DOCUMENT 14

Emily,

I can’t imagine telling you, but want to tell you the truth about your sister tonight, like we used to tell each other the truth under the hot covers when we were kids. When I half-lived at your house for five years, and our breath smelled like bubblegum, your house’s special toothpaste flavor. When we had to whisper so Marguerite wouldn’t hear us and get mad that we were still awake. And I told you how sometimes, when he spent weeks there for work, that I didn’t believe my dad would ever come back from Boston. That he never smiled at home. I said maybe he was plotting his escape. I said maybe Brian would change from being my brother to being my new dad, after all he was 18 years older than me, so it wouldn’t be that weird. And you said maybe my dad wasn’t going to Boston at all, maybe he was a spy, and that made sense why he was so serious all the time, I’d be serious too if I was a spy, you whispered. And maybe Brian was a spy too, you said, and that made sense why he was always coming home late and shutting the door to his room really quickly. And I liked your version of my family, all the boys being spies, and maybe my mom knew too, which would explain why she was always so nervous, and then, after you explained it to me, I could sleep again.

I told Brian about that the other month and he said being in the closet and being a spy require similar qualifications so maybe you were onto something.

Back when you couldn’t spend the entire night in my room because you used to wet the bed if you were in unfamiliar places, you’d cry, and your sister would come over to get you at what seemed like the middle of the night but was probably only 11:30 or something. I watched her carrying you down the street back to your house. You half asleep on Marguerite’s shoulder, that dark green blanket with a pattern of leaves on it thrown over both of you like a wraparound cape, protection against the night.

I didn’t want to come back here but I’m back, hopefully just temporary, a layover. Of course I feel like a hypocrite, no one’s forcing me to be here. We both know there are other options. You and I have friends sleeping on people’s couches, renting closets for $150 a month in cities and putting a futon mattress in them. If we had just graduated two years earlier. I know I’m taking advantage of a queen-sized bed with multiple sets of sheets. The washer and dryer, the fridge. Their full fridge is a thing of beauty. I’m attached to comfort.

At like 7 tonight—it’s a Thursday—Brian called when I was about to start eating dinner. He said no one had heard back from your sister in a few days, and Rich obviously couldn’t stop by, so he asked Brian to. He always says your dad’s name in that way, like he just ate a bite of too-old yogurt. It’s so weird to me that they even talk ever, since it seems like my entire family collectively decided to hate your dad once he left. Then Brian was like, you know Marguerite’s been drinking again, which I didn’t know know but I probably could have guessed.

Then he went into this long thing about why he couldn’t get to her house without canceling plans, his book club…you know how he can be when he wants something but doesn’t want to ask. Finally I offered to stop by later tonight, which was what he was trying to get me to do the whole time. Then he started quizzing me on what would I do at your house—he treats me like I’m a child again lately. Finally I was like you know Brian, it’s not like I’ve never seen a drunk person before.

I got in the car to drive over there. I brought a package I needed to take to the post office tomorrow and put it in the backseat, which almost felt like cause for celebration. That’s a new normal, doing little shortcuts and cheats and yelling reminders at myself. I’m terrified of my own inertia. This heaviness that makes just bringing in the trash bins an insurmountable feat sometimes lately. How did I used to do so much.

Driving, I wondered how I’d explain to the person who, ten years ago, fed me two soft-boiled eggs every Sunday morning what I was doing at her house, if she came to the door. The golden-haired teenager who bathed us in oatmeal when you and I both got chicken pox in preschool. What I’d say to her about life that she didn’t already know.

One important thing I haven’t told you is about the party my parents threw when I moved home. Sort of a post-graduation party. Marguerite came over early to help set up, and she said it was on behalf of you since you were still in Nashville. Your sister spent the night in the kitchen with my mom, cutting crudités and restocking the cooler with ice and bottled drinks. At the end she stayed to help us clean up and it was just the four of us, my mom and Brian and your sister and me. When she was ready to leave, I walked her out into the hallway. She stopped midway and turned around, and she put both her hands on my shoulders. I looked at her eyes, which look like yours, dark like blueberries, and tried to smile at her.

