Shine of the Ever Read online

  “In a good way, right?” I said. I wanted to linger while she made herself up, which was our custom, but this time I couldn’t make myself watch.

  “I’ll be back tonight, unless I like him,” she called after me.

  “Sounds good,” I said and closed my door on the jangle of her phone.

  Another week passed with fewer texts. I scrolled through our old conversations, wondering when I’d said the wrong thing.

  I logged into the dating app more often and actually responded to a few messages. I skipped the crossdressers and the obviously straight men who’d changed their orientation on their profile so that they could harass people who were queer. (Report, block.)

  You have such beautiful eyes. They told me that. They asked if I modeled, since I was tall. What are you doing this weekend? So many questions. I said I wasn’t great at checking my messages and asked to meet for a drink instead. Amanda told me I was much more interesting in person and I believed her.

  “You’re magnetic,” she told me once, when I asked her what made her want to move in. “And I knew I could trust you.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Can’t I?” She had smiled, teasing me.

  She had to know, by now.

  Saturday, I came home from a date, and she was sitting in the living room in front of the TV, wrapped in a blanket. She didn’t look up when I said hello.

  “Are you feeling okay?” I asked. “You don’t even like this show.”

  “I’ll watch it in my room.”

  She stood up, still cocooned, and stumbled out. I heard her door slam. She’d left the television on so I could watch the Game of Thrones knights eviscerate one another. I sank into the warm spot on the cushions and stared at the screen until the swords and bare winter trees blurred together. I thought she might come back later or get a glass of water from the kitchen, but she didn’t. I fell asleep on the sofa and didn’t wake up until I heard her leaving for work.

  “Amanda,” I croaked, but she was gone.

  Another week went by. I sent Amanda a picture of a cat eating a slice of birthday cake, but she didn’t respond. I found her dirty dishes in the sink, or a pot on the stove with mashed potatoes drying on it. There were little white takeout boxes in the refrigerator. The bathroom smelled like her hairspray, but she was out of the house every morning by five. I considered setting my alarm and trying to catch her, but decided that if she wanted to avoid me, I’d let her.

  If she wanted to move out, what would I even say about it? The reason I wanted her to stay wasn’t her reason for not leaving. She didn’t have the money. Even as a top pastry chef, she didn’t make enough to live on her own. She couldn’t leave, not without a reference. No, she wouldn’t leave like this. I wondered if she’d meet someone else, move in with him. How I would react when she told me. These are the things I thought about when I drove to the police station for my shift. Jeff saw me lingering by the coffeemaker and asked if things were okay at home. I couldn’t answer.

  “Women,” he said, commiserating.

  I only nodded and looked miserably into my mug, as though the answers were floating in it.

  Finally, on Monday evening, I knocked on her door.

  “I’m going out,” I said. “I have a date.”

  “Have fun,” she said.

  “Can I come in?”

  I held my breath, counted.

  “Sure.”

  I turned the knob. A white votive candle was lit by her bed, but the lights were off. The room smelled sour, a rancid combination of vanilla and wet socks. She was sitting up in bed; her tablet was a glowing rectangle beside her. Entering, I saw the stacks of plates and dirty dishes on the floor. Her clothes tumbled out of the closet in a dark wad that I had to step over as I came closer.

  “You can sit on the bed,” she said.

  “Are you all right?” I settled on the corner of the mattress and turned toward her. She looked thinner and tired. “You’ve been working a lot.”

  “It’s nonstop banquets. I always have something that’s falling behind. You know how it is.”

  “I missed seeing you.”

  She shrugged. “Yeah. Well. You’ve had plenty going on.”

  “I went on one date.”

  “I’m just saying. I’m not the only one who’s busy.”

  As we talked, her hands crept like crabs across the covers and gripped them compulsively. Her phone blipped at her, but she didn’t move, not even to look at the notification.

  “Amanda?”

  She blinked, turned her face toward me. “I’m tired.”

