Looking back now, I know you were hurting, too, trying to move on, find your own path. My note from New York must’ve felt like it had been beamed in from another planet. SummerStage? The Hamptons? I can’t even imagine what you thought when you read that. But then? Then I couldn’t understand how you could ignore me. How one minute you could spin me and kiss me and tell me I made you feel invincible, and then all of a sudden you could disappear.
Two months after you left I got an e-mail from you. The first one since you landed in Iraq. Glad you’re doing well! Things here are crazy. Sorry I didn’t write sooner. It was a hard adjustment, but I love the work. The feature’s done and they’re keeping me on here for a while. Hope you’re enjoying New York!
I read that e-mail over a hundred times, maybe. It could have been two hundred. I analyzed every word. Every punctuation mark. I looked for the hidden meanings, any insight I could glean into how you were feeling or what you were thinking. Trying to figure out whether you missed me, whether you’d found someone new.
But here’s the thing: There was no subtext, no hidden messages, no secret codes. It was just a quick response sent in a hurry. I’d been waiting two months for nothing. I created a Gmail folder called Disaster and put all your e-mails in there, including that one. I didn’t write back. I knew I wouldn’t be able to bear it if you ignored me again.
xxiii
Sometimes I’m told things that I don’t realize are important until much later. That’s how it always seems to be when I talk to my brother—whenever we have any kind of serious discussion, anything more than the everyday How are you and How’s work, it takes me years to understand what he was trying to tell me. A few weeks after you left, Jason called. He was twenty-eight at the time and had been dating Vanessa for about a year. They’d met at the lab—she was working in communications for the pharmaceutical company, and he was trying to develop some kind of targeted cancer therapy that I still only half understand.
“Hey, Lulu,” he said, when I picked up my cell. “I—uh—I wanted to see how you were doing. Mom said things have been pretty rough.”
“Yeah,” I said, my eyes already filling with tears at his concern. “I miss him so much, Jay. I love him and I hate him and it’s just . . . it’s awful.” My voice wobbled on the phone. I wasn’t questioning my decision not to go with you, I felt secure in that, but I’d been replaying the conversations we had over and over in my head, trying to figure out if there was anything I could’ve said that would’ve made you stay. And what it was about me that made you keep secrets. I wondered if you would have acted differently if you were dating someone else. Kate said you probably would have left sooner. I didn’t believe her then, but now I wonder if she was right.
“Oh, Lu,” Jason said, “I didn’t mean to make you cry. I just . . . well . . . I know we haven’t talked about relationships before, but remember when Jocelyn and I broke up for the last time?”
I don’t know if you and I ever talked about Jocelyn, but she was Jay’s girlfriend in college and right afterward. They met their sophomore year at Princeton and kept getting together and breaking up over and over for five years—until finally she decided to go to medical school at Stanford, and after a brief attempt at long distance they broke up for good. I guess their five years has nothing on our . . . how should I calculate it now . . . thirteen? Eleven?
“I remember,” I said to Jay, even though I only half did. I was in college at the time and so wrapped up in my own world that I hadn’t really been all that involved in my brother’s.
“The reason I was able to end things for good is that I realized that we were like the gummy bear experiment. Do you remember that one? I think I showed it to you in the lab when you came to visit me at college my freshman year. You put potassium chlorate in a test tube and then add a gummy bear, and these two items that are perfectly fine on their own explode. Every single time. Jocelyn and I were like that experiment. Every time we were together we would explode, and it was exciting and wonderful in some ways, but who wants to live with constant explosions?”
“Mm-hm,” I answered, thinking of you and me. We didn’t break up and get back together over and over, but our relationship back then did feel exciting and wonderful. We were better together than each of us was on our own.
“Anyway, when I met Vanessa, it was different. It was like . . . it was like the Old Nassau experiment. Do you remember that one? It starts out with three clear solutions, but you mix two together first, so I imagine I’m those two mixed solutions, and then when you add the third, nothing happens at first, but then the solution turns orange because of the potassium iodate and then a little while later, it turns color again, this time to black, which you know is my favorite color, because it’s the one that contains all the pigment there is, and then it stays that way.”
He stopped. I was silent. I had no clue how to respond.
“Basically, what I’m saying, Lu, is that the relationship got better the longer it lasted. Instead of that gummy bear explosion, it’s a clock reaction. Do you understand what I mean?”
I didn’t understand then, though I do now. Darren showed me that. Though he’d probably say love is like a fine wine, where flavors deepen and change over time. All I said to Jason then was, “But I love him so much, Jay.”
“I know,” he said. “I loved Jocelyn too. I still do. Probably I always will a little bit. But I love Vanessa—differently. What I wanted to tell you is that there are lots of ways to love people and I know that you’ll love someone else again. Even if it’s not the same, some of it might be better.”
“I don’t want to,” I whispered. I wanted to love only you. And I couldn’t imagine anything could be better than that.
Jason was quiet for a moment. “Maybe it was too soon for me to say that,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m not that good at this sort of thing. But maybe . . . what I said will make its way into your neurons and you’ll remember it when you need it most.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay. Thanks for calling.”
“I love you, Lucy, like hydrogen loves oxygen. A totally different kind of love. An elemental kind.”
And when he said that, I laughed through my tears because only my brother could explain love using the periodic table.
xxiv
Alexis dragged me all over that summer. To bars, to concerts, to parties, to movie screenings. We dressed up every night, in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Southampton, and with enough martinis, I could forget for a little bit.
Kate took me to her parents’ place on Cape Cod for a week, leaving Tom back in Manhattan. She pampered me with spa treatments and took me to a salon for a brand-new haircut she’d found in a French fashion magazine her sister sent. That’s when I cut off my braid and donated my hair.
Julia told me she was on Team Lucy and that she’d be there whenever I needed her. We spent a lot of nights together eating macaroni and cheese, since you hated it, and watching the most violent action films we could find.
My friends were actually pretty amazing, considering how much they hated you at that point. I don’t know if Kate or Alexis has ever forgiven you for leaving me. Julia has, but it took her a while to understand what you and I had together—until your gallery show.
My mom sent me text messages all day long. And inspirational articles in the mail.
Jason came to visit, treating me to a Brooklyn Cyclones game, and hot dogs, and an explosion using Diet Coke and Mentos.
Practically everyone I knew tried to cheer me up in every way they knew how. And I tried as hard as I could to get over you, but really the only thing I needed was time.
xxv
At the end of that summer, about two weeks after I got your e-mail and created my Disaster folder, I met Darren.
Does it bother you that I’m talking about him? I’m sorry if it does, but he’s part of our story too. As much as you might not like it—might not like him—our road wouldn’t be the same without Darren.
I woke up to make coffee the last weekend of my Hamptons share, Labor Day weekend, and he was sleeping on the couch in the middle of our living room. I’d never seen him before. He certainly hadn’t been there when I’d gone to bed. Still, Alexis’s friend Sabrina tended to bring groups of people back to the house, and it wasn’t a surprise to find them sleeping on couches or chairs or sometimes even on the floor in the living room.