“Honey, what’s going on? You’re starting to freak everyone out. Remi’s fine, she’s safe. What is it?”
“I don’t know,” she says, even though it’s a lie. The tears reappear on cue and this time she uses the heel of her palm to swipe them away. She checks her hand for black streaks before she remembers that she stopped wearing mascara for this very reason. “It’s awful. God, Gavin, I’m so fucked-up. And I’m late for work again. Everyone probably thinks I’m a total nutjob.”
Gavin takes another bite in her ear. “Well, I mean, you are stalking the preschool.”
“What are you eating, anyway?” she asks. “It sounds like you’re chomping on gravel.”
“Oh just one of your extremely undelicious granola bars,” he says, with a lilt of sarcasm. To assuage her working-mom guilt, Elizabeth spent last weekend making corn-syrup-free snacks for her daughter.
“Oh God, sorry. They’re so gross. You might want to chase it down with some milk or something,” she says, grimly. Remi had taken one bite and spit out the chewed mush into Elizabeth’s palm, then asked for cheddar bunnies instead.
“Look, honey, Remi is safe. She really is. We wouldn’t have sent her there if we thought she wasn’t. And by the way, a little corn syrup isn’t going to hurt her either.”
They pause for a minute, letting the silence and the weight of all that they never need to say settle between them. He knows that her nightmares are back. “You were talking in your sleep,” Gavin had said to her when she awoke in a daze on Friday morning, and Elizabeth blew it off, pretended not to remember how she’d bolted up in the middle of the night, a spasm of dread in her chest. She could hide it from everyone else, but not Gavin.
For years, the fear has come like this, in waves that pound over her and then recede. Her mind was calm for most of the summer. She was fine, happy even. She left Remi with their nanny, Flavia (who had been background checked within an inch of her life), each day; at work she was focused and productive. Then, last month, an email out of the blue brought it all rushing back. She knew what would happen as soon as she saw the name in her in-box, Leslie Portner, an old acquaintance from her college sorority days. Elizabeth dithered over whether to open the message for a few minutes, peered out of her office window to see if anyone was approaching, and angled her monitor to be sure no one walking down the hall could see. She considered deleting it. Perhaps she could look at it later. But then, her heart hammering, she clicked, and the past opened up on her screen.
“Look how young we were!!!” the email exclaimed. Attached was an invitation to a sorority reunion, scheduled on the weekend of the Tennessee football game, written in bold orange letters over a grainy photo. “Bygones,” Elizabeth mumbled to herself, as she scanned the image, five rows of beaming college girls in sundresses on Bid Day. Once you were in, even if you strain against it and resign in a huff, they never really let you go. She zoomed in with her mouse to scan their blurred faces. First she found her own—soft angles, her long honey-colored hair curled for the occasion.
Then she saw them. To her left was Caroline, and Ginny was wedged between them, seated on Caroline’s lap, her slender tanned arms draped around their shoulders. That’s how it always was. Ginny was the bridge between them, filling the empty space. Elizabeth went over their features again and again, suddenly aware of how long it had been since she had seen this photo, and that she could no longer recall their faces precisely from memory. All of the photos she had from that time were out of sight, stored away in her mother’s attic. Faces that had once been as familiar to her as her own had become hazy in her mind, until now.
Now they are all she sees.
Gavin’s voice shakes her back to the present. “Honey, listen. You’ve got to let her go.”
“Let who go, Gav?” she whispers into the phone, leaning her head down and pressing her thumb and forefinger against her brow bones to try to stop the tears. They both know she no longer means Remi. “That’s the question, isn’t it? And I can’t. She’s with me every day.”
Elizabeth has tried to move on, for years and years. Sometimes, on good days, she feels like she has. But the memories come nightly now. In her sleep, she walks into a dark apartment and notices a light burning in the bedroom, the door left slightly ajar. Sometimes there is a dark puddle of blood on the old hardwood floor. Sometimes he’s there, his face turned away from her, but she knows who it is. She wakes up in a sweat, runs into Remi’s room, feels the covers for her warm little body, watches the sheets move up and down with her breath.