***
It happens the way it always happens; shutters screaming shut over everyday life. I pull on my running shoes because they’re the first pair of shoes I find, even though I haven’t run in months—since I got to New York, really—and even then it was only ever something I did because my therapist and all my doctors told me I should. Exercise, they all say, as if it’s some kind of magic word. Abracadabra. I grab my keys and my cell and as I’m slamming the door behind me I pull the hood of my gray sweatshirt over my head. I have to walk up the basement steps just to get to street level and when I do I can smell it, despite the city smell: the engine exhaust and the trash cans, the Chinese takeout and the pizza place a couple doors away, the dog shit and probably the human shit too. Snow. Not yet. It’s not snowing yet, but it will. I shiver, from anticipation mostly but also regretting not putting on a coat warmer than my leather jacket. I start walking, hands stuffed into my jacket pockets, not even looking where I’m going, but still feeling the too-huge feeling in my chest. It’s grown in the last couple days to the point that I can barely breathe. Even now, with the cold stinging my eyes, they’re already smarting from almost crying anyway. I try not to cry, I really do, but I do it anyway.
The brick wall keeps rising up no matter how hard I try to knock it down, or stop it from building up in the first place, and I haven’t left the apartment in days. It has taken me the last fifteen hours just to force myself out now, and the only reason I’ve been able to do so is because it’s night, the middle of the fucking night, and no one will care who I am or where I’m going, or why I’m doing what I’m doing, or why I am the way I am. Every time I think about seeing anyone, or speaking to anyone, or having to stand at an ATM, or in line at a coffee shop, or make eye contact, or purchase milk, the scratching feeling starts up at the back of my eyes and it’s as if I can actually feel my retinas. The block of granite gets bigger and bigger inside my chest, and the brick wall builds itself up again, as if I never managed to knock it down in the first place.
I take a deep breath to steady myself, and even stop, my hand resting on a black iron railing in front of a brownstone. I almost lean over, head between my legs, about-to-faint-style, but I just keep a hold of the freezing iron and let that reassure me. After a couple of seconds, or maybe even minutes, I’m able to look around me somewhat and I notice that there’s a guy on the other side of the street walking in my direction. He’s wearing what looks like a magenta shell-suit jacket, and corduroy trousers and shoes without socks and he kind of looks right at me, but not as if he’s seen me. Just as if he were watching a movie and I was a secondary character he wasn’t really all that interested in. Blank look, then move on. I feel warm relief spread through me, as though I’ve just done a killer pee, and begin to walk on again. I don’t stop until I get to the East River.
I hunker down in my sweatshirt and jacket, trying to make myself as small as possible, hoping that it’ll also make me feel warm as well. The snow smell is even stronger here, the wind whipping it up along the river and mixing with that almost-salty metallic smell you get from the water as well. I sit down on a bench and it takes me a while to realize that there are people lying under some of the other benches, presumably because it’s got too cold to lie on the actual benches. One, two, three, four flakes of snow hurl themselves at my face, but if you ask me, they’re not trying hard enough. I lean back on the bench and, suddenly, my hands still stuffed in my pockets, my right hand curls around my cell and then, as if it’s not four o’clock in the morning, or damn close, I’m calling Nate.
He picks up on the seventh ring when I’m about to give in and hang up.
“’Lo.”
“Nate?”
I can practically hear him sit up in bed, even across half—more than half—the country, across one time zone, thousands and thousands of miles of night, and black sky, and farmland, and mountains, and rivers, and road, and motels, and tollbooths.
“Mads?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you okay?”
“I dunno, Nate.” I’m sitting looking at the Manhattan skyline but it’s not even like I’m looking at it at all. The slick blackness of the river looks nice though.
“Where are you?” he asks, as if we’re back in Madison, back when this used to happen all the time, and I’d call, and he’d ask where I was and he’d come meet me, and sit with me, until the too-huge feeling went away or at least lessened slightly. Sometimes, he’d even spot me walking across campus and he’d come after me, without me even having to call him. I never asked if he was watching for me, or just sitting up, late at night, unable to sleep, and looking out of his window. I never asked.
“I’m looking at Manhattan. I’m in Brooklyn. Where are you?”
“I’m in bed.” Oh, of course. I wonder for a second if he’s lying down, or sat up next to Emmaline. I wonder if she’s there, asleep next to him, dreaming. Probably not even dreaming yet. Pre-REM.
I don’t say anything for a while and it feels like a full minute goes by until I hear Nate cough softly and then say: “You should go home, Maddie. Go back to bed.”
But I can’t tell him about how I haven’t left the apartment in almost three days, and how every time I even think about doing so, my vision swims and black, black, black seems to rise up in front of my eyes.
“I need to ask you a favor,” I say instead.
“Yeah, of course.”
“Can you read it out to me? Do you have it?”
I hear him suck in his breath, even across those thousands and thousands of miles, because of course he already knows, instantly, that I’m asking him to read to me the last words Nora ever said to me. It’s the last voicemail she left me—the last voicemail she left anyone—and I transcribed it years ago, worried I would lose it one day, which of course I did when I finally upgraded my cell phone. Nate’s the only other person in the world who has that transcript, and this isn’t the first time I’ve asked him to read it out to me.
“Mads.”
“Please, Nate.”
There’s a pause before he says: “Okay. Just give me a second.”
I wait while he turns on his computer I guess, and I can hear him moving about, and moving furniture around, and the sound of a Mac starting up. It takes a while of tapping and typing and then he says, with a catch in his throat: “Mads, it’s me. Where—oh God, Maddie I can’t do this. I’m sorry. I can’t read this out.”
I can hear in his voice that he’s about to cry, about to break down, and I wonder to myself if I’ve done this purely to know that someone else is crying at the same thing, and at the same time, as me, to know that someone other than me feels the same pain. I squeeze my eyes shut.
“I’m sorry,” I croak, “I should never have asked. I shouldn’t have called—”
“No, that’s—”
But I cut him off before he can finish his sentence and I say, “I love you, Nate,” and then I hang up before he can reply, if he even replies at all.
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