“And my story? Have you figured it out?”
“That’s trickier because the only person who knows the truth and nothing but it can’t remember it in the first place.”
“She’s not the only person who knows the truth,” Sam interjects, back from typing a reply to her boss. “We’re here. Her friends, family, we’re trying, too.”
“You’re right, of course, Sam.” I rest my head on her shoulder as my way of thanking her. I know that she’s needed at the office, I know that she rarely has a spare thirty minutes to see her husband, work out at the gym. She doesn’t have to be here, grubbing on slices that have been sitting under a warmer for the better part of an hour. “But still, Jamie, thank you, too—I know that you didn’t have to, didn’t have to push for your producer connection, help link me to Jasper.”
His own e-mail vibrates, and he holds up a finger to say
hold on,
and then starts typing, greasy fingers and all, with fervor. I fold my
chin into my palm, staring down at the images in the notebook. Sam leans over to take a peek, too.
There are abstracts, exaggerated notions of what appears to be fields, sun, sky, stars, what? They should be telling me a story; I can see that somewhere there’s a line threaded between them, leading me from one to the next, but nothing is linear, none of it jumps out at me as making any sense.
I used to be good at this—I was the one with the eye, but now, with nothing to reason with, it’s fled me entirely.
“This, right here, what does that say to you?” I ask Sam. “Quick, without thinking, the first thing that comes to mind. Free associate.” I point at one of the pictures—like fragments of broken glass pieced back together again—and push the notebook toward her.
“I don’t know…art was never my forte.” She hesitates, squinting, taking another bite of the pizza. “Maybe a farm? A silo?”
“A silo?”
“Yes, those buildings they have on farms? I grew up in Chicago, so maybe I’m not articulating it right.”
I pause, digesting this. “Maybe this is of Vermont, where his studio was. Maybe I’m supposed to go to Vermont.” I flip to the next page while both of them attend to their BlackBerrys.
“Oh my god, Nell Slattery!” a voice calls out to me from in front of the pizza counter, and then a woman rushes forward, her blond hair flying behind her, her high heels tapping the cheap linoleum floor. “I knew it was you from the second I walked in here!”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I say, “but I have no idea who you are.”
“Yes, of course, no, you wouldn’t, now would you?” She waves her cotton candy–colored manicured nails. “I’m Tina Marquis. I
haven’t seen you since…well, since before. A few months before, when you called me.” She makes a frowny face like this is supposed to indicate since
before the accident,
and I match her frowny face to assure her that we don’t need to rehash it. Tina motions to Jamie to scoot over, and then she slides into the booth, uninvited, next to him.
“High school,” I say. “I’ve seen you in the yearbook. High school, right?”
“Yes, darling, high school!” She has an ever so slight lilt of a southern accent, and I’m not sure if it’s because she’s developed an affectation or if, before Bedford, she actually grew up there. I picture her from Texas. Yes, she seems like she might be from Texas. “Anyway,” she continues, “I just can’t believe this! I never come for pizza, but I just got off work and my fridge is empty, so I made a quick stop in!”
“Tina”—Sam wipes her hand on her napkin and extends it across the table—“Samantha. Her friend from college. We met at…” She narrows her eyes, trying to remember, and for a beat I’m jealous that she can. That she’ll sift around and come up with something. “Oh, yes, we met a few years ago—brunch at Balthazar.” She turns to me to say this. “You and I were having brunch and ran into her.”
“Of course! Hello, hello!” If there has ever been a more enthusiastic person in the world, I haven’t met her.
“Small world,” Jamie says.
“And you!” Tina turns toward him. “You are the talk of the town! The
Post
!
American Profiles
!” She extends her hand. “Tina Marquis. Nice to meet you.”
“So, Tina,” I say, trying to lasso her in, “I called you to get back in touch?” That seems odd, doesn’t seem like the old me at all.
“Oh god, no,” she laughs. “As soon as high school was over, you
dropped all of us like a hot stone in hell.”
Ah, yes, as suspected.
“The rest of us—our crew, as we called it—got together for drinks over the winter breaks, had our summer barbecues—but as soon as you were done, you were
done.
