Once More With Feeling

by Megan Crane

  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 mar
riage 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.

  How had I lost all of it? All of that brightness, and Brooke too?

  My cell phone buzzed in my pocket then, though it took me a long moment to recognize the sound and vibration and haul myself out of the past long enough to dig it out. It was a text from Carolyn – who had finally accepted the fact that I wasn’t going to answer her calls.

  Come to the hospital right now!! 911!!!! it read.

  I went completely cold.

  This was it, I thought through the iciness that spread through me. It had finally happened. Tim must have taken a turn for the worse.

  I held the phone in my hand and stared at it, realizing as I did that I was too much of a coward to text Carolyn back for clarification. I didn’t want to know. I would find out soon enough whether I wanted to or not, wouldn’t I?

  I climbed to my feet and lurched for the door. As I staggered through the house, our house, I knew I should have been replaying all the scenes of Tim’s and my time together, of this life of ours. I should have been telling myself something comforting – like that it didn’t matter that parts of our life weren’t what they should have been. That we’d built something good. That just because it had ended horribly and now tragically, that didn’t erase all that had gone before.

  But I didn’t really feel any of that.

  I just felt numb. All the way through.

  I stood in the corridor outside the ICU waiting room and stared at my sister without comprehension, as if I could somehow make sense of what had just happened through the force of my glare alone.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said again, hearing the strain in my own voice. ‘Why did you text me at all? Why didn’t you just talk to the doctor yourself?’

  Carolyn actually rolled her eyes, as if this were a wholly unreasonable question. She leaned back against the wall in the hallway and wrapped her arms around her middle.

  ‘I really can’t,’ she murmured, her voice hinting at a wealth of untold tragedies, so very much in the style of our mother. It made my shoulders creep up to a place right below my ears. ‘I told you. It gives me horrible anxiety and it certainly can’t be good for the baby.’

  ‘I just want to make sure I’m fully understanding what happened here,’ I said, aware that my tone was shifting into what my mother called my Lawyer Mode. I didn’t try to modify it. Some things called for a little cross-examination, and this was one of them. ‘You texted me, indicating it was an emergency, because you didn’t feel like having a conversation with a doctor. That can’t be what you’re telling me, Carolyn. Can it?’

  ‘I can do without the sarcastic tone, Sarah,’ she replied, with another dramatic roll of her eyes.

  ‘I thought Tim was dead,’ I snapped back at her. ‘Or dying. I drove down here preparing myself for impending widowhood. I was thinking about how to go about setting up his funeral service.’ I forced myself to stop. To inhale. ‘But he’s actually fine. Better, the doctors wanted to tell you, even if he isn’t awake yet – but you couldn’t have that conversation.’ I pressed my fingertips to my temples to keep my head from exploding. ‘When did you become such a delicate, hothouse flower?’

  Carolyn pushed herself away from the wall. ‘I’m not going to fight with you about this,’ she muttered. She shoved her jet-black hair back from her face. ‘And I’m not going to compete with you for terminology here. Is that why you’re so angry? It’s like you would take some kind of sick pleasure in getting to be Tim’s widow because I’m not – and I get it. I really do.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ My voice was absurdly, almost frighteningly calm. I shoved my hands deep in the pockets of the parka I hadn’t had time to do more than unzip, and rocked back on the comfy heels of my winter boots. Anything to keep the drumbeat of potential violence at a low level I could control, rather than expressing it all over Carolyn’s pretty face.

  ‘I heard the way you said that,’ she said, her voice shaking then, her eyes filling with tears. Crocodile tears, I was almost certain, although with her level of melodrama I could never be sure. ‘Believe me, Sarah, I know you’re still his wife. I know you’re getting off on getting to play the role here. Still, despite everything. I know.’

  The way she said that made my whole body fill with what felt like some kind of howling wind. Probably because there was that uncomfortable edge of truth to what she was saying, and I couldn’t help but hate her more for it. For recognizing it and calling attention to it, so I couldn’t pretend any more. I had to stand there for a moment until the tornado subsided to some kind of dull roar. Until I could be sure that I wouldn’t unleash it if I opened up my mouth.

  Carolyn, as ever, was completely blind to the danger. She pushed her hair back again and kept her hands there, on top of her head, making her face seem starker, somehow. The bones of it more delicate. For a moment she looked almost haunted, and I was struck by that. What ghosts made Carolyn’s life a misery? What regrets? But maybe I was projecting. Maybe I wanted to imagine that she could feel those things. It made her less of a monster, didn’t it? It made her my sister again. Maybe I wanted that more than I’d admitted to myself before.

  ‘I know this hurts you to hear,’ she said in that same wounded tone of voice
, so much like our mother’s it set my teeth on edge and made my heart pound in that familiar way I hated, ‘but if he woke up, he’d want me. Not you. On some level you have to know that.’

  So much for ghosts and regrets. And tornado control.

  I let it rip.

  ‘What do you think being a wife is?’ I snapped at her, not even trying to modify my volume or my tone. ‘You think it’s all doggy-style in the afternoon and sneaking away to a bed and breakfast to play out some romantic fantasies? Dream on, Carolyn. Marriage is a lot more work than that.’

  ‘I’m not going to compare relationships with you,’ she said primly, as if from some high horse.

  ‘You want to be his wife?’ I threw at her. ‘Then act like his wife. Feel free to take this over. I give you my blessing. I don’t even know why I bothered. Other women in my position would have lit the both of you on fire weeks ago.’

  ‘What?’ She studied my face, blinking as if I’d surprised her, and as if she were not at all comfortable with putting that particular shoe on the other foot. ‘What are you …?’

  ‘I’m sitting here keeping watch, keeping some insane vigil, and for what?’ I realized at that point that I was talking to myself. That in no way slowed me down. ‘Who am I proving myself to? You? Tim? What’s the fucking point?’

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked, and I thought it was cute, really, that she sounded like she cared. But I wouldn’t make the mistake of believing those little flickers of humanity again. They were nothing more than shooting stars – rocks and debris combusting and pretending to be stars on the way down.