Читать книгу Kara Was Here - William Conescu - Страница 8

CHAPTER ONE

LATELY, BRAD MITCHELL’S WORLD SEEMED TO BE SPLITTING IN TWO. THE GREEN minivan on the highway in front of him sped along atop the ghost of itself. Brad could see a hazy outline hovering on either side of it. Only if he concentrated, really focused on the minivan, was he able to fuse its overlapping images together. The traffic signs were more difficult to control—signs announcing a gas station ahead, thirty-seven miles to Wilmington, exit 380 to Rose Hill. They emerged in the distance in adjacent pairs that began to overlap as they grew closer, until each sign passed through Brad’s peripheral vision with a halo surrounding it, like a memory of the sign superimposed on the present.

He hoped it was still safe for him to drive. It probably was, he said to himself for the tenth time that morning. Highway driving wasn’t difficult, plus it was light outside. Lord knows you drove in worse condition when we were together, he could hear Kara saying.

A dozen years ago, sure. But the questionable vision made more sense back then.

If it makes you feel any better, I think you drove better stoned than I did, she might have told him.

The words were like a shameful soundtrack to years he never discussed anymore.

“But today—” he started to say aloud. Then he stopped himself. Today he was just seeing the world the way it had started to appear. And today he was en route to Kara Tinsley’s funeral.

Brad had driven this stretch of I-40 on many spring mornings like this one. Since he and Val had gotten married five years ago, they’d been heading to the beach every year as soon as she’d turned in grades, and back when he was at UNC, he and Kara would often escape from Chapel Hill to the North Carolina coast—for spring break, or to do laundry at her mother’s house, or to avoid a midterm. As far as Brad could recall, this was his first time driving this route without anyone beside him singing or fussing with the radio or insisting on a stop at a convenience store. He’d probably stopped at half of the gas stations he was now passing, so he and Val could buy sodas and the most complicated scratch-off lottery tickets they could find, or so he and Kara could stock up on cigarettes and Boone’s Farm. Strawberry Hill: seven and a half percent alcohol. Wild Island: only five percent. Choose wisely, she would say.

He had. When she turned twenty-four and moved to New York to pursue celebrity on the stage, he stayed behind in their apartment in Chapel Hill. For a year, he got more acting work in North Carolina than she did in New York, though it wasn’t as if he rubbed her nose in it. Eventually, he ended up with a realtor’s license and a beautiful wife who appreciated his attempts at making brunch. Kara ended up dead on a couch in Brooklyn. The call came the night before last.

Maybe he should have anticipated getting a call like this one day: news of an overdose, a car crash, alcohol poisoning. But why brace yourself for all the things you hope will never happen? Was that supposed to make the news go down easier? It didn’t seem likely.

An eighteen-wheeler sped past, edging into Brad’s lane—it was not an optical illusion—and as Brad shifted his Civic from the center to the right lane, he allowed himself to wonder once again if he shouldn’t have driven. It could be unsafe. But then again, the doctor had said it was probably nothing. And besides, Brad had been driving all week. He’d driven the week before. He was fine. It was daytime, this wasn’t dangerous. It was nothing, he told himself. Just focus on the road.

A mileage sign announced that Brad was only twenty-two miles away from Greenwood Park, maybe twenty-four from her body. And it was only the white border of the sign that seemed to sit, transparent, beside its double.

Brad’s yoga instructor had once said that mindfulness was the best way to combat anxiety, but these days, when Brad followed her advice, when he stayed in the moment and paid attention to the world around him, more often than not he saw two worlds. His moments had extra stoplights and two refrigerator handles superimposed on one another. Distant trees split like amoebas when Brad tried to be mindful of any one of them. At the gym, the lines of the machines wavered in and out of double as he crossed the room. Thresholds were becoming wider than they used to be, and making eye contact at the dinner table required choosing one of his wife’s four eyes to hold in focus. Only when Brad was least mindful, when he retreated into his head and existed with little concern for what was in front of him, only then did the doppelgangers go away. Or he didn’t notice them. If there was a difference. If a tree falls in the forest . . . or two trees.

“Let me ask Dr. Ziferra to look,” the first ophthalmologist had said. This was on Tuesday. Brad had made himself go, though he still hadn’t said anything to Val.

“Hmm,” said the second ophthalmologist.

“You see?”

“Yes, I do.”

Brad stared at a popsicle stick as they moved a small paddle back and forth over one eye and then the other. The doctors studied him; they breathed into his face. Dr. Ziferra had recently eaten something with ketchup on it. “His eyes are moving,” the first ophthalmologist whispered. Then they paced across the room and had a hushed conversation, the second ophthalmologist saying “Yes,” and then “Yes” and “Yes.”

“When did you say this started?” Dr. Ziferra asked.

Brad wasn’t certain. A month ago, maybe two.

The doctors exchanged a look.

“We want to send you to a neuro-ophthalmologist,” Dr. Ziferra said at length. “And we’re scheduling you to have an MRI—just to be safe.”

“Okay,” Brad said. “After I see the other doctor?”

“Sooner, actually,” the first doctor replied. “What are you doing on Friday?”

Driving to a funeral, as it turned out. The MRI was postponed, and on this morning when Brad should have been sitting in the hospital waiting room, when he would have told his colleagues he had a dentist’s appointment and probably would have let his wife believe he had an early showing, Brad was instead en route to Greenwood Park, North Carolina, a town just outside of Wilmington.

