The Smart One

The Smart One - By Jennifer Close



CHAPTER 1





From inside her apartment, Claire could hear the neighbor kids in the hall. They were running from one end to the other, the way they sometimes did, kicking a ball or playing tag, or just running for running’s sake. They had their dog with them too, a big, sad golden retriever named Ditka, who always looked confused, like he couldn’t understand why or how he’d ended up living in an apartment in New York.

Claire muted the TV and listened to see if the kids were going to stay out there for a while, or if they were just waiting for their parents to take them somewhere. She hoped it was the second option. It was Saturday morning, which meant they had hours ahead of them. Having them out there made her feel trapped in her own apartment. Just because she was sitting on the couch in sweatpants and had no plans to leave didn’t make the feeling go away. She could sense their presence on the other side of the wall, so close to her. She could see the shadow of Ditka’s nose as he sniffed at the bottom of the door. They were invading her space, what little of it she had. And it was interfering with her plan to be a hermit for the whole three-day weekend, something she was getting better and better at.

Last week, she was crossing Broadway and a man crossing the other way looked her in the eyes, pointed to her face, and said, “I want to f*ck you.” On the street, she’d blushed and walked away quickly. But when she got home she realized two things: The first was that the comment had pleased her. Claire was pretty, but it hadn’t always been that way. She was the kind of girl who grew into her looks, who suffered through an awkward stage of braces, unfortunate haircuts, and overalls in her teen years. Now, when men called out to her, “Hey, Princess. Looking good, beautiful,” she was grateful. She would duck her head and pretend to be embarrassed or insulted, but if they called out, “Smile, pretty girl,” she always obliged.

The second thing she realized was that the man on the street was the first person to talk directly to her in almost three days. She didn’t know whether to be impressed with herself or very disturbed. She chose a mix of the two.

THE KIDS IN THE HALLWAY were getting louder, and Claire turned up the volume on the TV, hoping that their parents would come out soon and tell them to come inside or at least quiet down. The kids’ names were Maddie and Jack, and they were somewhere in the nine-to-eleven age range. Jack was older, and starting to get that shoulder hunch that preteen boys get, like the whole world was so embarrassing, he couldn’t even stand up straight. Maddie was the kind of kid who believed adults found her adorable, shouting out things like “Purple is a mix of red and blue” in the elevator for Claire’s benefit and then smiling and looking down at her shoes, as if she were shy. They both had dirty-blond hair and buckteeth, and Maddie would find out soon enough that she wasn’t adorable or charming, so Claire always smiled at her.

She and Doug used to call them the Hamburger Helpers, because every night the smell of ground beef and onions came wafting out of their apartment. Sometimes Claire wanted to call the kids into her place to give them something to eat, anything that wasn’t meat and onions in a pan. It used to be a running joke—whenever they’d smell the ground beef cooking, Doug would say, “Is it tacos for dinner?” and Claire would answer, “Nope, just some good old-fashioned Beefy Mac.”

Together, she and Doug talked endlessly about the family. They wondered what possessed the Hamburger Helpers to raise a family in an average New York City apartment. Every Sunday they watched as the dad took the subway with Maddie and Jack to Fairway, watched the three of them return carrying loads of groceries, struggle onto the elevator, and go up to their apartment. Wouldn’t they have been better off in the suburbs? Wouldn’t things have been easier?

Claire and Doug laughed when Jack failed his spelling test and they heard the fight through the wall, heard Jack say, “F*ck spelling,” to his parents. They agreed that it was only going to get worse over at the Hamburger Helpers’ as Maddie and Jack hit puberty and hormones crawled all over their tiny apartment. They pitied the family and what was in store for them.

Now Claire realized the family was probably pitying her—that is, if they’d even noticed that Doug had moved out. Either way, they seemed to be getting a lot more annoying.

