Let Her Be (Hush collection)

by Lisa Unger

  That’s such a “now” thing, isn’t it? My best self. Is it a goal? An ultimate destination? Or is it a fluid thing, something that might ebb and flow with the tides of our lives?

  “What about now?” asks Emily. “Are you your best self now?”

  “Honestly, I don’t even know what that means anymore.”

  She lets out a little laugh, curls her stocking feet up under her.

  “Does anyone?”

  “Parker seems to.” I hold up the phone. He’s a good-looking guy—a vegan hottie with stylish stubble and cut abs. He’s fast becoming a millennial finance guru—quoted all over the place. But his stuff too—lifted more or less from everything else out there. Not spending a dollar is like earning a dollar. Um, hello, Benjamin Franklin—a penny saved is a penny earned?

  Meanwhile, there’s nothing about him online. Parker doesn’t have a LinkedIn profile. There’s no personal Facebook or Instagram page—with pictures of friends and family, party shots, or his nephew’s first birthday party. His social-media presence is on point—only about his finance blog and his Parker Pinches Pennies persona. The real Parker is nowhere to be found.

  She leans in to stare at my phone.

  “He looks like a dick,” Emily says flatly. I laugh. It’s funny when kind, careful people say what they’re really thinking.

  “She sure can pick ’em,” I say.

  She issues a knowing snort.

  The list of Anisa’s exes is long and colorful, kind of a running joke among her friends.

  The tattooed bartender who smoked so much dope that he regularly passed out cold while they were making love. The hirsute hedge fund manager who could never, ever not be looking at his phone. The off-Broadway actor who kept a picture of his mother by his bed. The timid IT guy who still had a VCR, along with a complete cataloged set of Seinfeld episodes that he rewatched and quoted endlessly. I never minded talking about her past, especially since I was always billed as the light at the end of the long, dark dating tunnel. The prince to all her frogs. Until I wasn’t.

  We decide Emily’s next call should be to Anisa’s mother, Jenny. There is a rule for calling Jenny. Never after six. Anisa’s mother starts drinking at lunch and is pretty much on an alcohol drip until she falls asleep in front of the television at night. She is fine, more or less, until the second glass after dinner—then she might turn maudlin or belligerent, nostalgic, exuberant, clingy, or downright mean.

  It’s 7:02 p.m. when Emily calls her, putting her on speaker while I sit silent, and it apparently isn’t one of Jenny’s better nights.

  “Hey, Jenny, it’s Emily, Anisa’s friend from college.”

  “Oh,” she says. Anisa used to say there was a pitch, a shift in tone that she could pick up on in one syllable. Over the time I got to know Jenny a little, I became able to discern it as well. It was kind of a sloppy wobble to words, a sharpness of tone. “Hello, Emily. Do you ever hear from my daughter?”

  “Actually,” Emily says, glancing at me, “I was calling to ask you the same thing.”

  A snort, the tinkle of ice in a glass. “Would you believe it’s been over a year since she called her mother? Not that I’m sitting by the phone. I have a life, you know.”

  “A year?”

  “Well, you know she has nothing but a catalog of complaints about me. Apparently, I was the world’s worst mother. The last I heard from her—a text, of all things—she was done with me. She said I was a sandbag in her life, one she had to cut loose in order to be free.”

  Clutter clearing, shedding the things that no longer serve, moving away from toxic people, dead relationships, the life-changing magic of getting rid of all your shit. It’s another very “of the moment” thing for our generation.

  But I look around my parents’ place, the house that belonged to my grandparents, the same floors they walked on, pieces of well-made furniture that have aged with grace over generations, that have embraced us in times of joy and sorrow—Christmas mornings and birthday parties, the gathering after my sister’s funeral. There are boxes of photos, childhood drawings and report cards, wedding china on which festive meals have been served to imperfect gatherings of friends and family. Piles of books, collected art of varying quality, notebooks of poetry and fiction that will never be read.

