The Opposite of Loneliness Essays and Stories(6)

*

His parents arrived the morning after the accident, and his roommates e-mailed a few people they thought might want to stop by. I wanted to go, and felt like I had to go, so I put on a pair of black jeans and a black sweater and asked Charlotte if I could borrow her black boots.

“They don’t fit you,” she said. “And besides, you don’t need to have black shoes.”

I wasn’t sure. And felt guilty for pondering my red ballet flats as I walked the seven-minute walk to his house. I figured I wasn’t supposed to be capable of that kind of thinking, and I felt like an alien. I feel that a lot, actually, in a lot of circumstances. Like I ought to be feeling something I don’t. My father used to tease me at the table by implying “cold Claire” had brought in the draft. I had three older sisters, all beautiful, and I was always less affected than they were, slower to smile. I remember finding it extremely hard to open presents as a child because the requisite theatricality was too exhausting. My sisters forever humiliated me over a moment in fifth grade when I’d opened a present from my grandmother and declared, straight-faced, “I already have this.”

It was cold for March, so I walked quickly. Brown snow still hugged the sides of our streets and the pines leaned in like gray walls, still limp with yellow Christmas lights. Whenever I slept at Brian’s, I called him as soon as I passed this certain stop sign—timing his arrival at the door so I wouldn’t have to wait. “I’m here,” I’d say, a block away, and he’d meander downstairs to let me in. This time, I knocked.

William let me in. Roommate and rich boy from Los Angeles. We were never friends, really, just occasional cohabiters, but we awkwardly hugged and he asked me how I was.

“Fine,” I said instinctively. But he understood that I wasn’t.

We walked upstairs and I felt immediately like I shouldn’t have been there. It was smaller than I’d imagined: Brian’s parents, two adults I didn’t recognize, and five or six of his closest friends. They huddled together in the corner next to a plate of bagels and an untouched platter of fruit. His mother was actually sobbing into the side of one of the women and I felt suddenly and extremely claustrophobic. The whole world was stark and bleak and I realized I couldn’t think of a single thing I was looking forward to. Brian had begun to be that for me—the thing at the end of the day I could think about when everything else was boring. I looked through the open door to his room and saw that his bed was still unmade.

“This is Claire,” William said. Tactful enough to stop before attempting to label my relationship. I held up a palm to the room and I wondered if anyone else had needed to be introduced.

“Claire,” his father said. “It’s good to see you.” He sounded genuine.

We’d gotten along at that brunch, though the whole thing was kind of an accident. Brian and I had slept late and when his parents arrived at his house at eleven o’clock, I was still in his bed, naked. I got dressed quickly—embarrassed to put on my heels from the night before—and was invited by default to eat eggs at Mirabelles. We laughed about it later.

“Good thing you weren’t some one-night stand.” He bit at my ear.

“Good thing,” I said, and punched him.

*

Brian’s dad gestured toward the untouched food but I said I was fine and moved over to the circle of his friends. I could tell at least one of them, Susannah, didn’t want me there. You don’t know him, I’m sure she was thinking. We don’t know you.

Apparently, they’d all been together at the hospital on Tuesday night and they were sharing stories in hushed voices about how and when they found out and waited, how and when the congenital aneurysm took place. I wanted to ask exactly how it all worked, how it all happened, but I couldn’t really engage. I kept looking into Brian’s room at the lump of a comforter piled on his sheetless bed, at the light spilling in from his window, speckling its folds, and decided it was the saddest thing I’d ever seen.

*

When Lauren Cleaver walked down from upstairs, everyone turned. Her face was swollen and red and she was breathing in staccato bursts. She must have gone upstairs to collect herself. To calm down, stop crying. There was an older boy with her whom I recognized from pictures as Brian’s brother. He was holding her by the shoulders and saying something into her ear. My mind raced, imagining the dinners she must have had at his family’s table. The trips she might have taken with them, the grandparents she must have met. She’d have watched movies at his real house clad in sweatpants and sweaters. Spent time with his brother, his mother, met his dog, his uncles, his high school friends.

Lauren looked thin and beautiful as she walked down the stairs and I realized that of course I wasn’t the girlfriend. I can’t explain how or why, but it filled me with a profound, seething anger . . . followed, inevitably, by waves of a familiar self-disgust. Brian was mine, I wanted to cry. My nose he’d kissed on Friday, my shirt he’d slipped his hand inside. The last time he’d kissed Lauren was in June and I knew they no longer talked. I imagined for a moment what he would have been like if Lauren died—if he would have romanticized their relationship and lamented the loss of their potential reunion. But it didn’t really seem like she was engaged in rationalization, just that she loved him a lot. Or had.

I knew, of course, that their breakup had been mutual and long coming. Brian and Lauren were beyond associated, and their collapse was slow and necessary. I also knew that only days before, I’d engaged in late-night deliberations with Charlotte over whether or not to break things off—that only days before I didn’t think of Brian the way I thought of him now—but neither of those things seemed to matter. Lauren was harrowed, drastically, and my cheeks were smooth and dry. I felt inadequate, cold; my relationship with Brian abruptly grounded.