A Volkswagen in front of Brad forced him to slow down to sixty-five, then sixty. The car was filled with young girls in swimsuits and sunglasses, and he could hear them singing even with his windows rolled up. He checked the rearview mirror, glanced over his shoulder, then passed them with a quick look to his right. It was hard to tell who was in high school and who was in college these days. One of the girls winked at him as he drove past.

It was with a guilty sense of relief that he had left Val behind. She was eleven weeks into a difficult pregnancy, and her fear of another miscarriage was making every stomach cramp that much more painful. So Brad discouraged Val from even trying to get a substitute for her class. She’d never even met Kara; he was fine going by himself, he told her. And in truth, he preferred having this chance to say good-bye alone. Oh, it’ll be fabulous, he could hear Kara saying. You can light candles and prop up my corpse. We’ll have a grand old time. In death, she was probably still chain-smoking.

Brad and Kara had been one of those college couples that seemed destined to stay together forever. When she moved to New York, there were resolutions to make it work, to visit each other every month or two, to talk daily or almost daily or soon. After there weren’t any more resolutions, there were still phone calls for a little while. Then a few quiet years of birthday text messages and holiday cards, until those two unsettling phone messages that Brad left unanswered. Then there was silence.

The silence made this drive a little worse. The silence and the twin exit signs announcing his arrival in Greenwood Park.

He’d made a reservation at the Greenwood Inn, because—well, he didn’t need to be on the road at night. Not that it was dangerous, but it was a two-and-a-half-hour drive. After a stressful day. He might be tired.

“Supposed to be a lot of sun this weekend,” said the girl working at the front desk. She wore her hair in a ponytail and had freckles and braces. “You’re going to the beach, right?” she asked as she pulled up his reservation.

Headed to my ex’s funeral, Kara would have said. Looking forward to it, too.

“Just a visit,” Brad told her, and in spite of himself, he flashed the girl one of his reassuring smiles. She smiled back, and Brad dropped his gaze to the counter.

It was ridiculous how often he smiled these days. Big, toothy, dimpled smiles that Kara never would have recognized. They popped out like this, involuntarily, all the time—out of habit, not elation. When he was showing a house or at a neighborhood barbecue, at dinners and lunches and meetings, everyone could count on Brad for a smile. Maybe even a wink. He’d become a winker. He never saw it coming. It just happened once, the half-selective we’re-in-this-together wink, and it seemed to appeal, so he found himself doing it again and again, and that was how he became a winker. Over the years, his lazy waves hello and good-bye were so frequently mistaken for two-fingered peace signs that he finally gave in and let them be construed as such. He’d become a regular flirt, though a benign one. Women seemed to enjoy it, men seemed to admire it, and he had no trouble signing clients.

Funny, because no one would have pegged Brad as a guy anyone would have particularly respected or admired. But aging out of his teens and early twenties, buying white oxford shirts and bright neckties, jogging and joining a fitness club, these things slowly transformed Brad until he started to look like the kind of man who played golf—and played it well. And then at some point—when was it?—he did learn to play golf. Not well, but he had the shoes. He could never have told Kara that he had the shoes. They’d had sex on a golf course once. Dropped acid and tooled around in one of the golf carts, peed in the holes. She referred to number sixteen as “the ladies’ room” all night.

“I’m visiting my dead girlfriend,” he said to the girl behind the desk.

The ponytailed girl held up a finger and kept typing with the other hand. Then she turned to look him in the eye. “Okay,” she said, “what was that?”

“I said,” Brad began—he cleared his throat—“I just said . . . um . . . thanks for the tip about the weather.”

“Oh, sure,” she said with a shrug. “Have fun.”

Margot Cominsky stood around the corner from the funeral parlor. She’d tried standing right outside the door, hoping for a breath of air that didn’t reek of carnations, but she was immediately taken for the welcoming committee, and strangers kept hugging her and cheek-kissing her and grabbing her hand. “We’re so sorry.” “So young.” “Too soon.” What was she supposed to do, thank them for their profound and original words? We’re all fucking sad, people. Look at where we are.

Inside the lobby, it had turned into a regular college reunion, but of course, no one recognized Margot. Not one person. Not the girl who lived next to her and Kara freshman year, not what’s-his-name who did the lighting for The Women, not even that mediocre soprano they’d only cast in Oliver! because Margot thought they needed some fresh blood. And who wasn’t tall and thin and blond? That little twig who’d understudied for Kara in Cabaret looked exactly like the girl she was fifteen years ago. Whereas Margot looked like she had eaten the girl she was fifteen years ago—and followed that up with a hearty dessert.

There was a time she felt certain she’d keep up with this crowd. They’d be her friends forever, she thought. But as soon as Margot moved back to New York, she lost touch with pretty much everyone. Except Kara.

Had Kara really kept up with all these people? Well, Kara could say hello to a person she hadn’t seen in five years and make the girl feel like a long lost friend. Even if Kara hated the girl—and she totally hated Francis, who was now passing in front of Margot attached to a short man who looked way too young for her. Kara would have had something to say about that. Francis looked good. Unfortunately.

Margot pulled out her phone. No little envelopes. No message lights blinking. She clicked through her photos to find the image of Mike, and in her head she kissed him. Then she typed: “At K’s funeral. Feel fat and angry. Wish you were here.”

Seconds later, from Japan, came his reply: “But looking BEAUTIFUL no doubt. What R U wearing?”

Margot looked down at her innocuous navy dress and replied, “Hot pink tutu. You?”

