A Clean Slate
A Clean Slate
Laura Caldwell
A Clean Slate chronicles the days of Kelly McGraw, a Chicago woman who suddenly can't remember the last five months of her life, a time when she was dumped by her soon-to-be fiancé and laid off by the company she thought would make her partner.Overwhelmed and confused but otherwise feeling wonderful, she begins to realize that she has a clean slate in life. She can do anything she wants, go anywhere she wants, be anything she wants. But what, exactly, does she want?Follow Kelly on a journey that includes her search to discover what caused her memory loss, an internship with a bad-boy British photographer, a Caribbean photo shoot, her boyfriend's desire to come crawling back and, eventually, a brutal discovery that will cause her to reevaluate both her old and new lives.
A Clean Slate
LAURA CALDWELL
graduated from University of Iowa, before getting her law degree from Loyola University Chicago School of Law. Laura was a trial lawyer for many years, specializing in medical negligence defense and entertainment law. She is widely published in the legal field, as well as in numerous mainstream publications. Burning the Map, her first novel, was published by Red Dress Ink and chosen by Barnes & Noble.com as one of “The Best of 2002.”
Laura is currently a writer and contributing editor at Lake Magazine, as well as an Adjunct Professor of legal writing at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. Please visit her online at www.lauracaldwell.com.
A Clean Slate
Laura Caldwell
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
All my admiration and appreciation to the following people: my stellar editor, Margaret Marbury, Maureen Walters at Curtis Brown, Ltd., everyone at Red Dress Ink (especially Laura Morris, Tania Charzewski, Craig Swinwood, Margie Miller, Maureen Stead and Don Lucey), Beth Kaveny, Suzanne Burchill, Kelly Harden, Ginger Heyman, Trisha Woodson, Ted McNabola, Joan Posch, Rochelle Wasserberger, Hilarie Pozesky, Alisa Speigel, Katie Caldwell Kuhn, Margaret Caldwell, William Caldwell, Karen Billups, Stacey Billups, Kelly Caldwell, Dr. Stuart Rice, Kim Wilkins, Joe Ford, Joel Odish, Anthony Parmalee (photographer extraordinaire) and Greg Brown and Roberto Puig of BMG Model Management.
Lastly, and once again most importantly, thanks, love and overwhelming gratitude to Jason Billups.
“Life isn’t about finding yourself; life is about creating yourself.”
—George Bernard Shaw
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Book Club Questions
1
Have you ever had a moment when you’ve known—I mean, logically known in your head—that you’re a fantastically lucky person, that you’re truly fortunate to have an education, to live in a nice place in a great city, to have friends who care about you and all that, but you just can’t get yourself to actually feel it?
Well, I was having one of those moments on the day it all started. I stood in the dry cleaners, where the temperature was about a hundred eighty degrees from the pressing and steaming machines.
“Sorry, sorry. No clothes for you,” the tiny Asian woman said as she came back to the cracked linoleum counter for the third time.
I clicked my nails on the counter and expelled a massive breath of hot air, trying to maintain rational thought. “Can you please look one more time? I brought in a whole bag of clothes last week.” I tried not to think of my favorite black pants—my skinny pants—which had been in that bag.
“You have ticket?” The lady waved a pile of pink slips.
“No,” I told her. I never saved those pesky things. Never had to before.
She shrugged. “I look again.” Wiping sweat from her eyebrows, she turned away. As she disappeared into a sea of hanging, plastic-covered clothes, I tried to guess her size. Was it possible that she had stolen my black pants and was wearing them on the weekends?
I felt one of my temper tantrums coming on, but I forced it down. I am lucky to be alive, I told myself as I leaned on the counter, fanning my face. I am lucky because I am now losing weight at an average of a pound a minute. I am lucky because I have a great town house and a nice boyfriend who is soon to be my fiancé, and a decent job and lovely friends. I’ve really got the world by the tail.
The problem was this—I wasn’t buying a word of it. My nice boyfriend soon-to-be-fiancé, Ben, was at my great town house, true, but he wouldn’t be so nice when he learned that his favorite French-blue shirt had been destroyed by the dry cleaners from hell. And the decent job I had—as a research analyst at an investment bank called Bartley Brothers—was starting to look like a ticket straight to nowhere-ville. I’d been toiling for years, digging up information on retail stocks so that my boss could pass on my recommendations and then take all the credit when we made money, or blame me when we lost it. After almost eight years of promises that I would soon be considered for partnership, it still hadn’t happened. Finally, my best friend, Laney, my sanity advisor, was off at some marketing conference (read: company boondoggle) in Palm Beach.
“Sorry,” the dry cleaner said, emerging from the plastic sea, looking even more red-faced and sweaty. “We have nothing for you.” She gave another helpless shrug.
“Can you please keep looking, and I’ll stop back later in the day?”
“Okay, okay.”
I stomped out of the sweltering store, a crisp Chicago breeze hitting me blessedly in the face. As an El train clamored to a halt on the tracks over my head, I trudged up Armitage Avenue, muttering obscenities about my missing clothes and the incompetence of the dry cleaners. The street was full of couples doing Saturday morning errands hand-in-hand, along with the post-college baseball-hat crowd searching for hangover grub.
I took a couple of deep breaths, but they brought no relief from my cranky mood. Ben rarely, if ever, held my hand and did errands with me on the weekends. Saturday mornings were his time to run with his marathon group or train for one of the other races he was constantly entering. It didn’t bother me…not really. Because Ben worshipped at the Church of Holy Workouts he had an amazing body, something that benefited me as well as him. Yes, sex was fine. More than fine, actually. But if I were forced to lodge one complaint about Ben, it would be this—we no longer had any of those couple-y, sappy-eyed rendezvous, such as candlelit dinners or surprise weekends at a log cabin. Romantic interludes just weren’t his thing these days, or at least that’s what he told me, what I told myself to make myself feel better when I saw other couples having picnics in Lincoln Park and horse-drawn carriage rides down Michigan Avenue.
Ben was sweet and funny and wonderful in his own way, though. He would cheer me up by singing show tunes in a falsetto voice, and when it was time to carbo-load for his next race, he’d cook huge pasta dinners for the two of us. And last January when my sister, Dee, died, Ben was amazing—an absolute rock. I couldn’t have gotten through it without him.
At Bissell Street, I took a left and walked along the sidewalk, crunching over a golden bed of fallen leaves, moving past the rusty autumn trees and stone three-flats until I hit the stretch of brick town houses, one of which was mine (something I was inordinately proud of). I’d saved all my paychecks from Bartley Brothers, and this place was the first home I’d ever owned, the place Dee used to love to stay when she came to visit, the place where Ben and I would live when we were married. The sun was peeking through the red curtain of trees, making an X-like pattern on the town homes. Normally, I would have loved to take photos of that—I liked the way the rays made crosshairs on the brick—but I was too annoyed by the dry cleaning debacle to think about getting my Nikon.
Before I went inside, I stopped at the bank of oblong silver mailboxes in the little courtyard located right behind the town houses. I stuck the key in the third one, my box, and tried to turn it to the right as I always did, but it wouldn’t budge.
I screwed my face up tight and tried again. Maybe the eager-bunny mailman had stuffed a stack of magazines in there, jamming the lock. I tried over and over, but the key wouldn’t turn.
I took it out and jiggled it in my hand, as if that would help. I was looking back at the box, lifting the key to try again, when I noticed what was wrong. The tiny black plate with white letters affixed to the box, the plate that should have said my name, KELLY MCGRAW, instead read BETH & BOB MANINSKY.
What the hell? I moved down the row of boxes, peering closely, reading each one: LILY CHANG, SIMON TURNER, MILLER/SAMSON, and on and on, but no KELLY MCGRAW.
I repeated the process two more times, then stood still, swiveling my head, looking at the trim bushes that were beginning to turn red at the edges and the brick walls of the surrounding town houses. Was there another bank of mailboxes somewhere? No, that couldn’t be right. This was the only set, the same place I’d been getting my mail for almost a year.
And then I figured out what it was. The damned management company. The company to whom I paid two hundred dollars a month so that they could refuse to repaint the garage door or fish a spoon out of my clogged sink. They’d screwed up once more.
Muttering again, I strode around the side of the town houses and up the front stairs to my place. The door was tall and painted green to match the trim on the bay windows. I tried the doorknob, but it was locked. Ben must have headed out for a run already. Just as well. I could prolong telling him that he’d probably never see his French-blue shirt again.
I put the key in the lock, or at least I tried, but it didn’t insert smoothly. Finally, I got it in and attempted to turn it. Déjà fucking vu. This lock wasn’t working, either. I wrestled with the key, grasping it with both hands and trying to force it to the left, as the wind whipped my hair in front of my face so I couldn’t see. Deep cleansing breaths, I told myself in a low soothing tone, just like the woman in my meditation tapes would say it. Inhale in, exhale out. I did this a few times, batting my hair out of my eyes, then tried the key again. No luck.
My deep-cleansing-breaths mantra turned to thoughts of violence. I would have to physically harm everyone in the management company now. This was ridiculous.
On the off chance that Ben was still home, I rang the doorbell. Ding, ding, ding—I could hear it going off inside. If he was home, doing his prerun stretches, he would be annoyed, but I didn’t care.
Ding, ding, ding, ding—I tried one more time, and then, thank God, I heard footsteps inside pounding down the stairs.
As the door swung open, I was already in midrant. “The dry cleaners lost our stuff, can you believe it? They say they’ll look some more, but it’s as good as gone. Your blue shirt was in that load, and my favorite black pants—and then the mailbox was messed up and…”
My body froze, along with my tirade, as I realized that Ben hadn’t opened the door. It was someone else. Someone I’d never seen, some woman.
She had short blond hair cropped close to her head. In fact, she looked a little like the pictures of Ben’s high school girlfriend, Toni, the woman he said he’d always love. And then the truth of the situation hit me. Ben was cheating on me, right here in my own house, getting his groove on with some girl who looked like Toni, when I’d only been gone an hour or so. Unbelievable. This wasn’t happening. Now I would have to kill Ben along with the management people. A thousand thoughts flew through my brain like birds let out of a cage. I couldn’t hold on to just one.
“Hi, can I help you?” the Toni look-alike said, a sweet smile grazing her face.
“Can I help you?” I crossed my arms over my chest, then, thinking better of it, dropped them and pushed past her inside. “Hey!”
The first thing I noticed was that my high mosaic table, the one made of tiny pieces of broken glass, the one I’d bought at an art fair, wasn’t there. Instead, in its place, there was a heavy wooden coat tree, its arms jutting out, holding a woman’s pink trench coat and a tiny kid’s sweatshirt.
“What’s going on here?” The woman’s voice was low and cautious, the kind of voice cops use with loose criminals on TV.
I wanted to make a smart comment, ask her the same thing, but a flock of doubts flew around in my head along with the other birds. “This is my house,” I said, but I heard my voice waver.
I spun around to check something, and sure enough, there it was, next to the coat tree. The dent in the drywall where Ben’s skis had fallen against it last year. This was my place, so what was the Toni look-alike doing here? And what was with that coat tree?
“No,” she said. “This is my house. My husband and I bought it a few months ago.”
I bit my lip and looked at her, confused. “Is Ben here?”
“There’s no Ben who lives here. What’s your name?” She took a step closer to me, as if she was afraid I’d move farther into the house.
I peeked my head around the corner and into the study, expecting to see the big, scarred desk that my mom had given me when she moved to L.A., but in its place was a playpen with yellow mesh sides and a jumble of brightly colored toys.
“Kelly McGraw,” I said, yet even that came out a little unsure.
The woman gave me the sweet smile again. “Oh, you’re Kelly McGraw! I’m Beth Maninsky. We never did meet you at the closing.” She held out her hand.
“Closing?”
“Sure. We bought this house from you, but you gave your lawyer power of attorney, so we never officially got to meet you when we closed on the house. We love it, though. Did you stop by for old times’ sake?” She tried the smile again, but when I didn’t shake her hand, the grin faltered, and now she was looking as perplexed as I felt.
“Closing?” I said again. “I sold this house?”
She nodded, gazing at me warily.
From somewhere above, I heard the cry of a baby, short at first, then a full-on wail. Beth Maninsky’s eyes shot to the ceiling as if she could see through it.
“A baby?” I couldn’t seem to form a full sentence.
“Scottie. I should get him. Now can I help you with anything?”
I just stood there. What was happening?
“Kelly? Are you all right?”
Beth Maninsky looked almost scared now, so I just nodded and moved to the door, then out to the stoop. I stood there looking at the house, my house.
Beth Maninsky stood in the doorway, fairly blocking it with her body. “Can I call someone for you?” There was warmth in her voice.
It took me a second to answer. “No. I’ll go to my boyfriend’s place.”
“Okay.” The wail of the baby got louder behind her. She glanced in the house, then back at me. “You sure you’re okay?”
“When you…” I paused, barely able to say the words that didn’t seem true “…bought this house. Did you learn why I…sold it?”
“Our Realtor told us that you thought it was too big for one person.”
“Right.” I nodded as if I could convince myself that this was really happening, that someone named Beth Maninsky, who looked like Toni, owned my house.
“Nice to meet you,” Beth Maninsky said.
My front door closed, and I heard the lock click inside.
2
As I walked along Bissell Street again, the fall wind felt brittle instead of crisp and the city seemed cool and gray instead of filled with warm autumn tones. I didn’t notice the light on the buildings anymore or think about the photos I could take. Instead, I concentrated on figuring out what had happened. There had to be an explanation. I knew that. I hadn’t gone to college or worked in the straight-lines, think-inside-the-box world of finance for nothing. There was always a reason for things.
So I hoofed it all the way up to Ben’s place in Wrigleyville, entertaining several possibilities. One—this Beth Maninsky was a covert operative for the CIA who’d taken over my town house in order to set up an elaborate cover. Crazy, outlandish, I know, but I’m fond of spy novels, and it was the first potential that came to mind. Two—Beth Maninsky really was Ben’s high school girlfriend, Toni, who was still crazed about him and had somehow arranged to take my place in his life. This also seemed a little outrageous, since I’d only set out for the dry cleaners that morning. She would have needed to work pretty damn fast.
But was that actually true? Had I really left for the dry cleaners just a few hours ago? Suddenly I wasn’t sure. I stuck my hands in the pockets of my leather jacket and put my head down, concentrating on each step, each seam in the pavement. My sense of timing still seemed off. I couldn’t remember waking up that morning or going to my mother ship, Starbucks, for a Venti Nonfat White Chocolate Mocha, my usual Saturday-morning treat. Still, that kind of memory trick happened, didn’t it? It was like driving home on your normal route and suddenly discovering you’re in your driveway and yet you can’t recall the drive itself.
Something niggled in my brain—a third possibility. I really had sold my town house and I really couldn’t remember it. I felt even colder with the thought, and I turned my collar up against the wind. Ridiculous, I said silently. Preposterous.
Luckily, I didn’t have to argue with myself much longer because I’d reached Ben’s building, a squat, multi-unit place that made up for its lack of character with cheap rent and a great location, only a few blocks from Wrigley Field. I peered at the vertical list of names next to the buzzers, and, thank God, there it was. BENJAMIN THOMAS, fifth from the top, right where he should have been. I hit the buzzer.
A shot of static came over the intercom. “Who is it?” said a woman’s cheery voice.
“Sorry. Wrong buzzer.” Please, please, please let it have been the wrong one.
I peered at the list again, and with exaggerated slowness, I put my finger on the brown button next to Ben’s name and pressed.
Same staticky burst. Same woman’s voice—not as cheery this time—saying the same words.
I froze. Something was wrong. Really, really wrong. But somehow my eternal optimism (or maybe my eternal stupidity) kept insisting there was a logical reason for all of this—something I would laugh about later.
I couldn’t laugh now, though, couldn’t even manage a smile, just a simple question laden with trepidation. “Is Ben home?”
“Kelly?” the woman said, clearly irritated.
“Yes?”
“Jesus. Not again.” A fizz of static, and then the intercom went silent.
I stood chewing on my bottom lip once more, debating what to do—piss off this woman in Ben’s apartment by hitting the buzzer again or break in and kick her ass. After about fifteen seconds, someone appeared behind the glass door. I squinted and made out Ben’s small, lean frame, his rock-hard legs in blue jogging shorts. Raising my hand, I gave a half wave, then let it fall.
Ben opened the door, but he didn’t invite me in or even come out on the front stoop with me. He just sighed, holding the door open with one arm, shoving his other hand through his damp brown hair. He’d obviously just come back from running. He had that pink flush to his cheeks.
“Kell, you’ve got to cut this out.”
I tried to get my mind around his statement. I forced myself not to rush inside and hug him. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. Stopping by like this, calling at all hours. She wants me to get a restraining order.”
“Who?”
A chest-heaving exhalation. “We’ve had this conversation. Don’t make me go through it again. I love you. I always will.”
Just like you’ll always love Toni, I thought.
“But I’m with Therese now,” he continued, “and you have to accept that.”
I put my head in my hands and rubbed at my temples. Another possibility came to mind—this was all an elaborate hoax. Laney would jump out from behind Ben at any minute and scream, “We got you!” The problem was Laney would never be that cruel, nor would Ben. He may not have been the most romantic guy, but he was always kind.
“C’mere, Kell.” Ben stepped out and let the door close behind him. He grabbed me in a hug, just as I hoped he would. I could smell the clean, outdoor scent of his sweat and feel the muscles of his back beneath the long-sleeved T-shirt.
“I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t understand anything.” I squeezed him tight, hoping that this gesture would make it all go away, this whole horrible day, but too soon the embrace was over. He let me go, and I felt the cool air swirl around me again.
“I know it’s been rough, but you’ll get through this. You always do.” He pushed his hair off his face and gave me a smile I recognized—the one he saved for his grandmother or the restaurant managers he would cajole into giving us a table.
I opened my mouth to tell him what had happened this morning, how I suddenly couldn’t make sense of anything in my life, but he gave me that patronizing grin again.
“You’re tough.” He punched me lightly on the arm like we were buddies, like we hadn’t been lovers for four years, like we weren’t supposed to be engaged soon.
“Ben,” I said, trying to ignore his patent condescension, “something’s going on that I don’t understand. I don’t remember all sorts of things. I don’t remember us breaking up. I—”
“Kell, I just can’t do this again. I can’t rehash the whole thing over and over, okay?” He cupped my cheek for a second, the way you would a child who had food on his face.
I pulled my head away. “No, you don’t get it.”
“I do. I get that you’re going to make it through this. You’re going to be okay.” He spoke these last words in a soft, hang-in-there-kid kind of way that infuriated me.
I glanced down at a spot on the sidewalk that looked strangely like old blood, then back up at his pitying eyes. “You’re absolutely right. I’m going to be fine. Fantastic even.”
“There you go,” Ben said in what was probably the smuggest tone I’d ever heard. “That’s the ticket.”
Yeah, that’s the ticket all right, I thought. The ticket out of here. I didn’t have a clue what was going on, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me fall apart.
“I’ll see you around.” I tried to sound flip, like I didn’t care, but I could feel the tears welling in my eyes. “See you,” I said again, then turned away.
As I walked up the street, my head down, my hands in my pockets, I could hear Ben buzzing his apartment, and the woman’s voice say over the intercom, “Ben, is that you?”
“It’s me, hon. Let me up.”
I stopped at Chuck’s, the first bar I found. Inside, it was dark, with at least five different football games blaring from at least ten different TVs. The tables were full of people cheering and screaming, baskets of fries and pitchers of beer in front of them. I slipped onto a stool at the bar.
“What can I get you?” the bartender asked me. He leaned forward and dried a spot of water on the wood with a quick flick of his towel.
“Beer.”
“Okay. Well, we have twenty-three different labels, so what kind do you want?”
“Doesn’t matter.” I usually drank margaritas, but it seemed too festive a drink.
The bartender stood there for a long minute, staring at me, before he moved toward a silver tapper and picked up a glass.
What was happening to me? What had happened to my town house, to my relationship with Ben? I wished desperately that I could rewind the day back to that moment at the dry cleaners when I was being pissy about losing a pair of black pants and the fact that my job wasn’t so great. If I could just go back, I would truly realize how lucky I was right at that moment. I would appreciate it somehow.
But my mind kept skidding away from the dry cleaners and rushing through the rest of the day. Why hadn’t I known that my place had been sold, that Ben and I had broken up?
The bartender pushed a glass of amber beer in front of me without a word. I took a sip, and I made myself review what I did know about myself. Name: Kelly McGraw. That was correct, wasn’t it? Beth Maninsky seemed to know that Kelly McGraw used to live in her house, and Ben had called me Kell, so that had to be right.
What else? Parents: Sylvie and Ken McGraw, who’d had me while they were married for a very brief period and living in Fort Myers, Florida. My father was a complete shit who took off a year after my birth, and my mom reverted to her maiden name, Sylvie Custer, even though she hated it. It was too close to custard, she always said, and made her sound like some sort of pudding.
Childhood: my mom worked her way from being a secretary at a TV station to a production assistant there, and a few years after that, she married Danny Rosati, a local crime boss who was the subject of an exposé she’d helped put together. Danny wasn’t much of a dad to me. He always treated me more like a pet, patting me on the head and giving me treats when I was good. He did give me my first camera, though, and for that I’d always be grateful. My mom gave birth to my half-sister when I was six. She was named Delores after Danny’s mom, but except for Danny, everyone called her Dee. Dee was always a frail kid, but she had the greatest toothy smile and the loudest laugh you’d ever heard.
After my mom divorced Danny, we moved to Atlanta so she could work for a better TV station, and we stayed there until after my freshman year in high school, when we moved to Chicago. I joined the yearbook staff at my new school because at least I could take pictures, even if they were of people I didn’t know—and that was where I met Laney. We’d been best friends ever since. We went to different colleges but visited each other constantly and shot up our phone bills. After we graduated, we got an apartment together in Lakeview and shared it until a few years ago.
Laney is the most energetic person I’ve ever met. Sometimes she’ll call me at eight in the morning, before she leaves for her account exec job at a marketing firm, and she’ll tell me that she’s already done her laundry, given herself a leg wax and taken a kick-boxing class at the gym. Laney was the person, other than Ben, who’d saved me when Dee died last year in a car accident. My mom and I couldn’t comfort each other; we reminded each other too much of Dee. My mom left Chicago—fled really—for L.A. last April to take a job with an entertainment news show, and Laney and Ben became my only family in town.
What happened after April? I tried to think about stocks I’d researched at work, weekend trips I’d taken, street fairs I’d gone to over the summer. Nothing. I couldn’t remember anything from May up to now, the beginning of October, a span of five or so months.
I took a gulp of my beer, hoping it would help, maybe induce some kind of alcoholic flashback. Nothing again. I had to talk to someone about this. Ben was out. Laney was my only support now, and she was in Palm Beach. Or was she?
I sat up straighter on the stool and pushed my beer away, trying to concentrate. Laney had gone to a marketing conference in Palm Beach for a week. But was that this week? I’d been wrong about so many things today.
I threw five dollars on the bar and took off for the pay phone. As I pushed my way toward the rest rooms, I noticed that everyone else in the place seemed to be having a fantastic time. People were slapping high fives when touchdowns were scored, pouring beer for their friends, throwing their heads back and laughing at stories from the night before. I’d had days like this, spent watching football and drinking in a smoky bar when it was bright daylight outside. Those times had always seemed simple, uncomplicated, and yet while they were happening I’d be drifting off about whether I’d make partner, whether I should ask Ben to move in with me. Once again, I wished I could hit Rewind and just enjoy that time, instead of letting my mind take me somewhere else.
Luckily, there was a pay phone in the women’s bathroom, so the noise was dimmed. I dialed Laney’s number, thinking that even if her voice mail answered I could talk and talk, and she would pick it up eventually. Sometimes, when we got busy, Laney and I communicated solely by voice mail. We knew each other so well that we didn’t have to be on the phone to feel like we were talking to each other.
I was starting to think of how I would phrase it, this strange, scary day, when I heard the chipper tones of Laney’s hello.
“Oh, God, you’re home.” I was so relieved that I actually leaned my head on the dirty phone box. “You’re not in Palm Beach.”
“Palm Beach? That was months ago.”
A chilly feeling passed through me. “Lane, something’s wrong.”
“I know, sweetie. Now hold on for a second, so I can sit down.” I heard Laney closing her refrigerator and, a moment later, her slight exhalation as she sat on the couch. “Okay. Shoot.”
How did she know something was wrong with me? “Well, uh, for starters, apparently Ben and I aren’t dating anymore.”
“Apparently? Honey, he dumped you months ago, and you’ve got to move on. Really. He’s just not worth this moping around.”
“Months ago?” My voice came out tiny and scared.
“On your fucking birthday, remember?”
A group of women came into the bathroom, giggling and shoving past me.
