Chapter 19
SEQUOIA FALLS, NEW YORK
JUNE 11, 2022
AGE: 35
IWAS DOWN ON THE GROUND. MY BODY WAS SPRAWLED OUT ACROSS A blanket so flimsy that I could feel the hard floor beneath me. I tried to speak but was only capable of grunting noises. The room was pitch dark. Was I dead? A voice cut through the silence, indicating that I was not.
“You were overheating so I brought you down here,” Desiree said. She was silhouetted against a doorframe across the room.
The officious sound of Desiree’s pumps echoed through the space as she walked over to me and pulled me up to my feet. “Your friends are looking for you. It’s time to go back to them,” she said, leading me through the darkness to the stairwell. I held tightly to the banister and made my way up to the ground floor. Right. My friends. How long had I been gone?
“We’ll see each other soon enough,” Desiree said, all but pushing me out the door.
Dawn was breaking as I stumbled out of the Simcott Center’s side entrance. I darted down the Ellison lawn and broke through the campus gates, reaching the town square. The familiarity of the scene comforted me. Vendors were setting up the Sequoia Falls Farmers Market, my old favorite. The scents of peppermint and tarragon shot through the early summer air. I could smell again! I stroked my nose and felt the familiar little bump on the bridge.
I looked down at my phone. Sure enough, the Memo app featured another achievement badge: a pair of boxing gloves rotating 360 degrees around a disembodied nose. I felt a stupid prick of pride. I’d done something right.
Much as I hated to admit it, Desiree had a point. All my heroes had their own tales of adversity. Julia Child was awkward and past her prime when she started to master the culinary arts. Nigella Lawson didn’t become a celebrated home cook until she was tending to her husband who was dying of throat cancer. There was that mother-daughter duo from Texas who used to be unhoused and now had a Michelin-starred restaurant with a two-year waiting list. My backstory, if you could call it that, had always been so boring: a girl from Long Island whose parents were still married and whose greatest claim to fame was setting a bakery on fire. I supposed I could use a spicy narrative of my own, even if it was entirely fabricated.
I stopped at the table of a pepper farm. The teenage girl running the stand handed me a sliver of bread drenched in chili-infused oil. The flavor made my mouth pucker. It was just like old times, when I used to come here every weekend, talking to vendors and tasting everything on offer. I inhaled another sample.
This market was up there with the best things about college. If it hadn’t been for the farmers market, after all, it’s unlikely I would have had my meet-cute with Yuri, the culinary student whom I dated for a few months. For all his talents, Yuri had also turned out to be a pathological liar, a fact I learned when Geeta had investigated his supposed stint with the Mossad. He’d spent his years between college and culinary school living in Tel Aviv with his eighteen-year-old fianceé and indulging an online poker habit. Geeta had assured me that I’d get over him in a heartbeat, calling him a “stupid starter boyfriend.” He’d given me my first sourdough starter. That was worth something, wasn’t it?
I wondered where Yuri had ended up as I admired a pyramid of apricots. I bought a couple as well as a loaf of sourdough bread. I ripped off a handful. The crust had integrity but the interior could have used a little more bite.
As I headed back uphill toward the Spruce Street house, I wondered how I was going to explain my extended absence to my friends. I cobbled together a story in my head. Hopefully, they’d understand how Alessandra had driven me away from the dinner. That was my explanation: her talk of the party on my birthday that I wasn’t invited to put me in a terrible mood, and I didn’t want to ruin their big night by being such a sad sack so I’d split. A defensible alibi.
As I turned right off Sedona Street, I spotted my beat-up Honda, one block down from where I remembered parking it. Geeta must have moved it for me. She used to do that for me in college, too, since she had a better handle on the strange local parking rules. As I neared the car, I noticed a dent on the rear left door. My rear-view mirror was also cracked and hanging by a wire. Someone must have slammed into my car and sped off. I kicked the ground and cursed.
I was still fuming when I walked up to our Airbnb. I tried to open the door with my key, but it didn’t budge, so I rang the doorbell. A disheveled guy came to the door in his Coleman College Class of 2023 shirt. He looked vaguely familiar. I wondered if one of the student waiters working the reunion dinner had come back to party with my friends.
“Hey.” He sounded tentative. “Can I help you?”
“I’m staying here,” I said. “I actually lived here when I was a senior.”
“Cool,” he said flatly.
“Are Geeta and Leigh sleeping?”
He furrowed his brow. “Who?”
“Geeta. And Leigh.”
“The only person who was sleeping is my girlfriend, who isn’t sleeping now that you’ve been ringing the doorbell,” he said.
A wash of confusion came over me. “But this is my Airbnb.”
“Hate to break it to you, but this is my home. It’s not an Airbnb.”
“I’m sure this is the right address: 25 Spruce. I used to live here. It used to be my address when I went to school here.”
“That must have been a long time ago,” he said.
I craned my neck and looked past him into the apartment. All the renovations I had seen the previous day were gone. The place was in the same state of disrepair as it had been when we lived there fifteen years ago. I felt my palms slick with sweat. “Can I just see something?” I said, shoving past him before he even had a chance to answer. All the furniture was different—used, beat-up, college-student stuff; none of the marble finishes or pristine light sconces from the previous day were there.
First the car, now this. Something must have changed when I was flying through the wormhole. Was this related to those disjunctions that Desiree had warned me about?