WHEN DOUG AND CLAIRE CALLED OFF their engagement, her friend Katherine had said, “In some ways, it’s worse than a divorce.” It was Claire’s first night out since the whole thing happened, and she and Katherine were at a wine bar near her apartment. “I guess it’s because it ended before it even started, so it’s like someone dying young.”

“Great,” Claire said.

Katherine wasn’t listening. “Or maybe it’s because by the time people get divorced, they’re usually like really sick of each other, and have done bad things and are ready to move on. With you guys, no one saw this coming.”

Claire figured this had to be the strangest response she would get. Katherine, a friend from high school, was so perpetually messed up that you got used to it after a while. Her first week in New York, she’d watched a thirty-two-year-old woman leap off the subway platform at Twenty-third and Park, killing herself as she got hit by the number 6 train. Katherine had skipped work for two weeks, leaving her apartment only to purchase a small white Maltese for eight hundred dollars from the pet store on the corner with her parents’ credit card. Things since then had been touch and go. Claire could forgive her strange reply. Surely everyone else would know how to be more appropriate.

But Claire was wrong. Apparently no one knew how to react to her news. Her two friends at work, Becca and Molly, decided that their mission would be to cheer Claire up by telling her all of the bizarre love stories they knew. Sometimes the point was clear (“My mom was engaged before she met my dad, you know!”) and sometimes it wasn’t, like the time Molly told her about her sister who worked as a nanny and ended up running off and marrying the father of her babysitting charges, leaving his first wife in their dust. “Isn’t that romantic?” Molly asked. No, Claire wanted to say, that’s not romantic, it’s adultery. But she stayed silent and smiled.

Becca and Molly had been nice coworkers to have. They were all around the same age, all enjoyed getting an occasional drink after work to complain about the office, and were happy to have lunch together. She had always liked them. Until now. One afternoon in her office, as Molly told her about all of the friends she had who were getting divorced, Claire said, “Well, at least I won’t have to be Claire Winklepleck. Now there’s a silver lining.”

Molly stared at her for a moment, and then said quietly, like she didn’t want to upset Claire, “So many women don’t take their husband’s name anymore. You wouldn’t have had to do that if it made you uncomfortable.”

“Right,” Claire answered. “Right.”

She’d decided that day that Becca and Molly had to go. It was really for the best. She began to avoid them. Whenever she saw them coming toward her office around lunchtime, she’d pick up the phone and call her voice mail, so that when they popped their heads in, she could roll her eyes and point to the phone, then wave them along, as if to say, “Don’t wait for me, this could take forever, just go, go on!”

MADDIE AND JACK WERE NOW screeching and laughing in the hallway, the kind of laughing that often turned into hysterical crying, when one kid hit another and the game quickly went south. She waited for that to happen, but they quieted a little bit and resumed their game, some sort of crummy hallway soccer, she assumed. She hoped that they’d be out of there by the time she wanted to order dinner, because she didn’t want to have to wave to them and say hello, have to pet the dog and smile as she accepted her food.

She probably shouldn’t even be ordering out, considering her money situation, but what difference did twenty more dollars on her credit card really make at this point? The credit card balance was so high, so unbelievable, that she was able to ignore it most of the time, to pretend that there was no way she’d spent that much in the past six months. It just wasn’t possible.

Her phone rang again, but she didn’t bother to look at it. Her mom had been calling every day (a few times a day, actually) trying to persuade Claire to come to the shore with the family. “It’s important to me,” her mom said, over and over. If Claire had been anyone else, she could have told her mom the truth, that she didn’t want to go and sit with her family for a week at the beach, that it would make her already pathetic life seem worse. But she wouldn’t do that, because no matter how old she got, she still hated hurting Weezy’s feelings, and the times that she did left her feeling so guilty she couldn’t sleep. But for now, she let the phone ring. She had stuff to do, like looking at her bank accounts online hoping something had changed, and watching TV.

