by Lisa Unger
“But when you came back to yourself, you didn’t know me, or where you were. You ran and I let you go. I’ve done my work, you know—therapy, anger management, all of that. I’m older. When someone wants to leave you, you don’t hold on.”
I want to reach for him, but I don’t. Instead I wrap my arms around my middle.
“The next year kind of passed in a rush, so much work, so many commissions. But you were there, always on my mind,” he continues. “When I saw you on that online dating service. I reached out. Then there you were that night, all those feelings I tried to forget, they came back in a rush. You didn’t remember me. I would have told you, but I wanted you to get to know me again, when you were well and whole. I planned to tell you everything, but then you ghosted me.”
He smiles wryly, rubs at his temples.
“I called a couple of times, just hoping. I felt something powerful—I hoped you would, too. Yes, I sent the flowers, not knowing everything else that was going on in your life. I didn’t cop to it on the phone, because you already thought I was a stalker. It’s kind of a shame trigger for me. I’m sorry. I guess I should have told you everything right there, right then.”
I want to move to him, to comfort him, but I can’t.
“So, the other night when you left your apartment, after the ambush, I was there, waiting outside. I knew you weren’t going to return my calls and I wanted a chance to tell you my side of things. But you raced out of there, never even saw me.”
He pauses and sighs. “I’m not proud of it, but I followed you.”
“You hit him,” I say. “I remember the blood, him screaming.”
“We had words, yeah,” he says. “There was an altercation. You were out of it and he was taking advantage of you, Poppy.”
“You’re the hooded man.”
He shakes his head emphatically.
“No,” he says. “That last night is the only time I ever followed you. Whoever that is, whatever it is, it’s not me. I swear.”
I believe him and tell him so. He stays over by the fireplace, though, keeping his distance.
“I’ve made mistakes, a lot of them,” he says. “But I’m a better man than I used to be.”
The fire crackles and casts dancing shadows on the wall. I rise and move to him, and he takes me in his arms. I touch his face and his mouth finds mine, then my throat. The soft of his skin, the silk of his hair, the steel of his arms; I could lose myself. The heat, the hunger between us, it could devour me. But.
“I can’t,” I whisper.
He groans. “I know.”
“I’m not whole,” I say. There are still so many questions, so much I don’t know about Jack, about myself, about what’s happened to me. “It’s not right.”
He kisses my head, holds me tight. His words are just a breath. “I’ll wait.”
27
“You always hated the country.” She’s a little breathless.
“That was you,” I say. “You hated the country.”
“I still do,” Layla says, though the flush on her cheeks suits her. We’re walking on one of the trails on Noah’s land; he keeps some of them shoveled so that he can get to his studio. The snow that’s fallen is piled high all around us.
“Remember when it used to fall like this in the city?” I say. “There were walls along the sidewalk after the plows came through, cars buried till spring. It doesn’t snow like that anymore, does it?”
She comes to a stop. The trail we’re on is steep. “I have a cramp. Too much yoga, not enough cardio.”
“It’s always a challenge to do something different.”
She puts her hands on her hips and looks up at the sky.
“What are you doing out here?” She drops her gaze to me. I can see her anger, her worry. “With this guy you barely know. You’ve walked out on your life.”
I’ve been out here nearly three weeks, thinking, healing. I couldn’t keep her from coming, though I tried. Once I had my phone on again, she tracked me with Find My Friends—again—and showed up. Carmelo waited in the car, stoically lifting a hand to me when I opened the front door for her. She started to cry when I stepped out onto the porch; so did I.
“No,” I say now. “I haven’t. I’m finding it for the first time since Jack died.”
“What about the agency?” she asks. Her breath plumes in the cold air.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Ben and Maura are running the show right now. We’ll see.”
I keep walking and after a moment, she follows.
“I’m not sure we really knew what we were giving up,” I say when she reaches me.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. “The agency was something Jack thought he wanted, and I just went along. But being away from his art, the travel, all of that—I think it contributed to the problems we were having. He grounded himself to be with me, so that we could have the things I wanted.”
“That’s what people do in a marriage,” she says sharply. “You become a ‘we,’ not just an ‘I.’ You make decisions for the couple, for the family you want to become. Maybe you sacrifice some things.”
“But when you give up too much of yourself, maybe resentment sets in.”
She doesn’t say anything for a while; I listen to her labored breathing.
“What about us?” she says finally, her voice small. “What about Izzy and Slade?”
I come to a stop so that she can rest, smile at her, take her hand. “I’m right here, silly. I didn’t fill out an application to go to Mars.”
“Might as well be on Mars,” she says sulkily.
She looks up again, this time suspiciously at the towering pines around us. We walk a little while longer, then come to a spot I like, a fallen log cleared of snow. I sit, feel the cold through my jacket. She sits beside me, leaning against me.
“If he turns out to be a killer, no one will hear you screaming.”
“He could have killed me already—a few times.”