The phone vibrated again: “Loin cloth + cardbord Burger King crown. XXOO.”

Margot smiled. “You’d fit right in,” she typed.

The parade of black and grey and navy from the parking lot across the street was starting to pick up. Only a few minutes before the big show. Margot didn’t recognize most of these people. The older ones might have been friends of the family or people who went to their church; the younger ones probably went to high school with Kara. And junior high. And elementary school. Everyone in Greenwood Park knew everyone else. Or was related, Kara used to say. They probably reserved the third weekend of each month for a real good town funeral, something everyone could enjoy.

Margot hadn’t seen Kara in two months, which seemed kind of silly, considering they only lived an hour apart. But it was a long hour between Brooklyn and Long Island, and everyone was so busy these days. There was work, and—well, they talked more often, of course. Kara had heard all about Mike, all about the horrors of dating a man in the military. “When you meet him . . .” Margot had said so many times. It was hard to believe that would never happen now, that Kara would never meet Mike or their children. The children Margot hoped they’d have, eventually.

Margot had met Mike two years ago. She’d helped cater his brother’s wedding, and there Mike was, this big hunk of a guy, biceps thick as cantaloupes, face like an oversized cherub, sneaking into the kitchen for an extra helping of potatoes or to check on the groom’s cake. Margot fell for him instantly—women always did, apparently—and for whatever reason, he fell for her too. Then, five months after they met, he was stationed overseas. In Japan, thank God, and not Iraq or Afghanistan, but still. By now, she’d had more email exchanges with the man than live conversations. But they were in the home stretch—just seven more months and he’d be back. “And it does feel real,” she’d told Kara. “Sometimes it’s funny how life works out.”

Or doesn’t. “Kara girl, what did you go and do?” she mumbled.

Kara’s stepfather had called with the news. As soon as he’d identified himself, Margot knew why he must’ve been calling. It was just a question of how and where. An overdose. At least she’d died in her sleep.

Margot excuse-me’d her way back through the front doors and kept her eyes down as she crossed the lobby with its heavy drapes, burgundy carpet, and fake antique chairs. She passed through the wreaths and floral arrangements, passed clusters of mourners saying mournful things or laughing awkwardly. People were starting to take seats in the next room, and in there was the box. It was open. She’d heard people saying it was open.

When she crossed the threshold, the first thing Margot saw across the room was Kara’s hair. It fell in familiar dark brown waves below her shoulders. Margot took a few steps forward. Kara’s eyes were closed, and in a way she did look like she might be asleep, though her arms weren’t sprawled all over the place. They were folded tight to her body, her hands gripping a strangely inappropriate bouquet of spring flowers in what looked like a fucking doily. Margot dropped her eyes and tried to suppress a laugh. Kara wouldn’t have bothered trying. Daisies and baby’s breath. A little snort of amusement escaped.

“Cougar Cominsky?”

Margot turned. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she muttered.

“It is you,” he said.

Standing beside her was Brad Mitchell looking not a damned thing like Brad Mitchell. The face was the same, but everything else had turned all country club. The hair was parted to the side, a shiny black instead of blue or green or magenta. The face was clean shaven. He was wearing a black suit, and everything looked crisp and tailored and not stolen from the drama department’s costume shop. He didn’t look like he was carrying a joint anywhere on his person.

Brad drew her into a tight hug. He even smelled good. Eucalyptus and mint something. “I see you bathed for the occasion,” she said.

“I did.”

“Very thoughtful of you.”

“I’ve been trained.”

“Well . . . you look good,” she said.

“So do you.”

He stood there for a minute, smiling like the goon she remembered, as if he was all dressed up to play a romantic lead, complete with shoulder pads in his suit and mousse in his hair. He could’ve been a politician. For all she knew, he was one. It was crazy how easily you could lose track of people you used to see every day. Margot hadn’t heard anything about Brad in years, not since Kara said he was getting married. Margot checked his hand. Yes, wedding band in place.

“Wow,” he said at last. “I’m really glad to see you. I mean, I can imagine events I’d prefer.”

Margot scanned the room. “I can imagine funerals I’d prefer.”

Brad hadn’t given much consideration to who else might be attending the funeral. If pressed, he might have acknowledged that he’d imagined a roomful of sixty-something-year-old relatives and locals, none of whom really understood Kara. When he walked into the Greenwood Park Funeral Home, he was surprised to see so many dimly familiar faces painted to varying degrees with signs of age: the hair, the figure, the makeup a little different, more sophisticated or at least less unsophisticated. They were mostly people from the UNC theater crowd, surrounded by husbands and wives and others Brad didn’t know or recall.

For a moment, he thought he recognized the poor girl from Kara’s Philosophy of Ethics class to whom Kara had “confessed” that she and Brad were not only a couple but also half-siblings. So . . . is it, like, half-ethical? Kara had asked. After that, she and Brad somehow ran into the girl at least once a week, walking to class or at the cafeteria or in a coffee shop. Kara would stick her tongue in Brad’s ear or grab his ass for show. He wouldn’t have minded seeing that girl today. He’d have kept up the part, if he could.