  “I see that.”

  “Amit, I had an abortion.”

  My throat closed. I wanted to reach for her, put my fingers over hers, but I couldn’t move. Her voice was low, rough. I realized that she had been crying.

  “The clinic gave me some painkillers for after, but I hurt so much. I can barely stand. I almost fainted at work, from the pain.”

  “How long?”

  “What?”

  I swallowed. “When did you do this?”

  “Four days ago.”

  And then all my words came out: “I would have taken you. Helped. Why didn’t you tell me? You couldn’t trust me with this?”

  “Amit,” she said, but it didn’t stop me.

  “Do you even know who the father was? Did you tell him? Who drove you home, after?”

  She covered her face with her hands and stroked her straw-colored bangs back from her forehead. Even in the half-light, I could see how damaged her hair was. “Why does it matter? It’s not like I was going to keep it. I’m not even dating anyone, why would I have a baby? I was in the second trimester, anyway. What am I going to do, text someone I fucked five months ago and let him know that he’s going to be a father?”

  “Five months? Jesus.”

  “It’s expensive. I had to save up for the procedure. I couldn’t take time off work. Stop looking at me like that. I could feel it moving, Amit. Do you know what that’s like? Moving.”

  “I would have helped you.”

  She snorted. “I don’t want your help, Amit. I know how you are.”

  “How am I, exactly?”

  The candles flickered as she waved her hand in front of her face. “It’s hard with you. You can’t just be there; it means too much. I took a cab home.”

  “I would have driven you.”

  She laughed, a dry little meow. “Yeah, you would have driven me home and put me in bed and all. I bet that, if I wanted to keep it, you’d want to help with that too. Help me pick out a name for it and everything. I’m not your pet. I don’t belong to you.”

  I stood up. My stomach, my whole body was shaking. “It’s your choice,” I said. “I should go to bed, it’s late.”

  “Don’t dream about me, Amit.”

  And I didn’t, that night. I couldn’t sleep. I did the dishes as quietly as I could and stacked them on the drying rack. If Amanda heard the water running or the clinking ceramic and metal, she didn’t get up to check on me. The pots were coated with experimental caramels, brittles, and syrups. She’d left a mess in the sink: a baking tin crusted with paper wrappers and burnt muffins; a handful of yellow flowers; strawberry cores covered in ants. I scrubbed a pie cutter: Its curved, silver blade was gummed with buttery flakes and cherry glue. As unsavory as this residue was, I still had the urge to taste it, to raise a soggy handful of crust to my mouth. Soap, salt, cinnamon, sugar. Amanda and her fanciful ingredients.

  When I finished, it was well past midnight. The streetlights were on. I stood on the back porch with the pie cutter in my hand. The grass was getting long. Dandelions straggled across the lawn. Their powdery scent mingled with the sweet smell of the neighbor’s pear tree. Once, we’d planned to have a garden. Amanda wanted herbs, and I wanted her to pick them: bouquets
of mint, violets, thyme, and nasturtium. The garden was a fantasy that we talked over on snowy days when nothing was alive. When spring came, we didn’t plant together. We were never home at the same time.

  It didn’t seem right to start without her.

  I walked down the porch steps and dug the pie knife into the grass. The turf resisted me, but I hacked into it. The roots tore with a sound like capillaries breaking inside flesh. I chopped at them, then dropped the knife and started to yank the grass out with my hands. I didn’t want to be in love with her anymore. The cool soil adhered to my fingers. I held up a clot of dirt and squinted at it, checking for worms, checking for sand and signs of viability. I looked for what I’d missed. Evidence.

  * * *

  She didn’t move out, but she didn’t talk to me for a month, maybe longer. All I got was the Venmo notification when she paid her part of the rent and utilities. She put her makeup in a big case and kept it in her room instead of getting ready where I could see her. She kept away from me, and I hardly heard her coming home or leaving. I left her mail by her bedroom door and watched it pile up, then disappear, like autumn leaves. The sink refilled with dishes. There were no more pregnancy tests or even tampons, so I assumed she’d gotten an IUD.

