After You (3 page)

5

T
wenty seconds into the launch and fifty-three seconds before the explosion, Lucy passed me a note in our eighth-grade history class that said:
Ten bucks the shuttle goes down
. A typical Lucy comment, perverse and poking fun at everyone else’s earnestness—the way the school had celebrated Christa McAuliffe, the “teachernaut” from New Hampshire, with a full rah-rah lesson plan around the space program, and the way we were all watching now, clichés of patriotic wonder: slack jawed and glassy eyed. And of course the
Challenger
wasn’t going down; it couldn’t, because Christa was on board, the whole world already on a first-name basis with the woman with the perfect jumpsuit and the permed hair, who looked just like all of our friends’ mothers.

Fifty seconds into the launch, and twenty-three seconds before the explosion, I wrote a note back that said:
Lu, just shut up and watch!

When we couldn’t see the shuttle anymore and it was just a plume of smoke, I thought:
Wow, Christa’s in space
.

And then the explosion: a globe of fire erupting, loud like ammunition, right there on the television, right there in the Florida sky. A voice was still reciting coordinates—later we would find out that mission control was reading from its notes, not looking at the screen—and so for a moment there was a disconnect between what we were hearing and what we were seeing, and what we understood but were not yet ready to believe. We had just watched seven people die.

Lucy made the transition to reality the fastest, even before our teacher, and it was only when I saw the scared look in her eyes that I realized that Christa wasn’t in space after all.

“Ellie, you know I didn’t mean it, right? You know that,” Lucy whispered, ashamed and horrified by how wrong she had gotten it, or how right. “I was just—I don’t know—kidding around.”

I didn’t say anything back; I was still digesting. Of course she hadn’t meant it. She was just trying to be outrageous, and she had, as usual, succeeded. No one could have believed it was possible; for weeks afterward our teachers would say that, over and over again, as we all wrote letters of condolence to President Reagan, just like Gorbachev did:
I can’t believe it
.

Today, more than twenty-two years later, I am thrown back to that moment—those seventy-three seconds—as if I am still sitting at that wooden desk, watching the thirty-inch television screen brought in on a rolling cart, Lucy shaking next to me, both of us wearing side ponies tied up with hot-pink scrunchies. I feel the weight of her note in my pocket, and I remember that I kept it, later flattened out its creases and glued it into my journal. Though Lucy and I never discussed the
Challenger
disaster, never added weight to the memory with repetition like we did with so many others, it suddenly looms large, in that way that memories can do. In the clarity of hindsight, it now seems a foreshadowing of all that was to happen after.

Because standing here in Lucy’s living room, trying to figure out how to pass Tuesday afternoon before I pick Sophie up from school, I am stricken with horror when I realize that at thirteen we had missed the whole point, hadn’t even scraped off the first level of that tragedy. The worst part of all: While Lucy and I were watching liftoff, so were Christa’s kids. They were watching too.

When you meet someone at the age of four, tumbling and doing the “downward doggie” in Mommy & Me yoga, and their house is just two blocks away and they make you laugh for over three decades, starting that first day when she stuck out her tongue and made stupid faces behind the yoga teacher’s back, a friendship is inevitable. Maybe even fated.

“Ellie’s on my team,” Lucy would say whenever we had to partner up for anything, and her choosing me, fast and with confidence and without waiting to see how the rest of the pairings shook out, was flattering even after it became so routine she didn’t need to say it out loud.

At the age of nine we became blood sisters, since we were already sisters in all ways but one.

“Ready?” Lucy asked.

“Ready,” I said, and so we pricked our fingers with a safety pin and rubbed our blood together, a glorious red smear. We believed that this small ritual would change something between us, elevate us to the status of “real” relatives, and I secretly wondered whether a drop of Lucy’s blood might make me more attractive. Maybe boys, and parents, and teachers would pay attention to me, too, the way they always did her. At twelve, when we each wore half of a broken “Best Friends Forever” heart necklace that we bought at the Copley mall with our lunch money, I felt superior to the other girls in school. I never noticed that these rites of passage had all been done before, were ingrained and banal, that other girls had their own best friends and blood sisters. I felt special and singular and lucky. And maybe that’s what was most distinct about our friendship—that the lucky-to-have-found-each-other feeling never went away.

Only twice did we waver: two fights in three decades, both of which left behind the invisible fissures that remind people that they are two separate wholes, the scars from incidents that can never be mentioned again.

