Chapter 2 #2
She grinned, stubbing out her cigarette on the fire escape railing. “Come on, it’ll be fun. And if you hate everyone, we’ll leave early and get ice cream. Deal?”
I looked at her—my best friend, young and alive and so completely herself—and felt something loosen in my chest. Whatever I’d given up to be here, I’d gotten this back. Diane, before we’d drifted apart. Before life had taken us in different directions.
“Deal.”
“Yes!” She checked the cat clock on the wall and swore. “Okay, we need to go. Valerie will literally fight us for mirror space, and I am not in the mood for her passive-aggressive comments about my pores.”
I stood, automatically reaching into my sweatshirt pocket for my phone.
It wasn’t there.
Of course it wasn’t there. Smartphones wouldn’t exist for another twenty years. I couldn’t check the time, couldn’t look up directions, couldn’t text anyone or scroll through Instagram or do any of the hundred small things I did without thinking in 2014.
I was disconnected from everything I knew. Everything I’d become.
And from Emma. The thought hit me so hard I had to steady myself against the wall. Last night—twenty-seven years from now—she’d been bouncing on her bed, gap-toothed grin filling the screen, telling me she’d gotten into Harvard. But the memory I reached for wasn’t that one. It was older.
Emma at eight, in the oncology ward at Children’s Hospital.
Third round of chemo. She’d lost her hair by then, wore a Red Sox cap pulled low over her bare scalp, and she’d stopped talking to the nurses.
Stopped talking to Sarah. Stopped talking to anyone, really, except me.
I still didn’t know why. Maybe because I was the only adult in her life who wasn’t trying to fix her, wasn’t adjusting an IV or reading a chart or having whispered hallway conversations about prognosis.
I’d brought Charlotte’s Web. Sat in the vinyl chair beside her bed and started reading out loud without asking permission.
By the third page, she’d shifted closer.
By chapter five, her head was on my arm.
By Charlotte’s death, we were both crying—me harder than her, which she found hilarious even through her tears.
“Aunt Mags,” she’d said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, the one without the IV. “You’re worse at this than me.”
“Charlotte was a really good spider.”
“She was a spider. She wrote words in a web. That’s objectively weird.”
“It’s a metaphor.”
“For what?”
“For loving someone enough to save them, even when it costs you everything.”
She’d gone quiet then. Pulled the Red Sox cap lower. When she spoke again, her voice was smaller. “Like you and Mom. Coming here every day.”
“Exactly like that. Except we don’t have to write in webs. We just have to show up.”
“Promise you’ll keep showing up?”
“I promise.”
She’d fallen asleep with my arm around her, the book open on the blanket, and I’d sat there for three hours not moving because I didn’t want to wake her.
The nurses had to work around me. Sarah found us like that when she came back from the cafeteria and stood in the doorway crying silently into her coffee cup.
That was the day I knew I’d do anything for that kid. Anything.
And now I was years and an impossible choice away from her. My hand was still in my pocket, still reaching for a phone that could connect me to a girl who hadn’t been born yet. Who might never be born, depending on what I did in the next thirteen days.
The forgetting will be gradual. And it will be complete.
I held the memory tighter. Memorized it. The Red Sox cap. The vinyl chair. Charlotte dying in her web while a bald little girl leaned against my arm and asked me to keep showing up.
I’ll remember you, I promised. Whatever happens. I’ll remember.
“Coming,” I said, and followed Diane out the door.
The YMCA was three blocks away, giving me time during the walk to reacclimate myself to a world without GPS, without constant connectivity, and without the safety net of being able to look up anything instantly.
The cold air bit at my cheeks as we passed familiar storefronts—the bodega where I used to buy overpriced milk, the laundromat that always smelled like industrial detergent, the bakery with the cranky owner who made incredible muffins.
Everything was exactly as I’d forgotten it. The same, but smaller somehow. More immediate. Without a phone to distract me, I actually saw the world I was walking through.
The Y itself was a temple of eighties fitness culture.
Mirrored walls reflected women in neon spandex and leg warmers, their hair shellacked into immovable sculptures.
The aerobics room thrummed with synthesizer-heavy pop music—Jazzercise, I remembered, was still huge, and this class was basically the same thing with a different name.
Valerie, predictably, was already stationed in front of the best mirror, examining her reflection with the intensity of someone searching for signs of aging at twenty-six. Diane shot me a look and we claimed spots near the back, where the view was worse but the judgment felt less oppressive.
The workout was harder than I expected, not because I was out of shape, but because I’d forgotten what it felt like to move in a body that actually cooperated.
I could do things. Jump without my knees protesting, stretch without something pulling wrong, match the instructor’s energy without wanting to die.
At fifty, I’d traded intensity for sustainability. At twenty-three, apparently I’d had both.
After class, we showered in the communal locker room, something I’d forgotten existed, and something 2014 me would have found horrifying, and then caught the T to brunch.
The train was crowded with Saturday shoppers, college students, and a guy playing guitar badly for change, as I stood holding the overhead rail while Diane chattered about Robbie’s dimples.
The diner was one of those places that had probably been exactly the same since 1965.
Vinyl booths, Formica counters, laminated menus advertising things like “the lumberjack special” without a trace of irony.
We slid into a booth by the window and ordered coffee and pancakes, and for a few minutes, I let myself believe this was normal.
That I was just a twenty-three-year-old having brunch with her best friend on a Saturday morning.
“So,” Diane said, pouring an alarming amount of syrup on her pancakes, “tonight. Robbie’s friend Kevin is apparently some kind of banker? Which, like, boring, but he’s supposed to be cute. And—”
She kept talking, but I’d stopped listening.
Because Jack Cavanaugh had just walked through the door.
He looked exactly as I remembered him. Tall, broad-shouldered, dark hair that needed a cut and probably always would. Blue eyes that saw everything, that had once looked at me like I was the answer to a question he was afraid to ask.
He wasn’t alone.
The woman with him was pretty in an effortless way with dark hair, an easy smile, and a camera bag slung over her shoulder. She laughed at something Jack said, and he smiled back at her, relaxed and open in a way I hadn’t seen in months before we’d ended things back in November.
They moved to a booth across the room, and the woman touched his arm casually as they sat down. Comfortable. Familiar.
Like they’d been doing this for a while.
“Maggie?” Diane’s voice came from very far away. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”
Not a ghost. Worse.
I watched Jack lean across the table to say something to the woman, watched her smile widen in response, and felt something cold settle in my stomach.
Three months, Diane had said. It had been three months since Jack and I ended, and he had apparently moved on.
Found someone who didn’t push him away. Someone who knew what she wanted and wasn’t afraid to reach for it.
So either we’d met on Valentine’s for some last ditch relationship repair dinner and failed, or the past had already changed and we’d never had the final last straw break-up over dinner?
That voice in the darkness had promised me thirteen days. A second chance.
But no one had told me I’d be competing for that chance.
Jack looked up then, as if he felt my gaze, and our eyes met across the crowded diner. Something flickered across his face. Surprise, maybe, or something more complicated, before his expression smoothed into careful neutrality.
He turned back to his companion without acknowledging me.
And I sat in that vinyl booth with my untouched pancakes and my racing heart, and wondered what the hell I’d gotten myself into.