been a family together. Just thinking about it summoned a sense of ease, the way being with your friends could feel like swimming a lazy backstroke beneath a warm embracing sun. How soft life had felt then, surrounded by her best people and a summer sea. No responsibilities. No burdens. No one trying to take the roof over her head. If only they could just go back to that...just for a little while. But then, they could, couldn’t they? Before the house sold. That’s what she’d realized. They should all go back. No, they needed to go back. One last hurrah! A chance to be wild and carefree like they used to be. To be a “framily” again. Man, she could really use that right now—to have her friends in her life. Really in it. Not just texts and calls, but together as one again. It could be like a do-over, a restart for all of them.
“So, listen, I have an idea...” She knew this would be a tough sell. She reminded Blue of the vow they’d made, of how long it had been since they were all together. She said that she’d been given a few days off—which wasn’t true, but she could just call in sick. The hospital would understand. Technically it really was in the best interest of her health.
“Yes, let’s do it,” Blue interrupted. “When do we leave?”
Maya had stared at the phone in perfect shock. “Does Thursday work for you?”
Right after that they’d called Hannah. Got the “no” they were expecting but hoping against. Maya still wasn’t sure what made her change her mind, but when she got a text from Hannah saying “What day are we leaving and what time are you guys picking me up?” she wasn’t about to question it.
Now Maya stood in the ER twenty minutes before her shift was over and said to Steve, “About that dollar.”
“Not happening.”
“Have you no pity? My blood sugar is plummeting.”
“I can probably score you a glucose tablet.”
“There’s no time,” she said, putting a dramatic hand to her forehead, letting her knees start to buckle.
He laughed and then sighed and pulled the bill from his wallet. There was a clear understanding as the money swapped hands that Steve would never see this dollar again, but Maya liked to think she paid it back with her sparkling personality.
“Hey, by the way,” she said, “remember that smokin’ twenty-one-year-old who came in last week with a scaphoid fracture? We recently bumped into each other. In my bedroom. Who knew what one could do with a cast?” She waggled her eyebrows and then, knowing the power of leaving an audience hanging, skipped off to the vending machine.
“When are you going to have a real relationship?” he called after her.
She turned, smiled. “What the hell is that?”
She returned with a bag of Fritos to find him sitting at the nurses’ station, doing a search on the computer. She stood next to him, peering over his shoulder, crunching loudly into his right ear to get his attention. “Do you think anyone will notice if I slip out early?”
“Yes,” he said.
She sighed, glanced at h
er watch. Sixteen minutes left in her shift. Sixteen minutes and eight hours until she was off to Montauk. She’d tried to convince Blue to take today off so they could get an earlier start, but her great powers of persuasion could only go so far.
Steve stood, stole a chip from her bag and went to check on a patient. She glanced at her watch again, its unmoving hands like prison bars.
Screw it.
She slipped past the nurses’ station, grabbed her purse from her locker and bolted for the door. She pulled out her phone, texted Blue with her designated arrival time. Together they would go get Hannah.
She stepped out into the dewy morning, shedding work and adulthood like a bad mood, eager to watch them shrink into the distance until finally she was at the beach, where the whole world would drop away the minute her feet hit sand. The beach would fix everything.
BLUE
Blue double-checked Maya’s designated arrival time and grabbed her duffel bag by the door. She paused, glanced back at her apartment, at the sleek contours of her furniture, the spare open space, the walls hung with paintings her interior designer had purchased at auction from Sotheby’s. The New York City skyline gathered around her windows, buildings of every height stacked deep, like a photo of a large family reunion.
The cleaning lady had come again that morning. Blue always had her come on the day she left for a trip. Part of it was so she’d have an immaculate place to return to, but ever since her father died and Nana moved into the home, there was also that creepy thought that if something happened to her, some unfortunate person would have to come and get her things in order. Who would it be? Surely not her mother. No chance she and her new husband would fly in from Paris. She’d probably just send flowers to the funeral home with an impersonal note. No, Blue was being unfair. Of course her mother would come! It would look terrible to her friends at the country club if she didn’t. Blue laughed darkly but then thought, Seriously, who would it be?
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