Claire sighed and switched the channel. She could always make something for dinner. There was a box of macaroni and cheese in the cupboard and that would be fine, she realized. Yes, if Maddie and Jack were still out there when she wanted to eat, she’d just make that. Calmed by the fact that she wouldn’t have to talk to anyone today, she pulled a blanket over her and settled down on the couch to watch an old eighties movie. She figured watching people go to the prom would be soothing.

CLAIRE FIRST MET DOUG AT a Super Bowl party of a friend of a friend on the Upper West Side. They’d sat next to each other on the couch and watched the game, eating guacamole and laughing at the commercials. Anytime Claire needed a beer, Doug stood up, took her empty bottle, and returned with a full one. At the end of the night, she was happy to give him her number when he asked.

“Doug Winklepleck?” her best friend, Lainie, had said. “That’s an unfortunate name.” Claire agreed, but continued to date him.

After they’d dated each other for a few weeks, Doug said, “I would like to be exclusive with you, if that’s what you want as well.” It sounded like a business proposal, but Claire was happy to agree. Doug was straightforward, and Claire appreciated that. He had a thin face, and a nose that was almost too big, but not quite. He was handsome in his own way. He was a systems developer for a fund of funds, a job title that meant nothing to Claire and that she never quite fully understood. He had his ties on a rotating schedule and contributed the maximum amount to his 401(k). He was, by all accounts, admirable.

On one of their early dates, Doug took Claire to see the elephants arrive in Manhattan for the circus. They were marched through the Queens Midtown Tunnel at midnight and Doug told her it was something she had to see. “I can’t believe you’ve lived here for five years and you’ve never seen them,” he said. “That won’t do.”

They went to a bar on Third Avenue that had a jukebox, long wooden tables, and smelled like yeast and bleach. They played darts and shared a plate of buffalo wings, which was a tricky thing to eat on an early date. And when it was time, they rushed out to the street to wait for the arrival.

Claire stood there, leaning against Doug, buzzed from the beers and the strangeness of the night. She shivered and watched the big, sad elephants march into Manhattan. They were wrinkled and dusty and magnificent. She wanted to cry for them, wanted to run up and touch their rough skin with her hand, to place her palms flat against their hides. It was all she could do to stay put in her place. She drew in a deep breath and said, “Oh.”

“See?” Doug whispered into her hair. “I told you. It’s something to see.”

And right then, Claire felt like Doug was the right choice, the person she’d been waiting for, and anytime she started to think otherwise, she’d close her eyes and whisper, “Remember the elephants,” until the feeling went away.

THEY MOVED IN TOGETHER NINE MONTHS after they met, and then, about a year after that, Doug proposed. The ring was dull, silver, and thick, with a vine etched all around it. Along the vine were tiny dots of diamonds. Claire hated it. “I knew you wouldn’t want a big, showy ring,” Doug said. She’d just nodded and looked down at her hand. Of course she wanted a big ring. She’d always wanted a big diamond, even if she knew she was supposed to say it didn’t matter.

And the thing that bugged her, the thing that really drove her crazy, was that Doug had never asked her. If he had, he would have known. She suspected that he surprised her with this one so he wouldn’t have to spend a lot of money, which was even more annoying, because he made a good amount of money—a lot of money by anyone’s standards. It wasn’t like she could look at the ring and think, Well, this is all he could afford, but I know he loves me. It wasn’t. He could have bought her something spectacular, but he decided to be practical. And who wanted practical for an engagement ring?

They were engaged for four months. Claire tried to remember where the shift happened, when things started to fall apart, but she could never quite figure it out. There were no screaming fights, no cheating, no admission of an Internet porn addiction or a hidden drug problem. They just simply began to crack.

Almost every conversation they had led them to a disagreement. Had it always been this way? Claire didn’t think so, but maybe it had and they’d just never noticed. Maybe now that they were facing the rest of their lives together, everything seemed bigger and more important.

“You only want two kids?” Claire said one day. Doug nodded. He’d said this before, but she’d always thought he was flexible.

“Two is a good number,” he said. “Two is affordable.”

“What if one of them dies?” Claire asked. “Then you only have one left.”

