of people who were not Maya emptied out of the building
into the steamy heat. She’d rushed to get here, assuming that there would be some sort of unexpected traffic jam or holdup.
But of course, the holdup was Maya, who could cause more
chaos than an overturned truck on the highway just by being
herself. Blue was about to call her when a text popped up.
I’ll be on the next one I swear!!
She had to laugh. It was so utterly annoying but also so
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predictably Maya. There was an odd comfort in knowing
and loving a friend so much that you not only accepted their
flaws but found amusement in the familiarity of them. In that most basic way, Blue thought, all friendships were rooted in
forgiveness.
This made her think of Renee. She abruptly discarded the
thought.
Another email came in . Jesus, I picked the wrong time to take a vacation. Though on reconsideration she couldn’t think of a more perfect time. In truth, it had seemed like fate—the most romantic, perfect fate—that just a few days after she received that message from Jack, while she was still trying to come up with a response, Maya had called with the suggestion about
going back to Montauk. She would write to Jack as soon as
they got there. Make it look spontaneous. Say something like,
“Coincidentally happen to be in town for the weekend, you
free?”
Now she walked alone down Forty-Second Street to the
car rental place, something she and Maya had planned to do
together. How unsurprising, she laughed to herself, that Maya was always miraculously absent whenever a credit card or cash was needed. But then, she thought, not always.
There was that one time in junior high school when Blue
got roped into doing a bake sale auction. It was a charity event to raise money for soccer equipment for her team. Blue had
played goalie. She decided she would bake Nana’s famous
cream pie, which happened to be her mother’s favorite. Truth
was she wasn’t much of a baker. She was more of a woodshop
kind of girl, but that was part of the problem. Blue suspected that her beautiful, feminine mother might actually love her
if Blue was a different kind of girl—pretty and dainty with a East Coast_9780778309499_TS_txt_277098.indd 49
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KERRY KLETTER
knack for cooking and shopping and ballet. These were the
kind of girls her mother would dote on and adore, the ones
with bows in their hair and frilly dresses, delicate boned and shy. But Blue was built like her father, athletic and husky. It was a quality she’d felt proud of until around fourth grade,
when society’s poisonous messages about femininity wormed
their way in. That’s when Blue had the epiphany that her
mother felt about her the way society did—that she was the
wrong kind of girl.
Somehow her thirteen-year-old mind thought that if she
could just make a perfect pie, she could earn her mother’s approval. She was always looking for the angle, the mathematical solution—as if she could rearrange herself in the exact dimen-sions that could squeeze into her mother’s heart.
The night before the auction she invited Renee over to
help her bake, and the two of them made sure to copy Nana’s
recipe to the letter. They made two pies to sell plus one to
sample to “make sure it was right.” As it turned out, she had a lot of fun doing it, especially the sampling part. It was delicious, just the perfect amount of sweet, and by the time she
went to bed that night, Blue was imagining a big stage and an enormous crowd, everyone fighting to get ahold of her pies.
In reality the auction was held in a small hot tent behind
the gym, the unimpressive crowd comprising the parents and
siblings of the soccer team members. The girls got up one by
one and described into the microphone what they’d baked,
using the most mouthwatering descriptions they could come
up with, and then the auctioneer (their soccer coach—this was a low-rent affair) would open up for bidding. As the auction
began, Blue noticed that pretty much the only people bid-
ding were the parents of whoever was onstage at the moment.
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Blue sat to the left with the rest of her team and scanned the crowd for her mother. She’d told her about it several times,
and each time her mother promised to come. Just in case,
be there, she would. Blue looked at the clock. Her shirt was
beaded with sweat and her heart was starting to pound hard
against its dampness. Her mother was probably just late. She
was always late.
The line of girls ahead of her was quickly dwindling. Blue
watched with panic as the girl two ahead of her finished her
presentation, sold her pie to her own grandfather for a cool
hundred. Still no sign of her mother. The next girl was called.
Blue wanted to dissolve into the grass beneath her chair. What if she got up there and no one bid? What if she had to stand
there, exposed and humiliated, with her stupid, unlovable pies?
The room went suddenly fuzzy, the coach’s voice muffled
in her ears. Her own name was called twice before it regis-
tered. She stood, her legs shaking so hard that one of her knee socks dropped to her ankle. Once at the mic she stammered
into it, her wavering voice sounding so much louder than the
girls’ before her. She kept repeating herself as she tried to describe what she’d so proudly baked. She could see the audi-
ence quickly drifting, losing interest. Who would want a pie
made by a sweaty, brutish girl whose own mother didn’t like
her enough to come?
