The Myth of You and Me (30 page)

With my conscious mind I couldn’t remember how to get to the pizza place, but my teenage self took over and made all the right turns. It was late in the afternoon, and the parking lot was empty. I sat in my bright blue rental car at the edge of the lot. This was the place where Sonia and I first met. I could see myself standing at the curb, hunching my shoulders to look smaller, and I could see her walking toward me, the sunlight shining in her hair.

The Grays’ house looked smaller than I remembered, like it had shrunk in the rearview mirror and then stayed that way. Still, walking up the driveway with the package in my hand, every move I made seemed an echo of one I’d made before. Time had closed in a loop, two hands bringing the ends of a string together.

I was reaching for the doorbell when the door opened and Sonia stepped out. She didn’t see me—she was moving fast, her eyes on her feet—and she ran right into me. “Oh!” she said. I felt the shock of her body against mine. She was physical, real, not just a character in my memory. I grabbed her arm to steady us both.

She was wearing ratty shorts, running shoes, a purple T-shirt left over from high school that said
GO WILDCATS
. She had her hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her cheekbones and the line of her jaw were more prominent than I remembered. She looked tired, I thought, or maybe she just looked older. She was staring at me with the same surprised recognition that was no doubt on my face.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” she said. “I didn’t really think you would come.” She stepped forward, out of my grasp, to give me an unexpected hug. It was an intimacy I wasn’t quite ready for. I hadn’t expected to find her so happy to see me. Somehow, after all these days of looking, I hadn’t expected to find her at all. I lifted my free hand to rest lightly on her back, my awkwardness making me feel inadequate to the moment. “Camazon,” she said into my shoulder, like she was confirming that that was who I was.

She stepped back and looked at me again. She was smiling, but when I failed to speak, her expression grew uncertain. She bit her lip with her two front teeth and tugged at the end of her ponytail, smoothing it against her neck. It was a nervous gesture so familiar that for an instant she could have been fourteen. I blinked, but the shadow of her girlhood self remained, a double exposure.

“Hi,” I said.

“I was just going out for the mail,” she said.

“Oh.”

We both nodded.

“I’ll get it later,” she said.

“Okay.”

Behind Sonia a teakettle began to wail. Alarm flashed across her face, and she turned and ran inside and down the hall, leaving the front door open.

I stood there, reluctant to follow her. Being back here unnerved me more than I’d expected. In the year after my friendship with Sonia ended, I hadn’t been able to stop myself from imagining the confrontation I might have with her, the biting things I might say. That year I had dreams where I defeated her, usually in some nonsensical way, like in a competition to buy a roller rink. But for a long time, I’d thought myself well past any such desire—I’d thought myself well past any desire to see her at all—and on the way here I’d thought only of giving her the package, seeing her open it, and leaving. Now I saw that of course it wasn’t as simple as that. I didn’t know quite what I wanted. I had the package in my hand, but it didn’t seem sufficient reason for my being there. For one thing, I’d felt, when she hugged me, an unexpected desire to be a kid again, to once again be her friend.

I made myself step inside. In the living room, the furniture was older, shabbier, but otherwise the same. I ran my hand along the back of the couch. I could see myself sitting there with Will as he pressed the bloody towel to his head. I walked into the kitchen, and another me brushed past, running outside to stop whatever might be happening there.

Sonia was standing at the counter, wearing an expectant smile. “I thought you’d forgotten the way,” she said.

“No,” I said. I put the package on the table.

“Well,” she said. “It has been a long time.”

“Sonia . . . ,” I started. I had a vague idea of asking after her mother.

“Do you want some tea?” she asked, her voice unnaturally bright, and I realized she was nervous, as nervous as I was. When I nodded, she listed the various teas on hand and then went to make me a cup. I sat down at the table. She seemed to be deliberately making noise, clattering the mugs, banging the sugar bowl on the table even after I’d said I didn’t want any. “Milk,” she said. “Spoon.” When all these things were arrayed in front of me, she sat down, gave me a quick smile, and then busied herself dunking her tea bag in and out of the water.

That day her mother had hit her in the backyard, I’d sat at this table with Sonia while her father consoled her weeping mother upstairs. Sonia had shown me her palms, shot through with splinters—fleeing her mother, she’d scrabbled up the wooden ladder on the swing set, and Madame Gray had pulled her back down. I’d found tweezers in the bathroom and, careful as a surgeon, removed every tiny sliver from her hands.

I didn’t know now how Sonia could be here without thinking of that, how she could walk into the backyard without seeing her mother standing over her, ready to hit her with a chain, how she could look at her mother at all. I couldn’t imagine what was happening with her mother now, to make Sonia come back here after all of that.

“How’s your mother?” I asked.

Sonia seemed startled that I’d spoken. “What?” she said.

“How’s your mother?”

“Oh,” she said, “she’s . . .” Her voice trailed off. Then she seemed to gather herself. She looked at me with determined cheerfulness. It was an expression I recognized. She was about to give a performance. “It’s really pretty funny,” she said. “It’s like I’m the mother and she’s the child. She keeps trying to sneak out. I caught her yesterday, and she said, ‘Tell me what nine times five is and I won’t go.’ Luckily, I always remember that one. Forty-five. Why my brain can come up with that answer and no others I have no idea. Then she started in with some other ones—six times seven, and so on—but I said, ‘Mother, we had a deal.’ Except I said it in French, because for some reason she listens to me more when I speak French. Can you believe she’s still playing the number game? It’s funny. Just like old times, huh?” As she said “old times,” her face, just for a second, was sad. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m being so flip. I just feel discombobulated, like I’ve gone back in time.”

“Oliver says all times exist simultaneously.”

“Feels like it,” she said. “Here we are again.”