Above us a hawk circles. A lonely hunter, searching for his prey, a warm body beneath the shelf of snow. I watch, breathe.
“It’s my fault, isn’t it?” she says.
When I look at her, she’s sixteen again, that same sad, angry, lost little girl, hiding the bruises on her arms, huddled in the back seat of my dad’s car, sleeping in the bed beside mine.
“What’s your fault?”
“The pills,” she says. “I should never have given you the stuff I was taking. When Dr. Nash wanted you to stop, I told you to keep taking them. I knew you were drinking with them.”
I shake my head. “It’s no one’s fault but mine.”
“I wanted to protect you, to take care of you, like you’ve always done for me,” she says. “I thought that meant helping you avoid the pain you were in.”
This surprises me. In the story of our friendship, it was always Layla taking care of me. She was the strong one, the one who knew what was right, so sure of herself.
“I’m doing it, too,” she continues. “Zoloft, Ativan. I have a couple of bottles of Xanax floating around. The sleeping pills. And, of course, the wine every night.”
The fog lifted, I see my friend for the first time in a while. She looks so tired, so sad, and angry.
“Layla. Tell me what’s going on.”
She breathes out, looks at her fingers pink with the cold. “Mac and me. It’s been bad for a while. I’ve made mistakes—he has, too. We’re so angry with each other. So far apart. I don’t think we know the way back from here, or forward.”
I hear Izzy’s whispered words: They were fighting. That’s all they ever do. They hurt each other.
“So instead of working on our issues, we just withdraw from each other. For me, it’s the pills—that’s my escape,” she says. “For him, it’s work.”
She pauses a moment. The
hawk above us lets out his high-pitched cry. “Whatever we do to avoid the truth of our life, to avoid pain, that’s our addiction.”
I should have seen it. I did see it; I just turned away from them, caught up in my own mess.
“You never told me,” I say. “That you two were in trouble.”
She’s wrapped her arms around herself.
“You and Jack—it always seemed so right. Your art, your business together, your freedom. Mac and I, it’s like we’re rotten at our foundation. I couldn’t face it.”
Rotten at the foundation? Surely not. “It’s just a rough patch. Everybody has those.”
She presses into me shivering and I wrap my arms around her. We should go back; it’s getting colder, the sun dipping lower. But we stay awhile longer.
“And then, after everything you’ve been through. How could I burden you with the problems in my marriage?”
I pull her tighter. “I’m here for you, always. I want to be, no matter what else goes on in my world.”
She lets out a little sob.
“I gave up too much of myself, Poppy,” she says between breaths. “For Mac, the kids—I thought you had to give all of yourself over to it, make everything perfect. I’m not even sure who I am anymore.”
I know the feeling, hold on to her tight. “We’ll talk it all through. Figure it out. Like we always do.”
She sits up and wipes her eyes. There’s the shade of a smile, that steely glint in her eye. That’s the real girl, the one beneath all the masks she wears, tough as nails, a fighter.
“You were always the strong one,” she says. “The one with all the answers.”
“That’s scary,” I say. “I thought it was you.”
We both laugh then, and it carries through the gloaming, scaring a murder of crows from the trees. There’s more she wants to say, I can feel it. But she stays quiet, and I don’t press. After a while, we head back to the house, where inside the fire we left is still burning in the hearth.
“How long are you going to stay out here?” she asks, shifting off her jacket.
Noah’s been in to the city, getting things from my apartment. I gave him the keys and he brought Jack’s Jeep to me, so that I have my own car.
“Not sure,” I say. “I’m seeing a new therapist, someone who doesn’t prescribe. There are good AA meetings here. Noah wants me to stay. And it’s comfortable for me here, peaceful. There’s distance, mental space.”
She looks around with disapproval, though I can’t imagine what she sees that she doesn’t like. Maybe it’s just that she’s not in control of this space, can’t take over here.
“Are you sleeping with him?” she asks. She takes off her boots and lines them neatly next to mine beneath the coats.
“No.”
She scoffs. “Bullshit.”
“Seriously,” I say. “We’re—friends. Well—I don’t know what we are, really. Or what we’ll be.”
Most of my lost days have come back, not the full linear picture, but images, moments, enough pieces that I see a clearer picture of where I was and what I did.
Except.
I don’t know who killed Jack. I still don’t know where that bag is. Or if there was a bag. Or what was in it. I don’t understand who the hooded man is—or if he was there at all. There’s no real clarity on what caused me to lose my grip that first night when I wound up in Morpheus and met Noah for the first time. How can I enter a relationship when I’m not whole?
The new therapist I’m seeing has some thoughts. “Your memory loss, the recent episodes could be attributed to some combination of the pills, the trauma of your husband’s murder, your grief. But we don’t really know what contributes to a psychotic break in someone with no history of mental illness. And there’s so much about the nature of memory that we don’t understand. You may get everything back. But maybe not.”