I heard a few of them came to your party last week.” She slouches in the booth, a moment of sincerity. “I’m sorry I was out of town, or I would have been there.”
“Since I didn’t remember you in the first place, I’ll consider your apology accepted.” I smile because that is what the new me would do. And should do. And what maybe I want to do anyway.
“Well, good, thank you for accepting it.” She reaches over and pours some of my Diet Coke into a Styrofoam cup without asking. “But to answer your question, you called me because I’m a real estate broker.”
“I was looking for a new apartment?”
Maybe that was what I was doing: kicking Peter out, starting fresh.
I look at Sam for an answer, but she’s as bewildered as I am.
“I don’t know quite what you were doing, to be honest,” she says. “You had me taking you to all sorts of spaces: lofts, walk-ups, doormen. You were very quiet about it. Said I couldn’t tell your mother—like I would!—and I couldn’t tell your sister.”
I flick my hand in a circle, indicating that I’d like her to get to the point already. “So you called, and I showed you well over a dozen places, and you fell in love with one of them in Gramercy—high beamed ceilings, back wall made entirely of brick, original fireplace, and then…well…then you stopped calling. I figured it was cold feet. I tried you back a few times, but then I got another interested party, and I leased it out. You left me a message right before…right before the crash, and we played phone tag and set up one more appointment.” She grabs a pepperoni from Jamie’s slice and drops it in her mouth, just as her cell phone dings in her purse.
“Excuse me for a second,” she says and eases out of the booth as nonchalantly as she came. I watch her mime her order for a slice of cheese pizza to the guy behind the counter, and then, still on the phone, she grabs a pen from her purse, scribbles something on a napkin, and strides back to us.
“Call me sometime,” she says, her palm covering her cell phone, thrusting the napkin toward the center of the table. She turns, grabs her boxed slice from the cashier, and is gone, her chatter a wave behind her. The door of Ray’s slams, and for a second she reminds me of a tornado, like one of those cartoon characters I used to watch as a kid. I furrow my brow and try to place it.
Wile E. Coyote. Yes, that’s it. A blond version of an incoming storm.
And then I remember something more—why her name was so familiar. It wasn’t the high school yearbook. No, of course not. She was on my desk calendar.
Tina Marquis.
Past meets present—a collision of time, memory, and circumstance. I must have been looking to move, but to what? For what?
“What was that all about?” Jamie asks.
I shrug and pocket her number in my bag, wondering the same thing exactly. What
was
that all about?
Everyone has their secrets,
Jamie had said just minutes before. It turns out everyone does: even me.
17
“You Can’t Always Get
What You Want”
—The Rolling Stones
T
hat night I fall asleep early and dream, for the first time, of the crash. I wake at 12:47 a.m., the sheets soaked in my virulent sweat, the spot next to me unoccupied in my bed. Peter is still at work—he’ll be home by 1, he’d texted earlier. Some sort of television commercial musical catastrophe, though just what that is, I don’t know. I press back my doubts that are biting at my psyche, tempting my better judgment, and close my eyes, drifting right back to where I was before I startled awake.
I am on the plane. Not just any plane, but
the
plane, the doomed 757 that tossed me unceremoniously into that Iowa farm field. But for now, all is copacetic, nothing has plunged or faltered to even give so much of a hint that destiny is about to seriously go haywire on the lot of us. My mother is our flight attendant and when the pilot comes on the PA system, Jasper Aarons’s voice echoes overhead. “Uh, folks, we’re all set for smooth sailing,” he says. “But keep that
seat belt fastened anyway because you never know what’s ahead.”
The worst of a bad metaphor.
Anderson is next to me—just as he was in real life—but this time, we’re back in coach, not in first class—in the row that saves our lives—and I’m in the middle seat, which feels uncomfortably small and getting smaller, like a trash compactor pushing in on my hip bones, my elbows, jostling my shoulders for space. I turn to my other side and there is Rachel Green from
Friends
! She is perfect, her hair and skin luminescent. I want to reach over and clutch her because on the show, nothing goes wrong, and when something goes wrong, they gather in Central Perk and buoy each other by the time the credits roll.