She said, I want you to know that I love you very much, Katie. You are my very, very good friend, and you are a very wonderful friend. You are my wonderful, wonderful friend. And then she leaned forward and gave me a heavy hug, drawing herself closer to me instead of me closer to her. When she straightened up she wiggled, like her arms and chest were filled with jello. I always remembered her skin as tan but it was green-tinted, and her cheeks looked chubby, like she’d stuffed them during the party with chunks of sourdough bread and melon balls. I hear her voice in my head still, months later, and think about how I don’t drive five minutes to visit her and I don’t feel like a very wonderful anything.

Maybe I’d find her just hanging out, watching a movie in her pajamas on the couch where you and I used to fall asleep head to foot when we were kids. Maybe then she’d get indignant, deservedly. That we were suspicious of her, didn’t trust her still. I pictured her sober, defensive. I pictured her drunk, angry. I pictured her lying next to a pool of vomit. Me calling 911. I wondered how I’d live with myself if I was already too late.

Your house came surprisingly quick, like always, at the front of the cul-de-sac. It’s been unseasonably warm here for January, so the trees in front were bare but no snow. I wasn’t wearing gloves or even a hat and for a moment I felt wonderfully free, when I stepped out of the car, like, why didn’t I leave the house all day. Your sister’s old green station wagon was out front. I walked up towards the front door and rang the bell. Your house was totally dark. I called Brian without really thinking and he stepped out of book club to talk. He said to walk around to the back of the house, which I was already doing, and I looked around the corner, into the window of Marguerite’s bedroom. I saw her in bed. The lights were off. I saw her move. I told him. He said well I’ll tell Rich that, I guess, and sighed like he does. I asked what if she’s just tired and got in bed early? Because I could imagine myself doing that right then, just walking back to our house and going to sleep. I felt like I was telling on her. He put on his serious voice and he was like it’s 8:15, Katie, that’s not a reasonable time to go to bed. And I was like okay, thank you brother, very helpful help.

We hung up and I rang the doorbell a couple more times but nothing happened. A light turned on next door and I got paranoid that your neighbors had seen me walk behind your house and were going to call the cops, but then I heard a stream of liquid splashing on the ground and realized they’d just let their dog out to pee. That no one was watching me, and no one was watching your old house as it sat in the darkness.

I’ve had a lot of time to think since I’ve been home. Because when you’re not in high school or college anymore you can only watch so much TV without getting totally depressed, and I can only write so many cover letters each day. I guess I’ve been trying to figure out what happened between you and me. I remember a Christmas party when we were maybe ten, at someone’s house from our girl scout troop, where you were wearing a white turtleneck and still had bangs. We drove you home from the party because your mom was under a folding table crying. And the day a few weeks later I came over and your dad’s stuff was all in boxes and there were empty wine glasses on the shelves, dusty except where his things had sat.

Then we started high school, and I think it’s normal to have trouble staying in touch when you go to different schools. Especially when we were both so busy, and had different kinds of parties, you gumming coke on leather couches, and me smoking shitty weed at parties in the backyards of one-story houses, seeing golden rings around everyone. Like as soon as the adults left it up to us to hold the thread of our friendship, it slipped through our fingers. I’ve always been the historian of it but I guess I’ve lost track now. In a way it always seemed inevitable we’d start talking again, the way people say it feels when you meet the person you’re going to marry.

Then we started writing long emails, and I loved hearing again about your liaisons with musicians visiting to record their albums, to have you listen to what I left behind in Vermont, at school. I never told you—you were one of the only people who believed in what was lost when I graduated and moved back home to this safe, stagnant landing pad where everything is the same, my dad still in Boston three-quarters time and my mother worrying about every crumb on every smooth counter when she’s home. And Brian only a couple miles away in a Williams Sonoma domestic paradise and a man named Victor he says he knows he’ll love forever.

I tried to tell you. When I was in Nashville for the weekend a few months ago, in September, and we were on the porch of that bar near your house, drinking iced coffee spiked with whatever that liquor was. I asked you how your mom was doing and then I was going to tell you about Marguerite at my party. You said your mom was doing okay, working as an assistant to some old woman so she didn’t get bedsores, and I thought about how your mom probably needed her own assistant. But then you started talking about how you wanted your sister to sell your childhood house and move to a place in a city, somewhere fun with art and other aging singles. But Marguerite’s job was where the DOD was, which was not in New York, or San Francisco, or Austin, so she wasn’t going to move. At least there’s DC, I said.

