“Come out tonight,” she said, her voice softening. “Meet Robbie’s friends. Get your mind off everything. You can’t just sit around moping forever.”
“I don’t mope.”
“You absolutely mope. You mope like it’s an Olympic sport and you’re going for gold.”
She grinned, stubbing out her cigarette on the fire escape railing. “Come on, it’ll be fun. And if you hate everyone, we’ll leave early and get ice cream. Deal?”
I looked at her—my best friend, young and alive and so completely herself—and felt something loosen in my chest. Whatever I’d given up to be here, I’d gotten this back. Diane, before we’d drifted apart. Before life had taken us in different directions.
“Deal.”
“Yes!” She checked the cat clock on the wall and swore. “Okay, we need to go. Valerie will literally fight us for mirror space, and I am not in the mood for her passive-aggressive comments about my pores.”
I stood, automatically reaching into my sweatshirt pocket for my phone.
It wasn’t there.
Of course it wasn’t there. Smartphones wouldn’t exist for another twenty years. I couldn’t check the time, couldn’t look up directions, couldn’t text anyone or scroll through Instagram or do any of the hundred small things I did without thinking in 2014.
I was disconnected from everything I knew. Everything I’d become.
And from Emma. The thought hit me so hard I had to steady myself against the wall. Last night—twenty-seven years from now—she’d been bouncing on her bed, gap-toothed grin filling the screen, telling me she’d gotten into Harvard. But the memory I reached for wasn’t that one. It was older.
Emma at eight, in the oncology ward at Children’s Hospital. Third round of chemo. She’d lost her hair by then, wore a Red Sox cap pulled low over her bare scalp, and she’d stopped talking to the nurses. Stopped talking to Sarah. Stopped talking to anyone, really, except me. I still didn’t know why. Maybe because I was the only adult in her life who wasn’t trying to fix her, wasn’t adjusting an IV or reading a chart or having whispered hallway conversations about prognosis.
I’d brought Charlotte’s Web. Sat in the vinyl chair beside her bed and started reading out loud without asking permission. By the third page, she’d shifted closer. By chapter five, her head was on my arm. By Charlotte’s death, we were both crying—me harder than her, which she found hilarious even through her tears.
“Aunt Mags,” she’d said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, the one without the IV. “You’re worse at this than me.”
“Charlotte was areally good spider.”
“She was a spider. She wrote words in a web. That’s objectively weird.”
“It’s a metaphor.”
“For what?”
“For loving someone enough to save them, even when it costs you everything.”
She’d gone quiet then. Pulled the Red Sox cap lower. When she spoke again, her voice was smaller. “Like you and Mom. Coming here every day.”
“Exactly like that. Except we don’t have to write in webs. We just have to show up.”
“Promise you’ll keep showing up?”
“I promise.”
She’d fallen asleep with my arm around her, the book open on the blanket, and I’d sat there for three hours not moving because I didn’t want to wake her. The nurses had to work around me. Sarah found us like that when she came back from the cafeteria and stood in the doorway crying silently into her coffee cup.
That was the day I knew I’d do anything for that kid. Anything.
And now I was years and an impossible choice away from her. My hand was still in my pocket, still reaching for a phone that could connect me to a girl who hadn’t been born yet. Who might never be born, depending on what I did in the next thirteen days.
The forgetting will be gradual. And it will be complete.
I held the memory tighter. Memorized it. The Red Sox cap. The vinyl chair. Charlotte dying in her web while a bald little girl leaned against my arm and asked me to keep showing up.
I’ll remember you,I promised.Whatever happens. I’ll remember.
