Jamie and I left the café together and said goodbye outside. He hugged me and looked down at me from his tall, graceful stature. He held on to my shoulders and rubbed them through my coat and smiled warmly, as though this entire conversation had been about my problems and making me feel better.
What happened to my friends? I wondered.
Jamie and I both started out as English-Theater double majors in college. We met in freshman acting class, where we were paired together in our final scene for the year. We were rehearsing in Jamie’s dorm room one night, in the middle of our scene, when his phone rang. Our characters had been arguing. Jamie glared at me and picked up the phone, almost as a dare. “Hello?” he said angrily. He was quiet for a minute and then grew impatient. “I have to call you back,” he said. Then louder, “I’m rehearsing a scene. I’m in character!” He slammed down the phone and began improvising. He said he hated me and I had no identity and that’s why I glommed on to other people. “There’s a word for people like you,” he said. “And it’s fag hag. Fag hag, fag hag, fag hag, fag hag.” He got very close to my face and saliva flew out of his mouth and landed on my forehead. His eyes shifted. I could see him break character and the question run through his mind whether or not he should apologize. I pushed him away from me. I told him he was pathetic and would never amount to anything. “You’ll never make it,” I said and locked myself in his bathroom. I waited what I thought was a good amount of time for him to have a moment in the scene by himself and then poked my head out. With anyone else, that would have been the time to break out laughing, but Jamie held his chin in his hand. He wondered if our characters were confused. He wondered if they could possibly make a go of being straight together. Or if their identities were sealed.
In our sophomore year, Jamie left me a voicemail message that I wish I had kept. “Hope, are you there? Where are you? Where, oh where, are you? Call me back. I’ve something momentous to tell you. I’ve discovered something. And it’s called modern dance.” Then he hung up.
When I got home, I took the rent envelope out of my coat pocket and shoved it into a desk drawer.
I lay down in bed with my shoes still on. I didn’t own any chairs except for one wooden desk chair and the one-room apartment was too small for a couch. Tomorrow the workweek started up again and I had no work. January was always dead for temping. I should have used December to hit a lot of holiday cocktail parties and remind people that I was around. I knew I should be making a list of people to email in the morning to try to drum something up. See if my friend who had a tech start-up needed someone to do something menial. Root around and see if I had any half-finished ideas for plays I could submit somewhere. I should’ve spent that week at my dad’s, writing. I knew I wouldn’t have any messages tomorrow. I wondered how long it would take, if I stopped calling or emailing people, for people to stop contacting me altogether. How long would it take to completely disappear from their memory?
I thought I could probably move out of Cortland’s apartment with just a rented van or a couple trips in a cab. When my girlfriend, Noreen, and I broke up I let her keep our apartment and most of the furniture. Guilt will make you do that. Then, less than six months later, she moved in with her now wife. I wouldn’t have been able to afford our old apartment on my own anyway. I threw out a lot of my belongings when I left. That upset Noreen. “You should have asked me,” she said. She felt she had rights to my clothes and other personal things I didn’t want. To old papers from my file cabinet. Old videotapes of me and Jamie from college. I dumped all of it when I moved out. I didn’t like carrying around the past. I did too much of that as it was.
I glanced around my tiny illegal sublet. It wouldn’t take me long to pack up everything I owned. I could do it tonight. I could do it tomorrow. Just say fuck it and ditch Cortland. He would threaten never to write another letter of recommendation for me. Ten years ago that would have terrified me. Cortland was the one who nominated my unpublished play for an award that got it produced. That’s what got it produced in London. It was my one and only quote-unquote success. Ten years ago I didn’t realize that Cortland was a hack like everyone else. Trying to hang on to a cheap, rent-stabilized apartment in case his girlfriend broke up with him while he wrote books on theater history that no one bought.
I can’t say I’m that much different.
I picked up my phone and ordered food to be delivered. As soon as I hung up, the landline rang. I let the machine answer. It was the girlfriend asking if I had given her the envelope. “I hope you forgot, because I’m freaking out that I lost it. Or someone stole it from the café. I don’t know what to do. I’m not going to tell Cortland until I hear from you. Ugh. So sorry to bother you again.” I felt bad she was stressing out over it, but I needed a few days to figure out what I was doing. I flipped through the pile of mail, separating mine from Cortland’s and the person who used to sublet before me, which I trashed unless it looked important.
There was a letter from Gail. I opened it and found two thin envelopes inside. Gail had stuck a Post-it on the first one saying it had been forwarded to her. The envelope was addressed to me, but at my mother’s house. The second envelope was addressed to Eden. “In case you’re in touch with her” was written on the second Post-it.
The envelopes looked identical. They had the same return address: Office of the District Attorney, Matoaka County, Virginia.
“Shit,” I muttered to myself.
