“There is no way you kept in touch with Charles and I never found out. No way. Quinn would have told me.” I shake my head aggressively at Porter. Quinn had the most to gain if Charles and Porter had been communicating. She surely would have freed herself from the hours we spent on the couch with my head in her lap crying, reliving my devastation, and crying some more. “Plus, you would have been at their wedding. You would have beenintheir wedding. Impossible.” I refuse to believe the story Porter is peddling. There is absolutely no world in which Charles and Quinn would have kept knowledge of Porter and his whereabouts from me.
Porter pushes his chair back, crosses his legs, and takes a sip of water. The man remains reserved and deliberate in his movements. I used to consider his comfort moving through life at his own pace attractive; now it’s nothing short of irritating.
“I had Charles swear not to tell you or Quinn where I was and that we were in touch. It wasn’t often that we talked. Only briefly every couple of months or so. And when we did talk, I told him we couldn’t talk about you.”
“Out of sight, out of mind. Is that it?” I accuse, getting satisfaction out of baiting him.
“Absolutely nothing like that,” Porter asserts.
“Keeping that heavy of a secret was a lot to put on Charles,” I blame.
“I know. Charles was always on me that I needed to reach out to you.”
“Really? Reach out to me? Like leaving me a voicemail while I was at work?”
“No. Like, come see you in person,” Porter owned.
“Did you know Quinn was pregnant when Charles died?” I inquire, highlighting another defining moment he missed. “That he was going to have a daughter?”
“I didn’t.” Porter drops his head, and his thumb reaches up to wipe the corner of his eye.
“Quinn got the gender results thirty minutes before she found out Charles had an aneurysm. Did you know he died rushing across Fifth Avenue to a lunch meeting? He never met his daughter. He never even knew he was having one. I was the one at the doctor’s appointment with Quinn that day. It took her a long time to forgive herself for telling Charles to go to his meeting instead of her appointment. That we had it covered. If he had been with her, there would have been doctors around, and maybe he would have ...” A lump catches in my throat. I haven’t talked to anyone other than Quinn about that day in over two decades.
“What’s her name?”
“Alice.”
“Alice.” Porter pauses, letting the name roll through his mouth like he’s tasting a full-bodied Sonoma Valley wine. “Named after Quinn’s favorite painter, Alice Neel, I’m guessing.”
My jaw drops in surprise, though it shouldn’t. Porter’s memory had always been encyclopedic. “I can’t believe you remember that.”
“I remember everything about Princeton, Callie,” Porter says with heat in his claim.
Really?Are his memories the same as mine? I have to wonder, because if they are, then there remains no plausible explanation for why he would have disappeared from my life, from the three of our lives, on graduation day.
Does Porter remember the morning I fell asleep and snored on his shoulder through Professor Smythe’s lecture on Germanic fairy tales because we had stayed up all night fucking like the teenage rabbits we were? What about when we couldn’t stop laughing for days when Charles swore to us he’d had frostbite on his penis after the Nude Olympics when his skin began to peel? Or when Quinn helped Porter plan a dinner for two in Porter and Charles’s room for my twenty-first birthday, and when we were kissing over the candlelight, my hair caught fire and the burned stench lingered in their dorm for weeks? Or our intense “I love you”s during spring break in the Bahamas. The warmth we felt not just in the air, but from the conviction in that moment thatPorter and I would be each other’s everything for eternity. Are those all moments that Porter remembers? Because they are the ones that I do, as clearly as if they were yesterday.
“You would have known Charles was going to be a dad if you had come to the memorial service,” I inform him, breaking my musings with another comment meant to cut.
Porter leans forward over the table, our faces closer than they have been in decades, and responds, “Iwasat the service.”
“There’s no way. I would have seen you there. We would have seen each other.”
“I saw you. You were sitting behind Quinn, who was flanked by her parents. Your left hand didn’t leave her back the entire service. Your right hand, I assumed, was locked with the man who was sitting shoulder to shoulder with you. You always did need to squeeze someone’s hand when you were scared or stressed. Or sad.”He saw Thomas, but he couldn’t have known who he was.“That was your husband.”
“You don’t know that,” I snap back.
“I know I saw a large diamond on your ring finger.”
“I was engaged, not married yet. You weren’t sitting with all your teammates in the church. And you didn’t show up at Charles’s parents’ apartment afterward.” My mind is searching recollections from that day, sure that if Porter was there, I would have spotted him. I know I would have. And if I had, would the course of my life have changed?
“I was in the way back of the church, watching from the lobby just outside the door into the sanctuary.”
“Why? Too scared to come inside and face all of us after completely disappearing from our lives without any explanation?”
“No. I was scared we would interrupt the service.”
“Who’swe?”
