I had been dreading that call all along, since the beginning. Her life could trot on happily ever after, just the way she’d planned.īut that’s a lie, too. I’d thought maybe if I only left her alone, she could build everything she wanted inside that Victorian brownstone in Lincoln Park. That’s something only a mother or a lifelong friend can do, and I might as well have been both to Denise despite our identical ages. That was another reason I’d kept some distance from Denise I hadn’t wanted to be there to poke holes in what she was trying to do, to cast doubts with the slightest glance. I think I’d started to believe I might have been wrong about the whole thing. I stood at that window and cursed as if what I was feeling had a shape and was standing in the room with me. My anger and sadness were tugging on my stomach. As the water dripped from my chin, I cupped my hands again and drank, and I could taste the traces of salty perspiration I’d rubbed from my skin, tasting myself. I turned on the faucet and listened to the water pummel my aluminum basin, then I captured some of the lukewarm stream in my palms to splash my face. My mind had frozen shut, sealing my thoughts out of reach. I went to my kitchen sink, in the direct path of the biting breeze from my half-open window, and I was shaking. “I can’t stand to look at her,” the voice on the message was saying again.
And Denise wanted to send her daughter away. So that meant her husband, Sean, must really be gone, I realized. Something had stripped Denise’s voice bare. I played the message again, listening for cadences and tones that would remind me of Denise, and it was like standing on the curb watching someone I knew get hit by a car. I’d always made excuses, saying I had too much traveling and too many demands as a documentary film producer, where life is always projected two and three years into the future, leaving little space for here and now.īut that wasn’t the reason I hadn’t seen my godchild in four years. I hadn’t seen her since she was two, which was a raging shame and hard for me to believe when I counted back the years in my mind, but it was true. Denise’s daughter, Neecy, is my godchild. We giggled on the phone as if we were planning a sleepover, the way we used to when we were kids. I had just talked to Denise a week before, when she called from Chicago to tell me her family might be coming to San Francisco to visit me that winter, when Neecy was out of school for Christmas vacation. Her words rolled like scattered marbles in my head. There was no video feed, only the recording, and the words were so improbable they only confused me more: “Sean’s gone. I didn’t recognize the voice on my computer’s answer-phone at first, although I thought it sounded like my best friend, Denise. I got the call in the middle of the week, when I came wheezing home from my uphill late-afternoon run. Series: The Tales of Gorlen Vizenfirthe.Series: From the Lost Travelers’ Tour Guide.People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!.
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