I bristled at the thought that there might be criticism in Suzette’s voice. “Did you know what she was talking about?”
Suzette shook her head. “That’s the first I’d heard of any drama between you. After college she just told me you two fell out of touch. But I assume it had something to do with a boy.”
“It did,” I said. “What else did she say?”
“She wanted to know if there were things I’d never forgive her for. I said, sure, there were probably lots of things, and then she wanted to know what. She kept saying, ‘Would you forgive me for being stupid? Would you forgive me for that?’ ” Suzette sighed. “She said, ‘Isn’t there love that could survive anything?’ I said no, probably not. She said yes, there was, that her father had loved her like that.”
“He did,” I said.
“She was lucky, then,” Suzette said. For a moment our eyes met and locked. I had a feeling I couldn’t explain, that Suzette and I were more alike than I knew. Then Suzette looked down at her belly, both hands going to it now. “That night she was so drunk Martin had to practically carry her out of there. She kept saying, ‘Forgive me, forgive me,’ as he dragged her out. I don’t know who she was talking to.”
I could picture this so vividly it was like I had a memory of it, Martin carrying her away while she shouted “Forgive me” at no one in particular. I was surprised by how sad the image made me. “What did you say you wouldn’t forgive her for?”
“I didn’t. I don’t like hypotheticals.” She toyed with the tassel on a throw pillow. “Actually, I’m angry at her now. We had a fight when she called to say she was going out of town. I lost my temper. She’d promised she’d be here to help with the baby. That’s what friends do.”
I nodded.
“That’s why I don’t know where she is,” Suzette said. “I didn’t ask. She said, ‘I’m having a hard time,’ and I said, ‘I’m having a baby,’ and then I hung up on her.”
“What kind of hard time?”
“I don’t know,” Suzette said. “Maybe something to do with the guy she was seeing, whoever he was.”
The guy she was seeing. I had a vision of Will leaving a message on Sonia’s answering machine, saying only, “It’s me.” I thought of him leaning over to plant a kiss on the rise of her breast. “Does she ever talk about Will Barrett?”
“Her ex? Yeah, she brought him to a party we had like a year ago.”
I stared at her. It’s okay, I thought. He told you that. “But it wasn’t a date,” I said.
“I hope not. She was with Martin then.”
“You don’t think he was the guy?”
Suzette shook her head. “I doubt it. She said seeing him was really awkward. Why?” The last word disappeared into a gasp. I froze. After a moment she smiled again. “I’m a little uncomfortable,” she said.
“Can I get you anything?” I said. “Should I boil some water?”
She laughed. “What’s that boiling water for, anyway? I’ve never understood that.”
“You’re not going into labor, are you?”
“No, more’s the pity. The baby’s just moving around. I am so ready to deliver, I can’t even tell you.” She frowned. “I’m just so angry at Sonia for not being here.”
“Maybe she’ll be back in time.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “And even if she is . . . I mean, if you can’t count on someone to be there when you need them . . . I wonder if we should even be friends anymore.”
I’d ended my friendship with Sonia by deserting her in the middle of nowhere, my tires kicking up a cloud of dust. Suzette sounded like she’d end hers with a memo. She went on to say that her anger might be the hormones talking, that she’d no doubt feel much less angry at Sonia after the baby was born, or would, at any rate, be too preoccupied to think about it. But as I walked away from Suzette’s apartment, I couldn’t stop thinking about the calm with which she’d suggested bringing their relationship to a close, as though that would erase all the time and affection between them, as a house fire destroys your photographs, leaving you to start over without any record of where you’ve been.
After we’d been friends for five years, Sonia gave me what she called an anniversary card. On the front she’d drawn our old logo, the
C
and the
S
intertwined, and inside she’d written a list.
