The Last Time I Saw You by Eleanor Moran Read Free Book Online

Livvy, she lived with me and Sally at uni. Sally and Mara were . . . you did everything together, didn’t you?”
    Mara turns her green-gray eyes on me, her smile reaching her face a fraction later. She’s wondering why I’m here if she never met me—a question I’m still asking myself.
    “Our daughters met on day one of kindergarten, and that was it: done,” she says, with that rapid fire pace that New York women often have. It’s a little too much for me right now. “So it sure was lucky we felt the same way. Richie and William too,” she adds, gesturing toward what I assume is her husband, a grizzled bear of a man who’s standing near the buffet. He’s handsome in a rough-hewn kind of a way, his dishevelment artfully designer labeled. He’s wearing black, but it’s not a suit. It’s a collarless shirt, worn over a pair of dark chinos, a jacket flung over the top. He’s gazing into space, a sense of disconnection about him, but he starts toward us when he sees she’s looking over. I’m finding it incredibly hard to engage, Lola’s words pinballing around my brain. It opens up a million new questions, but it answers one: Sally was still Sally.
    Richie introduces himself, his manners impeccable. Despite that, I sense he’s struggling every bit as much as me, and it makes me like him more than his wife, who I somehow imagine could mix a perfect martini in a fallout shelter.
    “How long are you here for?” I ask, unsure what the social etiquette is at an occasion as awful as this. Is it disrespectful to digress from the subject of Sally? I’m not sure I’ll be able to keep it together if we keep talking about her, and I dread anyone probing too much into where I was in the intervening years.
    “We’re heading out on the red-eye,” says Richie. He’s one of those men who gives you his complete and utter attention when he talks to you, as if the rest of the world has receded into nothing. His dark hair is flecked with gray, but it only adds to his rough-hewn good looks. “We left the kids with my sister. We’ve gotta get back.”
    There’s something about the way he says it that speaks of more than practicalities.
    “We’ll be there to support those guys when they get home,” says Mara, looking over at Madeline, standing at William’s side like a small, dogged guard. “That’s our job, right?” she adds, looking to Richie.
    “Yeah,” he agrees, but then sinks back into numb silence.
    I stare at Madeline—I can’t help myself—this little sprig of Sally, the part of her that she’s left behind. There’s something about the cast of her face, her self-determination, that is so evocative of Sally that I can no longer trust myself to stay here.
    I clumsily excuse myself and head for the bathroom, but the door is locked. I cast around for somewhere to go; there’s Sally’s childhood bedroom, the door firmly shut. Tears prickle at the back of my eyes as I remember the two of us holed up in there, talking so late, so obsessively, that her mom had to bodily haul us out of bed the next day. It takes all my self-control not to open the door, check inside in case our student incarnations are still there, babbling in giggly whispers, trapped in some kind of suspended animation. It’s insane, but as William said, standing up there in front of a church packed with mourners, it seems more insane that a spirit as sharp and bright as hers would simply evaporate.
    I push my palms against the wall, needing to feel the solidity of bricks and mortar, of the world that holds me.How fragile that holding is, however much we delude ourselves that we’re safe. I miss you, I think. Or is it that I miss the feeling state—a friendship for which friendship is far too flimsy a word? A friendship that creeps into all the hidden spaces inside yourself and turns them inside out, exposing them to the light. But with you—every single shard of sunlight was equaled by the shadow that lay behind it, ready to blot