“Were we ever as young as them?” she wrote to Jess. The girls were on a gap year. Clara herself had done a gap year—or three of them—way back when, but she hadn’t known the terminology. And even if she had known what the term meant, she hadn’t seen the time that way, hadn’t thought of those years after high school as a space to be filled. Maybe this was her gap year right now—just a decade late.
“You were twenty-one when I met you, already a woman of the world, so no, you were never that young,” Jess wrote back. “Maybe I was, though. And you were patient with me.”
But Jess was different and always had been, something Clara had noticed before they were even friends. At the beginning of their first year, all the other girls on their floor had been a pack. Jess was part of it, certainly, but she was the only one in the group who would turn around and smile at Clara, eating her lunch alone in the dining hall. Jess used to carry all her stuff in a tattered canvas cross-body bag with the lyrics to Des’ree’s “You Gotta Be” inscribed across it in blueink, which Clara found so embarrassingly earnest as to come full circle and be cool. The urgent strains of Ani DiFranco, Tracy Chapman, and the Indigo Girls poured out of Jess’s room whenever her awful roommate, Muffy, was away. It made Clara wish, in the words of another singer, that she too could have “a way with women,” even though most other girls just made her feel invisible. But Jess never did, and this was what Clara missed now, in the Midlands, that feeling of being recognized—and not just as she was recognized by the sparkly girls, as someone unfathomably older who owned only two pairs of jeans.
Owning just two pairs of jeans meant that when Clara finally found a flat—a room on the third floor of a shared house, although they called it the second floor here—she didn’t even need to take a taxi. Instead, she folded her belongings into her Woolworths suitcase and wheeled it twenty minutes across town to her new front door. Her flatmates were graduate students, so there were fewer midriffs and disposable beer cups, and for the first time in two years she had a room of her own.
She was so skinny now, and nobody in her life—her flatmates Kathleen, Ivan, and Jeremy—realized how strange it was for her to have cheekbones. She still hadn’t gotten around to replacing her one bra, which was threadbare, the cups like deflated balloons, her now-smallish breasts lost inside them. The pants she’d bought in London were a single-digit size she didn’t recall wearing since she was a child, even with the disparity between Canadian and British sizing. It was odd, and she was not herself, although things were improving—the shadows under her eyes had disappeared, and colour was returning to her face.
She had a kitchen again, which helped. None of her flatmates cooked much, so it was her own terrain, and she could put together proper meals for the first time in a long time—roast chicken, chili, pasta sauces, enchiladas, soufflés, stews. She started baking bread, and the smell would draw her flatmates out of their hidey-holes, creating a semblance of community. Everyone was grateful, and she also got to be well-fed, to fill the gnawing emptiness inside her. She was feeling better and stronger, and this was what she wrote to Tom: “You don’t have to worry about me.” She was trying to get better mostly so she could tell herself she didn’t need him and even for it to be true.
It had been a mistake, she could see this now, to hitch a ride on Tom’s professional coattails. He’d been her passport to anywhere, but it meant that she gave up charting her own course. Where might she be now without him? There were so many possibilities for what a life could turn into. Jess was right: how do you ever know?
This was why it seemed especially safe and comfortable where she was now, this space between, her gap year. She’d have a new beginning, but only when she was ready, and right now she was resting and recovering, returning to herself. The Midlands were in-between, just like she was, and the landscape, flat and unassuming, suited her needs. Low and soft, just like a heath, an ideal place for her to land.
THE WEDDING
2006–2007
When the phone rang in September, out of the blue, Jess was still holding the test in her hand. She heard Clara’s voice on the other end of the line, and thought,Of course, it’s you.
“You’re never going to believe this,” she started, but Clara was already speaking. “I’ve got news,” she said.
“You?” Jess was thrown off, her narrative hijacked. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” said Clara. “Really. I’ve only got a bit of phone credit. We might get cut off. You’re coming to my wedding.”
“What?” She hadn’t heard wrong. Clara was like this, capricious, impulsive, but it still made no sense. Jess had forgotten how disorienting it could be to connect the constellations of Clara’s whims. What she hadn’t forgotten was how much Clara had been through, how she’d been messed-up and broken. How vulnerable she was.
“I know. It’s sudden,” Clara continued. “But I need you to be there. That’s why I’m calling, giving you lots of notice.” Jess had gotten married in the spring, and Clara missed the wedding due to the excavation of an ancient harbour inCyprus. “It’s going to be at my mom’s. Not even far for you.” She paused. “I’m coming home.”
It was all overwhelming, everything at once. This had been Jess’s moment, and now it wasn’t, but Clara was coming home. Getting married, but to whom? She had no idea. “Is this Ivan…?” Jess asked, that being the name of the last boyfriend she’d heard of, but Clara said no.
“His name is Nick. And he’s a good one. He—” The connection broke up.
“Clara? I can’t—” This was all too much.
“He owns a bar,” Clara said, speaking loudly and slowly. “A pub. It’s where we met. And I want you to be my bridesmaid. At the end of June.”
“June.” Jess was still holding the test stick. Finally she said, “I’m pregnant, Clara.” The two pink lines had emerged so faintly at first, but now they were undeniable. “Just. Like, I mean, I just found out. Right now.” She was still sitting on the toilet with her pants around her ankles. She’d brought the phone into the bathroom so she could call Adam, but Clara had gotten to her first.
There was silence for a moment. “Well, this is huge,” Clara said, sounding even farther away than before.
And Jess thought about June, and then May, when the baby would be due.The baby.“We were trying. I just never imagined it would happen so fast.”
“It’s all happening,” said Clara. There was a noise on the line. “Credit’s almost all gone,” she said. “I’m thrilled for you, Jess.” She paused. “You’re going to be there, right?”
Jess said, “Of course.” Even though she didn’t believe it, she didn’t believe any of it: the wedding, the baby. June was another century, a different continent. “You’re coming home.And Nick.” It was a lot to process. “You’ve got to email me a picture,” she told her. They were friends on Facebook, but Clara never updated, had little truck with the online world. The only photos Clara ever posted were of the sky.
—
For months both things seemed impossible, that Clara was coming home, and that Jess would have a baby in her arms. The baby would be six weeks old by Clara’s wedding day, transformed from post-fetal into an actual human, but small enough to still be portable, stowed under a table during the party. Jess had never actually met a baby, but she’d been reading books, feeling as though she and Adam were preparing to jump off a cliff—or maybe they’d jumped already and were flying, hands gripped tightly, feeling exhilarated and terrified to contemplate the landing.
At night they would lie awake, Adam’s hands on her belly, waiting for the magic of the baby’s kick. It was impossible to predict when it would happen, but when it did, Jess would lie still and wait for it again. Feeling was believing, however fleetingly, that they weren’t just imagining this creature floating inside her. They tried to interpret the kicks as if they were a code, as though they could decipher their destiny.
On these nights, they were so solidly joined, a shell around her burgeoning belly—“I’m making aperson,” Jess kept repeating, marvelling at her body’s bag of tricks—though things were more complicated in the daytime. Jess skimmed the books, reading the charts mostly, and she noted with relief that by six weeks babies could sleep through the night, although six sleepless weeks still sounded like torture.
But Adam considered books inadequate preparation for what lay before them. “What you’ve got to focus on,” he toldJess, unpacking a box that was larger than their kitchen table, “is gear.”