One hundred pounds of chocolate, three thousand Cokes, three cavities, one cross-country drive, thirty trips to the Amarillo mall, one trip to Graceland, thirty-six pairs of sandals, five frat parties, seventy-five late nights at the paper, eighty-three prints I would’ve measured wrong, one first kiss, twenty-three viewings of
Dirty Dancing,
seven hundred and two fights with my mother, eight hundred talks about love, one friend for whom I would write all these numbers down.
At the time I found it amusing that a person who struggled so with numbers would see a friendship as a kind of math. Now I thought it made sense. I remembered Sonia saying, “Numbers are everywhere,” and I thought that because numbers were difficult for her she was forever aware of their presence. A relationship was a series of additions and subtractions, and maybe she couldn’t understand why I couldn’t forgive her because, while sleeping with Owen was a big minus, the balance remained in her favor.
But for me a relationship was a story. It was made up of individual moments, of snapshots: I could see Sonia standing on her bed, singing “Climb Every Mountain” at the top of her lungs, or baking a cake at midnight, making the frosting from scratch, the two of us eating the cake with our fingers straight from the pan. I could remember a night, two weeks after I learned about my parents’ separation, when I lay awake in our dorm room, crying so quietly Sonia couldn’t possibly have heard me, but she rose to comfort me anyway. Even in her sleep she knew she was needed. But when I thought of these things, I couldn’t keep the memories discrete, just as when I looked at the old photographs in Oliver’s attic, I’d never been content with the single image each picture contained. I’d always had to imagine what happened next.
Someone who found my album from the last trip I took with Sonia might look at that final photograph, of Sonia laughing in a beauty mask, and from that image extrapolate a happier tale. But when I looked at it I saw not the laughter but the mask. Once you know the end of the story, every part of the story contains that end, and is only a way of reaching it. Sonia disappearing in the rearview mirror.
Oliver sprawled out at the bottom of the stairs.
19
M
artin Linklater worked
downtown, in the basement of an enormous performing-arts complex. I made a wrong turn looking for the stairs and found myself beneath the high-domed ceiling of an empty theater—rows of red-velvet seats, chandeliers, gilt trim, a blank and waiting stage. A security guard materialized to shoo me out. He pointed me to the stairs, but the basement was a labyrinth. There were people in various stages of costuming scurrying through the halls. I opened one door, and a group of dancers turned their heads—one choreographed movement—to look at me. The office, when I found it, was a comforting return to normalcy, with institutional gray carpeting and plain wooden desks. But Martin wasn’t in it. A girl who appeared to have paid a great deal of money to look frumpy—she wore a shapeless dress and a loose brown scarf in expensive fabrics, plus a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses—directed me to a bench by a pond in the Public Garden, where she said I was sure to find him.
“So you want me to just walk into the park and look for a bench by a pond,” I said.
She sighed. She pulled out the sort of map given to tourists, full of bright drawings and ads for restaurants, and showed me exactly where to go. I must have still looked skeptical, because she said, “I swear you’ll find him. He’ll be sitting on the bench beside a tree with a plaque that says
WHITE ASH
. He’s a creature of habit. He eats his lunch there at the same time every single day.”
I couldn’t ask her what he looked like, because I had lied and said we were old friends, and so of course she thought I already knew.
It took only a few minutes to walk from the busy city street to the gardens, pretty as a fairy tale, where sunlight shimmered on the water and brightened the green of the trees. I crossed a white bridge that looked like a spot where a lady with a parasol might linger to have her portrait painted. The pond was ringed with majestic trees trailing leaves down to the water, and everywhere there were ducks and Canada geese and people tossing them the crumbs from their lunches. A boat shaped like a swan glided past, dwarfing the real goose that paddled beside it. The scene had the casual incongruity of a dream.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to see a man, just slightly shorter than I. He was attractive in a rumpled, boyish way, with wrinkles in his shirt, his hair in messy curls. “I was right,” he said. “You’re Camazon.”
I stared at him. In a dream, strangers are not strangers, but people who know your mind.
“I’m Martin,” he said. “I recognize you from Sonia’s pictures.”
