Mom’s eyes narrowed as if she was having difficulty seeing the traffic ahead.
You’re too young to understand. She said this gently, but it would have been better if her words were harsh, if she’d intended them to bruise rather than to protect me. I didn’t want to be protected.
Will you work it out? I asked.
I honestly don’t know, she said.
She did know. Whatever had passed between her and Billy, it had been too much for them to forgive. They’d said things they couldn’t unsay. They lost each other in that fight. Or maybe they’d been lost to each other for years. I had no idea anymore. One thing I did know, what I felt acutely, was that Billy had lost me. I didn’t want to be his favorite girl. I didn’t want to hear why he’d sent Mom to Prospero Books, why he hadn’t met me himself. Even if he turned up next Sunday, our relationship would never be the same.
Turns out it didn’t matter what I wanted because Billy didn’t stop by our house the following Sunday or the one after that. He didn’t pick me up for an afternoon at Prospero Books. He didn’t take me on any more adventures.
For months after he disappeared, I searched for signs of his imminent return. Instead of clues that would lead me to him, I found markers of his absence. The cloisonné plates Billy had bought us in Beijing were no longer displayed in the living room. The photograph of Billy and me at the aquarium was replaced with one of Dad pushing me on a swing. The cupcakes from the Cuban bakery in Glendale that Billy always brought over, no longer dessert at our Sunday barbecues.
By the time I reached high school, I stopped looking for Billy. He became a person of my family’s past, someone I virtually forgot. When he finally returned, I hadn’t thought about him in at least a decade. And at that point he was already dead.
But Billy’s death wasn’t the end of our story. It was only the beginning.
I always knew Billy would return to me in the form of a clue; I just didn’t think it would take him sixteen years.
By then I was twenty-seven, living in Philadelphia, a dedicated, if overzealous, eighth-grade history teacher. I had just moved in with my boyfriend, the other eigth-grade history teacher at my school, and was testing the waters of cohabitation for the first time. The school year had just ended. Our students’ term papers on the Emancipation Proclamation and the Underground Railroad had been marked and returned. Final grades had been submitted, and unless any parents complained, we were officially on summer break. Jay insisted we celebrate with a party. A housewarming party, even though he’d been in the apartment for half a decade, and the only thing new about the space was the fact that I lived there now, too.
Jay was headed out to buy booze for our big night. There was a state store a few blocks from our apartment, but he insisted on driving a half hour to Delaware where he could buy handles of cheap whiskey and vodka at a tax-free rate.
“You know you’ll spend as much on gas as you’ll save on tax,” I argued, watching him dart around our living room, looking for his keys.
“It’s the principle.” He dug his hand between the couch cushions. It resurfaced with potato chip crumbs and lint, which he piled on the coffee table.
“That’s disgusting,” I said, stating the obvious. Jay blew me a kiss as he continued to mine the couch, unearthing his keys and jangling them in victory. “You know there’s a hook by the door precisely for that reason.” I pointed to the brass hook with a bird perched on top, my one contribution to the decor of our apartment.
“Is that what it’s there for?” he teased, pulling me onto the couch. Jay kissed my neck and cheek, pinning me on his lap. I pictured him at the liquor store in Delaware, filling a shopping cart with enough plastic bottles to make everyone at the party sick.
“We could just skip town for the weekend, drive up to a cabin in Vermont, go off the grid.”
Jay released me. I remained on his lap. “I thought you wanted to have a party,” he said.
I shrugged. Jay wanted to have a party. I wanted to want to have a party, but I rarely went to—much less threw—the type of binge-drinking-until-dawn rager ours promised to be. “It was just an idea.”
Jay lifted me off him and put his wallet and keys in his back pocket. “It’ll be fun,” he promised, offering me a quick peck before he headed out.
Although I’d been living with Jay for three months, the apartment felt no more mine than it had before my clothes were folded in his dresser, before my yogurt and grilled chicken filled his otherwise empty fridge. The apartment was decorated in the style of Jay’s mother, how she thought a single, twentysomething man should live. A dark couch that hid stains, leather armchairs that thankfully didn’t recline, a television consuming one wall, the others lined with muted abstract art. The few objects I owned were in a small storage locker. An antique dresser I hadn’t sold with my other bedroom furniture. A stone coffee table my mother had bought in the ’70s in New York. A few framed prints from the Museum of Art, which weren’t worth the fight to put up on the walls of my new apartment. Jay had no great affinity for the artwork his mother had selected, but it would have offended her if we’d taken down the paintings she’d bought from her artist friends. He said it was easier to leave the apartment be, to choose our battles. I wondered what that was like, living in constant fear of upsetting your mother.
I strolled into the kitchen to clear the countertops for the cases of alcohol Jay would be bringing home. My mail was stacked in a haphazard pile next to the fridge, mostly bills and offers for yoga classes, two thank-you cards from students who professed in sloppy handwriting that I was their favorite teacher and they would always remember our trip to Franklin’s Print Shop. In addition to the cards, there was a padded envelope, my name carefully inscribed across the front—Miranda Brooks—more elegant than by my own hand. It didn’t have a return address, but it had been postmarked in Los Angeles. I squeezed the package. Hard and square, clearly a book. Probably one of Mom’s little surprises, even if it wasn’t her handwriting on the front of the padded envelope. She was always sending me something, overcompensating for how much it hurt her that her only child had decided to live on the opposite coast. A cookbook with recipes far too involved for me to ever make. A how-to book for decorating on a budget, since she’d reasonably assumed that when Jay’s apartment became our apartment the decor would be ours, too.
I unsealed the package and pulled out a paperback book wrapped in satiny emerald paper, a greeting card taped to the front. I ripped the paper off the book. It was a play I knew by heart. The Tempest. Mom had named me after Miranda, in her estimation the purest, most beautiful girl in all of literature. On the cover of the paperback, a rogue wave threatened to capsize the vessel that transported the king and his entourage—including Prospero’s brother, Antonio—home from the princess’s wedding. Mom often sent me copies of my namesake when she found them at estate sales and antiques shops. A rare edition with gold leaf. An illustrated version from the ’50s. A miniature replica fashioned into a pendant or pin. This was a generic paperback, printed by the thousands, not Mom’s type of gift. Only, if the package wasn’t from her, I had no idea who else would have sent it.
I took the greeting card out of its envelope. On the front, a sketch of a blonde lounging on a beach smiled back at me. Her eyes were hidden behind cat-eye sunglasses, her pixie cut caught in a strong breeze. Malibu, California was printed across the cloudless sky above her, letters as white and glossy as the woman’s teeth.
The message written inside the card offered little clarity.
Understanding prepares us for the future.
And that was it. No “hello from your dear old friend you’d entirely forgotten about.” No “here’s something that always makes me think of you, love your secret admirer.” No reference to the king’s doomed