Thirty-Six #2
I drive us the miles to Figueroa Street, where the laundromat stands, as though trapped in time.
A sacredness to it. The place where we began.
But I’m alone in the feeling. She’s furious.
She circles the floor, stands still with her back to me, says, “I remember a stairwell and doors but that’s all. ”
I don’t know what to do. She won’t meet my eye. But she could have borrowed my car and come here herself, could have asked Clément or one of her friends to go with her, and didn’t. “Should we walk around the block?” I ask. “See if something looks familiar?”
We circle around the front of the laundromat. Pass a Mexican restaurant and a manicurist, a shop selling paper goods, a notary. I slow in front of an apartment complex midblock. “Could this be it?” I ask.
“No,” she says.
We’re never going to find it. She was a child, all she remembers are stairs and doors.
We reach the back of the buildings again, near my parked car, and I say, “I know you’re looking for answers.
I can give you some, if you’ll let me.” Her jaw is clenched, her brow furrowed, her eyes piercing, scanning the backs of the buildings.
I wish I could wrap my arms around her but she’s ready to strike.
“Look,” she says, and points. There’s a small skylight on the partially slanted roof of the laundromat. “That’s it,” she says. And laughs. “Of course. The same building. Doors and stairs, out to the street and back in.”
“There’s a sign with a phone number inside,” I say.
Nathalie copies it down and we walk to a phone booth down the block.
She steps into it by herself and I watch her talking, and I wait, the cars blowing past me, a sense I’ve lost control of everything.
She comes out and tells me that Mr. Kim will meet us in the laundromat in twenty minutes.
There’s a diner across the street. I say, “Should we get something cold to drink while we’re waiting?”
“I’d rather go back. He might get there sooner.”
“All right.”
We go back in and she chooses the row of chairs we sat in when I first met her.
I want to ask if she remembers but I don’t.
She sits upright and very still. The detergent air is sticky and chemical and seeping into my skin.
I wish we could wait outside but I don’t dare suggest it.
Finally a man comes through the door—shiny black hair and a rumpled shirt; a giant ring, heavy with keys, attached to his belt—and Nathalie springs up.
“I’m sorry for the inconvenience,” she says.
“I really appreciate you coming back and showing us.”
“It’s just an attic,” he says. “Nothing up there.”
“It’s just that, my mother died when I was a child. It’s the last place I ever was with her.”
He sighs. “Come,” he says, and heads toward the back.
As soon as we’re out of earshot she mutters, “I’m a good liar, too.” Meant to cut, and it does.
We climb a dark echoing stairway at the back of the building, built for utility or emergency, three floors up.
“We’ve had trouble with squatters a few times over the years,” Mr. Kim says, fitting his key into the lock.
He pushes open the door. A waft of stale air.
“Turn the lock when you’re finished.” He leaves us, heavy footsteps fading out.
We hover in the stairwell. I look at Nathalie and she looks past me, inscrutable, and then strides into the attic as though she’s there to appraise it.
It’s small, dusty. Dark but for the single skylight.
The ceiling is just above my head when we walk in, slanting lower the farther we go.
Crouching, I see a pile of discarded clothing in a corner, an old discolored pillow without a case, an empty beer bottle.
Painful, to imagine Nathalie, five years old, helping to gather the laundry, carrying it down the stairs.
Delphine, abandoned and frightened, losing her mind in this place.
Tree branches grow low over the skylight, filtering the sun, and along one edge, cut into the wooden window frame, is a series of gouges.
I move closer, blood rushing, reaching to touch them, seized by their familiarity.
A smaller version of the gouges in the tree from Delphine’s old yard on North Harper.
“Nathalie,” I whisper, but she cuts me off.
“This isn’t it,” she says. She’s standing in the single lighted place, dust motes thick in the air around her, like I’m seeing her through static.
“But look here—” I say.
She turns away from me and rushes down the long stairwell and I hurry to match her pace. And then we’re outside, in the parking lot again, and Nathalie’s finally looking at me, but now she’s screaming. “How could you? You stole me!”
