by Lisa Unger
I wish I could say it was love at first sight. He claimed that it was for him, that he watched me from the moment I walked in and approached the minute he realized I was alone. But when I looked at him, I saw one of those guys—those sort of outdoorsy, adventure travel, adrenaline junkie guys. I’d known a few. Swaggering with ego, hard-bodied, they think because they risk their lives for nothing that they’re special. They regale you with stories of their adventures, tell you how they want to suck the marrow out of life, expecting you to be riveted as they drone on and on. There’s nothing more boring than a man who thinks only of himself.
“Canon 5D Mark III?” he asked, indicating my camera.
“That’s right.” Okay, so he’s a photographer, I thought. I’ll wait for the barb about how my press assignment is not as real, not as meaningful as his (obviously) journalistic one. I could tell by his scruffy arrogance that his was not a cushy gig like mine. Maybe some sexist comment about how mine is a good camera—for a woman because it fits nicely into a smaller hand.
“I heard the burst speed is slower than the EOS 5DS,” he said.
“Slightly,” I admitted. “But it’s more ergonomic and the files are gorgeous.”
“May I?”
I leaned against the balcony and handed it to him. It was his smile that did it, slow and mischievous. It brightened up his face as he lifted the camera and took a picture of me.
“You’re right,” he said, glancing at the screen. “Gorgeous.”
And then I’m back in my apartment, staring at the picture in front of me. Time traveling.
When I look at that picture now, I see the irked amusement on my own face, the glitter of attraction. I’m glad that girl didn’t know what lay ahead of her. Maybe she would have chosen to never love him, knowing how much it would hurt to lose him. That would have been a terrible loss for her, one she’d never even realize.
I am sifting through Jack’s files when the phone rings. The ring sounds funny, distant, and I dig for it underneath the piles of debris I’ve unpacked. Detective Grayson.
“Mrs. Lang?” His voice sounds oddly measured.
“Mrs. Lang?” I say, with a laugh. “What happened to Poppy?”
There’s a pause where I expect to hear him chuckle. But he doesn’t. “Okay, then. Poppy. Where are you?”
“I’m home.” But it doesn’t sound right. This place has not become my home. “At my apartment.”
“I thought you were staying with the Van Santens.”
I don’t love his tone—taut, officious. I find myself bristling.
“Is there a problem?” Last I checked I didn’t answer to him or anyone for my whereabouts.
“Don’t go anywhere, please. I’m on my way to you.” He hangs up without another word.
Looking around at the mess I’ve made, there’s a tingling sense of déjà vu. The portfolios of Jack’s prints, the files of tax returns, business documents, medical records, contracts—there’s nothing here I haven’t seen, that I don’t know about. What am I looking for? I’m not even sure—anything that helps me make sense of what happened yesterday, some piece of Jack that tells me why someone would want to hurt him, why someone is following me, breaking into my apartment, leaving me orchids and notes that bring back powerful memories of moments I shared with my husband.
I slice open another box. His clothes. Maybe it’s my imagination, but the smell of him wafts up into the air and it’s so fresh, so vivid that my whole body folds in with sadness. I reach for his New School sweatshirt and bring the ratty gray garment to my face, bury myself in its softness. His scent, the darkness, it wraps around me. I wish I could dive into it and disappear. But a soft click brings me back. Something has slipped from the front pocket of the sweatshirt.
I reach down and pick up a red foil matchbook. Embossed on the cover in silver: Morpheus.
I know it. Where? Where I have heard it before? The address on the back says Ludlow Street, Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Jack’s old stomping grounds. He went to the New School, lived in Alphabet City in the late ’80s and ’90s, when it was still gritty and tough and “real” according to Jack. Beautiful, he thought, in its tumbledown, graffiti-covered squalor. His photos from that time show his love for the streets, the buildings, the people in his neighborhood.
I open the matchbook; a pretty cursive, a woman’s handwriting: Elena, it says, and a phone number with a New York City cell exchange. I stare at it, not sure what it means.
