I looked at her in surprise.
“My whole life I’ve lived here,” she said. She touched the doorframe as she spoke. “Sixty years in one town. Maybe that’s enough. Hell, I know it’s enough.”
“I just can’t imagine that, living in one place your whole life,” I said. “You might as well tell me you’re from another planet.”
She smiled. “I would consider you the space traveler. You and Daddy.” Her eyes went past me to the car, and for a moment she looked just like her father.
“Come on, then,” I said, at that instant meaning it. “Let’s go.”
She gave her head a regretful shake. “My dear,” she said, “I am surprised to find that I will miss you.”
I laughed. “Me, too.” I bent to hug her. Another surprise—she gave me a firm, lasting hug, not the uncomfortable one-armed embrace I expected.
“Good luck,” she whispered in my ear. She said it like there was much more at stake than the safe arrival of a package.
“Thank you,” I said, pulling away from the embrace. First she, and then I, said good-bye. It was a few short steps to my car, and then my home of the last three years was in the rearview mirror. As things always do, it grew smaller until it disappeared.
Two
8
A
bout a month
after her father’s death, Sonia and I are sitting in the common room of our suite. We’re seniors in college. I’m flipping channels, looking at her as each new show or movie appears, to see if there’s any change in the vacant expression on her face. Finally I find
Dirty Dancing.
This seems promising to me. Early in high school it was our favorite movie, and we watched it until we could quote lines—“Most of all I’m afraid of never feeling again the way I feel when I’m with you.” We practiced Baby’s dance steps, counting one-two-three, one-two-three.
“We used to love this movie,” Sonia says.
“Remember dancing up and down your stairs?”
“I remember your crush on Patrick Swayze.”
“That was you.”
She shoots me an amused look. “I’m not the one who had a shirtless poster on my wall.”
“I put that up for you,” I say.
“The sacrifices you’ve made.” She pats my leg. “What a friend.”
I feel encouraged, even more so when she sings along to “Love Is Strange.” Since her father died, it’s been so hard to know what to do, her grief like a fog we’ve both been lost in. Her father doted on her. He called her Princess, and when he looked at her his love was like a spotlight—it made her the brightest thing in the room. Now she seems caught up in the movie, and so I let myself pay attention to it and not to her. During the scene when Baby confronts her father, my eyes well—I’m a sucker for father-daughter scenes, especially the sentimental ones, alien to my own experience, which make me feel a weird kind of longing mixed with scorn. Normally I laugh this off, saying in a breathy, little-girl voice to the character on screen, “Oh, will you be my daddy?” Now as Baby begins to cry, I do, too. Embarrassed, I try to sniff quietly, glancing at Sonia to see if she’s noticed.
She’s not paying attention to me, her eyes riveted to the screen without seeming to see what’s on it. Her face is frozen in a mask of grief. I put my arm around her shoulders, but there’s nothing I can say. “I’m sorry” seemed used up even before the first time I voiced it. She doesn’t cry—she never cries—and so I feel like I’m crying for her. I rock her a little from side to side, patting her shoulder, like she’s the one in tears.
Later that night, drifting on the edge of sleep, I snap awake when Sonia speaks from her bed across the darkened room. “I wasn’t a baby,” she says. “I was a princess.”
I was neither. It’s hard to say whether that’s anything worth regretting. “I know,” I say.
She’s silent, and soon I’m almost asleep, so that in the morning I won’t be sure whether I really heard her speak again. She says, “Now I’m nothing at all.”
9
W
hen you
drive across country instead of flying you really know how far you’ve gone. You feel the miles roll away beneath you, and as each one disappears, propelling you that much farther from where you started, it’s easy to believe you’ve left behind not just a place but everything you felt there, even grief. On the road during the day I was nothing but forward motion. I was a rocket cutting through time and space, a sealed and impenetrable metal thing.
