“All I’m saying,” Clara continued, “is that there are other possibilities. There always have been, but I just couldn’t see it. And you were going to be living with Clayton anyway, so what was I supposed to do?”
“But that was never going to happen,” said Jess finally. “You always knew. Even when I didn’t, you did.” She ventured out onto the rotten dock, once used to tie up a rowboat that was now sunk, the wood soft and yielding beneath her feet, her arms outstretched for balance. Then she whipped off her shirt and bra, scrambled out of her shorts, and jumped into the water. She surfaced with weeds in her teeth. She pulled them out of her mouth, flinging them over her shoulder. “So I don’t know that you’re being entirely genuine. You’re the one who said we need to be real with each other.”
Clara sat down at the end of the dock, her legs dangling in the water, the silver band around her ankle adorned with the butterfly charm from a necklace Jess had given her years ago, the chain long since broken, now lost. “It’s just that I have to be here now. And I’m as surprised by that as you are. And if I have to be here, maybe I could end up having to beanywhere. I just don’t know anymore. Where I’m going—”
“So you’re not coming back.” It was easier just to say it, Jess thought, easier than hearing it or leaving it unsaid, hanging in the air above them.
Clara said, “I need to be looking forward now. You do too.” Her voice was calm, as though this were a fact, and perhaps it was. She peeled off her clothes and slipped into the water. “It’s cold,” she said, and for a moment the frogs were quiet. “It was always going to be one of us,” she said. “Not because of Clayton, but eventually. You’re going to want things. The world is so large.”
“But I want you,” said Jess. While the water was murky, she’d never been so naked.
Clara was already drifting away. “You’ve got me,” she said, floating on her back, offering her brilliant body to the sun. “Forever and ever. But now you’ve got to come up with the rest.”
—
Everything started to happen in September, when Jess moved out of the basement into one of the bedrooms upstairs. She was moving on up in all the ways because she had a new, long-term assignment as a receptionist for a cancer-research charity on the seventeenth floor of a building midtown, and now each evening as she made her way to the elevator she’d catch a glimpse of the sun going down on the western horizon, and she’d think about Clara somewhere out there.
She didn’t hang the map on the wall of her new room, though. She slipped it inside the pages ofSummer Sistersby Judy Blume instead. She was taking Clara’s advice, expanding her horizons beyond the confines of the picture drawn so long ago. She left her new walls blank—not only becausethey’d just been repainted, but because she was trying to embrace possibility rather than kicking against her fate.
Clara flew to Korea in November with the slightest lead on a job opportunity there. She didn’t even have a visa, but she knew a guy, and she wanted to see what would happen. Her mother was supportive of the endeavour, admitting she was looking forward to having her house to herself again. The night Clara flew out, Jess went to see her at the airport. They didn’t have long because it was rush hour and Jess had been stuck on the subway, and when she finally got there it was forty minutes before boarding.
But Clara was waiting, sitting on her enormous backpack. “I was worried you weren’t going to make it,” she said, jumping up to greet Jess. Her hair was long and tangled, and she bubbled with nerves and excitement. There wasn’t time for a cup of coffee, or even to sit. “I can’t believe this is really happening.”
“I can’t either,” said Jess, who had been hoping Clara might still turn around and decide to come home with her, but she could see that wasn’t going to happen.
“You could come too,” said Clara, tilting her head, biting her lip. And for a moment Jess considered it, recalling how Clara had always led her to places she’d never have gone on her own. But then Clara’s expression changed as she shifted her heavy pack, and Jess knew she could never carry such a load.
“But I couldn’t,” Jess replied. “I don’t even have a passport.” She wanted Clara to stay, and that was different from wanting to go with her. She wrapped her arms around Clara and the bulk of her backpack. “You don’t need me anyway. You’re going to be fine.”
And they stood like that, Clara’s arms around her too, this old familiar place that was them, hugging until the last possible second, and maybe longer—Clara was cutting it close. Then she joined the snaking security lines and soon was lost in the crowd, everybody in their sock feet because it hadn’t been so long since the Shoe Bomber. Jess boarded the bus back downtown and watched Clara’s plane taking off out the window, a tiny speck in an enormous sky. It didn’t matter that it probably wasn’t Clara’s plane—she was likely still in her socks in line for security—because it was all the same, and Clara was gone. And it was now the sky Jess looked to each evening when she made her way to the elevators, instead of the horizon.
—
Clara was working under the table in Seoul and sleeping on somebody’s floor—she sent frequent dispatches from internet cafés. Jess finally had the internet at work, and she could reply right away. Sometimes their messages back-and-forthed to create an actual conversation.
She’d write to Clara, “What are you doing up in the middle of the night?”
Clara would respond, explaining it was a matter of economy. The rates for the internet café decreased as the hours crept by till morning, resulting in an infinite session, so it was hard to know when to go home.
Hearing footsteps behind her, Jess reflexively minimized Internet Explorer, spinning around in her chair, but her furtiveness proved unnecessary, because it was only Bronwyn, another admin, in search of the key to the stationery cupboard. Jess’s job was to greet visitors at the National Society for Childhood Cancers, which was never really a happy place to turn up at. It was usually quiet, so most of the time shewas answering the phone, directing calls, and sending emails to Clara and other friends less far afield who were as under-stimulated in their post-graduate employment as she was.
The internet was wondrous, though. In the past, Jess had to check her email at the library, but now at work she could surf the web for hours, keeping one hand on the mouse, prepared to minimize as necessary. She read newspapers from all over the world, researched graduate programs, looked for deals on cheap flights—to Korea, even—and read online diaries written by interesting people who lived in New York City. While the work continued to be dull, it beat stuffing envelopes, and because of the time she had on the internet, Jess could leave work feeling as though she’d used her brain that day.
She also got home by six, which meant that she could socialize with her housemates or head out for a drink. Her pay was better too, so she could even buy a round sometimes.
Which was not to say that calamity didn’t still periodically rear its head. Like the time she clicked on something accidentally, and suddenly every cursor on every computer on the office network was transformed into a purple magic wand that scattered pixels of fairy dust as it moved across the screen.
“What the hell?” she heard someone exclaim from a cubicle. For a few minutes Jess entertained the possibility that she was a victim in this whole twisted scenario, taking care to use her magic wand to close all her browser windows just in case.
She got up from her desk. “What’s going on?” she asked her colleague, who shrugged. People were coming out of their offices to congregate. They’d tried turning off their computers and turning them back on, to no avail.
“They think it’s a virus,” somebody said, and anyone still at their desk started inching away from their monitors.
So Jess and Bronwyn went down to the food court, and when they returned, everything had calmed down. Jess booted up her computer to find a cursor where a cursor should be. And then Andy from IT crept up behind her, so stealthily he might have been reading over her shoulder about Tom Cruise’s struggle with childhood dyslexia onPeople.com. His breath was on her neck. She’d been caught, but she closed the window anyway before turning around to address him.
“Anything you want to tell me?” he asked, looking amused rather than angry. Andy from IT had a square head and wore a T-shirt with Shaggy from Scooby-Doo on it at least three days a week. He wasn’t even cute, but Jess tended to develop a crush on anyone close enough to touch. Cute was relative.
Andy said, “It was you, the cursor thing. You downloaded something.”