“Why would you say something like that?” He looked away. “What’s wrong with you?”

When Claire wanted to go out to dinner three nights in a row, Doug said they shouldn’t, to save money. When Doug talked about moving to Long Island, Claire told him he was out of his mind. When Claire watched reality TV, especially the singing competition show that Doug hated, he told her she was contributing to the downfall of American culture. When Doug wore his BlackBerry strapped to his hip in a holster, Claire told him he was a nerd. It went on like this, until most nights were spent in separate rooms of the apartment, watching different TV shows.

“You’re always so mad at me,” Doug said, more than once. “It’s like whatever I do disappoints you.”

“That’s not true,” Claire said. But she wasn’t sure.

Then one night, after an argument about whether they should order Thai food or sushi that ended with Doug calling Claire overdramatic and Claire calling Doug controlling, he had sighed. “What’s going on with us?”

“It’s just Thai food,” Claire said. But it was too late.

“Something’s wrong. This isn’t right.”

“You can get the crab wontons,” she said. Doug shook his head.

Claire stayed in the apartment and Doug moved out, saying that he would pay his part of the rent for two more months while she looked for a new place. It all happened quickly. There were two nights of talking and fighting, of Claire crying on the couch, and Doug crying a little bit too, and then it was settled and he was moving out and Claire still hadn’t told anyone what had happened.

The Monday after Doug left, Claire got dressed, took the subway to work, and was standing in her boss’s office talking about a grant proposal when she started crying. Crying! Like she was seven years old. It had been mortifying to stand there and try to hold back her tears, and even more so to have her boss jump up and close the door to her office, then guide Claire to a chair to ask her what was wrong.

Claire had told her everything—the engagement, Doug’s moving out, the apartment, how she still needed to tell her family and cancel the plans that had been made for the wedding—and Amy had listened, nodding and handing her tissues, making sympathetic noises at certain places.

“It’s such a mess,” Claire said. “I’m sorry. It’s a mess, I’m a mess.”

Amy had sent her home then, instructing her to take the week off. “You have so much comp time. Take it. We’re covered here. There’s nothing that can’t be done next week. Just get things sorted and settled.” Claire thought how strange this was, since the extent of her personal conversations with Amy up to this point had been about the salad place across the street that they both liked. When they ran into each other there, they’d laugh and say, “Funny seeing you here,” and then they’d discuss whether it was better to get walnuts or pecans on your salad, or to leave them off altogether since nuts were so packed with calories.

“I don’t need a whole week,” Claire said, but Amy held up her hand.

“Take it. This is your life and this is important. There’s a lot for you to figure out. It wouldn’t hurt to rest and be kind to yourself for a few days.”

Claire was forever grateful for this. She hoped that one day she could show the same kindness to someone who worked for her. But she was also deeply embarrassed and when she finally did return to work, she couldn’t look Amy in the eye. It was like she’d taken all her clothes off in front of this woman and then expected it not to be awkward. It was awful, really.

Claire had spent the whole week in her apartment. She didn’t leave once. She called her mom to let her know about the engagement and refused the suggestions to come home to Philly, and screamed, “No!” at the idea of her mom coming to New York.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Really. I just need to sort things out.”

“Oh, Claire,” her mom had said. And Claire had to get off the phone before she started crying, because those two words coming out of her mom’s mouth were the worst. She’d heard them so many times before—when she got a D in calculus, when she crashed the car in the high school parking lot, when she got arrested at the shore for underage drinking.

Claire e-mailed her friends, but didn’t take any phone calls. She made it seem like she wasn’t in New York. I’m sorting things out, she typed. I’m doing fine.

That whole week, Claire took baths at night. She soaked in the tub, filling it with water as hot as she could stand. When the water started to cool, she would let some of it drain out and then turn on the faucet to let new, steaming water pour in. She emerged from these baths pink-faced and dizzy. She would wrap a towel around her head and another around her body and stare at herself in the mirror. She looked like a newborn hamster before it got its fur—a doughy pink blob of see-through skin, unrecognizable and delicate.