I ducked my head and cupped my hand around the receiver. “That’s just it. I can’t remember.”
“Where are you?”
“Chuck’s.”
“The bar by Ben’s place?” Her voice went a little high. “You didn’t go to his apartment again, did you? Kell, you’ve got to—”
“Laney, listen to me. I don’t remember.” I enunciated my words. “I don’t remember selling my town house. I don’t remember Ben breaking up with me. I can’t seem to remember anything about the last five months.”
A small silence. “Are you kidding?”
“Why would I kid about that?” My voice got loud and one of the women swung around, raising her perfectly arched eyebrows at me. I ducked my head again. “I need your help. I don’t know what’s going on.”
“Whoa. Okay, look, I’ll jump in my car and be there in ten minutes. Wait for me outside.”
Laney’s light blue, beat-up Mustang convertible screeched to a stop in front of Chuck’s. Before I could take two steps, she’d jumped out and was running around the side of the car. Her dark brown hair was in its usual perfectly messed style with a swoop of bangs over one eye. She wore a black miniskirt, black knee-high boots and a fuzzy orange cashmere sweater.
She gave me a quick hug, then pulled back and held me at arm’s length. “You okay?”
“Not really,” I said, but then I couldn’t help smiling. Laney did that to me. Just being around her made me feel better.
“What are you grinning at, girl? You’ve totally freaked me out. Get in the car.” She gave me a pat on the ass and opened the passenger door.
“So what’s going on here?” she said when she’d taken the driver’s seat.
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
“First things first.” She lifted a cardboard coffee carrier, two white cups from Starbucks tucked inside, steam seeping from the openings in the top. “You sounded like you hadn’t gotten your fix yet.”
“Oh!” I said. “White chocolate mocha?”
She nodded.
“Nonfat?”
“Of course.”
“I love you.” I took a sip, the warm, creamy concoction sweet on my tongue.
I know that lots of people hate Starbucks. They complain that these little green-and-white stores are the devil’s work, the corporatization of the coffee world, but I just don’t care. I’ve tried the others, the mom-and-pop coffee shops, the trendy little tea places, and nobody—and I mean nobody—makes anything close to my white chocolate mocha. It’s comfort in a cup.
Laney squeezed my hand, then put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. “All right, tell me what happened today.”
I went through the whole thing—the dry cleaners, my town house, Beth Maninsky, and finally my talk with Ben. As I spoke I stared at the hula girl that was stuck to Laney’s dashboard, the one that made swivels of her hips each time the car bumped or turned. For some reason, the movement of the girl’s tiny hips soothed me. Laney had owned the hula girl since high school, and it had been on the dash of every car she’d had since. It was a permanent fixture, something I could recognize.
“Kell, I don’t get this,” Laney said. “Your memory was fine last week.”
“Was it?”
“Yeah.”
Silence filled the car.
“Jesus,” Laney said. “Are you telling me that you really can’t remember anything about the last five months?”
“Nada.”
She stared intently at the road. “What do you remember about your birthday?”
May 3. May 3. May 3. I chanted the date in my head as if it might conjure up some images, but I could only remember my thoughts about my birthday in the weeks leading up to it. I’d been expecting Ben to propose on that date. I’d told him in February, a few weeks after Dee died, that I wanted to get married, that I wanted to be engaged by my birthday, and Ben had indicated he wanted the same thing. So as that day drew near, I made sure to have my nails done to perfection. I’d shaved and plucked nearly every stray hair on my body. I’d even bought a new black dress to wear to dinner. But the actual day of my birthday? I couldn’t recall a thing, and I told Laney as much.
“Oh, boy.” She sighed.
“What? What happened?”
She gave me a sidelong glance. “Maybe we shouldn’t go there just yet. You should sleep, you know, then see how you feel.”
“Other than scared shitless, I feel fine. Tell me.”
“I don’t know…”
“Laney!”
“Are you sure?” she said. “Do you really want to hear it?”
“Of course.”
“Okay, well, I told you Ben dumped you that night.”
I felt my mouth form a tight line. “Yes, so you said.”
“He’s a complete shit. Absolutely no sense of timing. But that’s not the only thing that happened.”
“What,” I said, “is the other thing that happened?”
Laney stopped at a light and gave me a look. “I hate to be the one to tell you this.”
My stomach twisted. “Just get it out.”
“Bartley Brothers laid you off.” She squeezed my hand. Someone honked behind us, and Laney gave the driver the finger before pulling into the intersection.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. “Tell me that you are kidding.”
Laney shook her head. “Sorry, hon.”
“They fired me?”
“No, no. You got laid off. Major difference.”
“How so?”
“They gave you nine months’ severance pay.”
My mouth snapped shut for a moment. I didn’t know what to think about that. On one hand, I’d worked my ass off at that place, praying that it would pay off one day, that I’d be a partner eventually. To have that all washed down the toilet was maddening. But on the flip side, I’d been bordering on miserable there for the last few years, and I’d always secretly wanted to be one of those people who got axed with a golden parachute.
Then the effect of what Laney was saying hit me. “Are you telling me that I got laid off on my thirtieth birthday?”
“’Fraid so, sweetie.”
“And Ben broke up with me?”
“Pretty much.”
A few seconds went by. The hula girl’s hips swirled and swayed as Laney turned a corner. “That,” I said finally, “has got to be the worst goddamned birthday on the planet.”
The car was quiet for a minute, but pretty soon, a short, reluctant chuckle came out of my mouth. “It would almost be funny if it wasn’t so sad,” I said.
“Right. Under different circumstances.”
Another half chuckle, a sort of shocked cough, escaped me, and Laney followed with one of her own. And then I couldn’t help it—I did it again. A few seconds later we were both giggling, slowly and stupidly at first, until the sound caught a rhythm that rolled and grew louder, and soon our laughter filled the car. It felt like the first time I’d laughed in forever.
I was wiping my eyes, trying to get myself under control, when I noticed that Laney had stopped in a circular drive of one of the Lake Shore Drive high-rises near Addison.
“What’s going on?” I said. “What are we doing here?”
Laney pursed her mouth and gave a quick whistle, the way she did when she was nervous. “You don’t remember this, either?”
I glanced out the window at the building—tall, made of huge gray blocks, a plate-glass window in front of a large marble lobby. As far as I knew I’d never been in the place.
I looked back at Laney. “What’s to remember?”
“You live here.”
3
I walked into the lobby and took in the details, hoping for something that would trigger my memory, some plant or chair or something that said, Yes, I live in this building. But the gray marble floor seemed as unfamiliar as the front desk and the man sitting behind it, so when he stood and said, “Afternoon, Miss McGraw,” I almost choked.
Laney put her hand on my arm and steered me to the left. “How are you, Mike?” she called over her shoulder as we walked.
“Fine, Laney. Have a good one.”
“How does he know me?” I whispered.
“I told you,” Laney said, keeping her voice low, “you live here.”
“Then how does he know you?”
“Because I’m a fabulous friend, and since you won’t go out anymore, I visit you all the time. I know that guy better than you do.”
We’d reached the end of the marble hallway. Laney turned me to the right and walked me through double doors into a sitting room. At the end of the room was a set of elevators, where Laney was directing us.
“What do you mean, I won’t go out?” I said.
Laney made that nervous whistle again. “Well, aside from your frequent trips to Ben’s place, you rarely leave the house, so I bring you food, and we hang out and talk.”
I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment and tried to conjure an image of an apartment, Laney and I sitting on a couch talking, maybe giggling, but my mind was a blank.
“What do we talk about?”
We’d reached the elevators. Laney hit the button for the twelfth floor. “You know—Dee, your mom, Bartley Brothers. We talked about Ben a lot, of course. You kept saying that now that he’d broken up with you, you were never going to have your first kid before you were thirty-five. And you talked about how much you loved your town house.”
“I did love that place. So why did I sell it?”
“That’s what I’ve been asking you. You made a chunk of cash on it, but you weren’t really hurting for money. You just kept saying that if you weren’t going to live there with Ben, you weren’t going to live there at all.”
I scoffed. “That’s ridiculous.”
Laney stared at me for a second. “Exactly. You really don’t remember any of this, do you?”
I shook my head. “So what about you?” I said. “What’s been going on with you? I can’t remember that, either.”
“Well, we haven’t talked about that much.”
“Why?” And then I realized. “Oh, I’m such a horrible friend! I’m so sorry. You’ve been coming over here, listening to my woes, and we haven’t spent any time on you, is that it?”
Laney shrugged. “You needed me.”
“Well, of course, but that’s not an excuse.”
“Sure it is. Seriously, it was nice to be needed. It’s no big deal that we didn’t talk about me that much.”
“It is a big deal.” I followed her out of the elevator. “I’m really sorry.”
“You’d do the same for me.”
“Still—”
Laney put her hand on my shoulder and stared into my eyes. “You’ve been bad, Kell. I mean really, really depressed. It’s been a little scary, if you want to know the truth.”
Just those words felt scary to me. Generally, I can handle the crap that life dishes out. I’d seen my mom go through a million brief relationships and fall apart with each one, so I’d found my own way to hold it together. Even after Dee died, when I was the saddest and angriest I’d been in my whole life, I was still able to work, to go out with Laney for margaritas and talk about it. I was able to keep going.
Laney gave me a reassuring smile. “Do you have your key?”
I stuck my hands in my pockets and pulled out a few bills, a lip balm and a small key ring. Hanging from the ring were three keys, along with the little sombrero key chain that I got during a trip to Tijuana, and the silver pendant with the Bartley Brothers logo that the bank had given as a Christmas present last year. I made myself focus on the keys. One was my mailbox key—or rather, what I’d thought was my mailbox key this morning. The second was a small one for my gym locker, and then there was a third. It was a gold key with a fat, square head, and it seemed like it was glinting malevolently at me under the fluorescent lights of the hallway.
Laney pointed at it. “That’s the one.”
“Oh my God,” I said.
The place was a disaster. I don’t mean the structure of the apartment itself. The white walls were unmarred, and there was a large bedroom, an equally large living room with a street view, and a European-style kitchen with new appliances. But there was stuff everywhere, as if a tropical storm had blown through the place. My clothes were strewn over the bed, the couch, the dresser. Wads of Kleenex overflowed from the wastebaskets, and old mugs with crusty tea bags sat on the nightstand and coffee table. A ton of pictures I’d taken of Ben were on my dresser, as if it was a shrine to him.
“Christ,” I said. “It’s a train wreck.”
Laney nodded but stayed quiet.
I looked down at my feet and saw my favorite smoke-gray sweater crumpled next to the couch. “How could I do this to cashmere?” I said, picking it up.
I recognized most of the other stuff, too—my furniture, my clothes, my sage-green duvet on the bed and framed photos that I’d taken of Laney, my mom and Dee. But nothing else about the apartment seemed like mine.
“I must have been really down,” I said as we stood in the middle of the living room, surveying the damage.
It’s a known fact to Laney and me that whenever I feel crazy or out of control, my cleaning skills completely leave me. You can always tell the state of my life by the state of my apartment. I’d just never seen any of my places that bad before.
“That’s an understatement,” Laney said simply.
We walked through the place again, and this time I tried to take in more than the filth. I noticed a new phone in the kitchen, a white model that matched the appliances, with a plastic-covered panel that listed the names of people who were on speed dial. I’d written only three names there—Ben, Laney, Ellen.
“Who’s Ellen?” I asked.
Laney took a seat on one of the stools that looked into the kitchen. “Ellen Geiger.”
I blinked a few times. “Why is Ellen Geiger on my speed dial?”
Ellen Geiger was a psychiatrist I saw briefly after Dee died. I thought she was nice enough, a good person to talk to, and she had helped me sort out a few things. But I remember I felt I was coming out of my mourning, that I could deal with the pain and anger on my own, so after a while I just stopped going.
“You keep Ellen Geiger in business,” Laney said.
Too frightened to ask what she meant, I went about opening the cabinets. My nice set of pots and pans looked dusty and unused, my refrigerator and freezer nearly empty except for a loaf of bread that was starting to green around the edges and a tub of chocolate chip ice cream with severe freezer burn. I opened the cabinet next to the fridge, and there, in front of an old bag of pretzels and a few cans of tuna, were four brown plastic bottles. Prescription bottles. I picked up the first three, reading the medications noted on the white labels—Wellbutrin, Prozac, another Wellbutrin.
I looked at Laney. “Antidepressants?”
She nodded. “You’ve been trying a few of them.”
“And?”
“They don’t work so well.”
I turned back to the cupboard and looked at the fourth one. The label stated that it was for pain, and it bore bold orange warnings about taking it only with food. It had been prescribed by Dr. Markup, the general practitioner whom both Laney and I had seen for years.
“Pain relievers?” I asked Laney.
“You’ve been getting these nasty headaches. Migraines, I guess.”
This was all so confusing—this apartment that didn’t seem like mine, the depression and headaches I didn’t remember. I felt completely removed from the life I’d supposedly been leading. Maybe if I heard more about it…Maybe I needed to hear more.
I sat on the counter facing Laney. “Okay, tell me.”
“I did. You’ve been down.”
“No, I mean give me the whole chronology—how it went, when it started, you know.”
She grimaced and shifted on the stool. “Well, there’s no doubt that it started on your birthday. You were all giddy that morning. You called me from work to say that you were looking good, feeling good and ready for your dinner with Ben. Then an hour later, you called again from your cell phone, and I could barely understand a word you were saying.”
“I was crying?” I tried to jump-start some memory.
“No, you were raging. You know how you get sometimes?”
I nodded. It wasn’t something I was proud of, but I had an occasional flaring temper that I had no control over, which is why I’d wanted to strangle the dry cleaner this morning and the reason, a few hours ago, I’d been plotting ways to terminate everyone in my management company. Ex-management company, I reminded myself.
“You told me that they’d laid you off,” Laney continued. “Budget cuts or something. They tried to give you six months’ severance, you railroaded them into nine and that was it. They said you could stay on for a month or so. They were going to assign you a desk and a cubicle so you could look for a new job.”
“That’s insulting!”
“Exactly. You couldn’t believe that this place that should have been making you partner was offering to put you in a cube so you could try and start over somewhere else. You told them to go to hell and just walked out.”
“And so I wasn’t depressed yet?”
“Oh no.” Laney chuckled. “Just pissed off.”
“Okay, so then what?”
“Well, naturally you went shopping.”
I nodded. It made absolute sense to me. I was required to shop as part of my job because I was a retail analyst for Bartley Brothers, and it was my duty to keep up on trends, but I also used retail therapy as a pick-me-up. Laney did, too. It always did the heart good to spend money you shouldn’t on something that made you look or feel fantastic.
“So you bought these great shoes to go with the black dress you were wearing for dinner,” Laney said.
I was tempted to interrupt and ask for details about the fabric and the heel, but decided it probably wasn’t the time.
“Anyway,” Laney continued, “you were actually fine by the time Ben came to pick you up. He took you to the Everest Room. He told you how sorry he was that you got laid off, how ludicrous it was for them to let you go. You were sure he was going to propose. You said besides being fired you were having a great day. Everything felt perfect—the candles, the champagne—and so when he said he needed to talk about something, you thought that was it. But instead, he started this spiel about how he thought he’d be ready, he wanted to be ready to marry you, but he wasn’t. He gave you that bullshit line about how it wasn’t you, it was him.”
I crossed my arms and leaned back against the cabinet. “Please tell me I dumped the champagne bucket over his head.” If there ever was a legitimate time for one of my temper tantrums, that night sounded like it.
“I wish,” Laney said. “You just told him to leave, and once he was gone, you realized that you had to pay the bill.”
I tried to laugh, I really did, but Laney’s words sounded like a bad joke. A pathetic woman who’d given her man an ultimatum to marry her or else, sitting there with her “or else”—a full bottle of champagne and the bill. So instead of a laugh, my voice came out a groan, and then I couldn’t help it, I let the tears come.
“Honey.” Laney jumped up from the stool and came around the bar to hug me. “It’s okay.”
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled through my tears and Laney’s fuzzy sweater. “You’ve done this already, haven’t you?”
“Doesn’t matter.” She stroked my hair. “Let it out.”
How could Ben, the man I thought I wanted to marry, be so thoughtless? We’d been together for four years, forever it seemed. We were meant for each other. How could he just end it all when he’d given me the impression that he wanted the same thing I did?
As I sniffled and cried some more into Laney’s sweater, I started to wonder about Ben’s desires, what he had really wanted. It wasn’t that I didn’t remember the talks we’d had about marriage. Those had happened in February and March after Dee died, a time I recalled clearly. But maybe he hadn’t really wanted a life together. Maybe he simply hadn’t disagreed with me when I said I did.
“And so that was it?” I said to Laney, using a paper towel to wipe my eyes. “That’s when I got so depressed?”
“Yes and no.” Laney picked up a stray pen, staring at it as if she was thinking hard. “You were down, don’t get me wrong. You’d taken two big blows in one day, and only five months or so after Dee died. You were crying a lot and acting a little weird, but something else happened a few weeks later.”
“What?”
She started tapping the pen. “I don’t know. You wouldn’t tell me. But you went from an I-need-to-sit-around-in-my-pajamas-for-a-few-weeks kind of mood to an I’m-taking-drugs-and-seeing-a-therapist-and-stalking-Ben kind of mood.”
I jumped down from the counter. “I was stalking Ben?”
“Well, that’s his word. I’d just say that you were trying a little too hard to get him back. You would often wait for him outside work and, a couple of times, you went inside his apartment and waited there.”
“Jesus, that’s humiliating.”
“It was so unlike you. You sold the town house next, which I couldn’t believe, and then you rented this place. There’s nothing much to tell after that. You’ve pretty much been holed up here for months. I can’t believe you don’t remember this.”
“None of it. But you know what?” I started to clean up the kitchen, using a sponge to scrub a sticky, chocolatey-looking circle off the countertop. “I don’t want to remember. I feel like my old self, and why would I want to go back to that nastiness you’re telling me about?”
Laney stood up and started helping me. “I don’t want you to go back, either, but you should visit Ellen or Dr. Markup or somebody.”
“Dr. Markup? C’mon.” Dr. Markup is good for the basics like flu shots and such, but otherwise he’s a human prescription and referral machine. “You’ve got jaw pain? Here’s some codeine and the number of an oral surgeon. Something in your eye? Use these drops and go see my optometrist friend. Sore throat? Let me give you the name of an ear, nose and throat guy.”
“Well, it can’t be good for you not to remember,” Laney said.
“Maybe it is good, though. Maybe it’s my mind not wanting to be in that place anymore, wanting to get on with it.”
“Maybe,” Laney said, although she didn’t sound convinced.
“Look, I don’t remember what you’re talking about, being depressed and moping around this place, but I don’t want to. I’m hurt and pissed off as hell about Ben.” I took a deep breath and tried to shake him out of my mind. “And I miss my town house. Other than that, I feel okay—great even.” I was relieved to find that I was speaking the truth.
As I was talking, I opened what looked to be a hall closet just outside the kitchen to see what lurked in there, but before I could concentrate on the contents I noticed a full-length mirror hanging inside one of the doors. I turned to face the mirror, and I could feel my mouth dropping open.
“What is it?” Laney said from the kitchen.
I couldn’t talk. I was too busy looking at myself—a drawn, unhealthy-looking, unfashionably dressed self that I barely recognized. My light brown hair, which I normally wore straight to my shoulders, was dingy and frizzy, with enough split ends to conduct electricity. My face was pale, almost gray, my cheeks sunken in, my mossy-green eyes red around the rims. I had on the leather jacket I’d bought last winter, which was a still-cute blazer style, but the jeans I wore were baggy and at least ten years old. My sweater was olive-green and shapeless—one of Ben’s. And the pièce de résistance were the shoes. Lumpy, brown suede walking shoes that I’d bought for a hiking trip Ben and I took years ago. Comfy, sure, but I’d never worn them around town.
Laney had moved behind me and was looking over my shoulder in the mirror.
“When was the last time I went shopping?” I asked her.
“Fucking ages.”
I kept staring at the ugly shoes, the hideous sweater, the god-awful jeans. “I wouldn’t even know what to shop for anymore. I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“We might need a professional,” Laney said.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you remember the personal shopper at Saks? The one who helped me on the Herpes Project?”
A year ago, Laney had been in charge of a statewide herpes campaign targeted at the twenty-something bar crowd. They’d turned to a personal shopper at Saks to outfit the people featured in the ads, and, as a result, the men and women who were supposedly plagued with genital sores looked gorgeous and hip. It was enough to make you think herpes wasn’t so bad, after all.
I nodded, unable to take my eyes away from my image in the mirror.
“She was pretty damn good,” Laney said. “She’ll size you up and then bring in a million things, and you just keep trying them on until you find what you need.”
I took another long look at myself in the mirror before I slammed the door shut and turned to Laney. “Let’s get her on the phone. Now.”
4
An hour later, Laney and I were sitting on yellow silk couches, sipping tea in a huge dressing room of the personal shopping department of Saks on Michigan Avenue. The person that Laney knew wasn’t working, but another woman, named Melanie, had proclaimed it a slow weekend and told us to come in immediately.
Melanie was a willowy frosted-blonde who could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty. She exuded calm and elegance as she sat across from Laney and me, handing us photos and opening pages of fashion magazines, pointing to styles she thought might look good on me. We’d already established that I wanted mostly casual clothes, since I didn’t have a job, but Laney thought I should also get a few dressy things in case something came up. Since I’d been a hermit for the past five months, I couldn’t imagine what would “come up” to cause me to need a beaded silver gown, yet I told Melanie I’d try it on.
“All right, ladies,” she said, standing up and tucking a lock of her perfect blond hair behind her ear, “I have an idea of what you’re looking for, so now I need to measure Kelly.”
I stood on a pedestal, while Melanie’s arms flew around me with a cloth tape measure, hugging my hips, slipping around my breasts, my waist. “All right,” she said, “we’ll get you mostly fours and sixes.”
“Size four and six?”
“Definitely,” Melanie said, rolling up her tape measure.
This should have been a cause for celebration, since I’d always been an eight or a ten. Always. My whole life, no matter how hard I tried to lose a few pounds for bathing suit season, I always hovered around the same weight, the same sizes. Laney and I glanced at each other briefly, neither of us acknowledging exactly how or why I’d lost that weight. I reached down and felt my hipbones through the baggy jeans and sweater. They were prominent for the first time in my life. I must have been either eating like crap or barely eating at all.
“You ladies relax,” Melanie said with a calm smile, making notes on a small leather-covered notepad. “I’ll be back shortly.” Before she left, she poured us more tea, replenishing the biscuits she’d laid out on a silver tray.
“I could get used to being waited on like this,” I told Laney, making my voice light, trying to instill some levity back into the situation. I made a point of breaking a biscuit in half and popping it into my mouth.
“No shit.” She sipped her tea, holding her pinky out for effect, and we both laughed, relieved.
“I love you, you know.” I was suddenly struck with how amazing Laney must have been to me over the past months.
“I know.” She gave me a little smile over her teacup.
It scared me to think about what could have happened if Laney hadn’t been there for me, but if I thought too much about the last few months, they might come back. I might remember. And as odd as it felt to have this gap in my brain, it was better than the alternative.
“So tell me,” I said. “Are you still dating Archer?”
“Archer? Archer was eons ago!”
I imagined Archer in my head—a tall, skinny bass player in a jazz band, with stringy blond hair—but I couldn’t remember learning they weren’t dating anymore. Not that Laney and he had dated very long—not that she dated anyone for very long—but he was the last boyfriend I could recall.
“Is there someone new?”
She nodded.
“Name, please.”
“Well, his real name is Gary.”
“And what’s his not-so-real name?”
She smiled and did that whistle of hers. “Gear.”
“Excuse me?”
“Gear, okay? He calls himself Gear.”
“And what band is Gear in?” This wasn’t a hard question for me to come up with. Laney nearly always dated musicians. I think she’d done it initially to piss off her four older sisters and her parents, but after a few years of music men, Laney had begun to take guitar lessons, and now she was hooked on the whole scene. Her dream was to be in a band herself.
“High Gear.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. High Gear. They’re very talented, actually.”
“I’m sure. And how did you meet Mr. High Gear?”
“Well…” She nearly sighed. “I was taking a lesson.”
She looked at me for confirmation that I remembered the guitar lessons she took at the Old Town School of Music, and I nodded.
“So I was taking a lesson, working on this song I’d written.”
“You’re writing songs now? That’s amazing!”
“Lyrics, too. So anyway, the door was slightly open and I played this damn song for probably the whole hour, and when I opened the door, he was just sitting there in the hallway.”
“Gear?” I asked, trying not to giggle at the name, although Laney probably wouldn’t have noticed. She looked positively dreamy.
“He told me I was talented. He told me he thought my song was beautiful, and that was about three months ago. Three great months.”