  Not that her choices were my business.

  But then, I was on a break at work, and she texted me a picture of a husky with hearts over its eyes. The bubble coming out of its mouth said, Let’s get fat!

  I hesitated for a moment, then wrote back: How about ice cream. Saturday?

  Yes, that worked. We had a date. I didn’t realize that I’d been holding my breath. I exhaled and put my phone face down.

  She was out of the house on Friday night, doing who knows what with God knows who. She came home while I was making coffee the next morning. The neighbor had started his leaf blower. When Amanda came in, she brought a burst of dust and noise with her that dissipated when she slammed the door. She dropped her overnight bag on the rug and kicked off her fake Louboutins. Immediately, she shrank back to her normal size, transforming from a femme fatale to her usual self. As she headed into the bathroom, she called, “Is that coffee?”

  “I’ll make you a cup,” I said.

  She emerged after a few minutes, her face damp and pale, traces of eyeliner still on her lids. As she poured cream into her mug of coffee, I noticed a bruise on the back of her hand, right over the primary metatarsal. The mark was curved and so faintly lavender that I almost missed it.

  “What’s this?” I asked, reaching for her.

  She let me touch her. I rotated her wrist and checked for a hematoma. The bruise was less than twelve hours old and showed distinct patterning: a bite. Those were teeth marks. I dropped her hand as though it had burned me.

  “Calm down, Amit. I gave much worse than I got.”

  “I don’t want to know,” I muttered. I took my coffee and went out on the back porch.

  She followed me.

  “What happened to the grass?” she asked. “Is that my pie cutter?”

  Of course it was her pie cutter. Of course something happened to the grass. I eyed her. She seemed happier than usual, lighter. She stretched in the sun, tasted her coffee. “It’s so nice to not be at work,” she said.

  “No more brunches?”

  “I’m done for a while. Wedding season is next, and I’m dreading it. All those brides. All those cakes.”

  “You love it,” I said.

  She smiled. “It’s a complex love.”

  She tucked her hair behind her ear. Her curls were still stiff in places and fraying loose hairs in others. A hairpin dangled, shaken loose of her French twist. I saw another bruise on her neck and one on her clavicle, probably everywhere, leopard spots of broken veins.

  “What have you been up to, Amanda?” I asked. “Where have you been?”

  “I’m just being a cat,” she said.

  “Those are some pretty bad claw marks.”

  “Let me be a cat, and we’ll be just fine. I know how to take care of myself.”

  I took her hand again and ran my fingers over the marks on it, noting the texture of her skin, smooth as sifted flour. She squeezed my fingers and gently dug her nails into my palm.

  “If you’re a cat, what does that make me?” I asked.

  “You’re something, Amit. You really are quite something.”

  Littermates

  Lauren and the dog had the same dull-blue, wide-set eyes. When I met them at the park by the library, they were also wearing the same shade of bright magenta. This seemed like overkill, so I didn’t say anything. Maybe Lauren just liked pink, although she didn’t seem like the kind of woman who was into pink, even ironically. She did like irony. That was one of the things we had in common.

  The dog was snapped into a pink padded harness, to prevent jumping up. Lauren had long adhesive strips the same color as the harness around one kneecap, from a recent surgery. When she said hello, she made a point of telling me that the surgery was painful and invasive, but she wouldn’t take the Vicodin the doctor gave her. The dog lolled at her feet, happy and oblivious.

  “What did you do with them?” I asked.

  “I flushed them.”

  “That’s terrible for the environment.”

  She bared her teeth at me. “It’s not terrible for my sobriety.”

  Lauren and I were both in recovery. We have the same sponsor, which makes us littermates. When I was drinking and using, I thought recovery was a big, inclusive club where you go to connect with people and hang out and form lifelong friendships, but, in reality, most of the people I ended up meeting in recovery were kind of shitty. I don’t say that to be mean; it’s just true.