The pounding on the door startles me, and the matchbook drops back into the box. I stuff the sweatshirt on top and close the cardboard folds. I walk down the hallway, the knocking continues.
“Mrs. Lang?” His voice is stern and unfriendly. “It’s Detective Grayson, please open the door.”
As I reach for the door, it swings open and he steps inside. He looks different somehow, less rumpled, more alert, younger.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“I don’t like having to track you down.”
I shake my head, not understanding his attitude, what he’s saying.
“What are you doing here?” he asks. His gaze is hard, suspicious.
I lift my palms. “I don’t know,” I say. “After yesterday, I just thought I’d look through some of his things. Maybe there’s something I missed. Some piece of this.”
“That’s my job, Mrs. Lang.”
“He’s my husband,” I say, my voice cracking. “It’s my job, too, to understand what happened to him. Maybe—I found something.”
But when I turn back toward the boxes—they’re gone.
In fact, I’m not in the new apartment at all, but back in the Upper West Side place where Jack and I lived together. How? Confusion pulls the moment long. How did I get here? The furniture is all pushed around the way it was after the gathering of friends we had to mark Jack’s passing. There are wineglasses, washed and lined up on the kitchen table, where Layla put them to dry. What’s happening to me? Panic squeezes my chest.
“No,” I say, my brain grappling. Outside the window, it’s dark. Wasn’t it just morning?
I startle to see Jack reclining in the chair by the window, his feet up on the ottoman.
“Let it go, Poppy,” he says. His face is caked with blood. “Let me go.”
A sob climbs up my throat. “Jack?”
The floor is soft, like it might buckle under my weight. The whole scene pulls long, and twisting.
“No,” I tell him, moving toward him. “I can’t. I won’t.”
I want to clean the blood from the side of his face.
“Get your coat,” says Grayson. “You shouldn’t be here.”
I’m not here, I want to tell him. It’s a year later, and I don’t live here anymore. This isn’t happening. Jack is gone.
“There was a matchbook,” I stammer. “From a downtown club, with a woman’s name written inside. Elena.”
“Let’s go.”
“Wait,” I say, panic ratcheting tight. I can’t breathe. “Why won’t you listen to me?”
“Because,” he says, suddenly nasty, his face twisted with disgust and anger. “You’re not making any sense.”
He taps at his temple hard. “Because you’re a fucking liar.”
He grabs me hard by the arm and starts pulling me toward the door. His fingers digging in, hurting. I try to resist, but he is impossibly strong and I am powerless to pull away. Even my voice is gone. I try to yell at him, to rage, but there is only silence. The hallway stretches, yawning and dark.
10
Layla’s guest room again. My heart is an engine, tears burning my eyes. I can’t get a full breath as I push myself to sitting, try to orient myself in the space, hold on to what’s real. I rub my arm, still feeling Grayson’s steely grip.
But no. It never happened. The stretching hallway, his twisted face.
&
nbsp; Not. Real.
Shit.
What’s happening to me?
“Aunt Poppy?” Izzy is a long lean shadow in the doorway, wearing a nightshirt, her hair up in a knot. “Are you okay? I thought I heard you crying.”
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “Everything’s fine. Just a nightmare.”
She’s real. I know that much. As she drifts near, I smell the soap on her skin, that same organic coconut bar that Layla keeps in the guest shower.
“Do you want me to stay with you?”
Kids know. They know that no one wants to be alone after a nightmare as its tendrils still whorl about, reaching for you, threatening to bring you back. No one wants to dwell in that nether place between night and morning where every shadow is a monster, every noise the boogeyman outside your door. Izzy doesn’t wait for me to answer, just slips into bed beside me.
“I thought I heard someone yelling before,” I say.
“They were fighting,” says Izzy, her voice heavy with sleep. “That’s all they ever do. They hurt each other. They, like, hate each other I think.”