“Wow.” I was struck by how romantic their meeting was. There was something so Shakespearean about him being drawn by her song.
It was completely different from the way I’d met Ben—a handshake at work when he started two years after me, and then an awkward, sloppy kiss a few weeks later following a Bartley Brothers happy hour.
I was about to ask Laney what kind of music High Gear played when Melanie sailed into the room holding aloft an armload of hangered clothes. “There’s more coming,” she said, “but this should get us started.”
For the next hour and a half, I tried on more outfits than I knew existed—black pants and jeans of every style, silk sweaters, wool pantsuits (“Good for job interviews, if you decide you want one,” Laney said), trendy skirts with splashy prints, clingy tops, leather boots, suede boots, short boots, high boots and every other shoe under the sun.
Ben used to like me in pastels—pink, powder-blue, lilac. “Soft and sweet,” he’d said. Although I didn’t despise those colors, I didn’t love them, either, and yet little by little my closet had become full of them. I wasn’t one of those women who would just change everything about herself in order to keep her man happy, but I had changed minutely, piece by piece. It was enough to eventually alter most of my wardrobe, to leave me feeling as if I didn’t know what colors I liked anymore.
I noticed now that I was gravitating more toward the basics, sturdy, elegant colors like black, tan, cream and gray. Colors you could build a whole wardrobe around.
Meanwhile, Laney sat on the couch, offering a running commentary on each piece. The problem was that she liked nearly everything.
“Lane,” I said, spinning around to face her. “I can’t buy every single thing.”
“I don’t know why not. You’ve got money to spare from your severance package, and you look amazing in everything.”
I turned back to the mirror and looked at the soft camel pants I had on with an ivory turtleneck and a pair of high-heeled camel boots. Okay, Laney had a point. It wasn’t that I thought I looked so fantastic, but the clothes were fitting me better than ever before. Where I’d been curvy in the past, I was more angular from the weight I’d lost—angular being an adjective I’d only dreamed of applying to myself in the past.
“The trousers look fabulous on you,” Melanie said. By this time, she had realized that I was definitely in a buying mood, and champagne had replaced the tea. She stood now with two other assistants, all of them studying me, nodding along with her.
I shrugged. “Okay, I’ll take the pants.”
“And now,” Melanie said, floating toward me with a garment bag hanging gingerly over her arms, “let’s try this.”
It was the gown from the photo, and it was stunning. I slipped it on, stepping into the high sandals they’d given me. The lining was silky and smooth. When I zipped the dress up, it felt like a second skin.
I came around the curtain, and as I stepped onto the pedestal I heard a gasp—Laney’s. I looked into the mirror and saw what she meant. It was spectacular. The dress was sleeveless and formfitting. It was cut so well, with its high neck and equally high slit, that it could have made anyone look good. The silver bugle beads glimmered with each movement as I turned this way and that. It was the most beautiful dress I’d ever seen.
I looked down at the price tag and tried not to swear. It was half a mortgage payment—if I’d still had a mortgage to pay off.
“You have to get it,” Laney said, a hand on her chest. “You look fabulous.”
“But it’s crazy money.”
“Don’t care.” Laney raised her champagne flute.
“Where would I wear it? I mean, what are the chances of me going to a gala or something if I’ve been needing antidepressants just to get out of the house?”
Melanie and her assistants sent each other questioning looks, probably wondering if they were dealing with an escapee from a mental hospital.
Laney shook her head and gave them a smile as if to say She’s kidding. “Kelly, it’s perfect on you. You have to have it. And who knows what will happen? Maybe there’ll be a black tie wedding.”
“Yeah, maybe Ben and Therese’s.” The thought almost made me fall off the heels.
Laney must have seen my stricken face because she jumped up, putting her arms around me from behind. “Look, this is a special dress. You probably won’t ever again find something this amazing. Think of it as a treat to yourself after everything you’ve gone through. And I’ll make you a deal. If after a year you haven’t found someplace to wear it, I’ll buy something fabulous, too, and we’ll take each other out for an outrageous night in our dresses.”
I looked at myself in the mirror again. I’d been so frugal for years, saving up to buy my town house, the one where Ben and I would start our lives together, and what did I have to show for it? Not a goddamn thing. I smoothed the dress over my stomach, although it hung perfectly. I watched the light glinting off the beads.
“Deal,” I said to Laney. I turned and hugged her back.
Fifteen minutes later, I was ready to go and wearing a new outfit—a silky, bronze sweater, a pair of dark jeans and tall, black leather boots. As I bent over to sign the credit card slip, I flipped my hair over my shoulder and got a rush of that damn-I-look-good feeling. It’d been a while. But then I got another rush, this one much more panicky, and my hand froze over the slip. What if Laney was wrong about how much money I had? What if I’d just rendered myself penniless?
“Everything all right?” Melanie said.
“Uh…” I tried not to focus on the grand total at the bottom. If Laney was wrong, if I was broke, I’d just have to return everything. “It’s fine,” I said, and I scrawled my signature with a flourish. “Thanks for everything.”
“Oh, it was a pleasure,” Melanie said. “A real pleasure.”
I’m sure it had been a great pleasure, since my whopping purchases had probably provided Melanie with her sales quota for the month, but I kept my mouth closed. Despite the moment of panic, I was entirely too pleased. I knew that this frivolous shopping spree couldn’t provide answers about my memory loss or stem the depression I feared might return; yet it had made me feel a hell of a lot better.
“May I make one more suggestion?” Melanie said.
She turned me around to the mirror and fingered my dull hair. “Can I send you to a friend of mine at Trevé?”
I knew what she was trying to say. My hair was hell. Something needed to be done. But Trevé was the hottest salon in the city.
“I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to get in there anytime soon,” I said.
“Let me try.”
She whipped out a cell phone the size of a Tic Tac box and raised it to her ear. “Tommy,” she said. “It’s Melanie from Saks. Tell Lino I’m calling in my favor. I need an appointment today.”
She paused, listening.
“No, it’s not for me. A client. Kelly McGraw.” Another pause. “Perfect,” she said with a smile. “Kisses to Lino.”
She clicked her phone off and looked at her watch. “You’ll have to get a cab. Lino is expecting you at Trevé in twenty minutes.”
We could hear the music pumping even before we walked in the door. A huge doorman with a bald head held the glass door for us. “Welcome to Trevé, ladies.”
“You’d think they’d have somebody with hair,” I said as we muscled my Saks bags through the doorway.
Laney laughed, or at least I could see her laughing, although it was hard to hear her above the thumping music. The front desk was at least six feet tall and spray-painted with gold graffiti. I stood on my tiptoes and screamed my name to the collagen-lipped receptionist, who led us upstairs to the stylists’ stations, where the music was, thank God, being played at a much lower volume.
I was seated on a chrome-and-leather chair, my bags piled high in a closet, while a stool was pulled up for Laney, and two more glasses of champagne were delivered to us.
“Feel free to lose your memory every Saturday so we can do this once a week,” Laney said.
I knew she meant it in a kidding way, but it reminded me of my horrible morning, of that sheer fear I’d felt when Beth Maninsky opened my door.
“You okay?” Laney looked a little chagrined at her comment.
I shook my head, shaking off the thoughts at the same time. “I’m great.”
I was leaning forward, my glass outstretched to toast with Laney, when I heard a cry. I swung around to see a short, deeply tanned man with dark hair and at least two coats of mascara around his dark eyes.
“My God!” he said, before he rattled off a litany of what sounded like Italian words. “Melanie didn’t tell me it was this bad.”
He spun my chair around so that I faced the mirror, and began pulling up strands of my hair, studying the split ends in the light.
“I take it you’re Lino,” Laney said. She put her champagne glass down on his station with a clunk. She had that defensive tone in her voice, the one that said, I’ll break your legs if you mess with my friend, and I loved her for it.
“Signorina,” he said in a heavy Italian accent, “I mean no harm.” He squeezed my shoulders and I looked at him in the mirror. His long lashes batted a few times. “You’re gorgeous,” he said to me. “Bellisima. Look at your body, your clothes. Beautiful! But this hair! I have no time for this.” He shuddered and turned to a boy who looked all of seventeen. “Get her shampooed. Now.”
After my head was scrubbed and then massaged until I was in a near dreamlike state by the underage minion, I was caped and back in front of Lino, who began furiously working away with his scissors.
“Shouldn’t you ask her what she wants?” Laney said, the snippiness in her tone matching the sound of the scissors.
“No.” Lino gave my hair another decisive clip. “I have no time for talking. I decide. Clearly, she does not know what is right for her hair. We’ll do a little cut, molto bene, and then you two ladies will be gone.”
“But that’s ridiculous!” Laney said. “You have to take your time. This is her hair we’re talking about! You need to find out what she wants. She’s an adult, she should decide—”
“Lane,” I said, holding my hand out. I couldn’t actually see her, since Lino had my wet, wonderful-smelling hair hanging in front of my face like a curtain. “It’s fine.”
“You don’t care what he does?”
I considered her question for a second. Usually, I was concerned about what Ben would say if I did something nuts with my makeup or hair, of what they would say at work, but that didn’t matter now, and I found myself pleasantly surprised. I was in for a change, and I told Laney as much.
“Mmm-hmm,” Lino said.
“So where are you from in Italy?” Laney asked. She sounded like she was trying to be nice, which I appreciated, since this guy had both my head and his sharp silver blades in his hands, but I sensed something mischievous in her voice. Although “Laney Pendleton” might not sound Italian, she was. Her mother’s family came from Milan. Laney herself had been to Italy at least ten times.
“Napoli,” Lino said, the scissors flying furiously.
“Oh, so you’ve been to Ravello, right?” she said.
“Mmm-hmm.” This time there was no smugness to his tone.
“Have you been to that hotel—what’s it called—Palazzo Mazzo?”
“Of course.”
Laney kept peppering him with questions about the Amalfi coast, about Positano and Capri and Sorrento. Lino grew more terse with each query, his scissor-snipping growing faster and faster until I felt I had to put a stop to it.
“What’s going on here?” I said, ducking my head away from the approaching blades.
Laney had a sadistic-looking grin on her face. “He’s not Italian.”
“Mon Dieu!” Lino said, slapping his hands to his chest so that the scissors were pointed at his neck as if he might off himself. “That’s not true!”
“Oh yes it is.” Laney’s face was smug, almost triumphant. “First of all, mon Dieu is French, not Italian. Second, there is no hotel named Palazzo Mazzo in Ravello, and Salerno is not right next to Capri. You’re a fraud!”
Behind me, Lino froze, the scissors poised at his neck for a long moment. Then he leaned over my shoulder, toward Laney. “Keep your voice down, you little hussy,” he said in a clear Southern accent.
Laney and I both gasped. “Where are you from? Mississippi?” I asked.
“Tennessee. And don’t you say a word.”
“What’s it worth to you?” Laney still wore that sadistic smile.
Lino glanced around, then leaned back into our little circle again. “I’ll give her a free color, I’ll pop for a makeup application and then you two get the hell out of here.”
“Done!” Laney said, and they shook hands over my cape.
Two hours later, I emerged from Trevé, my hair a gleaming, coppery-caramel color and styled in a chunky, layered bob that made me feel cutting edge (no pun intended) and gorgeous. My face had been cleansed and moisturized and powdered and plucked; my eyes were smoky with brown shadow; my lips glistened with gloss.
“Girl—” Laney looked me up and down as we stood trying to hail a cab “—we are going to have one hell of a night.”
5
We went to Laney’s, since I had no desire to go back to the high-rise I couldn’t remember, and I had enough clothes now to last me a month. Laney had a loft apartment in Old Town, with lots of exposed brick and artsy charm.
She cranked up a Rolling Stones CD and tossed me a beer. It was dark outside, but the apartment seemed to be glowing. Because of our afternoon champagne infusion, we were feeling a little goofy, and we danced around her kitchen for a while, singing into our beer bottles.
“All right,” Laney said after a few songs, “I need to redo my makeup and find an outfit that’s going to make me look half as amazing as you. Come to my room and help me decide what to wear.”
“Sure.”
As I walked through the living room toward the bedroom, my eyes caught on the baskets of photos Laney kept by her fireplace—one for childhood and family photos, one for high school and college, and two more for recent pictures.
“I think I’ll flip through these for a second,” I said, sinking onto her couch and picking up the high school/college basket.
“No problem.”
I think she sensed what I wanted—to test my memory, to make sure it wasn’t only the last five months that I couldn’t remember.
She turned the music down a little, and soon I could hear the slide of hangers and the opening of drawers from the gaping door of her bedroom.
The few photos on top of the basket were of Laney’s college friends, people I’d known vaguely from when I visited her during that time. Normally, I would have flipped through all of them, but I was more focused now. I was looking for pictures of myself.
The first one I came to was a shot of Laney and me in Tijuana, and I got a swoop of relief through my belly, because I could remember that time perfectly. I could even remember the hot Mexican guy who’d taken the picture. We’d been in San Diego for spring break, and we took a day trip into “TJ,” as all the San Diegans called it. We were giddy with the exchange rate and spent the day buying bright, coarse Mexican blankets and silver jewelry before we spent the rest of our money on tequila shots and margaritas. The photo in my hands was taken right before the last bus back across the border, and both Laney and I were rosy with drink, huge careless smiles playing on our faces.
As I dug deeper, I hit on smaller photos, rounded at the corners, taken when 3x5 was the usual photographic dimension. One of my favorites was there—Laney and I standing in front of a row of gray lockers, my Nikon on a strap around my neck, Laney clutching a clipboard to her chest. It had been taken only three days after we’d met, and once again, I had a near perfect memory of that day. We’d been just outside the yearbook office when someone had said they needed a photo of us for the staff section. Both Laney and I wore too much makeup and tidal wave bangs—bangs that arched above our foreheads and came to rest below one eye. Right before the photo was taken, Laney leaned in and threw her arm around me, a gesture that made me nearly weak with relief. I’d hated being new in the school, but after that moment, I knew I was going to be okay.
I picked through the basket, looking for pictures of my old boyfriends, thinking that maybe the breakup with Ben had something to do with the memory loss, and maybe I wouldn’t remember my exes. But I easily found and remembered a picture of my high school boyfriend, Ted, whom I’d lost my virginity to in the stockroom of the convenience store where he worked, and Steve, my college boyfriend, who looked stoned as he posed in front of one of the landscapes he’d painted.
Laney has always called me a serial monogamist, but it’s not really an accurate term. While it’s true that I’ve had almost as many boyfriends as I’ve had first dates, I don’t go from one to another to another without a break. In fact, I’ve always tried to avoid that pattern, having seen my mother date a long string of guys, only to end up with heartbreak. Instead, I have serious boyfriends, and if we break up, then I’m alone—no blind dates, no pickups in bars—until I find someone I truly, truly want to go on a date with. Laney claims this trait has weeded out far too many candidates and leaves no room for flings. Her point is that flings are, by design, to be had with completely inappropriate men—the ones you find attractive, but would never date for one reason or another. And yet the whole fling thing has always seemed a waste of time to me, particularly given my goal of being married with one kid by the time I’m thirty-five.
I picked up a stack of pictures toward the bottom of the basket and quickly discarded them one by one onto the coffee table like a blackjack dealer. With each slap of a picture, I mentally listed the who, where and when, building up a confidence that most of my memory was intact. Senior prom with Ted, me in a hideous chartreuse gown that make me look jaundiced; Laney and me after a football game, clearly about to pass out; on the beach in Florida with Laney’s sister, Sophia; Laney’s kleptomaniac college roommate, Tara. When I came to one of Laney, Dee and me, my hands froze. I’d been a senior in college, full of myself and how cool I was. Dee was still in high school and had used the trip as an excuse to “check out the campus,” when what she really wanted was to drink beer and hang out with me.
In the photo, Dee’s light brown hair is short, and she’s laughing—as she so often was—sandwiched between Laney and me, her head turned slightly toward mine. The pain of losing her rushed in like a hurricane.
According to Ellen Geiger, the psychiatrist I’d seen, everyone who suffers the loss of a loved one ruminates (her word) on the last time they spoke to or saw the person. I was not the patient to change that pattern. For months afterward, it was all I could think about—the last time I’d spoken to Dee and the last time I’d seen her, in January.
Dee had driven up from the University of Illinois to visit me, and we’d spent the weekend in our usual way—shopping during the day with Mom for clothes and boots and jewelry we didn’t need, and at night going out with Ben and Laney, regaling them with stories of the astounding mix of freaks and psychopaths our mother used to date. Ben and Laney adored Dee as much as I did. It was hard not to. She had a little-girl way of holding her head down and drawing her eyes up that made you want to take care of her, and yet she could drink like a Russian soldier. And that laugh of hers was impossible not to love—a buoyant, soft-at-first chuckle that grew into a belly laugh.
On Monday morning, when Dee was supposed to leave, it was a silver-gray day, the sidewalks slick with ice, the city covered in a freezing fog. I had an early meeting, and so I was gone before she got up, leaving a note to help herself to breakfast and have a safe trip back. The usual banalities. She called me at work, though, wanting to chat, telling me about some dream she had about lobsters, relating a story she’d seen on the news that morning, and finally asking me where I kept the coffee filters.
“Third cabinet from the fridge.” I tried not to sound annoyed. Dee loved long, chatty phone conversations (I didn’t) and she was always calling me at work during her study breaks, hoping for an hour-long talk.
“What about bagels?” Dee asked. “Do you have any bagels?”
“I don’t know, Dee, look around.” I scrolled through my e-mails, anxious to get back to work. My meeting had been disastrous, and the market had just opened.
“Maybe I should visit Mom at work before I leave. What do you think?”
“Whatever you want.”
“I haven’t even seen her office yet. Where’s the building? It’s somewhere on Michigan, right?”
“Michigan and Randolph.”
“Yeah, maybe I’ll just stop in. Although I do have two papers to write.”
At that point, Ronald Han, my boss, who was known around the office as Attila the Han, stopped by my desk and stood over me with a frown, brandishing a stack of faxes. He drew a line across his neck with his finger.
“I’ve got to go, Dee.”
“Oh, all right. But what do you think? Should I pop in to see Mom?”
Attila slapped the faxes on his palm.
“I think you should just get on the road.” I deduced that if she stopped in to see Mom, she might very well “pop in” to see me, too, and it was proving to be a much too hectic day for visitors.
“Yeah, you’re probably right.”
“Okay, see you then,” I said, and hung up.
Two hours later, I got a call from the state police, and two hours after that I saw Dee for the last time when I identified her bloody body at Cook County Hospital.
The memory of that morning reverberated in my brain now until I had a hard time breathing, wondering if maybe I was going under again, if I would soon forget this moment, too. But after a second, the air was a little clearer, and I was still there, still holding her picture, still missing her like crazy. At least, I consoled myself, I remembered. I seemed to recall everything about myself and my history except the very recent past.
With that thought, I picked up Laney’s latest basket of pictures, the ones taken during the last few years, and sure enough, I seemed to recognize all those as well. Actually all but one—a photo of Laney and me leaning together at a lunch table. I recognized the restaurant, a brunch place where we frequently met on Sunday mornings to dissect our weekends. Based on our clothes, the photo had probably been taken in summer…but I couldn’t remember having this picture taken at all. My earlier confidence evaporated, leaving a hollow feeling in my stomach.
I noticed how odd I looked in the photo. It wasn’t my hair, which was pulled back the way I used to often wear it, or my outfit of khaki shorts and a T-shirt. It was my face, and the utter lack of a genuine expression on it. My head was next to Laney’s, and she was smiling widely, but my face was frozen. Sure, I was smiling, but it was forced and tight, the grin failing to reach my eyes.
Laney slid into the room then, holding her hands away from her body for an outfit inspection.
“Adorable,” I said. She wore a shorter black skirt, a sweater in a deep wine color and matching lipstick.
“Thanks.” She dropped her hands. “What’s that?” She came around the couch and stood behind me, looking over my shoulder.
I lifted the photo so she could see. “It doesn’t even look like me.”
A second went by. “It really wasn’t you,” she said. “You hadn’t been you for a long time.”
I looked at my grim image one more time before I tucked it, facedown, into the bottom of the basket.
“Where are we going?” I’d been so distracted by my haunted face in that picture that it hadn’t dawned on me to ask the question until we were already in a cab, flying down Lincoln Avenue, past lit-up bars and restaurants and outcroppings of brick town houses much like the one I used to own.
“Tarringtons,” Laney said.
Tarringtons was one of our old haunts, a place where we used to know each and every bartender. I couldn’t say when I’d last been there, but I was sure it had been over a year. Ben and I had fallen into that relationship stage where we didn’t go out that often, happy to stay home, tucked away in the town house, making linguini and watching movies (weird little independent films if it was my night to pick, The Godfather or some other mobster flick if it was his). The problem with that stage, of course, is that when you come out of the relationship, as I apparently had, you feel odd going back into the old stage, the go-out-every-night-and-make-witty-small-talk stage. I hoped I was up to it.
The smoke hung like nimbus clouds from the ceiling as Laney and I walked in. Tarringtons was a long, thin, oak-lined place with a wooden bar to the left, the rest of the place scattered with stools and tall round tables. At the front, a shaggy guy played acoustic Van Morrison tunes.
We made our way to the bar and snagged the last two empty stools. Laney ordered margaritas, our cocktail of choice. I started to ask her for more details about Gear, but we were soon interrupted by a shout and a round of hugs from Jess and Steve, two friends of ours from Laney’s days at an advertising agency. Jess and Steve both still worked there (at least as far as I knew), and they both still did everything together, but for different reasons now. For years, while they were “just friends,” we were constantly telling Jess that they should have sex and get it over with, but she swore they weren’t like that. Then one day, a year and a half ago, they’d announced that they were, in fact, like that. They were in love, they’d discovered, and a few months later they were engaged. We’d been hearing about the wedding plans all year and in fact, if I remembered correctly, it was coming up soon.
“Oh my God,” Jess said. “Is it Kelly McGraw, blast from the past, or is it a vision?”
“It’s me,” I said, letting myself be pulled into another one of Jess’s surprisingly strong hugs. Everything about Jess was tiny—her miniature frame, her rosebud mouth, her hands and feet—and although she hated being called “cute,” she was probably going to be stuck with the term her whole life. Steve was just the opposite. Tall and gangly, with an unfortunate resemblance to Ichabod Crane.
“You look unbelievable,” Jess said. “Where have you been and what have you done to yourself?”
“We had a little makeover day,” Laney said. “Shopping at Saks and then the works at Trevé.”
I smiled at her, thankful for her answer and the diversion from the question about where I’d been for so long. I wasn’t prepared to broadcast my memory loss, and I couldn’t very well use Ben as an excuse for not being around, since everyone probably knew we’d broken up months ago.
“I won’t even ask what you spent,” Jess said, “but whatever it was, it was worth it. You look beautiful!”
Behind her Steve nodded, and I thanked them profusely, the compliments making me sit taller on my bar stool.
“So the wedding’s soon, right?” I asked as Laney turned to the bar and ordered drinks for Steve and Jess.
“One week from today,” Steve said. “According to the schedule Jess set, we should be home right now writing out place cards, but we needed a break.”
“He needed a break,” Jess said. “Anyway, Kell, we’re so bummed you can’t be there.”
I couldn’t be there? Why not? These were two of my good friends. An uncomfortable silence fell.
“Right. Well, I was going to be busy.” I glanced at Laney for some help.
“With that charity thing,” she said.
I had no idea what she was talking about, but by her expression and the way she was nodding slowly I could tell that she was making it up. I had, apparently, declined the wedding invitation because I had another date with my couch and my antidepressants.
“Right,” I said. “The charity thing. But I’m not doing that anymore, am I?”
“No,” Laney said. “It got cancelled, right?”
“Right. So I’ll be able to go, after all. Is that okay?”
“We’d love it,” Jess said, but she and Steve exchanged worried looks. “The thing is we already turned in our seating chart. I don’t know if we can change it.”
“I’ve got an idea,” Laney said. “I was planning on bringing Gear, but he was going to have to leave early to go to some gig, so why don’t I just bring Kelly as my date. Would that work?”
“That would be perfect!” Jess said in a relieved voice. “I’m so glad you’ll be there.”
“Me, too.” I squeezed Laney’s hand.
I loved being out and about like this, loved seeing my friends. So why hadn’t I done it for so long? Why had I holed myself up in that apartment and turned down a wedding invitation? I wouldn’t think about it. Not now—maybe not ever.
I helped Laney order another round of drinks, then more cocktails when other friends arrived. We made a tight circle near the bar, shouting over the music, laughing at old stories, clinking glasses. And then I felt him. My mouth slowed down, my head turned. Ben. Pushing through the crowd. He looked handsome in a thick wool sweater, his brown hair tamed and combed away from his face, his cheeks a little flushed from the cold outside. Behind him, another Toni look-alike trailed along, and when I looked closer, I could see they were holding hands. Therese. The girlfriend.
