What did that say about me?
That was how I found myself in the most crowded of the house’s closets. That it was so spacious, with so many built-in shelves, had dazzled us when we’d moved here from the city. But we had soon packed it full to bursting.
I’d had to psych myself up considerably to dig around in there. Who knew what might be tucked away inside?
Not to mention, I hadn’t been in the master bedroom much since That Day. I’d found myself unable to sleep in the bed they’d so defiled, even with a brand-spanking-new mattress, and so spent most of my nights pretending to sleep on the deep-cushioned sofa in the den – something I had started lying about to Lianne. She thought I needed to
reclaim
the king-sized platform bed in the master bedroom as my own. She insisted there should be a ritual to let me do so. Or a cleansing of some kind. I thought there was a long list of things I should probably try to reclaim from this situation, a much longer list than I really wanted to think about if I were honest, and the couch in the den was remarkably comfortable, really.
And anyway, it’s not like I was sleeping very much these days. So who cared where all that insomnia happened?
I shoved aside some old golf clubs now, muttering to myself. This closet was like a temple to Tim, and it was giving me a headache. Here, surrounded by his clothes and accessories, it was as if everything that happened on the other side of the closet’s pocket doors was a dream. In the cocoon of the closet, I could smell him, that mix of soap and the aftershave he only wore on important occasions, and that particular scent that was only his. It clung to his clothes, to the sweaters and shirts stacked so neatly on his side of the closet, like some kind of unwanted embrace. His dry-cleaned suits hung in neat
rows in their plastic covers, and his dress shoes gleamed, reminding me that Tim hated it whenever any scuff marks appeared to mar those glossy surfaces and had spent many hours industriously polishing them away himself. I ran my fingers over a gleaming dark chocolate loafer near me and had to swallow hard on a sudden lump in my throat.
Annoyed at myself, I pushed into the deepest recesses of the closet with far too much force, upending the contents of the furthest shelf all over me. It was the damned shoeboxes, of course, and as they fell they spewed their contents everywhere, old photographs raining down on my head and shoulders, not gently, and one box actually glancing off my forehead.
Great
, I thought.
Head injuries all around!
But it was the piece of fabric that fluttered down after the avalanche of shoeboxes that caught my attention. I ignored the sting in my forehead and grabbed it, rolling it open in front of me like some kind of Dead Sea scroll, and laughed out loud, surprising myself with the sound.
I hadn’t seen this in years. I’d forgotten it existed. I traced the nearest clump of words that had been painstakingly painted onto the large, once-white sheet in scarlet nail polish with my finger – I’d done it myself when I’d been all of eighteen years old, newly arrived at NYU and bursting with the sense of my own poetic melodrama. To say nothing of the illicit bottle of wine we’d smuggled into our dorm room. It was a few key lines from a Rainer
Maria Rilke poem I’d discovered that very same week, if I remembered it right.
For here there is no place that does not see you—You must change your life.
Brooke and I had been thrown together into a tiny dorm room in Hayden Hall, one of NYU’s residence halls located right on Washington Square Park. We’d both been suburban girls, Brooke from Main Line Pennsylvania and me from Rivermark, and we’d both been certain that New York was going to
change us forever
. And so it had. As if those Rilke lines had been prophecy, not poetry, after all.
We’d lived in that narrow little absurdity of a room, tucked up in our monastic single beds, the place more a bowling alley lane than anything else. The wonder was that we’d become such good friends so quickly and so seemingly permanently when, really, homicide might have been a more likely outcome from all that forced intimacy with a total stranger. But we’d bonded over silly things like this sheet, which we’d hung on the wall near the door and ‘decorated’ all throughout our years of living together. It had started as a freshman get-to-know-you exercise.
Years later, we called it the Sheet of Shame and joked that it was the roadmap to our secret histories, the ones only we knew. By that time we were living in that tiny little apartment in gritty Alphabet City that wasn’t really all that much bigger than our initial dorm room, but
which we’d loved anyway and lived in together, mostly harmoniously, until I’d moved in with Tim. We’d hung the sheet inside the hall closet door then, hiding it from public view as we grew older and pretended to be more mature, and we’d taken great pleasure in pulling it out on the odd wild evening in and updating it with cryptic snatches of songs or poems or deep thoughts, names and dates or bits of memories, creating a complicated and messy patchwork of our intertwined lives. We’d cut it in two the day I moved out, with great ceremony, promising that we would both continue the sheet’s great work on our own.
