The Girl He Used to Know

by Tracey Garvis Graves

  He was still planning for the day when I would join him, but I couldn’t think about the future. Getting back on my feet in the present took everything I had, and moving to New York would mean starting over yet again. Even though Jonathan would be by my side to help, the very thought of it exhausted me. I could only address the here and now and would have to worry about the rest later.

  * * *

  I was walking out of a lecture hall a few weeks later when I spotted Tim, a member of the chess club. It was too late to turn around or pretend I hadn’t seen him, which was my go-to maneuver for avoiding people I didn’t want to talk to.

  “Hey, Annika,” he said. “I thought you graduated.”

  “I have a few classes I still need to finish.”

  “It’s like you dropped off the face of the earth last spring.”

  “I had some health issues,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t ask for details. “I’m fine now.”

  “Good. I’m happy to hear that.” He hoisted his backpack higher on his shoulder. “Well, hey, I’m late for class but hopefully I’ll see you at the union on Sunday for chess club. You missed the first couple of meetings. We need you.”

  “Okay,” I said. “See you then.”

  But I did not rejoin the chess club, and this time there was no one around to talk me into it.

  * * *

  One day in October, I came back from the library and discovered there was something wrong with the lock on my apartment door. When I inserted my key, the lock didn’t make the same sound it had made previously. Or did it? I stood in the hallway turning the question over and over in my mind as I locked and then unlocked the door, listening for the click that never came. No matter which way I turned the key, the door always opened with ease.

  When the sun went down that night, the darkness that filled my apartment settled on me like an inky black film of anxiety. I shoved a chair under the doorknob of the front door and also the one leading into my bedroom. I dozed fitfully with the lights on, burrowed under the covers like an animal in its nest. Every noise sounded like an intruder slowly letting themselves in to my apartment.

  Every day that week when I left the apartment, I fiddled with the lock, hoping to hear the sound of it thumping into place. And every day that I didn’t, my fear increased. I stopped opening the curtains in the morning because the setting sun and the fretfulness that accompanied it unnerved me to the point that it was better to keep them closed all the time.

  It’s not that I didn’t know what to do, it was that I didn’t know how to make it happen, and I was too paralyzed to ask someone. Janice had always taken care of these things. Once, when she’d gone home for the weekend, she discovered upon her return that the heat had stopped working. She found me under the blankets in my bed wearing three sweaters, my wool stocking cap, and a pair of fingerless gloves. My fingertips were icy, but I’d found it difficult to turn the pages of my book with mittens on, so I’d had no choice.

  “It is fifty-two degrees in our apartment!”

  “Why are you shouting at me?”

  “Because it’s fifty-two degrees in our apartment.”

  “You already said that.”

  “I’ll be right back,” she said. When she returned, she told me that the maintenance man had put in a call to the furnace repair company, and by the time we woke up the next morning the apartment was a toasty seventy-two. I had never asked her what she’d done to make that happen, because as soon as it was taken care of, I forgot all about it.

  I took several deep breaths and walked down the stairs to the manager’s office near the entrance of the building. What if I couldn’t explain the problem properly? What if they told me there was nothing wrong with the lock, and I was just too dense to know how to turn a key?

  There was a tenant ahead of me in line, a young woman I’d seen in the hallway a few times. “I need to put in a work order,” she said. “The faucet in the kitchen is leaking.”

  “Sure,” the man said. “Just fill this out.” He handed her a form and she scribbled something on it and gave it back. He glanced at it and said someone would be there later that day to take a look.

  “I need to put in a work order too,” I said, the words tumbling out in a barely coherent rush when I stepped up to the desk.

  He handed me the same form he’d handed the young woman, and I wrote down my name and apartment number. “There’s something wrong with the lock on my door.”

  “Just note it on the work order and we’ll get it taken care of immediately. Security issues always take priority.”

  I wrote down “broken front door lock” and handed him the form. A few hours later, I had a fully functioning lock and a whole lot of peace. That wasn’t hard at all, I thought, chastising myself for acting so helpless instead of tackling the problem head-on.

  The next morning, I opened all the curtains and let the sun fill the apartment with light.

  * * *

  The epiphany that the world was full of people I could emulate the way I had with Janice and Jonathan gave me renewed hope. Once I opened my eyes, I realized it was all laid out right in front of me: Watch the person in line ahead of me buying their coffee. Pay attention to the way people were dressed, so that I’d never be caught off guard by changes in the weather. Listen to how other people responded before mimicking their answers and speech patterns, body language and behavior. The constant vigilance and my heightened anxiety that I’d screw it up anyway exhausted me, but I persevered.

  Because I was always looking, always observing, I saw things I didn’t want to see. The female students laughing and chatting on their way to class or sharing a meal in a restaurant the way Janice and I used to. The couples walking hand in hand, stopping to share a kiss before going their separate ways. The young man carrying a girl piggyback through the grass as she laughed and nuzzled her face in his neck. The guy in one of my classes who always dropped a tender kiss on his girlfriend’s forehead before they parted. I used to have that, I’d think. The hollow ache I felt due to Jonathan’s absence made my lip quiver and I’d blink back tears.

