Chapter XVIII
XVIII
My mind immediately flits to last night and replays my conversation with Reid in a torturous loop.
I get out of bed and wash my face. I think about what my mother would say about the purplish half-moons under my eyes.
I look at my single toothbrush in its narrow cup.
I feel the press of tears. I text the only person who has any shot of freeing me from this cycle of self-pity.
Call me when you wake up, I write.
It’s two-thirty in Seattle, but Nisha texts me back immediately anyway.
Call me now.
I do her one better and FaceTime her. I’m startled by my appearance on the screen, wan and slack, and if this were anyone other than Nisha, I would hang up immediately and pull myself together.
But this is the woman who squeezed my hand during the first few hours of my labor contractions, who wiped the sweat off my brow and fed me ice chips until my husband finished his twelve-hour shift and took over for her.
“Can’t sleep?” Nisha says when she picks up. She’s in her parents’ dimly lit kitchen, wearing her reading glasses and pajamas. A mug of tea hovers under her chin. I feel a surge of affection for my friend.
“I could say the same for you,” I say. “Your hour is even more ungodly than mine.”
“Menopause, baby. Because it’s not enough to sweat through your underwear every two hours, they take away our sleep too.”
“I’m sweating just looking at that tea.”
Nisha taps the mug. “It’s an ashwagandha-schisandra blend. You know it’s bad when I’m turning to holistic measures to knock myself out.”
“Why don’t you get an Ambien prescription?”
“My love, Ambien stopped working for me twenty years ago.”
We keep up like this for the next few minutes.
Our small talk is a balm. Then I ask after Nisha’s father, who’s facing stage-four pancreatic cancer.
He’s being kept comfortable with medication and is at peace with his prognosis, she shares, and his acceptance has put her at peace too.
But Nisha’s mother is taking it much harder, she tells me.
As is so often the case with the ones who will be left behind.
“Now that we’re off to a suitably morbid start to the day.” Nisha takes a sip of her tea and crinkles her nose. “Tell me why your face looks like that.”
I catch another glimpse of myself in the little square on my phone screen. As Nisha and I were talking, I slapped on a pair of sparkly gold undereye patches, and they’ve slid halfway down my face. I peel them off and squish the cushy gel material in my fist like a stress ball.
“Well,” I sigh. “You’re never going to guess who I ran into at the Jeff Buckley show this week.”
I start with the girls’ awkward meeting in the bathroom at Webster Hall and end with last night: How I’d had what very well might have been the best sex of my life, and how being with Reid was both new and familiar, like time had folded into itself.
How I would forever be at a loss to explain the bizarre privilege of experiencing a decades-long dream come to fruition.
And then how I proceeded to destroy everything because my misplaced fear and self-doubt spiraled all the way out of my control. Because I’m too afraid to put myself out on the line and try this again.
Nisha is silent for a moment. “This is a lot to take in.” She bites her lip. “How does Emme feel about all of it?”
“Considering that she and Gracie not-so-subtly engineered this whole thing, I’d say she approves of the idea of me and Reid.” I pause for a beat. “The other day, she told me she doesn’t want to be the reason I don’t move on.”
Nisha pouts and puts a hand over her heart. “Sweet girl.”
“The sweetest. But she’s getting caught up in the fantasy of it all.
I don’t blame her for that, but I have to be the grown-up here.
I have to consider how much it will hurt her when this doesn’t work out.
” I’m back to my talking points. The ones I spat at Reid and can’t seem to keep out of my mouth.
Nisha laughs. “Hurts her? You’re aware you’re self-sabotaging, right?”
I can’t help but laugh too. Nisha has a gift for getting right to the point. “Fully aware of that. Reid is too. He called me out on it.”
“I’m quickly remembering why I liked him.” Nisha blows out an exasperated breath. “James really did a number on you, Lil, and you’re dragging all that into this thing with Reid. He was a good kid, and now he seems like a good man. A good man is hard to find, you know.”
“Yeah. I’ve heard that one before.”
I think back to my conversation with my mother, when I’d told her with such conviction that we don’t have to let our pain rule us.
Why have I reserved my compassion for others while keeping myself locked in the cell of my mistakes, cataloging every misstep, memorizing each one in painstaking detail, as though cocooning myself in them could prevent me from committing them again?