The letter informed me that Larry was up for parole. And if I wanted to contact the parole board, I could. After that part was out of the way, the DA more cheerily introduced himself, stating that he was now in charge of this case. He said that while he was confident parole would be denied, there was a chance it could be granted because Larry had been an exemplary prisoner. In the next paragraph he got more serious and said he was trying to indict Larry for murdering a girl who was found dead two years before Eden and I got in Larry’s truck. The DA said it had been a cold case because his predecessors didn’t have enough evidence, and people were satisfied enough that Larry was in prison. Convicting him for the girl’s murder would ensure that he wouldn’t be released, the DA wrote. He wanted to talk to me. He wanted me to call anytime. He wanted me to make an appointment to come into his office.
I looked at the envelope again. My name neatly typed across the front. Eden and I were minors at the time. We lived with my mother. And therefore it was sent to her.
I never thought that Larry would get out of jail someday. I guess I should have realized that. Larry must be older now. He must be near my parents’ age.
I crumpled the letter and threw it aside. It hit the floor and scuttled away from me.
I packed up my things the next day. I called my friend Zara, who was an artist with a big loft space out in Queens. She agreed to keep my boxes and my three pieces of furniture. I jokingly referred to Zara as my successful friend. Zara was a computer genius who dropped out of an advanced technology PhD program “because of the rampant misogyny” and because “it was basically a training program for the NSA.” Now she was an artist, a “data sculptor,” as she called it. I never quite understood it, but the computers dictate the sculpture and light installations, and as soon as she started showing her work, people started throwing money at her. Then she had a nervous breakdown, but that only helped her art career. People love a crazy, pretty girl. Zara sensed this and made a vow never to buy any new clothes, never to wear any makeup, and never to cut or brush her hair. Not that it did much good. Zara was gorgeous. The camera loved her. Magazines brought designer clothes to photograph her in and left them at her loft. She kept the basic stuff and sold the dresses on eBay when she had a slow month. She got terrible reviews for her last gallery show, and selling designer clothes and trinkets from swag bags kept her afloat. “It’s like they’re daring me to lose it again,” she said. “My gallerist would love it if I had to be hospitalized again. You know, nothing permanent, just a little damage to give me a boost. Maybe a quic
k arrest or something involving drugs. Give my brand a jolt. It’s incredibly fucked up.” She was wrapping high-heeled shoes in tissue paper to ship out when I dropped off my stuff. “It’s like the only things I can engage in economy-wise are female tropes,” she said. “And no one gets the irony of it.” I asked her how her hair-growing was going, because it didn’t look all that long. “I know,” she said. “It gets to a certain point and then breaks off.”
I asked Zara if she wanted some money as a rent contribution. “No,” she said, “you’re my friend.” “So what?” I said. I took a couple of hundreds out of my rent cash and passed it to her. She put up her hands. “I’m not touching it. I’m not having my friendships reduced to commercial transactions,” she said. “Besides, you said you were broke and homeless. At least I’m house rich, even if I am cash poor at the moment. And you can take any of these clothes you want,” she said.
“I didn’t mean to insult you or anything,” I said. “It’s just that on top of all of this I got some weird news.” Zara nodded. Zara understood weird news. Like, sorry your gallerist in France snorted a bunch of cocaine and took off for Morocco with your money, never to be heard from again. Or that your ex-girlfriend is now a sex worker in Florida with a blog and posts a lot of pictures of you. Or that your estranged mother was trying to shop a book deal about your fucked-up childhood. Or that some anonymous computer dude constantly spews hate about you online. Zara once said, “I should really be more famous if I’m going to have to deal with this kind of shit.”
I told Zara how when I was a kid, my sister and I were witnesses to a crime and I recently got a letter from a lawyer saying they wanted to reopen the case. Zara didn’t ask what kind of crime it was or what we saw. Zara never asked direct questions. She nodded her head and taped up a box. “That must’ve really affected you,” she said. “Yeah,” I said. “It sort of fucked up my whole family. I don’t think my sister ever got over what happened to us.”
Zara looked up from her package, a little perplexed because in the space of a few minutes I had changed my story. Now we weren’t witnesses, we were victims. Or at least my sister was a victim. And maybe I was a witness. She digested my gaffe. It was more interesting to her than whatever she thought the real story might be. “You never told me any of that,” she said.
4
The police delivered us to our father, who immediately drove us back to my mother. Eden and I had the same father but different mothers, but Eden had lived with my mother since she was really little, since before I was born. Eden shut herself in her room for a week. My mother left food outside her door on a small TV tray, but it went untouched. “She must sneak out at night,” my mother whispered to our dad, who was sleeping on the downstairs couch, but he said he never heard anything. My mother always woke up early to work on her dissertation before she went to her job. She didn’t like our dad staying over, but she tolerated it because she didn’t want Eden alone in the house. Not that Eden seemed to care if anyone was in the house or not. She finally appeared at breakfast one day and said she wanted to go to the alternative boarding school that her friend Sharon went to in Pennsylvania.
My parents were dumbstruck. There was no way to afford something like that, but they both said, instinctively, “Whatever you need. Whatever you want.”
My first day back at school the vice principal was standing outside at his usual spot on the front steps. He was out there every morning, arms folded across his wide chest, looking like a prison guard. He liked to show off his knack for remembering kids’ names. “Nice hat, Lucas,” he would say to one. “Salutations, Charmaine,” to another. And to me that day he said, “It’s a good day to be alive, Hope.”