I forgave Lucy her indiscretion at sixteen—I found her kissing my first boyfriend, Stuart Tannenbaum, in plain sight, just a week after I’d confided in her that I thought I might be in love with him; and she forgave me mine at twenty-six—I told her, less than twenty minutes after she and Greg got engaged, that marrying him would be a mistake.

Today I dig up the memory of Stuart Tannenbaum and his blue eyes and heart-shaped lips, so I can hate her and stop the incessant missing, if only for a second. I relive the horrible moment I rounded the corner at that backyard high school party and saw them together: a drunk Lucy, an arm looped around Stewie’s neck, and his mouth on hers. Stewie was mine, I was supposed to be kissing him and maybe letting him get to another base, but she was right there, her new acquisition illuminated by the moon, and the entire junior class got to see that he wasn’t mine after all.

And I remember the one time I hurt her too.

“You can’t be serious,” I said when she told me Greg had proposed. “You barely know him.”

“What you’re supposed to say is, ‘Congratulations.’”

“But I don’t understand.” How could she be ready to settle down in London in this grand house, when she was still getting drunk three nights a week and sometimes kissing other men near the restroom in bars? When had Greg turned from one of many to The One? He was just some guy she had met at a cocktail party about a year before, the one who called every time he was in town for work, and the one who seemed nice enough if only because he took her to fabulous restaurants and had a charming accent and told her she was “lovely.”

“Ellie, why can’t you just be happy for me?” She was right. I wasn’t happy for her. I was scared. “I’m getting married. Didn’t you hear me? I’m getting married!”

“Congratulations … if this is what you want. It’s just that—” I wanted to remind her that she had lost her father less than three months earlier, that this was all too sudden, a shortcut to an easier, more glamorous life when things didn’t seem to be going her way in New York. But that seemed like too much truth, even for us. “I thought you weren’t even sure if you liked Greg.”

“I never said that.”

“I thought you said—”

“I never said that. I said that he seemed more interested in me than I was in him. And that was months ago. That was before.”

“Before what?”

“Nothing, Ellie. Never mind. I wish I hadn’t called you.” She hung up on me then, the first and only time she ever did that. When she finally came back to our apartment, she told me I was just jealous, which I was, and that I was afraid of losing her, which I was, and I told her I was sorry and that I didn’t mean it, although I did. I spent twenty-four hours apologizing, a record for me, and it became like a mantra:
I’m sorry. I never should have said anything. What do I know about love? I’m sorry
. I became a bad ’80s album on repeat.

Turns out I was wrong. Greg and Lucy got married nine months later at Hampton Court Palace, and she wore a beautiful princess gown made of raw white silk and said her vows with confidence. I was her maid of honor, and she let me pick my own dress, which I appreciated. I made a toast, and in the video, after everyone repeated, “To Lucy and Greg,” you can just about hear the words she whispered to me when she made a show of coming over and giving me a hug: “You’ll always be my favorite.”

Last Thursday, when Lucy stopped breathing, there is no doubt that a part of me died too. The history of who I am—the accumulation of a million memories from a thirty-one-year friendship, the knowledge that at least one person in the world could see me, that at least one person in the world would always know me—has been washed empty. I picture her blood trickling between the cobblestones, and one of the most important voices in my head, certainly the most constant, goes with it.

6

S
ophie’s bookshelf looks just like mine at home. Overstuffed, and warped by weight, and without an organizing principle. All fifty-six of the original Nancy Drew series; a few American Girl doll books;
Magic for Beginners;
an out-of-print edition of
The World Is Round
—Gertrude Stein’s only children’s book, a masterpiece better left to adults, which I bought as a gift for Lucy a couple of years ago;
A Wrinkle in Time; The Phantom Tollbooth; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe;
all of Shel Silverstein, including, in my opinion, his best,
A Light in the Attic
. They lean against one another, front to back, spines lined up like dominos. Many of my old favorites that Phillip and I have sent to her in care packages through the years, usually with a couple of Hershey bars thrown in for Lucy, now look old and battered and read, some crinkled by bathwater, just the way a good book should be. Exploring the shelf, seeing all the hours of entertainment right there to get lost in, a siren call to burrow our heads into another world, comforts me. I can tell, in that way that kindred spirits are able to recognize each other, that Sophie feels it too. She may be only eight, and yet I can tell she’s already a real reader, a habit or an addiction or a crutch, depending on which way you look at it, that will carry her through the rest of her life.

When I picked her up at school today, Sophie was sitting on a short stone wall, reading an old Sherlock Holmes hardback. The other kids just played around her—jumping off the ledge, walking an imaginary tightrope, occasionally pushing by as if she were permeable. Sophie didn’t even look up.