The armrests on my seat are digging now into my waist, and my mom leans over, her face fifteen years younger than in real life, and offers me a drink. I order a club soda, and Anderson asks for a Bloody Mary, and Rachel declines anything at all, but rather than returning her headphones to her own ears, she instead shoves them into mine. And she is so violent in doing so, I wince—I can feel myself wince in my sleep—at the way they grate against the skin in my ear. She is listening to the Rolling Stones, whom I know from my own playlist, and for a flicker of a moment, I am lost in a New Year’s Eve—a memory within a dream—with Tina Marquis and the other ghosts from high school, and we are throwing our arms into the air, crooning toward the ceiling.
“If you try sometimes, you just might find—you get what you need! Oh yeah!”
And then, just as my mother is placing the Bloody Mary on Anderson’s tray table, I sense it, and then I can feel it, and then it’s as if the insides of the plane are scrambled eggs: tossed and whisked so violently that I can feel my cheekbones shaking, like I might implode from within. We are being pulled downward, a vacuum, a black hole,
a Bermuda Triangle that has us in its clenches and refuses to relent. The gravity pulls on my skin, thrusting my entire being backward. Rachel starts screaming, and I try to tell her that we’ll all be okay, but when I turn toward her, she’s now morphed into Tina Marquis, and Tina Marquis then flings off her seat belt and starts running toward the rear of the plane. As if anything can save her back there. I want to yell at her to come back, that if we stay in this row, we’re somehow fated to survive, but it’s too late for that. Anderson has his head between his knees, and reaches up and shoves mine down, too, and then, in that tiny crevasse between us, I say to him, “Thank you, you’ve saved my life.”
He shakes his head because he can’t hear me over the squealing engines, which sound like slaughtered pigs, and the hysteria all around us, which sounds like death. Then, as if an omen, the engines go silent, their screeching vaporized, and I know that it won’t be long now, that I will wake in the field in Iowa and someone will come save me. Peter? Jamie? Rory? Who?
And then, we have impact, and fireballs swarm overhead, but just like in real life, I am alive. I am strapped into my row of seats, hanging upside down, the blood pooling in my brain, spinning stars and white lights around me. I cock my neck, despite my vertebrae begging for me not to, and peer upward, defying the forces of gravity working every which way against me.
I am not in a cornfield in Iowa.
Anderson moans and fidgets beside me, and I fight to stay conscious, fight to take it all in.
I am here, at the house, the big white house with the expansive porch where I spent that summer away from my other life.
Where he spent his life away from his other life.
My muscles, still strapped to my seat, surrender—
we can’t hold you up forever,
they seem to say—and my head flops toward the earth. Tan work boots with black smudges on the worn toes appear in my line of vision, and I fight—goddammit! fight for it!—to keep my eyes open, cast my neck upward.
“Hello, Nell,” the woman’s voice says, and I follow her long legs toward her face. “I’m Heather. It’s nice to see you back again.”
I finally shake myself
awake again, it is 6:17 a.m. I have always been a morning person—this hasn’t changed. But my brain is perpetually on now, the dial always amped toward high, and so even when rest may literally be what the doctor has prescribed, there’s no having it.
The bedroom is dark. Fall has officially planted its roots: the sun pushing into the sky later each morning, sinking beneath the horizon ever earlier, evaporating those last gasps of warm air that can soothe you underneath the deepest layers of your skin. Outside, I can hear the occasional whoosh of traffic, which sounds almost exactly like a wave crashing on a beach, but mostly it’s silent. No noise, no light, not much of anything. A void.
The dream still weaves in and out of me, even though I’m now alert. The Rolling Stones have wormed themselves into my ear, the thought of that New Year’s party as real as anything I know.
“You can’t always get what you want! You can’t always get what you want!”
I laugh at the irony—
so true
—and hum a bit of the melody before swinging my legs out of bed, happy that I have the mobility to now do so. I peel off my dank pajamas and toss them—
two points, swish!
—into the laundry basket. Suddenly, something about that motion—the movement of my arm, the snap of my wrist—feels familiar, like a sense of déjà vu.