Her coach opened the room up to bidding. There was si-
lence from the crowd. Please, she thought desperately. Someone.
Anyone. A woman coughed. People looked around, shifted, waited. Sweat was pouring off her forehead into her eyes. Oh God. Then at last a hand was raised. Someone’s mom she didn’t East Coast_9780778309499_TS_txt_277098.indd 51
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KERRY KLETTER
know, some kind, beautiful person who took pity on her and
bid ten dollars. Blue was so grateful. She wanted to run out
and hug her. She wanted to be adopted by her. She started to
walk off the stage when her coach said, “We’ve got ten dol-
lars! Can we get fifteen?” Blue turned to him, pleading with
her eyes, Please don’t do this to me. Take the ten and let me go.
She was so afraid she was going to start crying and make the
humiliation worse.
Then suddenly a commotion from the back of the tent. A
loud shout from just beyond it. “Fifteen dollars!”
Blue turned and peered out and there was Renee running
in, waving her hand high, Hannah and Maya trailing behind
her.
“We have fifteen!” the coach said excitedly. “Can we get
twenty?”
There was a pause.
“Twenty!” Hannah called.
“We’ve got twenty, can we get—”
Maya’s hand shot up. “Twenty-five!”
Hannah whacked her. “Do we even have twenty-five?”
“Oh, shit, good question,” Maya said, completely oblivi-
ous to the judgmental looks from some of the parents. “Hold
on a sec!”
Renee and Hannah pulled out crumpled dollars from their
pockets, Maya retrieved hers from her shoe and they piled
them together, holding up the auction as they counted. “Uh,
never mind,” Renee said finally. “Our bid is twenty-three
dollars!”
“And ten cents!” Maya added.
God, they were just so unbelievably embarrassing. Just look
at them, all grubby and weird and oblivious. But Blue didn’t
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care! Because they were there, they showed up and now everyone could see that she had people. Ridiculous people but
people!
“Sold for twenty-three dollars and, uh, ten cents to the
young ladies at the back!”
“Suckas!” Maya said to the crowd. “You don’t know what
you’re missing.”
Blue covered her face with her hands. Maya always took
it too far.
Afterward they sat on the bleachers and ate the pies with
their fingers and fed some to the birds and it was just nor-
mal, that they did this for her; she could take it for granted just like people with loving families did. In retrospect that was the best part.
For a moment the memory made Blue soft—to think of
how friends are life’s greatest first responders, rescuing one another time and again from life’s little atrocities. It was the big atrocities that no one could help with. Which was why
Hannah was nuts now and Maya was reckless and imprudent
and none of them had spoken to Renee in twelve years, Blue’s
anger toward her so solid and unmovable that even that mo-
ment of fond memory couldn’t make a dent. Pie auction res-
cue or not, Renee didn’t deserve her forgiveness, not after
what she’d done.
She put away the memory and pulled out into the blare of
car horns and the smoky breath of buses and an early evening
sky as luminous and blue as the Hudson beneath the glow of
bridge lights. The city had a particular lively beauty she could recognize but not connect with. She’d only moved here to be
with Nana in her failing age, but she always felt like an outsider—a tourist who forgot to leave.
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KERRY KLETTER
As she pulled back up to Port Authority, she spotted Maya
on the corner, standing out among the throngs—the only
person in New York without her guard up, the only person
smiling. It was in part this careless beauty that drew people to Maya. There was something so compelling about an adult who
was as trusting as a puppy on its back. Blue rolled down the
window and shouted Maya’s name twice before she noticed.
Maya took one look at the frumpy green sedan Blue had
rented and then bent down to look at her with disgust.
“You’re kidding me,” she said, climbing in. “You rented a
Jolly Rancher.”
“Sorry you’re late,” Blue replied.
Maya laughed and her eyes f lashed with love. “Let’s try
this again.” She leaned across the front seat and held her arms out wide and warm and welcoming as a beach. “Hi! You look
amazing!”
“Hi!” Blue said back, and the feeling of having someone
be so truly, openly happy to see her was like the sun shining right into her chest, brightening the place up a bit. In all her busyness it had been over a year since they’d last seen each
other in person, and she’d forgotten what it felt like to see in someone’s face that she mattered. She couldn’t imagine why
anyone would like her enough to give her such a reception.
But that was the thing about old friends. The love was built-
in to the innocent bones of youth, long before a proper assessment of each other’s qualities could be made.