“This is so weird, I’m sorry,” I told the guy, stepping back outside. “I had a rough night. I think I got... mixed up on my way over. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“Whatever,” he grunted and shut the door in my face.
My hands were shaking as I texted Geeta:
Hey, I got a little turned around. Could you tell me the address of the house where we are staying?
My phone rang immediately. “What the hell, Jenny?” Geeta barked. “You totally ghosted us last night. If we didn’t hear from you in an hour we were going to call the police.”
“It’s a long story,” I said. “I’m trying to find my way back to you. Where are you guys again?”
“I think I’m the one who should be asking that question,” she said. “We are exactly where we’re staying. At the house.”
“Right, right. I thought it was 25 Spruce Street, but it seems I have amnesia?”
Geeta went silent for a moment, then said, “Did something happen to you?”
I’ve been time-traveling and just got punched in the nose by a mercurial elderly physicist who asked me to assault a projection of you, which I was unable to do... but now I’m back.
“I just had a crazy night. Like, really crazy. I need some rest. Remind me of the address?”
Now I heard Leigh in the background. “Lemme talk to her,” she said. I could hear the two tussling over the phone. “Be nice,” Geeta whispered right before Leigh came on.
“Jesus, Jenny,” Leigh said. “We stayed up all night searching for you.”
“I’m so sorry.” My mind was blank. “Alessandra was being such a jerk and I lost my cool and just needed a little alone time, and... I should have called.”
“You don’t say.” Leigh let off a huffing sound. “Are you ever going to start thinking about how your actions impact other people?”
“I’m really sorry,” I repeated.
“That’s all you ever are these days.” She took a deep breath. “For years, actually.”
“Leigh, are we really still stuck on your art show?” I squeezed my eyes shut. “I thought I explained to you that I couldn’t afford it.”
“After the fact you did. This too-little-too-late thing is becoming your specialty.”
“And taking my problems as personal insults is yours,” I said. “It wasn’t about you.”
“Oh, I know,” Leigh agreed. “It was about you. That’s all it ever is.” Leigh handed the phone back to Geeta without even saying goodbye.
The address Geeta had provided, 17 Poplar Street, was two blocks away from the Spruce Street house. The apartment had the identical layout as the one on Spruce Street, and Matt’s photo equipment was in the kitchen, just as I’d remembered. The equipment, that is, but not the kitchen. The room was painted melon and was crammed with vintage cooking devices. There was no way I wouldn’t have remembered being here, and yet, I supposedly had been. I felt queasy. Keep it together, I told myself.
Geeta came down the hall. Her arms were folded across her chest.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“What happened?”
I tried to reconstruct the night’s events in a way that was understandable. “Alessandra was so rude to me, and I got upset and made the mistake of calling Hal from the dinner, which felt right at first but then was all wrong. It was obvious that Brie was there with him—”
Geeta shuddered. “The dog-hair girl?”
“The one and only. At least her dog was. I heard a bark.”
“Did you confront him?”
“Yeah. Sort of. I mean, no,” I said.
Geeta frowned. “Well, which is it?”
“I guess I was tipsier than I thought and just went to a dark place,” I said.
“But, where did you go? Literally?” Geeta pressed. “Where did yousleep? We were so worried.”
“I... wandered around. I was feeling really off... and by the time I’d cooled off, I couldn’t remember our address. So I rested on campus.”
Geeta squinted. “Like... you broke into a dorm?”
“There was a basement in that beautiful building we saw last night,” I said, as if that explained anything. “It wasn’t so bad.”
“You slept in the basement of the Success building?” Geeta’s eyes were bulging. “I am really concerned about your mental health.”
Leigh headed into the hallway to join us. “Why the fuck didn’t you text us? What is wrong with you?”
“I don’t know... I was just in a state.” I gave Geeta my best hangdog look. “I didn’t want to ruin your night.”
“Guess what, genius?” Leigh said, practically spitting out her words. “That’s exactly what you did.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, for the millionth time. “I really wasn’t thinking straight.”
“You look horrible,” Geeta said, reaching out to stroke my hair. “Sleep it off. We’ll talk more later.”
I wandered to the back of the apartment and lay on my bed, memories swarming my head. Crazily enough, the older recollections felt infinitely fresher. I could picture the boxing gym far more clearly than the workout room in my own apartment building (granted, I rarely exercised in Pittsburgh).
Through the walls, I could hear Geeta’s babies crying and Dasha’s soothing voice. Geeta, meanwhile, was running through lines, reciting what sounded like her next keynote speech. “Nothing in my training could have prepared me for this,” she said. “I was so burned out that my doctor told me, ‘You’re going to need medication. ‘And I said, ‘How about meditation?’”
I lay there, emotions pressing in on me. I was so ashamed—and also so hurt.
My friends had been essentially lying to me for our entire adult lives, letting me obsess over my lame dramas like a dog with a chew toy while they followed their Memos and focused on their legitimate triumphs. I’d been so naive about them, even more so than I had been with Hal. Chasing after a perky closet organizer was one thing. What Geeta had done was next level. Leaving your best friend out in the cold so you can have all the riches for yourself? It was almost too much to comprehend. And still, I couldn’t even punch a projection of her face when asked to.
I sat up with a jolt and stuffed my junk in my bag. I should have listened to Desiree back in the day or at least listened to my gut and blown off the reunion. This was a huge mistake. I’d had enough of everybody.