Chapter 54
Miles
Tuesday
I took a walk on the beach this morning, with my bare feet and part of my pants wet from the sea. The sun was shining. The sound of the waves and the smell of the tide felt like renewal.
Now, I walk from the CIC to Miss Amara’s house with a folder tucked under my arm.
Inside it there are printed inventory sheets, many blank labels, and a pen clipped to the front cover.
The afternoon sun follows me along the quiet street, warming my back and casting long shadows on the pavement.
I can’t remember the last time I took this route, it feels both like it was forever ago and as if it was just yesterday.
The key turns in the lock, and there’s a sound I don’t think could have made itself: the sound of a piano key.
I lean forward to peek into the living room, and there she is, Ella, sitting on the piano bench, one hand resting on her leg, covered by a long white skirt, the other hand lightly touching the piano keys without pressing down. Her nails are painted blue.
She notices me a few seconds later, and I realize I’ve interrupted her moment of reflection.
“I’m sorry,” I say with care.
“It’s okay,” she answers gently, and we fall into a quiet moment. “She still kept one key hidden in the same spot as always,” Ella explains herself.
“On the porch, under the small blue vase you gifted her,” I confirm. I remember Miss Amara loved the small blue vase Ella had gifted her.
She nods.
“I volunteered to help with the house inventory,” I add, now I’m explaining myself.
The other day, I stayed longer in Mr. Mandela’s office because I wanted to ask how I could be helpful. He explained the next procedures and told me to talk to someone at the CIC. So I did. And here I am.
“I’ll assess the items in the house and make an inventory to help the CIC decide what can be used, what should be sold or donated elsewhere, and what needs to be discarded,” I say.
“I can help you with that,” Ella offers, straightening up on the bench, some light returning to her.
Miss Amara was never one to hold on to many material things.
She enjoyed cleaning, discarding, and donating anything she hadn’t used in a set period of time.
Yet, some things remained, the ones that had not lost their purpose in her life over time.
And those are placed exactly where they have always been.
We aren’t looking at a cluttered house or a messy space. We are looking at a well-organized home, personalized and deeply familiar to the both of us.
“Let’s start in the living room?” Ella asks, standing up from the piano bench, ready to start reliving the rooms of this house.
We move through the living room. I peel the first blank label and write “#001” on it.
I place the sticker softly on the side panel of the low wooden console table beneath the oval wall mirror.
“You write in the inventory while I place the stickers?” I suggest, and Ella offers me a smile.
She nods. “Divide and conquer. Let’s go.”
And so we start.
One item down.
A houseful to go.
A while later, we’re both becoming expert professionals at the job.
The living room is almost entirely reflected in the inventory sheets, and the staff at the CIC will be able to walk into Miss Amara’s house feeling informed and organized about the furnished interior that has been donated to the Center.
I follow Ella as she heads toward the antique wooden bookshelf in the corner of the room.
She pulls open a lower drawer and grazes her fingers on the surface of an old, worn box tucked in there.
She hesitates for a second, then gently lifts it out, setting it on the small coffee table in front of the olive-green couch.
“This one’s been here forever,” she says softly, almost to herself.
Curious, I lean in as she opens the box, the smell of old photographs embraces me. Dusty, yet strangely comforting.
As she flips through the papers, we find photographs of the young Miss Amara, and faces I don’t recognize.
“She showed me this box the day she lent me her film camera,” Ella says. “This is Miss Amara’s husband, Everett. And this is her best friend Olivia, I remember she told me they were getting ready for a ball and Everett was going to be there.”
We go through the photographs while Ella tells me details and passes on stories about some of the older ones, so we can both carry these memories on and save them from being forgotten.
I recognize a few people in the more recent pictures.
We find one of Miss Amara that I took in 1999. She’s unposed, sitting on her olive-green couch with a cup of tea, laughing at something one of us had said. The photo captures her warmth, the essence of the woman who had brought us together and been there for us, always.
And then there we are, Ella and I, younger, smiling and carefree. A picture taken by Miss Amara in her garden, where Ella and I were laughing together in the sunlight, with dirt and seeds in our hands.
