A Clean Slate Read online

  “What’s going on?” I said. “What are we doing here?”

  Laney pursed her mouth and gave a quick whistle, the way she did when she was nervous. “You don’t remember this, either?”

  I glanced out the window at the building—tall, made of huge gray blocks, a plate-glass window in front of a large marble lobby. As far as I knew I’d never been in the place.

  I looked back at Laney. “What’s to remember?”

  “You live here.”

  3

  I walked into the lobby and took in the details, hoping for something that would trigger my memory, some plant or chair or something that said, Yes, I live in this building. But the gray marble floor seemed as unfamiliar as the front desk and the man sitting behind it, so when he stood and said, “Afternoon, Miss McGraw,” I almost choked.

  Laney put her hand on my arm and steered me to the left. “How are you, Mike?” she called over her shoulder as we walked.

  “Fine, Laney. Have a good one.”

  “How does he know me?” I whispered.

  “I told you,” Laney said, keeping her voice low, “you live here.”

  “Then how does he know you?”

  “Because I’m a fabulous friend, and since you won’t go out anymore, I visit you all the time. I know that guy better than you do.”

  We’d reached the end of the marble hallway. Laney turned me to the right and walked me through double doors into a sitting room. At the end of the room was a set of elevators, where Laney was directing us.

  “What do you mean, I won’t go out?” I said.

  Laney made that nervous whistle again. “Well, aside from your frequent trips to Ben’s place, you rarely leave the house, so I bring you food, and we hang out and talk.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment and tried to conjure an image of an apartment, Laney and I sitting on a couch talking, maybe giggling, but my mind was a blank.

  “What do we talk about?”

  We’d reached the elevators. Laney hit the button for the twelfth floor. “You know—Dee, your mom, Bartley Brothers. We talked about Ben a lot, of course. You kept saying that now that he’d broken up with you, you were never going to have your first kid before you were thirty-five. And you talked about how much you loved your town house.”

  “I did love that place. So why did I sell it?”

  “That’s what I’ve been asking you. You made a chunk of cash on it, but you weren’t really hurting for money. You just kept saying that if you weren’t going to live there with Ben, you weren’t going to live there at all.”

  I scoffed. “That’s ridiculous.”

  Laney stared at me for a second. “Exactly. You really don’t remember any of this, do you?”

  I shook my head. “So what about you?” I said. “What’s been going on with you? I can’t remember that, either.”

  “Well, we haven’t talked about that much.”

  “Why?” And then I realized. “Oh, I’m such a horrible friend! I’m so sorry. You’ve been coming over here, listening to my woes, and we haven’t spent any time on you, is that it?”

  Laney shrugged. “You needed me.”

  “Well, of course, but that’s not an excuse.”

  “Sure it is. Seriously, it was nice to be needed. It’s no big deal that we didn’t talk about me that much.”

  “It is a big deal.” I followed her out of the elevator. “I’m really sorry.”

  “You’d do the same for me.”

  “Still—”

  Laney put her hand on my shoulder and stared into my eyes. “You’ve been bad, Kell. I mean really, really depressed. It’s been a little scary, if you want to know the truth.”

  Just those words felt scary to me. Generally, I can handle the crap that life dishes out. I’d seen my mom go through a million brief relationships and fall apart with each one, so I’d found my own way to hold it together. Even after Dee died, when I was the saddest and angriest I’d been in my whole life, I was still able to work, to go out with Laney for margaritas and talk about it. I was able to keep going.

  Laney gave me a reassuring smile. “Do you have your key?”

  I stuck my hands in my pockets and pulled out a few bills, a lip balm and a small key ring. Hanging from the ring were three keys, along with the little sombrero key chain that I got during a trip to Tijuana, and the silver pendant with the Bartley Brothers logo that the bank had given as a Christmas present last year. I made myself focus on the keys. One was my mailbox key—or rather, what I’d thought was my mailbox key this morning. The second was a small one for my gym locker, and then there was a third. It was a gold key with a fat, square head, and it seemed like it was glinting malevolently at me under the fluorescent lights of the hallway.

