You don’t stop loving someone just because they stopped loving you. It would be a lot easier if you could. Emily’s kindness makes me turn away from her; I don’t deserve it.
I wait for her to move to the door. In fact, I’m still standing by it, gripping the handle. But she stays rooted, her brow wrinkled; she chews at the corner of her thumbnail. “I’ve been thinking about what you said.”
Hope wells. I almost leap on her with what I’ve just discovered, but I stay quiet. Instead of leaving, she moves into the living room and sits on the old sofa, places her bag on the floor.
I follow her and sink into the overstuffed chair on the other side of the coffee table. This furniture, it’s been here since I was a kid. A lot of it belonged to my grandmother. There are pieces—a shaky secretary, an ancient chifforobe—that haven’t been moved in half a century. There’s a portrait of Claire and me as children hanging over the fireplace. My parents were good about stuff like that—some people want to forget. But they wanted to remember her well, with joy, once the shock and the most brutal phases of grief and loss had passed. We talk about her openly now, allowing ourselves to remember, even when it’s painful.
“Did you know that Anisa just kind of bailed on her place?” Emily says. “She didn’t tell the landlord. She just packed her clothes, left most of her furniture. She just stopped paying.”
I didn’t know that. I haven’t seen or spoken to the real flesh-and-blood Anisa since she saved my life. I went straight from the hospital to the facility upstate, finally ending up here at my parents’ place, where I tried to piece my life back together. Am trying to piece my life back together. Am supposed to be trying to do that.
“It just doesn’t seem like her to do something so irresponsible, does it?”
I shrug, shake my head. Anisa, truth be told, could be a little irresponsible. She was prone to racking up debt on luxury goods like Gucci totes and Prada shoes, and then she’d eat ramen noodles for a month to pay it off. (What do you think about that, Parker Pinches Pennies? Little Miss Minimalist would do just about anything for a pair of Christian Louboutin shoes.) She could swing it because she made a fortune at that detested finance job, but she wasn’t much of a saver. She’d pretend to have the flu—like really play the role for her boss—to spend a few days with me when I was between temp jobs. We’d stay in bed, order in, watch rom-coms.
“And her job,” Emily goes on. “She didn’t love it. Finance was not her calling. But she left without notice. Again, not really like her. She respected her boss, was happy with the day-to-day. Or so she said.”
That was true. She didn’t hate her Wall Street job as much as she said. She had the rare mind that was excited by both art and numbers. She was a poet, and she could rock a spreadsheet like nobody’s business.
“I think she was happy,” Emily says. “Happyish? As happy as any of us are.”
Yes. But. There was a subliminal current of unhappiness there, a skein of dissatisfaction.
Is this it? Do you think this is it? she would ask me sometimes—in quiet moments after we’d made love, or walking through the park, moments when I was vibrating with happiness. I hope so, I’d answer. Writing. Loving her. Making a home in this frenetic candy store of a city. What else might there be? She’d drift away from me a little in those moments, as if we were on different wavelengths.
I think about Dr. Black, something he said coming back to me.
People walk away from their lives all the time. Make big sudden changes. It’s not a crime.
Emily and I sit with all of it a moment, our two different versions of Anisa. Was she Emily’s friend, my girlfriend? Yes. But she was also herself, unknown in some ways to both of us. I accept that now, when I couldn’t before. That’s progress, I think.
The big grandfather clock that my mother hates, and that my father winds and winds, ticks off time. It’s aggressive. Never lets you forget the passing seconds.
“I don’t want it to seem like I’m not happy for her.” Emily rubs at the bottom of her eyes. “I mean . . .” A sigh, an imploring lift of her gaze. “I’m jealous, okay? Everyone is. I thought it was that. Sour grapes, you know?”
Again, I stay quiet.
“But I guess you’re right. There is something off about it—the whole thing. The pictures. Even her words. Maybe it doesn’t—sound like her.”
My thumb finds the scar on the opposite arm. It’s still tender. Ugly. Frankenstein’s monster, I am stitched together. Less than the sum of my parts.
Before I can think better of it, I tell Emily about the Instagram post, about the old picture in my photo albums, the infinity necklace. It comes out in a tumble, sounding manic and off.
I wait for her to regret her decision to come, to share, to listen. I wait for her body language to close up before she scurries for the door, eager to get away from the shiftless, postsuicidal stalker that I am. But she just nods thoughtfully when I’m done, touches her collarbone.
“Show me,” she says.
I move over to sit beside her on the saggy sofa, and she dons her reading glasses. She stares at my phone, scrolling, flipping back and forth between apps.
“It does look like the same photo, Will,” she says. “I mean, it’s possible that it’s just really similar. She’s still wearing the necklace, maybe—she loved it. She loved you. And how many different ways are there to sit in lotus? But—the hair, the shirt, the light . . .”
Emily pulls out her laptop.
And over the next couple of hours, together, we analyze Anisa’s feed, comparing images with photos each of us has on our separate devices. I am comforted by the presence of someone sane. It’s not just me banging around the inside of my own head, analyzing, questioning, doubting.
We scroll through the feeds of Anisa’s friends going back two years. Many of the pictures on her new feed can be sourced from elsewhere—the yoga studio where she subbed Sunday morning classes, a cooking class she took here in the city, photos snapped by friends.
We search some of the phrases in her blog that seem especially not like Anisa and find that much of what’s there is a patchwork quilt of Zen memes, self-help books, Buddhist texts, sound bites from popular new age writers and thinkers like Eckhart Tolle, Gary Zukav, Michael Singer—even Jung, Einstein, Thich Nhat Hanh, Gandhi.
While I brew coffee, Emily makes some phone calls. Because no one is going to talk to me about Anisa. I hear the soft rise and fall of her voice from the kitchen.
Yeah, but actually speak to her, I mean. Like hear her voice.
When was that?
Are you sure? No. Okay.
Yeah, of course. Think about it.
When I come back with our mugs, she sits staring at the portrait of me and my sister, her face unreadable.
“Is that your sister?” she asks gently. “The one who drowned?”
“Claire,” I say. “Yes.”
She’s quiet a moment, seems to be considering her words.
“Did you ever notice how much she looks like Anisa?”
I hadn’t noticed at first. We are not quick to notice these deep psychological burdens, the secret machinations of our inner pain, and how they manifest themselves in our choices, are we? It was my mother who went sheet white when I brought Anisa home, quickly recovering, effusing warm smiles and opening welcoming arms. Only later did I find her crying in front of our portrait. Their coloring is not the same. It’s all in the shape of the eyes, the mouth, the dimple in her chin. Something ghostly in the essence—not knowable, untouchable.