I don’t speak for a moment, just run my finger over the edges of the photograph.
“Look at us,” I finally let out. “I remember this day. We had just come back from the beach and Miss Amara was at the bus stop, and we walked her home. She had bought sunflower seeds. It feels like yesterday.”
There’s something about this snapshot that feels like it’s been preserved in time, as if Miss Amara had kept it hidden from us for the right moment.
“It was fun being seventeen,” I say.
“In New York, I felt like we were still those seventeen-year-old friends,” Ella breathes softly.
“Me too.” It had been so easy, so natural, so us.
“I’m sorry for not telling you about Bill earlier. And for telling you like that. And for making things weird because of it.”
I smile. “I’m sorry too. I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable. Things got weird after that, didn’t they?”
“Completely weird,” she agrees.
“Unacceptably weird.” We joke about it.
“My sister said one thing that made sense to me,” she says pensively, and I lean against the couch to listen.
“We never talked about our love lives.” I nod, and she continues, “When we were teenagers, I never told you about Nathan, the guy from prom, and you never told me about… anything.” She waves her hand between us.
“My sister said that you and I didn’t figure it out in our past, and so now it’s still weird to talk about it. ”
It makes sense to me too. We treated the topic of love like a suspense crystal ball, too fragile to touch. And look at us, ten years later, doing exactly the same.
“Alright,” I say into our silence, “here it goes. You used to say: ‘We’re seventeen. What do we know about life anyway?’ And you were right, I didn’t know much.
There was, and still is, a lot I have to learn about life.
But one thing I was sure of at seventeen was that I loved you.
” I let the words out, and she keeps her eyes on mine.
“For me, back then, that was it. And I felt like you didn’t allow me to say that out loud. ” The few times I tried to say it.
She nods, accepting it. She knows. She knew.
“I was really afraid that things would change between us. You were my highest-quality friend,” she says.
“Your highest-quality friend?” A smile escapes me.
“Yes.” She stands by that expression in her adorably serious way of standing up for her peculiar ideas. It’s like nothing has changed. “Miss Amara taught me that.”
“Well, thank you. I guess you were also my highest-quality friend. And my only friend. That’s kind of one of the reasons I needed to go and live without relying on you. To learn how to stand on my own. It was also Miss Amara who taught me that.”
She smiles softly, understanding what I mean, taking a few minutes to herself to assimilate it.
“And now? Tell me about your New York girlfriends.” She sits up straighter, joining me in our shared determination to communicate with each other, and to leave the awkwardness behind. “I want to know what it’s like to date in the city that never sleeps,” she adds, joking lightly.
I chuckle. “I had a few. I mean, I went on dates. And I saw some of the same girls more than once,” I say, and she lets out a small laugh.
“None of them were very serious, though. The last one was Georgia Regine, it didn’t last long.
Asher used to invite her to our game nights, and she’d always show up reluctantly, complain about the unhealthy snacks, and, at some point, the sound of her BlackBerry’s keys drove Asher crazy. It was never going to work.”
She grins. “Asher holds the acceptance stamp.”
“Definitely. He represents the parents the three of us always want to impress when introducing our girlfriends.” We laugh a little.
“Tell me about Bill,” I ask her, and we turn more serious, but there’s no tension in the air this time.
“Well, he’s a management consultant. We live together in a nice apartment he bought a few years ago,” she says calmly.
I nod. “And you told me you’ve been dating for like three years now? You met on campus?” My heart aches a little, but my happiness for her happiness is bigger than it. The aching is told to stitch itself back together.
“Yes,” she answers. “After we met, we only saw each other at college parties. I only agreed to go on a date with him after graduation.”
“It took you long,” I say, and she chuckles. “So, where’s Bill from?”
We stay in the living room, talking about dating and all the complexity of sharing life with someone.
I tell Ella about my bad dates with girls I met in the strange place that is the New York subway.
I listen to her stories of the obligatory and far-from-spontaneous setups arranged by her two best friends before there was a Bill.
And we stay there.
We take our time.
Until we move to the next destination: friendship. (And the kitchen).