Once More With Feeling (14 page)

Because it wasn’t just that her apartment was pretty, I understood even then. It was that this was her dream. That she’d achieved it. And for the most part, she was
happy
. Not perfectly happy, but happy nonetheless. I’d thought I was there too, not so long ago, and I’d been horribly, humiliatingly wrong. Yet I had the sense that Brooke’s happiness was the real deal.

She came back in with a bottle and two glasses, and set about pouring. When we each had a glass, she lifted hers and tapped it to mine, then took a sip. I followed suit, not surprised to find it was a much more sophisticated vintage than one we might have sucked down while lurking out on stoops in this same neighbourhood all those years ago.

‘I feel as if you’re deliberately restraining yourself from saying something,’ I said after a moment. Carefully. Very, very carefully. ‘Which makes me think you’re even more grown up than you appear to be.’

‘I have learned tact and manners, it’s true,’ she said, her lips curving. ‘Though I generally try to keep such things in my professional sphere and let it all hang out at home. What am I, a saint?’

‘Clearly not.’

‘Clearly.’ She took another sip and sat back again, crossing one leg over the other and looking at me. ‘I guess I don’t know what to say that won’t sound patronizing, which I don’t want to be, especially because I haven’t seen you in so long and I’m afraid that if I take my eyes off you you’ll disappear again in a puff of smoke. Like you did last time.’

‘Was there smoke?’ I asked idly, running my finger around the rim of my glass. ‘I thought we moved to Rivermark.’

‘You disappeared a long time before you moved, Sarah,’ she said gently. But her eyes held mine, and didn’t soften as she said it. ‘Rivermark was the last nail in that particular coffin.’

Some part of me bristled at that, immediately. I hadn’t been the one who grew jealous – who had been so nasty and unsupportive of mine and Tim’s relationship. But I tamped it down. This was a fact-finding mission. A deposition, even. I hadn’t come all this way to argue with Brooke’s take on things. Quite the opposite. I was hoping she could offer some clues as to how I’d ended up where I was. That meant I had to listen, however much I might have wanted to argue instead.

‘The funny thing is that I don’t really remember any of this the way I should,’ I told her. I set the wine glass down on the table before me with great care, all too able to envision myself accidentally slinging the whole of it
across the room, destroying the lovely oriental carpets that stretched over gleaming expanses of polished hardwood. And I’d never know if it was nerves, clumsiness, or pure jealousy. Better to be safe. ‘It’s like so much of the past five years or so is a big blank. I mean, I remember what happened. What I did. But it’s like there are these huge holes in it that I didn’t even notice were there until a few days ago. I feel like Sydney on
Alias
.’

‘In the third season when she lost her memory of the previous two years,’ Brooke said at once, nodding, as I knew she would. She sighed, obviously lost in her memories of what had once been a favourite show of ours. Then she blinked. ‘But I don’t think there’s anything particularly nefarious going on here, if that’s what you’re worried about. I think you made certain choices, and you got rid of the things that didn’t support those choices. Simple, really.’

‘Including you?’ I asked. I shook my head. ‘How did I do that?’

She smiled again, and this time it hurt. ‘I wish I knew.’

‘I don’t understand—’ I began again, but she sat forward then, cutting me off. She put her own glass of wine down, with a loud
clink
when glass met glass.

‘He made you a Stepford wife,’ she said, her voice tight, as if she’d waited years to tell me this. As if she were thrilled that I’d finally asked. ‘He was everything you hated and you fell for him anyway, because you thought that would keep you safe, or something. And in order to believe
that – to really suck down all of his bullshit – you had to get rid of anything that reminded you that once upon a time you’d been somebody else entirely.’

That wasn’t really how I remembered it, and I had to fight to keep my expression neutral. I remembered flirting with Tim in the office, our secret late-night billable dinners, the first time Tim had kissed me on the street near Columbus Circle. I remembered thinking that finally,
finally
, I’d found someone I could trust. Someone who could be depended upon completely.

