We Were Never Here (15 page)

When I woke up on Sunday, I decided I would discuss Connor—finally!—with Nora when she visited. I had told nobody. It was the opposite of me, but I hadn't figured out how to talk about it, maybe because I hadn't figured out what exactly it was.

What was it? Maybe Nora could help, not define it necessarily, but think it over. Like I had with her so many times. So I decided I would tell her everything. I wouldn't show her the letter but maybe I could just tell her about him and us and, maybe, see what she thought.

So that was my plan for Sunday.

My mother and I went to pick her up at Union Station. We parked and then we went inside to wait, which makes it sound like we just pulled up and got out, which we did not because,
parking
, but after all that: slipping my letter to Connor inside the mailbox. After that: fluttering heart. And then waiting beneath the clock for Nora.

We waited for a really long time, though. Like, twenty-five minutes. No text from Nora. We checked the arrivals, and her train had come in, but Nora did not seem to be among the passengers. She wasn't answering my texts. So Nora. Her world and
we just happen to be roaming around in it.

“I hope everything is okay,” my mother said. Was it only recently that my mother went first to that bleak, bad place where no hope lives?

“Of course it is. She got on a train for half an hour in the morning on
Sunday
. I mean, what could happen? She's probably got no phone service is all.”

She's off being Nora
is what I didn't say, but after ten more minutes of loitering, I called her house.

“Mrs. Branford?” I said when her mother answered.

“Yes?”

“It's Lizzie!”

“Hi, honey,” she said. Here's the thing with camp friends. You barely ever see their parents. They just come to get us, throwing our massive bags of dirty laundry and our army blankets and our hideous birdhouses into the minivan and turning back for home. So as long as I'd known Nora, I think I'd maybe said thirteen words to her mother. Now, on the phone, she let out this massive sigh.

“Nora was supposed to come,” I said. “I mean, my mom and I are waiting for her. Under the clock. At the train station, I mean. Where we'd arranged.”

“I see,” Mrs. Branford sighed. Mrs. Branford, by the way, sounded the opposite of British. She sounded, I don't know, like she was Canadian or from Cleveland or something. Her consonants were pronounced
really
close together. And the sigh made it seem like I was supposed to ask her about why she'd made it.

“Is everything all right?” I didn't look at my mother, who I
could see out of the corner of my eye was plaintively giving me a nervous, knowing glance.

“Nora's been arrested,” Mrs. Branford said.

“What?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Branford said.

I waited, breathing. I pictured her in the dressing room, layering bras over her big boobs.

“Yes. She was arrested for shoplifting last night, out with some friends. I'm sorry she didn't let you know she would not be coming. Obviously.”

“Oh my gosh,” I said.

“Yes. She's home now, but she has no access to phone or computer. The store is deciding if they'll press charges. Obviously we're hoping they won't, but Nora will not be visiting anytime soon either way.”

“Oh,” I said. “What store, if you don't mind me asking?”

“Oh God, some tarty place. The Bottom Drawer.”

I giggled.

“It's a lingerie store here,” she said. “Very expensive.”

“I see.” Oh Nora.

“Yes. We are all disappointed. In Nora. I will let her know you called, Lizzie. How are you feeling, by the way? Nora was so worried about you.”

“I'm good. Thank you.”

“Glad to hear it. Okay, I will let her know you called.”

We said good-bye, and I slipped my phone in my back pocket. There were two ways to do this. (1) I could tell my mother what I once would have told her for sure: Nora had food poisoning.
She was so sick she couldn't call, and her mother forgot. Bad fish. It will do it every time. Or there was option (2), what actually happened. Which would make being friends with Nora pretty hard from there on out.

I looked at my mother. “Nora got caught shoplifting,” I said.

The moment ended. Very abruptly. “Oh my,” she said.

I nodded grimly.

“Well!” she said, taking me by my elbow. “Let's give ourselves a treat and have a nice lunch!”

Not the response I was expecting, but a better one. Only apparently there are no nice lunches in Union Station, and so we walked a few blocks to E Street into a restaurant in a really swanky hotel.

