‘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 i
n 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.
‘And so you married him,’ Brooke said after a moment, in that same too calm, matter-of-fact way, like these were facts instead of opinions based on perceptions. ‘I had to stand up in a preppy dress that the old you would have mocked and wax rhapsodic about the beauty of your love and I’ll tell you, Sarah, I hope that one day you recognize that as the act of love and sacrifice it was.’ She let out a little laugh. ‘But then it all became about this fantasy you claimed you’d always had to move back to your home town and live there. And there was no telling you that this wasn’t a fantasy you’d ever had in all the years I’d known you. You said that things changed when a person got married – that I would understand it some day when I got married myself.’ Brooke spread her hands out in front of her, as if staring at her ringless fingers the way we’d done when we were girls fantasizing about our future husbands. Our Prince Charmings, who were never hanging around the East Village bars with the rest of the NYU students like we did, chugging down cheap pitchers of beer. ‘So I guess you could argue that I still don’t understand, that this is nothing more than the rantings of an embittered single lady that you and Tim can chuckle over when you get back together.’
‘That was when you and I stopped seeing much of each other,’ I said, hearing far too much in the rasp of my voice in the quiet room. Not at all sure what was happening inside me. ‘After the wedding.’
‘You didn’t want to see me, Sarah,’ Brooke said gently, with a wealth of old pain beneath it. At least seven years’ worth of pain, and I could feel every one of those years hanging on me like a weight. ‘You didn’t want any part of me. I was nothing but a bad memory of a life you wanted nothing to do with any more. I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t hear from you once you left New York. To be honest, I never thought I’d hear from you again. When I first saw you tonight, I thought I was seeing a ghost. I really did.’
That sat there between us, all of it, ugly and misshapen in the centre of the glass coffee table, plunked down on top of the latest issue of The New Yorker and several New York magazines. I stared at it, as if I could make sense of it that way. But I couldn’t. I knew she wasn’t lying, necessarily. She believed the story she was telling me. I just knew the other side of it. The real truth about Tim and me in those days, long before Carolyn had delivered that killing blow to what we’d been. It was like Brooke and I had seen the same movie, but she was now offering a different interpretation of it, and only I had read the script.
It was very hard not to say that.
‘I don’t understand why I would do any of those things,’ I said eventually. I thought back through all the things she’d said, and blinked back the dizziness and chaos that threatened to blind me – that were far too close to a fullblown panic attack for comfort. Or maybe that was just the tears I was trying not to shed. ‘Did you say I was depressed? Why was I so depressed that I would date some guy I hated? And then go over all Stepford? Why would anyone do something like that?’
She really did laugh then, but stopped when she saw my face.
‘Oh my God,’ she said, sounding somewhere between astonished and scandalized. ‘You’re serious.’
She picked up her wine glass then and took a long, hard pull. Then she let out another laugh, but it was a shocked sort of sound. Like some kind
of stark disbelief.
‘I’m serious,’ I agreed, feeling tentative, suddenly. Or more tentative. And definitely afraid this time – in addition to panicked, and a little too close to a fit of hyper-ventilation that would definitely not end well. ‘I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.’
She shook her head, and then she put her wine down again, with another audible click, and smoothed her hands over her hair. She dropped them eventually, and then she sighed.
‘I’m talking about Alec Frasier,’ she said, and I could see him the moment she said it, like a storm roaring in, elemental and destructive. Unstoppable. ‘Dr Alec Frasier, whose name I promised I would never speak in your hearing again, but I’m going to go out on a limb and assume we’re past that.’
I could see that Cape Cod picture I’d found in my closet and more than that, I could see his clever gaze on mine and that lean, fascinating face of his I could have stared at for days. And had. His thoughtful hands and that easy, masculine grace he wore so carelessly. His rare smile, his surly impatience. His infectious laugh, his lone wolf tendency towards brooding. That impressive, formidable intellect of his that had often left me breathless with yearning. How had I ever forgotten him?
Because you had to, some tiny, hidden voice whispered. You had to forget about him or die. You had no choice.
‘When he left it broke you,’ Brooke said softly. Kindly, as if she thought the words might break me. As if she knew they already had. ‘Wrecked you. I get why you refused to go with him and I think you were right, but you never, ever forgave yourself for it.’
I stared back at her, stricken, as memories I hadn’t allowed myself to touch in more than seven years poured back into me like a river. Like a flood. Making a mockery of my plans to conduct an emotionless deposition of my own life. Making me question why I’d thought any of this was a good idea in the first place.