  I made endless lists to remind me what I needed to do every day. They were the things Janice used to do, in the order she’d always done them, and when we lived together, I followed her example. But Janice wasn’t there anymore, so I checked off each item on my list: Drop rent check into the slot on the metal box mounted outside the rental office. Pay utilities. Buy groceries. Take out the trash. On Sunday nights, I lined up a week’s worth of mugs containing a single tea bag. I put spoons in cereal bowls and stacked them seven high, taking one off the top every morning before pouring in the cereal and adding milk. Monday was for laundry. Wednesday was for cleaning. Eventually, I learned to love living alone. It was always quiet. My routines were solidly in place, and nothing ever interrupted them.

  Though I had things mostly under control, the lack of companionship wore on me. Janice, I could speak to by phone, but Jonathan’s calls were a different story. I always called him back, but now I found myself returning his calls when I knew he wouldn’t be there and eventually, we communicated more with our answering machines than we did with each other. At the time, I told myself I didn’t want to interfere with his life and was doing it for him, but that was another lie. It wasn’t that I was still afraid of holding Jonathan back; it was what I needed in order to soar.

  * * *

  The milk I’d taken from the refrigerator to pour on the cereal I’d decided to have for dinner one evening smelled sour, because even though “buy milk” was clearly listed on the grocery list I’d brought to the store with me the day before, sometimes I still forgot to buy it. The sun had set and I didn’t want to go out, but the cereal was already in the bowl, so I shrugged into my coat and left.

  On the way home from the corner store, I passed a man who was sipping something from a flask he pulled from the pocket of his dirty jean jacket. He looked older than me, maybe a worker from one of the nearby bars. He raised the flask in my direct
ion and started toward me. “Come drink with me, beauty,” he said.

  I quickened my pace, desperate to put more distance between us, but it only seemed to egg him on. “Come on, I won’t bite,” he yelled. “Unless you’re into that kind of thing.” His voice sounded closer now.

  I wore a whistle on a chain around my neck, and as the footsteps grew louder, I pulled it out from under my shirt and put it in my mouth. It was silver, pretty, shiny. Almost like a necklace, although I never wore it on the outside of my clothes.

  I felt a tug on my sleeve, and though it was gentle, I spun around, the shrill blast of the whistle piercing the otherwise quiet sidewalk. I blew as hard as I could, and I took a step toward him, stopping only to take a deep breath so I could blow it again. Bystanders and passersby stopped what they were doing and a few of them began to approach. But it wasn’t the man with the flask. The man who had tugged on my sleeve looked no older than me, and he held up his hands and yelled, “Hey, sorry! I thought you were someone else.”

  “You shouldn’t sneak up behind people like that! It’s very rude.”

  “Jesus Christ, chill out.” He turned on his heel and stomped away like he was mad. At me! I looked around and calmly dropped the whistle back down into my shirt. Then I went home and ate my cereal.

  You might think the whistle was Janice’s idea, but it had actually been my mother’s. It was the last thing she gave to me before she and my dad got back in the car to go home after moving me into my apartment. “You must speak up if something should happen that frightens or endangers you,” she said. “If you can’t, let this be your voice.”

  “I don’t want it,” I said, shoving it back into her palm. Why did my mother insist on scaring me like that? Giving me a whistle only filled my head with swirling thoughts of danger lurking on every corner, confirmed that the world was an unsafe place for people like me to navigate on their own. There’s no Janice to babysit you this time, Annika. So, here, have a whistle.

  “Take it anyway,” she said, slipping the chain over my head. “Someday you might need it and you’ll be thankful you have it.”

  My mother, as always, had been right.

  * * *

  Jonathan left a final message on my machine shortly before Christmas. I’d postponed my move to New York indefinitely by enrolling in graduate school. I finally felt like I was in control of my life, and I’d proven I could live independently. Leaving now would disrupt the routines that brought me such calm, rock the boat I’d worked so hard to keep steady. “I just need some more time,” I’d said into his machine. “I think I should complete my education before I move anywhere.”

  Now, I listened to the message he’d left for me, tears running in a torrent down my cheeks. It should not have been a surprise; even I knew he would not wait forever.

  Though my heart felt like it was splitting in two, I did not regret my decision. But I paid a steep price for my independence, and losing Jonathan was harder than all the things that had come before it, combined.

  32

  Annika

  THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

  AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

  1992

  Will showed up at my apartment to drive me home for Christmas. I’d been expecting my parents, but when I opened the door I found my brother instead.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Happy holidays to you too, sister.”

  “Mom said she and Dad were coming.”

  “Yeah, well. Mom’s busy cooking and Dad’s busy … being Dad. The roads are shit and I was bored, so I volunteered.”

  “You never come home this early.”

  “Clearly, I did this year.”

  Will picked up my suitcase and I locked the apartment and followed him out to his car.

