The Lost Night (Page 60)

He chuckles, beaming. “I can’t believe it. I know this is an overshare, but between you and me…I was really worried. Fertility-wise, I mean. Because the last time I was trying, it was with Edie, and nothing came of it. Thank god, in retrospect, but yeah.”

I start laughing, which is probably the wrong reaction, but everything about this is suddenly hilarious. What a thing to tell me, seconds after discussing our near affair. “You and Edie were thinking about having a baby? In Calhoun?”

“I mean, trying-not-trying. God, we were stupid. It was this half-baked, unspoken idea we’d had, probably because things were not going super well in the relationship even though we loved each other so damn much.” He jangles the ice in his drink, takes a final sip. “It was, like, the ultimate idiotic hipster choice. Thank god that didn’t materialize.”

Edie’s unborn child—I can’t believe it. I thought I’d die without knowing what had happened. I consider telling him, then lean on the bar instead, waving for the server. “This man’s going to be a father!” I call, pointing.

The bartender offers us a round on the house. I order another Diet Coke and Alex gets a look on his face and then orders a pickleback, beaming through the server’s eyebrow flash. I smile, too, as we watch him pour pickle juice into a glass and whiskey into a shot glass, then smack everything on the table with an eye roll.

Picklebacks. A 2009 classic, and Edie’s favorite.

We raise our drinks high, each waiting for the other to propose a toast.

“To Calhoun,” I say, and we clink.

“Didn’t you used to write?” he asks as he slams his glass onto the counter.

It’s not at all what I expected him to say. “Me?”

“Yeah. Poetry or something.”

“Essays. I did. That was a big era for navel-gazing. So yeah, I spent a lot of time being really, really in my own head. Or up my own ass, maybe.”

“Hey, don’t minimize it. They were good. I remember that piece you had in n+1.”

“Oh my god, I haven’t thought about that in years.” I lean back, remembering. That pretentious lit mag…I’d been so excited when they’d published my reported essay on the social politics of a kickball league. And a bit shy about it, so that I’d posted about it on Facebook but hadn’t mentioned it to the gang. But Edie had bought a bunch of copies and spread them out on their coffee table like a bouquet. That was actually really sweet of her.

“All I’m saying is, I got my guitar out of the basement last week,” Alex says. We grin at each other and then hide our faces behind our water glasses.

When I get home, I open up my photo archives from that summer, choosing one at random. It’s an outtake. We’re at Coney Island, having just tumbled out of a smelly sedan Alex borrowed from a bandmate. Sarah had set her camera with a timer on a barricade and then sprinted over to where we were standing, but she was still running when the shutter clicked, and Kevin was beginning to tip over from his one-legged Captain Morgan pose, and Alex’s mouth was open yelling at Sarah to hurry up, and Edie had further ruined the photo by tickling my ribs with the hand she’d wrapped around me, so that the rest of us were mid-drama and Edie alone gazed at the camera, smiling beatifically. Only it wasn’t ruined, I see now. I check the date: May 23, 2009. It was perfect.

* * *

A few nights later, at home in my pajamas, I sit down at the kitchen table and write an essay; it’s about finding in my best friend’s sudden and scary incarceration a support network I’d heretofore failed to notice, a whole hammock of loved ones I’d always been too closed off to really see. I give it a headline, Losing a Friend But Finding the Love, and read it over, making changes as I go; I like it, crisp and honest, so I look up Modern Love’s submission guidelines and hit send with a little spritz in my chest. I get the automatic reply saying I’ll hear back within twelve weeks, and so I do the math, projecting myself into twelve weeks from now when I’ll have a yes or, more likely, a no, and I smile at the fact that all those weeks feel solid, that I can trust the months to unspool for another fifty years like a ball of yarn.

* * *

Another week passes in the familiar rhythm of sunrises and sundowns, the days growing shorter, impervious to the drama that rumbled in and then out of my bones. One Tuesday, the mail guy drops off a stack just as I’m leaving my office for the day, and I find among the time wasters a card with my name and work address handwritten on the front. The address label is a couple’s initials, and it takes me a moment to recognize one as Sarah’s.

I slip the envelope into my purse and rip it open on the subway. It’s a cool letterpress card with a sheet of printer paper folded inside, and I smooth out the creases to read it:

Dear Lindsay,

I hope you’re well, and I hope you don’t mind my sending this to your work address—I don’t have your home one. I wanted you to have our new address, and I figure, who doesn’t like receiving mail? ☺ I’m super excited to see the whole gang in October. Kevin is going to stay in our guest room, which will be fun.

Anyway, lately I’ve been fixating on some things I said during our meet-up at Skylight Diner, and I just wanted to reach out directly. You know, no more keeping things bottled up, like in 2009.

I stop reading and blink around the packed subway. There’s a little boy asleep against his mother’s shoulder; a college-age woman reading a book with a slick cover design and an obviously ironic title: Self-Esteem for Dummies. I think back to the last few months, the self-suspicion and disgust camped in my chest, the paranoia shining back out onto other people. It felt familiar yet wrong in my body, like software meant for a much-older operating system. I take a long sip of air and continue reading.

I said some sort of nutty things that day. About Edie, especially. She was a really amazing person and I feel bad that I was talking about her being manipulative or narcissistic or whatever and how she had made so many enemies. She was also charming and free-spirited and loving. Remember that time she threw a fancy cocktail party in our crummy apartment with a tablecloth over a card table she borrowed and bodega flowers in a vase on top? That was just as much Edie as the cold or shrewd person I was trying to make her out to be. I guess what I’m saying is, we all have a choice, and I choose to see her as a beautiful person in that stage of my life. And similarly, I count you as someone super important to me. Now that I’m back in the city, I’d love for us to get together more. And, you know, talk about the present and the future, not just the past. Call me anytime!

XO,

Sarah

I read it twice, then lean back in my subway seat and close my eyes. There’s another dichotomy I’ve been playing with: There’s the Tessa who felt overcome with anger, sick with exclusion and hurt. The Tessa who felt backed into a corner and frenzied from the lack of options. But that’s only her from a certain angle, through a certain lens. And, of course, there’s the Lindsay wallowing in her childhood, pawing through the old anger and jagged violence, and the one here on this subway, finding a way forward, seeing her own pitfalls and learning how to avoid them. We all get to choose.

The train is climbing now, steadily escalating like a plane after takeoff. It breaches the surface and we’re on the Manhattan Bridge, the train gasping as if for air. The two skylines are there again, behind us Manhattan’s sawtooth horizon, and out front Brooklyn’s outline light-studded and bone white. I picture Edie, a million Edies an arm’s reach away from one another in that old chamber of mirrors, carefully sketching out the day’s events, documenting a twenty-four-hour period that mattered because it happened. I see infinite universes spanning out around her and in all of them but this one she’s alive and beautiful and going on thirty-four, her skinny freckled arms wrapped around her friends, tickling their sides and laughing into the molecules around her.