We Were Never Here

by Jennifer Gilmore

  “That is so bizarre!”

  “It really was. I’m sure my mother would have bought it if I’d wanted it. But I wanted to take it. I understand it, shoplifting. Who doesn’t want to just see if she can get away with something?”

  “I’m not sure that’s it. But the stealing part doesn’t appeal to me at all.”

  “Well, that’s a relief!” my mother said. “Obviously that was not an endorsement.”

  A waiter was making his way over to us.

  “I mean I have other things . . .” Like fleeing hospitals, I thought.

  “I’m sure,” she said. “So strange, that day, with the ChapStick. My father was a judge. It was fairly humiliating for him. I still feel this terrible, terrible guilt. To this day.”

  I looked at my mom. I felt terrible guilt as well. For all that I had put her through. But, I thought, at least I hadn’t been arrested for shoplifting.

  “Two chardonnays.” My mother grinned at the waiter, daring him to question her.

  Well, this was new. I tilted my head at my mom. I’d had wine with dinner before with my parents, on holidays and such, but this public display was a whole new level of Daphne’s . . . liberalness.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “Ma’am?” She was horrified. “Call me Daphne,” she said into her menu, she really couldn’t help herself, as he turned to leave.

  The wine was fun and it put me in kind of a mellow mood, and then Zoe was waiting when we got home. I guess she had heard what had happened to Nora from my dad, who must have heard from my mom, who must have called him while I was having the charming experience of dealing with my bag in a public bathroom. I guess I really needed to finally talk about Connor and then Nora got arrested, so whoever was sitting in front of me was who it was going to be.

  So Zoe.

  “Hey!” she said brightly, trying to corral Greta. Was it only then I noticed the half-eaten couch and the dust bunnies—more hair bunnies—twisting along the old Oriental carpet?

  “We need to crate train her,” my mother said to no one in particular.

  Connor. Connor. It was all I could think about.

  I miss you, I’d written. I can’t believe you’re gone. It feels like you weren’t real.

  When would he get my letter? I ticked off the days in my head.

  The dogs bounded with Zoe into her room, and she waved me in.

  Zoe’s room: How was it so much better, cooler, older than mine? Maybe it was that she had framed pictures—of her and Tim, us as little girls, a sepia-toned one of Nana as a baby in little white baby shoes and a bonnet—and also a framed poster of the Calder mobile that hangs in the National Gallery. Her books—huge art books on Impressionism and Neo-Fauvists, also little books of poetry, the kids’ books that she loved, like Madeline and Many Moons and Sylvester and the Magic Pebble— were all neatly shelved. A canopy bed. I don’t even know how we came from the same parents, really.

  The dogs jumped on the bed and we all lay back, even Greta.

  “Crazy about Nora. What a freak,” Zoe said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “The stealing, Liz. That’s crazy.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “I thought Nora drove you nuts anyway.”

  “She does and she also doesn’t. I don’t know, she seems a lot better than Dee-Dee and Lydia, that’s for sure.”

  “That is truth,” Zoe said.

  I petted Mabel and didn’t say anything.

  She closed her eyes and sighed.

  “Yeah, everything’s different now,” I said.

  Zoe nodded.

  “I miss Connor.” As I said it, I realized how badly I needed to talk about it. Then I said it: “I think I loved him.”

  “He was a sweet guy,” she said, but I could tell she didn’t mean it.

  “Was?”

  “You said ‘loved.’”

  “Okay, love.”

  “Do you still see him? Do you guys talk?”

  “God,” I said. “I just told you I loved someone.” I shook my head. “Love someone.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “Tell me.”

  “It’s okay. So, don’t repeat this to Mom and Dad, okay? But he got sent to boarding school.”

  “I heard that,” Zoe said.

  “From who?”

  “Just around.”

  “What are you talking about?” I felt a new kind of panic. That something had been going on behind my back with the people I had once been closest to.

