Losing the Light

by Andrea Dunlop

  Mercifully the answer seems to satisfy him.

  The conversation carries on in a decidedly neutral direction. He talks to me about his book tour and asks me thoughtful questions about what I’m reading and what I like to do in the city. He was plenty polished when he was twenty-five, but the years have only made him smoother around the edges, so refined that his words seem to slip through the air and surround you on all sides. It can’t be like this, I think, I didn’t come all this way to chitchat.

  “Do you live in the neighborhood?” Alex asks, hailing the waiter for another drink.

  I shake my head. “I just moved upstate. Not too far, it’s practically like staying in the city with the train being as fast as it is.”

  “I had not taken you for a suburban girl.”

  I shrug and smile, tempted to add that I hadn’t either.

  “So it must be the fiancé, in that case.”

  I blush. He has noticed the ring. Then does he wonder what I’m doing with him if I’m engaged? No, I think, he probably doesn’t wonder that. I’m sure I am not the first girl with an occupied ring finger to have sat across from him, falling for all of it. And yet, I remind myself, I have another purpose for all of this, which is why I didn’t remove the ring. I am not here to seduce or be seduced.

  “He’s starting to think about children,” I say.

  “How lovely. Probably enough about him now, no?”

  A pang of guilt surges through me as I nod. “Is the whiskey helping you stay warm?” I say rather helplessly as the waiter brings him another. I am dancing around the point, unable to find a way in.

  “Oh, yes, you should try some, although red wine can do the trick nicely as well. Honestly, I don’t mind the winters here. It’s the summers I can’t stand. I always used to leave for those.”

  “Where do you go for the summer?” I refuse to use the word as a verb as people on this coast are so fond of doing.

  “I suspect you can guess, my dear.”

  I smile broadly. He remembers. “Cap Ferrat. How wonderful. The most beautiful place I’d ever seen.”

  “Yes, Mamie left me the house,” he says impishly, “so I feel quite compelled to spend every summer there.”

  Ah, Sophie was right, then. He got the house and, I suspect, quite a lot of the money, and so he was able to pursue his dreams. I’m lost for a moment, the visceral memory of him returning full force as he sits across from me, my mind traveling back through the years. I’ve never been back to France after what happened there. I find myself overwhelmed.

  “And your friend, what was her name?”

  “Sophie.” My voice comes out in a squeak.

  “That’s right, my girl in the ocean.”

  “Excuse me for a moment.” I get up shakily from my chair. My legs feel weak and wobbly as I make my way to the ladies’ room.

  I sit for a moment in one of the stalls. What am I doing here? What did I ever hope to gain from this?

  I start to cry, and once I begin, it takes over my body and I’m suddenly heaving sobs. I’ve thought about Sophie plenty in the past ten years, but it’s been a long time since I’ve cried for her. Alex looks so much the same as he did the last time I saw him that it fools my mind into thinking we’re back in France, and if we’re back there, then there’s still a chance I could do something differently. I could have stayed. I could have helped her. I didn’t have to make her feel so guilty about what she’d done, about being with him. The letter I sent. The torn-up plane ticket. The bracelet. I hear her desperate voice on the answering machine.

  Looking in the rearview of all these years, the pain I felt over Alex seems so faded as to have never existed. Because it is nothing compared to the pain that came after. I should have known that she was fragile, that her regret could destroy her.

  So what did I want from Alex? To acknowledge that we’d mattered to him? That we’d had some impact? That we’d at least been memorable to the person who’d been everything? But we were just two girls he’d slept with a decade ago. Undoubtedly two out of many. And it wasn’t his fault. I’d always known he meant more to me, more to us, than we’d meant to him. That was never really the question. But Sophie had been so separated from everyone she knew at the end that if he didn’t remember her, it was as though that version of her was never known by anyone but me. And I couldn’t bear the weight on my own. I needed him to know and be sorry that she was gone. To shoulder the burden just a little, to spend at least one night as I had spent so many nights, wondering if he could have done something to help her. Part of me wanted to know if he had seen her after I left, if her stories had been true. But despite what he might tell me, the end would always be the same. She would still be gone.