Claire hoped for some revelation during these baths. She thought that soaking in the soapy water would clear her head. But it didn’t. Mostly she just tried to figure out where she’d gone wrong. Sometimes she wondered what would happen if Doug were still there. Almost always she replayed the moment in her head when the actual breakup happened, when Doug said he was going to move out, and Claire said, “What am I going to do now?” She hadn’t meant to say it, didn’t even realize it was coming out of her mouth until she heard it, and immediately she was ashamed. She didn’t want to be that person, didn’t want to hear her teary, pathetic voice in her head, admitting that she was lost, saying, “What am I supposed to do now?” like she couldn’t figure anything out for herself. And so she soaked in the water and hoped that somehow the words would steam out of her.

During the days, she watched talk shows. On Tuesday, the guest was a kidnapping specialist, who talked the audience through gory details of women being dismembered and raped. Claire forced herself to watch as a reminder that things could be much worse. More than once, the man looked at the audience with serious eyes as he repeated his most important advice: “Never let them take you to a second location,” he said. He pointed at a different person with each word.

Apparently, the odds of being killed went up enormously when you let an abductor take you somewhere else. Claire let this thought run itself over in her head. She ordered takeout every night, and figured she was safest in her apartment.

Claire returned to work without one thing figured out. She had considered moving, but the thought of finding a new place that she could afford seemed impossible. And so she stayed put and dipped into her savings to pay rent after Doug stopped sending her checks. She told herself that it was actually less expensive this way, because to move she’d need money for a deposit and a broker fee and a moving company. It was the right thing to do, she thought, to stay where she was for the moment. Never let them take you to a second location, she’d remind herself.

Of course, six months later, all of Claire’s savings were gone and she’d started charging anything she could on her credit cards—groceries, subway cards, taxi rides, the electric bill. It was easy to live in New York on credit.

At least ten times a day, she signed on to her bank accounts to look at the numbers, trying to make sense of them, trying to make them add up differently. She studied the numbers, like if she looked at them long enough, more money would appear in her bank account. But that never happened. After staring at it for about an hour, she’d begin to get a panicky feeling, and she’d have to sign out quickly, clicking the button at the top, like closing the screen was going to make the problem go away.

Sometimes at night, Claire dreamt about that crazy blond lady on TV, the one who tried to fix the financially irresponsible, adding up their bills, telling them, firmly, that they needed to change their habits. In her dreams, Claire saw this woman walking up to her in a no-nonsense suit, accentuating every word as she said, You cannot live like this. You have got to take responsibility. You have got to live within your means or you are going to end up—Broke. Without. A. Penny. To. Your. Name. Or. A. Place. To. Live.

In the dreams, Claire would try to run away from her. When she woke up, she’d always think, Even my dreams have money problems. Then she’d try to tell herself it wasn’t that bad.

This past month, she’d realized that she was totally screwed, that she probably wouldn’t even be able to pay her full rent next month. She wondered about this in a sort of abstract way, as if the apartment were so absolutely hers that the landlord wouldn’t be able to kick her out. But she knew that wasn’t the truth. She knew her borrowed time was almost up.

EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE, Claire went to craigslist to look at apartment listings. She scrolled through them, clicking on the pictures of the tiny studios, usually in Brooklyn, or else so far up and so far east on the island, she wasn’t even sure it could be considered Manhattan anymore. She looked at the pictures of the empty rooms, clicking through the bathroom photo that showed a bare toilet, naked and exposed in the empty white space. She’d click, click, click along, each one uglier than the one before, until she felt like she was going to throw up.

Even scarier were the apartment shares. She’d gone as far as e-mailing with one guy who was renting out a bedroom in a three-bedroom walk-up at York and Seventy-sixth. Claire set up a time to meet with him, got to the building, and then kept walking. She just couldn’t face it. She knew what she’d find: a tiny place with thin walls, where she’d be able to hear everything her roommates did and said, would have to run into them in the kitchen while eating cereal, and wait her turn for the shower in the morning.