Ben was smiling, looking right at our group, and I was panicked at how I was supposed to act. From what Laney had told me, I’d been trailing after Ben like a puppy for the last few months. But if Ben or Therese were unhappy about seeing me, they didn’t show it. They walked up to us, calling hello, hugging a few people, while Laney glared at him. Ben knew Steve from college, but clearly Laney hadn’t expected him to be here tonight.
When he reached us, Ben nodded at Laney. I felt my heart beating hard under my new bronze sweater, and I wondered if anyone could hear it. Laney gave him a terse nod back, and then Ben turned to me with an expectant smile.
“I’m Ben,” he said, apparently not recognizing me. He started to raise his hand to shake mine, but then froze, the smile dropping from his face. “Kell?”
“Hi, Ben.” Be brave. Be brave.
He gave a little shake of his head, the one that reminded me of a dog shaking water off its coat, the gesture he made when he was trying to clear his brain of something he couldn’t make sense of.
“Jeez.” He stared at my hair, my face, my clothes. “What…ah…what happened to you?”
He made it sound as if I’d been mauled by wild dogs.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it like that. You just look so different, especially from this morning.”
Was it only that morning that I’d stood in front of his apartment, frenetically pushing the buzzer?
“You look great, though.” His words came fast now, almost tripping over themselves. “You look better and beautiful, and I’m glad to see it, and—”
Just then the woman I assumed to be Therese wedged herself into our conversation and cast a look of disdain at me, then one at Ben for good measure.
“Hi,” I said, as politely as possible. “I’m Kelly.”
“I know who you are.” She raked her hands through her sandy, streaked hair and shot me an expression of pure disgust.
I felt myself falter. It had been such a shock to be so close to Ben that I’d forgotten for a second that I’d met this woman sometime over the last five months while I was hounding her boyfriend.
“I need to use the powder room,” Laney said in a too loud voice. “Kell?”
“Sure,” I said, grateful beyond belief.
“Are you all right?” Laney asked once we were in the safe confines of the tiny pink bathroom. She gripped my shoulders and peered at my face.
“I was just surprised, that’s all.” It was true, and I was also surprised to find that I didn’t feel like falling apart. I didn’t feel like crying or shrieking. I had just been so startled to see him, the guy whose kids I thought I’d have, whose underwear I thought I’d wash for the rest of my life. How strange it was to have known him so intimately—to know the way he squeezed his toothpaste tube into a triangular roll and the way he liked to have his forehead rubbed when he had a headache—and yet not to have a relationship with him anymore.
Laney hugged me, then proceeded to give me a rousing pep talk about not letting him get to me, how I was gorgeous and smart and starting a new chapter in my life that didn’t involve him.
By the time we made it back to the bar, I was better. We ordered another round, and I was just starting to enjoy a chat with Jess about their honeymoon plans when Ben interrupted.
“Can I have a second?” He shot me his meaningful look, the one he’d probably given me on my birthday before he’d handed me my walking papers instead of a diamond solitaire.
Jess patted me on the shoulder as if to say good luck, then left us alone.
“So.” Ben looked me up and down again. “You must have had some day.”
“A great day, actually. A little shopping with Laney.”
“And a new haircut.”
I said nothing. Did he really want to talk about my hair?
“You really look amazing.”
“Thanks.” I hated myself for being flattered.
“Well, anyway,” he said, with another doggy shake of his head, “Therese asked me to speak to you about today.”
I looked over my shoulder at his girlfriend who was pretending to be engrossed in a conversation with Steve, but I could sense her antennae pointed in our direction. “Yeah, I’m sorry about that.”
“This coming over to my place really has to stop.”
“I know. It’s done. It won’t happen again.”
He gave me a look of patent disbelief. “Seriously, Kell, Therese is getting upset. This can’t keep happening.”
His mouth continued to move, talking on and on about how poor little Therese could barely sleep, how I needed to get on with my life, et cetera. The more he talked, the more I wanted to laugh, because right then the thought of waiting for Ben at work or calling him repeatedly or buzzing his apartment was ludicrous to me. He’d dumped me, the asshole, and although I still had a hard time wrapping my mind around that, I wasn’t stalker material. I couldn’t believe I’d ever gotten close to it.
Finally I interrupted him, putting a hand on his arm. “I can’t even remember doing those things you’re talking about, but I promise you, it won’t ever happen again. I’ve had a little memory problem….” I let my words trail off, suddenly unsure whether I wanted to admit to anyone other than Laney my loss of memory. Would people think me crazy? Was I crazy?
“What are you talking about?” He actually looked concerned, his gray-brown eyes worried and blinking, and that expression got to me. I found myself telling him the whole story of my day, explaining that I had no recollection of us breaking up or the way I’d been unwilling to let him go.
“Are you joking?” he asked a few times, his eyes skeptical now, as if this might be another one of my crafty ploys to get him back.
“It’s true. I can’t remember my birthday or anything after that until today. But I feel okay.”
“Well, shouldn’t you go to a doctor or something? Get yourself checked out?”
I made a show of holding out my arms, looking down at my legs. “Everything else is intact, so…” I shrugged.
“I don’t know.” He fingered the dark-brown freckle on his right cheekbone. That freckle had always made him self-conscious, because it resembled a speck of dirt, and people were forever telling him he had something on his face. But I used to love that spot. I’d kiss it whenever he walked in my door.
“You do look good.” His eyes trailed over me again.
I wanted to make a snappy retort, something like Yes, I look damn good and you’re not getting any of it, but I kept quiet.
“So how’s Bartley Brothers?” I didn’t want to talk about us or my memory any longer, but wanted to occupy Ben for a while, just to piss off Therese. “How’s Attila?”
“Demoted. He’s pushing paper,” Ben said.
“No!”
Ben nodded. “Lots of people are getting moved around or let go.”
“Yeah, so I heard.”
“Well, obviously. You’d know that since you…”
“Got fired.”
“Right.”
There was an uncomfortable pause.
“So tell me what happened to Attila,” I said.
Ben launched into a story about Attila being investigated for insider information right around the time of the budget cuts. From there, our conversation was easy, catching up on all our co-workers—my ex-co-workers—Ben telling me stories about trades gone awry, and bringing me up-to-date on the market.
We were laughing about another Attila story when Therese sauntered up to us and placed a proprietary hand on his arm.
“Benji,” she said—and I couldn’t help it; I snorted. Benji was a nickname he hated, the name Ben’s brothers used to make fun of him. Both of his brothers were much bigger. They excelled at football and other bone-crunching sports, while Ben had been relegated to running and tennis.
Ben sent me a look as if to say, Shut up, please. I tried to quell the giggles.
“I’m ready to go,” Therese said, shooting me little knives with her eyes. “It’s getting way too uncomfortable in here.”
“How about one more and then we’ll head out?” Ben said.
Therese’s bottom lip dropped a little. I got the impression that she wasn’t used to Ben saying no to her. “I want to go now. We’ve got to be at my mother’s for brunch tomorrow, remember?” She sent me a look of triumph, clearly expecting me to be crushed by this news. Strangely, I wasn’t. In fact, I felt so much better now that Ben and I had had a normal conversation.
“Sure,” Ben said, “I was just updating Kelly on what’s going on at Bartley.”
“Great. Did you tell her that you made partner?”
Ben sent a quick, guilty look in my direction.
My good mood, my ease at talking to Ben, evaporated like steam. “What? When?”
“Last week,” Therese bragged.
I fought hard not to smack her.
“Is that true?” I said to Ben. I was the one who was supposed to make partner first. Me. Ben had started at Bartley two years after me. I was next in line. How had I gotten the ax while he was elected to goddamn partnership status? I felt my neck go red.
Ben nodded sheepishly.
“He deserves it,” Therese said. “He’s worked really hard and—”
“Excuse me,” I said. “Could you shut up for one minute?”
Her eyes narrowed, and she sent a glance at Ben as if to say, Are you going to let her talk to me like that?
“Kell,” he said. “Take it easy. It just happened. I didn’t even know it was coming.”
Something about the way he had said that, the way his words got incrementally softer at the end of the sentence and the way his mouth became tight, told me that he had damn well known it was coming. He probably knew back in May. For a horrified moment, I wondered if he’d known that I was going to be fired, too. I stood there, completely stumped for words, wishing my temper would take over and do something rash that I would later regret—something like head-butting Ben—but nothing came. Finally, Therese tugged on his sleeve.
He drained the rest of his beer. “I’m sorry, Kell. Good to see you.”
I searched my brain for a witty comeback, something that would erase the smirk from Therese’s face, but once again I came up blank. A pregnant quiet enveloped us.
“Ben, let’s go,” Therese said.
He hesitated, still standing before me as if he might say something else.
“Oh, please,” Therese said, before he got the chance. She clamped a hand on his arm and dragged him away.
When they reached the door, Therese disappeared through it, but Ben turned around and for the longest moment held my eyes.
My temper flared after Ben left, obviously the wrong time, but I was immune to a cure, and so I sat at the bar, boring poor Jess and Steve and Laney about the manipulative machinations of Bartley Brothers and the treachery of Ben, all the while trying to douse my anger with cocktails. Laney eventually wrenched the conversation away from me and back to Jess and Steve’s wedding, and they were happy to prattle on about place settings and invitations and the band vs. DJ debate until we got the “last call” shout from the bartender.
After Tarringtons closed, and Laney had convinced me that no convenience store in the city sold margarita mix, she and I lay snug in her king-size bed, gossiping maliciously about Therese, giggling about Ben not recognizing me, and rehashing—at least fifty times—my conversation with him. Although still pissed off about him being made partner ahead of me, about him possibly knowing that I would be fired, I felt much better now that I’d gotten my dose of rage. And oddly enough, I felt a tipsy contentment around me. It’d been eons since Laney and I had had a late-night chat like this, a fact that made me sad. It was Laney who’d been with me every step of the way though the traumas of high school, the newfound freedom of college and the often painful days of early adulthood, and yet it was Ben I’d ended up spending so much time with. Ben, who’d eventually decided that the time meant nothing.
“He is such a fucker,” I said, the margaritas making my tongue loose, causing me to repeat myself over and over.
Laney gave me a light smack on the arm. “Stop already. It’s unhealthy. Let’s talk about something else.”
“Name it.”
“Are you sure you’re all right with this no-memory thing? I mean, you’ve had a lot going on today, and it’s all right to fall apart.”
I turned on my side to face her. “I feel better than I ever have.”
“Well, don’t think that you have to put on a tough act. You can still fall apart if you want.”
“Nope. I’ve done enough of that.”
Laney was silent for a second, and I could hear the whoosh of cars passing by her building. “It’s just that something was definitely wrong. Something more than Ben and the job,” she said.
“It was obviously something that didn’t matter.”
“Maybe.”
Her tone made me feel a little chilly, and I buried myself deeper under her duvet. What was it that I hadn’t told anyone? Did it matter now? On one hand, if whatever it was could explain why I couldn’t remember this summer, I wanted to know it. For some reason, I truly wanted to learn why this odd memory loss had happened to me. But on the other hand, if I remembered those five months, wouldn’t I just slip back into that depression? I wanted the whys and the hows of the situation, but I feared the details. I felt as if my memory was a house of cards, wobbly and shaky and hollow inside. I was afraid that if I came too close to that emptiness, that missing time, everything would fall in on me.
“Look, Lane,” I said, “I’ve already spent too much time on whatever it was, and maybe that’s why I feel so good now, because I let myself be depressed until I couldn’t be depressed anymore.”
“Shouldn’t you try to figure out more about what was going on with you during that time? I could help you, you know. We could go talk to Ellen or somebody, maybe do some research.” Laney’s voice sounded so sweet, so helpful and slightly worried, and it made me tremble a little inside.
I squeezed her arm, as much to reassure her as myself. “It’s okay. As far as I can tell, nothing good happened during those months, right?”
“Right,” she said, a hint of doubt lingering in her voice.
“Right.” I rolled over, turning my back to her. “And what you don’t know can’t hurt you.”
6
On Sunday, I suffered an intense headache. I usually didn’t feel so bad after a night of drinking, but I probably hadn’t been drinking much for five months. I tried not to think about the headaches Laney had told me about, the ones I suffered during those months I was holed up in my apartment.
After Laney plied me with ibuprofen, she and I joined Gear and the rest of his High Gear band to watch the Bears game at a little corner pub. I’m not sure what I expected of Laney’s latest boyfriend—maybe heroin at halftime?—but he wasn’t exactly the stereotypical dude in a heavy metal band. Oh sure, he had the requisite tattoos on his arms (barbed wire on the right, some Chinese lettering on the left) and he wore a ripped black T-shirt and black army boots, but Gear was warm and friendly, too, which surprised me.
“So this is the infamous Kelly,” he said when Laney introduced us.
“Infamous? I hope that’s a good thing.” I held out my hand, but he pulled me into a hug. He smelled like shaving cream and cigarettes.
“You’re infamous because Laney Bug is always talking about you.”
“Laney Bug?” I looked over my shoulder at Laney, who groaned a little, probably realizing that she would never be able to live down this nickname. I could almost see us at age ninety, me taunting her, Oh Laney Bug, can you bring me my tea, please?
The rest of Gear’s band weren’t quite as outgoing or sweet, but we spent a happy afternoon with them eating pizza, watching football and screaming at the TV when the Bears messed up. I drank a few beers in a hair-of-the-dog effort, and didn’t think about anything else for hours—not Ben or my town house or my lack of employment.
Monday morning, I rolled over in Laney’s bed and stretched, feeling, once again, intensely headachy from the alcohol. Apparently, I couldn’t hold my liquor like I used to. I heard the hum of Laney’s hair dryer from the bathroom, followed by the clatter of makeup on the tile floor and Laney’s curse.
“You okay in there, Laney Bug?” I yelled, stretching my legs under her comfy duvet.
“Late,” she called back, ignoring my use of her new nickname. “Totally late.”
A second later, she tore out of the bathroom, yanked open her closet and stepped into a pair of shoes.
“What time did you get up?” I asked.
“Six.”
I turned and squinted at her bedside clock. It was eight-thirty. “And what have you been doing?”
“Answered e-mail, did a Tae-Bo tape, returned a few phone calls.”
“Okay, now I feel like a lazy ass.”
“You need to take it easy.” She picked up her purse by the bedside and squeezed my shoulder. “Stay as long as you want, all right? And call me at work if you need anything.”
“Thanks.” I watched her run into the kitchen and grab an apple out of a bowl. “Have a good day!” I called, but she was already out the door.
With Laney gone, the apartment seemed empty and vast. I swallowed some Advil, then took one of the books from her shelf, a memoir about a woman who’d followed the Grateful Dead. I figured that maybe I’d lie in bed all day and read. The book wasn’t that interesting, though, at least not after the first three acid trips, and within an hour I was antsy. I knew I should probably go back to my own apartment, but the thought brought only a queasy feeling.
To thank Laney for everything she’d done for me lately, I ignored the pain in my head and the nausea in my stomach and cleaned up her place. Then I made myself a bowl of granola and decided I’d just spend a lazy day in front of the TV.
The first few hours went okay, especially after my headache eased. I watched the news and business stations, trying to catch up on the market, studying the Bloomberg as I used to for the ticker symbols that signaled the retail stocks. There were a couple of surprises, a few stocks that were way higher than when I’d followed them, and I found myself analyzing the rest of the market and how it might affect these companies. After a while, though, I didn’t care all that much. It was a relief just to flip the channel.
Next, I tried the talk shows and the soaps, which kept my interest for a whole forty minutes. What, exactly, was I going to do with the rest of my day? A better question—what had I done when I was home for five months? I couldn’t fathom it.
A thought came to me. Laney had said that I had more than enough money to live on because of the severance pay from Bartley Brothers and the sale of my town house. But what if I’d somehow spent that money during those five months? Laney had assumed I was holed up in that high-rise, but what if I’d actually been blowing the cash on God-knows-what, maybe a sailboat or a Porsche for Ben or a diamond engagement ring for myself?
I found Laney’s cordless phone, dialing the number for my bank’s automated system. Leaning against the kitchen fridge, I punched in my social security number, relieved that I remembered it, then my banking code, which came just as easily. A second later, an inflectionless voice informed me that I had a nice chunk of money in my account, more than I’d ever had at one time. Laney had been right, after all. I hadn’t blown it. I didn’t have to work right now if I didn’t want to.
But what did people do if they didn’t work? I put the phone on the counter with a clunk. Most women I knew who were officially unemployed were unofficially working their asses off in their own homes, raising their kids. I didn’t have kids, obviously. Wasn’t even on the path to eventual children. So what to do?
I could do anything I wanted with my life, I realized. It was mine to shape. I suppose that had always been true, but before, I’d felt the invisible constraints of the need for money, or my relationship with Ben, or the partnership track I thought I was on. Yet none of those concerns existed anymore.
My life was a clean slate. What did I want to do with it?
I found a pad of paper in Laney’s desk and settled on the couch again. “New Possible Careers,” I wrote at the top. I sat there for a full five minutes staring at the paper. Why wasn’t anything coming to me? Anything, I told myself, write anything that comes to mind. I shook my hand to relax it and scribbled the following list:
Journalist
Clothing Store Owner
Music Video Dancer
Ambassador to France
A good list, excellent really. These were the jobs that I’d always thought so glamorous and cool. I could almost see myself as a political journalist, a pen tucked behind one ear, the president at the podium, pointing to me and saying, “Kelly,” because of course I’d know the president. The problem was that in reality I had no writing skills to speak of and it probably took twenty years of hard-core newspaper journalism to get on the White House beat.
All the other possible careers I’d listed had impediments, too. I’d love to have my own clothing store, to be able to change outfits in the middle of the day just because I could, but I knew that owning a store was a massive amount of hard work. And as much as I’d been interested in the retail stocks and my own shopping, I really couldn’t envision myself standing in the same shop day after day.
As for the music video career, well, I couldn’t imagine what would be more fun than wearing a don’t-fuck-with-me face and shaking my thing behind J. Lo or whoever, but I could dance about as well as I could remember the last five months. Ditto for the ambassador to France gig. I couldn’t speak French.
I crossed out the list and tore the paper off, giving myself a fresh sheet. I would concentrate on the things that I could do, the activities that truly gave me pleasure, whether or not they could lead to a career.
The thing that came immediately out of the pen was “Photography.” Ever since my stepfather, Danny, had given me that Nikon, a gift I later heard my mother say was “probably hot,” I’d loved taking pictures. As a kid, it was something to do, something to play around with, a way to let myself be part of a crowd while still hiding behind the safety of a lens. As I got older, I realized that I was a natural at it. I could study the light on a sidewalk and realize how it would appear as a pattern in a black-and-white photo, and I knew how to take portraits from different ranges and angles to make the subject appear more studious or glamorous or thoughtful. Ben had even given me classes at a local university as a gift, and for the last few years I’d been taking them weekly. Was I still taking those classes?
I made a note to follow up on this issue, then wrote, “Shopping.” Definitely one of my great loves, something I’d already made into a career of sorts, but I wasn’t a retail analyst anymore, and I’d already done enough shopping on Saturday. I could probably get an analyst job at another investment firm—I knew enough people in the business; I could work my way up again—and eventually I’d be a partner somewhere else, just like Ben. Yet, even as I thought this, the realization came to me that I didn’t have to work right now, and that knowledge took away all my drive to be in the market again. Maybe I’d never had the drive, or I’d only been driven by money.
What else? I lowered my pen and scribbled, “Walking.” I wasn’t much of a runner. I hated the way my breath came ragged and hard when I tried jogging, but I loved to walk. Again, I couldn’t imagine why I had holed myself up in my apartment during an entire summer in Chicago, a city that was made for walking along the lake and through the zoo and down the Mag Mile. That’s what I would do today, I decided. I’d take a huge walk.
But first I wanted to finish my list. What else, what else? It came to me, the answer, but I had a hard time putting it on paper. Finally, I wrote in small letters, so fine that you could barely read them—“Family.” My mom had given me the best life she could muster, but it was one filled with random men, alternating cities and a series of small apartments. For as long as I could remember, I’d been jealous of the typical family—the husband and wife in the country with the 2.5 kids—and I’d sworn I’d get that for myself someday. And so I’d always been concerned about the ticking of my so-called biological clock (although to be truthful I couldn’t hear a peep), pointing out to Ben time and again that if we were going to get married and have kids, we had to do it soon—a belief that led, in part, to the ultimatum I’d given him. But now I didn’t really have any family at all. Dee was gone in an instant, in a tangle of metal and rubber on the Dan Ryan Expressway, and Ben was gone now, too. And the children I was supposed to have one day? Far, far away.
My mom was still around, of course, but she and I had been family in name only since Dee had died. We’d handled Dee’s death differently, to say the least. Me, well, I had my tantrums, my not-so-occasional flashes of anger when I tossed picture frames and broke dishes. Ben, after quietly watching me shatter more than half of my Pottery Barn bowls, had bought me a big brown candle and taken me into the bathroom one day.
“Throw it,” he had said, opening the shower curtain and pointing to the wall inside the tub.
“What?” I looked from the candle to Ben and back again, irritated at this cryptic directive.
“Look.” He took the candle from my hand, hurling it at the wall. It bounced off, a mere dent in the brown wax. “See? You can throw it and smash it. Do whatever you want, but it won’t break.”
“I want it to break.”
“No, you don’t.” He kissed the top of my head. “You just want the feeling.”
He was right. I turned to that candle often. I threw it against the bathtub wall over and over until the wall was splotched brown and the candle beaten into a misshapen lump. And one day I put the candle away, tucked it far under the sink, just in case. But I hadn’t needed it anymore.
My mom, on the other hand, broke nothing, smashed nothing. She’d seemed to shut down after the accident. She didn’t want to talk about it, she said. She wanted to leave Chicago and forget. And so off to L.A. she went, only one month after the funeral, and without Dee’s death to talk about, all our conversations felt like disingenuous, twenty-first-century versions of the “Emperor’s New Clothes.” They were five-minute chats we both looked forward to ending. I had no idea when I’d last spoken to her.
I looked down at my watch. Right now, Sylvie Custer was probably at her desk on the set of The Biz, an entertainment “news” show that reported on the minutiae of celebrity activity—“Tom Cruise considers sideburns! Tonight on The Biz!”
I called information to get the general number, and the receptionist routed me through to my mom’s desk. She answered with a crisp, “Sylvie Custer.”
“Mom, it’s me.”
A little stretch of silence followed, and I knew what had happened. She’d been taken by surprise, and she’d thought for a moment it was Dee.
“Kelly,” I said in a softer voice.
“Hi, honey. How are you?” Her words were mothering, but her tone slightly formal. It was the way we talked to each other now.
“I’m okay. You?”
“Crazy over here. Some starlet got arrested for shoplifting a pack of gum, and I’m trying to convince the LAPD to release her name. Meanwhile Mella, that Swedish fashion model—you know her?”
She made it sound as if I might have had martinis with Mella last night. “Vaguely,” I said.
“Well, she’s gained a few pounds, so I need a quote from the restaurant near her apartment.”
I listened to some more Hollywood gossip, wondering how my mom could do it. She used to produce news segments on political corruption, double murders and Middle East violence, and now here she was, digging up info on Mella’s calorie count.
“So how’s Ben?” my mom said in a swift topic shift, and I wondered, frantically, if I’d told her anything about our breakup. It didn’t sound like it. I half wanted to tell her about my memory gap, but I didn’t want to give her any more worries. I honestly didn’t know if she could handle it, and it had been so long since I’d confided in her. And I was fine, wasn’t I? Better than fine, actually. I’d admit to the breakup, I decided. I couldn’t hide that, but I wouldn’t mention the memory issues.
“Ben?” I said. “Well, you know we broke up, right?”
“What?”
Okay, she definitely hadn’t known that, which either meant that I hadn’t spoken to her for a long time or I’d avoided talking to her about that subject. It didn’t surprise me, really. Our phone calls since Dee died were so few and so brief.
“What happened?” my mom said.
Great question. “He didn’t want to get married.” That was the simplest, most truthful answer I could deduce. I’d given him the dreaded ultimatum, the give-me-a-ring-or-I’ll-walk speech, and it’d slapped me right in the face.
“Oh, honey, are you all right?” I could hear that anguished, parental tone in her voice, the one that made me feel warm and taken care of, but it scared me a little, too. I was always worried that she was close to a breakdown after Dee, and even now I wasn’t sure what would make her snap.
