Everyone We've Been

by Sarah Everett

  And I nod again.

  He mentions in passing a night I spent at his house when his family was away. Though neither of us says it, I know what it means.

  We slept together.

  Me and Zach.

  Really, it’s her and Zach. Another Addison. I don’t feel different, I haven’t noticed anything different, and I would have if it was me and Zach.

  I would have.

  “I screwed up,” he says now in a soft voice, a voice that forces me to look up at him. His face is red. His eyes squint a little bit, like he’s still mad at himself. “But I did love you. I hope you know that.”

  His gray eyes rest on my face as he says that, and I feel the air vacuum out of my lungs, confirming, I guess, that his words do belong to me. Or I want them to.

  I want Zach to have loved me. I want to know that.

  “So that was it?” I ask after I trust myself to speak again. I mean, it isn’t hard to see how I might have been crazy about him, how much he’d meant to me before. I could see myself being upset at the breakup, but according to my family and Katy, I’d been devastated.

  Was it because we had sex? Was I even more in love with him than I can comprehend? Or was I just too weak to move on?

  “That was it,” Zach says.

  He was right. I am a coward.

  To erase my memory over a breakup?

  I frown, staring at the dashboard and wishing I could find some way to claim the things Zach has told me, to make whatever I felt before—love, betrayal, sadness—belong to me again.

  “I’m really sorry. I can’t imagine being in your shoes,” Zach says.

  I stare at my hands in my lap, suddenly embarrassed to think this boy has seen me naked. He’s the only boy who has. And once upon a time, I bet, I could trace the contours of his body.

  How is it possible to forget all that?

  “So when did you start working at Real New Delhi?” I ask, changing the subject to ward off the heaviness, the hopelessness, settling over my whole body.

  Even if how it ended was awful, I just want it to feel familiar. I want him to feel familiar.

  Zach grins at me now, and my stomach tickles. It might only have been familiar from the invisible Zach, Memory Zach, but I still like recognizing it. And oh my.

  “A whopping five days ago,” he says with a laugh. “Could you tell?”

  “Not really,” I say. “I saw that the restaurant was new.”

  I’m captivated by his smile, the way his lips tilt up, and my face gets hot as the thought of having kissed those lips—having done more and more—fills my mind.

  “Yeah. My parents closed the store months ago, and I quit at the Cineplex not long after we broke up. The owner is kind of a hard-ass, so pretty much everyone I worked with there has left. Then Raj’s mom asked if I’d work for her restaurant. Free food. No way was I turning that down.”

  I laugh, and he smiles but doesn’t laugh this time.

  When his eyes get this faraway look, I wonder if he’s thinking about a version of me I have no memory of. I fiddle with the partly open little ashtray of his car because I feel restless, feel like I need my viola, but also I’m still trying to find something I know in this car.

  “Oh, I haven’t used that in ages,” Zach says, looking into the tray. “Ever since I quit smoking.”

  “You quit?”

  And when I face Zach, he is nodding and beaming, the car getting at least five shades brighter.

  “That’s so great!” I say.

  He laughs. “I knew you’d be impressed, still.” He feels me keep watching him, so he adds, “You weren’t a fan of the smoking.”

  “Well, there’s one thing that sounds like me. Finally.”

  Zach gives me a sad smile.

  His phone suddenly vibrates in his pocket, and when he pulls it out, he says, “Shoot. My break was over ten minutes ago!”

  “Oh,” I say, feeling myself deflate. The car is no longer warm, but I don’t mind the idea of sitting in this car with Zach for hours.

  We climb out anyway and he comes around to my side. “If you ever need me,” Zach says, “you know where I am.”

  I nod, a lump the size of a house growing in my throat. And I blink rapidly to keep my eyes clear.

  “Hey,” Zach says, gently wrapping his arms around me. And that, that, feels familiar. The tips of my ears burn and not from the cold.

  I let my head rest on his chest, hear his heart beating steadily through his T-shirt, and I’m already dreading the moment he’ll let go.

  It comes too soon.

  And I realize as we step back that it didn’t come hurtling back—the memories, what it felt like to be with him. Secretly, I hoped it would. That being in his presence, touching the real Zach, would bring it all back.

  “I hoped seeing you would jog something, but…” My voice fades. “I guess I’ll just have to take your word for it that that’s how it happened.” I’m half laughing, even though it’s not funny. Even though a tear has escaped down my cheek.

  Zach frowns, at least a foot between us again, and looks sad for me.

  “I’m okay. I promise,” I say, swiping at my cheek with my hand.

  He nods, keeps watching me, then glances back at the restaurant. Finally he starts to walk in that direction.

  And then I feel something, a realization, like a forceful kick to the chest. I loved this boy. Memory Zach isn’t real; if I rest my head against his chest, it’s my own heartbeat I’m hearing. When he speaks, it’s my voice, my own mind, I’m hearing.

  But here is the real Zach. He still gives me butterflies. And if I let him walk away…

  “Zach!” I call. He stops and turns around.

  I take a couple steps toward him. “Do you want to…” I swallow. “When your shift is over or something, maybe we could hang out?”

