Friends and Strangers

by J. Courtney Sullivan

“That’s the Big Dipper,” Andrew whispered. “The really bright one is Venus. And I think that one over there is the one I paid to have named after my girlfriend freshman year of high school. Got a certificate and everything.”

  Elisabeth sometimes wondered if she belonged in her own life, a strange sensation. She still didn’t think she was very good at it. But she cherished the little family she had made beyond reason. For years to come, she would remember this sight: her Gil and her Andrew, staring out at a sky full of stars.

  EPILOGUE

  2025

  IT WAS ISABELLA WHO INSISTED they go to their tenth reunion. Neither of them had attended the fifth, feeling that five years were too few for anything significant to have happened to anyone.

  But ten years felt impossible. How could so much time have passed so quickly?

  “Do you think everyone will be married with children?” Sam said on the phone.

  “Only the tragically boring people,” said Isabella, who was herself married with two boys under three.

  “Will you bring Steve and the kids?”

  “No way. This is for us.”

  “We could go somewhere on our own,” Sam said.

  They did this once a year, met up in Jamaica or San Francisco or Maine for three or four nights. Years had passed since they spoke often. In their first jobs, they exchanged several emails a day, paragraphs long, about how busy they were. Now they were too busy to do anything like that. But when they saw each other in person, they clicked right back into place and talked nonstop until it was time to part ways, making up for all the lost conversations they should have had.

  “Sam, you look incredible, and you’re probably in the top three percent of successful members of our class,” Isabella said. “You’re going to the reunion.”

  So Sam sent in her check and her forms, and even got a little bit excited about staying in the dorm for old times’ sake. But then Isabella finagled the use of her father’s friend’s condo at a nearby ski resort. It was an hour from campus, but it had a hot tub and a deck and a fireplace in every bedroom.

  * * *

  —

  The reunion began on Friday afternoon. They met up on Wednesday evening to have some time alone beforehand. They drank wine and watched the sun set and agreed that life would be so much better if they lived closer. They talked until three in the morning.

  On Thursday, they hiked and went to lunch, talking all the while. It seemed impossible that they could ever run out of things to say. At some point, Sam wondered why her jaw hurt, and then realized it was from laughing. She wished she had understood during their school days that she would never experience friendship in such a concentrated form again, except in small doses, like this.

  When Isabella got depressed after the birth of her first son, they instituted the Bat Signal—a way of letting each other know that an urgent response was required. If one of them truly needed the other, she’d be there. But for the most part, their friendship was guilt-free. Voice mails sometimes went unanswered. A birthday present might arrive two months late, or not at all. There were no hurt feelings on either side.

  The plan for Friday was to get to the college early, hours before the festivities began. To remember the place on their own terms. But that morning, when Sam walked into the kitchen, Isabella didn’t even look up from her phone. She was typing furiously.

  “Fucking fuckheads,” she murmured.

  “Work drama?” Sam said.

  “Yes. Ugh. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.”

  Sam said she’d take her own car to campus. They could meet up later.

  On the drive, she listened to the radio, left the window down, and breathed in the air. Ten miles outside town, she started to feel nervous. She wished she had waited for Isabella after all.

  Sam made a mental list of her achievements, as if she could build a wall out of them and hide behind it—she weighed fifteen pounds less than the day she graduated. She knew how to dress now, in clothes that flattered her figure, rather than shapeless things meant to hide it. She had a two-hundred-dollar haircut and had recently been profiled in the Alumnae Quarterly for her work in the art world. So why did she feel so insecure?

  She parked in front of Foss-Lanford Hall. The dorm looked exactly as it always had, the name embossed in stone above the entrance.

  Once, lying poolside on one of their trips, Isabella asked, “Who was Foss Lanford?”

  “Was it a person?” Sam said. “I thought it was two people.”

  Isabella shrugged, and moved on to another topic.

  Back at work a few days later, Sam went online for answers.

  Eleanor Foss, class of ’47, had married George Lanford in 1950. Together, they made a fortune designing popular board games, none of which existed anymore. When Eleanor died, George gave enough money to the college that they named a building in her honor, albeit a dorm at the far end of campus. Sam felt bad for not knowing sooner, for passing under her name every day for years without so much as wondering. The appeal of having your name carved in stone, she would imagine, was that you would never be forgotten. But that assumed curiosity, care, on the part of those who came after.

  She got out of the car now and noted the second-to-last window on the third floor, which had once been hers and Isabella’s. From out here, it looked like all the others.

  In the dining hall on the first floor, bodies moved around.

  Sam couldn’t make out the faces.

  Maybe this was why she’d been reluctant to return, the sensation that still showed up every once in a while when she thought of what had happened. Not only what she’d done, but how she’d been. All the things she didn’t understand until later, made worse by the fact that she believed, at the time, that she understood perfectly.

  There was shame in knowing how easy it had been to walk away from the mess she made. A childish mistake on her part that would make every day that much harder for the women in the dining hall, women she claimed to love.

