The Futures(77)

The night crept by, the house silent around us except for the occasional chime of the hall clock downstairs. Around 3:00 a.m., Elizabeth finally started to yawn. She drifted off while telling me about a new photo series she was working on. I tucked the blanket around her and went back to my own room, to wait for sleep.

And it was the truth. It was, surprisingly, fine. It was the first time I had talked about Evan with anyone since the breakup. My parents pretended it had never happened. Elizabeth, I think, had pieced together most of it, but she had some of our mother in her—she didn’t probe when the topic was too delicate. Whenever Abby brought Evan up, I tended to change the subject. She’d snapped at me once. “Julia. Seriously. Enough of this repressive WASP bullshit. We have to talk about this at some point.” There was a long silence, then she sighed. “I’m sorry. That was unfair.” But where could I begin?

“It’s just…” I’d said. “I just need more time.”

And so to finally say his name aloud was a relief. Like ice shattering. Evan. He existed. He still existed.

I thought I had rid myself of any feeling for him, so that when the break came, it would be clean and easy. Just like the switch from Rob to Evan four years earlier. Adam would be waiting, baton extended, and I would simply reach for it and keep going. But this wasn’t to be. Adam wasn’t there (how could I have ever thought he would be?), and, more important, Evan wasn’t someone I could leave behind so painlessly. At this age perhaps we take change for granted: you can adopt and discard different identities as easily as Halloween costumes, and from that comes the arrogance of thinking that you can decide when, and how, you get to change. Evan had been one chapter of my life, I thought, but for the next—for Adam—I was going to become a new kind of person.

But when everything washed away in the ensuing mess, I was left with something not so easily discarded after all: the girl I had been before everything started. The girl who had loved Evan, who had finally understood that the past didn’t have to determine what would come in the future; the girl who had learned to be happy. It seemed that I had her back now, but I worried it was too late. She doesn’t fit in anymore. But this is me. This is the real me. I so desperately don’t want to lose it, that tender flame of being.

*

I spent that December weekend trying very hard not to think about my outpouring to Adam. Through my pounding hangover that Saturday, I cleaned the apartment. I beat the rugs on the fire escape, washed the windows, scrubbed the bathtub until it shone. That night I went to Abby’s holiday party. Her apartment was cheery and cozy, garlanded with lights and tinsel, mulled cider bubbling on the stove. I drank only water, still feeling sick from the night before. Evan had mentioned the party. I’d texted him to ask if he was coming, but he didn’t respond. Whenever a wave of noise announced an arrival, I found myself hoping—for the first time in months—that it would be Evan walking through the door. I wanted something beyond our stilted interaction on the stoop that morning. I felt it dangling in the air, like a sharp blade, the danger of what we hadn’t said.

By 2:00 a.m., as the party was emptying out, I gave up and left. Evan came home later and slept for a few hours before heading back to work early Sunday morning. I woke up nervous and jittery, needing distraction from my ballooning guilt. (But guilt over what, over which part? I still didn’t quite know.) I went to the Met that afternoon, but I couldn’t focus on the art. My lack of concentration seemed like a failure, and it gave the museum an oppressive air: another reminder of my inability to engage, to find a passion, to figure it out. A tour was wending past, and I clung to it, sheltering myself in the monologue of the leader. It was dark by the time I left the museum, and I went to bed early, falling into a shallow sleep. Evan got home past midnight, and I awoke wondering if I ought to turn on the light and try to talk to him, actually talk to him. To offer a real apology. But he lingered in the living room, and I fell asleep again.

Monday morning brought a new sting. Maybe I could pretend things were fine over the weekend, but on a weekday my unemployment was impossible to ignore. I went to the coffee shop down the block and looked online for job openings. I couldn’t concentrate. The whirring and banging of the espresso machines, the tinny jazz, the yoga-toned mothers with their lattes. Distractions everywhere. I was waiting for something, but I didn’t know what. Adam hadn’t called or texted. He hadn’t said a thing since Friday night. I reach back and try to remember what I was thinking about Adam at that moment, but I can’t quite say. My memory of that time is so infected by what I feel now. Or perhaps it’s that I was starting to realize the scope of my mistake. I wasn’t fixated on Adam anymore, because Adam wasn’t the person I’d have to reckon with. Evan was.

But that can’t be entirely true. Later that Monday night, after I ventured out into the rain to pick up dinner, some thought of Adam had driven me to open my computer. At home, I shook a packet of oyster crackers across my container of too-hot soup while I navigated to the New York Observer’s website. Maybe I was curious to see whether Adam had been working all weekend. Maybe I wanted to check the news after ignoring it for a few days. Or maybe an alarm bell was already ringing in my subconscious, finally forcing me to acknowledge the trigger on which I’d been resting my finger for months. I had only lifted one spoonful of soup to my mouth before I saw the headline strung across the top of the website in big, bold black letters for the whole world to see.