“Two,” she said to the waiter.

“The brunch here is supposed to be fabulous, but I only come here during the week,” she said when we were seated. “I just love this place.” She smiled at the bar and the other tables.

“Looks yummy.” I peered over the enormous menu, waiting.

“What did she steal?” my mother asked as she placed a starched white napkin on her lap.

“I have no idea,” I lied. “Her mom didn't say.”

“I wonder,” she said. “How does this make you feel?”

“Can you please not do that?” I asked.

“Yes. I can not do that.”

“Thank you. It was lingerie.”

My mother shook her head and her eyes widened. “Don't quite know what I was expecting.”

“Truth is, Nora did tell me she was stealing. It was recent. She
got some kind of odd rush from it. I don't think she's, like, wanting for bras and underwear.”

My mother nodded, trying to quell the evident thrill of my decision to go with option two: truth telling. Which, she couldn't have known, was also a way of not telling number three, which was the truth about Connor.

“Don't worry; I don't get it at all.”

My mom paused. “You know, I was caught stealing once.”

I looked at her. Anything my parents told me about who they once were, before Zoe and me, like when my father got drunk and threw up at some Neil Young concert, or when my mother kissed a famous actor, always shocked me. I didn't really want to hear about it either. I wanted them to have always been just this. My parents.

“I stole a ChapStick when I was with your grandmother. I got caught stealing
ChapStick
with my mother. In a drugstore. I was ten.”

“That is so bizarre!”

“It really was. I'm sure my mother would have bought it if I'd wanted it. But I wanted to
take
it. I understand it, shoplifting. Who doesn't want to just see if she can get away with something?”

“I'm not sure that's it. But the stealing part doesn't appeal to me at all.”

“Well, that's a relief!” my mother said. “Obviously that was not an endorsement.”

A waiter was making his way over to us.

“I mean I have other things . . .” Like fleeing hospitals, I thought.

“I'm sure,” she said. “So strange, that day, with the ChapStick. My father was a judge. It was fairly humiliating for him. I still feel this terrible, terrible guilt. To this day.”

I looked at my mom. I felt terrible guilt as well. For all that I had put her through. But, I thought, at least I hadn't been arrested for shoplifting.

“Two chardonnays.” My mother grinned at the waiter, daring him to question her.

Well, this was new. I tilted my head at my mom. I'd had wine with dinner before with my parents, on holidays and such, but this public display was a whole new level of Daphne's . . . liberalness.

“Yes, ma'am,” he said.

“Ma'am?” She was horrified. “Call me Daphne,” she said into her menu, she really couldn't help herself, as he turned to leave.

The wine was fun and it put me in kind of a mellow mood, and then Zoe was waiting when we got home. I guess she had heard what had happened to Nora from my dad, who must have heard from my mom, who must have called him while I was having the charming experience of dealing with my bag in a public bathroom. I guess I really needed to finally talk about Connor and then Nora got arrested, so whoever was sitting in front of me was who it was going to be.

So Zoe.

“Hey!” she said brightly, trying to corral Greta. Was it only then I noticed the half-eaten couch and the dust bunnies—more hair bunnies—twisting along the old Oriental carpet?

“We need to crate train her,” my mother said to no one in particular.

Connor. Connor. It was all I could think about.

I miss you,
I'd written.
I can't believe you're gone. It feels like you weren't real.

When would he get my letter? I ticked off the days in my head.

The dogs bounded with Zoe into her room, and she waved me in.

Zoe's room: How was it so much better, cooler, older than mine? Maybe it was that she had framed pictures—of her and Tim, us as little girls, a sepia-toned one of Nana as a baby in little white baby shoes and a bonnet—and also a framed poster of the Calder mobile that hangs in the National Gallery. Her books—huge art books on Impressionism and Neo-Fauvists, also little books of poetry, the kids' books that she loved, like
Madeline
and
Many Moons
and
Sylvester and the Magic Pebble
— were all neatly shelved. A canopy bed. I don't even know how we came from the same parents, really.