  I’m kind of shitty for saying that, actually. So that’s my proof.

  I am an alcoholic because I drink myself into the hospital every time I feel like I’m a victim of the future, the maybe. The future is a dead lunar surface, empty and open, like a field covered in smooth, silver sand or salt. Fear of the future is why I relapse about every ninety days. That is as long as I can stand to be uncomfortable. I can’t accept the future. It is a place where nothing can grow, no matter how much I water it.

  Every time I get sober, it’s because I hope I have something to look forward to. My sponsor said I was “terminally unique” and she didn’t mean it as a compliment, but as a true and accurate statement. I am unique. I just don’t want to die from it.

  * * *

  The puppy was named Sawyer Grey: a big name for a little, wiggly dog. I think the “Grey” was in the name because of the fur color, which was like the color of rain. I scooped it up and snuggled it to my chest. We were sitting in the summer grass at the park, and, if the puppy got away, it’d just fall onto the soft, safe green grass.

  “Did you get any callbacks today?” Lauren asked me.

  She knew I was looking for a job. Everyone in our recovery group knew, because that’s all I talked about in AA meetings—work.

  “No. I sent out my resume to a few places.”

  “Maybe it’s a sign,” she said, in that way that sober people have that is both irritating and reassuring at the same time. The puppy lunged gently at my face and licked my chin.

  “Hey,” I said and put it down.

  I don’t know why I keep saying “it” when the puppy was definitely a girl dog. I guess I don’t really believe that everything has a gender, and it feels weird to call a dog “she.” It’s also weird that people will ask a dog’s sex before they greet it. Like, what makes you think the dog cares? Why are you so worried about misgendering a dog?

  It’s about as weird as calling it a bitch. I’m a feminist but I’m not into reclaiming derogatory words. They feel wrong in my mouth. My own feelings about human genders are complicated, and it just seems unnecessary to slap a gender on every living thing when we can’t even accept people’s diff
erent gender expressions and identities and stuff. I kept thinking, what if the dog was male but still had the pink harness? Would people call it a boy? I was pretty sure I couldn’t get past any of my first-visit-only job interviews because I wasn’t wearing the right colors for my workplace gender.

  Everything about the way I looked and sounded gave me away. I wasn’t interviewing because I cared about the job; I was looking for benefits. But you can’t say that, even if it’s true. I need insurance so I can be OK in my body for once.

  “Sawyer Grey, come here,” Lauren said. She tugged the leash, but not hard. The puppy didn’t need that much encouragement; it ran right onto her lap and put its paws on her chest. Lauren was definitely a she.

  “On the upside, I’ve gotten really good at filling out applications,” I joked.

  “I don’t even look for work anymore,” Lauren said. “It’s all referrals at this point. So much easier than knocking on people’s doors.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I was thinking about how, if I was a dog trainer, I don’t think I would want to give up a puppy I’d named and trained and gotten all ready for its new family. I was also thinking how easy Lauren had it compared to me. She looked like what she was. The people who hired her didn’t have to work through awkward feelings regarding their dog trainer. She was someone they felt comfortable paying. She didn’t need anything except self-acceptance to feel comfortable in her skin.

  Lauren looked at me with her dog eyes, and I knew she was picturing me naked. When your gender is treated like a sideshow act, you get used to being eyeballed. I can feel when people are thinking about what’s in my pants. Lauren was more transparent than most.

  “Where’d the name come from?” I asked her, just to change the subject.

  “Sasha Grey.”

  “The porn star?”

  “I just really like her,” Lauren said. “She can take a pounding. It’s hot.”

  I looked down at the grass.

  Lauren rubbed Sawyer Grey, who was sitting between her legs. The way her hand moved over the dog’s still-stretchy skin made the gesture look obscene.