  Laney pointed at it. “That’s the one.”

  “Oh my God,” I said.

  The place was a disaster. I don’t mean the structure of the apartment itself. The white walls were unmarred, and there was a large bedroom, an equally large living room with a street view, and a European-style kitchen with new appliances. But there was stuff everywhere, as if a tropical storm had blown through the place. My clothes were strewn over the bed, the couch, the dresser. Wads of Kleenex overflowed from the wastebaskets, and old mugs with crusty tea bags sat on the nightstand and coffee table. A ton of pictures I’d taken of Ben were on my dresser, as if it was a shrine to him.

  “Christ,” I said. “It’s a train wreck.”

  Laney nodded but stayed quiet.

  I looked down at my feet and saw my favorite smoke-gray sweater crumpled next to the couch. “How could I do this to cashmere?” I said, picking it up.

  I recognized most of the other stuff, too—my furniture, my clothes, my sage-green duvet on the bed and framed photos that I’d taken of Laney, my mom and Dee. But nothing else about the apartment seemed like mine.

  “I must have been really down,” I said as we stood in the middle of the living room, surveying the damage.

  It’s a known fact to Laney and me that whenever I feel crazy or out of control, my cleaning skills completely leave me. You can always tell the state of my life by the state of my apartment. I’d just never seen any of my places that bad before.

  “That’s an understatement,” Laney said simply.

  We walked through the place again, and this time I tried to take in more than the filth. I noticed a new phone in the kitchen, a white model that matched the appliances, with a plastic-covered panel that listed the names of people who were on speed dial. I’d written only three names there—Ben, Laney, Ellen.

  “Who’s Ellen?” I asked.

  Laney took a seat on one of the stools that looked into the kitchen. “Ellen Geiger.”

  I blinked a few times. “Why is Ellen Geiger on my speed dial?”

  Ellen Geiger was a psychiatrist I saw briefly after Dee died. I thought she was nice enough, a good person to talk to, and she had helped me sort out a few things. But I remember I felt I was coming out of my mourning, that I could deal with the pain and anger on my own, so after a while I just stopped going.

  “You keep Ellen Geiger in business,” Laney said.

  Too frightened to ask what she meant, I went about opening the cabinets. My nice set of pots and pans looked dusty and unused, my refrigerator and freezer nearly empty except for a loaf of bread that was starting to green around the edges and a tub of chocolate chip ice cream with severe freezer burn. I opened the cabinet next to the fridge, and there, in front of an old bag of pretzels and a few cans of tuna, were four brown plastic bottles. Prescription bottles. I picked up the first three, reading the medications noted on the white labels—Wellbutrin, Prozac, another Wellbutrin.

  I looked at Laney. “Antidepressants?”

  She nodded. “You’ve been trying a few of them.”

  “And?”

  “They don’t work so well.”

  I turned back to the cupboard and looked at the fourth one. The label stated that it was for pain, and it bore bold
orange warnings about taking it only with food. It had been prescribed by Dr. Markup, the general practitioner whom both Laney and I had seen for years.

  “Pain relievers?” I asked Laney.

  “You’ve been getting these nasty headaches. Migraines, I guess.”

  This was all so confusing—this apartment that didn’t seem like mine, the depression and headaches I didn’t remember. I felt completely removed from the life I’d supposedly been leading. Maybe if I heard more about it…Maybe I needed to hear more.

  I sat on the counter facing Laney. “Okay, tell me.”

  “I did. You’ve been down.”

  “No, I mean give me the whole chronology—how it went, when it started, you know.”

  She grimaced and shifted on the stool. “Well, there’s no doubt that it started on your birthday. You were all giddy that morning. You called me from work to say that you were looking good, feeling good and ready for your dinner with Ben. Then an hour later, you called again from your cell phone, and I could barely understand a word you were saying.”