  Sam never spoke to them again after graduation. She left this place with promises to keep in touch with so many people, never imagining that she’d stop knowing them that day, or soon after. Her life would fill up with new names and faces, until the ones she knew here were only memories, and in some cases not even that.

  She gave Maria her parents’ address, but never heard from her, which made Sam wonder if Gaby had told Maria the truth once she was gone.

  She did try to track Gaby down a few years back. Sam found her photograph on the website of an upscale Salvadoran restaurant where, at the time, Gaby was working as the general manager. Sam thought she looked happy. She sent an email, but got no reply. She had wanted to make it right, whatever that meant after so much time.

  Thinking on it now, she vowed to try again.

  She began walking across campus. When she passed the president’s house, an old resentment rose up in her, even though the school had a new president now. Four years after Sam graduated, there had been an uproar among students and alumnae when the full story of Shirley Washington’s business dealings emerged in a documentary commemorating the tenth anniversary of the financial crisis.

  Sam didn’t know how it was possible that the issue hadn’t been raised until then. The stories were there, for anyone to see, but they had required pointing out, highlighting, by a third party who had no particular interest in seeing Shirley Washington as a hero.

  It’s so disappointing, Isabella had written in an email. To come from nothing like she did and get so far, only to become so corrupted.

  Sam chose not to reply. It seemed useless to point out that someone who came from nothing had just as much incentive as anyone else—probably more—to let herself be seduced by the system. But it was disappointing. Heartbreaking, really.

  The bill Sam received in the mail each month was a reminder of
the price she had paid for her education, and was paying still. As were the semiannual solicitations from the development office, which annoyed her, seeing as the money she owed this place was a large part of the reason why she’d probably never own a home or know what it was like to live debt-free. And yet, Sam was grateful for her time here. She thought of those as some of the best years of her life.

  She reached the pond now. A student center had been built on its banks, a modern white building that looked all wrong.

  Sam kept going. She was headed for the library.

  Once inside, she retraced her old path to the carrels downstairs. Sam was stunned to find them gone, replaced by two long, sleek wooden tables and several chairs. She would have hated to work like that, so exposed to everyone else.

  Wherever she went, students looked at her, suspicious.

  They saw this place as theirs, just as she once had. They didn’t realize they were only borrowing the stately brick buildings and the two-hundred-year-old oak trees, which were older than the college itself.

  There were far more black and brown faces among them than there were when she was here. Ten years on, the campus looked more like the world. The college was proud of this; touted it in every fundraising letter. Still, when Sam passed the white tent being set up outside College Hall, the staff looked the same as ever. She searched for Maria and Delmi, unsure whether she hoped to see them or not.

  She supposed it was childish, simplistic, but Sam still could not square the discrepancies of lives that overlapped with one another every day. She looked at the people digging up roads and busing dishes and caring for other people’s children—holding up the world—and wondered what they’d rather be doing. She was thirty-one years old, and she couldn’t quite accept that some people would be allowed and encouraged to pursue their passions, while others never would.

  But she knew that whether she accepted it or not did nothing to erase the fact of it. Every year it seemed the country moved closer and closer to a place where there would soon be very rich people and very poor people, and very few in between.

  Sam walked on. She went through the campus gates. There had long been a legend that any girl who did this before graduation would never marry. Ridiculous, but back then Sam hadn’t taken the chance. She always went around, in case.

  She had recently started telling people she wasn’t sure she ever wanted to get married. Each time she said it, she wondered if it was true. In the last two years, she’d been a bridesmaid five times. She had gone to three dinner parties where she was the only uncoupled attendee. When Isabella got married, Sam didn’t feel any twinge of jealousy. But when Isabella had a baby, bought a house, she suddenly grew aware of how behind she had fallen.

  Sam lived alone now, in an apartment on the top floor of a house built in 1790. She sensed the ghosts of its past hanging around when the hardwood creaked beneath her bare feet each morning, when the light in the kitchen flickered for no reason.

  Sam continued on until the downtown came into view.

  When she lived here, there wasn’t a single chain store besides CVS and, at the end of senior year, a Starbucks. Now almost every storefront advertised a familiar restaurant franchise or clothing brand. The historic old movie theater had been converted into a Citibank.

  She stood at the crosswalk at Plum and Main, waiting for the light to change. As it did, and the WALK sign lit up, a black SUV slowed to a stop in front of her. The woman behind the wheel was slight, eclipsed by her automobile. She swiveled her head and said something to the children in the back seat.

  Sam started to cross as the driver faced forward.

  Elisabeth.

  It was her, there was no doubt. She looked exactly the same.

  After college, for a while, Sam kept track of her.

  She had the urge to tell Elisabeth when she learned that Clive had gotten married, a year after they broke up. It stung at the time, even though Sam had been the one to end things. Those first few months in the city, she relied on their unclean break, on the fact that she could always call him or run off to be with him if she wanted. When the option was no longer hers, she grieved over it, if not over the loss of Clive himself.

