“Good morning,” I said coolly.
“Good morning.”
We caught eyes for a brief moment; hers were puffy underneath her makeup, her lashes spiking out from raw-looking lids. I looked away.
“Well, I’m going to get some time in the salle d’ordinateurs before it fills up.” Adam blew us a kiss over his shoulder. “See you later, les filles.”
We stood there silently as Sophie poured herself some coffee. From the corner of my eye, I could see her hand—or was it her whole body?—shaking.
“It’s almost time for class,” I said, glancing up at the clock. Mostly I just didn’t want to be in this small space alone with her; it felt suffocating.
“Brooke”—she lightly touched my arm as I went to leave, her voice raspy—“can I please talk to you?”
“Later,” I said as gently as I could, “we can talk after class, okay?”
“I have class at the university this morning. Should I just come back here after that?” Her voice wavered as though she feared I’d change my mind.
“If you want.” I shrugged. “Or we can talk later.”
“No, I’ll meet you,” she said quickly.
We met at our favorite sandwich shop to pick up lunch. The bread was warm and slathered with butter as always, the woman smiled imperceptibly when she thought you weren’t looking as always, but it all suddenly felt alien and it made me indescribably sad. We ate the sandwiches walking through the park, and for a while we said nothing.
“I don’t want to just keep saying I’m sorry,” Sophie said, “because I know it probably sounds empty. That you don’t believe me.”
I sighed and kicked at a small stone. “It’s not that I don’t believe you’re sorry . . . I know you are. But, no, you don’t need to keep saying it.”
We took slow, quiet steps and I bit into my sandwich. We’d been in this park a hundred times. Everything was the same and yet everything felt different. It was as though I’d discovered that I was on a film set after having believed all this time that it was real.
“I just feel like I’ve ruined everything.” Her voice caught. “Part of me wishes you would just scream at me and call me a whore or something.”
I laughed a little ruefully. “I’m not going to do that.” I understood what she meant. I was angry, yes, but it waxed and waned, and in between I slipped into something that felt far worse. There had been a seismic shift between Sophie and me, and fury seemed preferable to the bleak new reality: that our friendship might be beyond repair.
“I know,” she said, “because you’re a good friend and you’re too nice to say something like that.”
I bristled at the words too nice; it didn’t seem to me to be complimentary, it implied that I was someone who could be taken advantage of. She couldn’t really think it was so simple, could she?
“I just—” She stopped, choked by tears. “I don’t know what to do to make it right. You know I’d do anything. Whatever you ask, name it! I don’t care about anything else, only you.”
Her eyes were wide and her fingers curled around her uneaten sandwich, as though she were trying to strangle it to death. She raked her free hand through her hair. I leaned subtly away from her; she seemed to be almost vibrating, to be giving off heat. I couldn’t bear to look at her.
Take me back, I thought, take us both back to the train, let us start this over again. Let me never have to think of his hands on you, of him admiring your naked body, of what he might have said to you, of its all having been so close together: me and him, you and him. Let me never have to relive that night when I knew you’d gone off with him. Let me never have to know what that feels like.
“There’s nothing you can do, Sophie,” I said finally. Perversely I felt a fleeting desire to comfort her, and this in turn made me angry. I have cried too, I wanted to tell her, but not to you, not anymore. This would likely have hurt her most of all. We stood there for a moment, conscious perhaps that we’d reached the middle of the park and that we had to come to some sort of resolution before we reached the other end.
“I need you to understand the way I saw it.” Her voice shook. “I thought that we would share him like we’ve shared everything, that we would laugh about it and it would be just one more part of this whole experience. After you slept with him, I just thought it would be okay. I see now how stupid that was. I know I don’t have any right to ask you for anything, but do you think you can ever forgive me?” Turning away, she stared at the ground. “I need you to forgive me.”
She clutched at my hand so suddenly that it caught me off guard. Almost on impulse, I squeezed her hand and then quickly dropped it.
“It’s not that I can’t forgive you,” I said softly, although as the words left my mouth I wasn’t so certain, “but it doesn’t make it all go away.”
She looked up and gave me a small nod, trying to compose herself. I could hear her ragged breath, she seemed to be trying to slow it down without much success. Her hands clenched and unclenched into fists by her sides.
We began to walk again.
“Can we ever . . . ” she started to say, then exhaled as though gathering her nerve. “Do you think we can ever be friends again? Like we were, I mean.”
I was silent. The answer was something I didn’t want to acknowledge any more than she did. What’s done is done. What’s marked can never be unmarked. All you can hope is for the mark to fade, but it can never be pure again. I would never again have a friendship like that to lose.
“I guess time will tell, Sophie,” I said finally. I couldn’t imagine feeling anything other than what I felt at that moment, but I wanted to think that this anger and this sadness had an end somewhere down the line.
My answer must have wounded her because she said nothing else until we reached the edge of the park. I had a sudden and overwhelming need to be away from her, away from her palpable regret and sadness, her beauty none diminished by the tears, her naive desperation. She repelled me.
“Promise me that you’ll still consider staying,” she said.
“Sophie.” I shook my head. This again?
