Before she came to the magazine, she had worked freelance as a graphic designer and photographer, and in addition to being knockout brilliant, there was something about her that I immediately liked the first time we met.
She had been a military brat—moving around abroad as a child and in the US as a teen—so we spoke the same language, and also, Rox was ten years older than me and streetwise.
We took to each other and I found myself wanting to hang out with her more than the twentysomethings at the magazine, the climbers.
Rox was there for some of my nastier breakups, and also for my courtship with Graham.
“Graham’s the one,” she’d said one day in her deep smoker’s voice, gripping a cigarette and taking sharp, stinging drags from it. “And I’ll never forgive you if you fuck this up.”
We were sitting outside the café that afternoon on the patio. She was drumming the table with her long fingers that were adorned with silver skull-and-crossbones rings, inhaling her triple espresso. She’d noticed the flirty barista making eyes at me, and noticed me blushing at his attention and making eyes back.
“Look, we all have hormones,” she said. “I get it. But youdowant something stable; youdowant happiness. And that schmo over there? Please.”
“And what about you?” I asked, tilting my head, teasing her. Rox was always guarded about her past and even current relationships, but from what I gathered, she preferred quick flings over anything long-lasting.
“People like me don’t get married. I can’t be tied down. But you, it’s what you truly want.”
And I knew she was right.
Graham and I were six months away from our wedding, and for some perplexing reason, I’d developed cold feet. I had to find out why. So Rox and I took a long break from work that day and I spilled my guts to her. About how I was suddenly afraid of commitment, about how, even though I was head over heels for Graham, I’d become worried about whether he was the one. Marriage had started to seem like such a scary and final thing, and I was near panicked that day, but she coolly broke it all down for me.
“Look, what you’re dealing with is a classic case of self-sabotage,” she said, grinding her cigarette out in the metal ashtray. “I’m not trying to be an asshole here, but you have to trust me. It’snotGraham. It’s you.”
Fear of intimacy. That’s what she called it.
During our friendship, we’d sifted through the rubble of my childhood enough so that she knew about my father’s abandonment and Nikki’s tumbleweed-like nature.
“You don’t feel worthy of love, or stability, because of the way you were raised. On some fundamental level, you’re drawn to those who don’t want you, because you didn’t feel wanted by your mom or your dad,” she said, lighting another cigarette with her dark purple lighter. “So when everything is going great, your instinct is to wreck it. But youdodeserve happiness, Soph. You can be whole. This isn’t just some psychobabble bullshit. I really mean it.”
Before my friendship with Rox, I’d never given much thought to my childhood. I knew it hadn’t been traditional, or even ideal, but it wasn’t as though I’d been abused. But as Rox pointed out, my childhood hadn’t been exactly stable, either.
—
NIKKI NEVER KEPTus in one place for more than a year or two. The longest we’d ever stayed put was in our dark and dingy duplex in Prairie Garden, Kansas. We lived there from the time I was born until I was six. About a year after my father left.
So when I think of my childhood home, that’s the place that’s seared in my memory: orange shag carpet, peeling linoleum flooring in the kitchen that I used to pick at with my fingernails, the smell of Rice-A-Roni (one of Nikki’s only forays into cooking) mixed with clouds of smoke from her perpetually needing-to-be-ashed Virginia Slims.
The biggest presence in the house, though, after my dad had hit the road, was Nikki’s brittle moods. One day she’d be misty-eyed from a recent breakup—hands endlessly working a cigarette or her curling iron—and the next, she’d be giddy and humming while she squeezed herself into a pair of tight-fitting, acid-washed jeans for a date while leaving me in the care of our neighbor, Miss Denise, an ancient woman with hands the size of a trucker’s.
I understood, very early on, that I was—for the most part—just a side note in Nikki’s life, so I often retreated to my twin bed and curled up to read one of my Nancy Drew books. But at least in Prairie Garden, we were in a proper neighborhood and I had friends up and down the street to entertain me.
After that we moved into more shiftless environments: a condo in Tallahassee, Florida (one of my favorite places, though—I loved the howl of the sea breeze and walking along the shore, collecting shells), followed by apartments in Ann Arbor and Tucson.
Nikki liked this unattached mode of living—never getting too close to others—so I was excited when we moved to Mapleton and she finally sprung for a rental house on a wide street lined with magnolia trees. Even though my only possessions were a bubblegum-pink dresser and wood-framed twin bed—the rest of the house Nikki filled out with furniture from Rent-a-Room—I could at least pretend to myself that our lives were veering toward normal.
Which isn’t to say it was all bad growing up with Nikki. She did have her moments. As flighty as she could be with the rest of her life, she took her career very seriously, and by extension, took my studies very seriously, too.
We’d sit, knees touching, at the kitchen table, where she’d help me with my homework. Long division in the third grade, for instance, which I struggled with, but she made sure I finally got it. She was big on good grades and getting into college.
“You don’t wanna have to rely on some no-good man,” she’d say, time and again. “We take care of ourselves, you hear me?”
—
SO OBVIOUSLY Ididn’t consult with Nikki about my decision to upend my career at the magazine and move to Mapleton. I knew she would never understand actuallywantingto hang out with a kid as much as possible.
—
I DIDN’T GETthe chance to consult with Rox, either. And now I wish I had. While I was on maternity leave, she took a job in Iceland—as a freelance photographer for an ad agency—and now she roves around Europe taking gigs. We stay in touch on Instagram (everyone in Mapleton is on Facebook, and it’s as if Instagram and Twitter don’t exist here yet), liking each other’s posts, but I haven’t actually spoken to her since a few months after Jack was born.