  But it isn’t just about Sophie. I can’t pretend that I am selfless, that her death is the only reason for my regret. The last time I saw Alex was the last time a certain kind of life, and a certain version of myself, had felt possible. Enough years had gone to temper all of my expectations. It’s just what happens when we grow up.

  Even Alex was disillusioned. He too seemed fonder of his younger self.

  Then a truly dangerous thought takes hold. What if we could bring each other back? What if we were each the key for the other?

  But then I think of James, how real he is. How he’s sweet with my mother and sends me text messages from work in the middle of the afternoon when one of his coworkers does something funny. How he can make me laugh until I have tears in my eyes. How he always makes me dance with him at parties and how I always love it. How he still looks at me with gratitude and wonder when I undress before him.

  A girl knocks on the stall door. “Hey, are you okay?” She sounds drunk, wasted, and embarrassingly this makes me laugh out loud, that she is trying to save the day.

  “Yes.” I pat delicately under my eyes with a few sheets of toilet paper. “I’m okay. Thank you.”

  “Okay,” she slurs, then stage-whispers, “he’s not worth it, honey.”

  Taking a few deep breaths, I emerge from the stall. I have a particular talent for bouncing back quickly from a sobfest. I clean up the residue from my eye makeup and my face appears as though nothing has ever happened. I look at my watch. I can make it back to Grand Central in time for the nine o’clock train if I leave soon. I resolve to go upstairs, pay my portion of the bill, and say good-night to Alex. Let him think I’m a soon-to-be-married woman who’s had a change of heart just in time.

  I approach the table to reach for my purse, but I can tell by his expression that Alex has been waiting to ask me something.

  “It’s all coming back to me,” he says, smiling, “you and Sophie. The two beautiful American girls. What fun we had that weekend!”

  A weekend, that’s what he remembers. Yet my entire year, and some years since, had been consumed by him.

  “So did you keep in touch? You were such good friends then.” His voice is nostalgic.

  “No . . . I . . . No, we didn’t.”

  “She stayed on in France for a time, didn’t she?”

  I nod and feel ill. This is it, I realize, I have to tell him.

  “Véronique saw her out and about once in a while that summer. And then she came out one weekend to Cap Ferrat.” His smile seems too perfectly French.

  I nod. I realize now that I’ve only ever had Sophie’s version of anything that went on with her and Alex, that there might be another side to all of it.

  “And then, actually, I saw her several years ago in Paris. I don’t know if she was visiting or living there, though she was looking very French.” He paused to take a sip of his drink.

  I feel the blood draining from my face. “You . . . saw her?”

  “Yes, she came lurking around one of my shows, just like you! It was one of those parties where everyone was grabbing me by the arm and pulling me into conversations as I tried to make my way across the room. I missed talking to many people that night, but I was especially sorry to have missed her. We caught eyes at one point and she
gave me a little wave, but, alas, she didn’t wait around for me.”

  “But—” I begin quietly, only to be interrupted by the waiter.

  “Miss, would you like another glass of wine?”

  I should say no, just the check. I will spend a few more minutes here waiting for the bill, and then I will go back into the cold night, back to the subway, back to the train, back to my house where my whole life is waiting for me.

  Yet, much as I try to tell myself that he didn’t see Sophie—because, good Lord, how many lovely, lithe blondes are running around Paris?—that he couldn’t have seen her, an alternate reality plays out in my head. Sophie no longer Sophie but some Parisian version she’d chosen instead. Could she be alive? My insides suddenly feel as though they’re coming apart, my head is clouded and dizzy. I’ve made my peace with her death, and I can’t just resurrect her because Alex saw a blond girl. But . . .

  “I should . . .”

