Page 3 of Forget Me Not
“I have a few leads,” I say, tearing at the beer label with my right hand. I leave out the fact that none of them have gotten back to me; that practically every email I’ve sent in recent memory has been met with a smothering silence.
“That’s great,” he says. “One of them is bound to pan out eventually.”
I smile, hating the pity in his tone. The fact that we both know it’s not true.
“Listen, Claire. I know you’re having a hard time with this.”
I twist my neck, still distracted by the glimmer of the TVs. There’s a mug shot on the screen now, a twenty-something-year-old man dressed in orange, and I watch as the image flips to a truck, police tape wound around the doors as I start to imagine how it might look inside.
Scratch marks on the leather and fingerprints on the dash. Bloodstains like a Pollock painting, luminol everywhere.
“My promotion,” Ryan adds, drawing me back. “Everyone here knows it should have been yours.”
“Oh,” I say, the knot in my chest loosening once I understand what he means. He thinks I’m jealous, and while that is partially true, the particulars are infinitely more complicated than that. “No, Ryan. I’m happy for you.”
“Are you sure?” he asks. “Because these last few months, you’ve been different. Distant.”
“Positive,” I say. “You deserve it.”
He nods, though he doesn’t seem convinced.
“Then what is it?” he asks as he twists the glass neck of the bottle between his fingers, a rhythmicwhooshon the bar like the blood in my ears.
“What is what?” I ask, playing dumb, though he simply arches an eyebrow, refusing to indulge in my meager attempt at denial.
I stare at him now, trying to decide how to respond as the entirety of our friendship stretches out before me. Ten whole years of misty mornings and red-rimmed eyes, nothing but a particleboard partition between us, until one day I blinked and realized he was the closest thing to a friend I had in the world. It leads to an inevitable intimacy, doing what we do. Surrounding ourselves with stories of death… but still, even Ryan doesn’t know everything about me.
He knows very little, in fact, when it comes to my past.
I exhale, an oily guilt slipping through my stomach, because no matter how hard I try to justify it all, a lie by omissionisstill a lie. I’ve known that for a long time.
I open my mouth, my tongue teetering on the edge of another excuse, when I hear the buzz of my phone against the bar top. The glow of the screen drawing both our eyes down.
“You can get that,” he says, although his words barely register as I stare at the display. A name I haven’t seen in a long, long time.
“It’s fine,” I mutter, everything suddenly Novocain-numb as I search my mind for the date, for anything else I should have remembered, trying to figure out why I’m getting this call.
My hands stay stuck by my sides, unwilling to move, until the ringing finally stops. Only then do I flex my fingers, wrap them around the bottle to give them something to do.
“If it’s important, he’ll call back.”
Ryan nods, turning toward his beer, but immediately after my phone stops ringing, I watch as the screen lights up again. That grating noise against the old, stripped wood like the sharp chatter of teeth.
“Looks like it’s important.”
I swallow, watching the device dance across the table as Ryan starts to turn back in my direction, his eyes drilling into the side of my face. I can practically feel his confusion, a climbing curiosity about why I’m refusing to answer the phone, so I force myself to pick it up, hitting Accept before lifting it slowly up to my ear.
“Hello?” I ask, trying to stay calm as I listen to the sound of slow breath through the receiver. There’s an uncomfortable stillness between us, thick like two strangers on opposite sides of a door. “Dad, are you there?”
“Hi, Claire.”
I exhale at the sound, although his voice sounds different, distant, like he can’t quite believe he’s calling me, either.
“What is it?” I ask, the alarm continuing to spike in my chest because my father and I do not do small talk; there has to be a reason why he’s calling, and whatever it is, I already know it’s not good. “Is everything okay?”
I hear him sigh, a long, defeated sound, as I imagine his face on the other side of the line. Fingers massaging his eyes like this conversation is a migraine he’s trying to fight off.
“Claire, it’s your mother,” he says at last. “There’s been an accident.”
