Chapter 23
A week into November, Lou sat me down. “I really don’t want to kick you out,” she said. “But I think I need my room back. Tell me you have leads.”
“Some.” I was due to visit a three-bed in Astoria that weekend, but they’d stopped responding to my messages.
And though Nicolo’s proposal was tempting, I hadn’t given it serious consideration since Halloween.
I wasn’t sure how Lou would take it. Sleeping in her bed was a temporary imposition, but turning the living room into a bedroom would be a permanent one.
She was having a bad time at work, and everything sent her into a small rage.
The most recent trigger was a pair of Nicolo’s red socks mysteriously making their way into her whites cycle.
“I’m giving you an ultimatum,” Lou said. “Not because I don’t care about you, but because I’m turning into a bitch. You have until the end of the week to figure something out.”
I agreed, then resisted the urge to message James.
Instinctively, I still thought of him each time I faced a wall—insomnia, housing—and believed he could open the way through.
But James wasn’t some magic key, he was a person.
It dawned on me that I didn’t yet know how to talk to him in a way that showed I understood that.
—
In the back of a dessert café in Nolita, I waited for Isabelle to arrive.
I rarely went to this part of Manhattan and felt charmed by the narrow streets and ornate fire escapes.
When Isabelle told me she was in the city, my body went cold, like I was back on the beach when Bruno found Silver.
But now that I was reading the menu, where every dessert looked complex and enticing, I felt excited; I couldn’t wait to see her.
Her voice chirped from behind me, a bright “Hi!”
“Oh—Isabelle!” Even though I was keeping my eye on the door, I’d missed her. She’d cut her hair so it hung just below her chin. Her small ears poked prominently from her head, framed in curt curls. “Your hair, I love it.”
“Thanks. I was going for Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction.”
Isabelle’s faithful awareness of her beauty’s adjacency to major movie stars was endearing to me.
We ordered a white chocolate lava cake and crispy rice ice cream.
The lava cake was only okay, but the ice cream was impossible to eat slowly.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “I mean, how long are you staying?”
“Hopefully for a while.” She covered her smile with her hands. “I’m leaving Holme. That’s what I wanted to tell you. I’ve been staying with a friend while I look for a place.”
I put my spoon down. “What? That’s great.”
“Yeah, thanks, I’m really happy about it. And you, where are you living?”
My heart squeezed. That she thought to ask me meant she knew I wasn’t living with James. “I’m crashing with Lou. Trying to figure out something more long-term.”
“You got back together with Lou?”
“Yes, you were right about everything. We’re…back together now.” I felt strange yet stylish using Isabelle’s turns of phrase. “You’ve seen James, then?”
She had.
“And he’s okay?”
“Yeah, he’s fine. Hard to tell with him, though. He never really tells you how he’s feeling.”
“Did you happen to go into his bedroom?”
“What?”
“I’m just curious.” I rushed to explain. “He got me this stuffed shark from IKEA and I’m curious about where he keeps it now.”
“Oh, BL?HAJ,” said Isabelle, like BL?HAJ was an old friend. “Yeah, he’s in the living room.”
The living room! I blushed, unsure how to interpret this. BL?HAJ banished from the bedroom, or BL?HAJ promoted to the public sphere. It was possible I had assigned too deep a connection between me and BL?HAJ.
We discussed Isabelle’s decision to move out. It was an easy one, she said, seeded that night we did shrooms. “I wasn’t supposed to do that. You know, drink.” She stuck out her tongue. “Do drugs.”
“Oh, I’m sorry if I—”
“No,” she said. “You didn’t know. I practically poured the bottle down your throat.”
“It was really yummy.”
“It made me kind of crazy,” she said. “I spent the rest of that evening taking down all the photos on my wall, just wondering, like, who even was I, at what point did I turn into myself? And when I was done with the photos, I just scrolled through all my social media, all the way back to the year I made Facebook. Reading the comments. Deleting everything. Every picture and status update.”
“Everything?”
“Yeah. It was kind of scary at first, but then it was weirdly soothing. I got to the point where I didn’t even recognize the girl in the photos. I had braces back then, and I totally forgot what they felt like. Have you ever had braces?”
“No.”
“Well, with braces, you’re always running your tongue over your teeth.
