She, Myself, and I

by Emma Young

  Some blurry pictures from what looks like a house party.

  And then my heart stops.

  It’s her.

  Althea and Sylvia.

  Althea’s arm is around Sylvia’s shoulder. They’re in a glade somewhere, both in denim shorts and sunglasses, gripping water bottles. The picture is dated thirteen months ago.

  My chest tightening, I search on through the photos, and I find another: Sylvia, on her own this time, in a dark gray jersey dress and a lot of makeup, that little white dog in her arms. Then one of her back, with her reflection in a mirror. She’s making a happy, silly face. Underneath this photo is a comment: Thanks!! And the name of the person who left the comment:

  Sylvia Johnson.

  Interspersed with irrelevant photos, I find even more: Sylvia and Althea in a battered blue kayak, Sylvia and Althea and another girl on a street holding cups of golden ice cream to their lips, tongues out. Sylvia and Althea in a kitchen in aprons, standing behind a plate of profiteroles. Sylvia being kissed by a long-haired blond boy in a green Starbucks server’s apron, who’s tagged as Adam Sagan. Sylvia at a party, tanned, pouting, in black jeans and a green tie-dyed vest, a luminescent red drink in her hand, the same boy holding her around the waist. In a place tagged as O’Neill’s Bar & Restaurant, in that tight dark gray jersey dress, holding a microphone. Awesome gig, Sylvia! So proud xxx, Adam Sagan wrote at the top of a column of comments underneath.

  And then, this:

  A photograph of a page of a book. The text is handwritten. Evidently by different people. At first, I can’t make out what this is. But as I scan the text, catching occasional words—tragic, love, forever, heart, Sylvia, remember—I realize it’s a memorial book. There’s a location tag: Cary Memorial Library. I read this: So devastated, Sylvia—but so thankful I was lucky enough to know you. All my love. Adam.

  And, together with a few extracts from poems, these lines in slanting black:

  Music, when soft voices die,

  Vibrates in the memory—

  Odours, when sweet violets sicken,

  Live within the sense they quicken.

  Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,

  Are heaped for the beloved’s bed;

  And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,

  Love itself shall slumber on.

  I know those lines. I’ve read them before. In an anthology belonging to Elliot. Mary Shelley invented Frankenstein’s monster. Her husband described subtler ways to live on.

  A woman screeches from the TV, and I realize I’m trembling.

  “Rosa?”

  I hear Joe but I can’t respond.

  “Rosa?”

  He mutes the sound. Silenced jihadists continue waving rifles in the air. “What’s wrong?”

  Tears have rolled onto my cheeks. I rub them away. “I just found some photos of her.”

  “What kinds of photos?”

  Deep breath. “Happy ones. Dressed up. At a party. Hugging this dog. With her boyfriend. Singing in a bar.” I’m gripping the phone so tightly my fingers are throbbing.

  I don’t see Joe but I hear him get down from his bed. He sits beside me. I’m not moving. I can’t. Gently, he takes the phone, and he backs up through the pictures.

  “She’s dead,” he says quietly.

  I nod.

  He reaches out and when he lightly touches my shoulder, it’s a collision. I jump. Instead of letting go, he edges his arm around me.

  I squeeze my eyes shut. Slowly, he pulls me closer, and he turns toward me, so when I finally release my grip on myself, I slide against his chest.

  My head on his chest, my arm on his chest. His body heat in my flesh. His arm around my shoulder. Maybe this was normal for Sylvia. For me, it must be like deep-sea diving, or rocketing into space. Suddenly, everything is different, in ways both terrifying and amazing, and I know I’ll never look at my world in the same way again.

  And if Joe’s touch isn’t enough, there’s Sylvia.

  In my mind, she’s still there, smiling. I can’t let the tears truly come, because I feel like if I do, they’ll never stop. I want to speak, to say, Don’t let go, but I can’t, and he doesn’t.

  October 25: The first night I ever spend alone with a guy.

