I flatten my hair with my palms and wonder if it doesn’t feel four
inches too long for me. Why I wore it so plainly—straight, middle part—when something else might have brought out the softness of my jaw, illuminated my heart-shaped face. I push the wrinkles out of my gray sleeveless dress—my closet is a study in the palette of neutral—and exhale.
Peter hires a town car, and my mother, wearing a perfume that reminds me of patchouli, and Tate, wearing a blazer and oxford with one button too many undone, accompany us down there. Truthfully, I’m relieved for the company, even if it means I have to watch Tate damply kiss my mother, and then see her wipe her scarlet lipstick stain off his mouth. They’re like teenagers, these two, straight out of a sitcom.
They have the laugh track, dammit!
But I tolerate their company all the same. The simple truth is that with the chaos dying down and more quiet space to fill, Peter and I have run out of things to talk about, and these two help soak up the still air. Of course there are discussions to be had, but mostly Peter and I shuffle around each other and turn the TV louder when things shift from silent to awkward. Last night, after he got home from the gym, he pulled me to the piano bench and asked if I might want to play—for him, with him—and even though I rolled my fingers over the keys, and the muscles found their natural curl, the instinct of rhythm pulsing through them, I shook my head and declined. Then I pushed the bench back, the feet squeaking against the floor, and climbed into the shower. Where I stayed until the mirrors steamed up—chiding myself for doing so—
this is not what a seize-life-by-the-balls girl would do!
—but unable to find the strength to go back out to him all the same.
Time. Forgiveness. My mother had implored. I was trying to pay respect to both. Perhaps our wedding song was no coincidence: have a little faith. Indeed.
The gallery is on Twentieth Street in Chelsea, and the sun is only beginning to tuck itself behind the downtown skyscrapers when we pull up. We’re running late thanks to traffic on the West Side Highway, so there’s already a herd of faces there to greet me, all unfamiliar yet familiar from my photo albums. That is to be expected. What’s not is the bottleneck of camera crews parked on the sidewalk.
Anderson pushes through them and opens the town car door. He pulls me out, and we braid our now-healed limbs around each other.
“The girl who saved my life!” he says, burying his chin in my shoulder.
God, it is good to see him, though it’s only been a few days. A safe space in this tornado.
“Come on, don’t mind them,” he says, when we break from our embrace and he notices my saucer eyes. I know I should be used to this—that I’ve made magazine covers and that three-parter with Jamie back on the local news in Iowa, and with the interest from
American Profiles,
and Rory had even told me about the TV crews camped out at the gallery—but mostly, I’ve been folded inside a hospital room and now my apartment, so this loss of anonymity is startling. I feel like the empress who has been stripped of her clothes.
Of all of us embroiled in the debacle, however, Anderson knows how to handle this particular aspect.
“She’s not doing press,” he says to them all, guiding me by the elbow.
“Is it true your memory is returning?” shouts a woman who is holding a digital recorder.
“How would you know that?” I spin my neck too quickly toward her and a vertebra flares up.
How could someone possibly know that?
“Our sources are reporting that your memory is back,” she says, smiling now, like she’s doing me a favor.
“Hang on,” Anderson says to me, just as I’m thinking,
Your sources? Who is out there citing themselves as a source? Like my life is a covert op that can be clandestinely reported on?
Anderson turns back to the reporter while I’m in mid-thought, stepping two inches too close to the microphone. “Listen, Paige, back off.
Back off.
She’s not required to verify anything with you. So leave her alone.”
He double-steps back to me, and I tilt my head and assess the oddities of the situation: the paparazzi, the party, and that Anderson, B-list newly turned A-list actor, is jumping to my defense in the midst of both.
“Nice to see you again, Anderson!” she shouts back.
“You know her?” I ask once he’s beside me.
“We have a history,” he says, offering nothing more, so I leave it be.
“Should I be concerned that I have ‘sources’ now?” I say.
“They save those for the most important people.” He smiles.
“Ha ha.” I smile in return.
“No, I’ve just been through this before—I mean, even
before
before. I figure if I can help the girl who saved my life…” He holds the door open and I squeeze my way inside. We both fall silent, surveying the landscape, a moment of peace before we’re swallowed up.