  I watch the blood drain from Zach’s face. He glances quickly at his fingers, then back at me, and I feel my heart plummeting.

  “Or we could not,” I say, trying to make my voice light, trying to save face.

  “No, it’s just…,” Zach says, glancing down, glancing back at me again. “Just that…Lindsay and I are still together.”

  All the air falls out of my body.

  Oh.

  “Oh God,” I say, my whole face burning now. “I’m sorry. God. I swear I didn’t know.”

  “I’m sorry, Addie,” Zach says, not for the first time today, and I nod, even though I don’t know for which part he’s apologizing. For breaking my heart in the first place. For me not remembering any of it. For still being in love with Lindsay, after all this time.

  BEFORE

  Late November

  It’s the night after Thanksgiving, eight days after I found Zach and Lindsay in her car, and my chest still hurts from the thought of it. From how stupid and blind I was.

  But I miss him.

  I miss his full, joyful laugh. I miss his hair between my fingers. His breath, even cigarette-y, against my cheek, against my mouth. I miss being in his arms, the feeling of his body next to mine.

  For the first couple of days, I turned my phone off. I wouldn’t listen to his messages or read his texts, and I asked my mom and brother to send him away when he came over.

  But allowing myself to listen to one, just one, message was like falling into a vortex. Soon I was listening to all of them. Some three or four times.

  He kept saying the same things.

  I’m sorry, Addie.

  I screwed up.

  If you would just let me explain.

  It wasn’t supposed to happen. I swear it was the only time.

  Sometimes I played them for Katy and we thought of the worst names we could for him. She called him Zach-or-Mac-or-Jack, trying to make me laugh. I did, but it felt hollow and false.

  The last message is from Tuesday, three days ago—the longest he’s gone without trying to reach me—and I wonder if he’s given up. Has he accepted that it’s over? Have I?

  Do I w
ant it to be over?

  Foolishly, I call him now while I’m lying awake in bed. He picks up after four rings, sounding out of breath, like he raced for his phone.

  “Hello?” he says. I breathe into the phone, don’t answer. My heart fluttering in my chest.

  “Addie,” he says seconds later. I know it’s caller ID but I want to believe he recognizes the sound of my silence, the shaky intake of my breaths as I fight back tears. “Addie, hey.”

  “I really hate you right now,” I whisper into my phone.

  “I’m sorry. I never wanted to hurt you,” and it sounds like he’s near tears as he says it.

  “It was one time? A mistake?” I ask, paraphrasing the messages he’s left for me.

  “One time,” Zach promises. He doesn’t repeat the second half of my statement.

  “I think you were never over her. Deny it.”

  Our voices are gentle on the phone, like we’re exchanging secrets in the dark.

  “I think because we were together so long I just…It’s not that easy to cut her out of my life. I thought it would be, but it wasn’t. She’s still my friend and I thought maybe that would be okay and I guess, I don’t know, it wasn’t.”

  I feel my blood warming as he speaks. “So what do you want, Zach?” I hiss the question. Who do you want? I don’t want it to be his choice, I hate that, but my heart is betraying me, sitting firmly in his pocket, the one I slid my hand into and promised to unstick him.

  “I want you to not hate me,” he says. “I want us to meet face to face and talk and—”

  “What do you want?” We are both silent, and then I say, angrily, “Figure it out,” and hang up.

  Another two days pass.

  I keep trying not to think about him or the phone call or the fact that he couldn’t answer when I asked him what he wanted, who he wanted.

  He hasn’t called since I hung up.

  Today, on my drive back from seeing my dad—he was away on Thanksgiving, so Caleb and I went over there this morning—there is a force against my chest, relentless and sharp, like I’ve broken a rib or something. It’s been there for the past ten days, but I realize now that as angry as I am at Zach, I’m not close to being over him. Maybe seeing him face to face like he wanted would help. Maybe, just maybe, there’s somehow still hope for us.

  He doesn’t know I’m coming because I didn’t plan to. As soon as I pull into the parking lot of the movie store, my mind is already filling with uninvited questions: Will he be behind the counter? What does his hair look like today? Will he grin at me when he sees me, that bright, disarming smile? Or will he be contrite, apologetic, nervous?

  Then, as I get closer, climb out of my car: What if he’s not even here? Today is Sunday. What if he’s working at the Cineplex instead?

  But as I step on the concrete, before I even reach the all-glass front of the store, I have the answer to my questions. He is working today. And he’s not behind the counter; he’s on a stepladder on the far end of the store, draping tinsel over the shelves, decorating for the Christmas season.

  She’s standing next to the ladder, in a pair of jeans tucked into brown riding boots, and she’s holding it steady with one hand, gesturing with the other.

  I can’t move.

  I can’t do anything but watch them through the glass.

  He climbs down and hands her a bunch of tinsel, and she flings one piece back at him. Wraps the other piece around his head.

  He laughs and says something to her. He touches her back, her waist. It’s only for a second, and then he drags the ladder over a few feet and climbs on again to add some more tinsel.

  It doesn’t mean that they are together, or that they are almost together or not together.

  It doesn’t matter and I can’t tell and I don’t want to.

