She looked at me as if I were an idiot. “Were you with him?”
“What?” Though of course I knew what she meant.
“That day. You were with him, weren’t you? What did you do, just skulk away?”
I turned to stone. I turned to pasteboard. I felt as though all the book buyers in Boston were screaming my name. As though my menstrual blood were on the floor, as though my forehead had burst into flames.
“I keep wondering about it.” She sounded dead inside. “I just can’t shake this feeling that you were there.”
She folded her arms, waiting, but when I folded my arms too—when she saw that I wasn’t going to tell her anything—she sighed heavily and said, “I don’t even want to know. That’s what I keep coming back to. I don’t even want to know.”
From the shallow top drawer of the desk that was not hers, she withdrew a key labeled 12. “There’s something for you in the basement.” She smiled wryly. “His parents gave it to me, but I think you should have it.”
In the basement? It seemed impossible to go down. We were already down, set below the level of the street, dug a half foot into the earth, in this sterile gallery that tried with artful lighting to disguise the fact that it was submerged.
She pressed the key into my hand. “Take the elevator down. There are storage lockers for the studio spaces next door. His is the last one on the left.”
I tried to find her eyes. I yearned, suddenly, for the clarity of her hissing accusation. I even muttered, “Why are you giving me something”—but all she said was: “Move it soon. I told the gallery we’d have it out by Tuesday.”
She smiled once, no teeth. Then she spun on her heel and clattered off. She did not say goodbye, or that it had been nice to see me, or that I should take care of myself. Apparently our friendship was to have a smooth, bureaucratic death.
* * *
—
The sub-basement was unfinished, with a floor of poured concrete. A bare bulb flickered on when I descended the stairs. Unlike the other storage units, Ian’s did not have raw lumber or canvas or paint. There was no chainsaw or laser printer or speckled work boots. All of the making had been made; all of the doing had been done.
There had been a stretch when Ian had thought he needed to work big, and during that time he had constructed several shells, like the hulls of boats, massive pod-shaped husks made from bamboo. These were the pieces waiting for me. The smallest one came up to my chest.
I unlocked the chain-link door and stepped inside his cage, which smelled dankly of the sea. Was he here? Pressing the palm of my hand against the cheap wood, I tried to feel something. Anything. After all, this wood had been shaped by his hands. But it wasn’t something he had chosen for me.
And then I was deep in the place where I never let my mind go. Swimming slowly in circles in that pool, utterly unable to do the thing I needed to do. Split off from myself. Bruised and sore. Pale, transparent hairs.
I brushed again, and the wood—cheap, unvarnished—bent a splinter into my hands. Where was he? Where did he go? I had left part of myself in that pool forever, some essential part of me that believed I could be good.
Then I knew what she was trying to do. She was trying to chain me to him so I’d never be free. For these boats were horrible, dumb. Undergraduate work, at best. Mediocre undergraduate work. And heavy, and bulky, and big. If Ian had known he was going to die he would have destroyed them himself. I was sure of it.
But Lacie was counting on me not to be able to destroy them. She wanted me to carry around these shells like a penance, she wanted their weight on me, she wanted them to take up space in my house. She was counting on me to be too nostalgic to give them away.
But Lacie didn’t know me now. She didn’t know that I had already done the worst. I didn’t need to salvage. I wasn’t in search of the past, I didn’t need to cling to artifacts to remind me of who I was. I wasn’t sentimental. I wasn’t a writer anymore.
I turned to go, and found that the door was latched. Dumb. Dully I remembered its click. When I tried the handle, my fingers slid on the brass. Taking a deep, shaky breath, I tried again. Nope. I twisted the key and heard the dead bolt swing around, failing to catch.
Then with an automated tick the bare bulb blinked out: blackness. Stopping up a scream, I rattled the chain link of the cage, yanking the door so hard I stumbled back and hit a boat, which clattered to the floor, clobbering my shin. I yelped and collapsed in the dark, knocking another boat, and with a tremendous crash it, too, fell to the floor.
For a long time I lay still, panting. Gradually my eyes adjusted to the dim, murky light. Gradually I got used to the smell of rot. Maybe because I was afraid of hitting another boat, maybe because I missed him, I climbed inside the small canoe that lay beside me and curled up, pulsing, vibrating, my muscles clenched tight.
When I rose from the boat—I do not know after how long—my motion turned the light back on. All was lit. All was plain. It wasn’t difficult to unlock the door and step outside the cage. It wasn’t hard to pull the door snug behind me, to drop the little key down the drain in the floor, to say goodbye. All this I could leave behind.
To my mother and father