I’m surprised to hear this from her. “Izzy, really?”
But she doesn’t answer, sound asleep already. I teddy bear–hug her from behind and feel the rise and fall of her body, her deep breathing slow and soothing. Mac’s dark tone, the obvious tension between him and Layla. Am I so caught up in my own mess that I can’t see what’s going on with my best friends?
I lie there with Izzy. Sleep doesn’t come, just a parade of images, flashes. That matchbook, that name, the number I can’t remember. Was that real? Something that I found and lost? Or forgot? Who is Elena?
Thoughts of Jack tumble; I time travel into memory.
“Can I buy you a drink?” he asked that first night.
I hesitated, then joined his group. We sat talking late into the evening. Alvaro was there that night, too. They were working as a team. Dark where Jack was fair, quiet where Jack was talkative, his stare brooding and watchful. He sat, drinking, not saying much. Eventually, though, he was gone, and one by one, so was everyone else until it was just Jack and me. We drank too much, and finally we were making out like prom dates, pressed against the wall in front of my hotel room.
“Are you going to invite me inside?”
“Definitely not,” I breathed as he kissed my neck.
I’d known too many men like Jack. You meet them all over the world when you do this kind of work. For a night, or maybe even a weekend, it’s a party, but then they’re gone, on to the next assignment and whoever they meet there.
I ran my fingers through that sandy hair, kissed him long and deep, then I unraveled myself from his arms and pushed myself inside the hotel room, closing the door behind me.
“Seriously?” he said outside the door. “You’re killing me.”
“I doubt that.” My whole body was tingling.
“Poppy Jackson,” he said. “I’ll see you in New York.”
“Sure you will,” I said to the door. It took a superhuman amount of self-control not to let him in.
“I have your card right here,” he said. “I’m going to call you as soon as I get into town.”
I smiled, figuring I wouldn’t see him again. You never see this kind of guy again.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be waiting by the phone.”
I didn’t wait by the phone—not that anyone waits by the phone anymore. Now we just take it everywhere with us. And I didn’t hear from him again right away. I thought of him a couple of times, but only to remember that heat, his smile, to be glad I hadn’t slept with him or wanted more than a man like that could give.
A week later, he was waiting for me as I exited the SoHo Gallery where I was working between photo assignments. The address was on my card. He held a bouquet of poppies.
“Did you know that the poppy flower symbolizes sleep and death?” he said.
“I did know that,” I said, drinking him in. He’d cleaned up some, but in khakis and a white cotton button-down, hair wild, he still looked as if he’d just emerged from the jungle—tousled, able, as if he’d seen so many interesting things. “But my mother just really likes the color red. That’s why she chose that name.”
“In classical mythology,” he went on, “it represents resurrection.”
“You’ve done your research.”
“It also signifies remembrance.” He moved in close and handed me the flowers, their droopy scarlet faces fragrant and cheerful. “Do you remember me?”
“Vaguely,” I said with a smile, looking down at the bouquet. It’s not easy to get fresh-cut poppies; in some places they’re illegal, or they must be special ordered from a florist.
He kissed me then, on the street, with people passing all around us, the afternoon humid and darkening. The world disappeared and it was only us from that day forward.
Lying in Layla’s guest room, I wonder now: Was the note with the orchid meant to evoke that moment with Jack?
No, I decide. It’s an innocuous question, uttered frequently throughout your life. It might be asked in hope or passion, in casual query: Do you remember me? Was there a connection? Have you been thinking about me?
I remember you. Don’t you remember me?
If not that, then what did it mean? Who remembers me, when I can’t remember him?
* * *
Mercifully, darkness recedes and the sun rises, light sneaking milky white through the blinds. With Izzy still sleeping soundly, I dress, gather my things and leave a note for Layla. I slip out the front door, shuttle down the elevator, pass the doorman, déjà vu shadowing me.
