* * *
I will text her, daily at first and then weekly. I will ask her how she is, but there will only be so many ways to say that she is fine, that she has no job or friends but she’s still there. It will be almost a month after I leave before we talk on the phone again. It’s the fact of trying to fill up all that silence, mostly, that keeps me from picking up the phone. She’s cooking most of her meals and swimming in the pool we swam in; she’s still waiting for her life to start.
* * *
She’ll ace her MCATs. When she gets into nearly every med school she applies to, I’ll see her mother post about it on the internet and I’ll send her a text saying Congrats and she will text back Thanks.
* * *
A long stretch of time will pass then in her absence. It will pass for her, and for me, but not ever together. I’ll talk about her sometimes, my oldest, dearest friend, I’ll say, and then I’ll turn red and have to go splash water on my face.
* * *
I’ll get married and she’ll come—she’ll be in the wedding—and it will feel strange how little she knows or even seems to want to know the man that I am marrying. She will sit next to me as I get my hair done—paid for by my mother—talking to me, just like always, thinner than I’ve ever seen her, her feet up on the hairdresser’s supply kit, her own hair loose and wild down her back. She’ll tell the woman, who twists my hair at the base of my neck, what best suits me. She’ll stand next to her at one point, loosening dark strands around my face. She’ll bring a man whom I remember only as pale and tall and, once, as I am walking among the different tables greeting people, as I’ve been told it is my job to be greeting people, I’ll see his hand slipped high up underneath her dress and watch her face stay flat and passive as he grins and the thin fabric of her skirt rises slowly up and falls again.
* * *
Years will pass then. She’ll become more frantic as I start to feel more steady. We won’t know how to be with each other without her there to guide us both. We’ll talk sometimes once a week and sometimes once a month. There will be gaping holes of space of missed calls and unreturned text messages, both from her to me and me to her; there will be hours—when I do pick up and she’s sad or angry; when she has met someone and it hasn’t gone well; when no one, nothing, is the thing she wants; when she needs to cry and rage—that I walk around our apartment with the phone pressed against my ear and try to think how else to say the same useless phrases that I’m saying, as my husband motions to me to just get off the phone because dinner’s ready, we have people that we’re meeting, I have more to read or write or grade and he hates the way I look emptied out right after, because he’s heard me say the same thing in different forms for hours now, then years.
We’re dressed to go to dinner with a client of my husband’s who’s suggested maybe he’d be interested in opening a furniture store. It’s two years after he quit his job and one of the first of all the many times we wonder if our choices were all wrong. We’re walking to the subway and she calls me and I answer. I won’t go down the stairs until she isn’t crying anymore.
What’s wrong with me, though? she says.
Nothing, I say, and I mean it. You’re my favorite person in the world.
She’s been broken up with. She’s aced every year of med school and has her pick of residencies across the country, but she still wants most of all, maybe just like everybody else, to feel safe and loved. Her mother and her sister are exhausted by her. They have patience for her for the first little while, but they, like me, get worn out.
It’s cold out and my husband makes a show of pulling up the collar of his coat.
I’m just tired, she says.
I know, S.
I don’t want to have to try at this again.
We hear two trains come and go and she’s still talking. My husband says my name so she can hear.
What’s his deal? she says, angry.
Sash, I say. We have to …
She cries harder and I put my hand over the phone.
Just go, I say. I’ll meet you.
My husband mutters something I’m glad I don’t hear, looks at me pleadingly one more time, and heads down the subway stairs alone.
* * *
A phone call I don’t answer and then don’t return because I am, I tell myself, exhausted, qualifying exams and building a dissertation. I send pithy text messages telling her I’m thinking of her, which, sometimes, I am. I miss her, desperately; I know no one like her. The people I know in New York all know me only as a grown-up; we’re polite and functional, make plans weeks in advance. Sometimes I think of her and want only to be with her. But then either I get her on the phone or just linger long enough on the thought of her to remember the her I miss is not the one I’d get if I called. Messages I listen to at first and sometimes, at first, respond to, then her name, on my voicemail, after a preliminary dissertation conference: her name with the blue dot next to it that means the voicemail has not yet been played, a deep breath in, closing the phone, the blue dot haunting me for days, then months. Whole years pass. And then just swiping right and tapping, watching as I disappear them, exhausted by the prospect of her needs that day; not talking to my husband that week, back in therapy because he cannot fix me and I am angry at him for not helping to fix me. Back in therapy because grad school health insurance might be the last good health insurance of my life. Boundaries are an okay thing, says the therapist when I talk about Sasha. But she needs me, I say. I’m pregnant, and he motions toward my stomach. I am partially in therapy because everyone’s afraid for me. Postpartum depression is a real concern, they tell me. Get rest, and focus on the baby, they say. I am not yet done with graduate school and also tending bar for extra money. She is not a child, says the therapist, about Sasha, as I hold my hand under my belly. You have plenty on your plate.
* * *
One year later, as I nurse our five-month-old around the clock while trying to write my dissertation, Sasha will eat a bottle of Oxycontin alone in her apartment close to the hospital where she’s chief resident, and she will have to take a leave of absence and her mother and her sister will fly out to be with her and she’ll send me a letter, asking me to come get her from the rehab where they sent her that she hates. She will not call me, not during and not after. I’ll write her back something dumb about how much I love her, but that I think that she should listen to her sister and her mother. I don’t love her. I don’t know what love is, she’ll say, in the letter filled with fury she sends back to me. What in the fuck, she’ll ask me, have you ever done for anyone but read and speak and think?
THE CHILEAN WRITER eats a spoonful of the crème brûlée we’ve somehow ordered. I’ve talked and talked and now want mostly to be quiet. I hold my coffee with both hands.
You were so young, she says.
She was also, I say.
What could you have done? she says.
It’s a question that I’ve heard before and hate and want no part of.