A Clean Slate. Laura Caldwell
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trying to douse my anger with cocktails. Laney eventually wrenched the conversation away from me and back to Jess and Steve’s wedding, and they were happy to prattle on about place settings and invitations and the band vs. DJ debate until we got the “last call” shout from the bartender.
After Tarringtons closed, and Laney had convinced me that no convenience store in the city sold margarita mix, she and I lay snug in her king-size bed, gossiping maliciously about Therese, giggling about Ben not recognizing me, and rehashing—at least fifty times—my conversation with him. Although still pissed off about him being made partner ahead of me, about him possibly knowing that I would be fired, I felt much better now that I’d gotten my dose of rage. And oddly enough, I felt a tipsy contentment around me. It’d been eons since Laney and I had had a late-night chat like this, a fact that made me sad. It was Laney who’d been with me every step of the way though the traumas of high school, the newfound freedom of college and the often painful days of early adulthood, and yet it was Ben I’d ended up spending so much time with. Ben, who’d eventually decided that the time meant nothing.
“He is such a fucker,” I said, the margaritas making my tongue loose, causing me to repeat myself over and over.
Laney gave me a light smack on the arm. “Stop already. It’s unhealthy. Let’s talk about something else.”
“Name it.”
“Are you sure you’re all right with this no-memory thing? I mean, you’ve had a lot going on today, and it’s all right to fall apart.”
I turned on my side to face her. “I feel better than I ever have.”
“Well, don’t think that you have to put on a tough act. You can still fall apart if you want.”
“Nope. I’ve done enough of that.”
Laney was silent for a second, and I could hear the whoosh of cars passing by her building. “It’s just that something was definitely wrong. Something more than Ben and the job,” she said.
“It was obviously something that didn’t matter.”
“Maybe.”
Her tone made me feel a little chilly, and I buried myself deeper under her duvet. What was it that I hadn’t told anyone? Did it matter now? On one hand, if whatever it was could explain why I couldn’t remember this summer, I wanted to know it. For some reason, I truly wanted to learn why this odd memory loss had happened to me. But on the other hand, if I remembered those five months, wouldn’t I just slip back into that depression? I wanted the whys and the hows of the situation, but I feared the details. I felt as if my memory was a house of cards, wobbly and shaky and hollow inside. I was afraid that if I came too close to that emptiness, that missing time, everything would fall in on me.
“Look, Lane,” I said, “I’ve already spent too much time on whatever it was, and maybe that’s why I feel so good now, because I let myself be depressed until I couldn’t be depressed anymore.”
“Shouldn’t you try to figure out more about what was going on with you during that time? I could help you, you know. We could go talk to Ellen or somebody, maybe do some research.” Laney’s voice sounded so sweet, so helpful and slightly worried, and it made me tremble a little inside.
I squeezed her arm, as much to reassure her as myself. “It’s okay. As far as I can tell, nothing good happened during those months, right?”
“Right,” she said, a hint of doubt lingering in her voice.
“Right.” I rolled over, turning my back to her. “And what you don’t know can’t hurt you.”
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