“Stay close,” I say finally. “Who knows who half these ghosts are and what they’ll conjure up.”
He grasps my elbow. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere.”
At first, this party
seems like an ingenious idea. The new me agrees. The techno music is on just the right level—loud enough to give the energy a needed pulse, quiet enough so that I can still hear everyone’s cheers of encouragement, reintroductions, and the occasional
awkward pause because they really don’t make a greeting card for your friend who defied death and lost—nearly literally—her mind.
Still though, it feels good, welcoming, almost
heartwarming,
to be here. Rory hands me a club soda after a gaggle of college friends wander off. I’d recognized their faces from my pictures: pressed together, holding spilling plastic cups of beer, in some fraternity basement—
Golf Night!
—our cheeks glistening with sweat, our bra straps askew under our tank tops. Tonight, they hug me and rub my back, and everyone takes out their phones to schedule a girls’ night, which is something we evidently used to do whenever we were all in the same place at the same time, which, Samantha tells me, wasn’t too often.
“Life got so busy,” she says, like this is something to feel guilty about. “You were always here, at the gallery; I’m usually in London or Hong Kong for work; the moms could never find a sitter.” I think she’s about to start crying.
Jesus, please don’t start crying! What I would really like is if people could stop crying around me!
But she glues herself together. “Let’s not do that again? Okay?” She reaches for my hand. “Let’s be better about it this time.”
So we pull out our phones and promise to be better about it this time. I already suspect that we won’t be. Old patterns, old dogs, new tricks. All of that. Until I catch myself slipping back into the former me.
No, no, no. Things will be different, things must be different.
“I know I can’t remember everyone,” I say to Rory when she brings me the club soda. “But it’s nice to know I was this loved, that these people can all be my parachute.”
“Oh my god, have you been watching
Oprah
? Because you’d never have said that before,” she says. If one can manage to simultaneously roll her eyes
and
make them bulge with surprise, Rory does so.
“Well, before, I could remember everyone.”
“No, but the part about being loved. The parachute.” She shakes her head, taking the high road, setting aside her default response of sarcastic derision. “Anyway, it’s nice to know, nice to hear.” She hugs me, and the scent in her hair reminds me of that memory: the one in my dream that was really a dream about nothing. Honeysuckle. She smells like honeysuckle. But it’s a splinter, a fleeting spark of imagination I conjured up from somewhere deep inside. No matter what Liv says. No one can verify it, and if no one can verify your memory, who knows if it ever really happened?
We’re interrupted by Jamie, who tugs me away by the arm into a corner near a skinny cylindrical sculpture that reminds me of a penis but that Rory assures me sells for nearly twenty grand. Behind it, Anderson is talking two inches too close to three women, all stark lines and black eyeliner and towering heels, whom I know somehow from the art world.
“
American Profiles,
” Jamie says, his skin flush clear down his neck. “They said yes!” He is glowing, beaming. If he were any more excited, he’d be levitating. “I just got the news. And their connection—he came through. At least partially.”
“My dad? You found him?” I have to lean up against the wall to steady myself.
“No, not quite. It’s not that easy.” He glances toward the crowd. “But the producer—she made a call. To your dad’s best friend. He’s here tonight. Or will be.”
“He’s coming here tonight?” My nerves flare.
“I thought this is what you wanted. She scrambled to make it happen.”
“No, no”—I wave a hand—“it is. I just…didn’t expect it. There are so many questions to be asked.”
“I know,” he starts, but then sees someone in the crowd beckoning. “I’ll circle back, don’t worry. I just want to grab this writer while I have her. Keep an eye out for him.” He’s sucked back into well-wishers, armed with their chardonnay and cheese cubes and cold purple grapes.
