He looks surprised. “No. It wasn’t like that.”
He says the words, but why can’t I shake the feeling that there’s something else between us here on my parents’ couch—and in this cavernous white space in my mind?
“Never?” I whisper.
48
Drew
Almost never.
I don’t know what she’s picking up, but I’m not going to let her run with it. I do want her to remember—butnot this part. I’m here to help her through this crisis and then we’ll be going our separate ways. I’ve wasted too many years on this woman already, and now I’m thirty and drawing a line—she’s got to stop looking at me like this, innocent eyes full of possibility.
“Evie, I’m moving overseas in six weeks,” I announce. Nothing like putting a firm date on it. “I’m going to accept the magazine contract.”
These words are news even to me. But the way she’s editorializing us …I can’t go there. I have to commit to the path I know I deserve. Not this half-life, endlessly looking over my shoulder, hoping the future I imagined will catch up with the present and bowl everything over.
“I’m happy for you,” she says, but her tone conveys the exact dose of genuine disappointment that younger me would have clung to for months.
Visions of New York fill my head. Working in the magazine’s Fifth Avenue office. Lunchtime jogs in Central Park. Brunch at the Met. Maybe I’d rent a condo in New Jersey and travel onassignment, chasing stories and images and a whole new idea of what life could be …
“It’s time for bed,” I suggest, realizing my hand has now traveled to hers, clutching it, almost as if I’m preparing to pull her into this shiny new vision alongside me.
I let go, but she’s looking at me like she’s still snooping around in our past, trying to dredge up a bit of romance. She’s going to be disappointed. Besides, her husband just died. He was always the leading man, not me.
I pick up the mugs and carry them into the kitchen, rinse them at the sink, and exhale a long, deep breath. It’s not something I’d say aloud, but I used to imagine what it would be like if Oliver were dead. I thought I’d feel all kinds of things—triumph, relief. But it’s not like that. If anything, I’m sad about what could have been—that the brotherly bond I’d craved as an only child became a twisted, one-sided rivalry right from our first scholastic joust. “Complicated grief,” they call it. Someone you’re problematically tangled up with dies, and it’s all about guilt, regret, and resentment. Everything you’re meant to feel, you don’t.
And here’s Evie, who should have complicated grief and instead has nothing. No grief at all, except for the life she’s lost. A life I can’t say for sure shewouldgrieve if her memory does come back. Not that it’s my place to judge how happy or how miserable she might have been. Maybe the misery is a touch of wishful thinking …
She sets the crockery on the bench, and I help her carry in a pile of sheets and blankets her parents left on the kitchen table to make up a bed on the sofa. Her face is pale, like she’s wrung out. She starts pulling scatter cushions off the couch, dumping them in a pile in the corner of the room.
“I’ll do it,” I say. “You go to bed. You must be exhausted.”
But she’s already unbundling a white sheet and fluffs it out, so I pick up the other end and we tuck it into the couch cushions. She shakes the light blanket and tucks that in, then throws me a pillow and stands in front of me, beside the makeshift bed, admiring our work.
There’s a moment of awkward silence, while she looks at me, presumably assembling a good-night speech in her mind. My own mind is attempting to banish the thoughts I’m having about pulling her onto the bed we just made—still trying to line up the woman she is now against the girl I knew. A catalog of reasons why that cannot happen presents itself, starting with the fact that obviously she’s not in her right mind, and, once she remembers everything she’ll be a grieving widow to my half brother. Now I’m flashing back to that summer she told me Oliver was pressuring her about sex—an episode in her life that she’s forgotten. I mean, there’s simply no way I’m charging headlong into this much confusion and inexperience.
“Thank you, Drew. For coming here with me.” She takes a step toward me and looks like she’s contemplating a hug, but she rethinks it at the last moment.
My arms reach around her anyway and draw her close, just for a few seconds, her body melting into mine while I inhale her scent and remember us. But then I pull back too. And there’s nothing but the static electricity where the hug should still be. The longer I linger on the memory of the last time we did this, the more my common sense evaporates.
age TWENTY-THREE
49
Evie
I’m seated in the auditorium beside my peers, nervously adjusting the mortarboard on my head and hoping I don’t trip when it’s my turn to cross the stage. I’ve felt so clumsy lately. Even this morning, Oliver and I visited his grandfather on the way to him dropping me off at my graduation, and I flopped enthusiastically onto a small couch, sending it skating into the buffet table behind it, triggering a bunch of ornaments and photo frames to topple loudly onto a crystal tray.
“Never mind—it’s just stuff,” his grandfather had said. He’s the kindest person in the extended family. But in the car afterward, I received a lecture.
“Be more thoughtful, Evie. You’re always charging through places.”
That comment makes me even more nervous about all eyes being on me in this packed hall. I’d rather be the woman down in the front row with the clipboard, ticking off names as we parade past. Or, if I’m honest, I’d rather be recording a podcast in my room. I’d have never predicted a group assignment about gender-based violence would lead me down the podcasting path, but I love it—it gives me something to focus on andpeople to connect with. I guess I became so absorbed in my research I hadn’t noticed I was lonely.
The ring on my left hand flashes under the stage lights, and I want to cover it up. I’m anxious not to advertise the choice it represents as I look along the row. Of course I’m the only person wearing one. I haven’t even said yes yet.
“Marry me, Evie,” he’d said, at an expensive oyster bar in The Rocks. I don’t like oysters, but they’re his favorite, and he’d ordered a dozen and expected me to try one.