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Laura Caldwell
A Clean Slate chronicles the days of Kelly McGraw, a Chicago woman who suddenly can't remember the last five months of her life, a time when she was dumped by her soon-to-be fiancé and laid off by the company she thought would make her partner.Overwhelmed and confused but otherwise feeling wonderful, she begins to realize that she has a clean slate in life. She can do anything she wants, go anywhere she wants, be anything she wants. But what, exactly, does she want?Follow Kelly on a journey that includes her search to discover what caused her memory loss, an internship with a bad-boy British photographer, a Caribbean photo shoot, her boyfriend's desire to come crawling back and, eventually, a brutal discovery that will cause her to reevaluate both her old and new lives.
A Clean Slate
LAURA CALDWELL
graduated from University of Iowa, before getting her law degree from Loyola University Chicago School of Law. Laura was a trial lawyer for many years, specializing in medical negligence defense and entertainment law. She is widely published in the legal field, as well as in numerous mainstream publications. Burning the Map, her first novel, was published by Red Dress Ink and chosen by Barnes & Noble.com as one of “The Best of 2002.”
Laura is currently a writer and contributing editor at Lake Magazine, as well as an Adjunct Professor of legal writing at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. Please visit her online at www.lauracaldwell.com.
A Clean Slate
Laura Caldwell
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
All my admiration and appreciation to the following people: my stellar editor, Margaret Marbury, Maureen Walters at Curtis Brown, Ltd., everyone at Red Dress Ink (especially Laura Morris, Tania Charzewski, Craig Swinwood, Margie Miller, Maureen Stead and Don Lucey), Beth Kaveny, Suzanne Burchill, Kelly Harden, Ginger Heyman, Trisha Woodson, Ted McNabola, Joan Posch, Rochelle Wasserberger, Hilarie Pozesky, Alisa Speigel, Katie Caldwell Kuhn, Margaret Caldwell, William Caldwell, Karen Billups, Stacey Billups, Kelly Caldwell, Dr. Stuart Rice, Kim Wilkins, Joe Ford, Joel Odish, Anthony Parmalee (photographer extraordinaire) and Greg Brown and Roberto Puig of BMG Model Management.
Lastly, and once again most importantly, thanks, love and overwhelming gratitude to Jason Billups.
“Life isn’t about finding yourself; life is about creating yourself.”
—George Bernard Shaw
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Book Club Questions
1
Have you ever had a moment when you’ve known—I mean, logically known in your head—that you’re a fantastically lucky person, that you’re truly fortunate to have an education, to live in a nice place in a great city, to have friends who care about you and all that, but you just can’t get yourself to actually feel it?
Well, I was having one of those moments on the day it all started. I stood in the dry cleaners, where the temperature was about a hundred eighty degrees from the pressing and steaming machines.
“Sorry, sorry. No clothes for you,” the tiny Asian woman said as she came back to the cracked linoleum counter for the third time.
I clicked my nails on the counter and expelled a massive breath of hot air, trying to maintain rational thought. “Can you please look one more time? I brought in a whole bag of clothes last week.” I tried not to think of my favorite black pants—my skinny pants—which had been in that bag.
“You have ticket?” The lady waved a pile of pink slips.
“No,” I told her. I never saved those pesky things. Never had to before.
She shrugged. “I look again.” Wiping sweat from her eyebrows, she turned away. As she disappeared into a sea of hanging, plastic-covered clothes, I tried to guess her size. Was it possible that she had stolen my black pants and was wearing them on the weekends?
I felt one of my temper tantrums coming on, but I forced it down. I am lucky to be alive, I told myself as I leaned on the counter, fanning my face. I am lucky because I am now losing weight at an average of a pound a minute. I am lucky because I have a great town house and a nice boyfriend who is soon to be my fiancé, and a decent job and lovely friends. I’ve really got the world by the tail.
The problem was this—I wasn’t buying a word of it. My nice boyfriend soon-to-be-fiancé, Ben, was at my great town house, true, but he wouldn’t be so nice when he learned that his favorite French-blue shirt had been destroyed by the dry cleaners from hell. And the decent job I had—as a research analyst at an investment bank called Bartley Brothers—was starting to look like a ticket straight to nowhere-ville. I’d been toiling for years, digging up information on retail stocks so that my boss could pass on my recommendations and then take all the credit when we made money, or blame me when we lost it. After almost eight years of promises that I would soon be considered for partnership, it still hadn’t happened. Finally, my best friend, Laney, my sanity advisor, was off at some marketing conference (read: company boondoggle) in Palm Beach.
“Sorry,” the dry cleaner said, emerging from the plastic sea, looking even more red-faced and sweaty. “We have nothing for you.” She gave another helpless shrug.
“Can you please keep looking, and I’ll stop back later in the day?”
“Okay, okay.”
I stomped out of the sweltering store, a crisp Chicago breeze hitting me blessedly in the face. As an El train clamored to a halt on the tracks over my head, I trudged up Armitage Avenue, muttering obscenities about my missing clothes and the incompetence of the dry cleaners. The street was full of couples doing Saturday morning errands hand-in-hand, along with the post-college baseball-hat crowd searching for hangover grub.
I took a couple of deep breaths, but they brought no relief from my cranky mood. Ben rarely, if ever, held my hand and did errands with me on the weekends. Saturday mornings were his time to run with his marathon group or train for one of the other races he was constantly entering. It didn’t bother me…not really. Because Ben worshipped at the Church of Holy Workouts he had an amazing body, something that benefited me as well as him. Yes, sex was fine. More than fine, actually. But if I were forced to lodge one complaint about Ben, it would be this—we no longer had any of those couple-y, sappy-eyed rendezvous, such as candlelit dinners or surprise weekends at a log cabin. Romantic interludes just weren’t his thing these days, or at least that’s what he told me, what I told myself to make myself feel better when I saw other couples having picnics in Lincoln Park and horse-drawn carriage rides down Michigan Avenue.
Ben was sweet and funny and wonderful in his own way, though. He would cheer me up by singing show tunes in a falsetto voice, and when it was time to carbo-load for his next race, he’d cook huge pasta dinners for the two of us. And last January when my sister, Dee, died, Ben was amazing—an absolute rock. I couldn’t have gotten through it without him.
At Bissell Street, I took a left and walked along the sidewalk, crunching over a golden bed of fallen leaves, moving past the rusty autumn trees and stone three-flats until I hit the stretch of brick town houses, one of which was mine (something I was inordinately proud of). I’d saved all my paychecks from Bartley Brothers, and this place was the first home I’d ever owned, the place Dee used to love to stay when she came to visit, the place where Ben and I would live when we were married. The sun was peeking through the red curtain of trees, making an X-like pattern on the town homes. Normally, I would have loved to take photos of that—I liked the way the rays made crosshairs on the brick—but I was too annoyed by the dry cleaning debacle to think about getting my Nikon.
Before I went inside, I stopped at the bank of oblong silver mailboxes in the little courtyard located right behind the town houses. I stuck the key in the third one, my box, and tried to turn it to the right as I always did, but it wouldn’t budge.
I screwed my face up tight and tried again. Maybe the eager-bunny mailman had stuffed a stack of magazines in there, jamming the lock. I tried over and over, but the key wouldn’t turn.
I took it out and jiggled it in my hand, as if that would help. I was looking back at the box, lifting the key to try again, when I noticed what was wrong. The tiny black plate with white letters affixed to the box, the plate that should have said my name, KELLY MCGRAW, instead read BETH & BOB MANINSKY.
What the hell? I moved down the row of boxes, peering closely, reading each one: LILY CHANG, SIMON TURNER, MILLER/SAMSON, and on and on, but no KELLY MCGRAW.
I repeated the process two more times, then stood still, swiveling my head, looking at the trim bushes that were beginning to turn red at the edges and the brick walls of the surrounding town houses. Was there another bank of mailboxes somewhere? No, that couldn’t be right. This was the only set, the same place I’d been getting my mail for almost a year.
And then I figured out what it was. The damned management company. The company to whom I paid two hundred dollars a month so that they could refuse to repaint the garage door or fish a spoon out of my clogged sink. They’d screwed up once more.
Muttering again, I strode around the side of the town houses and up the front stairs to my place. The door was tall and painted green to match the trim on the bay windows. I tried the doorknob, but it was locked. Ben must have headed out for a run already. Just as well. I could prolong telling him that he’d probably never see his French-blue shirt again.
I put the key in the lock, or at least I tried, but it didn’t insert smoothly. Finally, I got it in and attempted to turn it. Déjà fucking vu. This lock wasn’t working, either. I wrestled with the key, grasping it with both hands and trying to force it to the left, as the wind whipped my hair in front of my face so I couldn’t see. Deep cleansing breaths, I told myself in a low soothing tone, just like the woman in my meditation tapes would say it. Inhale in, exhale out. I did this a few times, batting my hair out of my eyes, then tried the key again. No luck.
My deep-cleansing-breaths mantra turned to thoughts of violence. I would have to physically harm everyone in the management company now. This was ridiculous.
On the off chance that Ben was still home, I rang the doorbell. Ding, ding, ding—I could hear it going off inside. If he was home, doing his prerun stretches, he would be annoyed, but I didn’t care.
Ding, ding, ding, ding—I tried one more time, and then, thank God, I heard footsteps inside pounding down the stairs.
As the door swung open, I was already in midrant. “The dry cleaners lost our stuff, can you believe it? They say they’ll look some more, but it’s as good as gone. Your blue shirt was in that load, and my favorite black pants—and then the mailbox was messed up and…”
My body froze, along with my tirade, as I realized that Ben hadn’t opened the door. It was someone else. Someone I’d never seen, some woman.
She had short blond hair cropped close to her head. In fact, she looked a little like the pictures of Ben’s high school girlfriend, Toni, the woman he said he’d always love. And then the truth of the situation hit me. Ben was cheating on me, right here in my own house, getting his groove on with some girl who looked like Toni, when I’d only been gone an hour or so. Unbelievable. This wasn’t happening. Now I would have to kill Ben along with the management people. A thousand thoughts flew through my brain like birds let out of a cage. I couldn’t hold on to just one.
“Hi, can I help you?” the Toni look-alike said, a sweet smile grazing her face.
“Can I help you?” I crossed my arms over my chest, then, thinking better of it, dropped them and pushed past her inside. “Hey!”
The first thing I noticed was that my high mosaic table, the one made of tiny pieces of broken glass, the one I’d bought at an art fair, wasn’t there. Instead, in its place, there was a heavy wooden coat tree, its arms jutting out, holding a woman’s pink trench coat and a tiny kid’s sweatshirt.
“What’s going on here?” The woman’s voice was low and cautious, the kind of voice cops use with loose criminals on TV.
I wanted to make a smart comment, ask her the same thing, but a flock of doubts flew around in my head along with the other birds. “This is my house,” I said, but I heard my voice waver.
I spun around to check something, and sure enough, there it was, next to the coat tree. The dent in the drywall where Ben’s skis had fallen against it last year. This was my place, so what was the Toni look-alike doing here? And what was with that coat tree?
“No,” she said. “This is my house. My husband and I bought it a few months ago.”
I bit my lip and looked at her, confused. “Is Ben here?”
“There’s no Ben who lives here. What’s your name?” She took a step closer to me, as if she was afraid I’d move farther into the house.
I peeked my head around the corner and into the study, expecting to see the big, scarred desk that my mom had given me when she moved to L.A., but in its place was a playpen with yellow mesh sides and a jumble of brightly colored toys.
“Kelly McGraw,” I said, yet even that came out a little unsure.
The woman gave me the sweet smile again. “Oh, you’re Kelly McGraw! I’m Beth Maninsky. We never did meet you at the closing.” She held out her hand.
“Closing?”
“Sure. We bought this house from you, but you gave your lawyer power of attorney, so we never officially got to meet you when we closed on the house. We love it, though. Did you stop by for old times’ sake?” She tried the smile again, but when I didn’t shake her hand, the grin faltered, and now she was looking as perplexed as I felt.
“Closing?” I said again. “I sold this house?”
She nodded, gazing at me warily.
From somewhere above, I heard the cry of a baby, short at first, then a full-on wail. Beth Maninsky’s eyes shot to the ceiling as if she could see through it.
“A baby?” I couldn’t seem to form a full sentence.
“Scottie. I should get him. Now can I help you with anything?”
I just stood there. What was happening?
“Kelly? Are you all right?”
Beth Maninsky looked almost scared now, so I just nodded and moved to the door, then out to the stoop. I stood there looking at the house, my house.
Beth Maninsky stood in the doorway, fairly blocking it with her body. “Can I call someone for you?” There was warmth in her voice.
It took me a second to answer. “No. I’ll go to my boyfriend’s place.”
“Okay.” The wail of the baby got louder behind her. She glanced in the house, then back at me. “You sure you’re okay?”
“When you…” I paused, barely able to say the words that didn’t seem true “…bought this house. Did you learn why I…sold it?”
“Our Realtor told us that you thought it was too big for one person.”
“Right.” I nodded as if I could convince myself that this was really happening, that someone named Beth Maninsky, who looked like Toni, owned my house.
“Nice to meet you,” Beth Maninsky said.
My front door closed, and I heard the lock click inside.
2
As I walked along Bissell Street again, the fall wind felt brittle instead of crisp and the city seemed cool and gray instead of filled with warm autumn tones. I didn’t notice the light on the buildings anymore or think about the photos I could take. Instead, I concentrated on figuring out what had happened. There had to be an explanation. I knew that. I hadn’t gone to college or worked in the straight-lines, think-inside-the-box world of finance for nothing. There was always a reason for things.
So I hoofed it all the way up to Ben’s place in Wrigleyville, entertaining several possibilities. One—this Beth Maninsky was a covert operative for the CIA who’d taken over my town house in order to set up an elaborate cover. Crazy, outlandish, I know, but I’m fond of spy novels, and it was the first potential that came to mind. Two—Beth Maninsky really was Ben’s high school girlfriend, Toni, who was still crazed about him and had somehow arranged to take my place in his life. This also seemed a little outrageous, since I’d only set out for the dry cleaners that morning. She would have needed to work pretty damn fast.
But was that actually true? Had I really left for the dry cleaners just a few hours ago? Suddenly I wasn’t sure. I stuck my hands in the pockets of my leather jacket and put my head down, concentrating on each step, each seam in the pavement. My sense of timing still seemed off. I couldn’t remember waking up that morning or going to my mother ship, Starbucks, for a Venti Nonfat White Chocolate Mocha, my usual Saturday-morning treat. Still, that kind of memory trick happened, didn’t it? It was like driving home on your normal route and suddenly discovering you’re in your driveway and yet you can’t recall the drive itself.
Something niggled in my brain—a third possibility. I really had sold my town house and I really couldn’t remember it. I felt even colder with the thought, and I turned my collar up against the wind. Ridiculous, I said silently. Preposterous.
Luckily, I didn’t have to argue with myself much longer because I’d reached Ben’s building, a squat, multi-unit place that made up for its lack of character with cheap rent and a great location, only a few blocks from Wrigley Field. I peered at the vertical list of names next to the buzzers, and, thank God, there it was. BENJAMIN THOMAS, fifth from the top, right where he should have been. I hit the buzzer.
A shot of static came over the intercom. “Who is it?” said a woman’s cheery voice.
“Sorry. Wrong buzzer.” Please, please, please let it have been the wrong one.
I peered at the list again, and with exaggerated slowness, I put my finger on the brown button next to Ben’s name and pressed.
Same staticky burst. Same woman’s voice—not as cheery this time—saying the same words.
I froze. Something was wrong. Really, really wrong. But somehow my eternal optimism (or maybe my eternal stupidity) kept insisting there was a logical reason for all of this—something I would laugh about later.
I couldn’t laugh now, though, couldn’t even manage a smile, just a simple question laden with trepidation. “Is Ben home?”
“Kelly?” the woman said, clearly irritated.
“Yes?”
“Jesus. Not again.” A fizz of static, and then the intercom went silent.
I stood chewing on my bottom lip once more, debating what to do—piss off this woman in Ben’s apartment by hitting the buzzer again or break in and kick her ass. After about fifteen seconds, someone appeared behind the glass door. I squinted and made out Ben’s small, lean frame, his rock-hard legs in blue jogging shorts. Raising my hand, I gave a half wave, then let it fall.
Ben opened the door, but he didn’t invite me in or even come out on the front stoop with me. He just sighed, holding the door open with one arm, shoving his other hand through his damp brown hair. He’d obviously just come back from running. He had that pink flush to his cheeks.
“Kell, you’ve got to cut this out.”
I tried to get my mind around his statement. I forced myself not to rush inside and hug him. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. Stopping by like this, calling at all hours. She wants me to get a restraining order.”
“Who?”
A chest-heaving exhalation. “We’ve had this conversation. Don’t make me go through it again. I love you. I always will.”
Just like you’ll always love Toni, I thought.
“But I’m with Therese now,” he continued, “and you have to accept that.”
I put my head in my hands and rubbed at my temples. Another possibility came to mind—this was all an elaborate hoax. Laney would jump out from behind Ben at any minute and scream, “We got you!” The problem was Laney would never be that cruel, nor would Ben. He may not have been the most romantic guy, but he was always kind.
“C’mere, Kell.” Ben stepped out and let the door close behind him. He grabbed me in a hug, just as I hoped he would. I could smell the clean, outdoor scent of his sweat and feel the muscles of his back beneath the long-sleeved T-shirt.
“I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t understand anything.” I squeezed him tight, hoping that this gesture would make it all go away, this whole horrible day, but too soon the embrace was over. He let me go, and I felt the cool air swirl around me again.
“I know it’s been rough, but you’ll get through this. You always do.” He pushed his hair off his face and gave me a smile I recognized—the one he saved for his grandmother or the restaurant managers he would cajole into giving us a table.
I opened my mouth to tell him what had happened this morning, how I suddenly couldn’t make sense of anything in my life, but he gave me that patronizing grin again.
“You’re tough.” He punched me lightly on the arm like we were buddies, like we hadn’t been lovers for four years, like we weren’t supposed to be engaged soon.
“Ben,” I said, trying to ignore his patent condescension, “something’s going on that I don’t understand. I don’t remember all sorts of things. I don’t remember us breaking up. I—”
“Kell, I just can’t do this again. I can’t rehash the whole thing over and over, okay?” He cupped my cheek for a second, the way you would a child who had food on his face.
I pulled my head away. “No, you don’t get it.”
“I do. I get that you’re going to make it through this. You’re going to be okay.” He spoke these last words in a soft, hang-in-there-kid kind of way that infuriated me.
I glanced down at a spot on the sidewalk that looked strangely like old blood, then back up at his pitying eyes. “You’re absolutely right. I’m going to be fine. Fantastic even.”
“There you go,” Ben said in what was probably the smuggest tone I’d ever heard. “That’s the ticket.”
Yeah, that’s the ticket all right, I thought. The ticket out of here. I didn’t have a clue what was going on, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me fall apart.
“I’ll see you around.” I tried to sound flip, like I didn’t care, but I could feel the tears welling in my eyes. “See you,” I said again, then turned away.
As I walked up the street, my head down, my hands in my pockets, I could hear Ben buzzing his apartment, and the woman’s voice say over the intercom, “Ben, is that you?”
“It’s me, hon. Let me up.”
I stopped at Chuck’s, the first bar I found. Inside, it was dark, with at least five different football games blaring from at least ten different TVs. The tables were full of people cheering and screaming, baskets of fries and pitchers of beer in front of them. I slipped onto a stool at the bar.
“What can I get you?” the bartender asked me. He leaned forward and dried a spot of water on the wood with a quick flick of his towel.
“Beer.”
“Okay. Well, we have twenty-three different labels, so what kind do you want?”
“Doesn’t matter.” I usually drank margaritas, but it seemed too festive a drink.
The bartender stood there for a long minute, staring at me, before he moved toward a silver tapper and picked up a glass.
What was happening to me? What had happened to my town house, to my relationship with Ben? I wished desperately that I could rewind the day back to that moment at the dry cleaners when I was being pissy about losing a pair of black pants and the fact that my job wasn’t so great. If I could just go back, I would truly realize how lucky I was right at that moment. I would appreciate it somehow.
But my mind kept skidding away from the dry cleaners and rushing through the rest of the day. Why hadn’t I known that my place had been sold, that Ben and I had broken up?
The bartender pushed a glass of amber beer in front of me without a word. I took a sip, and I made myself review what I did know about myself. Name: Kelly McGraw. That was correct, wasn’t it? Beth Maninsky seemed to know that Kelly McGraw used to live in her house, and Ben had called me Kell, so that had to be right.
What else? Parents: Sylvie and Ken McGraw, who’d had me while they were married for a very brief period and living in Fort Myers, Florida. My father was a complete shit who took off a year after my birth, and my mom reverted to her maiden name, Sylvie Custer, even though she hated it. It was too close to custard, she always said, and made her sound like some sort of pudding.
Childhood: my mom worked her way from being a secretary at a TV station to a production assistant there, and a few years after that, she married Danny Rosati, a local crime boss who was the subject of an exposé she’d helped put together. Danny wasn’t much of a dad to me. He always treated me more like a pet, patting me on the head and giving me treats when I was good. He did give me my first camera, though, and for that I’d always be grateful. My mom gave birth to my half-sister when I was six. She was named Delores after Danny’s mom, but except for Danny, everyone called her Dee. Dee was always a frail kid, but she had the greatest toothy smile and the loudest laugh you’d ever heard.
After my mom divorced Danny, we moved to Atlanta so she could work for a better TV station, and we stayed there until after my freshman year in high school, when we moved to Chicago. I joined the yearbook staff at my new school because at least I could take pictures, even if they were of people I didn’t know—and that was where I met Laney. We’d been best friends ever since. We went to different colleges but visited each other constantly and shot up our phone bills. After we graduated, we got an apartment together in Lakeview and shared it until a few years ago.
Laney is the most energetic person I’ve ever met. Sometimes she’ll call me at eight in the morning, before she leaves for her account exec job at a marketing firm, and she’ll tell me that she’s already done her laundry, given herself a leg wax and taken a kick-boxing class at the gym. Laney was the person, other than Ben, who’d saved me when Dee died last year in a car accident. My mom and I couldn’t comfort each other; we reminded each other too much of Dee. My mom left Chicago—fled really—for L.A. last April to take a job with an entertainment news show, and Laney and Ben became my only family in town.
What happened after April? I tried to think about stocks I’d researched at work, weekend trips I’d taken, street fairs I’d gone to over the summer. Nothing. I couldn’t remember anything from May up to now, the beginning of October, a span of five or so months.
I took a gulp of my beer, hoping it would help, maybe induce some kind of alcoholic flashback. Nothing again. I had to talk to someone about this. Ben was out. Laney was my only support now, and she was in Palm Beach. Or was she?
I sat up straighter on the stool and pushed my beer away, trying to concentrate. Laney had gone to a marketing conference in Palm Beach for a week. But was that this week? I’d been wrong about so many things today.
I threw five dollars on the bar and took off for the pay phone. As I pushed my way toward the rest rooms, I noticed that everyone else in the place seemed to be having a fantastic time. People were slapping high fives when touchdowns were scored, pouring beer for their friends, throwing their heads back and laughing at stories from the night before. I’d had days like this, spent watching football and drinking in a smoky bar when it was bright daylight outside. Those times had always seemed simple, uncomplicated, and yet while they were happening I’d be drifting off about whether I’d make partner, whether I should ask Ben to move in with me. Once again, I wished I could hit Rewind and just enjoy that time, instead of letting my mind take me somewhere else.
Luckily, there was a pay phone in the women’s bathroom, so the noise was dimmed. I dialed Laney’s number, thinking that even if her voice mail answered I could talk and talk, and she would pick it up eventually. Sometimes, when we got busy, Laney and I communicated solely by voice mail. We knew each other so well that we didn’t have to be on the phone to feel like we were talking to each other.
I was starting to think of how I would phrase it, this strange, scary day, when I heard the chipper tones of Laney’s hello.
“Oh, God, you’re home.” I was so relieved that I actually leaned my head on the dirty phone box. “You’re not in Palm Beach.”
“Palm Beach? That was months ago.”
A chilly feeling passed through me. “Lane, something’s wrong.”
“I know, sweetie. Now hold on for a second, so I can sit down.” I heard Laney closing her refrigerator and, a moment later, her slight exhalation as she sat on the couch. “Okay. Shoot.”
How did she know something was wrong with me? “Well, uh, for starters, apparently Ben and I aren’t dating anymore.”
“Apparently? Honey, he dumped you months ago, and you’ve got to move on. Really. He’s just not worth this moping around.”
“Months ago?” My voice came out tiny and scared.
“On your fucking birthday, remember?”
A group of women came into the bathroom, giggling and shoving past me.
I ducked my head and cupped my hand around the receiver. “That’s just it. I can’t remember.”
“Where are you?”
“Chuck’s.”
“The bar by Ben’s place?” Her voice went a little high. “You didn’t go to his apartment again, did you? Kell, you’ve got to—”
“Laney, listen to me. I don’t remember.” I enunciated my words. “I don’t remember selling my town house. I don’t remember Ben breaking up with me. I can’t seem to remember anything about the last five months.”