‘I’m sorry if that sounds harsh,’ she said stiffly. ‘I don’t mean it to be. If anything, that’s the watered-down, time-heals-all-wounds version of how I feel about Tim Lowery.’

‘It’s not that I don’t believe you,’ I said after a moment, still fighting to fit her words into what I knew, to make space for them in the things I thought were true about me and the choices I’d made. To keep myself from snapping back at her, from accusing her of very old transgressions I hadn’t known I was still holding on to.
This is a deposition, nothing more
, I told myself.
You want to know what she thinks, even if you don’t like it
. ‘It’s just that I don’t remember it quite like that. I don’t remember having big fights with you over Tim.’ Because she’d been so snide and snippy every time the subject came up. But I shook that off. ‘Did I really block that out?’

‘We didn’t fight about him.’

‘Good,’ I said. I even smiled, though it felt a bit wan. ‘I was beginning to think I’d gone completely crazy.’

Brooke shrugged, and her eyes flashed with something I might have called hurt, long ago when I’d been able to read her so well.

‘There was no argument to be had on the subject,’ she told me. ‘You made up your mind about him and that was that. If anyone – if
I
– even hinted that maybe it was moving too fast, you just … disappeared. You stopped returning calls. You stopped talking about it. You made it very clear that I could get on the Tim bandwagon or get lost.’

I shook my head, trying to take that in. Trying to see what she’d seen. But what I remembered was her rolled eyes, her pointed sighs whenever I mentioned him. I remembered the unpleasant night she’d tried to set me up with someone else, completely ignoring the fact that I’d told her things were serious with Tim, and she and I had ended up in a slightly tipsy screaming match on Avenue A at three in the morning. So maybe we had fought about Tim at least once. I remembered lying in my bed in the tiny walk-up after another tense evening with Brooke, shaking with fury as I turned over the latest batch of snide remarks or flippant asides she’d thrown at me. It was the first time we’d ever been so far apart on anything, and it had scared me to death.

But I’d been so sure she was wrong. That she was being a baby. That she needed to grow up and realize that we weren’t going to spend our whole lives there, in that crappy old apartment that I hated more and more every time I
stayed over at Tim’s sleek and beautiful place. That we were going to move on and this was me doing it, and her unable to handle that fact. I’d been positive that she would come round, and equally certain that she was, at the heart of all of it, incredibly jealous that I’d found someone I would think about leaving her for.

Our relationship had been that tight, that suffocating. That all-consuming. I remembered thinking that back then. I remembered feeling that realization go off in me like a light bulb. I remembered that I’d thought very seriously about the possibility that I was never going to be capable of having a real relationship with a man if I was
this
embroiled with my best friend, this woven together with her. I remembered Tim agreeing with me, but not in the divisive way I knew Brooke thought he operated. And I had never told Brooke that theory; I’d thought it would be too cruel.

I had to bite down on my lip to keep from saying it now.
A fact-finding mission does not involve restarting fights from seven years ago
, I snapped at myself.
This is about listening, not defending
.

And anyway, there were so many things that weren’t at all true about my marriage, like that it was happy and good and filled with trust, that I hadn’t seen until it was too late. Why shouldn’t my memories of how it all started be more of the same? What did it hurt me to consider that possibility?

‘This is a few years of therapy talking, by the way,’ she
said, smiling blandly at me when I concentrated on her again. ‘I used to be much, much angrier about all of this.’

I couldn’t tell if she was kidding or not. That was the first time it really dawned on me; how far apart we’d grown. There was a time when she wouldn’t have had a single expression I couldn’t read from across a room. Oddly, realizing this made me feel something more like calm. We weren’t those angry girls in our mid twenties any longer. We could be much more serene adults, looking back at things we didn’t need to feel so acutely if we didn’t want to.

‘The way I remember it,’ I said in that spirit, telling myself I felt nothing at all but
serene
, ‘is that things changed when I got serious with Tim. When we got engaged.’

‘You mean five minutes after you started dating him?’ she asked, a definite edge in her tone. She smiled ruefully, as if she’d surprised herself. ‘I’m still pretty angry, I guess. It’s still in there.’