  How do you discern between the things that hold you back and the things that hold you up? My parents have made mistakes. I have too. Maybe they have enabled me, softened blows, causing me to grow up unable to deal with the harsh realities of life. And I have been in trouble, was a middling student, an inconsiderate son at times.

  And I tried to kill the only child they had left—myself. But we’re all still here, making our way, together. I can’t imagine being done with them, or they with me. Sometimes if we cut too many sandbags, we float away. Is that what happened to Anisa? Did Anisa float away? Having shed all her family and friends, did she disappear into the ether?

  “I tried to tell her.” Jenny and Emily are still on the phone, Jenny’s words dipping and pitching. “She can stop talking to me, stop visiting me. But I’ll always be her mother. Like it or not.”

  “Yeah, I hear that. So, I am trying to locate her, Jenny,” Emily says. “Do you have any idea where she lives?”

  “So I’m not the only one she left at the curb? What about that nice boy? Will, was it? I knew that wouldn’t last. She only wants someone who treats her badly.”

  “Jenny,” Emily says, rolling her eyes at me. “Do you have an address? Or did she mention a town? Anything that might be a clue to where she lives.”

  “She lives online, like all of you kids. You think that’s the real world. But it isn’t.”

  The line goes dead, Emily’s phone issuing the desultory beep of an ended call.

  I dip my head in my hand. I’m sorry, Anisa. I’m sorry for driving you away.

  I’ve been round and round about all of this with Dr. Black. He lets me walk the winding roads of regret and self-flagellation, of what-ifs and if-onlys. But we always wind up at the same point. Anisa has walked away from her life and any contact with me, due in large part to my bad behavior in our relationship, our breakup, and my suicide attempt. She has made clear her choice and her boundaries. Any chasing I do is boundary trampling, an attempt to control another person, the actions of an abuser. I must accept the consequences of my actions and respect her choice.

  For some reason, sitting here with Emily, it suddenly becomes clear that there’s no road back to what I had with Anisa. I have to let her go.

  I am about to suggest that Emily do the same when she speaks up.

  “I think I might have some idea where she is,” Emily says.

  I look up at her. She’s hunched over her laptop in the dark room, the screen turning the lenses of her glasses blue.

  “Look,” she says when I don’t say anything.

  When I come to stand behind her, I see Anisa’s face—mouth open, eyes on the camera, a giant glop of pink on a spoon headed for those perfect lips. It somehow manages to be totally innocent and yet highly sexualized, like all of her posts.

  Organic ice cream, made with all locally sourced ingredients—milk from local grass-fed cows, strawberries from the farm up the road, sweetened with honey from an area beekeeper. Parker may be totally vegan, but I am NOT. #local #organic #yum #sogood

  “We’ve been there,” Emily says.

  I look at the picture, and there on the counter behind Anisa’s smiling face is a stack of paper ice cream bowls. The logo: a simple black-and-white cow with a big smile and a pink tongue. The Happy Cow. Emily is right. It was a brutal summer weekend, sweltering temperatures and my AC on the fritz. Anisa was jealous that all our friends seemed to have left the city for rental houses in the Hamptons. Emily was going through a bad breakup. So I suggested we borrow my parents’ car and all head north.

  That was the weekend I told Anisa and Emily about Claire. Anisa already knew that I’d lost a sister; she just didn’t know the details.

&n
bsp; We stopped in town, had lunch, ice cream at the Happy Cow. Then we got groceries, booze, and went to the house. She loved it there at first. The house is sweet, the grounds beautiful, the town a picture postcard—a yoga studio, a little bookstore, some really nice restaurants, and tons of shops selling goods from local artisans, farmers, craftsmen.

  It was only after Emily had gone to sleep and Anisa and I sat out by the firepit that she started to feel the sadness that kept us all away. My parents couldn’t bring themselves to sell it, because it always felt as if we had left Claire there. But we couldn’t stand to be there either.

  “I’m sorry your family has had to go through this,” she said that night, holding my hand. The fire crackled, and the night sky glittered with stars.