  Yeah, we are fully clothed. And yes, his hands don’t touch anything more sensitive than my back, my shoulder, and my arm . . . but my back, my shoulder, my arm, my heart are branded by that touch. I find myself thinking, I’m so sorry, Sylvia. She looked so happy in those pictures. Her body’s here in this motel room in Lexington, beside Joe, but she will never again feel anything as vividly perfect as this.

  I wake in the predawn. The curtains are thick and the window is screened, so without a clock or an internal sense of time, you’d never know if it was midday out there or the blackest apocalyptic night. I can’t see a clock, but somehow I know I have a jump on the day. I can lie here, and if I don’t move, Joe won’t wake, so I can immerse myself in this—the bare skin of his arm against my face, the regular sound of his breathing, his smell. I feel transformed. Electrifyingly alert and elementally still. I have never felt as good as I do at this moment.

  Then I remember the photos on Althea Fernando’s Face-book page. Sylvia, posing and relaxed. Secure. Confident. But now she’s dead. The moment dissolves into something bitter.

  Slowly, so as not to wake Joe, I inch away from him and swing my feet down to the carpet. I take my bag into the bathroom. On a shelf beside the plain white sink are two tumblers with paper caps. I shuck the cap from one and fill the glass halfway with water. Then I find my toiletries bag, dig out my pills, and swallow my morning prescription: one little pink anti-epileptic followed by a big white anti-rejection tablet.

  Dr. Monzales explained all the reported side effects of my various medications. If you’ve seen American TV, you’ll know how they do it in the ads. There’ll be a grinning silver-haired man in a pastel cashmere sweater helming a yacht or flying a kite with his laughing grandkids in a marigold-lit meadow, while a serious voice rattles through a list of hellish potential side effects of prostate medication or pills for high cholesterol—everything from a mild skin rash to death, or worse.

  A noted side effect of my anti-seizure medication is the shedding of all your skin. Yep. People have survived this, apparently. Don’t ask me how.

  I had only Dr. Monzales’s admittedly handsome face to focus on while he spelled out the risks associated with my medications. Footage of a girl lying on a bed next to a surreally good-looking boy might have been better . . . I guess advertising companies hope an appealing image will override a thousand ugly words. But aren’t the words what lasts?

  I forget what people look like—their features grow faint—but I remember certain things they told me with unfading clarity. Unkind words. Loving words. Gestures from their minds, not their bodies.

  The mirror in this bathroom has its own built-in bulb. I peer at my bright reflection, and I think of those Facebook photos.

  I put on a smile.

  Then I lift my hand, hesitantly at first. I twist at the hips and imitate Sylvia’s grin in that picture at the party.

  I know exactly what I’m doing. I’m acting out her poses. But something strange happens. Suddenly, the expression in the eyes in the reflection no longer seems to be mine.

  My pulse leaps.

  Is this me?

  “Rosa? You okay?”

  Joe. His voice is so loud he must be right outside the bathroom. I recheck the mirror. The look that wasn’t mine is gone.

  I take a slow breath. Open the door.

  It shouldn’t be a shock, but it is: He’s standing right there. Still in his T-shirt and jeans. Devastating. I smile, partly because it seems like the right thing to do. He gives me a slightly crooked smile back.

  “Okay?” he repeats.

  I can’t really answer that in a single word or sentence, or in anything remotely appropriate in tone, fact, or duration. So I just nod.

  “It’s real
ly early,” he says.

  “Yeah.” I wish I didn’t sound so nervous.

  “An hour till breakfast.”

  Beyond him, I see the disheveled bed.

  “Joe—” He waits. And yes, I was going to refer to last night. But it probably wouldn’t be the best thing right now. I have to push, push before somebody—my parents, Sylvia’s dad—finds me, before I’m caught. “Can we go and find where she lived?”

  “Right now?”

  I nod.

  “. . . Okay.”

  I dress quickly, pulling on my jeans, a T-shirt, and a pastel blue cardigan, a gift from Elliot, which is the reason, I think, that I fumble over the buttons. But I’m not going to think about my family right now.

  Just before we leave the room, I borrow Joe’s phone again. I should have messaged Althea Fernando last night, but I got diverted. It took Joe to do that.

