17. Zelda
ZELDA
Ifind the game under Hedy’s bed because she has no other place to put it. Its box has lost one corner, and someone has repaired the lid with blue tape. Candace and I used to accuse each other of cheating at it until our downstairs neighbor knocked on the ceiling.
Hedy brought it back from the anniversary with the other things she’d taken for us to play. I carry it to the front door. Candace is coming at four: her game for the cardigan I left at her apartment last month. When she offered to bring it to Jeremiah’s, I gave her Hedy’s address again.
Hedy has a shift tomorrow and a sink full of dishes from the two of us. She doesn’t offer to stand beside me. She puts a kettle on and says she’ll be in the kitchen if I want her.
All morning I have been arranging the conversation in my head. Candace says she’s sorry. I ask why. She cries, perhaps, and I don’t know what I do then.
But maybe, somehow, I get my best friend back.
I have not managed to imagine giving her the game and closing the door.
The doorbell sounds at four exactly. Candace used to be late to everything except a party she was being paid to arrange. I open the door, step outside, and put the box on the porch rail.
She wears the red scarf I bought her when she started working events. My gray cardigan is folded over her arm. She notices me noticing the scarf and touches it.
“You still wear it,” I say.
“Of course I do.” She lets her hand fall. “Your cardigan was on the back of the chair. You always left something there.”
She holds it out. I take it and feel the rough patch at the cuff where I caught it on the radiator in our old apartment.
That apartment was so cold we played the game in coats, our fingers stiff over the little painted pieces.
Once the power went out and Candace found enough candles to light the whole kitchen.
We ate cereal from the box while she told me the six unlikely ways we might both become rich by thirty.
“You remember that radiator?” she asks.
“You complained to the landlord every Wednesday.”
“You told him we were cultivating penicillin in the bathroom.”
I did. He fixed the radiator the next morning.
A laugh escapes me. Candace laughs too, and there we are, freezing together again. I almost tell her Hedy has the kettle on.
My hand is already moving toward the door when I let it fall.
She puts a hand on the game box. “I don’t want the last thing between us to be that dinner.”
“Then tell me why you said I hit you.”
She lifts the box lid. “You were accusing me of wanting your husband. I was upset.”
“I was upset too. I didn’t tell everyone you hit me.”
“I didn’t make you apologize, Zelda. Your husband did that.”
Her head stays bent over the pieces she is counting while I try to find a way to ask the question that will make her look at me.
“You watched.”
She puts the lid down. “What did you want me to do?”
I can’t answer. I pull on the cardigan. One sleeve has turned halfway inside out, and I can’t get my hand through it. Candace reaches to help.
“Don’t.”
She draws back. I tug until my fingers come free.
“You know I was trying to make a place for you,” she says.
“At my anniversary dinner?”
“In your marriage. You were miserable. There were nights you called me because he hadn’t spoken to you all evening. I listened.”
“You did.” I can still picture her car outside the library, its heater turned up until the windows fogged. She handed me tissues and waited through the sentences I couldn’t finish. “I trusted you.”
“You can still trust that I know him. He needs to feel wanted, Zelda. Not wrong every time he comes home.”
“And you know how to make him happy.”
She looks at me for a long time. “I think I could.”
I look down at the cuff I have finally straightened.
She has imagined it. Waking beside him. Being the person he comes home to. While I called her from the library and cried about wanting one evening, she had somewhere else she wanted to be.
“Was it funny?” I ask.
“What?”
“Listening to me.”
“No.” She sounds hurt that I asked. I want to hurt her more, and then I want her to say something that makes me stop wanting it.
“When I called you crying after he said I couldn’t schedule a marriage like a work shift,” I ask, “did you tell him that too?”
“You told me you wanted him to understand how lonely you were.”
“I wanted you to understand.”
The words come out too softly. I have to swallow before I can look at her again.
“I called you because you were my friend.”
“I wasn’t trying to hurt you then.”
“When did it change?”
She presses the box lid down. For once she doesn’t supply an answer quickly.
“I kept watching you have a life you said you didn’t want,” she says. “I have to go home alone when you’re finished telling me how little you like being his wife.”
“You could have told me you didn’t want to listen.”
“You would have made me the bad friend.”
“I would have asked what was wrong.”
The kettle whistles. Candace looks past me toward the kitchen.
I used to know what she would say next. I would have the cup ready, or the tissues, or a story bad enough to make her laugh. Now I pull the cardigan closed and wait for her to look back at me.
“Jeremiah was alone for Christmas,” she says. “He called you, didn’t he?”
“You don’t get to ask how my marriage is going.”
“I cared about both of you.”
“You could have said you were angry with me. You could have said you loved him. You said I hit you so he would make me say a lie in front of our friends.”
“I didn’t know he would make you apologize.”
“You said ‘Watch.’” My voice breaks on it. “In the study, going past me. You said he’d believe you, and you told me to watch.”
She looks toward the street.
I think of the room at Suri’s, the relief in it after I gave Jeremiah the sentence he wanted. Candace saw me waiting for her to stop him. “You knew when he did. You had nineteen days to put it right.”
She picks up the game. The loose corner opens, and a small painted tile falls toward the steps. She catches it before it reaches the ground. Her hand has always been fast when a piece got away from us.
“I don’t want this to be how you remember me.”
“It isn’t the only way.”
She presses the tile through the gap in the box.
I wait. If she would say it now, without telling me what Jeremiah did or how unhappy I was. Just once, I want her to be sorry she did this to me.
“Zelda, we could still?—”
I shake my head. It is such a small movement that I have to do it again.
“Take the game,” I say. “Keep the scarf. Don’t come back to Hedy’s.”
“You’re ending eleven years of friendship over one night.”
“The night didn’t end for me when the party did.”
I go inside. She stays on the porch long enough that I can hear her rearrange the box against her coat, then her steps go down to the street.
Hedy has made two cups of tea. I sit down still wearing the cardigan. The sleeve smells of Candace’s laundry soap when I wipe my face with it.
“Did you get it back?” Hedy asks from the sink.
I look down at myself. “Yes.”
She turns and sees me. She leaves the tap running for a second before she comes over.
That evening I pick up the bird book Hedy gave Otto.
The crow still has the disapproving face that made us laugh on Christmas.
I almost photograph it for Candace. She would have given the bird a voice like the woman who used to live beneath our apartment and complained whenever we played the game.
I start to laugh. Then I remember the porch and stop.
I open our message thread and scroll past the arrangements for today. The last thing I sent her before the party is still there among eleven years of complaints, plans, and pictures neither of us can return. My thumb finds the space where I would tell her about the crow.
I lock the phone.
Hedy calls from the kitchen to ask whether I want toast. I say yes, then ask for butter before she can disappear again.
I turn the page to the owl. I don’t take the photograph.