The world was the color of memory, faded blue sky, fragile, liquid light, branches moving in a gentle breeze as if to some twinkling melody. From somewhere on the street, an eruption of laughter.
Maya started walking. Soft, harmless summer, open and forgiving. “Okay, I’m here,” she said. “Please tell me I got the loan.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line.
Time stalled, held its breath.
“I’m afraid that after a full review of your credit history and even taking into account your current employment...”
Oh no.
“Okay,” Maya said. He continued talking but her heart was pounding over the sound of his voice. She didn’t need to hear the rest anyway. “Not a problem. Thanks for calling.”
“Miss Mar—”
She hung up.
The weight of it was so crushing. She wanted to put it somewhere—heave it off herself. She wanted to sit down. Give up. Cry.
There was nothing she could do. That was the worst part. She’d screwed up. Just like she’d screwed up a million other things. And now it was too late to fix it. One more loss in what had felt like an endless sea of them over the last twelve years.
She turned, stared up at the house, at the dark aging wood and cracking white paint on the shutters, the murmur of voices drifting out the kitchen window.
She felt so alone.
But no. She wasn’t alone. And she refused to accept that there was nothing she could fix.
She put on her brightest smile and went back inside. “Okay, new plan!” she said to them. “Renee, you’re staying for dinner.”
BLUE
Blue realized she was mildly stoned the moment she did not murder Maya. Instead the suggestion of Renee staying for dinner seemed to move over her like a ducked punch. What were a few more hours of torture? She couldn’t be bothered to care. Renee looked at her, her eyes asking permission. It was difficult, even when you hated someone, to outright deny them. What was she going to say, no?
“I’m going to my room,” she said instead. Renee could take the obvious hint.
She marched up the creaky stairs, where thirty years of sand had settled in the cracks of the floorboards, to the second-floor rooms with their summery, mismatched furniture. The air was musty with uncirculated air, but throw open the windows, add a little polish and everything really was the same. If only people could be that easily returned to themselves.
As she entered the bedroom she’d slept in as a child—yellow curtains the color of morning sun, white chest of drawers with a handle missing, two twin beds quilted in a soft checkered gray—Blue knew Maya was right. She’d arrived at the last place she was truly happy. She could feel the lingering, pale wisps of daylight through the windows enter her, lighting up old spaces in her brain, time morphing between then and now so that she was looking out with the eyes of all the Blues she’d been—child, teenager, adult.
She threw her duffel on the bed by the window, sat down for a minute to decompress. She glanced at the empty one next to hers. Had a flash of Renee sitting on it in a camisole top and pajama shorts, her hair pinned up, a moisturizing mask on her face that made her look at once ghoulish and girly. Blue across from her in an oversize T-shirt and boxers, spots of acne cream on her chin. The two of them whispering late into the night as the ocean stomped outside the window. They were supposed to age side by side, grow into old ladies swinging on a porch, cursing the neighborhood kids and drinking spiked lemonade. That had always been the plan. Instead Renee had ended up with a shiny, perfect life while Blue carried all the damage, vandalized like a late-night subway car.
She shook off the thoughts. Felt something lumpy just underneath the anger. A swallow of sorrow.
It never got easier, mourning someone who was still alive.
From downstairs, laughter in a chorus of three. Apparently Renee hadn’t taken the hint yet. Blue closed the door against the sound but still it lingered, a hollow echo in her chest. How did she end up being the one pushed to the outside? It was so unfair that her anger—her righteous anger—labeled her with a bitterness that was undeserved, that the script had been flipped so that she was the perpetrator for feeling wronged.
But then, self-doubt—was she right to still be mad? When was it time to forgive? Was it just a guess, a stab at a particular passage of time—a month, a year, a decade—or was forgiveness a feeling you could deliberately walk into like a room?
She pulled out her laptop, checked her brokerage account. There was always relief in seeing that large number staring back at her. The comfort of knowing she could be an island, utterly self-sufficient. No attachments, no need.
Of course the price of such self-sufficiency was a job she despised. She’d never meant to have this kind of career. It had started as a summer internship at her father’s brokerage. She’d taken it only because it required less effort than finding something she actually wanted to do. Back then most of her energy was devoted to simply surviving the hours between sleep. Maybe it still was. But the talent for the job must have been in her blood, because she picked it up quickly and her instincts were good. She’d been hired on, moved up the ranks and eventually was poached by a rival company—a job she took, in part, to spite her father. At times she actually did enjoy the work itself, getting lost in the numbers, feeling she was good at something, having somewhere to go. It was the greed and corruption that bothered her most. She didn’t want to be part of a system that seemed to glorify psychopathy. Some days she walked into the office and imagined jumping on a desk, delivering a grand speech about what dead-eyed, money-hungry, bottom-feeding, little-guy-screwing, status-seeking, sociopathic menaces to society some of her coworkers were, and the fantasy was so pure and gratifying she worried she might actually play it out at some point.
As if on cue, her email pinged—a message about an IPO her brokerage wanted her to push, one she suspected would not be in her clients’ best interest. She chucked her phone on the bed and carefully, heavily, stood and began to unpack.
When she opened the top drawer of her dresser, she gasped. There, worn thin from age and still stained with chocolate, was the ice cream wrapper she’d saved all those years ago, a memento from the best night of her life. She couldn’t believe it hadn’t been thrown away.
She took it out. Sniffed it, though of course it smelled nothing but old. It all came back to her. The slow fade to memory, the beach re-creating itself around her. She was eighteen again, walking along the ocean’s jagged seam, the sun riding her shoulders until they tingled. She’d left the girls back on their towels, their quest for beauty in a tan a ritual she’d felt left out of even then. Around the cliffs and over jagged rock she climbed to reach a spot that was empty, littered only with the carcasses of crabs and the cling of seaweed. A place that understood her.