  Even though Anisa was sad, I could see for the first time how love might transform the house again. We’d come up there with our friends, make a new energy field—parties and cooked meals, take the old rowboat out on the lake. Laughter and music would energize the space. Maybe my parents would find their way back. One day, after Anisa and I were married, we’d bring our own children here for lazy summer weekends. The house, the garden, the woods, the lake—it would breathe again. That was the way of it in the organic world—death and rebirth.

  But we didn’t go back. And strangely, that weekend lives in my memory as the last time things were really good. A few weeks later, those first clouds of suspicion started to set in and turn our relationship dark. Almost as if remembering how painful it is to lose someone, I started to cling to Anisa in unhealthy ways. Dr. Black and I have discussed at length how Claire’s death changed the way I saw the world. How I discovered too early that it was wild, unpredictable, utterly out of my control.

  “We have been there,” I say.

  “The Happy Cow,” she says. “Anisa loved it up there.”

  “But what if it’s just another old picture?” I scroll through my photos, but I don’t see anything like it. Emily does the same.

  “In this photo, she’s not wearing the infinity necklace,” Emily says finally. “You had just given it to her when we were there together. She never took it off. If it was an old photo, she’d be wearing the necklace.”

  I look more closely at the post. Her neck is bare.

  “So,” I say. “What should we do?”

  “Do your parents still have a car?”

  “They do.”

  “How about a road trip?”

  “You mean go look for her?”

  I balk. Stalking. I’ve been accused of stalking her. There’s a restraining order, which, as far as I know, is still in force. Isn’t this just more of the same? A violation of her very clear boundaries.

  I express all of this to Emily.

  “I get all that,” she says. “Except I’m worried too. Maybe something’s not right, Will.”

  “Then maybe we should just go to the police.”

  She blows out a laugh, points at the computer. “And say what? My friend won’t return my calls. I think this online life she’s living is an elaborate sham. I think—da-da-DAH—she might be the victim of foul play.”

  It does sound pretty stupid.

  “Look,” she says. “This is not just you. It’s me. I’ll vouch for that, if it comes down to it. All I’m asking for is a ride.”

  I wonder what Dr. Black would think of this plan. I’m going to guess he would not support this. Work on your novel. Work on getting a job. Work on yourself. Those are the three sanctioned activities. Avoid relationships right now. No alcohol or drugs of any kind. Don’t social-media stalk Anisa.

  But the draw is so powerful, my suspicions so convincing.

  But this is exactly the place I was in when I was certain she was cheating on me. She was lying, I believed. It was true to me in that headspace, with the evidence I thought I had. And that gave me the right to do ugly things like stalk, snoop, follow. To grab her arm when she tried to leave, maybe even worse. And my angry thoughts, my suspicions, felt real. Why is this different? I’m guessing Dr. Black would say it isn’t. He has encouraged me to call him when I feel those dark impulses. Maybe I should do that.

  “I think I’m going,” Emily says into my tortured silence. “With or without you. You know why? Because I can live with making an idiot out of myself if we’re just being totally paranoid. But I’m not going to be able to live with myself if I’m right and I do nothing.”

  Fair point. She stands, a bit breathless with the power of her intention. Her hair is wild and shiny, and I find her slightly mesmerizing—her sudden passion, her prettiness. It’s not that I never noticed before. It’s just that I had eyes only for Anisa.

  “And say we go, say we find her,” she goes on. “And there she is, all gorgeous and minimalist and in love, living her best life. Then we know for sure—she bailed. She doesn’t want the life she had here. She doesn’t want my friendship anymore. And then, well—”

  “We know the truth,” I finish. “And that’s that.”

  It isn’t long before we’re in a cab heading to the garage where my parents keep their Land Rover. Then, for a while, we stand in the brightly lit drive, cars coming and going, waiting for ours to be retrieved from the mysterious depths of urban vehicle storage.

  “Where are we going exactly?” I say when I’m behind the wheel. Their car is a nice one, late model, with beautiful leather seats and a dash alive with glowing lights, a colorful GPS map. I pull out into the schizophrenic flow of city traffic.

