Ilena
Friday Morning
One DayAfterthe Outing
Ilena awakens to too much light. Did Jonah get up before her? Is he back on those 4 a.m. runs? Even so, his lifting of the blackout shades is definitely a passive-aggressive reaction to their last conversation.
Though technically, their last conversation wasn’t a conversation at all. It was a request. One she said yes to, easily, more easily than she expected considering the request was to end their marriage.
She sits up, feeling groggy, like when she takes a sleeping pill too late and doesn’t log enough hours. She tries to open her eyes, but the light’s so bright, she can’t focus. She aches everywhere. She had that one strawberry mule, just the one. She didn’t drink enough to warrant feeling like this. It’s Mallory’s fault. Somehow. Everything is Mallory’s fault lately.
Ilena searches for her silk eye mask. Finding nothing, she pulls the covers higher. The sheets slip through her fingers, the surface slicker than usual. She opens her eyes fully, the sheenof what should be her normally soft bamboo sheets registering behind the fact that they’re a light blue, not white.
The xylophone tone of her cell precedes its buzzing against the nightstand. She shakes her head, trying to reconcile that Jonah not only changed the sheets butchangedthe sheets as she checks the clock beside the bed. The bright red numbers of 8:08 glare at her. What the hell is Jonah up to? They bought her round analog clock together in that store in Newburyport that smelled like Earl Grey tea and old wood. Neither had known what the rose compass inside was called, and it leaned more heavily on the kitsch side than Ilena’s sophisticated tendencies. But Jonah had been the one to suggest it, a memento of the weekend spent on Plum Island, the weekend they were sure they exceeded the world record for number of orgasms in a single day. They rolled in ocean waves and cotton sheets and promised they’d return every year. That was four years ago. They’ve never been back. All they had to show for it was the clock, which Jonah apparently passive-aggressively moved, and a straw beach bag that came with the hotel room. They use it to hold guest towels, though they haven’t had any guests in a long time. Still, she’ll take the tote. And the clock. Is this her life now? Tagging twenty-one years of knickknacks and plates like they were at an estate sale?
Her phone continues its escalating ringtone, and she reaches for it. Aubrey’s name scrolls across the lock screen, and Ilena hesitates. As much as she understands and sympathizes with her friend’s fear of making choices, not having a belief of her own is costing them all. It may even cost them AIM.
Except Ilena can’t honestly expect Aubrey to weigh in on canceling the direct listing when she doesn’t have all the facts—let alone the key fact: that AIM’s explosive success isn’t real. AIM’s exponential growth in users and subsequent high valuation is partly due to a computer error replicating accountsinstead of actual humans signing up in droves. And only Ilena and Mallory know.
Pushing AIM into the spotlight now, without reconciling the fake accounts, isn’t a risk, it’s an unpinned grenade. It will go off. It will ruin AIM and everyone who gave up ski weekends and Cabo vacations and having kids when they were young to help build it.
But Mallory keeps on shoving, no matter what Ilena says.
Entwined as rope and as disparate as oil and water. That’s been her relationship with Mallory since the beginning. Ilena’s self-aware enough to realize that her judgmental nature, the thing she can’t seem to fully unlearn from her mother, can be as detrimental as Mallory’s no-holds-barred approach. Their long friendship has been a system of checks and balances for them both.
But the system has broken. The weight of their secrets has shattered it.
When Mallory came to Ilena a little over a month ago with the discovery of the duplicate accounts, they mourned together. The AIM they’d built was a success. Just not at the level they thought it was.
Still, it was theirs, the manifestation of twenty-one years of friendship and partnership. It had been incredible and fulfilling and hard, and this would be the hardest. But they wouldn’t let a software malfunction be their end. They’d fix it together. They agreed on that. What they couldn’t agree on was how. Aubrey’s fragile state after Ethan meant keeping the truth from her, which meant keeping the truth from everyone, a decision that united Ilena and Mallory, that justified Ilena giving Mallory the time she’d asked for to try to make it right—part of Ilena perhaps truly believing that Mallorycouldfix it because Mallory’s determination made her capable of anything. They are now a week out from going public. Nothing is fixed. And this, this is wrong.
Except not to Mallory, who isn’t bound by rules or guilt orright or wrong. It’s who she’s always been. Ilena loves her because of and in spite of it.
But that’s not Ilena, and she won’t let it become her. Ilena has every choice in the world, but yesterday, before the outing, she gave just one to Mallory:Either we cancel the direct listing or I’m leaving AIM.
And with the issuing of that ultimatum, Ilena erased decades of sophisticated decorating and baking her own rugelach and loving the man she’s married to, all things done partly to ensure she is nothing like her mother.
Ilena refuses to be a woman on the cusp of forty, divorced, with a grenade of a company in her pocket.
The barrage comes like an assault.
The red spreading across his shirt. The smell of alcohol. The shattering of glass.
Ilena shoves the ensuing nausea away. She crushes the still-ringing phone in her hand, and guilt makes her answer Aubrey’s call.
“Ilena! Is that you? Do I have you? Please tell me it’s you. I have no idea what to do, and I must have really messed up and—”
“Aubrey.” Ilena tries to cut her off, but the nonstop rambling continues, intensifying the throbbing in Ilena’s head. She tries to sit up, but her lower back screams at her.
“But I’m naked, and I can’t find my clothes, and—”
Naked?
“Aubrey!” Ilena propels herself into a seated position. She bangs her head against a panel of hard wood behind her where the upholstered linen should be and a wetness spreads beneath her. She thinks she may have just peed herself a little. Which makes her snap, “Aubrey, slow down, just slow down.”
Ilena breathes deeply, but each inhale somehow squeezes her lungs.
“Okay, okay,” Aubrey says. “It’s just... I have no idea whatto do. I mean, I think, I must have slept with him. Oh, Ilena, how could I have slept with him? With... with anyone?”