  I’m not sure exactly what to write, how much detail to include. In the end, I keep it simple:

  Hi, I used to know Sylvia Johnson. It was a long time ago. I don’t want to drag anything up but I’m really hoping to meet a friend, just to ask about her. Rosa.

  21.

  It’s 6:04 A.M., according to the clock on Joe’s dashboard.

  I’m trying to distract myself from wondering whether Althea’s replied yet—unlikely, I know—by reading, in the dome light, a month-old copy of USA Today, which I found on the backseat.

  The lead story seems to be about a business scandal, which doesn’t interest me. In a box on the bottom left of the front page, there’s a simple graphic with accompanying text:

  Did you know? About 35 million pounds of candy corn are produced annually. How adults eat it: 43 percent start with the narrow white end; 47 percent eat the whole piece at once; 10 percent start with the wider yellow end—

  There’s a click and a gust of cold. Joe’s getting into the car with two oversize cups of coffee from the beverage station in the lobby. He passes one to me. Behind his head, beyond the parking lot, above the trees, the early clouds are separating, revealing glowing streaks of light.

  Dawn, in Lexington. I’m in a car with Joe, in the town where Sylvia lived. It’s hard to believe this is real.

  “Thanks,” I say as I take my coffee.

  “So, I’ve been thinking,” he says, and I have to try hard to stop myself from focusing on what it was like to have his arm around me, to sleep beside him. “What if Sylvia’s parents are looking for you? Maybe you need a disguise. Do you think you need one?”

  A disguise?

  I had wondered how to avoid being recognized. I thought, maybe a hat. And my Jackie O sunglasses.

  If Sylvia’s dad didn’t follow us from the hospital, though, I doubt there’s much risk of him turning up now.

  I take a sip of coffee. It’s weak. But I’ll take all the caffeine I can get. “That license address was in Connecticut.”

  “I guess maybe they moved after what happened to Sylvia. But her dad might assume you’ve found out where they used to live.”

  “If he’s still looking for me around the hospital, and he doesn’t see me, won’t he think I’ve gone into hiding? I don’t know if he’d think I’d be back here.”

  “Back here?” His expression doesn’t alter. Just his tone.

  “Here.”

  “It’s not just him,” he says, apparently deciding to let my slip pass. “If someone sees you and thinks they recognize you, they might call her parents. A disguise would help.”

  I must look skeptical, because he frowns.

  I know: There must be dozens, even hundreds, of people in Lexington who could recognize Sylvia. If a disguise makes sense—which it does—why am I so resistant to the idea? Because it smacks of pranks and silliness, I think. And the reasons I’m here are so very serious.

  But if I’m serious about finding out about her—of course, he’s right.

  “Okay,” I say. “Yeah, a disguise . . . What’s candy corn?”

  His frown deepens. I guess he’s trying to work out why I’m asking.

  I hold up the paper and point to the graphic. “Forty-three percent of adults start at the narrow white end. I don’t even know what candy corn is.”

  “Really? I guess you can tell from the fact that it’s on the front page that it is extremely important to Americans.” There’s sarcasm in his tone. He smiles. “So, candy corn—”

  But I don’t really pay attention. Because I find myself thinking:

  What exactly am I going to ask Althea?

  I have some ideas.

  1. Was Sylvia kind or unkind? (Kind, I guess; though so far I have only one incident to go on—and what if she was out on the ice because she was the reason her friend’s relationship broke up?)

  2. Loves?

  3. Hates?

  4. Was she happy or unhappy?

  5. What were her hopes and dreams?

  But even with a disguise, how exactly am I not going to freak Althea out? My mind jumps back to the motel bathroom mirror. I freaked myself out.

  Slow breath in.

  Slower breath out.

  Joe puts his coffee in a cup holder. He brings up the map app on his phone. Among the beige and yellow, I see a red pin on Courtyard Place. According to the newspaper story, this was where Sylvia lived. And I do want to see it. But to go there first . . . ?

  I guess it seems weak.

  Joe starts the engine.

  “Can we go to the reservoir?” I ask.

