I don’t know who you are either, Blue thought, anger returning. She reached past the calamari for the bread, slathered a roll with butter, shoved it into her mouth. To hell with it. “Anyway, who says I’m alone?”
Renee’s face lit with surprise. “You have a boyfriend? I didn’t know... I just assumed...”
Blue sat back, folded her arms. Of course you did. Also screw you.
“Sorry. I just...hadn’t heard you mention anyone. So...so you’re seeing someone?”
“Look, I really don’t feel like talking, if you don’t mind,” Blue said.
“Okay, then, that sounds like no. It’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with being single.” Renee grabbed some of the calamari she’d said she wouldn’t eat and shoved it into her mouth. Shook her head. Looked out the window where the last glow of purple sky had been swallowed by darkness.
“Jack.”
Renee turned. Squinted. “What?”
Blue’s stomach buzzed, electrified. “I’m seeing Jack. You remember Jack. Superhot guy from the last time we were here. We have a date tomorrow night, actually.”
Renee’s mouth dropped, just as Blue hoped it would. Only Blue didn’t feel the satisfaction she was looking for. She felt positively sick with the fact that she’d said that, that she’d lied, and worse, that she’d felt she had to lie to prove she wasn’t unlovable. Only she hadn’t proved anything except that she was subscribing to some stupid patriarchal idea that her worth was determined by having a man.
Thank God Renee was leaving after dinner. Otherwise she’d have completely screwed herself. Otherwise she’d be expected to produce Jack.
HANNAH
Hannah had ended the call with Vivian, then stood for a moment in a state of numb detachment listening to the knock and slosh of water against the docks, the bustle of people going in and out of the restaurant, the music floating out and drifting over the water. By the jetty a large tugboat glided solemnly past, like something from another era, old and mournful as the sea.
As she started back, she saw Renee and Blue framed within the restaurant window, and she was struck by how old they looked, older than their age, or at least older than how they lived in her—those young girls she once knew with all their effervescent hope.
Her own reflection floated in the glass. Ghostly, disembodied, true.
The phone call with Vivian had left her guilty, especially the surprise in Vivian’s voice when Hannah explained that she wasn’t in DC. She and Vivian had spent so much time together over the years as they teamed up to care for Henry. But it was complicated for Hannah. When she and Henry had first started dating, Vivian had taken her in almost like a surrogate daughter. She went out of her way to include Hannah for dinners and holidays, even got her a birthday present each year. Hannah loved being a part of Henry’s family. At Christmas they sang carols around the piano and on the Fourth of July Vivian would make a picnic and they’d all go down to the National Mall and watch the feathery plume of fireworks light up the Washington Monument. Sometimes Hannah would catch his parents nuzzling or laughing with Henry over an inside family joke, and it was all so warm and also confusing. In some way Hannah found it hard to trust, didn’t quite understand it. Happy families seemed almost fake to her; there was no part of her brain that had developed to understand this strange phenomenon. It was so far from what she knew.
After what happened to Henry, Hannah had few people to turn to. Her own mother was too fragile, too absent, had no empathy reserves to offer. Their relationship persisted as one of avoidance—a polite phone call once a week where nothing was ever really said because nothing would be heard. Hannah accepted that it would never be any other way. But Vivian was available to her; she not only understood her sense of loss but shared it. The two of them lived it together, day in and day out, in that care facility. She knew Vivian blamed herself for what happened to Henry, for being out late that night, for leaving him home alone. And probably his dad had blamed himself too. He’d suffered a fatal heart attack only a few years after. Vivian said the grief was what killed him. There were just so many endless repercussions to that night.
But Hannah couldn’t imagine that Vivian did not blame her as well, blame her the most. After all, it never would’ve happened if she and Henry hadn’t been dating. She assumed Vivian was still nice to her simply because she needed an extra hand with Henry. If anything happened to him, she was certain Vivian would have no more use for her. Maybe that’s why she hadn’t told her she was going away for a few days. She was too afraid to remind her of the vast difference in their fates, that she’d be on vacation with her friends while Henry was stuck in a long-term care facility, his mind a turned-off TV. And all because of them.
A piece of memory broke free, floated up.
The four of them driving home from Check’s party that night. Her hands on the wheel, Renee adjusting the radio beside her.
“Maybe we should cruise around a little so we can sober up,” Renee had said. “And by ‘we’ I mean Blue. I think she’s having a harder time with the separation than she’s letting on.”
“From Jack?” Hannah had asked. They all knew Blue was lovesick over him, had talked about little else ever since they’d returned from Montauk.
“No, from us. College. That we’re all leaving each other.”
Hannah glanced in the rearview mirror, saw Blue slumped like a rag doll in the back seat, eyes closed, lost inside a boozy, weedy spin. Hannah understood it. She was struggling with their impending separation too.
“It’s still a month away!” Maya said, poking her head through the divider. “All the more reason to live it up while we’re still together.” She leaned forward and cranked up the radio, and soon they were singing along to it, loud as a crash, the black night rushing through the windows as they sailed across Rock Creek Parkway, an aisle of infinite sky above the tree line.
The music seemed so right, and that sultry summer air was pouring into the car through the open windows and so Hannah drove on aimlessly, no rush to get home anyway. She took a right turn and then another. How many times had they done that? Just taken right turns until they landed somewhere interesting. They knew DC by heart, or at least Hannah thought she did. But she was distracted by the music, the laughter, and somewhere she lost track of the turns, and then the neighborhoods started to look unfamiliar, seedy, the sky blacker, the streetlamps fewer—surrounding them in that darkness of neglect.
“You guys,” Hannah said, “I think we’re lost.”
* * *
Now as she slammed through the noise and the restaurant crowd toward Blue, who sat with her arms folded across her chest, toward Renee looking longingly at the bay as if she wanted to throw herself into it, Hannah understood, really understood, that they’d been lost ever since.