“I’m guessing Mom doesn’t know?” Sarah asks.
“Uh-uh. I was going to tell you guys at dinner Saturday night. But apparently I’m not very good at keeping secrets.”
“Well, I am so glad you told me!” she says, and I almost expect her to clap her hands and yell, “Go, team!” like she used to during her high school cheerleading days. “I bet I still have a stack of my Brides in the basement somewhere. I’ll dig them up and we can start brainstorming for dresses.”
“Looks like you and I will be spending all weekend shooting hoops,” says Marcus, looking at Dave in the rearview mirror. “But seriously, congrats, dude.”
“Thanks, dude,” says Dave, and we all laugh. It’s already seven when we get to Sarah and Marcus’s house, so we reluctantly wolf down pastrami sandwiches that deserve to be savored and retreat upstairs to unpack and get ready. “Are you sure you’re prepared for this?” Dave asks, pulling a stack of neatly folded T-shirts and underwear out of his suitcase and placing them in the dresser in Sarah’s guest bedroom. He’s referring to the fact that we’ll soon be heading over to Julia’s for her housewarming party. I’m excited to see her and her new place, but I’m nervous, too, if only because I’m not sure how she’ll react to the news that Dave and I are engaged.
“I’m ready,” I tell Dave. “Ready as I’ll ever be. Just swear you’ll pry the vodka bottle from my hands if things get too bad.”
“Not only will I do that, I’ll hold your hair while you’re praying to the porcelain goddess,” Dave says, and kisses my shoulder.
“See? Now, that is exactly why I’m marrying you,” I tell him.
“Whoever says attorneys are good for nothing has clearly never met my barf buddy and future husband. Now, let’s get out of here before I change my mind.”
Julia’s garden-level flat is nestled on a sleepy street just outside the center of town. As Dave and I pull up, I spot a small group mingling on her front lawn. “As usual, she hasn’t had much trouble making friends,” I tell Dave.
“I can’t imagine Julia ever having trouble meeting people,” he says, and I can’t tell if it’s a compliment.
“Go easy on her, okay?”
“M, I am always, always easy on her,” says Dave, trailing behind me on the cement sidewalk that leads up to Julia’s new place. “Come on. Let’s stop stressing and go have a good time.”
When we reach her, Julia is standing in the center of the grass, engrossed in conversation with a slimy-looking guy in a tight black T-shirt that shows off his bulging muscles, whom I assume is Rich. His hand rests possessively on her arm, and I resist the urge to swat it away.
“Marissa!” she squeaks when she sees me, handing her drink to Rich without looking to see if he’s taken it from her. Fortunately, he’s quick enough to grab the glass before it can crash to the ground.
“Jules.” I embrace her, breathing in the familiar gardenia scent of her hair. “I can’t believe it’s been so long. You look amazing, as always.” I say this in no small part because she’s traded her favorite purple attire for a short silver dress from her preaccident days. She stands out among the sea of jeans and T-shirts, but she looks fantastic: Ann Arbor’s very own Holly Golightly.
“As do you, skinny minny!” she says, surveying me as though it’s the first time she’s seen me up close in ages. I suppose I do look a little different. After finally calling it quits on my futile attempt to lose the twenty pounds I packed on over the past few years, the most curious thing happened: Ten of them fell right off. Even better, I’ve decided that the sleek runners’ muscles I’ve recently acquired make me look better than I ever have—strong but still curvy.
Julia gestures to her left. “Marissa, Dave, this is Rich.”
“So great to finally meet you,” he says, extending his hand to me, and then Dave. “Julia talks about you all the time. I’ve even seen the complete Julia and Marissa photo collection. The early high school photos are priceless,” he says, smiling, and in spite of myself, I find him markedly less loathsome than I did a minute ago.
“The high school photos? Ugh.” I groan. “Some memories aren’t meant to be revisited. Those bangs were—well, you saw them.” I look at Rich again and realize that apart from his pending divorce, I know absolutely nothing about him. “So where did you guys meet?” I ask.