  “I know I should have said something earlier, but we have a few mutual friends. I knew someone—a friend of Jake’s, Tim’s friend from swim team?—who dated him. Well, more like hooked up with him, I guess. And he never called or texted or emailed her again. I think they did a lot,” she said. She wouldn’t look at me. “The girl was really upset.”

  I was dumbfounded. “Well, don’t you always have all the information.”

  “They were drunk. Lizzie, he’s one of those asshole private-school boys. We hate those kids.”

  Was this in fact West Side Story? I recalled not a single conversation that was about how much we didn’t like private-school boys. I didn’t even know them. “He’s not, though. He’s not like that.”

  “Lizzie, he is. I’m sorry he got sent away, but maybe it’s just for the best.”

  “I’m really glad I have you to talk to,” I said, extricating myself from the pile of us. “So helpful.”

  “Come on.” She grabbed my wrist to pull me back down.

  I twisted it away. “No, Zoe. That is messed up.”

  “Liz!” she called to me when I was in the hallway. “I was just trying to help!”

  I went into my room and closed my door. I took out the letter from Connor, and I have to say, I loved it. I wanted to press it into a book and save it forever, like a flower or pretty leaf. I wanted to kiss it and hold it, open, to my heart.

  And yet. And yet!

  Now I couldn’t stop picturing Connor with another girl, someone perfect, either perfectly cool or perfectly tanned and blond. Who would it be? No matter where he was, Connor always found someone. After all, he had found me.

  Who would Connor love? If he could love.

  I wished I could take my letter back, reverse the day and just suck it out of that mailbox, go back to my bed, undo writing it on my study buddy covered in stars, put the paper back, the pen. Be the kind of girl who just one time waited patiently. Be the girl who didn’t say everything all at once.

  I heard Tim arrive yet again and I heard him go into Zoe’s room and I heard the dogs leave, and the creak of the bed, and I heard them talking and then after a few minutes I heard silence.

  Fuck Zoe, I thought, with her perfect room and her perfect intact body and her perfect boyfriend, and all her information. I had been so humiliated—by doctors, by my body, by Connor. And by Zoe, who chose to deliver this kind of important detail way later than was ethically correct. She was my sister.

  Why was I the only one with shame around here?

  I knew they were doing it, even with my parents right downstairs getting Sunday dinner ready. I wondered if they were naked.

  I tiptoed out of my room and into the hallway and leaned into her closed door, placed my fingertips against the wood. It was silent but for Nina Simone playing softly from her phone dock—downloaded from Tim’s Pandora search for Sounds Like Birdy, no doubt—and an occasional creak of the bed. I hesitated, but my worst self got the best of me. I grabbed the handle and opened the door as loudly and shockingly as possible.

  Zoe, who was on her bed, leaning against the perfect unstickered headboard, jumped. And Tim, who was seated on the floor, his back against the bed, just at her feet, looked toward me slowly, imploringly.

  “What the fuck, Liz?” she said.

  My hand was still on the glass doorknob. It always fell off, but no one ever fixed it. They looked so sweet. Like they’d known each other forever. “Oh,” I said.

  “
What?” Zoe knocked her pencil against her notebook, which sat on her knees.

  “Nothing.” I shook my head.

  “Do you need something, Liz?” Tim asked.

  “Sorry.” I shook my head again. Love is just sitting in your room studying together. You don’t even have to be touching. It could be that easy. Who knew.

  Who would you love if you could love? I thought, closing the door and heading downstairs. Maybe, for Connor, it was no one. Maybe he just couldn’t. It really is sometimes best to cut the bad out. My colon. Just get rid of it. Before it explodes inside me. Perhaps Connor had been right. We were never there. We were not here either. Pretty much, we were nowhere.

  In Ether

  If this was a different kind of story, a kind where time could bend and split, where we could hurl ourselves across time, if this story—my story—let me turn time backward, it would be to before I opened Letter Two. It would be to the time when all I feared was that Connor treated a girl who trusted him badly and that he might not love me back or that he might get a letter from me that laid my heart bare and crumple it up and throw it away.

