The Drifter(3)

“Look how young we were!!!” the email exclaimed. Attached was an invitation to a sorority reunion, scheduled on the weekend of the Tennessee football game, written in bold orange letters over a grainy photo. “Bygones,” Elizabeth mumbled to herself, as she scanned the image, five rows of beaming college girls in sundresses on Bid Day. Once you were in, even if you strain against it and resign in a huff, they never really let you go. She zoomed in with her mouse to scan their blurred faces. First she found her own—soft angles, her long honey-colored hair curled for the occasion.

Then she saw them. To her left was Caroline, and Ginny was wedged between them, seated on Caroline’s lap, her slender tanned arms draped around their shoulders. That’s how it always was. Ginny was the bridge between them, filling the empty space. Elizabeth went over their features again and again, suddenly aware of how long it had been since she had seen this photo, and that she could no longer recall their faces precisely from memory. All of the photos she had from that time were out of sight, stored away in her mother’s attic. Faces that had once been as familiar to her as her own had become hazy in her mind, until now.

Now they are all she sees.

Gavin’s voice shakes her back to the present. “Honey, listen. You’ve got to let her go.”

“Let who go, Gav?” she whispers into the phone, leaning her head down and pressing her thumb and forefinger against her brow bones to try to stop the tears. They both know she no longer means Remi. “That’s the question, isn’t it? And I can’t. She’s with me every day.”

Elizabeth has tried to move on, for years and years. Sometimes, on good days, she feels like she has. But the memories come nightly now. In her sleep, she walks into a dark apartment and notices a light burning in the bedroom, the door left slightly ajar. Sometimes there is a dark puddle of blood on the old hardwood floor. Sometimes he’s there, his face turned away from her, but she knows who it is. She wakes up in a sweat, runs into Remi’s room, feels the covers for her warm little body, watches the sheets move up and down with her breath.

“I can’t let her go, Gavin.” She sits on the stoop. She is shaking now.

“I’m coming, Betsy, don’t move.” And those words, hearing Gavin say her real name, sends her hurtling back. She is not Elizabeth anymore. She never was. She is Betsy, she will always be Betsy. Betsy, who left her friend alone to die. Betsy, who will never be able to move on, who will never deserve the beautiful life she has made. She sits on the stoop, warm now from the bright sunlight, and cries.





PART 1





CHAPTER 1


THE DRIFTERS


August 22, 1990

In another world before New York, before Remi, before the nightmares, Elizabeth was called Betsy, and she rode a bicycle to work. The pedals were leaden under the soles of her Converse, which were worn paper-thin. And, as always, the last stretch of the steep hill she climbed to get to campus was slow and brutal, through air that clung to her skin like jeans snatched impatiently out of the dryer: damp, hot, sticky. It was seventy-four degrees at 5:30 in the morning, the coolest it would be all day.

The one obvious con about Betsy’s job at Bagelville was that people ate bagels in the morning, sometimes desperately early. They’d had a lock on the market until the culty Krispy Kreme doughnut shop opened down the street and challenged their dominance in the round, pre-noon food category. Regardless, business remained steady as long as refills were free, and Betsy, for the moment, was employed.

The upside of the job was that the coffee was decent and the place was derelict enough to be acceptably dingy to all of the cool kids in town who avoided anything too shiny. Betsy’s battered cutoffs and last night’s T-shirt were considered an acceptable uniform. Plus, there was ample fresh-squeezed orange juice to slip to her friends, who’d shuffle in dry-mouthed with bloodshot eyes around ten. If she was in at six, she was out by noon and sufficiently caffeinated for a class or two, her backpack loaded with remarkably versatile day-olds to stow in the freezer for times when money was tight, and it always was.

She hung a left to cut a diagonal line through the Plaza of the Americas, past a handful of drifters. They usually ended up in Gainesville after wandering off the interstate, growing impatient in their search for the mythical Florida orange groves. Inside the pastel halls of the sorority, it had been easy enough to ignore the seedier side of Gainesville, but outside those walls, it was impossible. It’s the first sizable city intersected by I-75, the freeway that begins in Michigan. It starts north of Detroit at the Canadian border and snakes down to Ohio past Toledo and Dayton, further south to Lexington, Kentucky, before it passes through the depressed west Tennessee mountain towns into Atlanta and Macon until it crosses the state line into absolutely empty, impossibly green space. The verdant wasteland of low trees and fields punctuated by the occasional cow is an epic disappointment for kids who expect an eight-foot Mickey Mouse to greet them upon entering the Promised Land, not realizing that they still had nearly four Disney-free hours in the car ahead of them. In the fall, it’s the migratory path for Midwestern snowbirds who flee the cold en route to their slumped, one-story cinder block homes in sixty-plus communities. Then, after Easter they do the reverse trip “up north” in understated, gold four-door sedans. Gainesville was brimming with Last-Stop Larrys of the world—sad sacks who just want to see one palm tree before they die, and anyone who’d given up on the rust belt cities and decided to try their luck in the Sunshine State. During the school year, the young, tan coeds were the center of attention in town. In August, before the semester started and the stream of returning students clogged the three exits into town, the people trickling in off the highway more likely stuck out their thumbs somewhere north of there and hitched a ride. It wasn’t unusual for bad news to tag along with them.