“Jules didn’t tell you?” He turns to her with a questioning look on his face. I’m usually the one to know everything about Julia, and here is some stranger, checking to see if it’s okay to tell me something. It’s an odd feeling, to say the least. “We met at group therapy,” he says after Julia nods her approval. “For brain injury survivors. I was in Iraq three years ago when my Humvee was hit by an IED. I suffered major head trauma, although it was a good six months before I was actually diagnosed.”
“But you . . .”
“Seem normal?” asks Rich. He chuckles, causing his crow’s-feet to crinkle up, and I see that he’s probably a decade older than I initially took him for. “Tell my ex that. It’s been a tough couple of years, to say the least. I’ve had, uh—how to put this delicately? Temper problems.”
Great, I think, but Rich says, “Don’t worry, not temper problems of the domestic violence variety. But little, stupid things would set me off, especially before I started therapy. I ended up being discharged from the military, but it took me another eight months to find a civilian job because I wasn’t ready for the real world. When I finally got hired at a consulting company, my neurologist had to meet with my colleagues so they understood the problems I was having.” He shakes his head at the memory. “That was really what set my wife over the edge—thinking that I wouldn’t be able to bring home my share of the bacon. So she started sleeping with my cousin. What a dick.” He looks at us sheepishly. “Sorry. That’s what I mean about the temper.” And the lack of filter, I think.
Dave whistles at Rich’s story. “Man. That is horrible.”
“Yep. But the silver lining is Julia,” says Rich, looking at her like he’s not sure what she’s doing in front of him. It’s an expression I’ve seen dozens of men give her, but this is different. In spite of his tough appearance, Rich seems almost provincial in comparison to the choreographers and artists and musicians she usually favors. And yet maybe he is exactly what Julia needs at this point in her life.
“Come on, I want to show you around,” Julia says to me, and we leave Rich and Dave chatting on the lawn. “The apartment is barely set up, but you’ll get the general idea.” She yanks open the creaky screen door and we’re hit with a wave of eau de cat urine. “Is that Snowball I detect?” I ask, trying not to scrunch up my nose.
“No, Snowball’s completely litter trained, the little angel,” she says, not insulted in the least. “The girls who used to live here had a bunch of animals and they really destroyed the place. Which is why I got such a good deal on it, I suppose. But don’t worry, I’ve got air fresheners that should fix the stench by the end of the month.”
We make our way to the kitchen, which is quaint if outdated, and reminds me a little of Dave’s parents’ place if it had been decorated in the seventies. Julia grabs a couple beers from the fridge door and hands me one. Then she leans against the yellow Formica countertop and takes a swig from her bottle. “It’s not Buckingham Palace, obviously, but I do like it here,” she says, looking around. “And I wouldn’t let my parents pay a dime for it, which makes it even better. Dr. Gopal and I discussed it and decided that it would be a positive step for me to pay my own way as much as I’m able to.” She bites her bottom lip, making her look like a child. I feel an urge to pat her back and tell her it will be okay, although I know that this is precisely what she does not want from me or anyone else. A wave of melancholy rises up in my chest when I think about how hard this must be for her. Not only has she given up her former life, but she also knows that everyone is hoping and waiting for her to return to the person she used to be.
“I’m impressed, Jules,” I tell her. “Did G
race and Jim put up a fight when you told them no?”
“Grace wouldn’t dare.” Julia laughs with a hint of her old mischief. “She’s terrified of me these days, poor thing.”
“I think she’s always been a little afraid of you,” I tell her, thinking back to high school when Julia would run circles around her mother until she gave her what she wanted—a Ford pickup truck to replace her brand-new Audi sedan, permission to go to Cancún for spring break, her blessing on yet another doomed relationship.
“Listen, Mar, I should warn you . . .” she says suddenly, her eyes flashing with alarm. Before I can turn around to see why, a voice from behind me raises the hairs on the back of my neck.