The dogs jumped on the bed and we all lay back, even Greta.

“Crazy about Nora. What a freak,” Zoe said.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“The stealing, Liz. That's crazy.”

“I guess,” I said.

“I thought Nora drove you nuts anyway.”

“She does and she also doesn't. I don't know, she seems a lot better than Dee-Dee and Lydia, that's for sure.”

“That is truth,” Zoe said.

I petted Mabel and didn't say anything.

She closed her eyes and sighed.

“Yeah, everything's different now,” I said.

Zoe nodded.

“I miss Connor.” As I said it, I realized how badly I needed to talk about it. Then I said it: “I think I loved him.”

“He was a sweet guy,” she said, but I could tell she didn't mean it.

“Was?”

“You said ‘loved.'”

“Okay, love.”

“Do you still see him? Do you guys
talk
?”

“God,” I said. “I just told you I
loved
someone.” I shook my head. “Love someone.”

“Sorry,” she said. “Tell me.”

“It's okay. So, don't repeat this to Mom and Dad, okay? But he got sent to boarding school.”

“I heard that,” Zoe said.

“From who?”

“Just around.”

“What are you talking about?” I felt a new kind of panic. That something had been going on behind my back with the people I had once been closest to.

“I know I should have said something earlier, but we have a few mutual friends. I knew someone—a friend of Jake's, Tim's friend from swim team?—who dated him. Well, more like hooked up with him, I guess. And he never called or texted or emailed her again. I think they did a lot,” she said. She wouldn't
look at me. “The girl was really upset.”

I was dumbfounded. “Well, don't you always have all the information.”

“They were drunk. Lizzie, he's one of those asshole private-school boys. We hate those kids.”

Was this in fact
West Side Story
? I recalled not a single conversation that was about how much we didn't like private-school boys. I didn't even know them. “He's not, though. He's not like that.”

“Lizzie, he
is
. I'm sorry he got sent away, but maybe it's just for the best.”

“I'm really glad I have you to talk to,” I said, extricating myself from the pile of us. “So helpful.”

“Come on.” She grabbed my wrist to pull me back down.

I twisted it away. “No, Zoe. That is messed up.”

“Liz!” she called to me when I was in the hallway. “I was just trying to help!”

I went into my room and closed my door. I took out the letter from Connor, and I have to say, I loved it. I wanted to press it into a book and save it forever, like a flower or pretty leaf. I wanted to kiss it and hold it, open, to my heart.

And yet. And yet!

Now I couldn't stop picturing Connor with another girl, someone perfect, either perfectly cool or perfectly tanned and blond. Who would it be? No matter where he was, Connor always found someone. After all, he had found me.

Who would Connor love? If he could love.

I wished I could take my letter back, reverse the day and just
suck it out of that mailbox, go back to my bed, undo writing it on my study buddy covered in stars, put the paper back, the pen. Be the kind of girl who just one time waited patiently. Be the girl who didn't say everything all at once.

I heard Tim arrive yet again and I heard him go into Zoe's room and I heard the dogs leave, and the creak of the bed, and I heard them talking and then after a few minutes I heard silence.

Fuck Zoe, I thought, with her perfect room and her perfect intact body and her perfect boyfriend, and all her
information
. I had been so humiliated—by doctors, by my body, by Connor. And by Zoe, who chose to deliver this kind of important detail way later than was ethically correct. She was my
sister
.

Why was I the only one with shame around here?

I knew they were doing it, even with my parents right downstairs getting Sunday dinner ready. I wondered if they were naked.

I tiptoed out of my room and into the hallway and leaned into her closed door, placed my fingertips against the wood. It was silent but for Nina Simone playing softly from her phone dock—downloaded from Tim's Pandora search for Sounds Like Birdy, no doubt—and an occasional creak of the bed. I hesitated, but my worst self got the best of me. I grabbed the handle and opened the door as loudly and shockingly as possible.