A small silence. “Are you kidding?”
“Why would I kid about that?” My voice got loud and one of the women swung around, raising her perfectly arched eyebrows at me. I ducked my head again. “I need your help. I don’t know what’s going on.”
“Whoa. Okay, look, I’ll jump in my car and be there in ten minutes. Wait for me outside.”
Laney’s light blue, beat-up Mustang convertible screeched to a stop in front of Chuck’s. Before I could take two steps, she’d jumped out and was running around the side of the car. Her dark brown hair was in its usual perfectly messed style with a swoop of bangs over one eye. She wore a black miniskirt, black knee-high boots and a fuzzy orange cashmere sweater.
She gave me a quick hug, then pulled back and held me at arm’s length. “You okay?”
“Not really,” I said, but then I couldn’t help smiling. Laney did that to me. Just being around her made me feel better.
“What are you grinning at, girl? You’ve totally freaked me out. Get in the car.” She gave me a pat on the ass and opened the passenger door.
“So what’s going on here?” she said when she’d taken the driver’s seat.
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
“First things first.” She lifted a cardboard coffee carrier, two white cups from Starbucks tucked inside, steam seeping from the openings in the top. “You sounded like you hadn’t gotten your fix yet.”
“Oh!” I said. “White chocolate mocha?”
She nodded.
“Nonfat?”
“Of course.”
“I love you.” I took a sip, the warm, creamy concoction sweet on my tongue.
I know that lots of people hate Starbucks. They complain that these little green-and-white stores are the devil’s work, the corporatization of the coffee world, but I just don’t care. I’ve tried the others, the mom-and-pop coffee shops, the trendy little tea places, and nobody—and I mean nobody—makes anything close to my white chocolate mocha. It’s comfort in a cup.
Laney squeezed my hand, then put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. “All right, tell me what happened today.”
I went through the whole thing—the dry cleaners, my town house, Beth Maninsky, and finally my talk with Ben. As I spoke I stared at the hula girl that was stuck to Laney’s dashboard, the one that made swivels of her hips each time the car bumped or turned. For some reason, the movement of the girl’s tiny hips soothed me. Laney had owned the hula girl since high school, and it had been on the dash of every car she’d had since. It was a permanent fixture, something I could recognize.
“Kell, I don’t get this,” Laney said. “Your memory was fine last week.”
“Was it?”
“Yeah.”
Silence filled the car.
“Jesus,” Laney said. “Are you telling me that you really can’t remember anything about the last five months?”
“Nada.”
She stared intently at the road. “What do you remember about your birthday?”
May 3. May 3. May 3. I chanted the date in my head as if it might conjure up some images, but I could only remember my thoughts about my birthday in the weeks leading up to it. I’d been expecting Ben to propose on that date. I’d told him in February, a few weeks after Dee died, that I wanted to get married, that I wanted to be engaged by my birthday, and Ben had indicated he wanted the same thing. So as that day drew near, I made sure to have my nails done to perfection. I’d shaved and plucked nearly every stray hair on my body. I’d even bought a new black dress to wear to dinner. But the actual day of my birthday? I couldn’t recall a thing, and I told Laney as much.
“Oh, boy.” She sighed.
“What? What happened?”
She gave me a sidelong glance. “Maybe we shouldn’t go there just yet. You should sleep, you know, then see how you feel.”
“Other than scared shitless, I feel fine. Tell me.”
“I don’t know…”
“Laney!”
“Are you sure?” she said. “Do you really want to hear it?”
“Of course.”
“Okay, well, I told you Ben dumped you that night.”
I felt my mouth form a tight line. “Yes, so you said.”
“He’s a complete shit. Absolutely no sense of timing. But that’s not the only thing that happened.”
“What,” I said, “is the other thing that happened?”
Laney stopped at a light and gave me a look. “I hate to be the one to tell you this.”
My stomach twisted. “Just get it out.”
“Bartley Brothers laid you off.” She squeezed my hand. Someone honked behind us, and Laney gave the driver the finger before pulling into the intersection.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. “Tell me that you are kidding.”
Laney shook her head. “Sorry, hon.”
“They fired me?”
“No, no. You got laid off. Major difference.”
“How so?”
“They gave you nine months’ severance pay.”
My mouth snapped shut for a moment. I didn’t know what to think about that. On one hand, I’d worked my ass off at that place, praying that it would pay off one day, that I’d be a partner eventually. To have that all washed down the toilet was maddening. But on the flip side, I’d been bordering on miserable there for the last few years, and I’d always secretly wanted to be one of those people who got axed with a golden parachute.
Then the effect of what Laney was saying hit me. “Are you telling me that I got laid off on my thirtieth birthday?”
“’Fraid so, sweetie.”
“And Ben broke up with me?”
“Pretty much.”
A few seconds went by. The hula girl’s hips swirled and swayed as Laney turned a corner. “That,” I said finally, “has got to be the worst goddamned birthday on the planet.”
The car was quiet for a minute, but pretty soon, a short, reluctant chuckle came out of my mouth. “It would almost be funny if it wasn’t so sad,” I said.
“Right. Under different circumstances.”
Another half chuckle, a sort of shocked cough, escaped me, and Laney followed with one of her own. And then I couldn’t help it—I did it again. A few seconds later we were both giggling, slowly and stupidly at first, until the sound caught a rhythm that rolled and grew louder, and soon our laughter filled the car. It felt like the first time I’d laughed in forever.
I was wiping my eyes, trying to get myself under control, when I noticed that Laney had stopped in a circular drive of one of the Lake Shore Drive high-rises near Addison.
“What’s going on?” I said. “What are we doing here?”
Laney pursed her mouth and gave a quick whistle, the way she did when she was nervous. “You don’t remember this, either?”
I glanced out the window at the building—tall, made of huge gray blocks, a plate-glass window in front of a large marble lobby. As far as I knew I’d never been in the place.
I looked back at Laney. “What’s to remember?”
“You live here.”
3
I walked into the lobby and took in the details, hoping for something that would trigger my memory, some plant or chair or something that said, Yes, I live in this building. But the gray marble floor seemed as unfamiliar as the front desk and the man sitting behind it, so when he stood and said, “Afternoon, Miss McGraw,” I almost choked.
Laney put her hand on my arm and steered me to the left. “How are you, Mike?” she called over her shoulder as we walked.
“Fine, Laney. Have a good one.”
“How does he know me?” I whispered.
“I told you,” Laney said, keeping her voice low, “you live here.”
“Then how does he know you?”
“Because I’m a fabulous friend, and since you won’t go out anymore, I visit you all the time. I know that guy better than you do.”
We’d reached the end of the marble hallway. Laney turned me to the right and walked me through double doors into a sitting room. At the end of the room was a set of elevators, where Laney was directing us.
“What do you mean, I won’t go out?” I said.
Laney made that nervous whistle again. “Well, aside from your frequent trips to Ben’s place, you rarely leave the house, so I bring you food, and we hang out and talk.”
I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment and tried to conjure an image of an apartment, Laney and I sitting on a couch talking, maybe giggling, but my mind was a blank.
“What do we talk about?”
We’d reached the elevators. Laney hit the button for the twelfth floor. “You know—Dee, your mom, Bartley Brothers. We talked about Ben a lot, of course. You kept saying that now that he’d broken up with you, you were never going to have your first kid before you were thirty-five. And you talked about how much you loved your town house.”
“I did love that place. So why did I sell it?”
“That’s what I’ve been asking you. You made a chunk of cash on it, but you weren’t really hurting for money. You just kept saying that if you weren’t going to live there with Ben, you weren’t going to live there at all.”
I scoffed. “That’s ridiculous.”
Laney stared at me for a second. “Exactly. You really don’t remember any of this, do you?”
I shook my head. “So what about you?” I said. “What’s been going on with you? I can’t remember that, either.”
“Well, we haven’t talked about that much.”
“Why?” And then I realized. “Oh, I’m such a horrible friend! I’m so sorry. You’ve been coming over here, listening to my woes, and we haven’t spent any time on you, is that it?”
Laney shrugged. “You needed me.”
“Well, of course, but that’s not an excuse.”
“Sure it is. Seriously, it was nice to be needed. It’s no big deal that we didn’t talk about me that much.”
“It is a big deal.” I followed her out of the elevator. “I’m really sorry.”
“You’d do the same for me.”
“Still—”
Laney put her hand on my shoulder and stared into my eyes. “You’ve been bad, Kell. I mean really, really depressed. It’s been a little scary, if you want to know the truth.”
Just those words felt scary to me. Generally, I can handle the crap that life dishes out. I’d seen my mom go through a million brief relationships and fall apart with each one, so I’d found my own way to hold it together. Even after Dee died, when I was the saddest and angriest I’d been in my whole life, I was still able to work, to go out with Laney for margaritas and talk about it. I was able to keep going.
Laney gave me a reassuring smile. “Do you have your key?”
I stuck my hands in my pockets and pulled out a few bills, a lip balm and a small key ring. Hanging from the ring were three keys, along with the little sombrero key chain that I got during a trip to Tijuana, and the silver pendant with the Bartley Brothers logo that the bank had given as a Christmas present last year. I made myself focus on the keys. One was my mailbox key—or rather, what I’d thought was my mailbox key this morning. The second was a small one for my gym locker, and then there was a third. It was a gold key with a fat, square head, and it seemed like it was glinting malevolently at me under the fluorescent lights of the hallway.
Laney pointed at it. “That’s the one.”
“Oh my God,” I said.
The place was a disaster. I don’t mean the structure of the apartment itself. The white walls were unmarred, and there was a large bedroom, an equally large living room with a street view, and a European-style kitchen with new appliances. But there was stuff everywhere, as if a tropical storm had blown through the place. My clothes were strewn over the bed, the couch, the dresser. Wads of Kleenex overflowed from the wastebaskets, and old mugs with crusty tea bags sat on the nightstand and coffee table. A ton of pictures I’d taken of Ben were on my dresser, as if it was a shrine to him.
“Christ,” I said. “It’s a train wreck.”
Laney nodded but stayed quiet.
I looked down at my feet and saw my favorite smoke-gray sweater crumpled next to the couch. “How could I do this to cashmere?” I said, picking it up.
I recognized most of the other stuff, too—my furniture, my clothes, my sage-green duvet on the bed and framed photos that I’d taken of Laney, my mom and Dee. But nothing else about the apartment seemed like mine.
“I must have been really down,” I said as we stood in the middle of the living room, surveying the damage.
It’s a known fact to Laney and me that whenever I feel crazy or out of control, my cleaning skills completely leave me. You can always tell the state of my life by the state of my apartment. I’d just never seen any of my places that bad before.
“That’s an understatement,” Laney said simply.
We walked through the place again, and this time I tried to take in more than the filth. I noticed a new phone in the kitchen, a white model that matched the appliances, with a plastic-covered panel that listed the names of people who were on speed dial. I’d written only three names there—Ben, Laney, Ellen.
“Who’s Ellen?” I asked.
Laney took a seat on one of the stools that looked into the kitchen. “Ellen Geiger.”
I blinked a few times. “Why is Ellen Geiger on my speed dial?”
Ellen Geiger was a psychiatrist I saw briefly after Dee died. I thought she was nice enough, a good person to talk to, and she had helped me sort out a few things. But I remember I felt I was coming out of my mourning, that I could deal with the pain and anger on my own, so after a while I just stopped going.
“You keep Ellen Geiger in business,” Laney said.
Too frightened to ask what she meant, I went about opening the cabinets. My nice set of pots and pans looked dusty and unused, my refrigerator and freezer nearly empty except for a loaf of bread that was starting to green around the edges and a tub of chocolate chip ice cream with severe freezer burn. I opened the cabinet next to the fridge, and there, in front of an old bag of pretzels and a few cans of tuna, were four brown plastic bottles. Prescription bottles. I picked up the first three, reading the medications noted on the white labels—Wellbutrin, Prozac, another Wellbutrin.
I looked at Laney. “Antidepressants?”
She nodded. “You’ve been trying a few of them.”
“And?”
“They don’t work so well.”
I turned back to the cupboard and looked at the fourth one. The label stated that it was for pain, and it bore bold orange warnings about taking it only with food. It had been prescribed by Dr. Markup, the general practitioner whom both Laney and I had seen for years.
“Pain relievers?” I asked Laney.
“You’ve been getting these nasty headaches. Migraines, I guess.”
This was all so confusing—this apartment that didn’t seem like mine, the depression and headaches I didn’t remember. I felt completely removed from the life I’d supposedly been leading. Maybe if I heard more about it…Maybe I needed to hear more.
I sat on the counter facing Laney. “Okay, tell me.”
“I did. You’ve been down.”
“No, I mean give me the whole chronology—how it went, when it started, you know.”
She grimaced and shifted on the stool. “Well, there’s no doubt that it started on your birthday. You were all giddy that morning. You called me from work to say that you were looking good, feeling good and ready for your dinner with Ben. Then an hour later, you called again from your cell phone, and I could barely understand a word you were saying.”
“I was crying?” I tried to jump-start some memory.
“No, you were raging. You know how you get sometimes?”
I nodded. It wasn’t something I was proud of, but I had an occasional flaring temper that I had no control over, which is why I’d wanted to strangle the dry cleaner this morning and the reason, a few hours ago, I’d been plotting ways to terminate everyone in my management company. Ex-management company, I reminded myself.
“You told me that they’d laid you off,” Laney continued. “Budget cuts or something. They tried to give you six months’ severance, you railroaded them into nine and that was it. They said you could stay on for a month or so. They were going to assign you a desk and a cubicle so you could look for a new job.”
“That’s insulting!”
“Exactly. You couldn’t believe that this place that should have been making you partner was offering to put you in a cube so you could try and start over somewhere else. You told them to go to hell and just walked out.”
“And so I wasn’t depressed yet?”
“Oh no.” Laney chuckled. “Just pissed off.”
“Okay, so then what?”
“Well, naturally you went shopping.”
I nodded. It made absolute sense to me. I was required to shop as part of my job because I was a retail analyst for Bartley Brothers, and it was my duty to keep up on trends, but I also used retail therapy as a pick-me-up. Laney did, too. It always did the heart good to spend money you shouldn’t on something that made you look or feel fantastic.
“So you bought these great shoes to go with the black dress you were wearing for dinner,” Laney said.
I was tempted to interrupt and ask for details about the fabric and the heel, but decided it probably wasn’t the time.
“Anyway,” Laney continued, “you were actually fine by the time Ben came to pick you up. He took you to the Everest Room. He told you how sorry he was that you got laid off, how ludicrous it was for them to let you go. You were sure he was going to propose. You said besides being fired you were having a great day. Everything felt perfect—the candles, the champagne—and so when he said he needed to talk about something, you thought that was it. But instead, he started this spiel about how he thought he’d be ready, he wanted to be ready to marry you, but he wasn’t. He gave you that bullshit line about how it wasn’t you, it was him.”
I crossed my arms and leaned back against the cabinet. “Please tell me I dumped the champagne bucket over his head.” If there ever was a legitimate time for one of my temper tantrums, that night sounded like it.
“I wish,” Laney said. “You just told him to leave, and once he was gone, you realized that you had to pay the bill.”
I tried to laugh, I really did, but Laney’s words sounded like a bad joke. A pathetic woman who’d given her man an ultimatum to marry her or else, sitting there with her “or else”—a full bottle of champagne and the bill. So instead of a laugh, my voice came out a groan, and then I couldn’t help it, I let the tears come.
“Honey.” Laney jumped up from the stool and came around the bar to hug me. “It’s okay.”
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled through my tears and Laney’s fuzzy sweater. “You’ve done this already, haven’t you?”
“Doesn’t matter.” She stroked my hair. “Let it out.”
How could Ben, the man I thought I wanted to marry, be so thoughtless? We’d been together for four years, forever it seemed. We were meant for each other. How could he just end it all when he’d given me the impression that he wanted the same thing I did?
As I sniffled and cried some more into Laney’s sweater, I started to wonder about Ben’s desires, what he had really wanted. It wasn’t that I didn’t remember the talks we’d had about marriage. Those had happened in February and March after Dee died, a time I recalled clearly. But maybe he hadn’t really wanted a life together. Maybe he simply hadn’t disagreed with me when I said I did.
“And so that was it?” I said to Laney, using a paper towel to wipe my eyes. “That’s when I got so depressed?”
“Yes and no.” Laney picked up a stray pen, staring at it as if she was thinking hard. “You were down, don’t get me wrong. You’d taken two big blows in one day, and only five months or so after Dee died. You were crying a lot and acting a little weird, but something else happened a few weeks later.”
“What?”
She started tapping the pen. “I don’t know. You wouldn’t tell me. But you went from an I-need-to-sit-around-in-my-pajamas-for-a-few-weeks kind of mood to an I’m-taking-drugs-and-seeing-a-therapist-and-stalking-Ben kind of mood.”
I jumped down from the counter. “I was stalking Ben?”
“Well, that’s his word. I’d just say that you were trying a little too hard to get him back. You would often wait for him outside work and, a couple of times, you went inside his apartment and waited there.”
“Jesus, that’s humiliating.”
“It was so unlike you. You sold the town house next, which I couldn’t believe, and then you rented this place. There’s nothing much to tell after that. You’ve pretty much been holed up here for months. I can’t believe you don’t remember this.”
“None of it. But you know what?” I started to clean up the kitchen, using a sponge to scrub a sticky, chocolatey-looking circle off the countertop. “I don’t want to remember. I feel like my old self, and why would I want to go back to that nastiness you’re telling me about?”
Laney stood up and started helping me. “I don’t want you to go back, either, but you should visit Ellen or Dr. Markup or somebody.”
“Dr. Markup? C’mon.” Dr. Markup is good for the basics like flu shots and such, but otherwise he’s a human prescription and referral machine. “You’ve got jaw pain? Here’s some codeine and the number of an oral surgeon. Something in your eye? Use these drops and go see my optometrist friend. Sore throat? Let me give you the name of an ear, nose and throat guy.”
“Well, it can’t be good for you not to remember,” Laney said.
“Maybe it is good, though. Maybe it’s my mind not wanting to be in that place anymore, wanting to get on with it.”
“Maybe,” Laney said, although she didn’t sound convinced.
“Look, I don’t remember what you’re talking about, being depressed and moping around this place, but I don’t want to. I’m hurt and pissed off as hell about Ben.” I took a deep breath and tried to shake him out of my mind. “And I miss my town house. Other than that, I feel okay—great even.” I was relieved to find that I was speaking the truth.
As I was talking, I opened what looked to be a hall closet just outside the kitchen to see what lurked in there, but before I could concentrate on the contents I noticed a full-length mirror hanging inside one of the doors. I turned to face the mirror, and I could feel my mouth dropping open.
“What is it?” Laney said from the kitchen.
I couldn’t talk. I was too busy looking at myself—a drawn, unhealthy-looking, unfashionably dressed self that I barely recognized. My light brown hair, which I normally wore straight to my shoulders, was dingy and frizzy, with enough split ends to conduct electricity. My face was pale, almost gray, my cheeks sunken in, my mossy-green eyes red around the rims. I had on the leather jacket I’d bought last winter, which was a still-cute blazer style, but the jeans I wore were baggy and at least ten years old. My sweater was olive-green and shapeless—one of Ben’s. And the pièce de résistance were the shoes. Lumpy, brown suede walking shoes that I’d bought for a hiking trip Ben and I took years ago. Comfy, sure, but I’d never worn them around town.
Laney had moved behind me and was looking over my shoulder in the mirror.
“When was the last time I went shopping?” I asked her.
“Fucking ages.”
I kept staring at the ugly shoes, the hideous sweater, the god-awful jeans. “I wouldn’t even know what to shop for anymore. I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“We might need a professional,” Laney said.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you remember the personal shopper at Saks? The one who helped me on the Herpes Project?”
A year ago, Laney had been in charge of a statewide herpes campaign targeted at the twenty-something bar crowd. They’d turned to a personal shopper at Saks to outfit the people featured in the ads, and, as a result, the men and women who were supposedly plagued with genital sores looked gorgeous and hip. It was enough to make you think herpes wasn’t so bad, after all.
I nodded, unable to take my eyes away from my image in the mirror.
“She was pretty damn good,” Laney said. “She’ll size you up and then bring in a million things, and you just keep trying them on until you find what you need.”
I took another long look at myself in the mirror before I slammed the door shut and turned to Laney. “Let’s get her on the phone. Now.”
4
An hour later, Laney and I were sitting on yellow silk couches, sipping tea in a huge dressing room of the personal shopping department of Saks on Michigan Avenue. The person that Laney knew wasn’t working, but another woman, named Melanie, had proclaimed it a slow weekend and told us to come in immediately.
Melanie was a willowy frosted-blonde who could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty. She exuded calm and elegance as she sat across from Laney and me, handing us photos and opening pages of fashion magazines, pointing to styles she thought might look good on me. We’d already established that I wanted mostly casual clothes, since I didn’t have a job, but Laney thought I should also get a few dressy things in case something came up. Since I’d been a hermit for the past five months, I couldn’t imagine what would “come up” to cause me to need a beaded silver gown, yet I told Melanie I’d try it on.
“All right, ladies,” she said, standing up and tucking a lock of her perfect blond hair behind her ear, “I have an idea of what you’re looking for, so now I need to measure Kelly.”
I stood on a pedestal, while Melanie’s arms flew around me with a cloth tape measure, hugging my hips, slipping around my breasts, my waist. “All right,” she said, “we’ll get you mostly fours and sixes.”
“Size four and six?”
“Definitely,” Melanie said, rolling up her tape measure.
This should have been a cause for celebration, since I’d always been an eight or a ten. Always. My whole life, no matter how hard I tried to lose a few pounds for bathing suit season, I always hovered around the same weight, the same sizes. Laney and I glanced at each other briefly, neither of us acknowledging exactly how or why I’d lost that weight. I reached down and felt my hipbones through the baggy jeans and sweater. They were prominent for the first time in my life. I must have been either eating like crap or barely eating at all.
“You ladies relax,” Melanie said with a calm smile, making notes on a small leather-covered notepad. “I’ll be back shortly.” Before she left, she poured us more tea, replenishing the biscuits she’d laid out on a silver tray.
“I could get used to being waited on like this,” I told Laney, making my voice light, trying to instill some levity back into the situation. I made a point of breaking a biscuit in half and popping it into my mouth.
“No shit.” She sipped her tea, holding her pinky out for effect, and we both laughed, relieved.
“I love you, you know.” I was suddenly struck with how amazing Laney must have been to me over the past months.
“I know.” She gave me a little smile over her teacup.
It scared me to think about what could have happened if Laney hadn’t been there for me, but if I thought too much about the last few months, they might come back. I might remember. And as odd as it felt to have this gap in my brain, it was better than the alternative.
“So tell me,” I said. “Are you still dating Archer?”
“Archer? Archer was eons ago!”
I imagined Archer in my head—a tall, skinny bass player in a jazz band, with stringy blond hair—but I couldn’t remember learning they weren’t dating anymore. Not that Laney and he had dated very long—not that she dated anyone for very long—but he was the last boyfriend I could recall.
“Is there someone new?”
She nodded.
“Name, please.”
“Well, his real name is Gary.”
“And what’s his not-so-real name?”
She smiled and did that whistle of hers. “Gear.”
“Excuse me?”
“Gear, okay? He calls himself Gear.”
“And what band is Gear in?” This wasn’t a hard question for me to come up with. Laney nearly always dated musicians. I think she’d done it initially to piss off her four older sisters and her parents, but after a few years of music men, Laney had begun to take guitar lessons, and now she was hooked on the whole scene. Her dream was to be in a band herself.
“High Gear.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. High Gear. They’re very talented, actually.”
“I’m sure. And how did you meet Mr. High Gear?”
“Well…” She nearly sighed. “I was taking a lesson.”
She looked at me for confirmation that I remembered the guitar lessons she took at the Old Town School of Music, and I nodded.
“So I was taking a lesson, working on this song I’d written.”
“You’re writing songs now? That’s amazing!”
“Lyrics, too. So anyway, the door was slightly open and I played this damn song for probably the whole hour, and when I opened the door, he was just sitting there in the hallway.”
“Gear?” I asked, trying not to giggle at the name, although Laney probably wouldn’t have noticed. She looked positively dreamy.
“He told me I was talented. He told me he thought my song was beautiful, and that was about three months ago. Three great months.”
“Wow.” I was struck by how romantic their meeting was. There was something so Shakespearean about him being drawn by her song.
It was completely different from the way I’d met Ben—a handshake at work when he started two years after me, and then an awkward, sloppy kiss a few weeks later following a Bartley Brothers happy hour.
I was about to ask Laney what kind of music High Gear played when Melanie sailed into the room holding aloft an armload of hangered clothes. “There’s more coming,” she said, “but this should get us started.”