No. Sharing a place with randoms was out of the question. She was too old for that. Maybe a few years ago, it wouldn’t have seemed so bad. But she was twenty-nine and she didn’t want to have to negotiate refrigerator space with strangers.

What she wanted was to stay where she was. It wasn’t fair that she had to leave. She hadn’t done anything wrong. She’d always had a job, had worked hard, had been responsible. Why was she the only one being punished? None of her other friends had to deal with this. Even the dumb girls she’d known in high school seemed to be capable of living as adults. How had they all ended up fine and she’d ended up like this?

Claire loved the apartment that she and Doug had shared. It was a teeny bit run-down, but it was clean and in a beautiful old building. It wasn’t big, but it was certainly the biggest place she’d ever lived in New York—a proper one-bedroom, with a kitchen that opened up into the living room with a counter and stools. What more could you want? Sure, she couldn’t afford it, but maybe something would happen, maybe her circumstances would change.

CLAIRE’S PHONE HAD BEEN RINGING all weekend, which was really annoying. It was one thing to have to talk to people at work, but on Saturday and Sunday, she wanted peace. The first call was from her sister, Martha, reporting that a meth lab had been busted on the Upper West Side. Martha assumed that the meth lab was right next to Claire’s apartment, possibly in the very same building. Martha left messages like this a few times a week. It was almost as if she searched for bad news to share, almost as if she liked it.

Her mom had called twice more, asking about the shore. Claire didn’t even have to listen to the messages to know what they were about. Weezy wasn’t going to stop until she got the answer that she wanted.

Her friend Lainie had also called three times, but hadn’t left any messages. Lainie never left messages; she got too impatient waiting for the beep to come. Claire wasn’t that concerned, because if it was a real emergency, Lainie would text her. But when her number came up a fourth time, Claire answered.

“You sound miserable,” Lainie said. She didn’t even say hello. She was never one to sugarcoat things. Once in high school, when Claire was obsessing over a giant pimple on her forehead, searching for some sort of reassurance that it wasn’t as bad as she thought, Lainie had said, “Yeah, it’s huge, but what are you going to do? Stay in your house until it’s gone? Everyone knows you don’t normally look like that.”

“Well, hello to you too,” Claire said now.

“Hi,” Lainie said. She spoke quickly. “So what’s going on? You sound awful.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. You sound like someone died. Katherine thinks you’re depressed.”

“Katherine thinks everyone’s depressed.”

“Fair enough.” Lainie knew this was true. Katherine loved therapy, thought everyone should be in it, and had encouraged Lainie to see someone after she gave birth to each of her children, just in case she developed postpartum depression.

“I’m fine,” Claire said again. She felt awkward on the phone with Lainie, like they were dancing on the offbeat of a song. They hadn’t talked much since Doug moved out. Lainie had her third baby the month after, and was available only for quick calls, in which she often mentioned that her life was full of poop and that she sometimes forgot to brush her teeth. Claire was used to this, the way Lainie disappeared for a little while when each of her boys was born. She wasn’t surprised by it anymore, or even hurt. It was just the way things happened, and Lainie always resurfaced after a few months. Just because this last baby had come at an inconvenient time for Claire, a time when she could have used her best friend, there wasn’t anything she could do about it, except wait.

“Are you sure?” Lainie was saying.

“Yeah, I’m just … You know, trying to adjust, I guess.”

“It’s been six months.” Lainie didn’t say this unkindly, but it still made Claire’s throat tighten up.

“I know. It’s just weird, okay? It just sucks.” Claire heard a baby crying, and Lainie sighed. Claire could tell that Lainie was picking Matthew up and bouncing him around, trying to get him to quiet down.

“I know, I know,” Lainie said. But she didn’t.