And you were like, yeah, anyway, she’s fine, and you flipped your hair forward over your left shoulder, where you have that long white scar you got when you were climbing a tree in middle school, in Grace’s backyard. And that’s when I was going to tell you about the party, and Marguerite’s swollen face, but you had your lips pursed closed, and you weren’t looking me in the eye.

So I just took a sip of my drink, holding it with both my hands, and you said, like a sippy cup! and we laughed, and I knew you’d painted your own reality while you two talked on the phone. You in your colorful apartment in Nashville and Marguerite with one lamp on in the living room where we grew up. In your imaginary world everything was just fine, or it would be as soon as you relocated her. Just like when we were kids and people would ask about your sister when she’d drop us off at girl scout camp, and you’d say oh that’s my mom so the counselors wouldn’t ask about the age difference between you two, or where your mom was. I understood, because I did the same about Brian whenever I could.

And I thought about how you made up your world, and how some children never leave their imaginations behind. Some children keep them close at hand because they have to. Some children lose them completely, and those children can turn into very boring people, but some children never lose them, and those children can turn into liars. I’ve known since we were little who makes the more interesting friend.

Which is exactly why I won’t actually be sending this to you, why I’m typing it into a word document and not an email with your name in the To line. What happened tonight, which is maybe nothing, or maybe everything, might trickle back to you, from me to my brother to your dad to you, which is fine, but I’m not going to be the one to tell you. It’s not how we work, not now when we’re trying to refind this. We’re playing pretend again together, and one of the rules of playing pretend is that if one person decides the desk is the jail, the desk is the jail. No one wants to play with the girl who says, no, that’s just a desk. That girl is ignored and goes into the living room to sulk until an adult intervenes on her behalf. Even so, she’s never really a part of the game. If she can’t see it’s a jail, then she’s dispensable to the made-up world.

It’s almost a nothing thing, what I saw, and yet the only thing that matters: a motion. No cops, no ambulances, no tears. Just your sister, lying in bed, wrapped in a white down comforter. She flailed her arm into the air and rolled over, away from the window where I stood watching her. This is how I knew she was alive. It’s really not a nothing thing, to know a person is alive when they could just as easily not be. For her tonight will just be another one she was probably plastered, on rum or wine or whatever she could find in the cupboards, whatever she bought nonchalantly at the supermarket, the liquor blending in among apples and instant brown rice packages to seem unremarkable.

Tonight, the quiet suburban streets, no trains or buses, houses with wide spaces between them, no clues from outside betraying the insides, it was all so fucking normal. I want to tell you I checked carefully to make sure your sister was breathing, and the feeling of wanting to tell you, it’s like I want a medal for it or something. But also: how many times in your life have you held your breath and tiptoed down the hall to do the same thing? How many times have you told no one? And has anyone ever thanked you for it?

After, I got in my car and just drove, no reason, past my old high school and past where the movie theater used to be near the KFC. I still know all the stores on that drive. What do you do with rage against a place. A place you can drink yourself almost to death before a person who knew what every stone looked like leading up to your gate, who you’d bathed countless times, would come ring the doorbell.

I guess I’d wanted a confrontation. An intervention. But there was only this. I want to say this place taught us to keep quiet but that seems like shirking responsibility now that we’re old enough to have a choice, and isn’t that a thing they say we do too?

Sometimes I do hope it’s different somewhere else. Like maybe in the crowded cities people actually take care of each other. Or maybe it’s in a very small town, with fewer people around they give a shit. Or is this what taking care looks like.

When I got back home I waited before opening the front door, listening, trying to imagine what was happening inside of the houses near mine. I felt the stuckness and couldn’t remember the last time I’d breathed on purpose. Like, I’m breathing all day, without even knowing it, and why don’t I notice it.

Anyway, I don’t know if

I guess I want you to know I’m thinking of you, tonight and

I hope you are

___

Janet Frishberg is currently at work on a memoir about grief, writing, and friendship. Her work has been published in Catapult, Electric Literature, and The Rumpus, among others. You can find her on Twitter @jfrishberg.