“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, I won’t really have a choice, will I?”
“I guess not, no.” Pressed lips. “Lean back, please.”
I lay down, shivering in my hospital gown, and the crinkly paper shivered along with me. I closed my eyes. It was only a half hour. A half hour to give to someone who had once been my best friend.
“Count backward from ten,” she said.
Like counting steps in a waltz. I did it in German. I didn’t know why.
* * *
It wasn’t like sleeping—that sinking, heavy feeling. It was like the world disappearing in pieces around me—first sight, then sound, then the touch of the paper and the plush hospital table. I tasted something bitter, like alcohol, and then the world came back again, but not in the right way.
Instead of the exam room, I was standing in a crowd, warm bodies all around me, the pulsing of breaths, eyes guided up to a stage, everyone waiting as the roadies set up for the band. I turned to Matt and grinned, bouncing on my toes to show him how excited I was.
But that was just the memory. I felt that it was wrong before I understood why, sinking back to my heels. My stomach squeezed as I remembered that this was the last visitation, that I had chosen this memory because it was the first time I felt like we were really friends. That the real, present-day Matthew was actually standing in those beat-up sneakers, black hair hanging over his forehead.
His eyes met mine, bewildered and wide. All around us, the crowd was unchanged, and the roadies still screwed the drum set into place and twisted the knobs on the amplifiers.
“Matt,” I said, creaky like an old door. “Are you there?”
“Claire,” he said.
“Matt, this is a visitation,” I said. I couldn’t bear to say the word last to him. He would know what I meant without it. “We’re in our shared memories. Do you … understand?”
He looked around, at the girl to his left with the cigarette dangling from her lips, lipstick marking it in places, and the skinny boy in front of him with the too-tight plaid shirt and the patchy facial hair.
“The accident,” he said, all dreamy voice and unfocused eyes. “The paramedic kind of reminded me of you.”
He reached past the boy to skim the front of the stage with his fingertips, drawing away dust. And he smiled. I didn’t usually think this way, but Matt had looked so good that day, his brown skin even darker from a summer in the sun and his smile, by contrast, so bright.
“Are you … okay?” I said. For someone who had just found out that he was about to die, he seemed pretty calm.
“I guess,” he said. “I’m sure it has more to do with the drug cocktail they have me on than some kind of ‘inner peace, surrendering to fate’ thing.”
He had a point. Dr. Albertson had to have perfected the unique combination of substances that made a dying person calm, capable of appreciating their Last Visitation, instead of panicking the whole time. But then again, Matt had never reacted to things quite the way I expected him to, so it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that, in the face of death, he was as calm as still water.
He glanced at me. “This is our first Chase Wolcott concert. Right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know that because the girl next to you is going to give you a cigarette burn at some point.”
“Ah, yes, she was a gem. Lapis lazuli. Maybe ruby.”
“You don’t have to pick the gem.”
“That’s what you always say.”
My smile fell away. Some habits of friendship were like muscle memory, rising up even when everything else had changed. I knew our jokes, our rhythms, the choreography of our friendship. But that didn’t take away what we were now. Any normal person would have been stumbling through their second apology by now, desperate to make things right before our time was over. Any normal person would have been crying, too, at the last sight of him.
Be normal, I told myself, willing the tears to come. Just now, just for him.
“Why am I here, Matt?” I said.
Dry eyed.
“You didn’t want to see me?” he said.
“It’s not that.” It wasn’t a lie. I both did and didn’t want to see him—wanted to, because this was one of the last times I would get to, and didn’t want to, because … well, because of what I had done to him. Because it hurt too much and I’d never been any good at feeling pain.
“I’m not so sure.” He tilted his head. “I want to tell you a story, that’s all. And you’ll bear with me, because you know this is all the time I get.”
“Matt…” But there was no point in arguing with him. He was right—this was probably all the time he would get.
“Come on. This isn’t where the story starts.” He reached for my hand, and the scene changed.
* * *
I knew Matt’s car by the smelclass="underline" old crackers and a stale “new car scent” air freshener, which was dangling from the rearview mirror. My feet crunched receipts and spilled potato chips in the foot well. Unlike new cars, powered by electricity, this one was an old hybrid, so it made a sound somewhere between a whistle and a hum.
The dashboard lit his face blue from beneath, making the whites of his eyes glow. He had driven the others home—all the people from the party who lived in this general area—and saved me for last, because I was closest. He and I had never really spoken before that night, when we had stumbled across each other in a game of strip poker. I had lost a sweater and two socks. He had been on the verge of losing his boxers when he declared that he was about to miss his curfew. How convenient.
Even inside the memory, I blushed, thinking of his bare skin at the poker table. He’d had the kind of body someone got right after a growth spurt, long and lanky and a little hunched, like he was uncomfortable with how tall he’d gotten.
I picked up one of the receipts from the foot well and pressed it flat against my knee.
“You know Chase Wolcott?” I said. The receipt was for their new album.
“Do I know them,” he said, glancing at me. “I bought it the day it came out.”
“Yeah, well, I preordered it three months in advance.”
“But did you buy it on CD?”
“No,” I admitted. “That’s retro hip of you. Should I bow before the One True Fan?”
He laughed. He had a nice laugh, half an octave higher than his deep, speaking voice. There was an ease to it that made me comfortable, though I wasn’t usually comfortable sitting in cars alone with people I barely knew.
“I will take homage in curtsies only,” he said.
He pressed a few buttons on the dashboard and the album came on. The first track, “Traditional Panic,” was faster than the rest, a strange blend of handbells and electric guitar. The singer was a woman, a true contralto who sometimes sounded like a man. I had dressed up as her for the last two Halloweens, and no one had ever guessed my costume right.
“What do you think of it? The album, I mean.”
“Not my favorite. It’s so much more upbeat than their other stuff, it’s a little … I don’t know, like they went too mainstream with it, or something.”
“I read this article about the lead guitarist, the one who writes the songs—apparently he’s been struggling with depression all his life, and when he wrote this album he was coming out of a low period. Now he’s like … really into his wife, and expecting a kid. So now when I listen to it, all I can hear is that he feels better, you know?”
“I’ve always had trouble connecting to the happy stuff.” I drummed my fingers on the dashboard. I was wearing all my rings—one made of rubber bands, one an old mood ring, one made of resin with an ant preserved inside it, and one with spikes across the top. “It just doesn’t make me feel as much.”