Because food’s always getting stuck, and you don’t want anyone to notice.
I remembered I did that so much. I was always trying to be subtle about it.
And I realized I still do that now. When other people are talking, I run my tongue over my teeth, even though I don’t have braces anymore.
It was weird to pinpoint exactly when I started doing something I assumed I’d always done. ”
I thought of my mother, the way she was always massaging her own hands.
The habit originated from her cold cream routine, which she practiced religiously because age, she said, showed in your fingers.
Eventually, it became a tic. Whenever she was bored, or angry, or stressed, she’d twist her fingers until they whitened.
I always worried she would wrinkle them even more without the cream softening her grip.
“Sorry to ramble,” Isabelle said. “It just hit really hard, this realization. That everything I do now is probably connected to something I did back then. I guess it’s not that deep, but I was high, and it was a lot.”
“Your actions had consequences,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “Like, I saw that my present was the consequence of my past. And once I realized that, I thought, fuck, the future is the consequence of my present. And that really scared me.”
This seemed like a shroomy revelation, but also a true one. I’d experienced something similar, on the beach with Isabelle and Bruno. Without Silver. “You make your life happen, whether or not you mean to.”
“Exactly,” she said. “I’m not totally there yet.
It’s hard to accept that I actually have some control over my life—I mean, take it away from me, please—but it’s gotten me to move out.
And I haven’t touched a drink since.” Isabelle smiled at me from across the table, and then we both started to giggle.
“What’s funny?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m just really happy for you.”
“Thanks. That means a lot.” Then, in a low voice: “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
I laughed again, amused that I was ever intimidated by Isabelle. She just had really nice skin.
We chatted about my job and apartment hunt.
Isabelle listened with a seriousness that betrayed a total unfamiliarity with the subject, but I didn’t hold it against her.
While Isabelle went to the bathroom, I checked my bank account.
There was still some money left from my mother.
I waved for the bill and put down my debit card.
James would’ve tucked my card into his pocket and replaced it with his, but when Isabelle returned, she only stacked hers on top of mine.
The waitress left us a postcard bearing a line drawing of the street. Isabelle insisted I keep it.
I slipped the postcard, along with the café receipt, into my bag, slotting them between a book and my water bottle so they wouldn’t get wrinkled.
Knowing the postcard would still be there when I got home filled me with immense satisfaction.
I felt very mature, even though I’d just spent fifteen of my mother’s dollars on dessert.
Maybe growing up didn’t mean gaining more control but rather learning to exercise the little you already had.
In any case, that’s what Silver did. She ate out of dishwashers. She ran into the sea.
—
Afterward, Isabelle and I walked around Madison Square Park. I was cold from the ice cream, so Isabelle lent me her scarf. It smelled like the cinnamon of her childhood bedroom. My chest panged with the memory of being inside it.
“Will Bruno come with you when you move?”
“No, I wouldn’t do that to him. He’s so happy with his garden and the beach.” Isabelle cleared her throat. “I’ve been meaning to bring this up, actually. I’ve been thinking about Silver.”
I froze. “What about her?”
“I’ve been thinking about how Bruno found her, like he knew exactly where to search.
Animals are really incredible, you know, they have these powerful instincts.
And I remembered reading somewhere that animals have an instinct for when they’re about to die.
When they feel it, they take themselves outside to die in the wild. Where they feel they’re safe.”
I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, walking steadily down the path.
“What I’m trying to say is, maybe Silver was already dying before you let her out. And even if you hadn’t unlocked the door, she would’ve found a way to go. I don’t know if that makes it better or worse, but I thought at the very least it would help with the guilt.”
I couldn’t bring myself to say anything.
The idea made me so sad I wanted to run away from her, out of the park, fast enough to rid myself of the feeling.
How could dying be the last choice Silver ever made?
Her bright green eyes flashed in my mind, tuned into signals invisible to me, seeking whatever it was that she wanted.
You never knew what other people were really thinking, how they hoped their lives might change, what to them was blue and what was gray and what was bright yellow lake.
You only had yourself, your private heart.
So I preferred to think that instead of taking herself to die, Silver went outside to play. She couldn’t have known the tide was higher in the morning. She was just a little animal.