“I just have to figure a bunch of stuff out. I just never feel like doing anything. I have to move, I have to do tons of things, and I just feel like I can’t.”

Lainie was silent for a moment. “Maybe I’ll come up to see you this weekend.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really. That’s what we’ll do. I could come tomorrow and stay the night. It’s a three-day weekend and Brian can watch the boys. We’ll figure it all out. We’ll find an apartment, get you signed up for online dating.”

“Funny,” Claire said. But then she did let out a little laugh.

“I’m serious. We’ll get it all figured out.” Claire knew that Lainie was only half kidding. Lainie liked to solve problems and she probably thought she could come up for one weekend and easily sort out Claire’s mess. Which was just a little obnoxious, but Claire didn’t mind.

“IT’S AMAZING, REALLY,” LAINIE SAID, “that this place hasn’t driven you crazy yet.” She dropped her bag on the floor and looked around at the apartment. Claire had to admit it didn’t look good. When Doug had packed up all of his stuff, it became clear that almost everything in the apartment was his. They’d both known this, of course, but somehow it was still a surprise to see him take it all with him.

He’d taken all of the framed pictures from the walls, the big TV, the dresser, the desk, the big couch, and most of the stuff in the kitchen. He’d left her the bed to be nice, and so Claire had insisted he take the duvet and pillows, which he had (except for one pillow), and now the bed looked like it belonged in an insane asylum, stripped down except for white sheets and an old knitted afghan that Claire had stolen from home years ago.

The only things left in the main room of the apartment were an old loveseat, a side table, a small TV, and a lawn chair that she’d found in the closet after Doug left. There were a few things in the kitchen, enough to get by, anyway—a couple of plates, a bowl, some silverware, a pot, and a skillet. She knew Doug had felt bad for leaving her with so few things, and he kept offering to leave more, but she insisted he take his stuff. “It’s yours,” she kept saying. “You should take it, it’s all yours.”

Doug probably assumed that Claire had waited a few days and then gone out to replace what was missing, that she’d moved things around, hung new pictures, or at least covered the holes that were left. But she hadn’t done a thing. And now the whole place was practically empty, like she was in the middle of moving in or out, like the whole situation was just temporary.

That night, she and Lainie decided to just stay in and order food and when the deliveryman came, Claire realized that she wouldn’t be able to charge it to her card. She hadn’t paid the bill and there wasn’t enough credit left.

“Oh shit,” she said. “I forgot, there was some security thing with my bank and they canceled all my cards. I was supposed to get new ones, but they haven’t come yet.”

“That’s okay,” Lainie said. “I got it.”

“Thanks,” Claire said. Her heart was pounding with the lie, but Lainie didn’t seem to notice anything.

AFTER THEY ATE AND DRANK WINE and went to bed, Claire lay on her back for a long time and stared at the ceiling. Her room never got all that dark, since the light of the city came in through the blinds and she’d never taken the time to get curtains or a shade to block it out. This never bothered Claire, because when she woke up, she could always see everything in the room and never had to turn on a light to go to the bathroom, never tripped over a pair of shoes or walked into a wall.

“I have no money left,” she said. She wasn’t sure if Lainie was awake or asleep, and she figured that was her gamble, that she could just say it out loud and if Lainie heard, then she’d have to deal with it.

But then she saw the pillow move, and then Lainie was squinting at her. “What?”

Claire considered lying for a minute, or telling her that she was just exaggerating. But then it seemed too hard, and Lainie always knew when she was lying anyway. “I have no money left,” Claire said again. “I’m broke. And I don’t mean, I’m broke, like I normally mean it. I mean that I’ve spent all of my savings and have been living on my credit cards for months and now there’s no more room left on them, and I don’t think I can pay rent this month. Not after I pay the minimum on the cards, and I seriously don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Oh shit.” Lainie was sitting up now.

“Yeah.”

“Can you borrow some money from your parents?”

“Yeah, I guess. I mean, I’m going to have to. But I don’t know what good that’ll do. Even if I get through this month, I’m going to have the same problem again next month.”