She put her hands out as though to stop me in my tracks. “No.” She shook her head. I had a wild and fleeting desire to shove her away, to push her down. “Don’t answer right now. Don’t say no just like that. Just tell me you’ll think about it?”
I sighed and nodded. Not because I really would consider staying, but because I knew it was the fastest way to remove myself from the situation. She had become, within days, someone I didn’t feel the need to be honest with. I reminded myself that I owed her exactly nothing. Perhaps I was too soft even for hearing her out.
I took the long way home. I felt deeply sad and, strangely, a little closer to being free.
AFTER THAT, Sophie and I fell into a holding pattern that nearly resembled normalcy, or so it would have seemed to an outside observer. It was too much effort to try to keep her at bay. But we were like a cake missing several key ingredients: fine to look at but all wrong to taste. I focused on studying, and Sophie mostly went out to our bar in the evenings. She wanted me to go with her as was our habit, but I begged off. God knows what she got up to in that place on her own; since our fight she’d developed a wide-eyed look that made me nervous. Or perhaps she’d had it for a while and I’d only now noticed. One time I let her talk me into joining her for drinks, a day when I’d spent so many hours studying I feared my brain might emulsify. It felt tense to be alone with her; we got drunk and reminisced about our trip as though it were already a long-past fond memory. We carefully avoided any mention of Alex.
At the end of our penultimate week we took our final exams. They were long, arduous, and occasionally terrifying, but to my relief it wasn’t a repeat of the entrance exams. I was resigned to my academic fate and only hoped for a passing grade. As I kept telling myself, I had another year of university ahead of me.
“How did it go?” I asked Sophie as we were leaving an exam.
“Fine.
Okay.” Her eyes were glazed over, perhaps the result of filling in so many of those bubbles in a row.
After the exams the faculty threw us a party at the institute. Véronique and some of the other students who had attended the conversation club also came. I happily availed myself of the array of sweets and mediocre wine; once my appetite had returned after finding out about Sophie and Alex, I could hardly keep myself away from sugar, let alone wine.
I was relieved to see Véronique. I knew I wouldn’t go into what had happened. Even though Véronique probably had an idea, it just didn’t feel right to talk about it, and I felt vaguely embarrassed about the whole thing.
“Alex said to say hello,” she told me when we’d stepped aside to pour ourselves a glass of wine. “He had to go back to Paris for work.”
“Ah.” I felt my heart constrict a little even though I had already resigned myself to not seeing him again, or at least so I’d told myself. “Well, you must tell him goodbye for me then.”
“Goodbye?” Véronique asked with what seemed to me feigned surprise. “But I thought that you were staying, at least for the summer?”
I shook my head and drank my wine. Sophie was in the corner paying an unusual amount of attention to one of the white-hat-wearing frat boys, perhaps avoiding Véronique, perhaps even avoiding me. Sophie had said a quick hello to Véronique earlier but then meandered off to talk to some other Americans. The guy looked stunned by her flirtations, and the sight of the two of them made me queasy.
“I would love to, but it’s just not the most realistic of plans. I have to work during the summer.” It felt pleasantly shocking to mention to Véronique the necessity of something like a summer job.
She gave a gratifyingly reverent little nod. “Well, you must come back and visit us.”
“Definitely, and you must come see me in California sometime.” All this time I’d been making plans that would never happen, why stop now?
“Of course.” She smiled quickly. She gazed into the plastic glass that held her wine, cupping it in her palm and twisting it with her fingers. Then she stared at Sophie for too long a moment to be meaningless. “So, work, that’s the reason you’re leaving?” She moved her glance back to me with eyebrows raised.
“Yes,” I said with a rueful smile, “that’s the reason.”
I said my goodbyes to Véronique that night. With her exams also now finished, she was headed off to Mykonos with some friends. I kissed her cheeks and made my way into the night. Despite all of our promises to keep in touch, I knew it was the last I’d see of her. It will be easier, I told myself, if you just recognize this. Let it all be what it really is.
Sophie left with the frat boy before the party ended, perhaps trying to prove that Alex really hadn’t meant anything to her.
The night before I was due to leave, Sophie wanted to go out, but I told her I had to pack. She offered to come over and help, to bring a bottle of wine.
“So where did you run off to last night?” I asked.
She sat at my desk, working on removing the wine cork. She gave me a sheepish smile.
“I thought so.” I laughed. Slut, my mind silently formed the word. “And?”
She shrugged. “Not terrible.” Neither of us wanted to be having this conversation and yet we both wanted to pretend that we could still speak freely with each other. It felt strange to have her in my bedroom. I’d agreed to see her because, somehow, even after what she’d done, I was caught between my terror of losing her completely and my overwhelming desire to put thousands of miles between us. I couldn’t be in the room with her without feeling waves of anger lashing up from the pit of my stomach, small torrents of revulsion when I thought of the two of them. Intertwined. Naked. Without me. I had seen too much of Sophie’s body not to be able to picture it perfectly.
She poured me a glass of wine and I sat down on the bed next to my overflowing suitcase. I looked over Sophie’s shoulder, out my open window. Was it really the last time I’d see the view from here? The last night I would spend in this room? In France? It felt surreal that all this would so soon become my past.
