The Futures(75)

I pulled out my phone and called her. I belatedly realized that the ringing was louder than usual, coming not just from the speaker next to my ear but also from somewhere in the room. I followed the chime and buzz to the coffee table, where her phone was partially obscured by a stack of takeout napkins. I picked up her phone, which was glowing from my missed call.

The wallpaper on her iPhone screen, for a long time, had been a picture of the two of us taken during that summer in Europe. She had handed her phone to another tourist while we leaned against the railing that separated the rocky path from the bright blue sea below. She loved that picture. The two of us smiling and squinting, happy and tired and sunburned from an afternoon trekking through the Cinque Terre. After the digital shutter snapped, we relaxed our smiles, Julia thanked the tourist, and we walked back to our B and B in Monterosso. That night we drank wine on the terrace overlooking the Mediterranean. She pulled her hair loose from its bun and tilted her head back to look at the stars. I took her hand and led her back to our room under the attic rafters. We fell asleep curled together as the waves crashed far below. But that photo, that moment, that life was gone. In its place, on the phone screen, was a generic image of planet earth floating in space. That image wedged in my brain like a shard of glass. Erasure of our happiest memories. Evidence of just how far we had drifted.

But that’s not what I was really looking at. I was reading, over and over again, the text message that appeared on the locked screen of the phone. Eight short words, but that was all it took. It became suddenly, painfully clear who was behind the revelations about Spire. Who had been drawing closer and slipping information to the person on the other side of the table.

Adam McCard, thirty-two minutes ago.

I’m sorry, babe. I had to do it.

Part 3





Chapter 14


Julia



Last week I was lying in bed, pretending to take a late afternoon nap but really just staring at the ceiling, when I heard a car pull up in the driveway.

My father wouldn’t be back from work until dinner. My mother was busy all day with errands and meetings. I was home alone on that sunny May day. I pulled aside the curtain and saw my sister shutting the trunk of her silver Saab.

It was like Elizabeth had forgotten, for a moment, that I was living at home. A look rippled across her face as I appeared at the top of the stairs. There she was, fresh from her junior year at college, embarking on summer break with all its possibilities—and as I dragged myself down the stairs in ratty old leggings and a T-shirt, I was there to remind her of everything that could go wrong. Failure, heartbreak. A vector for a disease she might catch, too. But the look vanished in a second, and Elizabeth threw her arms around me in a hug.

We had seen each other at Christmas and when she breezed through over spring break before hopping a flight to Belize. But those had been short, distracted visits, and the depths to which I was sinking weren’t yet clear. It was evident enough now: months had passed, my excuses were running out, and I was still hiding inside with unwashed hair and worn-out clothes. After settling at the kitchen table, Elizabeth asked me how I was. The look on her face said she wanted the full answer.

I’m okay. That’s what I’ve been saying all along, hoping that eventually I’ll trick myself into making it true. It’s been months now. I’m getting over it. I’m okay.

But I’m also, distinctly, not okay. I’m not getting over it. Sometimes I feel like I’m living on two planes: the present in Boston, which I move through physically like a hollow zombie, and that night in New York, where I’m stuck forever mentally, replaying the same disastrous sequence on a loop. The memory persists like a hot cavity. I shut my eyes, and I see Evan. I try to fall asleep, and I see Evan. And I see him as he was at the very end, his face written with disappointment. That’s the worst part. It wasn’t shock or anger. It was like he’d always known that it would come to this. Four years of my life disappeared into that expression. All the good things that had come before were negated by that pitch-black reminder of what I was capable of—of the person I had been all along.

I called my mother later that December night. I was jobless, single, with nowhere to live. But she was too busy to help, so I moved myself out. I shipped a box of books home. I took a taxi to Penn Station with two bulging suitcases in the trunk. A man in a Santa costume stood on the corner of 34th Street, ringing a bell, collecting for the Salvation Army. Tourists streamed down the sidewalks, eyes shining in the holiday lights, on their way to Radio City or the Rockefeller Center tree. It all receded so quickly. The train pulled out of the station, right on time for once, and a few hours later I was in Boston. As fast as that. My life in New York had ended.

It was like I’d been hit by a truck. My joints felt sore, my skin tender. I hibernated through the winter, confining my movements to the bedroom, the kitchen, the den. I slept too many hours every night—sleep was the only thing I wanted to do, the only way to make the time pass. Lately, though, I’m plagued by a different problem: insomnia. Maybe my body is trying to tell me to move on after the glut of the last several months, but my mind won’t let me. So I’m awake late into the night. Nothing works: warm milk, hot baths, prescription pills. I spend hours going for drives through the darkened suburbs, past shuttered windows and empty parking lots, with only the radio for company. My mother hates my middle-of-the-night peregrinations and the way I sleep so late, wasting daylight hours. So now I’m presented with a double serving of guilt: for what I did last year in New York, and for the way I am constantly failing to get over it.