It was amazing how the old Brooklyn neighborhood had remained crystallized in time. There was Mrs Delaney walking one of her many yellow labs, still wearing that big purple parka that made her look like Grimace from the McDonald’s commercials. There was Mr Gould, still dancing in front of the window-he never could figure out how to close the curtains. There was Mrs Fry’s same collection of pinwheels, trapped under a film of ice.
I put the key in the lock, anticipating the dogs’ jingling collars until I remembered they were in Vermont. The apartment looked as I had expected it would-boxes everywhere, most of the furniture gone, a big hole in the kitchen where the fridge used to be. New granite countertops and darkcherry cabinets in the kitchen. A new coat of paint on the walls, and new light fixtures in the kitchen and living room. My father had taken the curtains off the windows and stripped the freshly sanded wood floors of their rugs, making the whole place seem enormous.
We went to my bedroom. There was a poster of The Smashing Pumpkins on the wall. Pairs and pairs of Gap jeans in the closet. My old Babysitter’s Clubs from elementary school were on the bookshelves, as were my biology textbooks. I opened a random drawer; inside were things I hadn’t thought about in years. The pale pink leotard and iridescent tights from the year my mother urged me to try ballet. A little crystal box someone had given me in a Secret Santa exchange. A Nintendo Game Boy, without batteries. I shut the drawer again.
Philip swayed in the doorway. ‘So this is it.’
‘Only for a little while longer, I guess.’
‘I used to imagine you here, you know,’ he said. ‘When we were young.’
I smiled into my chest. ‘What did you imagine me doing?’
‘Just…being you. Lying in your bed. Looking in the mirror. I imagined you thinking about me, maybe.’
We’d had this conversation thousands of times by now-that the time we met in high school during my grandmother’s funeral was more significant than either of us had ever dared to let on, but we’d both felt silly, afterwards, for holding onto it. But I guess it wasn’t silly, after all.
Over those first long phone conversations, me in Cobalt, helping Stella through the last few months of her life, Philip in New York, before his company moved him to Annapolis, I could connect to him in a way I had never been able to connect to anyone. I could tell him things I’d told no one else. Maybe it was because we weren’t face to face, or maybe it was because he told me things about himself, too-that he had been teased all his life for his father’s religion and appearance. That he’d had an obsession with the ThunderCats cartoon when he was young, and wished that he could just become a ThunderCat to escape harsh, confusing preadolescence. That one girl he had dated had called him too feminine and sensitive and had cheated on him. He didn’t seem sensitive like my father, though-he just seemed willing to talk. And willing to accept what I had to say.
With that connection, though, came a vulnerability I’d never really felt before, and with that vulnerability came paranoia. I was stunned when he asked me to move to Annapolis with him after Stella died. I waffled over it for a few days, wondering if I really should go. I was afraid that, soon enough, Philip and I would discover the hateful things about each other, and our relationship would recede into alienation. Or we’d realize that there was no plausible way two people who met once as teenagers would actually end up together. There were some days where I didn’t think about it, but most days, I did, at least a little.
I pulled the quilted comforter back and sat down on my old bed. ‘You didn’t have to kiss my dad’s ass like that, you know.’
‘I didn’t kiss his ass.’ Philip looked surprised.
‘Yeah you did. How you loved his shirt? How you loved Vermont? You’ve never been to Vermont.’
‘I didn’t say I’d been. I said I wanted to go. And anyway, what’s wrong with wanting him to like me?’
The back of my neck ached, the same way it used to after I played Steven’s video games too long. I always played so clenched and tense, afraid that an enemy would come out from the pixelated ether and disintegrate me with his mace or sword or three fire-breathing heads. ‘My dad was really nervous tonight, wasn’t he?’
‘Well, he was seeing all of you again. It’s been a while, right?’
‘No, I think there was more than just that.’ I thought about my father’s fluttering hands, how he’d gone outside to smoke. I had confronted him about it afterwards and he’d shrugged, saying it wasn’t a habit or anything, just something he picked up during his boring days at Merewether. ‘Maybe he’s tense about selling the house. Or maybe he’s tense about me. It’s not like I’ve talked to him much.’
‘You talk to him all the time.’
‘Yes, but not real talk.’