“Oh,” I said. “Hi.” His explanation didn’t make the moment any less strange. It was odd to be recognized by someone who knew me only through Sonia’s descriptions. What pictures had she shown him? What stories had she told? What did he know about me, when I knew so little about him? All at once it bothered me that Sonia was marrying a man I’d never even met. I found myself examining him like he’d been submitted for my approval. He had a sweet, almost pretty, face—big blue eyes, a full bottom lip—made masculine by a square jaw. He was slender but broad-shouldered, and I had the feeling that if I squeezed his arm I’d find his bicep firm. He gave an impression of easy confidence, and he looked at me now with frank curiosity, waiting for me to finish looking at him.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“Of what?”
He grinned. “Of me.”
I couldn’t help grinning back, impressed by the way he’d managed to ask for my opinion without any appearance of aggression or insecurity. “You seem like a nice guy,” I said.
“Good,” he said. He looked me over again. “This is so weird. Sonia’s been talking about you a lot lately. But she never said you were coming here.”
I explained, one more time, about the package, how I couldn’t find Sonia, how no one seemed to know where she was.
“Really?” Martin said. “She’s in New York.”
I was so surprised to at last get an answer that I just stared at him.
“She’s at a conference for work,” he said. “Going to seminars on black-and-white versus color, I guess.”
“What?” I said. “For work? But Daisy . . .” I stopped. I was not going to be the one to tell this man his fiancée was a liar. A liar and a cheat, if Suzette was right, and she must have been right—I could think of no reason for Sonia to lie to Martin about her whereabouts if she wasn’t with another man. He was looking at me now with a worried, doubtful expression. “Okay, it all makes sense now,” I said. “I misunderstood.”
Martin still looked uncertain. “Daisy said she didn’t know where Sonia was?”
“Yeah, but that’s because Avery’s the one who sent her to the conference,” I said. “He didn’t want Daisy to know. I just got the dates mixed up. I thought she was already supposed to be back from that.”
“Oh,” Martin said. “No, she’s still there.” He grinned at me, doubt banished, and I felt furious at Sonia, and at myself, for aiding her in her deceit, just like I’d always done. Before I’d left Suzette, I’d asked her if Sonia had changed. She’d thought about it a moment before saying no, she hadn’t. She was certainly right about that. “That place is so dysfunctional, isn’t it?” Martin said. “I mean, why wouldn’t he want Daisy to know?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess he’s totally fucked up.”
I must have spoken with more fervor than I intended, because Martin looked taken aback. “So,” I said, trying to smile, “what has Sonia been telling you about me?”
Sonia had told him about a night she slept over when my parents were out, and we heard on the news that a tornado had been spotted eight miles west of town. We could already see bolts of lightning touching down on the golf course behind my house, and Sonia was terrified. We gathered supplies and made for the hall bathroom, the only windowless room. We’d forgotten the flashlight, so I ran back down the hall to retrieve it. We had turned off all the lamps, and when the lightning flashed outside it was startling and beautiful, an invasion of light. I heard a gust whip around the house and pictured us in the funnel of a tornado, balanced on the wind. In the bathroom Sonia greeted me as though I had braved enemy fire to make it back to the foxhole.
“She said you were really brave,” Martin said. “Even though it turned out to be nothing. She said your parents laughed and laughed when they got home.”
I hated to be laughed at, and in the living room I’d sat on the couch with my arms folded while my father put
Rumours
on the stereo and began to sing along to “Second Hand News.” He had a good, clear, tenor voice. I liked to hear him sing. But I was still angry. “Come on, Camazon,” my father said. He took my hands, pulled me up, and swung me around.
“You’re my Camazon, you’re my Camazon news,” Sonia harmonized. That was when she adopted my father’s nickname for me, made it seem affectionate instead of mocking. She grabbed my mother’s hands and spun her once, and after a startled moment my mother relaxed and let herself be spun again. Everybody danced.