The cab carries me downtown, and the morning sun climbs, coloring windows golden. The city bustles by, even before 6:00 a.m.—the overachievers jogging, or dressed and moving with click-clack purpose up the sidewalk, headphones in, coffees or cell phones clutched in hand.
I wish—desperately—that I was one of them today, with nothing on my mind this Wednesday morning but maybe getting a workout before my early meeting. I’m addled, jumpy, back to feeling as I did after Jack died, after my breakdown: disconnected from the world, torn out, separated. Any schedule for my days or goals for my week scattered like debris after a bomb blast.
Back in my apartment for real this time, I stand before the boxes that line the far wall.
If there’s something about Jack I didn’t know, some secret self, maybe it’s hiding in here. I read in one of those clutter clearing books that if you have sealed boxes in your life, then there are places within yourself you’re afraid to confront. A warrior, I wield the box cutter and get to work. I tear them open one after another, rummaging through the contents, digging into the detritus of Jack’s life.
Finally, I sink to the floor, my throat constricted with frustration. Piles of papers, files, portfolios, clothes form a chaotic circle around me. I don’t find his New School sweatshirt; there’s no red matchbook. Nothing there points to a different Jack, one I didn’t know.
I pick up a small black box; Jack’s wedding ring glints in the velvet cushion around it. I take it out and hold it in my palm. When I slipped it on his finger at our wedding, it almost didn’t go on. We laughed as he forced it.
Layla thought I should wear it on a chain as a necklace. But no. He’d hate that. Move on, he’d surely say, just like the Jack in my dreams. Let go.
I look around at the mess I’ve made. It’s all just stuff, void of his energy, drained of anything it might have meant once to him, to me. His mother already knew, that’s why she wanted so little. Just that watch, a shadowy picture of Jack as a small boy and his lithe and handsome dad fishing on a dock. She’d lost her husband, Jack’s dad, when they were still so young, in their thirties with a baby. She never married again.
There wasn’t anyone else, not after him. No one ever compared.
I knew what she mean
t. I’ve never been one of those girls who mooned over boys—not like Layla. I never ached to marry, never saw myself with my hair done, wearing a white dress. Layla was already planning her wedding when we were in middle school. She’d steal bridal magazines from the drugstore, leaf through them on the floor of my room. She’d turn the pages slowly, gazing on all the perfect, airbrushed images of dewy brides and virile grooms—her hair would be like this, her dress like this, oh, Poppy, look at that ring.
Which one, Poppy? Which one do you want?
I don’t know, I’d laugh. Do I have to get married?
To me then, marriage was angry conversations behind closed doors, cold looks, barbed comments, long silences. My parents weren’t happy, always moving in wide orbits around me—him out in his shed, her in the bedroom with the shades drawn and the television tuned in to some old movie, him working late, her out at bunco, stumbling in after I was asleep. At least there’s no screaming, Layla said. At least the police don’t come. Yeah, okay. There was that. No black eyes, no arms in slings like at Layla’s.
Of course you have to get married, Layla said emphatically.
But there was never some imaginary bridegroom for me; it was only ever Jack I wanted to marry. It was his baby I wanted to have when I eventually wanted that. Before him, I never did develop Layla’s grand plans for marriage and children. I had no ache for that kind of life, the kind Layla wanted so badly—the happy home, beautiful children, the enviable love. I only wanted to travel, to hold the world in my lens. To take moments, those abstract slices of life and places and people, and make them say something. I wanted to make magic. That changed, of course.
Mac’s words still knock around my brain. Maybe we only knew a piece of him.
When I photographed Jack, it was always slivers of him—the ledge of his stubbled jaw, his calloused hands, the smooth round of his shoulder. I sift through some of those photos now. Those moments, fragments, the shifting shadows that pass and can’t be recovered. That’s what’s real, isn’t it?
I put the ring back in the box and snap the lid closed, start piling things back where they were. Enough of this. Why can’t I keep myself rooted in the present?