  "Now?”

  I nod.

  “You sure? Her street might be an easier place to start than the reservoir.”

  “Wide bit first,” I tell him, thinking of the candy corn. “That’s how I am.”

  I gaze out of my window at the passing homes and trees.

  Now that the sun is up, I can properly make out all the oaks with the last of their enormous leaves, and the equally—to my London-accustomed eyes—oversize homes, all timber-framed and detached, painted in varying subdued colors, some with swing sets, some with basketball hoops, some with both. Almost every house I see is decorated for Halloween. There are fabric ghouls on stakes in the gardens, plastic skeletons dangling from branches, and pumpkins on front steps, arranged in order of ascending size.

  It looks like the kind of America I’ve seen in horror movies. The “perfect” town, where people normally only act out being afraid.

  As I peer out at all of this, I think: Joe must have a theory to explain why I look like Sylvia, and why we’re here.

  I guess he thinks we’re estranged identical twins. It would be the most likely explanation. Which only goes to show when “most likely” is wrong just how flat-Earth wrong it can be.

  And I feel bad, because I am deceiving him deeply and utterly, while using him for my own benefit.

  I think of Sylvia, and feel bad, because I’m using her for my own benefit.

  How does anybody survive forty-two minutes under water?

  I know Dr. Monzales cooled my brain to 16 degrees Celsius before and during the surgery, because low temperatures improve resistance to damage from oxygen deprivation. Evidently, the chill water of the reservoir protected Sylvia long enough not to save her, but, yes, to save me.

  No prolonged pain.

  Surely, though, she’d have been fully conscious—and conscious of everything—as she plunged into the reservoir. She’d have been terrified. Desperate to live.

  She was pretty and kind; she had good friends who obviously loved her. I was . . . not that pretty. I’m honestly not sure if I was kind. Are online-only friends real friends? Well, which of them knows the truth about me—if the fact of my disease was an essential truth? The answer is: none.

  In fact, when it comes to Sylvia and me, the only similarity I’m sure of is this: We were desperate to live.

  So when I compare myself with the admittedly very little I’ve learned about her so far, the truth is: I’m worried.

  The car slows. We’re on a broad street. Electricity cables seem to run e
verywhere in bundled strands along and over the road. Joe hits the brake even harder, and we stop. We’re at a red light. Beside us is a bagel shop, with a container truck parked outside. I notice an ad on the side of the container. It features a silver-haired man and an older woman cosmetically enhanced to within an inch of her life (yes, I know I’m on shaky ground). Just before the light changes, I make out the first of the possible side effects: Exantra may cause insomnia—

  Joe must notice it, too, because he breaks the silence in the car by saying, “Side effects of silent introspection include but are not limited to debilitating rumination, angst, and regret.”

  I’m on my way to the place where Sylvia almost died while comparing myself with her and coming up short. Yet just like that, at Joe’s words, my pool of toxic thoughts drains, as if he pulled the plug on my brain. I realize there are only two people in the world who can do that: Elliot and Joe.

  “Silent introspection is normal,” he says, eyes back on the road. “I just wanted to point out the side effects.”

  I clasp my fingers together in my lap.

  “It’s so unfair they’re always bad,” I say, focusing on my hands. “You never hear, ‘Side effects include but are not limited to excessive happiness, improved energy, and a sudden passion for Byzantine art and poetry.’”

  After just enough time has passed that I don’t think he’s going to respond, he says, “Side effects of hanging out with you include but are not limited to a reduction in debilitating rumination, a resurgent sense of positivity, and the reinstatement of a belief that life can involve meaningful action and even pleasure.”

  He doesn’t take his eyes off the road. My heart spins. What should I say? What can I say?

  “I—” My tongue dries.

  “It’s okay,” he says.

  I can’t speak.

  “It really is okay,” he says.

  But it isn’t.

  I want to make my mouth work, and to give him something, but now I see railings. Trees. A narrow road into a small parking lot. A glimmer of water.

  We are here.

  22.

  “You want me to come down with you?” Joe asks as the engine dies.