by Laura Hankin
On her subway ride home, she chewed two pieces of gum and tried not to fall asleep. She hated missing her stop and waking up at the end of the line in Flushing, but it had happened more than once recently when she’d taken the subway drunk. She balanced her guitar, in its soft dark case, against her knees.
When she’d daydreamed about her first year out of college, she’d pictured instant stardom, a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, a profile in the New York Times that began, “Ally Morris, radiant in jeans and no makeup . . .” Even when she’d tried to tether herself to reality, she’d still believed she would stand out. She knew that she didn’t necessarily have the best voice of anyone in the world, and she didn’t write the most deeply felt songs—but still, she thought she had something special, some extra sweetness in her smile that would make people want to smile back at her, some quality that she could diffuse into the atmosphere just by sitting on a stage and singing, until it affected all those watching.
So far, though, New York had crushed her soul with a concentrated glee. At first, when she didn’t hear back from any of the clubs or managers to whom she’d sent her demo, she told herself that maybe she’d accidentally given them the wrong contact information. She double-checked the way she’d written her phone number and her e-mail address, searching in vain for a misplaced digit or letter.
She’d auditioned for bands, for concert spots, for everything she could, and each time she’d spent entire weeks afterward with a constricted throat whenever an unknown number called her cell phone (it always turned out to be the pharmacy, reminding her to pick up her birth control, or someone asking her to babysit), and a shaky hand whenever she checked her e-mail. Finally a mutual friend introduced her to Scott, who paved the way for her to sing with Projected Trajectory. They performed in the corner of a different dingy bar every Saturday night for pitiful tips while twentysomethings screamed conversations above the music. She could tell as she sang her No Doubt and Journey covers that her audience would rather be dancing to a DJ.
No one in Projected Trajectory had seemed happy with what they were doing, with the possible exception of Stephen, the lead guitarist who’d started it all. He claimed a total monopoly on writing the band’s few original songs, which all seemed to be about how much he wanted to cheat on his girlfriend.
(The chorus to the song of which he was most proud:
Hey you! Wearing that white
Dress so tight—
Come on over tonight.
Nobody needs to know.
Whoa-oh!)
Everything got worse after she and Tom broke up and Beth, without explanation, stopped responding to her e-mails. Beth had always been supportive, engaged, the definitive example of what a best friend should be. Her sudden disappearance from Ally’s life was the last thing Ally had expected, and it threw her even further off-kilter. Those Saturday night bar gigs began to seem insurmountably depressing. So Ally quit. She tried to be as diplomatic as possible, even writing out a little speech and practicing it beforehand. “I just need to focus on my solo career right now. I’m so sorry,” she said to Stephen, under the fluorescent lights of their sixty-four-square-foot practice space. But he called her a flake and a deserter anyway. Then he’d said the thing that wormed its way into her mind and wouldn’t leave. “Whatever. We’ll find someone better than you.” Of the three insults he’d hurled at her, that one stuck because she was starting to believe it was true.
Most nights, self-loathing crawled into bed alongside her. It burrowed under the covers and wrapped itself around her body. It pried apart her eyelids and pinched the fat on her arms. You’re not pretty enough for this, it hissed into her defenseless ear. You’re delusional if you think your voice is exceptional.
Now she leaned her head against the subway seat, letting the train rattle her around. As she jolted, woozy, she thought, I don’t have to do this. Maybe I should just give up. The idea held such a strange fascination for her that she didn’t realize she’d reached her stop until the doors slid open. Quickly, she slung her guitar case over one shoulder and bolted up from her seat, power-walking toward the doors. She stepped out right before they shut with their bing-bing bell sound, and they closed on her guitar, grasping the neck of it in their dull silver grip.