  Sam was now almost the age he had been when they met. She had college interns at work. She marveled at how young they were. Just babies. She had never felt exploited by Clive, or taken advantage of. He was kind and encouraging and loyal. He had loved her. But it did occur to her that at the time it had seemed like no one else understood, when maybe she was the one who didn’t.

  Once, when she was twenty-six, eating dinner with friends at a café in the West Village, she saw a poster advertising a reading by the poet Julian Wells.

  There he was, smiling in his photograph. Julian, the Mollusk, from the campus library. He looked good. He’d figured out what to do with that tight, curly hair, letting it grow out a bit. He wore glasses and had a beard. Nerds were having a moment in the city, and Julian looked as if he was making the most of it.

  The bio on the poster said he had published a poem in the Atlantic and had a forthcoming book. He was teaching at Columbia that semester. Sam was at a particularly lonesome point. Staring at the poster, she wondered if she had taken a wrong turn all those years ago, one which she would never be able to correct. She went so far as to email Julian at his Columbia address after a few glasses of wine. She tried to sound breezy—how funny they had both landed in New York at the same time, maybe they should meet for coffee. He never wrote back.

  That same year, Elisabeth published her book The Hollow Tree to much acclaim.

  Sam found it on the new nonfiction shelf at Shakespeare & Co. one snowy afternoon. She flipped through, searching for some mention of herself, but there wasn’t one. There was a chapter about a discussion group, made up of old men who met at a small-town coffee shop to talk through the ills of the world. Elisabeth quoted them, but used fake names. Sam tried to guess who had said what.

  The last five pages of the chapter focused on a man she called Larry, who ran a lucrative car service, until Uber put him out of business. After building a name for himself as a volunteer advocate for workers’ rights, Larry got a job as a union organizer.

  That had made Sam smile.

  She still saw examples of the Hollow Tree everywhere, even more so after they lost touch. George used to shake his head and say, Where can this possibly be headed? Sam thought of that when she read about the ever-worsening state of the country, when the members of her family who had always loved debating politics had to stop talking about the subject, or else stop talking, period. When so many of the things George had predicted came true.

  Even though she did not name him in the story, Elisabeth acknowledged that her book wouldn’t exist without George. The Hollow Tree was dedicated to him.

  Elisabeth crossed Sam’s mind again months later, when Sam was moving out of the apartment she and Maddie shared in New York. As Sam filled a box with books, a photograph slipped out of one—in it, Sam was holding Gilbert, the strap of her top obscured, the baby visible only from the waist up, so that it appeared both of them were naked. Inspiration for a painting she had never finished, never delivered. She wondered what happened to it and, in turn, to Elisabeth. Had she ever told Andrew the truth? Were they still together?

  Sam was almost certain that was the last time she thought of her. The years passed faster, the older she got. There was less time to ruminate, less time for everything. Less time.

  But now Elisabeth was in front of her, looking confused as to why some random woman was waving.

  Until she seemed to realize. She rolled down her window.

  “Sam?” she said. “I didn’t recognize you. You look fantastic. You’re all grown up.”

  For a moment, it was just the two of them, as it had been years before.

  Elisabeth turned and said, “Gil! This is Sam. She was your
first babysitter.”

  The boy in the back seat was tall and lanky. He wore a shiny green basketball uniform. His blond curls were gone. He had shaggy brown hair now.

  “Say hello,” Elisabeth said.

  “Hi,” he said, bashful.

  Sam was a stranger to him.

  She could remember what it felt like to cross a room with the weight of his body pressed against her shoulder; the sensation of popping Cheerios into his mouth, one by one.

  “And this is Willa,” Elisabeth said. “Willa, you weren’t even born yet when we knew Sam.”

  The girl looked like Elisabeth. The same slender build, the same eyes.

  Sam almost expected her to explain. The Elisabeth she remembered would have blurted out, Willa was adopted, or I ended up getting pregnant by accident after all that. Can you believe it?

  Instead, in a voice that was warm, but somewhat formal, Elisabeth said, “What are you up to these days?”

  Sam felt flustered, as if she were not an authority on her own life.

  “I’m here for my tenth reunion,” she said finally. “I opened my own gallery last year.”

  “That’s amazing. In Brooklyn?”

  “No. Providence.”

  Sam had first gone there to visit her sister Caitlin when she was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. She fell in love with the city—with its gorgeous old mansions and tacky Italian restaurants and proximity to the beach. She decided to stay. Caitlin stayed on too, after she graduated. They lived only a few blocks apart. She was making it as a painter now, almost. Supplementing her income by bartending a few nights a week. She looked like Sam had at that age, but for the sleeve tattoos of birds and butterflies. Caitlin was the artist Sam had almost wanted to be, but not badly enough. A more independent, self-assured version of the original. They met most mornings for a walk along the river.

  Sam had lasted six years in New York, doing everything for Matilda—from helping her choose the art, to giving her Chihuahua his host of daily medications. That had set her on her path. Matilda promoted her twice, and would have done so again if Sam had wanted to stay. But Sam never felt she belonged in the city the way some people did.