I stand there, frozen, keeping that eye out, until I see him. Well, until he sees me, really, since I wouldn’t spot him in the first place, and moves through the crowd toward me. He is older, likely my father’s age, but still handsome, with wavy, boyishly blond hair and wrinkles around his eyes that he’s grown into. He clutches me in too close a grasp for a man I’d never met, and after two claustrophobic seconds, I push my hands against his shoulders and politely wedge some air between us.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t remember you.” It comes out rudely, and I’m unsure if I’m embarrassed at my brusqueness or not. Would this sort of thing embarrass me? Being so trite, so forthcoming. The old me, probably not. No, that brusqueness was actually my defining characteristic.
He’s not offended, and instead, smiles widely.
“You’re still your father’s girl, I see. Blunt to the end. He’d admire that.”
“I’m glad,” I respond because it seems like the right thing to say.
“I’m Jasper Aarons,” he says. “Your dad’s oldest friend in the world.” He laughs. “And if you look at me, I really might be the
oldest
friend in the world.”
“Ah. I was told you might be here,” I say. “
American Profiles
.” I spot my mom over Jasper’s left shoulder eyeing us carefully, looking like she’s trying not to stare but staring all the same. He turns and catches her glimpses and offers a sort of sophisticated half-wave, but she startles at him and scampers away.
“
American Profiles
or not, it’s an honor. A privilege,” he says, glancing back at me.
I nod because now, this seems like the right thing for him to say.
“I have a lot of questions,” I stutter.
“And I’m happy to do my best to answer them.”
“How did I know you…before? From when I was a child?”
“You wouldn’t remember. I haven’t seen you in many, many years.” He stops and tries to pin it down. “Maybe since that summer that he left.
Jesus
.” He pales. “Could it have been that long?” He catches himself for a moment, lost in a place he doesn’t share. “Well, however long it’s been, when Nancy called—she’s a dear, very old friend who is now at
American Profiles
—well, I wanted to come down here tonight and tell you how much you meant to him. He’d be devastated to know that you couldn’t remember him, remember your childhood spent with him, so…even though I promised him I’d watch out for you, and I guess I failed at that, I wanted to come down and make sure that you knew.”
He adjusts his glasses, and I notice his green eyes, and I imagine how stunning he must have been thirty years ago. He’s an artist, I can sense that from his worn hands and his earthy demeanor, and I can already see my father and him lighting up the world. A twinge of envy pinches my insides, at their brazenness, at their glory.
“Thank you, I mean, obviously I really don’t know much,” I say, then consider the specifics of what he’s said. “So you knew that he was leaving? Leaving…us? You’re the first one who’s been willing to speak frankly about it.”
He clears his throat. “I wouldn’t say that I knew…explicitly. But on a more fleeting level, I suppose I did. He…struggled. That’s probably the best way of putting it. He struggled for a long time to conform himself to the straight and narrow.…”
“The straight and narrow?” I interrupt. “Like, living within the law or living with my mother, being married?”
“The latter.” He smiles, and I try to force one, too, but don’t find much funny in this. “It just broke him.
Conventional society,
he used to say. Some men aren’t cut out for it, and then the fame”—he flops a hand—“so I knew that it was perhaps too much for him, and when he hinted that he might be, well,
leaving,
I didn’t press him for more because I wasn’t sure if he meant this earth or just his current life.”
“So you think he could have killed himself?” My throat feels like it’s closing in on itself, the visceral emotional reaction that comes from stored memories, even if I can’t tap into them.
His shoulders bob, and he starts to reply, but my mom bumps into me at this exact moment and spills red wine clear down the side of my pale gray dress.
“Oh, Jesus!” she and I say together. Jasper grasps her arm but she jolts it away, purposefully ignoring him.
“Hello, Indira,” he says. “It’s so nice to see you.”
She looks up as if she hadn’t noticed him before and makes an enormous show of her false surprise.
“Oh, Jasper! Jasper Aarons, I didn’t recognize you! It’s been so long!”
No one involved in the charade believes it, so Jasper winks to break the tension, then grabs some cocktail napkins from a waiter. I dab at the spreading stain, but am forced to excuse myself before I look like a gunshot victim at my own welcome-back party.
“Listen, he’d want you to move on with your life, to be happy,” Jasper says to me before I retreat to the back office to salvage my outfit, “to know that he loved you more than anything. I know you can’t remember, but try not to forget
that
.”