These were the types of things she’d boxed up before she left for the Peace Corps, sealing it all up with silver duct tape. She’d asked me to keep this single box for her, as if these were the only things worth remembering.
Eight years, and I never heard from her. That box had moved with me for three apartments, out of some misguided sense of duty to her. Or some hope that she would come back for it.
* * *
I HAD LONG BELIEVED that life was not linear but cyclical.
It was the way news stories worked, and history—that you ended where you began, confused and gasping for breath.
And so I was not completely surprised when, eight years later, in a bar off a side street in the Back Bay, I saw Emmy again when my life was set to veer completely off track, as it had only once before.
She did not look as she had always looked: Her hair was dyed even darker, and her body had thinned and hardened, and her shoulders were hunched a little forward, maybe against the chill at night, but maybe not. And yet there was something quintessentially Emmy that had me calling after her, completely sure. I can only explain it this way: that I knew her deeply, if not thoroughly; that a four-month relationship can supersede all the boyfriends, all the friendships, that came after and lasted longer; that our friendship was born from the one time I’d stepped off track, done something unexpected that did not follow the predicted steps of my life. And for that reason, it shone brighter, and so did she.
She didn’t turn around at first as she brushed by me on the way past the bar, until I called again—“Emmy”—realizing I couldn’t remember her last name—had I ever really known it?
She spun around, and in the yellow glow of the overhead lights, I saw that the pockets under her eyes were discolored. And her eyes had that look I knew too well—that she wanted to escape. She was casting glances over her shoulder as she called back, “Leah?”
I stepped closer, and her face broke into laughter. She hooked her arms around my neck, and I circled mine around her back, feeling all the differences between then and now.
In the mass of people, she pressed her mouth close to my ear, and I could hear the laughter in her voice. “Oh my God, it’s you.”
When we pulled back, she looked over her shoulder again, and I asked, “Are you okay?”
She nodded in that familiar, easy way of hers, as if to say, Of course, I’m always okay, but she smiled tightly and said, “I need to leave.”
I picked up my purse and said, “Where to?”
“Anywhere but here,” she said, and it seemed so logical that I would take her back to my apartment—now in a nicer area, with a view—and we would sit on the floor and drink vodka.
“When did you get back?” I asked.
“Few years ago. I re-upped for another round after the first. I was living in D.C. after I got back, until a couple of months ago.” She was eating a loaf of my bread straight from the bag, and she noticed me watching. “I’m hungry all the time. But it’s like I can taste everything that went into this. Every container it’s been in, every hand that’s touched it, every machine and chemical.”
I frowned, tried to imagine stepping into a city after years of open air, open land. “Do you want to go back?”
“No, I don’t want to go back. I missed the death of my mother, and for what? I’m still trying to figure that out.”
I had thought she had been an idealist. We both were, in different ways. Me: the pursuit of truth, the naive belief that finding and reporting it could and would evoke real change. But hers ran deeper than her intentions. I supposed that was another reason I respected her. While the rest of us took internships to pad our résumés, and Paige went backpacking on her family’s dime, and Aaron did Habitat in the summers, Emmy dove full in. As she had done everything.
“My fiancé just found out I’m leaving,” she told me. I saw her eyes again. Pictured her pushing her way through the mass of people at the bar, looking over her shoulder. I poured her more vodka as she continued. “We moved up here a few months ago. A few months in a new place, and suddenly, you realize it’s never going to work.” She grimaced faintly, in a way that would be invisible to someone who didn’t know her the way I did. “Two years together, and I just now discovered the type of man he is.”
“Oh yeah? And what type is that?”
“The type who thought I would eventually become more like him. He was upset to discover I was exactly the same person I always was.”
“How upset are we talking?” I asked. The liquor was burning my throat at this point, my voice scratchy with what sounded like emotion.
She paused for a beat. “Upset enough that I’ll wait until he’s at work to go back for my things. If he hasn’t trashed them by then.”
She didn’t need to say anything more. This was the understanding we’d always had.
“Where are you going to go?” I asked.
She lifted her fingers as if to flick the imaginary dust from the air. Something more whimsical than a shrug. “Somewhere else. Away from all the people, all the noise. From people like him.” She drained her glass, held it out to me again, her wrist so thin, the veins visible. “Kind of ironic,” she said, “it seems like people who aren’t grounded give all this weight to stability and planning, and the people who work the steady, traditional nine-to-fives envy the wanderers. Guess it was inevitable we’d be drawn to each other. Him, in finance; me, bouncing around in nonprofit work. But then he gets a transfer and I up and move with him, no job or anything, and everything changes. I guess he thought I’d settle or something. Find a steady job. But I don’t have that type of background or résumé. I’m not that type of person. He’s not who I thought, either, I guess. So here I go again.”
The vodka sat empty between us, and I pulled out a bottle of wine from the fridge.
She kept talking, the alcohol coursing through her head, her tongue. “I think he was surprised I’d really up and leave him.”
I stared at her bare fingers. She curled them in, on her lap. “Sorry,” she said, raising her eyes to mine, smiling. “I don’t see you for eight years, and all I have is this sob story to vent. I’m fine. It’s fine. Let’s talk about something else.”
But I didn’t want to talk about anything else. I was solidly drunk, infatuated with the person in front of me, with how she was so different from me and yet so familiar. “Emmy, what’s your last name?” I asked, and she laughed.
“You really don’t know?”
I shook my head. “I really don’t.”
“It’s Grey,” she said, still smiling, her eyes twinkling from the buzz.
“Emmy Grey,” I said, rolling her name around in my mouth. Yes, it suited her. “Emmy Grey, I need to leave the city,” I said, which felt like more of a confession than it was.