Lucy, unlike her daughter or me, was never a voracious reader. From time to time she’d recommend some nonfiction, usually something about the Iraq War, but generally books didn’t grab her. Music did. That’s how she’d remember things, by song, as if her life glided along to a soundtrack to which the rest of us weren’t privy. Her memories were all cataloged by musical reference. Junior high was the rock power ballads: “Living on a Prayer” and “Sister Christian” and “Every Rose Has Its Thorn.” High school was all about Nirvana, and, somewhat strangely, at a time when our attention spans were at their shortest, Lucy was interested in the long riff, too: the Grateful Dead, Phish.

Remember that time
, I would say, and Lucy would always remember, her life built on the same big pile of shared experiences, and she’d be able to tell me what was playing on the radio or sometimes what she was humming in her head at the time. When we got our driver’s licenses on the same day, since our birthdays were only a week apart (“We Didn’t Start the Fire”); when we both wore matching off-the-shoulder dresses to the eighth-grade dance (“Kiss”). The first time we took the T alone to buy preripped jeans at Urban Outfitters (“Walk This Way”).

For me, it has always been about books. I can tell you what I was reading when the Twin Towers fell
(White Teeth)
, or when Lucy crashed her mother’s Buick and broke her nose when she was seventeen
(The Prince of Tides)
, or when Greg called to say that Sophie had been born, 6 lbs., 7 oz.
(The Accidental Tourist)
. When in fourth grade, Eric Schwartz passed me a note saying
I like you
and then asked me to give it to Lucy for him
(Sweet Valley High, #3, Playing with Fire)
, and in eighth, when Lucy got elected student-body president and I was picked to be a delegate
(Pet Sematary
and
Love Story
, alternating between the two). When my parents told me they were getting divorced
(The World According to Garp)
, and when Phillip asked me to marry him
(Play It As It Lays)
.

So this is no small decision, choosing what we are going to read today, what book both Sophie and I will forever associate with this moment, what we read
after
. And when the answer is right in front of me—of course,
The Secret Garden—
all I have to do is touch the mint-green cover and I am thrown back twenty years to my parents’ bedroom in the old house in Cambridge. My mother and I are tucked into her queen-sized bed, though we usually read in mine, just hours after my grandmother’s funeral.

“Have you read this one?” I ask Sophie now, trying to keep my tone neutral, though I can think of nothing better than dipping back into
The Secret Garden
. I have read it dozens of times over the years, and it has not yet lost its power. Little Mary Lennox and her locked garden—sweet, yes, but redemptive too.

Sophie shakes her head no.

“My room or yours?” I ask her, but then I realize the guest room is not
my
room and wish I could take it back. A disturbing presumptuousness considering the circumstances. Sophie doesn’t seem to notice my slip and simply points toward the guest room, and then runs down the hall and jumps onto the bed, her feet kicking in the air. A moment of giggly childishness, and when she shows me these glimpses of the real Sophie, or maybe now the old Sophie, I melt. I dive onto the bed next to her and tickle her ribs. She laughs, rides the giddiness for a moment or two, before she remembers why I am here, and why she is hanging out with me and not her mother. So the suspension passes; new mute Sophie is back.

“Okay, I’ve got to tell you something before we start. This isn’t like reading your Nancy Drew or even Ramona. Quimby You only get to read
The Secret Garden
for the first time once. This is my favorite book, and now I’m sharing it with you. But this is the thing. Are you ready for it, Soph? Because we just can’t waste
The Secret Garden
.” Her eyes widen, and her nod is solemn. Excitement and challenge in the set of her jaw.

“Let’s shake on it,” I say, and so we do, and this adds some gravity to the moment. Then Sophie hands me the book and cuddles in closer.

I begin to read, and the story of miserable and ugly Mary Lennox unfolds before us with all its sweet release. We are transported far away from this house, and this moment, where it has only been one hundred and five hours since Lucy died. The clock rewinds a century, and Sophie and I are now in India under British colonial rule. We watch young Mary—pale and cross and yet somehow lovable to us—as she wakes up to find that she has been forgotten and orphaned by a cholera epidemic. Before long, she is taken to a creepy manor house in England to live with a distant, disinterested relative, alone and scared and far away from everything she knows.

Time and place fall away. We dip into the book, as if bathing. There will soon be a garden. A buried key. A hidden door. We keep reading, and we can almost forget everything that has been lost and taken.