For the next hour and a half, I tried on more outfits than I knew existed—black pants and jeans of every style, silk sweaters, wool pantsuits (“Good for job interviews, if you decide you want one,” Laney said), trendy skirts with splashy prints, clingy tops, leather boots, suede boots, short boots, high boots and every other shoe under the sun.
Ben used to like me in pastels—pink, powder-blue, lilac. “Soft and sweet,” he’d said. Although I didn’t despise those colors, I didn’t love them, either, and yet little by little my closet had become full of them. I wasn’t one of those women who would just change everything about herself in order to keep her man happy, but I had changed minutely, piece by piece. It was enough to eventually alter most of my wardrobe, to leave me feeling as if I didn’t know what colors I liked anymore.
I noticed now that I was gravitating more toward the basics, sturdy, elegant colors like black, tan, cream and gray. Colors you could build a whole wardrobe around.
Meanwhile, Laney sat on the couch, offering a running commentary on each piece. The problem was that she liked nearly everything.
“Lane,” I said, spinning around to face her. “I can’t buy every single thing.”
“I don’t know why not. You’ve got money to spare from your severance package, and you look amazing in everything.”
I turned back to the mirror and looked at the soft camel pants I had on with an ivory turtleneck and a pair of high-heeled camel boots. Okay, Laney had a point. It wasn’t that I thought I looked so fantastic, but the clothes were fitting me better than ever before. Where I’d been curvy in the past, I was more angular from the weight I’d lost—angular being an adjective I’d only dreamed of applying to myself in the past.
“The trousers look fabulous on you,” Melanie said. By this time, she had realized that I was definitely in a buying mood, and champagne had replaced the tea. She stood now with two other assistants, all of them studying me, nodding along with her.
I shrugged. “Okay, I’ll take the pants.”
“And now,” Melanie said, floating toward me with a garment bag hanging gingerly over her arms, “let’s try this.”
It was the gown from the photo, and it was stunning. I slipped it on, stepping into the high sandals they’d given me. The lining was silky and smooth. When I zipped the dress up, it felt like a second skin.
I came around the curtain, and as I stepped onto the pedestal I heard a gasp—Laney’s. I looked into the mirror and saw what she meant. It was spectacular. The dress was sleeveless and formfitting. It was cut so well, with its high neck and equally high slit, that it could have made anyone look good. The silver bugle beads glimmered with each movement as I turned this way and that. It was the most beautiful dress I’d ever seen.
I looked down at the price tag and tried not to swear. It was half a mortgage payment—if I’d still had a mortgage to pay off.
“You have to get it,” Laney said, a hand on her chest. “You look fabulous.”
“But it’s crazy money.”
“Don’t care.” Laney raised her champagne flute.
“Where would I wear it? I mean, what are the chances of me going to a gala or something if I’ve been needing antidepressants just to get out of the house?”
Melanie and her assistants sent each other questioning looks, probably wondering if they were dealing with an escapee from a mental hospital.
Laney shook her head and gave them a smile as if to say She’s kidding. “Kelly, it’s perfect on you. You have to have it. And who knows what will happen? Maybe there’ll be a black tie wedding.”
“Yeah, maybe Ben and Therese’s.” The thought almost made me fall off the heels.
Laney must have seen my stricken face because she jumped up, putting her arms around me from behind. “Look, this is a special dress. You probably won’t ever again find something this amazing. Think of it as a treat to yourself after everything you’ve gone through. And I’ll make you a deal. If after a year you haven’t found someplace to wear it, I’ll buy something fabulous, too, and we’ll take each other out for an outrageous night in our dresses.”
I looked at myself in the mirror again. I’d been so frugal for years, saving up to buy my town house, the one where Ben and I would start our lives together, and what did I have to show for it? Not a goddamn thing. I smoothed the dress over my stomach, although it hung perfectly. I watched the light glinting off the beads.
“Deal,” I said to Laney. I turned and hugged her back.
Fifteen minutes later, I was ready to go and wearing a new outfit—a silky, bronze sweater, a pair of dark jeans and tall, black leather boots. As I bent over to sign the credit card slip, I flipped my hair over my shoulder and got a rush of that damn-I-look-good feeling. It’d been a while. But then I got another rush, this one much more panicky, and my hand froze over the slip. What if Laney was wrong about how much money I had? What if I’d just rendered myself penniless?
“Everything all right?” Melanie said.
“Uh…” I tried not to focus on the grand total at the bottom. If Laney was wrong, if I was broke, I’d just have to return everything. “It’s fine,” I said, and I scrawled my signature with a flourish. “Thanks for everything.”
“Oh, it was a pleasure,” Melanie said. “A real pleasure.”
I’m sure it had been a great pleasure, since my whopping purchases had probably provided Melanie with her sales quota for the month, but I kept my mouth closed. Despite the moment of panic, I was entirely too pleased. I knew that this frivolous shopping spree couldn’t provide answers about my memory loss or stem the depression I feared might return; yet it had made me feel a hell of a lot better.
“May I make one more suggestion?” Melanie said.
She turned me around to the mirror and fingered my dull hair. “Can I send you to a friend of mine at Trevé?”
I knew what she was trying to say. My hair was hell. Something needed to be done. But Trevé was the hottest salon in the city.
“I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to get in there anytime soon,” I said.
“Let me try.”
She whipped out a cell phone the size of a Tic Tac box and raised it to her ear. “Tommy,” she said. “It’s Melanie from Saks. Tell Lino I’m calling in my favor. I need an appointment today.”
She paused, listening.
“No, it’s not for me. A client. Kelly McGraw.” Another pause. “Perfect,” she said with a smile. “Kisses to Lino.”
She clicked her phone off and looked at her watch. “You’ll have to get a cab. Lino is expecting you at Trevé in twenty minutes.”
We could hear the music pumping even before we walked in the door. A huge doorman with a bald head held the glass door for us. “Welcome to Trevé, ladies.”
“You’d think they’d have somebody with hair,” I said as we muscled my Saks bags through the doorway.
Laney laughed, or at least I could see her laughing, although it was hard to hear her above the thumping music. The front desk was at least six feet tall and spray-painted with gold graffiti. I stood on my tiptoes and screamed my name to the collagen-lipped receptionist, who led us upstairs to the stylists’ stations, where the music was, thank God, being played at a much lower volume.
I was seated on a chrome-and-leather chair, my bags piled high in a closet, while a stool was pulled up for Laney, and two more glasses of champagne were delivered to us.
“Feel free to lose your memory every Saturday so we can do this once a week,” Laney said.
I knew she meant it in a kidding way, but it reminded me of my horrible morning, of that sheer fear I’d felt when Beth Maninsky opened my door.
“You okay?” Laney looked a little chagrined at her comment.
I shook my head, shaking off the thoughts at the same time. “I’m great.”
I was leaning forward, my glass outstretched to toast with Laney, when I heard a cry. I swung around to see a short, deeply tanned man with dark hair and at least two coats of mascara around his dark eyes.
“My God!” he said, before he rattled off a litany of what sounded like Italian words. “Melanie didn’t tell me it was this bad.”
He spun my chair around so that I faced the mirror, and began pulling up strands of my hair, studying the split ends in the light.
“I take it you’re Lino,” Laney said. She put her champagne glass down on his station with a clunk. She had that defensive tone in her voice, the one that said, I’ll break your legs if you mess with my friend, and I loved her for it.
“Signorina,” he said in a heavy Italian accent, “I mean no harm.” He squeezed my shoulders and I looked at him in the mirror. His long lashes batted a few times. “You’re gorgeous,” he said to me. “Bellisima. Look at your body, your clothes. Beautiful! But this hair! I have no time for this.” He shuddered and turned to a boy who looked all of seventeen. “Get her shampooed. Now.”
After my head was scrubbed and then massaged until I was in a near dreamlike state by the underage minion, I was caped and back in front of Lino, who began furiously working away with his scissors.
“Shouldn’t you ask her what she wants?” Laney said, the snippiness in her tone matching the sound of the scissors.
“No.” Lino gave my hair another decisive clip. “I have no time for talking. I decide. Clearly, she does not know what is right for her hair. We’ll do a little cut, molto bene, and then you two ladies will be gone.”
“But that’s ridiculous!” Laney said. “You have to take your time. This is her hair we’re talking about! You need to find out what she wants. She’s an adult, she should decide—”
“Lane,” I said, holding my hand out. I couldn’t actually see her, since Lino had my wet, wonderful-smelling hair hanging in front of my face like a curtain. “It’s fine.”
“You don’t care what he does?”
I considered her question for a second. Usually, I was concerned about what Ben would say if I did something nuts with my makeup or hair, of what they would say at work, but that didn’t matter now, and I found myself pleasantly surprised. I was in for a change, and I told Laney as much.
“Mmm-hmm,” Lino said.
“So where are you from in Italy?” Laney asked. She sounded like she was trying to be nice, which I appreciated, since this guy had both my head and his sharp silver blades in his hands, but I sensed something mischievous in her voice. Although “Laney Pendleton” might not sound Italian, she was. Her mother’s family came from Milan. Laney herself had been to Italy at least ten times.
“Napoli,” Lino said, the scissors flying furiously.
“Oh, so you’ve been to Ravello, right?” she said.
“Mmm-hmm.” This time there was no smugness to his tone.
“Have you been to that hotel—what’s it called—Palazzo Mazzo?”
“Of course.”
Laney kept peppering him with questions about the Amalfi coast, about Positano and Capri and Sorrento. Lino grew more terse with each query, his scissor-snipping growing faster and faster until I felt I had to put a stop to it.
“What’s going on here?” I said, ducking my head away from the approaching blades.
Laney had a sadistic-looking grin on her face. “He’s not Italian.”
“Mon Dieu!” Lino said, slapping his hands to his chest so that the scissors were pointed at his neck as if he might off himself. “That’s not true!”
“Oh yes it is.” Laney’s face was smug, almost triumphant. “First of all, mon Dieu is French, not Italian. Second, there is no hotel named Palazzo Mazzo in Ravello, and Salerno is not right next to Capri. You’re a fraud!”
Behind me, Lino froze, the scissors poised at his neck for a long moment. Then he leaned over my shoulder, toward Laney. “Keep your voice down, you little hussy,” he said in a clear Southern accent.
Laney and I both gasped. “Where are you from? Mississippi?” I asked.
“Tennessee. And don’t you say a word.”
“What’s it worth to you?” Laney still wore that sadistic smile.
Lino glanced around, then leaned back into our little circle again. “I’ll give her a free color, I’ll pop for a makeup application and then you two get the hell out of here.”
“Done!” Laney said, and they shook hands over my cape.
Two hours later, I emerged from Trevé, my hair a gleaming, coppery-caramel color and styled in a chunky, layered bob that made me feel cutting edge (no pun intended) and gorgeous. My face had been cleansed and moisturized and powdered and plucked; my eyes were smoky with brown shadow; my lips glistened with gloss.
“Girl—” Laney looked me up and down as we stood trying to hail a cab “—we are going to have one hell of a night.”
5
We went to Laney’s, since I had no desire to go back to the high-rise I couldn’t remember, and I had enough clothes now to last me a month. Laney had a loft apartment in Old Town, with lots of exposed brick and artsy charm.
She cranked up a Rolling Stones CD and tossed me a beer. It was dark outside, but the apartment seemed to be glowing. Because of our afternoon champagne infusion, we were feeling a little goofy, and we danced around her kitchen for a while, singing into our beer bottles.
“All right,” Laney said after a few songs, “I need to redo my makeup and find an outfit that’s going to make me look half as amazing as you. Come to my room and help me decide what to wear.”
“Sure.”
As I walked through the living room toward the bedroom, my eyes caught on the baskets of photos Laney kept by her fireplace—one for childhood and family photos, one for high school and college, and two more for recent pictures.
“I think I’ll flip through these for a second,” I said, sinking onto her couch and picking up the high school/college basket.
“No problem.”
I think she sensed what I wanted—to test my memory, to make sure it wasn’t only the last five months that I couldn’t remember.
She turned the music down a little, and soon I could hear the slide of hangers and the opening of drawers from the gaping door of her bedroom.
The few photos on top of the basket were of Laney’s college friends, people I’d known vaguely from when I visited her during that time. Normally, I would have flipped through all of them, but I was more focused now. I was looking for pictures of myself.
The first one I came to was a shot of Laney and me in Tijuana, and I got a swoop of relief through my belly, because I could remember that time perfectly. I could even remember the hot Mexican guy who’d taken the picture. We’d been in San Diego for spring break, and we took a day trip into “TJ,” as all the San Diegans called it. We were giddy with the exchange rate and spent the day buying bright, coarse Mexican blankets and silver jewelry before we spent the rest of our money on tequila shots and margaritas. The photo in my hands was taken right before the last bus back across the border, and both Laney and I were rosy with drink, huge careless smiles playing on our faces.
As I dug deeper, I hit on smaller photos, rounded at the corners, taken when 3x5 was the usual photographic dimension. One of my favorites was there—Laney and I standing in front of a row of gray lockers, my Nikon on a strap around my neck, Laney clutching a clipboard to her chest. It had been taken only three days after we’d met, and once again, I had a near perfect memory of that day. We’d been just outside the yearbook office when someone had said they needed a photo of us for the staff section. Both Laney and I wore too much makeup and tidal wave bangs—bangs that arched above our foreheads and came to rest below one eye. Right before the photo was taken, Laney leaned in and threw her arm around me, a gesture that made me nearly weak with relief. I’d hated being new in the school, but after that moment, I knew I was going to be okay.
I picked through the basket, looking for pictures of my old boyfriends, thinking that maybe the breakup with Ben had something to do with the memory loss, and maybe I wouldn’t remember my exes. But I easily found and remembered a picture of my high school boyfriend, Ted, whom I’d lost my virginity to in the stockroom of the convenience store where he worked, and Steve, my college boyfriend, who looked stoned as he posed in front of one of the landscapes he’d painted.
Laney has always called me a serial monogamist, but it’s not really an accurate term. While it’s true that I’ve had almost as many boyfriends as I’ve had first dates, I don’t go from one to another to another without a break. In fact, I’ve always tried to avoid that pattern, having seen my mother date a long string of guys, only to end up with heartbreak. Instead, I have serious boyfriends, and if we break up, then I’m alone—no blind dates, no pickups in bars—until I find someone I truly, truly want to go on a date with. Laney claims this trait has weeded out far too many candidates and leaves no room for flings. Her point is that flings are, by design, to be had with completely inappropriate men—the ones you find attractive, but would never date for one reason or another. And yet the whole fling thing has always seemed a waste of time to me, particularly given my goal of being married with one kid by the time I’m thirty-five.
I picked up a stack of pictures toward the bottom of the basket and quickly discarded them one by one onto the coffee table like a blackjack dealer. With each slap of a picture, I mentally listed the who, where and when, building up a confidence that most of my memory was intact. Senior prom with Ted, me in a hideous chartreuse gown that make me look jaundiced; Laney and me after a football game, clearly about to pass out; on the beach in Florida with Laney’s sister, Sophia; Laney’s kleptomaniac college roommate, Tara. When I came to one of Laney, Dee and me, my hands froze. I’d been a senior in college, full of myself and how cool I was. Dee was still in high school and had used the trip as an excuse to “check out the campus,” when what she really wanted was to drink beer and hang out with me.
In the photo, Dee’s light brown hair is short, and she’s laughing—as she so often was—sandwiched between Laney and me, her head turned slightly toward mine. The pain of losing her rushed in like a hurricane.
According to Ellen Geiger, the psychiatrist I’d seen, everyone who suffers the loss of a loved one ruminates (her word) on the last time they spoke to or saw the person. I was not the patient to change that pattern. For months afterward, it was all I could think about—the last time I’d spoken to Dee and the last time I’d seen her, in January.
Dee had driven up from the University of Illinois to visit me, and we’d spent the weekend in our usual way—shopping during the day with Mom for clothes and boots and jewelry we didn’t need, and at night going out with Ben and Laney, regaling them with stories of the astounding mix of freaks and psychopaths our mother used to date. Ben and Laney adored Dee as much as I did. It was hard not to. She had a little-girl way of holding her head down and drawing her eyes up that made you want to take care of her, and yet she could drink like a Russian soldier. And that laugh of hers was impossible not to love—a buoyant, soft-at-first chuckle that grew into a belly laugh.
On Monday morning, when Dee was supposed to leave, it was a silver-gray day, the sidewalks slick with ice, the city covered in a freezing fog. I had an early meeting, and so I was gone before she got up, leaving a note to help herself to breakfast and have a safe trip back. The usual banalities. She called me at work, though, wanting to chat, telling me about some dream she had about lobsters, relating a story she’d seen on the news that morning, and finally asking me where I kept the coffee filters.
“Third cabinet from the fridge.” I tried not to sound annoyed. Dee loved long, chatty phone conversations (I didn’t) and she was always calling me at work during her study breaks, hoping for an hour-long talk.
“What about bagels?” Dee asked. “Do you have any bagels?”
“I don’t know, Dee, look around.” I scrolled through my e-mails, anxious to get back to work. My meeting had been disastrous, and the market had just opened.
“Maybe I should visit Mom at work before I leave. What do you think?”
“Whatever you want.”
“I haven’t even seen her office yet. Where’s the building? It’s somewhere on Michigan, right?”
“Michigan and Randolph.”
“Yeah, maybe I’ll just stop in. Although I do have two papers to write.”
At that point, Ronald Han, my boss, who was known around the office as Attila the Han, stopped by my desk and stood over me with a frown, brandishing a stack of faxes. He drew a line across his neck with his finger.
“I’ve got to go, Dee.”
“Oh, all right. But what do you think? Should I pop in to see Mom?”
Attila slapped the faxes on his palm.
“I think you should just get on the road.” I deduced that if she stopped in to see Mom, she might very well “pop in” to see me, too, and it was proving to be a much too hectic day for visitors.
“Yeah, you’re probably right.”
“Okay, see you then,” I said, and hung up.
Two hours later, I got a call from the state police, and two hours after that I saw Dee for the last time when I identified her bloody body at Cook County Hospital.
The memory of that morning reverberated in my brain now until I had a hard time breathing, wondering if maybe I was going under again, if I would soon forget this moment, too. But after a second, the air was a little clearer, and I was still there, still holding her picture, still missing her like crazy. At least, I consoled myself, I remembered. I seemed to recall everything about myself and my history except the very recent past.
With that thought, I picked up Laney’s latest basket of pictures, the ones taken during the last few years, and sure enough, I seemed to recognize all those as well. Actually all but one—a photo of Laney and me leaning together at a lunch table. I recognized the restaurant, a brunch place where we frequently met on Sunday mornings to dissect our weekends. Based on our clothes, the photo had probably been taken in summer…but I couldn’t remember having this picture taken at all. My earlier confidence evaporated, leaving a hollow feeling in my stomach.
I noticed how odd I looked in the photo. It wasn’t my hair, which was pulled back the way I used to often wear it, or my outfit of khaki shorts and a T-shirt. It was my face, and the utter lack of a genuine expression on it. My head was next to Laney’s, and she was smiling widely, but my face was frozen. Sure, I was smiling, but it was forced and tight, the grin failing to reach my eyes.
Laney slid into the room then, holding her hands away from her body for an outfit inspection.
“Adorable,” I said. She wore a shorter black skirt, a sweater in a deep wine color and matching lipstick.
“Thanks.” She dropped her hands. “What’s that?” She came around the couch and stood behind me, looking over my shoulder.
I lifted the photo so she could see. “It doesn’t even look like me.”
A second went by. “It really wasn’t you,” she said. “You hadn’t been you for a long time.”
I looked at my grim image one more time before I tucked it, facedown, into the bottom of the basket.
“Where are we going?” I’d been so distracted by my haunted face in that picture that it hadn’t dawned on me to ask the question until we were already in a cab, flying down Lincoln Avenue, past lit-up bars and restaurants and outcroppings of brick town houses much like the one I used to own.
“Tarringtons,” Laney said.
Tarringtons was one of our old haunts, a place where we used to know each and every bartender. I couldn’t say when I’d last been there, but I was sure it had been over a year. Ben and I had fallen into that relationship stage where we didn’t go out that often, happy to stay home, tucked away in the town house, making linguini and watching movies (weird little independent films if it was my night to pick, The Godfather or some other mobster flick if it was his). The problem with that stage, of course, is that when you come out of the relationship, as I apparently had, you feel odd going back into the old stage, the go-out-every-night-and-make-witty-small-talk stage. I hoped I was up to it.
The smoke hung like nimbus clouds from the ceiling as Laney and I walked in. Tarringtons was a long, thin, oak-lined place with a wooden bar to the left, the rest of the place scattered with stools and tall round tables. At the front, a shaggy guy played acoustic Van Morrison tunes.
We made our way to the bar and snagged the last two empty stools. Laney ordered margaritas, our cocktail of choice. I started to ask her for more details about Gear, but we were soon interrupted by a shout and a round of hugs from Jess and Steve, two friends of ours from Laney’s days at an advertising agency. Jess and Steve both still worked there (at least as far as I knew), and they both still did everything together, but for different reasons now. For years, while they were “just friends,” we were constantly telling Jess that they should have sex and get it over with, but she swore they weren’t like that. Then one day, a year and a half ago, they’d announced that they were, in fact, like that. They were in love, they’d discovered, and a few months later they were engaged. We’d been hearing about the wedding plans all year and in fact, if I remembered correctly, it was coming up soon.
“Oh my God,” Jess said. “Is it Kelly McGraw, blast from the past, or is it a vision?”
“It’s me,” I said, letting myself be pulled into another one of Jess’s surprisingly strong hugs. Everything about Jess was tiny—her miniature frame, her rosebud mouth, her hands and feet—and although she hated being called “cute,” she was probably going to be stuck with the term her whole life. Steve was just the opposite. Tall and gangly, with an unfortunate resemblance to Ichabod Crane.
“You look unbelievable,” Jess said. “Where have you been and what have you done to yourself?”
“We had a little makeover day,” Laney said. “Shopping at Saks and then the works at Trevé.”
I smiled at her, thankful for her answer and the diversion from the question about where I’d been for so long. I wasn’t prepared to broadcast my memory loss, and I couldn’t very well use Ben as an excuse for not being around, since everyone probably knew we’d broken up months ago.
“I won’t even ask what you spent,” Jess said, “but whatever it was, it was worth it. You look beautiful!”
Behind her Steve nodded, and I thanked them profusely, the compliments making me sit taller on my bar stool.
“So the wedding’s soon, right?” I asked as Laney turned to the bar and ordered drinks for Steve and Jess.
“One week from today,” Steve said. “According to the schedule Jess set, we should be home right now writing out place cards, but we needed a break.”
“He needed a break,” Jess said. “Anyway, Kell, we’re so bummed you can’t be there.”
I couldn’t be there? Why not? These were two of my good friends. An uncomfortable silence fell.
“Right. Well, I was going to be busy.” I glanced at Laney for some help.
“With that charity thing,” she said.
I had no idea what she was talking about, but by her expression and the way she was nodding slowly I could tell that she was making it up. I had, apparently, declined the wedding invitation because I had another date with my couch and my antidepressants.
“Right,” I said. “The charity thing. But I’m not doing that anymore, am I?”
“No,” Laney said. “It got cancelled, right?”
“Right. So I’ll be able to go, after all. Is that okay?”
“We’d love it,” Jess said, but she and Steve exchanged worried looks. “The thing is we already turned in our seating chart. I don’t know if we can change it.”
“I’ve got an idea,” Laney said. “I was planning on bringing Gear, but he was going to have to leave early to go to some gig, so why don’t I just bring Kelly as my date. Would that work?”
“That would be perfect!” Jess said in a relieved voice. “I’m so glad you’ll be there.”
“Me, too.” I squeezed Laney’s hand.
I loved being out and about like this, loved seeing my friends. So why hadn’t I done it for so long? Why had I holed myself up in that apartment and turned down a wedding invitation? I wouldn’t think about it. Not now—maybe not ever.
I helped Laney order another round of drinks, then more cocktails when other friends arrived. We made a tight circle near the bar, shouting over the music, laughing at old stories, clinking glasses. And then I felt him. My mouth slowed down, my head turned. Ben. Pushing through the crowd. He looked handsome in a thick wool sweater, his brown hair tamed and combed away from his face, his cheeks a little flushed from the cold outside. Behind him, another Toni look-alike trailed along, and when I looked closer, I could see they were holding hands. Therese. The girlfriend.
Ben was smiling, looking right at our group, and I was panicked at how I was supposed to act. From what Laney had told me, I’d been trailing after Ben like a puppy for the last few months. But if Ben or Therese were unhappy about seeing me, they didn’t show it. They walked up to us, calling hello, hugging a few people, while Laney glared at him. Ben knew Steve from college, but clearly Laney hadn’t expected him to be here tonight.