Brad smiled a few greetings, then passed through the lobby to the back room where the casket was. He needed to see Kara before the room filled up. The casket was a lacquered white, which struck Brad as an odd choice, and as he approached, he saw that Kara was dressed in a white long-sleeve shirt with some sort of ruffles happening on the front and a dark skirt with black stockings. They’d put flowers in her hands too, as if she were an aging flower girl for the dead. She was the picture of someone who had once made a marvelous quilt, not someone who had gone for two years without owning a fork. (What can a fork do that a spoon can’t? Honestly?) Brad stopped within a few feet of the casket. This wasn’t the way he’d imagined her, even dead—her lips folded into a nothing sort of expression, a false complacency in her relaxed cheeks and brow. As he stood staring at her, Kara’s tiny nose divided in two. Or maybe he made his eyes do that, as a test.

He had only been seated for two minutes when he spotted Margot. She walked into the room by herself and was laughing through her nose, amused by some private joke. So typical. She looked all grown up, a little plump, but undeniably herself. They only had time to exchange a few words before the organ started to play, so Brad invited her to sit beside him, and he was glad to have a friend from the past close by.

A mass of people moved in from the lobby, and Brad checked his watch. It was just a minute before four o’clock. Kara had never done anything on time in her life, but apparently it wasn’t too late for a first. A minute later, the pastor entered the room. Then everyone stood for the family: a few older relatives, followed by Kara’s mother, Lucy Ann, who refused to stop looking like a woman in her forties. Her hair was dyed in the honey brown/blond family, and she kept it short now, in a bob. Beside her was stepdad Randy, who was greyer and stockier, followed by Kara’s ten-year-old half-brothers, the twins, born just as Kara was moving to New York. They were blond with bowl-cut hair, and wore matching navy suits. Then, after a gap, came Kara’s sister, Gwen, wearing small oval glasses, her hair tied behind her in a dark knot. And God, somehow it hadn’t occurred to Brad that the little girl who was seven or eight the last time he saw her would be so much older now. Or that she might resemble Kara.

Once everyone was seated, the pastor began with generic words of faith and sorrow, then went on to remark on the recklessness of youth, the unexpected paths people’s lives take, and “the dangers our children can welcome all too readily.” What followed was an invitation for anyone in the room—Kara’s family and friends, her neighbors and loved ones, anyone—to step forward and accept Christ and his teachings. Right then and there.

Brad turned to Margot, who shrugged. “Eh, I’m not in the mood,” she said.

Margot was the only other person Brad knew in college whose parents sent a box of Matzo every year for Passover. She never ate it, of course; neither did he. Junior year he gift-wrapped his and gave it to Margot. The next year she added a bow and gave it back. “It comes ‘pre-stale,’ so it’s just as good as the day it was made,” she said. Kara got a kick out of the fact that she knew two of the only Jews in North Carolina. Why does your Sabbath have to start on Friday night? It seems like such poor planning. We schedule ours for Sunday morning—that way we can sleep right through it.

No one chose this particular moment in the funeral service to embrace the teachings of Jesus Christ, so the pastor continued, inviting up the first speaker. It was a high school musical theater teacher and friend of the family. From Brad’s seat near the back, he had a tough time keeping the teacher’s head from doubling. He had to look straight ahead and really concentrate, and even then, if the teacher turned his head or shifted his body, he’d split.

The teacher said things that made Brad laugh and tear up a little, as did Kara’s stepfather. The pastor had said her stepfather was representing the family, so it seemed like he would be the final speaker, but then after he returned to his seat, the pastor announced that one more person had asked to say a few words. “Would Steve Donegan please come up to the lectern?”

The name was new to Brad, and he watched as Steve rose from the line of seats across the aisle and strolled up to the front of the room. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with rust-colored hair that was slicked back behind his ears and continued down his neck in what looked like a mullet. He wore a mustache and goatee, and his skin had a red, leathery tint to match. He was clearly older than Brad and Kara, somewhere in his late forties. His brown twill sport coat had what looked like a grease stain on the elbow. “Who’s that?” Brad whispered.

“Roommate,” Margot replied.

“Ah.” Brad nodded. Kara tended to go through roommates quickly, given her habit of eating other people’s food and letting months go by without paying or procuring rent. Before she lived with Brad, and later when she first moved to New York, her housing situations would emerge during crisis: She was being evicted, and another actor or waiter or singer or chain-smoker who was Kara’s dearest, sweetest friend of the moment gave her a place to crash. It was only a matter of time before she’d taken over the bathroom with scented shampoos and candles and handmade soaps. Shortly thereafter, another crisis arose, and someone new had to be charmed into letting her move in.

At the lectern, Steve paused to extract a wrinkled sheet of notebook paper from inside his jacket. Then he clicked on a microphone that the others hadn’t used, dropped his notes, mumbled, “Shit,” which was amplified, then, “Oh, shit, sorry.” Then he shook his head, took a breath, and began to speak.

“I didn’t know Kara for that long,” Steve announced in a New York accent that pressed against the walls of the room. “I can’t tell stories from when she was a teenager,” he continued, pausing for some sort of effect. “I’m not from the South. This is my first time to North Carolina. But we have one thing in common: Kara.”

Brad lowered his eyes to his hand, and with a little effort, saw only five fingers. He could discern their outlines clearly, follow the lines on each knuckle.

“Kara and I lived together almost a year,” Steve continued into the microphone. “I feel real lucky I got to know her. She could be funny, she could be bossy, she could be a real pain in the you know what. But she was a great person, as all you know, or you wouldn’t be here. And I know she didn’t have a chance to tell you all this, but she and I were going to get married.”

Brad’s right hand had ten fingers now. He looked up at Steve’s heads.

“I gave her a ring”—he paused and swallowed—“just a week ago. I can’t believe she was only able to show it to you like this.” Steve gestured toward the casket, and Brad turned to Margot. He hadn’t noticed a ring. Margot shook her head, her lips apart and eyes half-squinting.