  “I was crying?” I tried to jump-start some memory.

  “No, you were raging. You know how you get sometimes?”

  I nodded. It wasn’t something I was proud of, but I had an occasional flaring temper that I had no control over, which is why I’d wanted to strangle the dry cleaner this morning and the reason, a few hours ago, I’d been plotting ways to terminate everyone in my management company. Ex-management company, I reminded myself.

  “You told me that they’d laid you off,” Laney continued. “Budget cuts or something. They tried to give you six months’ severance, you railroaded them into nine and that was it. They said you could stay on for a month or so. They were going to assign you a desk and a cubicle so you could look for a new job.”

  “That’s insulting!”

  “Exactly. You couldn’t believe that this place that should have been making you partner was offering to put you in a cube so you could try and start over somewhere else. You told them to go to hell and just walked out.”

  “And so I wasn’t depressed yet?”

  “Oh no.” Laney chuckled. “Just pissed off.”

  “Okay, so then what?”

  “Well, naturally you went shopping.”

  I nodded. It made absolute sense to me. I was required to shop as part of my job because I was a retail analyst for Bartley Brothers, and it was my duty to keep up on trends, but I also used retail therapy as a pick-me-up. Laney did, too. It always did the heart good to spend money you shouldn’t on something that made you look or feel fantastic.

  “So you bought these great shoes to go with the black dress you were wearing for dinner,” Laney said.

  I was tempted to interrupt and ask for details about the fabric and the heel, but decided it probably wasn’t the time.

  “Anyway,” Laney continued, “you were actually fine by the time Ben came to pick you up. He took you to the Everest Room. He told you how sorry he was that you got laid off, how ludicrous it was for them to let you go. You were sure he was going to propose. You said besides being fired you were having a great day. Everything felt perfect—the candles, the champagne—and so when he said he needed to talk about something, you thought that was it. But instead, he started this spiel about how he thought he’d be ready, he wanted to be ready to marry you, but he wasn’t. He gave you that bullshit line about how it wasn’t you, it was him.”

  I crossed my arms and leaned back against the cabinet. “Please tell me I dumped the champagne bucket over his head.” If there ever was a legitimate time for one of my temper tantrums, that night sounded like it.

  “I wish,” Laney said. “You just told him to leave, and once he was gone, you realized that you had to pay the bill.”

  I tried to laugh, I really did, but Laney’s words sounded like a bad joke. A pathetic woman who’d given her man an ultimatum to marry her or else, sitting there with her “or else”—a full bottle of champagne and the bill. So instead of a laugh, my voice came out a groan, and then I couldn’t help it, I let the tears come.

  “Honey.” Laney jumped up from the stool and came around the bar to hug me. “It’s okay.”

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled through my tears and Laney’s fuzzy sweater. “You’ve done this already, haven’t you?”

  “Doesn’t matter.” She stroked my hair. “Let it out.”

  How could Ben, the man I thought I wanted to marry, be so thoughtless? We’d been together for four years, forever it seemed. We were meant for each other. How could he just end it all when he’d given me the impression that he wanted the same thing I did?

  As I sniffled and cried some more into Laney’s sweater, I started to wonder about Ben’s desires, what he had really wanted. It wasn’t that I didn’t remember the talks we’d had about marriage. Those had happened in February and March after Dee died, a time I recalled clearly. But maybe he hadn’t really wanted a life together. Maybe he simply hadn’t disagreed with me when I said I did.

  “And so that was it?” I said to Laney, using a paper towel to wipe my eyes. “That’s when I got so depressed?”

  “Yes and no.” Laney picked up a stray pen, staring at it as if she was thinking hard. “You were down, don’t get me wrong. You’d taken two big blows in one day, and only five months or so after Dee died. You were crying a lot and acting a little weird, but something else happened a few weeks later.”

  “What?”