We sit and I tell Layla everything I remember, everything I know. She listens, and for once in her life, doesn’t interrupt. She lifts a sculpture that sits on the coffee table. It’s a smaller version of the one behind the house. Two figures in a dance, this one looks more like a battle with the larger figure besting the smaller, an arm lifted as if to deliver a killing blow.
“How do we trust this guy?” asks Layla when I’m done. She turns the piece around, staring at it from every angle. “He’s practically a stalker.”
“He’s not a stalker.”
“No?” she says. “You met him during your psychotic break. He brought you out here. You ran away from him. He found you online nearly a year later. You slept with him then, right? He kept calling. He’s the one who sent the flowers, right?”
I admit that he was.
She raises her eyebrows, that look that says she knows everything and she just hopes I’ll catch up at some point.
“Didn’t he stalk someone else?” she goes on. “Wasn’t he a suspect in his girlfriend’s death? That’s what Tom said.”
I try to explain it to her, but she’s not listening. She’s made her decision about Noah and it’s going to take time or an act of nature to get her to change her mind.
“He’s got an anger problem, at the very least,” she concludes sagely.
“You should talk.”
“I’ve grown out of that,” she says, hiking up her shoulders. “I had a lot to be angry about as a kid.”
“So, people change.”
She puts the sculpture down, but keeps her eye on it like she thinks she might have to fight it if it comes to life.
“It’s not a good idea to be in a relationship when you’re in recovery,” she says. “That’s, like, AA 101.”
I smile at her. “Thank you, doctor. I’ll keep that in mind. Anyway, like I said, we’re friends.”
“Friends who live together. Who have slept together in the past.”
She moves over to the hearth, lifting her hands to warm them against the heat. She stares into the flames.
“Do you think you dreamed—or hallucinated—that bag?” she asks.
“I honestly don’t know.”
“No idea at all what was in it?” I’ve already told her this. Why is she asking me again?
“What about Merlinda?” she asks.
“Her number has been disconnected,” I say, feeling the familiar bite of frustration. There’s another dead end at every turn in this maze. “The doorman said she moved out six months ago.”
She lifts the fire poker, moves the logs around, and the fire burns brighter. “So, you were never there at all? You never saw her.”
“It seems that way,” I admit, though it doesn’t seem possible; my memory of our meeting was so vivid, so real—the wind chimes, the smell of incense, Merlinda’s warm embrace.
“You did a web search?”
“There’s nothing,” I say. “Just a cobweb site with an email that bounced, and her old number.”
“I’ll have Tom dig around.” Tension settles into my shoulders. The thought of him makes me uncomfortable, anxious. I don’t want him digging around in my life.
“Thanks, but Grayson’s investigating. I called him and told him everything I remember, all the details of my dreams. I’ll just stick with the police. At least Grayson’s agenda is clear—he’s not a mercenary.”
Layla regards me for a moment. There’s something odd in the air between us.
“There’s no clearer agenda than a mercenary’s,” she says easily. “Money. Plain and simple.”
She says that like it’s a good thing.
“And I’m just supposed to leave you out here with this guy?” she says, putting the poker down and turning around. “Grayson had his suspicions about Noah, told you to stay away. What’s changed there?”
I release a sigh.
“Noah is not a suspect in Jack’s death,” I answer. “He’s been question
ed and investigated. There’s nothing linking him to Jack, or to me before the night we met at Morpheus.”
The missing piece at the center of my life and who I am now:
Who killed Jack?
“I’m okay here,” I assure her. “I’m safe. Safer than I’ve been in a while.”
She shakes her head, disapproval, skepticism pulling the features of her face taut.
“How do you know you’re not dreaming now—or hallucinating?”
“Or in a hypnagogic state.”
“Whatever.”
I smile again but the question rubs against the raw places inside me. “How do any of us know?”
She dips her head in acknowledgment, but a cloud of worry darkens her face.
“What about the hooded man?”
“He’s gone,” I say. I still find myself looking for him in the shadows, but he’s not there.
“Coincidentally,” she says with a smirk. “Now that Noah has you to himself.”
“It wasn’t him.”
“So you say he says.”
“Layla.”
She sweeps her arm around the room. “This isn’t right, Poppy. You out here. It’s not you.”
How can she be so sure of who I am and where I belong when I’m no longer sure myself?
“What are you going to do?” I ask, flipping the conversation back to her. “What are you going to do about Mac? Counseling?”
“He won’t do it,” she says. She rubs her hands together as if she’s trying to warm herself, looks away. “He says he won’t air our problems in front of a stranger.”
I blow out a sigh. How stubborn we all are, how we cling to our ways, our ideas.
“I don’t think there’s anything left to fix,” Layla says. “Maybe we’re just together for the kids.”
“Don’t say that,” I say, leaning toward her. “You loved each other once.”
She doesn’t say anything for a moment. “That was a long time ago.”
There’s that strange flatness to her tone again—resignation. Then, “You said it yourself. People change. Except sometimes it’s not for the better. Or maybe it was always wrong.”