When she decides, a few days later, in a hostel in Cambodia, to go home, she expects me to go with her. We call her sister, who, whatever I think or say about her over all these years, is there for her, both before and after, in ways that I am not. We start to plan. The whole time we talk as if I’ll come with her. Right before we call the airline, though, I realize that I won’t. This is maybe more agency than I’ve ever had in front of her, perhaps the first time I’ve chosen to be separate from her since we met. I can’t fathom right up to the point when I say so that I might choose it. I feel both scared and impossibly relieved once I do.
We’re in a hostel phone booth in Phnom Penh as I tell her I’m not going with her and she sits and I stand and watch her fingers clutch the old, black phone and I watch pedicabs fly past her out the window, hoping maybe I’ll just disappear.
I’m going to stay, I think, I say.
I can see her shoulders still, her flat, scared face. I feel emptied out and free all of a sudden. For weeks I’ve been trying to help her, somehow fix this or make it better. All this time I wanted her to need me, but I can’t give to her whatever she needs now. I sit with her as she calls the airline. She’s spent more money than me. For weeks before we left, I doled out more and more of the cash I kept by my bed, and we kept a tally on the fridge of what she owed. She spent so much more on weed and evenings out, and I paid most of our rent.
I’ll pay you back, she says, as I hand her my parents’ credit card so she can give the number to the airline.
It’s not my money, I say.
I’ll pay them back, she says.
The day after she leaves I spend walking through an old school close to the killing fields outside Phnom Penh, now turned into a makeshift memorial: classroom after classroom, I stare at rows of murdered faces. Different rooms contain different sexes: board after board of men and boys; row after row of women and girls. Days later, I’m in Siem Reap and wake up before the sunrise. I’ve hired a young guy to drive me around Angkor Wat and we watch the sunrise through the main temple and I forget to take a picture, shocked still, each time I turn, that she’s not there.
I imagine all those hours of her flying, nauseous still, I’m certain. I want to go to her, follow her home, if only briefly. I track the hours I know have had to pass to get her off the plane and somewhere safe and settled. Her sister’s there to meet her. They email from a hotel in Miami and I’m relieved that she’s in someone else’s care.
I stay five more weeks and we write long emails back and forth the whole time. It is, in some ways, the best our relationship has been in months or years. From hostel hallways and internet cafes, in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, so alone that I go days or weeks hardly talking to other people, I can pour myself out loving her, knowing she will take in all of it, knowing she’s so many thousands of miles away and cannot come to ask for more. My whole life, I’ll be better at this type of friendship and feel guilty for it; I like being needed, giving, but not so close that I can’t run away.
A month later, in Florida, both of us are back with our parents while I wait for school to start. She calls, she texts almost every day. Her body’s changing but not enough that anyone but I and her family can see the difference. She’s tired and she’s sick but it’s not clear what of her nausea is hormones and what’s being afraid. We go for the same long walks on the beach we used to take in high school. We talk and talk except the tenor’s different. Everything feels heavy, everything is shaped and weighted differently by what lies ahead.
She goes out to California. She does not want to be the knocked-up girl in our small Florida town and though it smells a little like it was not wholly her choice, I understand why she wants not to know anyone in the place where she’ll become a mom. I am not privy to her conversations with her mother. She’s known me almost half my life but I’m not comfortable at their house anymore, afraid somehow that her mother finds me culpable. I imagine her mother wants her to have the baby somewhere where people won’t assume this is an aberrance, like her beauty and her brilliance, that her mom passed along.
Her mother’s brother takes her in. She has a room overlooking their pool up in the hills outside LA where she reads and studies for her MCATs and waits for the baby. She says she wants peace and time to think, none of the people we grew up with asking how she’s doing, wondering out loud about the father; she doesn’t want her mother every day pretending this is all just exactly as she’d planned it all along. Sometimes, when she calls to tell me about what it feels like, the sound of her on the machine at the doctor’s office, where she goes by herself, the pictures that she texts of blacks and grays and whites that look like shadowy mush, I try to picture her as Mother, and it makes a certain kind of sense. It’s so concrete. She’ll have someone