“It happened real fast between us,” Steve continued. “I know she was looking forward to introducing me to Lucy Ann and Randy, who seem like great parents, and to all of you guys. I just wish we’d have been able to meet at, you know, a funner event.”

A “funner event”? Brad wished he could see Lucy Ann and Randy’s faces.

“I know this is a sad time for everybody, and I know a lot of you knew Kara a lot longer than me. But I want to thank you for being so welcoming to me. I know Kara would’ve appreciated it.”

The silence after Steve spoke was pungent with surprise. Nose-blowing and whispering were kept to a minimum. Brad watched Steve walk back to his seat. The man didn’t make eye contact with anyone. He fumbled with his notes, shoved them back into his jacket. He wasn’t wearing a tie, and orange chest hairs protruded from the top of his shirt. He didn’t look like an actor, or sound like one. He looked like someone who might’ve delivered pizza for too many years, or worked at an old video store renting out porn. He could’ve been Kara’s trashy uncle, an uncle she would have made fun of behind his back. Or in front of his face. How on earth had she ended up with him?

He was lying. He had to be lying. Margot didn’t know why, or what to do about it, but she knew it.

Didn’t she?

Kara couldn’t have been engaged—and to him—and not have said anything. And besides . . .

Margot took a quick mental survey of her conversations with Kara over the past year. Kara hadn’t talked much about this latest roommate. There was the physical description: Imagine a big red dinosaur transformed into a forty-seven-year-old loser—with a mullet. He’s your basic mullet-saurus. And then there were the passing references: Mullet’s got his panties in a wad . . . Not that it’s any of Mullet’s business . . . Mullet will get over it . . . I can handle Mullet . . .

No, “Mullet” did not sound like a pet name or a term of endearment. There was not love in Kara’s voice when she’d uttered the word. Contempt, frustration—that was what Margot had heard.

“Did you know him?” Brad whispered. Margot had felt his eyes on her when Mullet was speaking. She shook her head. She couldn’t bring herself to speak.

Row by row, people walked past the open casket and out the door. Jews didn’t do this sort of thing. Shove ’em in a pinewood box and send ’em on their way—that was the Jewish funeral. That was how Margot’s mother had gone. But not Kara. Now Margot was being given yet another opportunity to gaze on her dead friend. When it was her turn to pass the casket, Margot dropped her eyes from Kara’s face to the bouquet in her hands, and tucked beneath the flowers, Margot spotted it: a cheap-looking little diamond ring on Kara’s finger.

How can you say it was cheap-looking if you barely saw it? Margot asked herself as she walked to the door. But that was how it struck her; she didn’t feel like arguing with herself. Cheap, fake, impossible.

“How did that happen?” Brad asked once they were standing outside.

“I don’t know,” Margot said. How many times had Kara turned down Brad?

As they waited outside, groups of familiar faces passed. Some were whispering—about Kara, about the fiancé. “Oh look, there’s Brad,” someone whispered. A couple of people from college nodded past Margot to him. No one offered her any sign of recognition. Finally, the casket was carried outside by Kara’s stepfather, Mullet, and a few men Margot didn’t recognize. Then everyone headed to their cars.

“Do you need a ride?” Brad asked.

“No, thanks,” she told him.

The procession to the cemetery took twenty minutes, though it was only a few miles away. There were a lot of cars to be moved, a lot of people inching along. Margot was glad to be alone in her own rental car as she sat wedged between cars of strangers who also believed they knew Kara.

Kara had been the last of her single friends, the last one without children. Margot’s childhood friends from Long Island now had one, two, and three kids; their photos decorated her refrigerator doors. When she got together with them, they talked about the price of day care and finding good schools, and soccer practice and dance classes, and husbands who worked too hard or traveled too much or didn’t help around the house. When Margot and Kara got together, they talked about theater and auditions and Margot’s business and Kara’s latest adventures. They laughed about the old days, about their lives, about nothing. There was a time they talked about Brad a lot, then intermittently, then not at all. More recently, they’d talked about Mike.

Had Margot misunderstood anything Kara said about Mullet? He really hadn’t come up much in conversation.

At the cemetery, Margot pulled into the gravel parking lot and walked up the hill toward the awning. Brad had arrived already, and Margot took a spot beside him a few feet behind the awning. From where they stood, Margot could see the parking lot and could watch the line of skinny women wearing black stockings in the eighty-something-degree heat as they marched up the hill. The ground was soft from recent rain. Margot was glad she hadn’t worn heels, and a little bit glad some of the other women had.

Having seen the casket open, Margot felt odd seeing it closed now and knowing that Kara was inside and that no one would open the box or look at Kara’s face again. The part of Margot that always liked to double-check—car doors, grocery lists, unplugged irons, credit scores—had an impulse to look inside. She imagined herself slowly opening the lid a crack, the way she’d open the oven, careful not to upset a soufflé. She’d look close at Kara’s waxed face, whisper her name, poke her with a toothpick perhaps—to be sure she was dead. Margot tried to recreate the image of Kara she’d seen at the funeral home. It really was a crumby-looking ring.

The ceremony was mercifully brief, and as soon as it ended, Kara’s little sister, Gwen, pulled away from the family and lit a cigarette, just as Kara would have done. Mullet pushed out from under the awning and did the same, muttering “Oh, man” in what sounded like a stage whisper.