  But I couldn’t bend time, and Letter Two arrived while my letter was out there in the ether. It’s a feeling I remember so well: wanting to reach out into the universe and snatch my words back. Impossible, of course, and here was Connor’s letter anyway.

  Letter 2

  October 12, 2013

  Dear Lizzie,

  First of all, Lizzie, I miss you. I won’t go on about how it is here, how strange and how dark it gets at night. Like the way you said the hospital got. No city, no stars really, just black. I miss Verlaine most then. Poor Verlaine, all alone in my house. My father takes him out, I know he does, but he’s not there all day.

  I guess that’s a whole other story, for another letter. A letter that can just tell you about life here, like the record player in the lounge area donated by some kid’s famous music producer father, who believed you needed to hear the scratch of the needle, watch the record turn, and it is a whole other experience. It is true: you really do just listen.

  But that’s not for this letter.

  I haven’t told you all of it, because I didn’t want you to lose respect for me. Or stop . . . liking me. I want to stay the special guy who, when he walked into your room, made you smile.

  But I need to tell you now, and this might be the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write. The accident was not a hit-and-run. I did not just witness the accident. People did blame me, but that was because I hit the girl. I was the driver. I had my learner’s permit, and I was driving with my friend’s older sister, who was seventeen and an underage person to drive with when you only have a permit. Anyway, that isn’t really the important thing. The thing is I hit her. I didn’t just hit her. I was also stoned. Which is horrible, I know. She just ran out in front of the car and I couldn’t stop in time. She just ran out into the street. She died. I hit her. I totally hit her. I lied to you. I killed the little girl in the green dress. It was always me.

  So I fell apart. I became someone I wasn’t. I treated people like I shouldn’t have. Until you. You made me need to be good again.

  I am so so so so so sorry I lied to you, Lizzie. I wish that I could take that back too. I know it’s not an excuse, but I couldn’t bear you knowing this horrible thing about me.

  I wanted you to see me as the good person I wanted to be, the person I know I am, inside.

  I will do anything for you to forgive me. Anything.

  I hope you can forgive me. I hope everyone can.

  Yours always,

  Connor

  Closet of Lost Toys

  What can I say. Stunned, shocked, bowled over, horrified, sad, angry, shaking, betrayed. Did I mention horrified? I was all of these things all at once. It was like my body was just storage, a closet of lost toys, and instead of the tennis rackets and hockey sticks and old karaoke machines and beach balls and pails and shovels and old hats, it was stuffed with every kind of emotion available to humans. Just open it and everything would tumble out. And go where? Where do those old discarded things go?

  What I didn’t feel then was sorry for Connor. When I got that letter, I just shook and crawled up into a ball and cried for all of us: the girl, for me, and also every other person I’d ever known. Connor too, I guess, even though I almost hated him. I felt this suffering—everyone’s suffering—move through me. It was awful. I even felt it for the flowers dying in my father’s garden. I thought I was going insane, because there I was thinking plants had feelings and that they were suffering too.

  Why me? I guess I thought this a lot then. Why did I have all this stuff to deal with—body stuff, life stuff, death stuff—while everyone else was just making out at dances and singing in the school musical? I got ahold of myself. I was able to, without picking up the phone and calling . . . who? Who was I going to call? That was the thing. Connor was my connection to my self. I realized that only then, that he was the only one I could talk to about what he’d done.

  Was Connor a bad person? Was Nora? Nora was reckless, but nothing really bad had happened to her yet. It could. It might. What happened to Connor was an accident. It was, like Collette said that day we came back from Fletcher’s Cove, poor judgment. I couldn’t think of her family, of her mother, holding her dead hand. I thought instead about Connor: it was a bad thing, but it was an accident. In a way, Connor was not unlike me. We had both been so unlucky.