“Do you remember . . . ,” I started, and then I looked away. I’d been about to ask about the time with the splinters, which of course she remembered, and why did I want to bring it up now? What exactly did I want to remind her of? Her mother’s cruelty? My own beneficence?

She waited for me to finish, but when I didn’t she didn’t press me. “It’s so weird, being here with you at this table, feeling like I have to be polite to you,” she said.

“You don’t have to,” I said. “Don’t strain yourself.”

She stood, abruptly, and dumped her tea in the sink. “I made it too strong,” she said, but she hadn’t even tasted it. She took out another tea bag, poured the water again. “I knew the second that was out of my mouth you’d take it the wrong way,” she said.

“What way should I take it?” I said.

She turned and leaned against the counter. “I just mean, you’re so familiar, but then you’re not. I don’t know the rules for how we should interact.” She looked down at her mug. “When I saw you, my first feeling was relief, you know, like thank God, Camazon’s here, she’ll understand, I can tell her everything . . . but then I remembered that’s not who we are to each other anymore.” She looked up. “Is it?”

“There’s a reason for that,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “I know.” She sighed. “You know, I knew from what Oliver said that you were still angry at me. But I’d hoped you weren’t just coming here to settle a score.”

Though I’d been curious before, now I didn’t want to hear about her secret correspondence with Oliver. I wanted to pretend he’d never written her at all, just as I wished I could pretend she’d never slept with Will. “How did you even know I was coming?” I asked.

“Will called me.”

“Oh.” My stomach tightened at this news. “I didn’t tell him.”

“No, but he thought it was a possibility. I thought you’d be torn between your desire to complete a task and your reluctance to ever see me again.” She gave me a quick, sharp look.

“I was,” I said.

“See how well I still know you?”

Was that sadness in her voice, regret, or just weariness? I wasn’t sure. Her body gave nothing away. She was leaning against the counter, her hands cupped loosely around her mug, with every appearance of calm. She didn’t even seem nervous anymore, as though in the last few minutes she’d decided I wasn’t worth it. Now she wasn’t even looking at me, her gaze traveling out the window toward the backyard. I couldn’t gauge whether she really felt as indifferent, as confident, as she looked. I used to think I knew what was real, what was the mask. She used to teach me her cheerleading routines, so that I watched her at football games with a mix of pride and worry, because if she made a mistake, I’d know it, even if no one else did. But she didn’t make mistakes. She was the only cheerleader who ever looked happy to be up in the air. The other girls wobbled and shook, their mouths set in fearful grimaces. Up she went, Sonia, with a broad grin. Her leg didn’t even shake as the squad’s only boy held her foot with both hands. He would pitch her into the air, and for a moment she would fly. No one but me knew how scared she was, every time, that she would fall. She said no one in her life had ever understood her the way I did, in that moment before we knew whether she had gotten it right.

Out of all the conflicting things I felt, looking at her now, the one that rose to the surface was a desire to provoke her, to make her angry. There’s nothing lonelier than being angry at someone who’s indifferent to your anger. It’s like playing catch off a wall by yourself. Everything you feel just bounces back to you.

“Why did you write to me?” I asked. “Was it the challenge, to see if you could win me back?”

Her gaze snapped back to me. “That’s one way of looking at it,” she said, and to my satisfaction I heard an edge in her voice.

“What’s another?”

“I told you why,” she said. “Getting engaged made me think about my life so far, how I’d gotten here, what might’ve been different. And my mother was . . . having problems. After a long time when she wasn’t. So here I am, about to do this adult thing, and these things are happening that are making me feel like a kid again. And I wanted to talk to someone who would understand.”

“Sleeping with Will didn’t do the trick?”

“No.” She tried to look impassive but her left eye twitched. “I’m not going to talk to you about Will.”

“Why not?”

“Why should I? What happened between us is between us. What happened between you is between you.”

“You don’t see any connection? That’s twice now we’ve shared a man.”

“I wouldn’t really say we shared them. They were both yours in the end.”

“What do you mean?”

She took a long sip of her tea before she answered. “Will still hopes you’re coming back,” she said. “He’s fallen for you.”

“He told you that?” I was taken aback by this, and it struck me that I’d gone on assuming my feelings for Will were stronger than his for me.

“I could tell,” she said. “When he falls he falls hard. Or didn’t you notice?”

“Lying to me is a funny way to show it.”

“Now he feels stupid. He’s afraid he misread you, thinking you’d fallen for him.”

“He misread me? I’m not the one who was sleeping with you.”

“You’re not going to make this one my fault,” she said. “This is nothing like what happened with Owen.”

“But it is.”

“How?” she snapped.

“Because it is,” I snapped back. “Because maybe I’m just the one they take when they can’t have you.”

There was a terrible silence in which my words seemed to echo. If only I’d said something neutral, even cold or hurtful, instead of insecure and pathetic. I waited with dread for her to speak, sure I’d hear pity in her voice.

Instead, she seemed angry. “That’s completely ridiculous,” she said. “It’s you he wants, believe me. And I’m telling you this even though it makes me a little jealous, how badly he wants you.” She paused, and when she spoke again it was in a clipped, matter-of-fact way. “It’s funny, I used to worry about you and Will, because sometimes it seemed to me you two were a better match than we were. But you never noticed that, because you’re so busy protecting yourself it never occurs to you that everyone else is just as vulnerable. Thank God I didn’t realize you were in love with him until we broke up.”

“You knew?” I couldn’t believe it, and all at once I felt like I was sitting there naked. “How?”

Sonia shrugged. “There was something about the way you were that day, the way you went to the airport after him. I just knew.”

“And you were angry?”

“I didn’t think you’d done anything,” she said. “And you were with Owen by then. But, yes, I was angry, at least for a while. Angry that you’d kept the secret from me.”