“Forrest could learn manners,” said Jule.
“He didn’t think. He just blurted out the laugh. Then he was super sorry afterward.” Immie always defended Forrest after criticizing him.
“Please tell me your birth name,” said Jule. “I will not laugh.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
Immie whispered in Jule’s ear, “Melody, and then Bacon. Melody Bacon.”
“Was there a middle name?” Jule asked.
“Nope.”
Jule did not laugh, or even smile. She put both her arms around Immie’s body. They looked out at the sea. “Do you feel like a Melody?”
“No.” Immie was thoughtful. “But I don’t feel like an Imogen, either.”
They watched a pair of seagulls that had just landed on a rock near them.
“Why did your mother die?” Jule asked eventually. “Was that in the file?”
“I guessed the basic picture before I read it, but yeah. She overdosed on meth.”
Jule took that in. She pictured her friend as a toddler in a wet diaper, crawling across dirty bedclothes while her mother lay beneath them, high and neglectful. Or dead.
“I have two marks on my upper right arm,” said Immie. “I had them when I came to live in New York. As far as I knew, I’d always had them. I never thought to ask, but the nurse at Vassar told me they were burns. Like from a cigarette.”
Jule didn’t know what to say. She wanted to fix things for baby Immie, but Patti and Gil Sokoloff had already done that, long ago.
“My parents are dead, too,” she said, finally. It was the first time she’d spoken it aloud, though Immie already knew she’d been raised by her aunt.
“I figured,” said Immie. “But I also figured you didn’t want to talk about it.”
“I don’t,” said Jule. “Not yet, anyway.” She leaned forward, separating herself from Imogen. “I don’t know what story to tell about it yet. It doesn’t…” Words failed her. She couldn’t ramble like Immie did, to figure herself out. “The story won’t take shape.”
It was true. At that time, Jule had only begun to construct the origin tale she would later rely upon, and she could not, could not tell anything else.
“All good,” said Imogen.
She reached into her backpack and pulled out a thick bar of milk chocolate. She unwrapped it halfway and broke off a piece for Jule and a piece for herself. Jule leaned back against the rock and let the chocolate melt in her mouth and the sun warm her face. Immie shooed the begging seagulls away, scolding them.
Jule felt then that she knew Imogen completely. Everything was understood between them, and it always would be.
Now, in the youth hostel, Jule put down Our Mutual Friend. There was a body in the Thames, early in the story. She didn’t like reading that—the description of a waterlogged dead body. Jule’s days were long now, since news had gotten around that Imogen Sokoloff had killed herself in that selfsame river, weighting her pockets with stones and jumping off the Westminster Bridge, leaving a suicide note in her bread box.
Jule thought about Immie every day. Every hour. She remembered the way Immie covered her face with her hands or her hoodie when she felt vulnerable. The high, bubblegum sound of her voice. Imogen rolled her rings around her fingers. She had those two cigarette burns on her upper arm and a scar on one hand from a hot pan of cream-cheese brownies. She chopped onions fast and hard with an outsize heavy knife, something she had learned to do from a cooking video. She smelled like jasmine and sometimes like coffee with cream and sugar. There was a lemony spray she put on her hair.
Imogen Sokoloff was the type of girl teachers never thought worked to her full potential. The type of girl who blew off studying and yet filled her favorite books with sticky notes. Immie refused to strive for greatness or to work toward other people’s definitions of success. She struggled to wrest herself from men who wanted to dominate her and women who wanted her exclusive attention. She refused, over and over, to give any single person her devotion, preferring instead to make a home for herself that she defined on her own terms, and of which she was master. She had accepted her parents’ money but not their control of her identity, and had taken advantage of her good fortune to reinvent herself, to find a different way of living. It was a particular kind of bravery, one that often got mistaken for selfishness or laziness. She was the type of girl you might think was nothing more than a private-school blonde, but you’d be very wrong if you went no deeper than that.
—
Today, when the hostel woke up and the backpackers began staggering to the bathroom, Jule went out. She spent the day as she often did, on self-improvement. She walked through the halls of the British Museum for a couple of hours, learning the names of paintings and drinking a series of Diet Cokes from small bottles. She stood in a bookshop for an hour and committed a map of Mexico to memory, then learned by heart a chapter of a book called Wealth Management: Eight Core Principles.
She wanted to call Paolo, but she could not.
She wouldn’t answer any calls except the one she was waiting for.
The phone rang as Jule came out of the tube near the hostel. It was Patti Sokoloff. Jule saw the cell number and used her general American accent.
Patti was in London, it turned out.
Jule was not expecting that.
Could Jule meet for lunch at the Ivy tomorrow?
Of course. Jule said how surprised she was to hear from Patti. They had spoken a number of times directly after Immie’s death, when Jule had talked to police officers and shipped back items from Immie’s London flat while Patti nursed Gil in New York City, but all those difficult conversations had finished some weeks ago.
Patti normally had a busy, chatty way about her, but today she sounded low and her voice didn’t have its usual animation. “I should tell you,” she said, “that I lost Gil.”
That was a shock. Jule thought of Gil Sokoloff’s swollen gray face and the funny little dogs he doted on. She had liked him very much. She hadn’t known he was dead.
Patti explained that Gil had died two weeks ago of heart failure. All those years of kidney dialysis, and his heart had killed him. Or maybe, Patti said, because of Immie’s suicide, he had not wanted to continue living any longer.
They talked about Gil’s illness for a while, and about how wonderful he was, and about Immie. Patti said what a help Jule had been, handling things in London when the Sokoloffs couldn’t leave New York. “I know it seems strange for me to be traveling,” Patti said, “but after all those years of looking after Gil, I can’t bear to be in the apartment alone. It’s filled with his things, Immie’s things. I was going to…” Her voice trailed off, and when she started talking again it was forced and bright. “Anyway, my friend Rebecca lives in Hampshire and she offered me use of her guest cottage to rest up and heal. She told me I had to come. Some friends are just like that. I hadn’t talked to Rebecca in ages, but the moment she called—after hearing about Immie and Gil—we started up again right away. No small talk. It was all honesty. We went to Greenbriar together. School friends have these memories, these shared histories that bind them together, I think. Look at you and Immie. You picked up again so brilliantly after being apart.”