“Look,” Sophie finally began, her voice uneven, betraying the effort it took to say whatever she had to say, “I know things haven’t been the same between us.”
“Sophie,” I said, cutting her off but trying to keep the edge out of my voice. I wanted something, but I didn’t think a fight was it. “We really don’t need to do this.”
“Just listen, please?”
I nodded. I rolled my last few items of clothing tightly and pressed them into the corner of my suitcase.
“I know things haven’t been quite the same between us,” she said again as though starting a well-rehearsed speech, “after what happened. And I know you said you need time, and I respect that, I do. But I really think that your deciding to go home because of this is something that you’ll regret.” She paused as though gathering her strength. “I think you should call and change your ticket. I think you should stay.”
She reached for her phone and held it out to me, her hand shaking slightly, as though she meant for me to agree and call right then with no further discussion. I felt a sudden and almost overwhelming exhaustion. I wanted to laugh in her face, or scream at her, or bury my head in her lap and cry for hours.
“It’s not just about that, not just about you. I couldn’t even afford the change fee on the ticket, let alone spending a summer in France. I couldn’t stay even if I wanted to.”
“Well, do you want to stay?”
Did I even know the answer to this question? Did I want to stay even after everything that had happened?
“Part of me does. But it doesn’t matter,” I said finally.
“It does matter!” She got up from her seat and came to kneel by the bed, taking my hand in hers, her skin hot and fevered. “I can cover you. My parents sent me some money for the summer. I told them I was joining an arts program. It would get us through until we find jobs in Cap Ferrat.”
“Sophie, stop.” I pulled my hands away. “Just stop.” She got to her feet and sat back in her chair, looking despondent. Couldn’t she see she was humiliating both of us? “It’s just not going to happen. This is not a fairy tale, we are not like Alex and Véronique, we don’t live in their world. Or at least I don’t. . . .” I sighed.
Sophie’s eyes brimmed with tears. “I knew I’d ruined everything,” she said under her breath.
“Sophie, not everything is about you.” A little wave of surprise passed over her face. “We have to go back to the real world eventually. At some point you have to be practical. I wanted to believe it was all possible too, but it isn’t. It’s not the right thing. And maybe you shouldn’t be staying either.” I wondered how well her parents knew her, how much they had any idea what sort of life we’d been living over here.
“I can’t go back,” she said—she had a hell-bent look in her eyes, daring me, or anyone, to challenge her.
“Why not?”
“I just can’t. I want you to stay with me, but even if you get on that plane tomorrow, I’m staying here.”
Sophie turned and stared out the window. In profile I could see a tear rolling down her cheek, leaving a blackened trail of mascara.
I shrugged, though she wasn’t looking at me. “Oh, well,” I said quietly, “none of my business.” I closed the suitcase with a violent zip and stood up. I crossed my arms over my chest.
She turned back to look at me, her eyes huge and hollow. “Don’t say that, please don’t say that. I want to be your business.”
I wanted to hug her. I wanted to tear her to pieces.
“Come on,” I said softly, “help me check the rest of the room to make sure I didn’t leave anything behind. I’m always doing that.”
Then it was time for her to leave. I walked her down to the street, her feet falling unsteadily on the stairs.
We put our arms around each other. It was the first time since the incident that I had really touched her, and it w
as almost more than I could handle. She shook a little in my embrace and I thought I might faint.
“I wish you’d stay,” she whispered into my ear. “I’ll miss you so much.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to write you. You don’t have to write back immediately, just read my e-mails, and then when you’re ready, you can write back, okay?”
The bargain had a girlish desperation to it. I wanted to say something to soothe the moment, but there was nothing for it. No more playing pretend, I thought. I managed a little nod as my eyes found a spot beyond her shoulder on the street. I couldn’t bear the weight of her gaze anymore.
“Oh!” Her eyes lit up. She rummaged in her gray bag and pulled out a tiny red box. “For you.”
I smiled nervously and for a moment was still.
“Take it.”
Inside the box was a delicate gold chain bracelet with interlocking circles. “Sophie, I can’t . . .”
“It’s just a little friendship bracelet,” she said with a wave of her hand.
“Sophie, it’s from Cartier.” I whispered the name with reverence.
“I know, I know. But it’s not the expensive one or anything. Look, I got one for myself too!” She pulled the sleeve of her cardigan up to display it. “So we match.”
“This is too much.” I shook my head. I imagined how horrified my mother would be if she saw it; she’d probably call Sophie’s parents about it.
“It’s nothing.” She moved away from where I was standing trying weakly to hand her back the box. “I insist you keep it.” She stepped away but her eyes stayed on me until the very last second.
“À bientôt, chérie,” she said as she walked away. See you soon.
I watched her go. Even then it seemed I felt the need to memorize the image of her hair swinging back and forth. Part of me was waiting for her to look back over her shoulder, to smile or to say something, but she didn’t. Somewhere in my heart I feel that if she’d turned around, things could have gone differently, that knowing I was standing in the doorway watching her would have been enough to make her realize I still loved her, even after everything.
Losing the Light Page 24