“Shit,” she said. She wrenched the instrument free, and it came unstuck with a loud crack, a jangling of strings. “No, no, no!” She knelt on the platform and unzipped her case to assess the damage. The neck of the guitar had snapped in half. The top part of it bent jaggedly away from the bottom, and the strings poked up in a random tangle. “Fuck!” she exhaled, trying in vain to fit the parts of her instrument back together as late commuters walked around her, giving her a wide berth like she was a crazy person.
When she got back to her apartment, Gabby was sprawled on the couch, watching some reality show about wedding dresses, her hand in a bag of pita chips.
“How was the rest of your night?” she called.
“Well, I went down on the bartender in the handicapped bathroom, and I broke my guitar on the subway,” Ally said, and then immediately burst into tears. “I give up. I quit music.” She dropped her useless guitar on the ground, not even bothering to be gentle, and slid down next to it.
Gabby turned off the TV and knelt down beside her, wrapping her into a hug. “Ice cream?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Ally said, wiping an icicle of snot away from her nose with the back of her hand. “Ice cream.”
• • •
THEY ate an entire pint of Phish Food. Ally devoured most of it, dragging her spoon along the bottom to get every last bit of the melted chocolate. Then, hyped up on the sugar and starting to sober up, she ran into her bedroom. She pushed her mangled guitar under her bed, way back behind her winter boots, and grabbed her laptop. She plopped it down on the Ikea kitchen table, which wobbled a bit. (When she and Gabby had put it together, they must have forgotten some screw, or skipped some step in the instruction booklet, and they’d never bothered to fix it. Someday, in the middle of a dinner party, it would probably collapse completely, spilling Three-Buck Chuck all over the floor.)
“I’m going to edit my résumé,” she announced to Gabby, who’d turned the TV back on to a show about cats from hell. “And see what the fuck else I’m qualified to do, besides babysitting.”
She pulled up the neglected Word document and tried to make herself sound more impressive than she was. She changed Filed papers to Facilitated documentation organizational system. It barely made sense, even to her, and she couldn’t keep her mind on it. Every few minutes, her eyes flickered involuntarily toward the tab that told her if any new e-mails had reached her inbox.
She nurtured a tiny hope that, someday, she’d get an e-mail that would make everything clear and easy. On that glorious day, she would log in to Gmail and have a miraculous, unsolicited record deal or, she told herself now, a job offer for the career she was meant to pursue, instead of another advertisement from a store she didn’t shop at. As she deleted a swath of text about her music credentials, she saw the little Inbox (1) pop up, and clicked over to it. She warned herself, as always, that it was probably nothing exciting. But then she saw Beth’s name in her inbox, next to an e-mail titled Hey There!
“Oh my God,” she said aloud.
“What?” Gabby asked.
“Beth just e-mailed me.”
“What?” Gabby sat up and peered over the couch, primed for something juicy. “What did she say? Is she e-mailing to explain that every single Internet café in Haiti burned down, and that’s why she hasn’t responded to you in months?”
“Um, I don’t know. Hold on.” Ally opened the e-mail. There they were, words that Beth had written, and suddenly she felt that she needed to be alone to read them. “I’m actually going to go into my room. I’ll be right back.”
“Oh. Okay,” Gabby said, her eyes puzzled and a little hurt. She turned b
ack to the TV, where a tabby cat was mauling its owner. Ally took her laptop and closed the door behind her, turning the television noise into a soft murmur. Then she got onto her bed and started to read.
Hey, Ally,
How’s your life going? I’m sure you are just taking the city by storm. Has the mayor started sending you flowers yet, thanking you for bringing new light and joy to New York’s music scene? Sorry I’ve been a bit MIA—so much to do here. Sorry, too, to hear about Tom. You deserve better.
Anyways, Grandma Stella has decided to sell the house and move into a retirement community. I’m really sad to see the house go, but it’s the best thing for her now. She’s still herself—aka super-sharp and amazing—but an entire house is a lot for an 84-year-old to handle. Plus, last week she had a scary incident where she fell out in her yard gardening, and had trouble getting back up. Luckily one of her friends came by for, according to Grandma Stella, a “gossip session” (of course!), and found her just about 10-15 minutes after it happened. She drove her to the hospital, and they bandaged her up, and she’s okay, but everyone in my family is freaked out that it might happen again when no one’s nearby.