I hear a knock on the door. Emme comes in, her hair a staticky pink halo around her face. She climbs into bed next to me. Nisha beams when she sees her.
“You’re up early,” I say.
“I got your text and I wanted to come talk to you. How was last night?” Emme’s voice is brighter than the time would suggest. Usually, she wouldn’t get out of bed for another four or five hours.
I glance at Nisha. She smirks at me over her mug. This is on you, babe.
“We had a nice time, but I don’t think Reid and I will be seeing each other again,” I say.
Emme’s face falls. “Why not?”
I smooth her hair behind her ear. “It’s just too complicated. We both have a lot going on in our lives, and we live on opposite sides of the country.”
“But that’s what planes are for. Used intentionally, of course. I don’t need to tell you they are a cancer to the earth.”
That’s what Reid said, I don’t say.
Emme looks at me thoughtfully. Then she turns to Nisha. “What do you think?”
Nisha takes a pause so exaggerated, I wonder if she has somehow fallen asleep with her eyes open.
But then she nods. “You know, when your mom and I met on the first day of our freshman year, I thought she was the coolest person I had ever met.” I give her a skeptical look—I’ve never heard her say this in my life.
“I know you think I’m lying, Lil, but it’s the truth.
” She looks back toward Emme. “She was so calm, cool, and collected, with her tastefully curated book collection and her little slip skirts and cropped cardigans. All her attention to detail, the way she protected her routines—I envied it. I was this sprawling mess, and she was this quietly interesting, mature city girl who had no problem leaving parties early and declining dates with guys if they were boring. She wouldn’t let anything impinge upon her peace.
“But then, the summer before our junior year, she tells me that she’s actually really unhappy.
That the pressure of holding everything together is completely overwhelming, and she’s so afraid that she’s wasting the best years of her life chasing this idea of perfection.
She’s burnt out, we’d call it now. So, she asks me to help her figure out how to have fun.
Real, genuine fun. You know what I tell her? ”
“What?” Emme is rapt, and honestly, I want to ask Nisha the same thing: I remember that time, and I remember that feeling, but I cannot for the life of me remember this conversation.
“Get out of your own way and let yourself feel the good feelings. Obviously, your mom is a great student. She understood the assignment.”
Nisha turns her gaze to me.
“So the next day, I take her to a tiny café on St. Mark’s to go see this musician named Jeff Buckley.
And then your mom meets this ridiculously hot guy and spends every minute of the next week with him, even though the new school year is about to start.
She falls in love, and even though she never tells me those words herself, I know what love is when I see it.
So, Emme, what’s important in this story is not that the hot guy made your mom happy. ”
I watch Emme mask a grimace as she bravely weathers the news of her mom thinking a guy was hot.
Nisha gives us both her slyest smile. “It’s that she let herself be happy first, and she stayed out of her own way long enough to make it count.
And guess what? She still got straight A’s the next semester.
Maybe she was a little anxious, but her life did not fall apart because she let herself go for a second. Actually, her life expanded.”
I return to that moment now, recalling with sudden clarity Nisha’s edict to go forth and be free.
Me coming home with that thrifted gunmetal slip dress and her telling me not to waste it.
I swallowed her advice whole, stopped focusing on accumulating gold stars.
I remember the way my summer had opened up—how I’d roamed downtown with my camera in hand, collecting freckles across my collarbone and stories that tumbled from my mouth at parties with a newfound ease.
And I realize, too, that if I had not embraced this mindset, I would have stayed home that night while Nisha sailed to Sin-é with another friend—maybe Trisha with the tinkling laugh or Monique with the bee-stung lips and the lilting Montrealer accent.
And one of them would have noticed him: the boy in the freshly pressed suit, with hair that curled around his ears in the humid air that made everything else wilt.
That night would not have belonged to me.
Reid would have walked into someone else’s story.
And here I am, thirty years later, still with so much to learn from that girl who was sometimes afraid but resolved to go forth anyway.
Here I am again, on the precipice of genuine connection, of freedom, of opportunity, and I’m running in the opposite direction of it all.
Nisha drains her mug and lets out a jaw-cracking yawn. “OK, this hippie shit is working. I’m gonna try to sleep for a couple hours before my parents get up. Love you girls.”
“Love you, Neesh,” I say.