  The reluctance in my voice gives me away and Alex grabs my wrist lightly, shaking his head. “No, you can’t leave. Not when we’ve only now found each other at last. Please stay.”

  Please stay. If he’d only said those words to me ten years ago, would I ever have left France? He does not release my wrist, but begins to stroke the inside of it with his thumb. I feel it, what I’d had then, all that slipped through my fingers. All those years ago, he and Sophie had made me believe that I could be more, that anything I wanted was possible. Maybe it still was. If Sophie could come back from the dead, why couldn’t I?

  The waiter looks down at me, his eyes both expectant and bored.

  “Okay,” I say. “One more drink.”

  Grand Central is nearly empty by the time I catch my train later that night. Once I’m seated, I open my book out of habit, but I can’t focus on the words. There’s no space in my head to absorb them.

  Alex is exactly the same; other than the gray at his temples, it’s as though not a day has passed. In the moment, the sameness of him seemed to compress the years, to take me right back in time, the nostalgia dizzying. But now I realize I’m also a bit disappointed. I realize that it’s actually a bit pathetic that Alex is the same as he was when he was twenty-five: charming and bright, yes, but also arrogant and shallow. Unwilling to go deeper than the superficial glamour that surrounds him, and unwilling to separate himself from it.

  I am relieved to be going back to my warm house and my steadfast fiancé. I am relieved that I am relieved.

  I stare absentmindedly into the blackness of the window of the train, the ghost of my own reflection looking back at me. A thousand questions run through my mind about Sophie. First of all, what did I really know about her death? Sophie hadn’t been on the plane from Paris. All of her things were left behind. A police report was filed that a couple had seen a girl of Sophie’s description jumping off the bridge. And they’d found the body in the lake below. Hadn’t they? Was this simply a detail my mind had filled in? As I thought about it, I realized I was relatively hazy on the details. Her parents hadn’t shared the forensics with me, but then why would they have? There’d been no doubts at the time that she was dead. Had there? If there had been any mystery, any scandal, word would have made it around the tight-knit alumni community of our little school like lightning; her death was a legend there.

  I suddenly feel nauseated and bend over and put my head between my knees.

  “Are you all right, miss?” a man in a sharply tailored business suit asks me, a middle-aged finance guy on his way back home after working long hours.

  “Yes, yes, thank you.” I smile weakly at him.

  I think of Sophie, Sophie at thirty, Sophie alive but perhaps no longer named Sophie. Sophie speaking perfect French and wearing perfect French clothes and shopping at the market and smoking cigarettes, every trace of the California girl erased. How would she have pulled it off? She always seemed to have more money than she even knew what to do with. But her parents weren’t that wealthy. For me back then, there was only rich and not rich, no gradations, but now I understood that they were unlikely to have had the kind of money Sophie acted like she had. Wasn’t there a grandmother, though? Someone who’d left her something? I suddenly remember the magazine mogul she’d met at the party, the one who’d shown up in Paris and insisted on taking her to dinner. I imagine her: Save me from going back to my dreadful American life! Help me disappear, I need you!

  I should be furious, I realize, at the very idea that this might all have been a charade, that Sophie has let me feel guilty for all these years. But I’m not, I can’t be. Because the idea of it, of her living in some parallel, self-designed universe, sets us both free.

  The train speeds me toward my comfortable home, toward James, and the life I was meant for. And I am smiling to myself with tears running down my cheeks, imagining that perhaps Sophie is sleeping somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic, keeping company with my long-lost dreams.

  Epilogue

  COME ON!” Sophie said to me. “I’m glad we get some beach time before everyone gets here. We don’t have to share.”

  It was our second day in Cap Ferrat. Alex was napping up at the house and no one else had yet arrived. Sophie and I were too keyed up to rest, despite the day’s relentless heat. I laughed and followed her. The sun was blazing above us as we made our way down through the scratchy brush that lined the trail.

  “I always thought I’d want to live in Paris, but maybe I choose Cap Ferrat instead,” Sophie said after we’d arrived breathless on the beach and plopped down in the sand.