“Hey, Marissa.”
I stand, frozen, staring at Julia with disbelief. “Julia,” I whisper sharply, “I thought we discussed this.” I’m angrier at myself than I am at her; clearly, it was a mistake to assume that she would behave.
To her credit, she at least has the wherewithal to look embarrassed. “I was just going to say that I hope you don’t mind that I invited Nathan. Speaking of the—the—” she says, floundering for the correct word.
“Devil?” Nathan volunteers. When it’s clear that I will not or cannot seem to unplant my feet from where I’m standing, he walks in front of the fridge to face me. “Happy to see you, too,” he drawls, grinning ear to ear.
So much for my plans to never speak to Nathan again. “Uh, yeah,” I respond, sweating furiously and praying that Dave doesn’t venture into the kitchen this very second. I’m visibly tongue-tied as I try to figure out how to react, but Nathan is his usual coolcucumber self and fills in the gaps with ease.
“I was hoping to see you here. Especially after I never heard back from you,” he says, digging his hands into his jeans pockets and giving me his best poor-little-me face. It may have worked the last time I saw him, but this time, it doesn’t make my pulse race or send little flutters through my stomach.
No, this time it triggers a memory of an incident I haven’t thought of once in the eleven years since it happened.
A month or so after Nathan and I started dating, I came down with a horrible flu. I couldn’t get out of bed, even to take my final exams, and had to go to the emergency room at one point because my fever was so high. I holed up at Nathan’s apartment and he watched over me, feeding me ice chips and little spoonfuls of soup, draping my forehead with damp washcloths, calling my doctor to find out how much cold medicine I could safely take.
Then, after seven harrowing days, I was fine. It could not be said that I looked as normal as I felt, however: My hair hung in clumps around my sallow face, and I had dropped so much weight that I could pull my jeans, fully zipped, down over my hips.
“Crap, I lost thirteen pounds,” I said to Nathan, looking down with shock at the bathroom scale. Just to be certain, I stepped off of it and then on again, and the large black digits confirmed that I was officially thinner than I’d ever been since hitting puberty.
“Well, you’re always saying you want to be skinnier,” Nathan said, looking up at me from where he sat on the edge of his mintgreen bathtub. “If you can keep the weight off now, you’ll be set.”
Although part of me was delighted in my newfound status as a waif, his words were still a slap in the face. It was the type of comment I’d expect from my mother, not my boyfriend. “So you’re saying that I needed to lose weight?”
“No,” he said defensively. “You’re the one who’s always obsessing about how thin you are or aren’t. I just thought this would be something you’d be happy about.
“Come on, Marissa. I didn’t mean anything by it,” he said, laying on the charm. “Forget I ever said anything.”
I didn’t want to get in a fight with him, so I pretended to forget about it. And in time, I eventually did.
It’s not as though I’ve just conjured up a memory of him tossing fresh dirt on a suspicious hole in the backyard in the middle of the night, or crawling out of bed with my sister. Which is too bad, because it would be so much easier if I were Tori Spelling and my life was a Lifetime movie. Then, at least, Nathan would clearly be the villain, and I, the heroine, would have bravely thrown him down a stairwell just before the police showed up. Then, with dignity and grace, I would have moved on.
But Nathan is not a monster. He’s just a normal person with whom I happen to share a past. And it’s not his fault that I’ve not only clung to that past, I’ve actually repainted it in the rosiest hue, when in fact it was messy and imperfect and far from ideal.
But what makes me feel especially horrible, I realize as I look back and forth between Julia and Nathan, is that I’ve given him the ultimate free pass while storing up resentment against her for one stupid thing that she did eleven years ago. This, in spite of the fact that Julia has been there for me for more than half my life. She is not perfect, I know. She can be needy and steals the spotlight without thinking about it. But she is the best friend I have ever had.
“I’m sorry,” I tell Nathan, who continues to stare me down as though he’s trying to master mind control. “I may have given you the wrong impression before, but I’m in love with Dave. My fiancé,” I add. “We’re engaged.”
