“Anyway,” Maya said. “The reason I’m calling is because we’re going back to Montauk.”
“What?” Hannah said.
“Long weekend. You, me, Blue and a twelve-pack of wine coolers—just like old times.”
Old times. If only. Old times seemed like someone else’s life—that’s how far removed she felt from her carefree youth or their summers together in Montauk. They’d spent two weeks every year there at Blue’s nana’s beach house, staying up late and laughing until they’d cried, playing drunk truth or dare in the kitchen and watching the sun climb out of the ocean by the lighthouse. She thought of them soaking in light over long, luxurious days at the beach, chasing the umbrella they’d failed to secure as it skidded like a leaf in wind across the sand, Maya pretending to drown to get the attention of a cute lifeguard, ice cream and souvenir T-shirts and more laughter. The last time life had been perfect, the last time Hannah had ever believed it could be.
Now she looked out the window. The evening had turned cloudy with the promise of rain.
“Before you even think about saying no, we made a vow. Remember? We said we’d go back every year, and now we’re almost thirty. We have to go back before we turn thirty.”
“I’m already thirty,” Hannah said. “Thanks for the card by the way.”
There was a pause.
“Let me tell you something,” Maya said. “I am sick and tired of the postal service. Rain, sleet and snow my ass.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Come on, it’s gonna be great! We’ll rent a convertible and wear our old bikinis, maybe even accidentally run over another fruit stand. Seriously, this is nonnegotiable.”
Hannah remembered Maya plowing through the fruit stand, bright oranges bouncing like giant hail off the windshield, Nana’s Volvo coming to a stop in the potato field behind it. That was the summer Nana was teaching them to drive, and there had been a moment of shocked silence before Maya said, “Well, I guess that wasn’t the brake,” and Nana said, “It appears not,” and then they all burst into hysterics. Later Nana said the price of paying for all those oranges was worth it just for that one good laugh.
Now Hannah smiled at the memory. It seemed impossible that the girls were ever that innocent. When they didn’t know what life could do.
“Where is this all coming from?” she said. There seemed an unusual urgency in Maya’s voice.
“Stop overanalyzing and say yes,” Maya said.
“Maybe next year,” she said.
“We can’t go next year,” Blue said. “We put Nana’s house on the market.”
“Oh no.” Hannah could hear the sadness in Blue’s voice. It made her sad too. They all loved Nana so much, the one adult in their world whom they’d trusted. But Blue was forced to move her into a home last year when Nana lost the last of her memory. Already, Nana’s apartment in Manhattan had been sold; the Montauk house would probably go just as quickly.
“Now or never,” Maya said. “It will be so fun!”
Hannah tried to picture herself on an actual vacation, relaxed, driving with the top down, sea salt and the smell of cut grass on the wind, the rosy sunset blushing across the Atlantic, her lifelong friends beside her. She felt a pressure lift. Then she envisioned all the terrible things that could happen. Their car swerving off the road. Careening into the ocean. All of them going under. What would Henry do without her? “I can’t.”
“You need to,” Maya said.
“I have things to do, Maya. I have a life.”
“What things? You don’t have things. And you definitely don’t have a life.”
Hannah tried to come up with examples, but the truth was she worked from home and was beholden to nothing. Well, nothing except Henry. She wanted to tell them about how well he was doing lately, how just a few days before she could see his eyes tracking her with understanding as she talked, and then as if to prove it, he had smiled at her. Smiled! At her! And, my God, didn’t they know there was no more important place to be, no more important thing to do than to witness that? But she knew it would be a mistake to talk about Henry. It was the unspoken condition of their friendship that she speak of him as little as possible and definitely never of the night that changed them all. Anytime she’d tried, she’d felt her friends’ walls go up. Maya didn’t like to talk about hard things. She put them away like china in a cupboard, stored them somewhere just out of reach. Blue simply didn’t know how to talk about them, grew uncomfortable and shifty.
“Really, I want to, but...”
“Sorry.” Blue made crackling noises into the phone. “I think you cut out there. Did you hear her, Maya?”
“Sounded like she said yes.”
“I said—”
“Hold, please,” Blue said and began humming Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” into the phone.
Hannah tried to speak over her. Blue hummed louder. Hannah sighed and leaned against the wall and wished she was still the kind of person who could do, who would dare. She wanted to ask them how they went about saying yes, or at least saying it ever again.
“Listen to me. Are you listening to me?” Maya shouted over Blue’s singing. “You’re coming. Do you understand me? Ask yourself this—when was the last time you were truly happy? You know the answer. Now go pack your bags. We leave the day after tomorrow. Blue and I will even pick you up.”
“We will?” Blue said.
“Yes—road trip!” Maya said. “It’ll be great.”
Hannah chewed her lip. “I’ll think about it,” she lied and hung up the phone before they could argue.
But the thought was like an earworm the way it kept wiggling its way back into her consciousness. She missed her friends. She missed fun. She missed herself—the girl she’d once been with them, the one who would’ve already had a suitcase packed. She thought of the fortune-teller at the Bridgehampton fair all those years ago with that fountain of white hair and that pointy jaw that jutted out like an accusation, whose face had startled when Hannah sat down before her and let her palm be read. She still wondered what would’ve happened if only she had listened to her warning, how different her life, all of their lives, might have turned out.
Pointless to think about, she told herself. Besides, I can’t leave Henry. She climbed into bed, convinced, and fell asleep with the TV light flickering across her closed eyes.
Even in her sleep Hannah could sense the storm when it came, beating at her windows, thundering around the building, making the city its drum. She was restless inside all that rain, inside Maya’s question about happiness, and in her dreams the storm got inside her apartment, the water rising higher and higher. She woke at one point with the sheets so drenched that she decided she had leukemia and spent an hour online both confirming her diagnosis and discovering several other deadly afflictions she had, as well. She could practically hear Maya’s voice in her head saying, “I’ll give you a diagnosis. Batshit crazy.”