WHEN she arrived at Kara’s mother’s house, Margot wandered to the dining room, where the table was covered with moist finger sandwiches, competing bowls of potato salad, and a surprising number of cans of dry-roasted peanuts. Perhaps there’d been a sale. She tried to resist the instinct to criticize, to put on her caterer’s hat and judge the menu and presentation. The carafe of chardonnay on the sideboard made her smile. You could fill a carafe with piss, and my stepdad would call it fancy, Kara once said. My family really knows how to put the k in klassy. Margot poured herself a glass and braced herself for the sharp taste and strained conversation.

She gave her condolences to Kara’s mother, Lucy Ann, who seemed glad to see Margot but said very little, and to Kara’s stepfather, Randy, whose thickly Southern “So-good-of-you-to-come” poured out in one word. Margot said a few words to Kara’s half-brothers, who hovered in a corner, somberly passing a hand-held video game back and forth, and she reintroduced herself to Gwen, who was moving about the house in a mask of officiousness. Margot even sucked it up and said hello to a few of the girls from the drama department. One of them said, “Oh my God, I didn’t see you before”—which was a lie. Another said, “It’s wild how different everyone looks”—but “everyone” meant Margot and “different” meant fat.

If she hadn’t quit smoking last year, this would have been a good time for about thirty consecutive cigarettes, so Margot topped off her wine and went out to the carport where she and Kara used to smoke in their college days. It still smelled like ashtrays, which was a comfort, though now it had more bicycles and toys than before. The ice chest where she and Kara used to sit had been replaced by a box of sporting equipment. Margot was marveling at all the basketballs and soccer balls and baseball paraphernalia when the side door opened and Mullet walked out.

The revulsion felt like a bubble inflating inside her stomach.

“Am I interrupting?” he asked.

“No,” she said, reluctantly.

He lit his cigarette, cupping the flame in his thick hand. Margot thought about going inside.

“You want a smoke?” he asked.

“I quit,” she told him.

He nodded.

They exchanged silences.

“Pretty crazy shit,” he said after a minute. “I’m the fiancé, Steve Donegan.”

He said the words with an ownership that made Margot uncomfortable, and she wished he’d trip over a stray baseball, but she took his extended hand. “Margot Cominsky,” she said. “I’m a friend of Kara’s from college.”

“Cool,” he said. “Yeah, I remember her talking about you.” He sucked on his cigarette and blew the smoke out the side of his mouth. Margot could smell it. She could almost taste it.

“You from around here?” he asked.

“New York.”

“Oh yeah, me too.”

“I know,” she said.

They both nodded.

Margot dropped her eyes to a row of muddy sneakers beside the door. Mullet flicked an ash into the driveway.

Then Margot said, “I didn’t realize you were a couple.”

“Oh yeah, I know. Kara was nervous about telling people ’cause of, you know, the age difference. But I’m sure she’d have introduced us soon.”

“I would hope so. If she was engaged.”

“Absolutely, no doubt. It just sort of happened, you know. One minute we’re talking about maybe looking for a bigger place together, the next we’re saying the M-word.”

Margot’s throat felt dry. She took a sip of wine from her plastic cup.

“How did you two meet?” she asked after a minute.

“At a bar,” he said. “Lemon Drop—you know it? Near Prospect Park? Anyway, it’s a neighborhood place we both used to hang out at. We would see each other, talk. One day she needed a place to live. We started out as roommates. One thing leads to another . . .”

Mullet is acting like a giant hemorrhoid, Kara had once growled over the phone.

The story, as Margot had heard it from Randy, was that Kara fell asleep on Saturday night and didn’t wake up. She’d taken some kind of drug the night before, and Mullet didn’t realize she’d gone too far until the next morning when he tried to wake her up.

“So, you found her . . . unconscious?” Margot asked.

“Yeah, it was pretty crazy.” Mullet dropped his eyes, then pushed his hair behind his ear, looked up, and continued. “Saturday night she fell asleep watching TV on the couch, so I went ahead and left her there, thinking no big deal. Then Sunday morning, we’re supposed to go to Pancake King for brunch, so I make coffee and I’m talking to her and stuff, trying to wake her up before I realize.”

Margot tried to picture Mullet saying “Good morning” to Kara’s dead body. Then she tried not to picture it.

Mullet held out his pack of Marlboros. “You sure you don’t want one? I wouldn’t tell.”

She shook her head. “I can’t.”

He finished the cigarette and dropped the butt into a soda can that seemed to be in the corner for that purpose. Then he lit another and put the lighter and box of cigarettes beside the can. “I’m leaving them here in case you change your mind. Kara’s sister keeps bumming smokes from me, so I said I’d leave them out.”

“Thank you,” Margot said.

“I couldn’t quit at a time like this.”

“I—” She was about to explain that she’d quit a year and a half ago, when Mike left for Japan. He said smoking was more dangerous than running communications for the Army. She was about to say this but stopped herself. It was none of Mullet’s business.

“Man, this is not my scene,” Mullet said, shaking his head slowly.

“It’s no one’s scene,” Margot snapped, before she could control her tone of voice. “It’s a funeral.”

“Yeah, I know. I meant here,” Mullet said. “Like, the town, the little bicycles and shit . . .”

Margot couldn’t listen anymore. She felt like she was suffocating, breathing his smoke, his air, his sweat. Through the window she saw Brad passing in the kitchen. She would talk to him. Or she’d remind another college friend who she was. “Excuse me,” she said. “I see someone I should say hello to.”

