The Seven Year Slip

AND THAT WAS HOW Drew found herself floating on cloud nine Friday afternoon. She pulled every cookbook Strauss & Adder had off the shelves like she was a bookworm in a bookstore where everything was free, while Fiona and I sent her YouTube tutorial links and made a list of Netflix cooking shows to binge every waking hour this weekend. The apartment didn’t send me back again to him, but maybe it was for the best as I slowly spiraled into a panic about how to hold a knife.

“We might burn down the entire restaurant,” Drew said happily, waltzing her way over to Fiona and me at the table in the kitchen. “But at least we’re still in the running!”

Fiona was snacking on half of the granola bar that was supposed to go into my parfait. She nibbled at it. “For someone who can’t cook, you’re certainly going to give it the old college try, babe.”

“Absolutely, babe,” Drew replied, dumping the stack of books down on the edge of the table, and slid into a seat. “I’m going to burn the fuck out of some tortellini. I don’t know how you did it, Clementine, but you’re a miracle worker. As always. The agent said that she jumped the gun before consulting James Ashton.”

Fiona added, “What did you do to get him to reconsider?”

I shrugged, stirring up my yogurt. “Nothing, really.” Besides trespass into a kitchen and manhandle a prospective client. “I just asked him why, and he changed his mind.”

Mostly.

From the mail room, Jerry—our mail guy, a tall man who made the absolute best dump cakes for holidays—rolled out a cart, whistling a Lizzo song. “Mornin’, ladies,” he greeted, and reached for a package to hand to me. “For you.”

“Oh?” I took it and turned the package over to read the name. My world narrowed to a pinprick.

Jerry turned to Drew. “I heard you’re in the next round with that chef guy! Congrats!”

They high-fived. “Thanks! I’m going to crash and burn!” she replied happily, and he laughed and rolled his cart on. She took the first book off the pile—Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat—and began to read.

“I guess we won’t be finishing the baby’s nursery this weekend,” Fiona said wryly, and Drew gave her a dejected look. “What? You still haven’t hung up the wallpaper I bought.”

“Babe, I know less about hanging wallpaper than I do about cooking.”

“There are fewer ways to screw up wallpaper,” she replied matter-of-factly.

Drew glared, and Fiona smiled, and that was their marriage in a nutshell. I set down the package quickly, turning the address side down. “I love doing wallpaper. I can help?”

“Oh my god, really? Thank you,” Fiona said in relief, and shoved the rest of the granola into her mouth.

“We’ll pay you,” Drew added.

“A bottle of rosé and I’m yours for as long as you need,” I replied, and with one last bite of yogurt, I shoved my plastic spoon into the empty cup and stood. “I should probably get back to work.”

I had begun to leave when Drew said, “Hey, you forgot your package.”

Fiona picked it up and flipped it over. “I wonder who it’s f—Oh.”

I winced.

Fiona showed Drew the name on the package, and her eyes widened. “Your aunt?” Drew asked. “But . . .”

“It must’ve gotten lost in the mail,” I mumbled.

My friends exchanged a worried look. Sometimes, when my aunt was alive, she’d send packages to my work to surprise me—leather-bound notebooks from Spain, teas from Vietnam, lederhosen from Germany—whenever she went traveling on her own.

But my aunt had been dead for six months.

The package must have been lost in the mail for a very long time. She hadn’t gone anywhere since last November, when she visited the last place she’d never been—Antarctica. She’d said it was the coldest she’d ever felt in her life, so cold that her fingertips still hadn’t warmed in the weeks since she’d come home.

“Is your heater working?” I had asked, and she’d laughed it off.

“Oh, I’m fine, I’m fine, my darling. Sometimes the cold just sticks to you.”

“If you say so.” I couldn’t remember what I’d been doing then—I think I was walking home from work, having just come out of the subway, my nose cold and snow sloshing the ground, but I couldn’t quite remember. You never commit a mundane moment to memory, thinking it’ll be the last time you’ll hear their voice, or see their smile, or smell their perfume. Your head never remembers the things your heart wants to in hindsight.

My aunt said, “I’m feeling restless. Let’s go on an adventure, my darling. I’ll meet you at the airport. Let’s pick the first flight out—”

“I can’t, I have work,” I interrupted, “and besides, I just bought our tickets to Iceland today for our trip in August. They were a real steal, so I couldn’t resist.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t want to go to Iceland?”

“No—no, I do. It’s just we’ve been before.”

“But not in August! You can apparently see the sun at midnight, and there’s this hot spring I want to try—I hear it’s really good for arthritis, so it’ll be great for you,” I added, and my aunt made a noise in her throat because it was getting more and more apparent that she didn’t like the thought of slowing down. She was sixty-two, so in her mind, she shouldn’t have arthritis. Not at least until seventy. My phone beeped. “Oh, Mom’s calling. I’ll see you in the New Year—dinner at my parents, you’ll be there?”

“Of course, darling,” she replied.

“Promise you won’t fly off on the next plane out of JFK?”

She laughed at that. “I promise, I promise. Not without you.”

And suddenly, I was back to last New Year’s morning, my phone ringing and ringing and ringing, as my head pounded. I’d drank too much the night before—too much of everything. My mouth felt like cotton candy, and I think I kissed someone at midnight, but I couldn’t remember his face. Drew and Fiona always dragged me to New Year’s Eve bashes, and it never failed that every party was all the same kind of awful.

I had felt for my phone on my nightstand, and when I’d finally found it, I unplugged it and answered. “Mom, it’s too earl—”

“She’s gone.” I had never heard my mom sound like that before. High and hysterical. Her voice cracking. Her words forced. “She’s gone! Sweetheart—sweetheart, she’s gone.”

I didn’t understand. My head was still sleepy. “Who? What do you mean? Mom?”

“Analea.” Then, quieter: “The neighbors found her. She . . .”

The thing no one tells you, the thing you have to find out on your own through firsthand experience, is that there is never an easy way to talk about suicide. There never was, there never will be. If ever someone asked, I’d tell them the truth: that my aunt was amazing, that she lived widely, that she had the most infectious laugh, that she knew four different languages and had a passport cluttered with so many stamps from different countries that it’d make any world traveler green with envy, and that she had a monster over her shoulder she didn’t let anyone else see.

And, in turn, that monster didn’t let her see all the things she would miss. The birthdays. The anniversaries. The sunsets. The bodega on the corner that had turned into that shiplap furniture store. The monster closed her eyes to all the pain she would give the people she left—the terrible weight of missing her and trying not to blame her all in the same breath. And then you started blaming yourself. Could you have done something, been that voice that finally broke through? If you loved them more, if you paid more attention, if you were better, if you only asked, if you even knew to ask, if you could just read between the lines and—

If, if, if.

There is no easy way to talk about suicide.

Sometimes the people you love don’t leave you with goodbyes—they just leave.

“Are you okay?” Fiona asked softly, putting her hand on my shoulder.

I flinched away from her, blinking the tears out of my eyes. “Yes,” I said, sucking in a lungful of breath. Then another. Fiona had the package in her hand, and I took it. I wasn’t going to open it. “I’m fine. It’s just . . . unexpected.”

Drew eyed the package. “It’s pretty small. I wonder what it is?”

“I need to get back to work.” As I left, I discarded my lunch—and the package—in the trash can, and returned to my cubicle, and drowned myself in work like I used to. Like I should.

Two hours later, when mostly everyone had left the office, I returned to the trash can to dig out the package from beneath four-day-old lo mein and half a tuna sandwich, but it wasn’t there. The package my aunt had sent me was gone.