  “Well, just up to the town where the ice cream place is,” Emily says.

  “The shop will be closed,” I say. “The whole town shuts down at nine.”

  Something crosses her face, doubt maybe.

  “It’s okay,” she says brightly. “We’re in the flow. We’ll find our way.”

  She sounds sure of herself, though to me it just sounds like one of Anisa’s regurgitated posts. Something illustrated and packaged for happy consumption. This idea that if we just ask the universe to fulfill our desires, it will? I’m not sure I buy it.

  But maybe that’s why that attitude never seems to work for me. Because in my heart, I don’t believe. I know that no matter how much you love and want, no matter how much you ask and beg, sometimes things just get taken away from you. Like Claire. Like Anisa.

  I share this black idea with Emily as we pull onto the highway. It’s still sitting heavy in the air as the city disappears behind us.

  “Jesus, Will,” she says after a while. “That’s really depressing. Maybe—lighten up a little?”

  We exchange a look in the dim interior of the car, and then we both start to laugh. Hard. Tears streaming, shoulders shaking. It feels good, like really good. It’s the first time I’ve had a belly laugh in a damn long time.

  But then the laughter dies and we are in the dark, driving north—to find someone we’ve both loved and lost. Someone who may be in trouble—or not. Who may need a rescue, or who may see what we’re doing as deluded, a terrible violation of the space she’s claimed.

  She doesn’t want you, I remind myself.

  We ride in silence.

  “I always wonder why she came that night,” I say after I don’t know how long. “After everything. Why she even answered my call.”

  I say it out loud, even though I don’t mean to. Dr. Black thinks I shouldn’t attach too much meaning to it. It was the right thing, the human thing to do. And Anisa is a kind person. Of course she wouldn’t just ignore my calls and let me die.

  “She didn’t,” Emily says. Her voice is soft but clear, and the words ring like a bell in my psyche.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was—me,” she says.

  We’ve pulled off the interstate and onto the smaller rural highway that leads to town, trees all around. We haven’t seen another car for a while now.

  “It was me,” she says again.

  “You?”

  There’s a kind of tightening in my center.

  “She never answered you that ni
ght. She felt awful about it later. Will—she did. But she sent your calls straight to voice mail, then deleted them. She didn’t know until later that you tried to kill yourself.”

  I let this sink in. But no. It’s not true. I saw her standing there, an angel calling me back from the edge of my life. There was nothing else, no ray of light, no voice offering a choice. It was just Anisa.

  “You called me when you didn’t reach her.” Her voice is just a whisper. “I raced to your place, convinced your landlord to open the door. The whole bathroom was flooded.”

  My friend . . .

  There’s so much blood . . .

  “I called 911.”

  I’ve clung to that memory. Really held on tight, thinking that Anisa came. That some part of her still cared about some part of me. Except she didn’t come. Even after she knew, she didn’t call or send a note. She just—left.

  “I didn’t want to tell you.” Emily’s voice is small in the dark. “I didn’t want to hurt you any more than you’ve been hurt already. I could tell that it meant something to you.”

  My hands grip the wheel too tightly, my eyes on the dark stretch of road glowing in the headlights.

  “Will?”

  Finally, I loosen my grip. I reach a hand out and put it over hers. She’s shaking.

  “Thank you, Emily.”

  I guess it’s long overdue. I’m myopic, unable to see past my own pain these days. “Thank you for saving my life.”

  Her breathing is shallow now, wobbly. She laces her fingers through mine.

  “Will.” Her face has gone earnest, and then she casts her eyes down. “I’m glad you’re still here.”

  I think about it a moment, watching the road ahead.

  “So am I.”

  Of course it wasn’t Anisa. Why should she answer my calls that night? Why would she take my threats seriously—or care? The restraining order forbade me from calling her, and her lawyer friend had advised her not to “engage.” She used that word a lot. I’m not going to engage with you, Will. Boy, did that enrage me.

  My addled brain saw what it wanted to see.