“Well, you need to move.” Lainie sounded firm, like moving would solve everything.

“I know, I know. I know I need to. I just put it off for so long because I didn’t want to live somewhere shitty, and it costs so much to move—to pay the movers and put down the deposit and all of that. At this point, I’d have to borrow ten thousand dollars from my parents to move and that probably wouldn’t even be enough. And I’d end up in some dungeon in Brooklyn.”

Claire felt her nose start to run and knew she’d be crying soon. Lainie patted her knee, got up, turned on the bedroom light, and went into the kitchen. She came back with Kleenex and two beers. She handed one to Claire and sat cross-legged in front of her.

“I’m so screwed,” Claire said.

Lainie nodded. “We’ll figure it out,” she said. “It seems impossible, I know, but it’s not. We’ll figure it out.”

There were times in college when the size of a paper she had to write would overwhelm Claire. She’d sit there in front of the computer and try to get herself to start typing, but all she could think about was how much she had to do, the enormousness of the project. It would paralyze her. People sometimes said that fear was a motivator, but she never found that. Instead, she’d sit, all night, staring at the screen and not typing a word.

And it was happening again. The amount of her debt was too big, the size of her f*ckup was too large. To act on it would be to acknowledge it, to start trying to fix it, and it just didn’t seem like there was any way to do that. And so she sat, paralyzed, and waited.

The next day, Lainie left and Claire sat on her couch. She was exhausted. She and Lainie had stayed up almost the whole night talking, and right around five in the morning, Lainie had said, “Look, don’t freak out, okay? But maybe you should think about moving home.”

“Lainie. I’m not moving home. That’s ridiculous.”

“Okay, that’s what I thought you’d say. But listen, people do it all the time to pay off debt. You don’t even like your job, and it would be an excuse to leave it. You could live rent free, get a random job, pay off all your credit cards, and then move back when you’re more settled. You could take your time looking for a job and find one that you really want.”

Claire was annoyed at how rational Lainie sounded. She wanted to offer up another plan, another idea for how she could get herself out of her situation, but she didn’t have one. From her calculations, after next month, she was done.

“You could even temp,” Lainie continued. “So it wouldn’t even be like you were staying there. Temping is just that. Temping. Temporary. Beth used an agency that loved her, that’s always e-mailing her for referrals. They’d die to get you. I think most of the people that go there are sort of weird or something, but whatever. It would be easy. It would be like a break, and you deserve a break after this year, you really do.”

When she’d left today, Lainie had said, “Think about what we talked about. I think it’s the best plan.”

Claire had hugged her and closed the door, thinking there was no way in hell that was going to happen. But now here she was, alone in her apartment, and she felt trapped again, but this time it wasn’t because the Hamburger Helpers were outside—it was because she had no money. None. This was it. Lainie was right. She couldn’t stay, and her only option was to move home.

Last night Lainie had said, “Look at it this way—at least you have this option. At least going home is a possibility.” Claire knew she should feel grateful for that, even if she didn’t right now. She’d tell her parents at the shore, she decided. How bad could it be? It couldn’t be worse than telling them her engagement was called off, could it?

And so, knowing that she couldn’t get out of it, knowing that she had no better alternative anyway, Claire pulled her bag out of the closet and began putting together her clothes for a week at the shore with her family.

The woman that Katherine saw jump in front of the subway was named Joanne Jansen. It was a cute name—catchy and poetic, sort of like Claire Coffey. There were a few people on the subway platform that day that insisted Joanne Jansen had just fallen, that the whole thing was a horrible accident. But Katherine told Claire that wasn’t true. “She jumped with her arms in front of her,” Katherine said. “She jumped like a superhero, like she wanted to make sure she got to where she was going.” Claire thought of that now as she packed, how Joanne Jansen had put her arms straight in front of her, determined and sure of her decision. She wished she didn’t know that detail. It made it worse somehow.