At night in the motel rooms it was different. The first night, I drove as late as I could, until I began to nod over the wheel. On an empty stretch of highway in Virginia, the only motel I could find had a horror-movie look. There were two beds in the shabby room, and in the center of one of them lay a knife. In the bathtub there was a strange red stain. I lay down on the other bed, fully clothed on top of the bedspread, but I had trouble sleeping, haunted by the thought that murders might have taken place there. I wanted only to be moving again, and when I finally did drop off I dreamed of trying to overtake another car around a mountain curve. Over and over again my car flew off the road, I hung in the air for a long moment, and then, as in a video game, the picture froze and the race began again.
The next night, somewhere in Delaware, I stopped earlier and found a better motel, generic and clean, but still I couldn’t sleep, this time because thoughts of Sonia and our impending meeting circled and circled in my mind. I couldn’t decide what would be worse—if she’d changed so much I’d barely recognize her, or if she hadn’t changed at all. I imagined that what I’d always considered the falser side of her had prevailed, the side that had been a cheerleader and a sorority girl. The man she was marrying was a grown-up frat boy, a lawyer or an investment banker who wore baseball caps on the weekend, made dumb-blonde jokes, and talked about his golf game. She’d be dressed like she was going to a country-club luncheon, in a sweater set and a string of pearls, and she’d kiss both my cheeks, flash me a cocktail-party smile, one that didn’t quite reach her eyes, and tell me that if I was at loose ends it was a perfect time for me to travel through France. Or perhaps the strain of maintaining her persona had become too much—rather than poised she’d be brittle and too thin, heavily made-up, a drinker of martinis with an uncertain laugh. She’d insist on how happy she was, how perfect her life was—she’d insist she was thrilled to see me, while again and again her eyes would dart past me to the door.
Then I imagined another Sonia, one who’d emerged from the part of her that worked at the college newspaper with me. This Sonia wore vintage clothes she spent hours scouring thrift shops to find. She’d abandoned her tinted contacts in favor of angular red glasses. She worked for a nonprofit organization or made documentary films. Her fiancé was thin and earnest, an artist of some kind, or a political activist. When I arrived she’d insist we go to a funky neighborhood bar that had local beer on tap, and after a couple of pints she’d want to talk, really talk, about what had happened to us. I populated my mind with a crowd of different Sonias—she was an advocate for kids with learning disabilities; she was a girlish dilettante with a father complex, marrying a much older man—but I knew that none of them was real. I was dividing her into her parts—forthright and secretive, insecure and confident—as though she wouldn’t still be all of those things.
Near dawn, I finally fell asleep, and dreamed that I was up in Oliver’s attic. I was sitting on the floor and crying, though in the dream it wasn’t clear to me why. The door opened, and Oliver and Sonia appeared. They approached me with serious expressions, making urgent gestures with their hands. I knew they were telling me something important, but I couldn’t hear them, and when I tried to tell them that, they just looked bewildered. They started talking to each other, and I knew they were talking about me. They seemed less and less aware of my presence, and as they receded from me I grew increasingly frantic to know what they were saying. But I couldn’t understand them. I couldn’t make them understand.
I didn’t find
Sonia’s apartment until after dark. I’d gotten off to a late start, and then miscalculated the length of that day’s drive and spent too long in a Cracker Barrel, picking out candy-stick flavors in the country store after my meal. I chose root beer for Sonia, because it used to be her favorite. Back in the car I remembered that Sonia thought me detached and indifferent, not the sort of person who’d show up bearing candy, but the sort who’d hand her Oliver’s package, shrug off good-byes, and climb back into the car. Why bother trying to be nice? I might as well be what she expected. Stuck in traffic in New York, I ate the candy, every sugar-saturated, crunchy, sticky bite. “That’ll show her, huh?” I said to the package, still resting on the seat beside me. It had come to seem like a passenger over the long three days of the drive.
By the time I found the apartment, my shoulders were tight with the stress of negotiating directions and traffic. The Cambridge street signs were hard to spot or sometimes missing altogether, as though navigation of this town were a privilege only for locals. I had been honked at more than once, and shouted curses at people who couldn’t hear me. This was not Oxford. But at least I’d found a parking space, just the size of my car, across the street from Sonia’s building. Sonia was in apartment one. For a couple of minutes I watched the dark windows on the first floor like a private detective, waiting for lights to come on, waiting for proof that Sonia was home. I’d tried to call again from the road, but only the computerized voice answered, and the long beep on the answering machine signaled that the tape was full.