“What are you talking about?” My voice comes out a shriek, not unlike hers last night. People are staring, Nathalie’s eyes are wide and panicked and furious and sad.
“You stole me,” she says, and I’m back at Adele’s dining table, I’m twenty-four years old and I have my life planned out, I’m right on the precipice, Clément and me, an apartment ours in just a month, working the figures for the two of us, a bed for him and a bed for me, two bowls and two mugs and two sets of utensils to start us off.
I make no pacts with Delphine. I tell her to do what she must with her daughter, with my sisters.
I tell her that I’m my own person and I’m her best friend and I refuse.
Her threat cannot touch me. This isn’t you, I tell her.
I know this isn’t you, and I will stay right here until you come back.
Clément and I move just like we plan to.
My life, just as I planned it. Quiet nights, view of Sunset Boulevard from the living room window.
Friends down the hall for Clément. Women in my bed.
Ginny returns and there’s no ring on my finger, no hesitation, my body doesn’t fight when she takes off my clothes because I’ve had practice, because I haven’t hidden myself away.
I see Felix try to kiss Al at the Christmas party and we tell each other everything.
We’re friends in the least complicated way.
I never sit in the cold night while the headboard bangs against the wall, never lie to myself about what’s possible.
I don’t say to Ginny: Just once. I say: Always.
I say: Here I am, I’ve been waiting. And I tell Clément that love can look any number of ways, I tell him: There are so many ways to be in this world and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
We’re in the parking lot and people are staring and I am dazzled by my own fury. “You have no idea what I gave up,” I say. “No idea.”
Desperation across her face, and fear. “I hate you,” she says.
Snarl on her lips. Trembling. She’s nearly the same age as I was, that last night with my mother at the table, when there wasn’t nearly enough love between us, when we said what was true and lost each other for good.
A severing. But not for Nathalie and me.
“You have no idea what I gave up,” I tell her again. “But I’d do it all over. I’d give all of it up—all over again—for you.”
She covers her face with her hands.
“Come,” I tell her. “Let’s go home.”
A storm rages in my body as we drive. She’s looking out the window.
“I’m so stupid,” she says. “To write a song about that place. Oh my God.” You stole me.
It’s repeating in my brain—so wrong, so wrong, my breathing shallow with its wrongness—and now she’s talking about something else.
“I have to perform it tomorrow in front of so many people. All of my friends. A famous producer. My teachers. You. It’s a fake song, a made-up story. ”
That she could say such a thing to me and then move on—to this, to anything—after saying it.
We stop at a red light. A blue car passes, a black one.
I’ve lied to her our whole lives together, terrible, even though I felt I didn’t have a choice.
She doesn’t want my explanations. She wants to talk about her song.
The light turns green, I move through it.
“You’re an artist,” I say. “You’ve done what artists do.
Turned one thing into another thing, entirely its own.
Whoever said a song had to be true? No one will know what it’s about unless you tell them.
” She doesn’t respond. “Listen. I know you aren’t ready to talk about this, but there are a few things I need to say.
No one’s seen Delphine since the hospital.
We don’t know where she is. No one’s laughing at you.
No one’s pitying you. She asked us to think of her as dead. So we let her be dead, to all of us.”
When we get home, she goes straight to her room.
I lie on the sofa and stare at the ceiling.
How many places did they sleep between the house on North Harper and the laundromat attic?
How did Delphine decide, day after day, to not call me for help?
Maybe it wasn’t even a decision. Maybe I had faded away to her already.
Nathalie’s door opens. I wait, but she’s just heading to the bathroom.
Water running, door to her bedroom shutting again.
Shadow of branches and leaves on the ceiling, light dancing, everything else still.
I watch until the shadows have made their way from the ceiling to the wall.
The phone rings. A burst of noise on the other end, overlapping voices, music, and Elise saying, “Odette, can you hear me? The opening’s still in full swing but I had to call you with the news.
Odette? Your paintings. They all sold. All five of them. ”