I offered to help her pack up all her stuff and get everything in order before the move. I’ll be going up to Maine pretty soon after I get back to Wilmington next month, for a week and a half around Memorial Day, and was wondering if you wanted to come with me? Grandma Stella really wants to see you. Plus it could be nice to have one last Britton Hills hurrah, a chance to say good-bye to the town. Let me know if you’re available. I completely understand though if you’ve got too many things going on and can’t make it. Seriously. No pressure at all.
This Internet café smells like damp goats,
Beth
When Ally finished reading the e-mail, her eyes were watering dangerously. She’d known that Beth’s grandma was getting into her mideighties, but still, she always thought of her as a constant, forever lording over her cozy home, waiting to welcome Ally inside.
The first time she met Grandma Stella, she was with Beth’s family, who had invited her on their annual weeklong summer trip to Maine after fifth grade ended. As they lugged suitcases toward a cream-colored bungalow, its window boxes filled with flowers, Beth ran ahead. She clambered up the three steps to the porch and rang the bell. After a minute, the fire-engine-red door swung open to reveal a tiny lady with a smile as wide as her head, practically about to combust with excitement and love.
“Hello, hello, hello!” she shouted, doing a remarkably spry little jig. Beth plowed straight into her arms, and Ally felt a sharp jab of jealousy. But then Grandma Stella turned to her.
“You must be Ally,” she said, and immediately smothered her in a hug. She smelled like lavender. “Oh, I have been waiting all year to meet you!”
That first vacation with the Abbotts had seemed to Ally like it took place in some parallel universe, where families cared about each other openly and consistently. She saw no shortage of affection, no rationing of love. After that first moment in Grandma Stella’s arms, Ally didn’t feel like an outsider at all. She’d been invited back every summer since, and for the occasional Christmas trip too. As the years wore on, she and Beth started staying in Britton Hills after Beth’s parents had used up their allotted vacation days and gone back to work. Once, they stayed there for two whole months and got summer jobs together in the town’s ice cream shop. Stella treated Ally like a surrogate granddaughter and, even now, although their monthly phone calls had started leaning toward the biannual, Ally knew to expect a package of cookies and a twenty-dollar bill from Britton Hills on her birthday.
This e-mail contained no real apologies from Beth. No explanations for her disappearance that actually made sense. Sitting on her bed in a cramped, windowless room that felt worlds away from small-town Maine, Ally thought about taking some time to make the decision. To go away for a week and a half and still be able to pay rent? She’d have to babysit like mad over the next month. But more than that, surely it was crazy to go on vacation with the girl who’d abandoned her when she’d needed her most, and whose halfhearted apology for it was almost more insulting than no apology at all.
Yet Ally’s fingers weren’t listening to her brain. They were already typing out a message and hitting send:
Beth,
Yes. Definitely.
Ally
TWO
Beth stood in the train station, car keys in hand, shifting her weight from one foot to the other and waiting for Ally. The car keys jingled, hitting each other with a delicate clink, and she realized that her hand was shaking. Just a tiny tremble, but still. She clenched the keys tight in her palm, and the noise stopped.
They’d decided, via e-mail, that Ally would take the train from New York to Secaucus, right outside the city. She’d arrive at 11:35, Beth would pick her up, and from there they’d head north to Maine. So Beth waited as the train station loomed around her, all high windows and shiny floors, fancy ticket machines, and an odd titanium sculpture of a massive cattail that glowed the colors of the New Jersey Transit logo—purple, blue, and orange. She stared at the cattail, trying to get used to it. Since she’d gotten back to the States a week before, she felt like she’d been trying to get used to everything all over again. Open Arms, the mission clinic in Haiti where she’d spent the last year working, seemed to exist not only in an entirely different part of the world, but in an entirely different universe—light-years away from a place where people spent money commissioning sculptures of giant wetland plants.