I went to the school office first. In part because I had lost most of my textbooks, and in part because it seemed the official thing to do after the event. I don’t know why. The school secretaries were shocked to see me. They didn’t get up right away. Then one of them came over and hugged me. “So glad to have you back in one piece,” she said, pressing me to her gigantic breasts. She smelled of baby powder. I pulled out the folded blank check my mother had given me to pay for the lost books. That’s when the other secretary stood up. “Don’t be ridiculous,” the other one said. “We’ll fix it.”
When I walked down the hall to class I felt strangely magnetic. I thought everyone must know what had happened to me. I had come back from the presumed dead. I must have supernatural powers, or be blessed by God or some animal spirit, or be really smart in situations like that. Fight-or-flight situations. Life-or-death situations. I must have good survival instincts. But no one asked about it. Their parents must’ve told them not to talk to me about it. Just act like everything is normal when you see her, they probably said. No one came up to me the way they did to the kid with the bald head who had cancer. When you get cancer, a community snaps into gear, raises money for your parents to stay at the Ronald McDonald house, fixes the family car, drops off casseroles on the doorstep, and cuts your grass for you. People shave their head in solidarity with you. Everyone roots for you.
A few kids stared at me. I thought some of them whispered or stopped talking when I walked by.
The second day back at school my homeroom teacher handed me a slip of paper that said I was supposed to go see the guidance counselor. I never had to see the guidance counselor before, except for an obligatory “Hey, it’s not too early to think about college!” meeting. Or once, when the female health teacher was out sick the day they split the girls up from the boys to talk about birth control and safe sex, they sent the girls to the guidance counselor instead. She passed around a fishbowl of condoms at the end of the class and said we could take as many as we wanted and the bowl would always be available in her office. We were all too embarrassed to take any, except for this girl Layla, who was last in the circle. She grabbed a few and stuck them in her pocket. The rest of us were doing our best not to laugh from discomfort. Layla looked like she didn’t give a shit. Then this girl Amy asked why we could get free condoms but we couldn’t get free tampons. She did that to one-up Layla.
I dutifully showed up at the appointed time and knocked on the guidance counselor’s frosted glass door. She sang out, “Come on in!” I sat down in the chair in front of her desk. She said, “Wait just a sec,” and went to hang a DO NOT DISTURB sign on her office doorknob.
“How is everything?” she asked when she sat back down.
“Fine,” I said.
“Everything okay being back here? You okay catching up with classes?”
She was acting like I had missed a month of school. But I had only missed one week. I was confused. I thought maybe she had mixed up her files and was thinking I was the kid who had mono. But I didn’t know how to respond, so I just said, “It’s fine.”
She smiled at me. Her desk had lots of stacks of folders. The sun beaming in through the window behind her back made her look hazy. “I think we should talk about what happened,” she said. “Is that okay?” she asked with a concerned look and using a girly voice. It was a voice you used with little kids who hurt themselves on the playground. I found the whole situation bizarre. I said, “Sure, but I guess, you know, everything turned out for the best.”
“What do you mean by that?” she asked.
“I mean, it all worked out in the end. They caught the guy. And we’re okay.”
“I’m glad,” she said. She waited a minute and then said, “Is your sister okay? She hasn’t been back to school yet.” I said, “I think she just hasn’t been feeling well.”
“Was there something else that happened to her?”
“No. I mean, we were together the whole time.”
The guidance counselor smiled and said, “Hmm.” She said, “It’s good you have each other to talk to. I grew up with three brothers and I always wanted a sister.”
“Right,” I said, and then thought it was a weird thing to say. I thought maybe the guidance counselor has to check in with students when something like this happ
ens. She has to fill out a form that says she met with me. It’s just this one time and I just have to get through it.
“Sometimes,” she said, “when something major happens to us, we don’t react until some time has passed. Maybe it’s a week. Maybe it’s a couple of months. Sometimes we don’t feel all of our feelings right away and then they start coming out when we don’t expect them. So if that happens to you, you can always come talk to me.”
“Sure,” I said. I had no intention of ever coming to her office unless I suddenly needed condoms. Or to have her go over my college applications when I was a senior.
The bell rang and I instinctively reached for my backpack, but I didn’t have one because I had left it at Larry’s. I was carrying stuff around by hand until my mom and I could go shopping. The guidance counselor nodded at me that I could go.
I didn’t get summoned to have a follow-up session with the guidance counselor, but she did go out of her way to say hello to me in the hall or the cafeteria and ask me lame questions about movies or TV. No one else at school asked me directly about it, but I could feel people were curious. They wanted more details than what was in the newspaper. They wanted me to make a public statement about it. Get up in front of class and read my essay about it. They wanted to give me an award, a savings bond for not dying. Each day that I got home unscathed by questions, it only felt closer to when people would start to ask. Then, as if an internal timer went off, people would think that enough time had passed and I seemed to be doing fine and it would be okay to start asking me about what happened. But the school absorbed my silence and no one asked me anything. My parents didn’t bring it up either. And Eden left for boarding school not long after that.
Eden Page 3