When he reached us, Ben nodded at Laney. I felt my heart beating hard under my new bronze sweater, and I wondered if anyone could hear it. Laney gave him a terse nod back, and then Ben turned to me with an expectant smile.
“I’m Ben,” he said, apparently not recognizing me. He started to raise his hand to shake mine, but then froze, the smile dropping from his face. “Kell?”
“Hi, Ben.” Be brave. Be brave.
He gave a little shake of his head, the one that reminded me of a dog shaking water off its coat, the gesture he made when he was trying to clear his brain of something he couldn’t make sense of.
“Jeez.” He stared at my hair, my face, my clothes. “What…ah…what happened to you?”
He made it sound as if I’d been mauled by wild dogs.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it like that. You just look so different, especially from this morning.”
Was it only that morning that I’d stood in front of his apartment, frenetically pushing the buzzer?
“You look great, though.” His words came fast now, almost tripping over themselves. “You look better and beautiful, and I’m glad to see it, and—”
Just then the woman I assumed to be Therese wedged herself into our conversation and cast a look of disdain at me, then one at Ben for good measure.
“Hi,” I said, as politely as possible. “I’m Kelly.”
“I know who you are.” She raked her hands through her sandy, streaked hair and shot me an expression of pure disgust.
I felt myself falter. It had been such a shock to be so close to Ben that I’d forgotten for a second that I’d met this woman sometime over the last five months while I was hounding her boyfriend.
“I need to use the powder room,” Laney said in a too loud voice. “Kell?”
“Sure,” I said, grateful beyond belief.
“Are you all right?” Laney asked once we were in the safe confines of the tiny pink bathroom. She gripped my shoulders and peered at my face.
“I was just surprised, that’s all.” It was true, and I was also surprised to find that I didn’t feel like falling apart. I didn’t feel like crying or shrieking. I had just been so startled to see him, the guy whose kids I thought I’d have, whose underwear I thought I’d wash for the rest of my life. How strange it was to have known him so intimately—to know the way he squeezed his toothpaste tube into a triangular roll and the way he liked to have his forehead rubbed when he had a headache—and yet not to have a relationship with him anymore.
Laney hugged me, then proceeded to give me a rousing pep talk about not letting him get to me, how I was gorgeous and smart and starting a new chapter in my life that didn’t involve him.
By the time we made it back to the bar, I was better. We ordered another round, and I was just starting to enjoy a chat with Jess about their honeymoon plans when Ben interrupted.
“Can I have a second?” He shot me his meaningful look, the one he’d probably given me on my birthday before he’d handed me my walking papers instead of a diamond solitaire.
Jess patted me on the shoulder as if to say good luck, then left us alone.
“So.” Ben looked me up and down again. “You must have had some day.”
“A great day, actually. A little shopping with Laney.”
“And a new haircut.”
I said nothing. Did he really want to talk about my hair?
“You really look amazing.”
“Thanks.” I hated myself for being flattered.
“Well, anyway,” he said, with another doggy shake of his head, “Therese asked me to speak to you about today.”
I looked over my shoulder at his girlfriend who was pretending to be engrossed in a conversation with Steve, but I could sense her antennae pointed in our direction. “Yeah, I’m sorry about that.”
“This coming over to my place really has to stop.”
“I know. It’s done. It won’t happen again.”
He gave me a look of patent disbelief. “Seriously, Kell, Therese is getting upset. This can’t keep happening.”
His mouth continued to move, talking on and on about how poor little Therese could barely sleep, how I needed to get on with my life, et cetera. The more he talked, the more I wanted to laugh, because right then the thought of waiting for Ben at work or calling him repeatedly or buzzing his apartment was ludicrous to me. He’d dumped me, the asshole, and although I still had a hard time wrapping my mind around that, I wasn’t stalker material. I couldn’t believe I’d ever gotten close to it.
Finally I interrupted him, putting a hand on his arm. “I can’t even remember doing those things you’re talking about, but I promise you, it won’t ever happen again. I’ve had a little memory problem….” I let my words trail off, suddenly unsure whether I wanted to admit to anyone other than Laney my loss of memory. Would people think me crazy? Was I crazy?
“What are you talking about?” He actually looked concerned, his gray-brown eyes worried and blinking, and that expression got to me. I found myself telling him the whole story of my day, explaining that I had no recollection of us breaking up or the way I’d been unwilling to let him go.
“Are you joking?” he asked a few times, his eyes skeptical now, as if this might be another one of my crafty ploys to get him back.
“It’s true. I can’t remember my birthday or anything after that until today. But I feel okay.”
“Well, shouldn’t you go to a doctor or something? Get yourself checked out?”
I made a show of holding out my arms, looking down at my legs. “Everything else is intact, so…” I shrugged.
“I don’t know.” He fingered the dark-brown freckle on his right cheekbone. That freckle had always made him self-conscious, because it resembled a speck of dirt, and people were forever telling him he had something on his face. But I used to love that spot. I’d kiss it whenever he walked in my door.
“You do look good.” His eyes trailed over me again.
I wanted to make a snappy retort, something like Yes, I look damn good and you’re not getting any of it, but I kept quiet.
“So how’s Bartley Brothers?” I didn’t want to talk about us or my memory any longer, but wanted to occupy Ben for a while, just to piss off Therese. “How’s Attila?”
“Demoted. He’s pushing paper,” Ben said.
“No!”
Ben nodded. “Lots of people are getting moved around or let go.”
“Yeah, so I heard.”
“Well, obviously. You’d know that since you…”
“Got fired.”
“Right.”
There was an uncomfortable pause.
“So tell me what happened to Attila,” I said.
Ben launched into a story about Attila being investigated for insider information right around the time of the budget cuts. From there, our conversation was easy, catching up on all our co-workers—my ex-co-workers—Ben telling me stories about trades gone awry, and bringing me up-to-date on the market.
We were laughing about another Attila story when Therese sauntered up to us and placed a proprietary hand on his arm.
“Benji,” she said—and I couldn’t help it; I snorted. Benji was a nickname he hated, the name Ben’s brothers used to make fun of him. Both of his brothers were much bigger. They excelled at football and other bone-crunching sports, while Ben had been relegated to running and tennis.
Ben sent me a look as if to say, Shut up, please. I tried to quell the giggles.
“I’m ready to go,” Therese said, shooting me little knives with her eyes. “It’s getting way too uncomfortable in here.”
“How about one more and then we’ll head out?” Ben said.
Therese’s bottom lip dropped a little. I got the impression that she wasn’t used to Ben saying no to her. “I want to go now. We’ve got to be at my mother’s for brunch tomorrow, remember?” She sent me a look of triumph, clearly expecting me to be crushed by this news. Strangely, I wasn’t. In fact, I felt so much better now that Ben and I had had a normal conversation.
“Sure,” Ben said, “I was just updating Kelly on what’s going on at Bartley.”
“Great. Did you tell her that you made partner?”
Ben sent a quick, guilty look in my direction.
My good mood, my ease at talking to Ben, evaporated like steam. “What? When?”
“Last week,” Therese bragged.
I fought hard not to smack her.
“Is that true?” I said to Ben. I was the one who was supposed to make partner first. Me. Ben had started at Bartley two years after me. I was next in line. How had I gotten the ax while he was elected to goddamn partnership status? I felt my neck go red.
Ben nodded sheepishly.
“He deserves it,” Therese said. “He’s worked really hard and—”
“Excuse me,” I said. “Could you shut up for one minute?”
Her eyes narrowed, and she sent a glance at Ben as if to say, Are you going to let her talk to me like that?
“Kell,” he said. “Take it easy. It just happened. I didn’t even know it was coming.”
Something about the way he had said that, the way his words got incrementally softer at the end of the sentence and the way his mouth became tight, told me that he had damn well known it was coming. He probably knew back in May. For a horrified moment, I wondered if he’d known that I was going to be fired, too. I stood there, completely stumped for words, wishing my temper would take over and do something rash that I would later regret—something like head-butting Ben—but nothing came. Finally, Therese tugged on his sleeve.
He drained the rest of his beer. “I’m sorry, Kell. Good to see you.”
I searched my brain for a witty comeback, something that would erase the smirk from Therese’s face, but once again I came up blank. A pregnant quiet enveloped us.
“Ben, let’s go,” Therese said.
He hesitated, still standing before me as if he might say something else.
“Oh, please,” Therese said, before he got the chance. She clamped a hand on his arm and dragged him away.
When they reached the door, Therese disappeared through it, but Ben turned around and for the longest moment held my eyes.
My temper flared after Ben left, obviously the wrong time, but I was immune to a cure, and so I sat at the bar, boring poor Jess and Steve and Laney about the manipulative machinations of Bartley Brothers and the treachery of Ben, all the while trying to douse my anger with cocktails. Laney eventually wrenched the conversation away from me and back to Jess and Steve’s wedding, and they were happy to prattle on about place settings and invitations and the band vs. DJ debate until we got the “last call” shout from the bartender.
After Tarringtons closed, and Laney had convinced me that no convenience store in the city sold margarita mix, she and I lay snug in her king-size bed, gossiping maliciously about Therese, giggling about Ben not recognizing me, and rehashing—at least fifty times—my conversation with him. Although still pissed off about him being made partner ahead of me, about him possibly knowing that I would be fired, I felt much better now that I’d gotten my dose of rage. And oddly enough, I felt a tipsy contentment around me. It’d been eons since Laney and I had had a late-night chat like this, a fact that made me sad. It was Laney who’d been with me every step of the way though the traumas of high school, the newfound freedom of college and the often painful days of early adulthood, and yet it was Ben I’d ended up spending so much time with. Ben, who’d eventually decided that the time meant nothing.
“He is such a fucker,” I said, the margaritas making my tongue loose, causing me to repeat myself over and over.
Laney gave me a light smack on the arm. “Stop already. It’s unhealthy. Let’s talk about something else.”
“Name it.”
“Are you sure you’re all right with this no-memory thing? I mean, you’ve had a lot going on today, and it’s all right to fall apart.”
I turned on my side to face her. “I feel better than I ever have.”
“Well, don’t think that you have to put on a tough act. You can still fall apart if you want.”
“Nope. I’ve done enough of that.”
Laney was silent for a second, and I could hear the whoosh of cars passing by her building. “It’s just that something was definitely wrong. Something more than Ben and the job,” she said.
“It was obviously something that didn’t matter.”
“Maybe.”
Her tone made me feel a little chilly, and I buried myself deeper under her duvet. What was it that I hadn’t told anyone? Did it matter now? On one hand, if whatever it was could explain why I couldn’t remember this summer, I wanted to know it. For some reason, I truly wanted to learn why this odd memory loss had happened to me. But on the other hand, if I remembered those five months, wouldn’t I just slip back into that depression? I wanted the whys and the hows of the situation, but I feared the details. I felt as if my memory was a house of cards, wobbly and shaky and hollow inside. I was afraid that if I came too close to that emptiness, that missing time, everything would fall in on me.
“Look, Lane,” I said, “I’ve already spent too much time on whatever it was, and maybe that’s why I feel so good now, because I let myself be depressed until I couldn’t be depressed anymore.”
“Shouldn’t you try to figure out more about what was going on with you during that time? I could help you, you know. We could go talk to Ellen or somebody, maybe do some research.” Laney’s voice sounded so sweet, so helpful and slightly worried, and it made me tremble a little inside.
I squeezed her arm, as much to reassure her as myself. “It’s okay. As far as I can tell, nothing good happened during those months, right?”
“Right,” she said, a hint of doubt lingering in her voice.
“Right.” I rolled over, turning my back to her. “And what you don’t know can’t hurt you.”
6
On Sunday, I suffered an intense headache. I usually didn’t feel so bad after a night of drinking, but I probably hadn’t been drinking much for five months. I tried not to think about the headaches Laney had told me about, the ones I suffered during those months I was holed up in my apartment.
After Laney plied me with ibuprofen, she and I joined Gear and the rest of his High Gear band to watch the Bears game at a little corner pub. I’m not sure what I expected of Laney’s latest boyfriend—maybe heroin at halftime?—but he wasn’t exactly the stereotypical dude in a heavy metal band. Oh sure, he had the requisite tattoos on his arms (barbed wire on the right, some Chinese lettering on the left) and he wore a ripped black T-shirt and black army boots, but Gear was warm and friendly, too, which surprised me.
“So this is the infamous Kelly,” he said when Laney introduced us.
“Infamous? I hope that’s a good thing.” I held out my hand, but he pulled me into a hug. He smelled like shaving cream and cigarettes.
“You’re infamous because Laney Bug is always talking about you.”
“Laney Bug?” I looked over my shoulder at Laney, who groaned a little, probably realizing that she would never be able to live down this nickname. I could almost see us at age ninety, me taunting her, Oh Laney Bug, can you bring me my tea, please?
The rest of Gear’s band weren’t quite as outgoing or sweet, but we spent a happy afternoon with them eating pizza, watching football and screaming at the TV when the Bears messed up. I drank a few beers in a hair-of-the-dog effort, and didn’t think about anything else for hours—not Ben or my town house or my lack of employment.
Monday morning, I rolled over in Laney’s bed and stretched, feeling, once again, intensely headachy from the alcohol. Apparently, I couldn’t hold my liquor like I used to. I heard the hum of Laney’s hair dryer from the bathroom, followed by the clatter of makeup on the tile floor and Laney’s curse.
“You okay in there, Laney Bug?” I yelled, stretching my legs under her comfy duvet.
“Late,” she called back, ignoring my use of her new nickname. “Totally late.”
A second later, she tore out of the bathroom, yanked open her closet and stepped into a pair of shoes.
“What time did you get up?” I asked.
“Six.”
I turned and squinted at her bedside clock. It was eight-thirty. “And what have you been doing?”
“Answered e-mail, did a Tae-Bo tape, returned a few phone calls.”
“Okay, now I feel like a lazy ass.”
“You need to take it easy.” She picked up her purse by the bedside and squeezed my shoulder. “Stay as long as you want, all right? And call me at work if you need anything.”
“Thanks.” I watched her run into the kitchen and grab an apple out of a bowl. “Have a good day!” I called, but she was already out the door.
With Laney gone, the apartment seemed empty and vast. I swallowed some Advil, then took one of the books from her shelf, a memoir about a woman who’d followed the Grateful Dead. I figured that maybe I’d lie in bed all day and read. The book wasn’t that interesting, though, at least not after the first three acid trips, and within an hour I was antsy. I knew I should probably go back to my own apartment, but the thought brought only a queasy feeling.
To thank Laney for everything she’d done for me lately, I ignored the pain in my head and the nausea in my stomach and cleaned up her place. Then I made myself a bowl of granola and decided I’d just spend a lazy day in front of the TV.
The first few hours went okay, especially after my headache eased. I watched the news and business stations, trying to catch up on the market, studying the Bloomberg as I used to for the ticker symbols that signaled the retail stocks. There were a couple of surprises, a few stocks that were way higher than when I’d followed them, and I found myself analyzing the rest of the market and how it might affect these companies. After a while, though, I didn’t care all that much. It was a relief just to flip the channel.
Next, I tried the talk shows and the soaps, which kept my interest for a whole forty minutes. What, exactly, was I going to do with the rest of my day? A better question—what had I done when I was home for five months? I couldn’t fathom it.
A thought came to me. Laney had said that I had more than enough money to live on because of the severance pay from Bartley Brothers and the sale of my town house. But what if I’d somehow spent that money during those five months? Laney had assumed I was holed up in that high-rise, but what if I’d actually been blowing the cash on God-knows-what, maybe a sailboat or a Porsche for Ben or a diamond engagement ring for myself?
I found Laney’s cordless phone, dialing the number for my bank’s automated system. Leaning against the kitchen fridge, I punched in my social security number, relieved that I remembered it, then my banking code, which came just as easily. A second later, an inflectionless voice informed me that I had a nice chunk of money in my account, more than I’d ever had at one time. Laney had been right, after all. I hadn’t blown it. I didn’t have to work right now if I didn’t want to.
But what did people do if they didn’t work? I put the phone on the counter with a clunk. Most women I knew who were officially unemployed were unofficially working their asses off in their own homes, raising their kids. I didn’t have kids, obviously. Wasn’t even on the path to eventual children. So what to do?
I could do anything I wanted with my life, I realized. It was mine to shape. I suppose that had always been true, but before, I’d felt the invisible constraints of the need for money, or my relationship with Ben, or the partnership track I thought I was on. Yet none of those concerns existed anymore.
My life was a clean slate. What did I want to do with it?
I found a pad of paper in Laney’s desk and settled on the couch again. “New Possible Careers,” I wrote at the top. I sat there for a full five minutes staring at the paper. Why wasn’t anything coming to me? Anything, I told myself, write anything that comes to mind. I shook my hand to relax it and scribbled the following list:
Journalist
Clothing Store Owner
Music Video Dancer
Ambassador to France
A good list, excellent really. These were the jobs that I’d always thought so glamorous and cool. I could almost see myself as a political journalist, a pen tucked behind one ear, the president at the podium, pointing to me and saying, “Kelly,” because of course I’d know the president. The problem was that in reality I had no writing skills to speak of and it probably took twenty years of hard-core newspaper journalism to get on the White House beat.
All the other possible careers I’d listed had impediments, too. I’d love to have my own clothing store, to be able to change outfits in the middle of the day just because I could, but I knew that owning a store was a massive amount of hard work. And as much as I’d been interested in the retail stocks and my own shopping, I really couldn’t envision myself standing in the same shop day after day.
As for the music video career, well, I couldn’t imagine what would be more fun than wearing a don’t-fuck-with-me face and shaking my thing behind J. Lo or whoever, but I could dance about as well as I could remember the last five months. Ditto for the ambassador to France gig. I couldn’t speak French.
I crossed out the list and tore the paper off, giving myself a fresh sheet. I would concentrate on the things that I could do, the activities that truly gave me pleasure, whether or not they could lead to a career.
The thing that came immediately out of the pen was “Photography.” Ever since my stepfather, Danny, had given me that Nikon, a gift I later heard my mother say was “probably hot,” I’d loved taking pictures. As a kid, it was something to do, something to play around with, a way to let myself be part of a crowd while still hiding behind the safety of a lens. As I got older, I realized that I was a natural at it. I could study the light on a sidewalk and realize how it would appear as a pattern in a black-and-white photo, and I knew how to take portraits from different ranges and angles to make the subject appear more studious or glamorous or thoughtful. Ben had even given me classes at a local university as a gift, and for the last few years I’d been taking them weekly. Was I still taking those classes?
I made a note to follow up on this issue, then wrote, “Shopping.” Definitely one of my great loves, something I’d already made into a career of sorts, but I wasn’t a retail analyst anymore, and I’d already done enough shopping on Saturday. I could probably get an analyst job at another investment firm—I knew enough people in the business; I could work my way up again—and eventually I’d be a partner somewhere else, just like Ben. Yet, even as I thought this, the realization came to me that I didn’t have to work right now, and that knowledge took away all my drive to be in the market again. Maybe I’d never had the drive, or I’d only been driven by money.
What else? I lowered my pen and scribbled, “Walking.” I wasn’t much of a runner. I hated the way my breath came ragged and hard when I tried jogging, but I loved to walk. Again, I couldn’t imagine why I had holed myself up in my apartment during an entire summer in Chicago, a city that was made for walking along the lake and through the zoo and down the Mag Mile. That’s what I would do today, I decided. I’d take a huge walk.
But first I wanted to finish my list. What else, what else? It came to me, the answer, but I had a hard time putting it on paper. Finally, I wrote in small letters, so fine that you could barely read them—“Family.” My mom had given me the best life she could muster, but it was one filled with random men, alternating cities and a series of small apartments. For as long as I could remember, I’d been jealous of the typical family—the husband and wife in the country with the 2.5 kids—and I’d sworn I’d get that for myself someday. And so I’d always been concerned about the ticking of my so-called biological clock (although to be truthful I couldn’t hear a peep), pointing out to Ben time and again that if we were going to get married and have kids, we had to do it soon—a belief that led, in part, to the ultimatum I’d given him. But now I didn’t really have any family at all. Dee was gone in an instant, in a tangle of metal and rubber on the Dan Ryan Expressway, and Ben was gone now, too. And the children I was supposed to have one day? Far, far away.
My mom was still around, of course, but she and I had been family in name only since Dee had died. We’d handled Dee’s death differently, to say the least. Me, well, I had my tantrums, my not-so-occasional flashes of anger when I tossed picture frames and broke dishes. Ben, after quietly watching me shatter more than half of my Pottery Barn bowls, had bought me a big brown candle and taken me into the bathroom one day.
“Throw it,” he had said, opening the shower curtain and pointing to the wall inside the tub.
“What?” I looked from the candle to Ben and back again, irritated at this cryptic directive.
“Look.” He took the candle from my hand, hurling it at the wall. It bounced off, a mere dent in the brown wax. “See? You can throw it and smash it. Do whatever you want, but it won’t break.”
“I want it to break.”
“No, you don’t.” He kissed the top of my head. “You just want the feeling.”
He was right. I turned to that candle often. I threw it against the bathtub wall over and over until the wall was splotched brown and the candle beaten into a misshapen lump. And one day I put the candle away, tucked it far under the sink, just in case. But I hadn’t needed it anymore.
My mom, on the other hand, broke nothing, smashed nothing. She’d seemed to shut down after the accident. She didn’t want to talk about it, she said. She wanted to leave Chicago and forget. And so off to L.A. she went, only one month after the funeral, and without Dee’s death to talk about, all our conversations felt like disingenuous, twenty-first-century versions of the “Emperor’s New Clothes.” They were five-minute chats we both looked forward to ending. I had no idea when I’d last spoken to her.
I looked down at my watch. Right now, Sylvie Custer was probably at her desk on the set of The Biz, an entertainment “news” show that reported on the minutiae of celebrity activity—“Tom Cruise considers sideburns! Tonight on The Biz!”
I called information to get the general number, and the receptionist routed me through to my mom’s desk. She answered with a crisp, “Sylvie Custer.”
“Mom, it’s me.”
A little stretch of silence followed, and I knew what had happened. She’d been taken by surprise, and she’d thought for a moment it was Dee.
“Kelly,” I said in a softer voice.
“Hi, honey. How are you?” Her words were mothering, but her tone slightly formal. It was the way we talked to each other now.
“I’m okay. You?”
“Crazy over here. Some starlet got arrested for shoplifting a pack of gum, and I’m trying to convince the LAPD to release her name. Meanwhile Mella, that Swedish fashion model—you know her?”
She made it sound as if I might have had martinis with Mella last night. “Vaguely,” I said.
“Well, she’s gained a few pounds, so I need a quote from the restaurant near her apartment.”
I listened to some more Hollywood gossip, wondering how my mom could do it. She used to produce news segments on political corruption, double murders and Middle East violence, and now here she was, digging up info on Mella’s calorie count.
“So how’s Ben?” my mom said in a swift topic shift, and I wondered, frantically, if I’d told her anything about our breakup. It didn’t sound like it. I half wanted to tell her about my memory gap, but I didn’t want to give her any more worries. I honestly didn’t know if she could handle it, and it had been so long since I’d confided in her. And I was fine, wasn’t I? Better than fine, actually. I’d admit to the breakup, I decided. I couldn’t hide that, but I wouldn’t mention the memory issues.
“Ben?” I said. “Well, you know we broke up, right?”
“What?”
Okay, she definitely hadn’t known that, which either meant that I hadn’t spoken to her for a long time or I’d avoided talking to her about that subject. It didn’t surprise me, really. Our phone calls since Dee died were so few and so brief.
“What happened?” my mom said.
Great question. “He didn’t want to get married.” That was the simplest, most truthful answer I could deduce. I’d given him the dreaded ultimatum, the give-me-a-ring-or-I’ll-walk speech, and it’d slapped me right in the face.
“Oh, honey, are you all right?” I could hear that anguished, parental tone in her voice, the one that made me feel warm and taken care of, but it scared me a little, too. I was always worried that she was close to a breakdown after Dee, and even now I wasn’t sure what would make her snap.
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Laura Caldwell
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A Clean Slate chronicles the days of Kelly McGraw, a Chicago woman who suddenly can′t remember the last five months of her life, a time when she was dumped by her soon-to-be fiancé and laid off by the company she thought would make her partner.Overwhelmed and confused but otherwise feeling wonderful, she begins to realize that she has a clean slate in life. She can do anything she wants, go anywhere she wants, be anything she wants. But what, exactly, does she want?Follow Kelly on a journey that includes her search to discover what caused her memory loss, an internship with a bad-boy British photographer, a Caribbean photo shoot, her boyfriend′s desire to come crawling back and, eventually, a brutal discovery that will cause her to reevaluate both her old and new lives.