  She started tapping the pen. “I don’t know. You wouldn’t tell me. But you went from an I-need-to-sit-around-in-my-pajamas-for-a-few-weeks kind of mood to an I’m-taking-drugs-and-seeing-a-therapist-and-stalking-Ben kind of mood.”

  I jumped down from the counter. “I was stalking Ben?”

  “Well, that’s his word. I’d just say that you were trying a little too hard to get him back. You would often wait for him outside work and, a couple of times, you went inside his apartment and waited there.”

  “Jesus, that’s humiliating.”

  “It was so unlike you. You sold the town house next, which I couldn’t believe, and then you rented this place. There’s nothing much to tell after that. You’ve pretty much been holed up here for months. I can’t believe you don’t remember this.”

  “None of it. But you know what?” I started to clean up the kitchen, using a sponge to scrub a sticky, chocolatey-looking circle off the countertop. “I don’t want to remember. I feel like my old self, and why would I want to go back to that nastiness you’re telling me about?”

  Laney stood up and started helping me. “I don’t want you to go back, either, but you should visit Ellen or Dr. Markup or somebody.”

  “Dr. Markup? C’mon.” Dr. Markup is good for the basics like flu shots and such, but otherwise he’s a human prescription and referral machine. “You’ve got jaw pain? Here’s some codeine and the number of an oral surgeon. Something in your eye? Use these drops and go see my optometrist friend. Sore throat? Let me give you the name of an ear, nose and throat guy.”

  “Well, it can’t be good for you not to remember,” Laney said.

  “Maybe it is good, though. Maybe it’s my mind not wanting to be in that place anymore, wanting to get on with it.”

  “Maybe,” Laney said, although she didn’t sound convinced.

  “Look, I don’t remember what you’re talking about, being depressed and moping around this place, but I don’t want to. I’m hurt and pissed off as hell about Ben.” I took a deep breath and tried to shake him out of my mind. “And I miss my town house. Other than that, I feel okay—great even.” I was relieved to find that I was speaking the truth.

  As I was talking, I opened what looked to be a hall closet just outside the kitchen to see what lurked in there, but before I could concentrate on the contents I noticed a full-length mirror hanging inside one of the doors. I turned to face the mirror, and I could feel my mouth dropping open.

  “What is it?” Laney said from the kitchen.

  I couldn’t ta
lk. I was too busy looking at myself—a drawn, unhealthy-looking, unfashionably dressed self that I barely recognized. My light brown hair, which I normally wore straight to my shoulders, was dingy and frizzy, with enough split ends to conduct electricity. My face was pale, almost gray, my cheeks sunken in, my mossy-green eyes red around the rims. I had on the leather jacket I’d bought last winter, which was a still-cute blazer style, but the jeans I wore were baggy and at least ten years old. My sweater was olive-green and shapeless—one of Ben’s. And the pièce de résistance were the shoes. Lumpy, brown suede walking shoes that I’d bought for a hiking trip Ben and I took years ago. Comfy, sure, but I’d never worn them around town.

  Laney had moved behind me and was looking over my shoulder in the mirror.

  “When was the last time I went shopping?” I asked her.

  “Fucking ages.”

  I kept staring at the ugly shoes, the hideous sweater, the god-awful jeans. “I wouldn’t even know what to shop for anymore. I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “We might need a professional,” Laney said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you remember the personal shopper at Saks? The one who helped me on the Herpes Project?”

  A year ago, Laney had been in charge of a statewide herpes campaign targeted at the twenty-something bar crowd. They’d turned to a personal shopper at Saks to outfit the people featured in the ads, and, as a result, the men and women who were supposedly plagued with genital sores looked gorgeous and hip. It was enough to make you think herpes wasn’t so bad, after all.

  I nodded, unable to take my eyes away from my image in the mirror.

  “She was pretty damn good,” Laney said. “She’ll size you up and then bring in a million things, and you just keep trying them on until you find what you need.”

  I took another long look at myself in the mirror before I slammed the door shut and turned to Laney. “Let’s get her on the phone. Now.”