  “Nice to have the choice.”

  “I think our choices are whatever we decide they are.”

  “Yeah”—I looked out at the pure azure of the ocean—“maybe.”

  “We’re young and beautiful!” Sophie shook my shoulder as though to snap me out of something. “Anything is possible.”

  I laughed. I wanted to believe her.

  “I feel like I’m another version of myself here,” she said, “like I’m living a whole other life and nothing back in California matters.”

  “Me too. I miss my mom, though. If it wasn’t for her, I probably wouldn’t want to go back at all.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  “I’m lucky?”

  “Your mom, she’s amazing. I wish my mom was like her.”

  It had never occurred to me that Sophie would have envied me for anything. It had never occurred to me that my roots might have been deeper than hers. “I wonder if our moms knew what their lives would be when they were our age.”

  “I’m sure they didn’t,” Sophie said sadly, “or they probably would have done something differently. At least my mom.”

  “Mine too, I think.” I’d never wondered much about it, whether she had regrets. It wasn’t that my mother seemed particularly unhappy, but it also didn’t seem like the kind of life anyone would deliberately choose.

  “But”—Sophie bit the edge of her lip as if she could hardly contain her smile—“it’s going to be different for us. We’re going to choose. We’ll make our own destiny.” She dug her hands into the sand beneath us as though trying to hold on to it, to keep it from slipping away. She leaned her head on my shoulder. “After all, I’m nothing if not resourceful.”

  Acknowledgments

  Much love and gratitude to my parents, who always treated my writing aspirations seriously and endured many years of my writerly angst. I won the parent lottery and I love you guys to pieces.

  To my fantastic agent, Carly Watters, who helped make this book what it is and has been an invaluable support to me throughout the process. To my darling editor, Sarah Cantin, thank you for believing in this book and for your keen editorial eye and your unfaltering positivity. A big thanks also to Haley Weaver, Steve Boldt, and all the rest of the folks at Atria for their goodwill and hard work.

  Many, many book friends have helped me along in my journey. To Lucy Silag: your belief in this book has made an enormous difference, thank you for all that you’ve
done. To Meg Thompson, Susan Chi, and Colleen Lawrie: thank you for being such good friends, helpful readers, and shoulders to cry on over the years.

  To all of my wonderful work family at Girl Friday Productions, especially editor extraordinaire Amara Holestein for all of her help with the original manuscript. Much love to Leslie Miller, Ingrid Emerick, Jenna Free, Christina Henry, and Kristin Mehus-Roe. I’m so lucky to have you as friends and colleagues.

  Big thanks and all my love to Derek Vetter, who is always on my side.

  Losing the Light

  ANDREA DUNLOP

  A Readers Club Guide

  Questions and Topics for Discussion

  1. “I’m more than willing to take an anthropological stance on the beautiful people.” Early in the novel, Brooke positions herself as an “anthropologist” among attractive people—a neutral observer. Do you agree with Brooke’s self-description? Why or why not?

  2. One of the major themes throughout Losing the Light is the notion of belonging. What does it mean to belong? Using examples from the novel, discuss whether it seems like people naturally “belong” (in a certain crowd, country, lifestyle, etc.) or whether belonging is a matter of confidence or is somehow otherwise fostered. What are some moments in the book when Brooke feels she does or doesn’t belong?

  3. Alex has a critical impression of the wealthy, glamorous people who surround him, and yet Brooke notes both in France and in New York that he is, in essence, one of them. Why do you think he regards his peers this way? In what ways do his views parallel or differ from Brooke’s opinions of rich, fashionable people?

  4. As the novel goes on, Brooke becomes more aware of the socioeconomic difference between herself and Sophie. How are class differences depicted in Losing the Light? What is their significance?

  5. What role does Brooke’s relationship with her mother play in the novel? How does this relationship influence Brooke, and what lessons does she learn (or fail to learn) from her mom?