‘I remember that you were very – that you didn’t like it,’ I said, determined to ignore my own anger and the fear that I would offend her. Determined to just get it out. It’s not like I could create
more
distance between us than there had been, could I? ‘I remember that it was hard for you.’

‘Oh, right,’ she said, with a different sort of edge in her voice this time. ‘Because I was jealous or something, right? Because I either wanted what you had, or because I had an unhealthy and adolescent attachment to my best
friend. That was your take on it, I know. See?’ Her smile then was strained. ‘You do remember, after all.’

‘Just tell me how it all happened, from your perspective,’ I said, feeling significantly less serene, but determined to push through it. ‘You’re not going to hurt my feelings. I came here, didn’t I? I want to know what you think.’ She looked uncertain, so I leaned forward, propping my elbows on my knees. ‘I promise I can take it,’ I told her, though I wasn’t in the least bit sure of that. I wanted to hear it anyway, and that was what mattered, wasn’t it? ‘I really can.’

She sighed, and shifted in her seat, and something old and sad seemed to move over her then, making a slight chill snake through me in response.
Maybe
, a little voice piped up then,
there’s a good reason you have completely different memories of all of this …
But I shook it off, impatient with myself.

‘What I remember?’ she asked. ‘Even if I know you don’t agree with what I think about all of it? Or you didn’t back then, anyway?’

‘Especially if you know I don’t agree,’ I assured her. ‘That most of all.’

She raised one shoulder, a slightly jerky movement that looked like the physical embodiment of the same
what do I have to lose
thought I’d had a few moments before.

‘Tim was after you from the start,’ she said in a quiet, sure voice. The tone she’d always used to tell me my own story, to make it real, to remind me. It was both comforting
and dislocating to hear it again. ‘From the first second of your summer associate programme, despite the fact it was inappropriate. That was Tim. Mr Inappropriate. When you first described him to me, you laughed at him. You thought he was so full of himself – the stereotypical corporate lawyer.’ She shook her head. ‘When you started dating him, you kept it a secret for almost two months. You said that you thought I would hate you for sleeping with the enemy, but I really thought that the truth was, you hated yourself.’

I let out a breath, and wasn’t surprised that it was shaky. But when Brooke looked at me, eyebrows high like she expected me to explode, I waved for her to continue. I even sketched some version of a smile.
Just finding out a few facts here
, I told myself, addressing what felt like a possible panic attack, or a white hot fury, brewing deep inside.
Doesn’t mean they’re true …

‘You were so depressed,’ she continued in that far-away voice, like she was consulting her own memories. She rubbed her hands along the tops of her legs, which I knew meant she was anxious too. ‘So broken. But you refused to admit it. You … changed. When I’d try to remind you that this was never who you wanted to be before, you acted like
I
was crazy. Like
I
was the one having a breakdown. That was the major theme – I was a lunatic who couldn’t cope with your new, great love and brand-new life goals. You hammered that point home. It didn’t occur to me for years that you actually believed it yourself. That
you probably had to if you wanted to go through with it. Which you did.’

It was almost funny that she could tell me a story that was so much like the one I remembered, but which ultimately wasn’t the same at all. Almost.

‘Why did I have to do something like that?’ I asked her in a small voice. ‘Why did I want to?’

‘Because you had to make sense of this big new story you were telling yourself, I guess,’ Brooke said, with a helpless sort of shrug. ‘I don’t know.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Maybe a lot of people do this. Maybe this is just what settling looks like. I really don’t know. But you were the kind of person who always said she would rather die than settle. And I always thought you meant it.’

I found that I was wringing my hands together and forced myself to stop. To listen. To let this penetrate, even if none of it sounded real to me. Even if, despite that, it was dripping into me like some kind of poison. I could feel it moving through me, burning through my veins, making me entirely too afraid that she was telling the truth.

But that was crazy. There was no one truth here. There was no wrong or right. The fact that she remembered it all so differently didn’t invalidate what I remembered. It didn’t make her
correct
. Just because she thought I’d settled didn’t mean I had.

It was really important, suddenly, that I held on to that.