  I told him to figure out what he wanted.

  And he did.

  He did.

  As I stand there watching them, that pain in my chest stretches and expands until it’s a tidal wave of sadness, of anger.

  It hurts to draw in my breath, to stay standing, to turn back and head to my car. And all I can think is, It was always her.

  Why did I let myself love him, let myself be with him? Everything I felt with him, felt for him—all the things I told him that I’d never told anyone else—in spite of all that, I wasn’t and would never be enough for him. He woke me up, he made me come alive, but Lindsay did that for him.

  Did everything that happened between us mean anything? Was our whole relationship a lie?

  I fall into my car and the world roars with too much silence, and it ends right outside where it began. In Zach’s father’s movie store.

  Because he still loves her.

  It was always her.

  I don’t remember when anything has hurt so much.

  AFTER

  January

  I pretend to busy myself with something in my car until Zach disappears back into Raj’s mother’s restaurant. And then I sink lower in my seat and close my eyes.

  “Zach,” I whisper, and wait for the sound of his voice.

  “Zach,” I say again, more loudly. Open my eyes and he’s still not anywhere around. I think of “Air on the G String.” Our song.

  I hum it, and there is still nothing.

  “Zach!” I yell into my car.

  “My Zach,” I say. “Memory Zach?”

  Nothing.

  He doesn’t appear in my passenger seat out of thin air. He doesn’t appear across the street and walk toward me.

  Not his flapping red puff of hair, not his crazy bright smile, not even his cigarette. Nothing.

  And suddenly I’m remembering what he asked me in the diner on Saturday night: What do you think happens when you find him?

  And what he said that morning we drove to school together.

  Don’t forget about me.

  How nervous he was that he wouldn’t exist anymore if I found the real Zach.

  But I didn’t forget. I didn’t. Just because I talked to the real Zach, I…

  I never meant to make him go.

  We didn’t even say goodbye.

  He didn’t know it would be the last time he existed.

  Zach, Zach, Zach.

  “Where are you?” I say out loud, feeling a surge of panic begin to build in my chest. “Come back.”

  The noise of my car’s heater whirs a warm silence back at me.

  “Come back,” I whisper to it. To no one.

  To myself.

  AFTER

  January

  The tears hit me with force when they come. I wrap my arms around myself and lean my hand against the headrest, and all I can do is heave and sob because I can’t stop thinking about all the things I’ve lost without knowing.

  I’m still parked outside the restaurant, but I can’t stop thinking about what it might have felt like to have a younger brother. A pink-toed baby brother who maybe cooed at the sight of my face and danced around in a high chair and smelled like baby powder and new life.

  I can’t stop thinking about the day we put him in that tiny grave and how it’s been there all these years and how I never went back. How I should have gone back.

  I can’t stop wondering about the first time I met Zach, and whether I liked him from the moment I laid eyes on him. And why don’t I remember what it felt like to kiss him the first time? To lock my fingers in between his?

  I lost my virginity to him and it’s supposed to make you different, and all this time I didn’t know. And even now I’ll never really know.

  What did his hair feel like in my hands, and what are all the truths I told him, gave him, about myself that I’ll never get back?

  Who was I when I loved him? Did being in love make the air feel light and musical? Did I have more good hair days and better playing days, and was I any surer of who I am? Were my eyes wider, my lips different, from having been kissed? Was I that girl who couldn’t stop grinning, couldn’t stop telling strangers about this boy I
liked, or was I quiet and cool and coy like I always hoped I’d be?

  I don’t remember anything about being with him, or not being with him. Did it really make me different, did our relationship really mean anything, if he’s still with her?

  I would take the sting of brokenheartedness, of being betrayed, if I could somehow get back the knowing, the feeling, of all those days. The weight of them, certain and clear in my mind. I would give anything to have them back. I’d even take his invisible replica, the boy who wasn’t Zach but who led me to him. And to a version of myself I might never have known existed.

  The impact of everything I’ve lost, all the things I’ve lost forever, hits me again and again until I can’t breathe.

  AFTER

  January

  “I need your help please I need your help.” I mumble a run-on sentence once I reach the counter where the receptionist is. It’s Heidi again, and the man who was training is nowhere in sight. I drove to Overton right after losing it in the car, and I was expecting to have to plead or grovel my way into the clinic since I didn’t make an appointment, but apparently Dr. Overton has granted me temporary emergency access because of my “symptoms,” the unexpected side effects I’ve been experiencing.

  “Please,” I say again. I must be loud, because while Heidi is trying to calm me down and the other patients are staring, the nurse with the purple stripe in her hair hurries in with Dr. Overton, who’s holding a half-eaten chocolate granola bar, his eyes wide with surprise.

  “Addison!” he says. “What are you doing here?”

  “I need you to help me.”

  He and the nurse exchange a glance, and I determine definitively that, yes, she does know me. Then I follow Dr. Overton to his office and sit across the desk from him for the third time in a week.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks, looking genuinely concerned.

  “The boy I was seeing? The memory?” Dr. Overton nods. “He’s gone. I can’t get him to come back.”

  I see some of the tension release from his shoulders.