Now Blue accepted Maya’s hug, then surrendered it just as
quickly, aware of her own awkwardness, how she’d forgot-
ten how to be close.
“It’s been way too long,” Maya said. “But really, you’re
joking with this car, right?” She eyed the roof like it had in-East Coast_9780778309499_TS_txt_277098.indd 54
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sulted her. “How are we supposed to re-create our fun trip
without a convertible?”
“I think we’ll be okay,” Blue said.
“We’ll just have to improvise. I assume you’ve got a chain-
saw at the house?”
Blue rolled her eyes. “Buckle up. Poor Hannah is probably
freaking out that we’re not there yet.”
“Wait, you didn’t tell her we were going to be late?”
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HANNAH
Hannah sat beside her suitcase with her phone in hand. On
the other line, Vivian’s voice buzzed with excitement.
“It happened again! I was wheeling Henry outside for some
air and he looked up at me, his eyes so clear and present—you know how they can be sometimes—and he said, ‘Hi, Mom’!
Just like that! ‘Hi, Mom.’”
The smile on Hannah’s face was so big she could feel the
stretch of it. “Ooh,” she said, “that’s amazing!” And there it was, just like every other occasion when Henry had spoken
or squeezed a hand or flashed a smile—sudden irrepressible,
delicious hope. On those days everything was okay again, ev-
erything was worth it, all the waiting and worrying and care-
taking and loneliness and sleepless nights and gray despair, all of it worth it because he was still there, he was still in there, her Henry, her love, her one. He was still capable of coming
back. Oh, how she wished she’d been there to see it!
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phone, but the girls would be here any minute. As soon as she hung up, she thought of Henry in the care facility, imagined
him wide awake and conscious, back for good. There was still
some brain activity. And advancing medicine. Miracles did
happen. Even the doctors said that. There was that kid who
woke up after eighteen years—turned out he’d heard every-
thing around him. There was just so much they didn’t know.
But then, another thought: What if he woke up again,
even brief ly, while she was away? She imagined him con-
fused, disoriented, swallowed inside a lights-out loneliness in that sterile, loveless room. Imagined him saying “Hannah?”
and getting no reply. It was the wrong time to be leaving for a trip. She couldn’t even bring herself to mention to Vivian
that she was going. She should back out of it right now. But
her friends were already en route, driving a considerable distance in the wrong direction just to get her, knowing she’d
never come if they didn’t show up at her doorstep and drag
her along. Knowing she wouldn’t, couldn
’t, get behind the
wheel of a car ever since that night she’d inadvertently driven them into a hell they couldn’t have imagined.
She unzipped her suitcase, double-checked that everything
she needed was in there. There were so many self-created sys-
tems that had to be followed for her to feel like she could go.
She had to pack everything in plastic vacuum bags, sealed
tight against germs and bugs. Any item of clothing taken
out would need to be hot washed and dried in the dryer for
at least an hour before it could be returned to the bag. The
suitcase itself could not touch the ground or else that would have to be discarded. And of course, she needed her bleach
packs, her Purell. And then all her medications—she couldn’t
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purse. Vicodin in case she got hurt, antibiotics in case she got an infection, muscle relaxers in case she got stiff, et cetera.
And then there were the rules: no large crowds (terrorism),
no driving through tunnels (claustrophobia), no swimming
in the ocean (sharks, drowning), no shellfish (she could be al-lergic—who knew for sure?), no sharing utensils or towels or
sheets or anything, really—oh, she had to be so careful not to slip, to stay ever vigilant. It was exhausting to live in a state of “just in case” and “better safe than sorry.” To try to avoid more disaster and regret.
She checked her watch. Maya and Blue were almost an
hour late. Darkness pressed against her windows, pushed into
her thoughts. She considered calling to find out where they
were, but to do so would telegraph her irrational fear/hope
that they’d forgotten her entirely.
She glanced out the window overlooking the street, up at
the stars glowing politely in the sky. Waiting was such an intolerable state for her, being in limbo, unable to relax and settle into any one place yet. Hell, sometimes just the mere transition of crossing from one side of the room to the other gave
her a dim existential anxiety, like she could disappear inside the cavity of neither here nor there.
Years ago, in the early days of Henry’s coma, she’d talked
to her psychiatrist, Dr. Maloney, about this. She’d been failing to cope with the unendurable in-between place where hope
was on one side, despair on the other, and she was never sure upon which side to wait. It wasn’t even just the uncertainty