I hadn’t touched it since, except to roll it up and store it in the back of this closet.
I set my half of the sheet aside now, as if it were fragile, aware of a new wave of sadness moving through me, making my eyes start to blur. I blinked the blurriness away. I started to sort through all the fallen photos that lay around me, scattered over the shoes and all over the closet floor. There were so many of them.
There were stacks of me and Lianne back in high school, with Billy as often as not, the three of us musketeers rolling around Rivermark being bored together in the time-honoured teenage tradition. I’d thought we were all the same kind of bored, the kind that dreamed of nothing more than
escape
– and as I came across their wedding pictures in the backyard of that old house on Monroe Street where Lianne had grown up, I remembered how
impossible it had been for me to get my head around the fact that they’d been getting married so young. Nineteen? And that they’d wanted a house in Rivermark and a few kids, not the escape I’d longed for.
I’d been obsessed with how different I’d felt then, how much I’d felt New York City had changed me in that single short first year of college. I’d felt so worldly and mature next to poor, suburban Lianne – something I’d thought I’d hidden at the time and yet was painfully obvious to me now as I looked at the pictures of myself, smirking through my overly red lips and lounging about in my inappropriate black dress like a wraith in the middle of Lianne’s sweet summer wedding. What an asshole I’d been.
And now here we were almost fifteen years later. Lianne and Billy were still happily married and reasonably content, while smirky old me was crouched in the closet of her dream house, trying to figure out how her fabulous life had fallen into all these jagged pieces.
The rest of the pictures were all of Brooke and me. Brooke and me in a variety of NYU settings. Brooke and me living in that house on Nantucket with three other girls that one summer, all of us working random jobs waiting tables or serving ice cream, just for the pleasure of the odd days off spent sailing and at parties on the crisp, white sand beaches. Brooke and me dressed in corporate drag for our first summer internships. The two of us in graduation caps and gowns. The two of us on that never-to-be-discussed-aloud road trip to Savannah, Georgia, that
one spring break. The parade of crushes and, more rarely, actual boyfriends. The other girls we’d known and spent time with in and around the coffee houses, bars and cheap restaurants of lower Manhattan. There were a few photos at the truly fancy restaurants we’d visited very occasionally in those years, to celebrate things like birthdays or law school acceptance letters, both of us feeling so
grown up
.
I stopped for a long time on a particular shot of us on our backpacking trip through Costa Rica. The two of us stood in front of a waterfall, our arms around each other, grins splitting open our faces. We looked a little bit grubby and darkly tanned, dressed exactly alike in faded jeans and black tank tops and hiking boots, though I thought now that that had probably been accidental – we’d dressed alike more often than not, yet it only seemed obvious later in the photos. We’d somehow been unaware of our similarities at the time. We’d been so young. We’d been all of twenty-three that summer, and we’d concentrated so fiercely on all the ways we were different. It seemed silly to me now, with clear evidence of the two of us dressed as twins.
I could remember that particular hike so vividly. We’d trekked for what seemed like miles up the side of that mountain, giggling the whole way over the Australian boys we’d met at the beach in Manuel Antonio the previous day who we were supposed to meet up with again that night. I remembered exactly how I’d felt right before
we’d flagged down another hiker, one half of an intimidatingly fit German couple, to take that shot. I’d been looking at the blue sky, the precious few clouds, the bright green trees and the impossibly beautiful waterfall that sketched its way over the hard rocks to the gleaming pool beneath. I’d been awed by the
immensity
of what I felt, what I was doing, what my life – our life – would entail. It had been
right there, waiting
. I had been so sure that if I just stretched out my hands far enough, I’d be able to touch it. Hold it. Shape it.
