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 door-
bell 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, in-
decipherable 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
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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.
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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
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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 reac-
tion, 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.
Mrs. Miller was sitting in her usual spot in the doorway.
“Leaving so soon?” she called as Hannah neared.
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“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 ad-
venture! 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.”
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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.”
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“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, hop-
ing 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. Stil 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 some-
times 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. Consid-
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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.”
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“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 ap-
pointment, 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 expo-sure 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, inad-East Coast_9780778309499_TS_txt_277098.indd 37
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vertently 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 intro-
duced himself as Michael 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
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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.
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