At 11:35 on the dot, people started trickling up the escalator leading from the train platform. Beth scanned them as they appeared—a few men, a teenage couple stopping every few feet to smash their faces together, a visibly overwhelmed mom who cradled a baby in one arm and used her other hand to hold the end of her toddler’s leash. Trailing the others, a young woman came up the escalator, looking down at the phone in her hand. She seemed about the right height, and Beth started to smile, nervous, as she approached. As she got closer, though, Beth realized the woman’s face wasn’t Ally’s at all. She was surprised at the strength of the relief that washed through her.
The people stopped coming and Beth waited, looking through the passengers again to double-check. The overwhelmed mom sat on a bench, taking out a snack pack for her toddler and a bottle for her baby. The teenage couple continued on their merry, hormonal way. Finally Beth thought to check her phone. Having just spent a year without it, she kept accidentally leaving it on silent and forgetting about its existence. A text from Ally waited for her: Gahhhh missed the 11:35 but I’ll be on the 12:02. I’m really sorry! Of course. Ally was incapable of punctuality.
Maybe it had been a mistake inviting her. Everything would have been easier if Beth could’ve just gone up to Maine alone. But, no, Beth thought, Grandma Stella’s excitement over seeing the two girls together again trumped all else. For her grandmother’s sake, she could make nice for a week and a half. So she swallowed her frustration, typed back No worries, and put her phone away.
As she slipped it back into the pocket of her shorts, a yell pierced the air. She looked up, confused, her heart punching the walls of her chest, as the mother on the bench struggled to her feet.
“Grab him!” the mother screamed at no one in particular. Then, her eyes locked with Beth, and she directed the words toward her. Beth understood on some level that the toddler had wrenched his leash free, and that he was tottering wildly away, past her, headed for the escalators, where any number of terrible things could happen to injure him. She turned around, reaching out a slender arm that did nothing as it moved through air as dense as Jell-O, failing once again, and the toddler kept toddling until a security guard scooped him up, laughing.
“Whoa there, little guy,” the security guard said, and deposited him back with his mother. Everything went back to normal—the passengers who had stopped to watch, or who had made some cursory moves toward t
he boy, turned around and went on reading their papers and sipping their coffees. But Beth’s hands were so slick with sweat that she dropped the keys she’d been clenching. She picked them back up again and hooked her finger through the key ring, then leaned her head against the station’s cool wall, breathing from her belly until her heart rate slowed back down to normal. She tried to fit her guilt back into the compartment where she normally kept it, but it wasn’t working so well.
She decided she needed to move. She stepped out to the parking lot and double-checked that she’d locked the car, made herself go to the bathroom one extra time in anticipation of the hours ahead on the road and, with fifteen minutes still left to kill, sat down and attempted to read her book. She pulled it out of her bag, the copy of Mountains Beyond Mountains that Deirdre, the founder of the Open Arms Mission Clinic, had given her, but her normal focus and concentration eluded her. She ended up just staring at the Arrivals and Departures board until the clock turned to 12:02.
This time, Ally burst up the escalator ahead of the rest of the pack, trailing a big rolling suitcase and breathing heavily. Her round brown eyes darted around the large waiting area until they landed on Beth.
“Oh my God, I am so sorry!” she called as she got closer. “The subway is the worst ever. It kept doing this thing where it would jerk along for ten feet and then sit without moving for five minutes, so I ran into Penn Station just as the 11:35 was leaving.” She stopped in front of Beth and let go of her bag, which skidded to a halt next to her. “I swear the MTA gets off on making people late for their commitments. Anyways, hello.” Though her words were typical Ally, bright and fun, the smile she gave Beth was wary. Her dimples were nowhere in sight. She seemed somehow a little duller, less shiny than the girl Beth had hugged good-bye at the airport a year ago, before flying off to Haiti.