And whatever that life might turn out to be, I’d known with a deep certainty that it would involve Brooke. I felt that sadness again now, a far richer strain. It worked through me as I set the photo aside and let out the breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding. She had been, in so many ways, the first great love of my life. More intimate and important than any of those boyfriends either one of us had had in those years. Sometimes I’d suspected that I lived through the drama of whatever boy it was simply to get to the part where Brooke and I dissected it all on our crappy old couch in the living room, such as it was, in our Alphabet City apartment.
I picked up another handful of pictures and tossed them into the closest box, then another, and paused again. This time it was a picture of a tall, smoothly muscled and intense-looking man, his arms wrapped tight around me as we both looked into the camera, both of us in faded T-shirts, a picture-perfect Cape Cod beach arrayed behind
us. He wasn’t smiling, though his dark eyes were bright. His hair was a shaggy mix of copper, blonde and brown, and framed his lean, clever face in a way that suggested that, left to its own devices, it might look leonine. I was leaning back against his chest with an ease that spoke of deep physical comfort with this man, and I was laughing at something – at Brooke, I remembered, who had taken that particular picture on that particular morning, though I couldn’t remember what she’d said to make me laugh like that, openmouthed and carefree.
Nor could I remember when I’d laughed like that recently. I threw the picture in the box with the rest. But I didn’t pick up any more from the floor around me.
That Cape Cod shot was one of three existing photographs of Dr Alec Frasier and me from that long, momentous year we’d been together. I shook my head at my own silliness, because I still knew that number and worse, I knew exactly where the other two photos were. Or had been, anyway, way back when any of that had mattered. That was the kind of junk that I carried around in my head – the mess that filled the spaces where there could have been all kinds of other things. Things like some awareness of what had been going on in my marriage right under my nose, for example. If Brooke were here, she would have let out that cackle of hers and told me I was ridiculous, and I would have agreed. I sat back, leaning against the wall of cubbies that housed all of Tim’s shoes and the shirts and sweaters he kept folded in neat rows. I felt almost lightheaded with loss.
What the hell had happened? How had I lost my best friend? When she’d been so much more than that term could encompass – when she’d been like another limb, or my heart and lungs, as integral to my ability to function as any of those things?
We hadn’t had any fights that I could remember – and I felt sure I would remember. Wouldn’t I? There hadn’t been any big, traumatic scenes, any unforgivable words flung at each other. She’d been the maid of honour at my wedding – something that seemed odd to me, as I thought about it, given that I’d managed to put up pictures of our wedding all over this house yet not one of them with her in it. Things had become strained between us when I’d moved in with Tim, I knew, but I’d put that down to necessary growing pains.
Brooke and I had lived together for almost ten years at that point. We’d shared everything. Of course it was weird for her when I moved on. And then I’d really started focusing on my career, and she’d become busier and busier herself, juggling more book manuscripts per week than most people read in a year. We’d gone from talking all day every day to more and more infrequent phone calls, from living in each other’s pockets to a dinner every month or so. We’d gone from knowing every detail of each other’s lives and thoughts, so much so that we had our own language of private jokes and inferences and shared moments that we could communicate in a glance, to a few awkward hours of playing catch-up over sushi.
This was called growing up, I’d told myself then, as I’d prepared for my wedding and the life Tim and I so carefully plotted out together. This was what happened. All friendships had to change, because we weren’t eighteen-year-old freshmen at NYU any more, and we wouldn’t ever be again. Look at me and Lianne. We’d kept in touch throughout my Manhattan years, but had only really reconnected when I moved back to Rivermark. Which was right about when I’d last spoken to Brooke, now that I thought about it. We’d exchanged emails for a while – a few earnest lines here and there, promising to make plans that never materialized.
It was as if I’d discarded Brooke along with the rest of my twenties. I couldn’t understand it. Just as I couldn’t understand how I’d managed to block all of that out – my whole history – with such success that it now felt as if I didn’t have access to my own life, my own memories. My mother had said I’d had
plights
I’d been so concerned with. Yet when I thought about it now, all I could remember about those years was Brooke. Brooke and me and all of that bright, gleaming future spread out before us, ripe for the taking.