Every Summer After(6)

Charlie’s phone call is an ax through my bubble, and I’m so anxious to get north that as soon as I hang up, I book a car and a motel room for tomorrow, even though the funeral is a few days from now. It’s like I’ve woken from a twelve-year coma, and my head throbs in anticipation and terror.

I’m going to see Sam.



* * *





I SIT DOWN to write an email to my parents to tell them about Sue. They haven’t been regularly checking their messages on this European vacation of theirs, so I don’t know when they’ll get it. I also don’t know whether they were still in contact with Sue. Mom kept in touch with her for at least a few years after Sam and I “broke up,” but each time she’d mention any one of the Floreks, my eyes would well up. Eventually she stopped giving me updates.

I keep the note short and when I’m done, I throw some clothes into the Rimowa suitcase I couldn’t afford but bought anyway. It’s now well after midnight, and I have an interview for work in the morning and then a long drive, so I change into pj’s, lie down, and shut my eyes. But I’m too wired to sleep.

There are these moments I come back to when I’m at my most nostalgic, when all I want to do is curl up in the past with Sam. I can play them in my mind as if they’re old home videos. I used to watch them all the time in university, a bedtime routine as familiar as the pilled Hudson’s Bay blanket I’d taken from the cottage. But the memories and the regrets they carried with them chafed like the blanket’s wool, and I would lose nights imagining where Sam was at that precise moment, wondering if there’s a chance he might be thinking of me. Sometimes I felt sure he was—like there was an invisible, unbreakable string that ran between us, stretching vast distances and keeping us joined. Other times, I dozed off in the midst of a movie only to wake in the middle of the night, my lungs feeling like they were on the verge of collapse, and I’d have to breathe my way through the panic attack.

Eventually, by the end of school, I’d managed to shut off the nightly broadcasts, filling my brain instead with looming exams and article deadlines and internship applications, and the panic attacks began to subside.

Tonight I have no such restraint. I cue up our firsts—the first time we met, our first kiss, the first time Sam told me he loved me—until the reality of seeing him starts to sink in, and my thoughts become a swirl of questions I don’t have answers for. How will he react to my showing up? How much has he changed? Is he single? Or, fuck, is he married?

My therapist, Jennifer—not Jen, never Jen—I made the mistake once and was sharply corrected. The woman has framed quotes on the wall (“Life begins after coffee,” and “I’m not weird I’m limited edition”), so I’m not sure what kind of gravitas she thinks her full name adds. Anyway, Jennifer has tricks for coping with this kind of anxious spiraling, but deep belly breaths and mantras don’t stand a chance tonight. I started seeing Jennifer a few years ago, shortly after the Thanksgiving I spent puking up rosé and spilling my guts to Chantal. I didn’t want to talk to a therapist; I thought that panic attack had just been a blip on an otherwise (fairly successful!) path to pushing Sam Florek out of my heart and mind, but Chantal was insistent. “This shit is above my pay grade, P,” she’d told me with trademark blunt force.

Chantal and I met as interns at the city magazine where she is now the entertainment editor. We bonded over the peculiar business of fact-checking restaurant reviews (So the halibut is coated in a pine nut dust, not a pistachio crust?) and the editor in chief’s farcical obsession with tennis. The moment that solidified our friendship was during a story meeting that the editor literally began with the words, “I’ve been thinking a lot about tennis,” and then turned to Chantal, who was the only Black person in the entire office, and said, “You must be great at tennis.” Her face remained perfectly composed when she replied that she did not play, while at the same time I blurted, “Are you kidding?”

Chantal is my closest girlfriend, not that there’s much competition. My reluctance to share embarrassing or intimate parts of myself with other women makes them suspicious of me. For instance: Chantal knew I grew up with a cottage and that I hung around with the boys next door, but she had no idea about the extent of my relationship with Sam—or how it ended in a messy explosion that left no survivors. I think the fact that I’d kept such a fundamental piece of my history from her was more shocking than the story of what happened all those years ago.

“You do understand what it means to have friends, right?” she’d asked me after I told her the horrible truth. Considering that my two closest friends no longer speak to me, the answer probably should have been Not really.

But I have been a good friend to Chantal. I’m the person she calls to bitch about work or her future mother-in-law, who is continually suggesting Chantal relax her hair for the wedding. Chantal has no interest in wedding-y things, except for having a big dance party, an open bar, and a killer dress, which, fair, but since the event needs to come together somehow, I’ve become the default planner, putting together Pinterest boards with decor inspo. I’m reliable. I’m a good listener. I’m the one who knows what cool new restaurant has the hottest chef. I make excellent Manhattans. I am fun! I just don’t want to talk about what keeps me awake at night. I don’t want to reveal how I’m beginning to question whether climbing the ladder has made me happy, how sometimes I long to write but can’t seem to find the courage, or how lonely I sometimes feel. Chantal is the only person who can pull it out of me.