  “Is Jonathan going to join us over break?” Will asked as he merged onto the snowy highway.

  “No. That’s over.” I had never said it out loud. Now that I had, it meant that it was real and it hurt. I played Jonathan’s last message again in my head. Definitely over.

  “By the way, in case you were wondering. It wasn’t that I couldn’t hold on to Jonathan. It was that I decided to let him go.”

  * * *

  Will had never been home in time to go get the tree. My dad and I were usually the ones who cut it down and dragged it back to the car, but it was bitterly cold and Will told our parents to stay home. “Annika and I can handle it.”

  We drove to the same tree farm we’d been buying our trees from my whole life, and we walked down the rows until I found the perfect tree, a seven-foot Canaan fir. I waited patiently while Will sawed it down.

  “I got fired,” he said as we watched the tree fall.

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t you want to know why?”

  That felt like a trick question. “Do you want me to know why?” We each picked up one end of the tree and headed toward the parking lot.

  “I made a mistake. A big one. It cost the company a lot of money. I didn’t tell Mom and Dad. I just said I quit because I didn’t like the job.”

  I didn’t say anything. It was cold enough for us to see our breath as we panted and dragged the unwieldy tree through the snow.

  “Do you have any thoughts on this?”

  “I make mistakes all the time, Will. Been making them pretty steadily my whole life.”

  “Yeah, well, when you make them in investment banking, it’s a big deal.” He set down his end of the tree. I couldn’t carry it without him, so I did, too.

  “I didn’t take my birth control pills the way I was supposed to, and I got pregnant.”

  “I know that. Did you think Mom and Dad wouldn’t tell me? They said you could have died. I was worried about you.”

  “You never told me you were worried. You didn’t call me. Or come home to visit me.”

  “No. I didn’t and I should have. I’m sorry.”

  “So, what are you going to do now? Just give up?” I asked.

  “What? No. What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I picked up my end of the tree again. “It just means that life goes on.”

  * * *

  After we got home, we decorated the tree. Will didn’t like the way Dad and I did it last year and convinced me to do it the old boring way. “That’s just not very creative at all, but whatever.” It was a nice way to spend the afternoon, though. I liked hanging the shiny ornaments, felt the thrill of plugging in a strand of lights and watching the resultant burst of color. My mother kept offering to throw another log on the fire crackling in the hearth; to bring cocoa; to ask if we’d like her to put on some Christmas music. I said yes to the cocoa but no to the music.

  “Mom’s so happy,” Will said.

  “How can you tell?”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “No.” I pulled a chair over next to the tree so I could place the angel on the top. “Isn’t Mom always happy?”

  “No one is always happy.”

  * * *

  When we finished decorating the tree, Will sat down next to me on the couch. I covered my lap with the old wool blanket that my mother always kept folded over the back of the couch in the winter. Will balanced a paper plate of Christmas cookies on his knee and cracked open a beer. He took a bite of the cookie and a drink of the beer, and my stomach turned over.

  “That looks revolting.”

  “Don’t knock it ’til you try it. There’s more beer in the fridge.” He offered me the plate of cookies and I took one.

  “I only like wine coolers,” I said around a mouthful of frosting. “Preferably cherry.”

  “I saw a bottle of peach wine in the fridge. That sounds … horrible. But maybe you’d like it?” Will got up and went into the kitchen. When he returned, he held a wineglass full of light-amber liquid.

  I sniffed it, and it smelled okay. Definitely peach. The first sip went down a little rough, but the more I drank the more the flavor grew on me.

  “Give me some of that blanket,” W
ill said. I shoved it over and he shook it out a little so that it covered both of us.

  “What did you get Mom and Dad for Christmas?” he asked.

  “I got Dad a book and Mom some dish towels.”

  “Isn’t that what you got both of them last year?”

  How did Will remember something like that? I’d had to rack my brain to remember what I’d bought them last year when I was trying to come up with something to get them this year.

  “Yes, but it’s a safe choice. They both seemed to like their gifts last year.” Truthfully, I was a little worried about it and would have to come up with something different next year. The same gifts three years in a row would probably be pushing it.

  “I should tell Janice about this wine.”

  Will drained the last of his beer and I handed him my empty glass. “Looks like someone needs a refill,” he said.

  * * *

  We did all of the Christmassy things in the days leading up to the actual holiday. Will was right, because my mom did seem happy. She was always smiling or humming and she kept coming into the living room whenever Will and I were in there. She’d stand at the door and just look at us and then Will would laugh and say, “Enough, Mom.” The four of us watched It’s a Wonderful Life, and I had a hard time watching George Bailey on that bridge. But I was surrounded by my family and for the first time ever, I felt like we were all in this life together.

  * * *

  When break was over Will volunteered to drive me back to school. “The roads still aren’t great. I’ll take Annika.” He was in a good mood, because he had an interview with a big firm in New York the next week and would be flying home the next day to prepare. He’d told me to keep my fingers crossed for him and I said I would even though that wouldn’t have anything to do with him actually getting the job.