Julia lets out yet another squeal. “You’re engaged! That’s huge!” she says, giving me a hug, and my shoulders unclench in relief at her relatively drama-free reaction. From over her back, I see Nathan looking skeptically at my bare ring finger, but I don’t bother explaining. After Julia finally stops squeezing me, I catch Dave’s eye from across the apartment and wave for him to come over. I swallow hard, determined not to let my voice break. “There he is now,” I say purposefully to Nathan.
“Hey, guys,” he says to Julia and me. “I’m Dave,” he introduces himself to Nathan.
“And I’m Nathan. You’re one lucky guy, Dave,” Nathan responds.
“I’ve been getting that a lot lately,” Dave says, smiling slowly. “But I already knew it.”
I look at the two of them in front of me and a wave of dizziness washes over me. It’s not unlike the uncanny sensation I get occasionally after having one too many glasses of wine and then looking in the mirror: Holy crap! That’s you—that’s really what you look like and this is your life! Only this time, that little voice is saying, Marissa Rogers, it’s decision time! To your left, you have your past. And to your right, your future. Which man will you choose?
I made my choice years ago, I remind myself. And then I made it again three days ago when I said yes to Dave. Because that’s really what it comes down to. I’ve clung to the idea of Nathan because I felt like he was an option that was taken from me. But the truth is, while Julia may have pushed the issue, I ultimately made the choice myself. If I hadn’t been so happy to constantly play second fiddle to Julia, to put our friendship above everything else—even my own happiness—then I could have stood up to her. Then maybe, just maybe, Nathan and I would be together today. But as I look at him, I suddenly understand that as painful as our past may be for me, our lives ultimately unfolded the exact way they were supposed to.
“I’m going to get going,” says Nathan. “I’ll see you around, Julia,” he says, kissing her cheek good-bye. Then he looks at me for a second too long, as though he’s trying to commit my face to memory. “Good-bye, Marissa,” he says finally.
“Good-bye, Nathan,” I tell him for the last time.
“Can I talk to you?” I ask Julia after Nathan has left.
“Um . . .” She stalls. “Right now?”
“Right now,” I say firmly.
“Okay. Bedroom,” she says, and motions me toward a door off the hallway.
The room is different from the one at her parents’ house. Although the violet throw and pillows are in place, her purple knickknacks are gone, and the walls are painted a subtle cream color. “I like it,” I tell her.
“Me, too. Although Rich is the one who told me no purple walls. He said it gave him a headache.”
“Jules,” I say, rea
lizing I shouldn’t derail the conversation discussing décor, “we need to talk about what just happened back there. About what’s been happening in general.” I shift on the bed so that we’re both facing each other. “I thought you understood what I said before, and at this point, I don’t know how I can make this any clearer: Nathan and I are over. We’ve been over for more than a decade now. I am going to marry Dave, and even though I can’t ask you to like him, I need you to at least support me in this.”
“I like Dave,” she says. She is clenching a throw pillow and I notice that she’s shaking slightly. She’s actually nervous to have this conversation with me, I realize with surprise.
“I’ve always liked him, you know that,” she tells me. “It’s just that—well, my brain injury makes me really prone to fixations.”
“I remember,” I say, although I don’t add that her purple passion is a constant reminder of that.
“Yeah, but it’s not just things like colors,” she says. “It’s ideas and associations. When I saw you in the hospital, all I could think about was you and Nathan. It’s like every time I saw your face all I could think about was how I made you break up with him in college.”
“You didn’t make me.”
“Mar, I knew that you would choose me over him. I knew that you were so loyal to me that it wouldn’t feel like a decision at all.” She smiles wistfully. “Dr. Gopal has helped me understand that long before the accident, I had been burying the guilt I felt about doing that to you, and to him. You’re the only true friend I’ve ever had, and I thought that Nathan would take that away.”
The Art of Forgetting Page 24