  But the difference between Connor and me was that he had lied. Was he a liar? Or was it just this one thing that he was keeping from me to make me love him? I had told him everything. Everything! And everything he had revealed had been a lie. Maybe the emotions were the same, maybe he was telling me his feelings, but the facts were plain old dirty lies.

  Did that make him a liar? He was trying to talk to me. He was. It was hard not to think of the reasons he could have lied. Fear. I know the way fear works now—what wouldn’t I have done to make even some of my fear go away?

  What had he done to Zoe’s friend? Was that what he meant by treating people badly? And driving stoned? Who was the girl he was driving with anyway? The girl me took over, the one who even then could not stop thinking about how much better all the other girls were, in every possible way. The girl me who could so easily lose sight of the rest of it, the real story.

  I would never be strong enough, I thought.

  So many lies. He was as far from that boy I had once thought he was, straight off a surfboard, sauntering in with his golden dog, as far beyond my reach as he could be. Imagine my luck, I’d thought then. Of all places, a boy like Connor Bryant. Was this the same person who had taken me out of the hospital and kissed me in a rowboat like it was the end of the world? Who had given me a turtle and let me call her Frog?

  Yes. He was all those things. Did I love him despite what he’d done? I was learning that you had to take all of it, the whole person, whatever was left of that person, see everything, want everything, accept it all. People needed to do that for me and my new hacked-at self, my new bitter sparkly personality, and maybe one day I would have to do that for Connor. But I also had some power now. I was standing up and out of bed, and for better or worse—worse actually, in that here I was shoving myself into my jeans again—the staples had been taken out and I was standing up straighter and I could do the choosing. Would just having loved Connor be enough? Did I still? Could I? My letter hadn’t reached him yet. But it would so soon. I couldn’t take it back, so: What would I choose?

  Warm Phone

  It was the day the letter came. On the fifteenth, well actually just a little after midnight on the fifteenth, so, I guess if we’re documenting things, it was technically the sixteenth. A call from a 603 area code came in, and I just knew it was him, that it came from a place where the leaves were changing and it was getting colder and it was like what I imagine college would be. That was what I got from the 603. All of that.

  But I couldn’t answer it. I had been wait
ing for Connor to call since the day he came into my hospital room. How many nights had I waited? But the letter had only come that day. I could not talk to him about what was in that letter yet.

  I let it ring and ring until voice mail, so he could still think that maybe I just had the ringer off to sleep. I waited, the phone lighted beneath my comforter, and then I waited again for the red 1 to come up on my voice-mail widget.

  There it was. I listened, but there was just dead air. Nothing. Was it breathing?

  And then the 603 call again. The going through the waiting again. And then this time, Connor spoke.

  “Hi, Elizabeth Stoller,” he said. Still, he stopped my heart. No matter what, no matter anything. Heart stopper. “Hi. I think you got my letter by now. I’m sure you have. I wanted to call you because, as Dr. Farrell says, it’s good to be direct. I want to talk to you about everything. Will you still talk to me?” he asked. “This is our only line, and we have sign-ups for when we can use it. I will call you again. I will try to reach you. Hello, Lizzie. It’s that guy from the hospital. Remember me?” he said. “I remember you.”

  How could that message have been more beautiful? Forget that he had waited this long to call me. Forget that he had killed a girl and lied about it. Forget that he was sent away. Remember our hands. I remembered Connor. The feel of him.

  I scrolled down, listened:

  Well, this is Connor. The guy from the hospital? The guy with the cute dog? Call me sometime.

  I held my warm phone close. The voice was a stranger’s voice and yet it was the same voice, the boy was the same, I was the same.

  So how had everything suddenly changed?

  Good Citizen

  The Bottom Drawer didn’t press charges. That’s what Nora emailed to tell me, anyway, and what now did she have to gain by lying? Did they even have email in juvie? I didn’t think so, but what did I know? We need to make another plan, she wrote. And then? I will say I’ve got some killer new skivvies. I ignored this when I wrote her back. We totally do! I wrote, regarding the plan. Smiley face heart kiss pink elephant yellow flower.