Brad slipped around a corner in the kitchen and down a hall to the back of the house. His head was pounding and he rubbed his fingers against his temples. Maybe he was feeling the tumor grow, pushing against the folds of his brain. Could a developing tumor kick, like a fetus? If he put a finger in just the right place at the right time, would he feel it?

Brad found Kara’s room empty and surprisingly familiar, and he closed the door behind him and took a deep breath. The walls were all white except for one. That’s my graffiti wall, she’d explained the first time she brought Brad home. In her early teens, she’d spray-painted her name on it in giant pink letters, and over time, she’d added doodles, quotes, names, phone numbers, bumper stickers. Standing in the room now, he still had no trouble finding Kara-hearts-Brad. He also had no trouble finding Kara-hearts-Mark, his predecessor from her high school days. Nothing got erased from the graffiti wall. And the wall had remained intact for all these years.

Looking around the room, Brad saw past all the things that weren’t Kara’s—the treadmill and television set near the entrance, the sewing machine by the window and stack of little boy pants piled next to it. The bedspread wasn’t Kara’s. This one was brown with white flowers; Kara’s had been leopard print. But the bed was exactly where it had been before, in the center of the room, up against the graffiti wall. Across from it, beside the desk, hung Kara’s poster from the movie Grease 2. Still. She was probably the only person on earth who’d ever hung this poster in her bedroom, and throughout her life, when asked, she continued to insist with a deadpan face that it was one of the finest films in American history.

A bookshelf that Kara had covered in neon-colored paisley wallpaper stood in the far corner of the room, with college textbooks sitting beside Roald Dahl novels and Uta Hagen’s Respect for Acting. Kara’s flute, long abandoned, sat dusty on the bottom shelf. Behind the treadmill sat Lucy Ann’s old dollhouse, which she’d given to Kara, and Kara had given to Gwen, and Gwen must have outgrown years ago.

Kara’s desk had always served as a vanity and was still cluttered with jewelry and bottles of nail polish and lipstick tubes and mascara. Brad looked up from the desk to the mirror hanging above it, and he could picture her looking out at him. The face he saw belonged to the thirty-four-year-old he’d seen in the coffin, but her dark hair was alive again and fell in tangled waves, and her eyes, almost black, had that mischievous glimmer he’d once adored. Her lips were painted a deep burgundy, instead of the softer pink they’d used at the funeral home, and she was showing more cleavage than they’d let her show that morning. She didn’t look too different from the Kara he remembered.

“Hi,” he said to her.

He could practically hear her voice. Hey there. How was my funeral?

“It sucked,” he said.

The preacher, I know. Not the smoothest operator, but there was entertainment value.

She was wearing some sort of patchwork plaid top he’d never seen before.

Don’t be critical, she said. I love this. I found it at a thrift shop.

“You’re dead.”

Yeah, but I can still spot a cool shirt when I see one. What’s up with the suit? Are you an investment banker now?

“Realtor,” he said.

Difference?

Brad didn’t have an answer.

Ibuprofen’s in the nightstand, she told him.

She’d always kept a bottle there, and he went to the drawer, pulled out the 300-tablet container, and took two. When he turned back around, she was waiting for him in the mirror.

“So,” he said, “Steve, huh?”

You’re not going to be jealous, are you? she asked, and she lit a cigarette. When she exhaled, he pictured the smoke penetrating the glass and rising to the ceiling.

“That was kind of a surprise,” he said.

The engagement? she asked. Or me dropping dead? Or the whole maybe/maybe not a brain tumor thing—if you don’t mind my bringing it up.

Another puff. He watched the smoke seep out from between her lips.

Do you remember my secrets? she asked. He followed her gaze to the dollhouse. A moment later, she stepped out of the mirror and into the room.

The move startled Brad. He hadn’t felt himself imagining it. And yet there she was—almost—walking past him across the room. Below her shirt, she wore blue jeans and flip-flops. Dress flip-flops, she said. Each had a large plastic daisy clipped to the front.

When she reached the dollhouse, Kara ashed in a tiny sink and opened the miniature toilet. I think you could use these, she said. Brad looked inside, knowing what he would find. Before she gave the dollhouse to Gwen, Kara had always kept a few Xanax there. For domestic emergencies, she used to say. You’re having one now, she told him.

“So are you,” he said.

No, I’m dead. It’s all very simple now. Last Saturday was a different story.

“How could you let yourself . . .” he began, but he let the words trail off. She was ignoring them anyway.

She rested a finger on the flusher of the dollhouse toilet. I’m going to offer them up to someone else if you don’t take them, so you might as well.

“I don’t do that anymore.”

At least take two for your little trip through the MRI tube. Your doctor would give them to you, if you asked. That’s why God invented Xanax.

Kara drifted back across the room and into the mirror, and Brad felt his eyes start to water, his vision grow blurry.

It’s okay, Brad. Did you ever imagine I’d turn forty one day? Or sixty?

“What about me?”

She ran her eyes up and down him. I think growing old will suit you—if you can manage it.

For a solid minute, Brad stared into the mirror where the image of Kara was and then wasn’t. He could remember standing in front of this mirror with her, both of them grinning and naked. Now he felt like an imposter. Being in this room. Being older than twenty-two. Wearing a tie and shoes that he’d polished. Owning shoe polish in the first place. He turned back to the dollhouse and with his finger slid two Xanax out of the toilet bowl. It felt like there were probably four more inside. He dropped the two pills into his shirt pocket.