The front door to the building—an old house that had been subdivided—was locked. There was a row of five buzzers beside it. Beneath the first, the nameplate read
GRAY
, in Sonia’s handwriting, which of course I recognized as easily as my own. I rang the buzzer. I stood on the porch with the package in my hand. I waited a long time before I rang the buzzer again.
It used to be that when I found the front door of Sonia’s house locked—her mother often kept it locked, even during the day—I’d go around the right corner to find a green ceramic frog nestled against the wall with the house keys in his mouth. His name was Frank—Sonia had named him that as a little girl. I used to take the keys from him rather than risk disturbing Madame Gray with the doorbell, and then I’d slip quietly up to Sonia’s room, to find her pacing, singing something from
The Sound of Music,
or sitting at her window doing a careful, intricate drawing of a bird.
I remembered all this, and it seemed to me that if I went around the corner of this building, I’d find that things were exactly the same. I was right—there was Frank, waiting with the keys in his mouth, as if he’d known all along I’d be back. I unlocked the exterior door quietly, like I was still trying not to disturb Madame Gray. I had the feeling that inside the apartment Sonia would turn to me with no surprise on her face, her mouth shaping the words to “Climb Every Mountain,” and that she’d be not a woman but a fourteen-year-old girl.
I stepped into the entryway. Judging from the mail jammed inside Sonia’s box, she hadn’t been home in two or three days. This was odd, no doubt, but certainly no cause for the shot of fear and adrenaline that went through me at the sight. Sometimes Sonia was scattered and impatient. Most likely she just hadn’t bothered to bring her mail inside. Not everybody was going to turn up dead. Still, as I gathered all the envelopes and magazines and newspaper flyers and fumbled with the door to her apartment, I felt like I was watching myself in a horror movie, yelling,
No, no, don’t go inside!
The apartment was small but beautiful, with high ceilings, crown molding, shiny blond hardwood floors. There was a small table in the foyer, and on it was a note.
C,
Oliver told me he wanted to send me something—did he mean this package or you? Either way, I can’t be here. No doubt you want to get back on the road, so I suppose you can just leave the package. I know you’ve had a long drive—feel free to spend the night. Clean sheets on the bed.
—S.
For a moment I stared at that last line,
Clean sheets on the bed,
as though that were the most significant part. How odd that she’d taken the time to make her bed for me, but hadn’t left me a note about the keys. Somehow she’d known I’d find them and come inside. We used to send each other pictures with our minds, trying to develop ESP. We never saw any of each other’s pictures, but still there were times when each knew exactly what the other one was thinking. Now I had the sudden conviction that there was a connection between us I’d never managed to sever after all. Sonia knew what I would do as clearly as if she were watching me.
She was wrong, though, to imagine I wouldn’t wait for her return. I couldn’t abandon the package without seeing what was inside. I didn’t want to sleep in her apartment, but I felt so weary at the thought of braving Boston roads and traffic again that it seemed I might as well. The truth was, I hadn’t really considered what I’d do once I delivered the package, though Sonia was right to think I’d had a vague notion of getting back on the road. When I thought of this now a pit opened in my stomach. Get back on the road to where?
I picked up the note and stacked the mail on the table as neatly as I could. I looked at the note again. “I can’t be here,” I read aloud. What did she mean by
can’t?
I’d thought she was eager to see me. The note even suggested that I was Oliver’s wedding gift, as though my presence continued to be something she wanted. Had she changed her mind and decided to avoid me, or was something else keeping her away? I wanted to believe that she had a pressing need to be elsewhere—for all I knew she might already be on her honeymoon—but something told me she just didn’t want to see me anymore. How ridiculous, when I’d been the one to ignore her attempt at contact, that this should make me feel abandoned. I’d never spoken to Sonia, never told her exactly when I was arriving, but it seemed I’d nevertheless expected to find her waiting here.