Laura Caldwell - A Clean Slate

On Monday morning, when Dee was supposed to leave, it was a silver-gray day, the sidewalks slick with ice, the city covered in a freezing fog. I had an early meeting, and so I was gone before she got up, leaving a note to help herself to breakfast and have a safe trip back. The usual banalities. She called me at work, though, wanting to chat, telling me about some dream she had about lobsters, relating a story she’d seen on the news that morning, and finally asking me where I kept the coffee filters.

“Third cabinet from the fridge.” I tried not to sound annoyed. Dee loved long, chatty phone conversations (I didn’t) and she was always calling me at work during her study breaks, hoping for an hour-long talk.

“What about bagels?” Dee asked. “Do you have any bagels?”

“I don’t know, Dee, look around.” I scrolled through my e-mails, anxious to get back to work. My meeting had been disastrous, and the market had just opened.

“Maybe I should visit Mom at work before I leave. What do you think?”

“Whatever you want.”

“I haven’t even seen her office yet. Where’s the building? It’s somewhere on Michigan, right?”

“Michigan and Randolph.”

“Yeah, maybe I’ll just stop in. Although I do have two papers to write.”

At that point, Ronald Han, my boss, who was known around the office as Attila the Han, stopped by my desk and stood over me with a frown, brandishing a stack of faxes. He drew a line across his neck with his finger.

“I’ve got to go, Dee.”

“Oh, all right. But what do you think? Should I pop in to see Mom?”

Attila slapped the faxes on his palm.

“I think you should just get on the road.” I deduced that if she stopped in to see Mom, she might very well “pop in” to see me, too, and it was proving to be a much too hectic day for visitors.

“Yeah, you’re probably right.”

“Okay, see you then,” I said, and hung up.

Two hours later, I got a call from the state police, and two hours after that I saw Dee for the last time when I identified her bloody body at Cook County Hospital.

The memory of that morning reverberated in my brain now until I had a hard time breathing, wondering if maybe I was going under again, if I would soon forget this moment, too. But after a second, the air was a little clearer, and I was still there, still holding her picture, still missing her like crazy. At least, I consoled myself, I remembered. I seemed to recall everything about myself and my history except the very recent past.

With that thought, I picked up Laney’s latest basket of pictures, the ones taken during the last few years, and sure enough, I seemed to recognize all those as well. Actually all but one—a photo of Laney and me leaning together at a lunch table. I recognized the restaurant, a brunch place where we frequently met on Sunday mornings to dissect our weekends. Based on our clothes, the photo had probably been taken in summer…but I couldn’t remember having this picture taken at all. My earlier confidence evaporated, leaving a hollow feeling in my stomach.

I noticed how odd I looked in the photo. It wasn’t my hair, which was pulled back the way I used to often wear it, or my outfit of khaki shorts and a T-shirt. It was my face, and the utter lack of a genuine expression on it. My head was next to Laney’s, and she was smiling widely, but my face was frozen. Sure, I was smiling, but it was forced and tight, the grin failing to reach my eyes.

Laney slid into the room then, holding her hands away from her body for an outfit inspection.

“Adorable,” I said. She wore a shorter black skirt, a sweater in a deep wine color and matching lipstick.

“Thanks.” She dropped her hands. “What’s that?” She came around the couch and stood behind me, looking over my shoulder.

I lifted the photo so she could see. “It doesn’t even look like me.”

A second went by. “It really wasn’t you,” she said. “You hadn’t been you for a long time.”

I looked at my grim image one more time before I tucked it, facedown, into the bottom of the basket.

“Where are we going?” I’d been so distracted by my haunted face in that picture that it hadn’t dawned on me to ask the question until we were already in a cab, flying down Lincoln Avenue, past lit-up bars and restaurants and outcroppings of brick town houses much like the one I used to own.

“Tarringtons,” Laney said.

Tarringtons was one of our old haunts, a place where we used to know each and every bartender. I couldn’t say when I’d last been there, but I was sure it had been over a year. Ben and I had fallen into that relationship stage where we didn’t go out that often, happy to stay home, tucked away in the town house, making linguini and watching movies (weird little independent films if it was my night to pick, The Godfather or some other mobster flick if it was his). The problem with that stage, of course, is that when you come out of the relationship, as I apparently had, you feel odd going back into the old stage, the go-out-every-night-and-make-witty-small-talk stage. I hoped I was up to it.

The smoke hung like nimbus clouds from the ceiling as Laney and I walked in. Tarringtons was a long, thin, oak-lined place with a wooden bar to the left, the rest of the place scattered with stools and tall round tables. At the front, a shaggy guy played acoustic Van Morrison tunes.

We made our way to the bar and snagged the last two empty stools. Laney ordered margaritas, our cocktail of choice. I started to ask her for more details about Gear, but we were soon interrupted by a shout and a round of hugs from Jess and Steve, two friends of ours from Laney’s days at an advertising agency. Jess and Steve both still worked there (at least as far as I knew), and they both still did everything together, but for different reasons now. For years, while they were “just friends,” we were constantly telling Jess that they should have sex and get it over with, but she swore they weren’t like that. Then one day, a year and a half ago, they’d announced that they were, in fact, like that. They were in love, they’d discovered, and a few months later they were engaged. We’d been hearing about the wedding plans all year and in fact, if I remembered correctly, it was coming up soon.

“Oh my God,” Jess said. “Is it Kelly McGraw, blast from the past, or is it a vision?”

“It’s me,” I said, letting myself be pulled into another one of Jess’s surprisingly strong hugs. Everything about Jess was tiny—her miniature frame, her rosebud mouth, her hands and feet—and although she hated being called “cute,” she was probably going to be stuck with the term her whole life. Steve was just the opposite. Tall and gangly, with an unfortunate resemblance to Ichabod Crane.

“You look unbelievable,” Jess said. “Where have you been and what have you done to yourself?”

“We had a little makeover day,” Laney said. “Shopping at Saks and then the works at Trevé.”

I smiled at her, thankful for her answer and the diversion from the question about where I’d been for so long. I wasn’t prepared to broadcast my memory loss, and I couldn’t very well use Ben as an excuse for not being around, since everyone probably knew we’d broken up months ago.

“I won’t even ask what you spent,” Jess said, “but whatever it was, it was worth it. You look beautiful!”

Behind her Steve nodded, and I thanked them profusely, the compliments making me sit taller on my bar stool.

“So the wedding’s soon, right?” I asked as Laney turned to the bar and ordered drinks for Steve and Jess.

“One week from today,” Steve said. “According to the schedule Jess set, we should be home right now writing out place cards, but we needed a break.”