“Did you just take—?”

Brad turned to face the door, and for a second he thought he was seeing Kara again. But no, it was Gwen. And once again he was conscious of his vision, of a transparent outline around the girl that might have been her sister hiding behind her.

He didn’t have a chance to respond before Gwen was walking past him and reaching into the dollhouse. But she wasn’t going for the bathroom. She was fishing through the master bedroom. A moment later, she was holding a miniature dresser, which he now saw was just a hollow box with false drawers. Crammed inside the back was a ziplock bag of marijuana. “Sorry,” she said, and she turned to face him.

Brad shook his head to say no, and don’t worry.

Up close, Gwen looked like a deflated version of her sister: more angular cheekbones, a smaller chest, tiny limbs, straighter hair. Her lips were thin lines, lightly colored. She was wearing a black silk dress with ornate stitching on the front and oval glasses that emphasized the darkness of her eyes.

“I remember you,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Do you remember me?”

“Yes,” Brad told her. “You look older now.”

“So do you.”

He felt her studying him, and he took a deep breath. “Sorry about Kara,” he said at length.

“Yeah, I know,” she mumbled.

“I hope it’s okay that I came in here.”

“Sure, I don’t care.”

Gwen returned the dresser to the dollhouse, and as she did, Brad noticed dangling from her wrist a bracelet that he’d bought for Kara a dozen years ago or more. It was made up of square tiles of onyx set in silver and held together with a black leather cord. They’d gotten it on a road trip through the mountains. He wondered if Gwen had started wearing the bracelet in the last few days, or if it had been passed on to her long ago. And if so, how long ago. And why.

“Are you still an actor?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “Realtor.”

She nodded.

“Are you in college now?”

“In the fall,” she said. “I’m going to a pre-college thing this summer.” She pushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “It’s an art program in New York. Being there was supposed to be a whole sister-bonding thing. Mom wants me to cancel now, but I mean, what else am I going to do?”

Brad felt like her question wasn’t entirely rhetorical, like he should say something consoling or constructive. His instinct was to agree with her mother. New York was a hard place for anyone to navigate, let alone an eighteen-year-old who’d just lost her sister. But that probably wasn’t the advice she wanted.

“I should go help out,” she said.

His window of time had passed.

“Okay,” Brad said. “But if you need anything . . .” He fished into his pocket and pulled a business card from his wallet.

“Like a house?”

“No. Like, to talk.”

She examined his card. “You’re still in Chapel Hill,” she said, her voice lightening. “I’m going to UNC.”

“Oh, then you should definitely give me a call. When you’re there for orientation. I can buy you a decent meal.”

“Maybe so.”

“I’m serious. Please let me.”

“Well,” she said, “I should go help. People keep bringing over macaroni, and I’m in charge of putting it somewhere.”

Margot was done. She’d said her good-byes to the family, eaten her share of funeral food, and chatted with a half-dozen people she’d probably never see again. Now she was standing in the kitchen, wondering if Brad might have left without saying good-bye, when she saw both him and Gwen slip out of Kara’s bedroom down the hall. At a glance, Gwen looked a lot like Kara, and Margot was reminded of a moment long ago when she’d been standing in this kitchen, talking to Kara’s mother about God-knows-what for God-knows-how-long, and saw Kara and Brad walk out of the bedroom behind Lucy Ann’s back. This was early in Kara and Brad’s relationship. Margot had thought he was the third wheel on the trip, but his face was flush and Kara was grinning. Without knowing it, Margot had become their accomplice, their decoy. She’d been furious. She pouted the whole weekend, though no one seemed to notice.

Gwen passed through the kitchen and said good-bye to Margot again as she picked up a bowl of soupy chicken salad to bring into the living room. Brad lingered in the kitchen. “You going?” he asked.

“I am, yeah. I have a flight out of Wilmington in a couple of hours. Do you still live down here?”

“Yeah, in Chapel Hill.”

“I need to make a visit back one of these days. I’m in Long Island.”

“I still have a couple of cousins up in New York. We try to make it up every once in a while.”

Brad walked with her outside and down to her car, and they exchanged phone numbers, both typing the digits into their cell phones as if they meant to call. (“That was an eight?” “Yes, exactly.”) And Brad, she found herself thinking, was one of a handful of people she’d seen today whose wedding she wasn’t invited to but whose funeral she might have attended if he’d died and she’d been told.

And who would have told her if he’d died? Kara, of course.

“This was a little surreal,” he said.

“Tell me about it.”

“And Steve . . .”

“I know.”

“It’s hard to believe,” he said.

“Very hard,” she agreed. “I almost feel like he’s lying.” Margot inserted a fake laugh to lighten the tone.

“To inherit the tens of dollars she had to her name?” Brad said. He wasn’t taking her seriously.

“Kara was something,” he added. “You never quite knew what to expect.”

Over his shoulder, Margot saw Mullet walk out of the house and light a cigarette under the carport. He caught her eye and took a few steps down the driveway. “You going?” he called out. “Good to meet you. Maybe we can get together back home sometime.”

Margot forced a smile and waved back. “Mm-hmm,” she called back.

“You never met him before?” Brad asked quietly.

“Never,” she said, still smiling over his shoulder. “I thought she couldn’t stand him.” Margot looked at Brad now, then turned away and tossed her purse in the car. “I don’t know,” she said, in answer to the question in his eyes. “She should have married you when she had the chance.”

Brad dropped his gaze to the ground. Now it was his turn to fake a laugh.