Kelly and Penny bickered sometimes, like sisters, and every so often a dinner would end abruptly, Penny getting worked up over something Kelly had said, usually political, and storming out. But Kelly adored Penny and was always the first to show up to her house if a pipe burst or if she needed help painting a room. She was always at our house with this girlfriend or that — none of them stuck — watching movies, cooking meals, bragging about her softball-team victories, complaining about work. She didn’t have far to go since she lived two doors down to the right from the end of our street. Kelly always used to say that if the wind was just right, she could throw a Frisbee from our stoop and hit Penny’s house.
And then, out of the blue, a couple of kids climbed through Penny’s window and raped and strangled her to death. She was alone, the girl she was seeing — she always liked them young — was still in college and asleep at her dorm that night. It was late, three or four o’clock in the morning, and no one heard her screaming. I still have nightmares about what she must have gone through, how terrified she had to have been. For a long time I didn’t speak beyond muttering. Neither did Kelly. We just sort of coexisted in near silence for months. We went to our jobs, came home, went to bed after eating something. The world had changed and we with it. Penny’s family did not come to her funeral. A friend from New York came, and a girl we knew in college, too, the staff at the paper where Penny had become associate publisher, her softball team, her sober friends. And us. I was a mess, so Kelly spoke and Penny’s boss did, too. And then it was over. There are no words precise enough to describe how wide and empty the world is when you lose someone that matters to you as much as Penny did to me. Every effort suddenly seems useless. I made it through the funeral and a few months after. But the mornings got tougher as time went by, and it became more and more difficult to get out of bed. I started calling in sick to work and eventually just said I was taking a vacation. One week turned into three, and the manager of the hotel called and said we needed to have a talk. Over the phone, without even so much as meeting with him, I told him I quit. Said those two short words, hung up the phone, and rolled back into my pillow. He called Kelly at work and told her what had happened before I could. He told her that he understood I was going through a tough time and that the hotel was happy to give me a leave and help out in any way they could, but he wasn’t accepting my resignation. Kelly came straight home, threw a handful of sweaters and socks and toiletries into a bag, picked me up out of the bed — in my sweatpants and T-shirt — and carried me out the front door and into the passenger seat of her CRX. Change of scene is all she said as she started driving — as much to herself, I think, as to me. She pulled onto 101 and headed south, along the coast. By the time we got to Astoria, just over the Oregon border, the sun was setting over the Pacific. We stayed the night at a little bed-and-breakfast, but the town was spooky — steep hills stacked impossibly with ramshackle houses, all of it tilting above a ghosty wharf. We left that morning and drove back up 101 to the edge of Grays Harbor. North of Aberdeen along 109, it’s all beach. Little houses, a few motels and beach. And above it all the widest sky I’d ever seen. It was May and still chilly, but we pulled over to the side of the road and walked past the dunes to the water. Kelly told me to take my shoes off even though the sand was freezing cold. The wind was wild, and as we walked, we leaned into it to keep moving forward. It was the first real effort I’d made in months, leaning in, not allowing myself to be blown back or down. The hard, cold sand beneath my feet felt good, and I remembered I had a body and that it could feel. We walked along the surf’s edge for twenty minutes or so and eventually we saw the Moonstone. From the beach it looked abandoned, but as we got closer, we saw a few lights on in the office and a housekeeper dragging a vacuum between rooms. The place was flaking with old paint and for the most part empty, but I was struck by the way it squatted at the edge of the beach, under that enormous blue sky and before the vast Pacific. It sat there, ugly and unbudging, the sandy wind whipping along its rusted gutters. I thought of Penny.
We stayed that night in Room 6, where Jane is now, but long before the good mattress. And then, after a few weeks of convincing Kelly, we sold our house, quit our jobs, and cashed in our 401(k)’s early. During that time we came back to Moclips twice and haggled with the Hillworths, who’d been trying to unload the place for years but had a hard time letting go. Eventually, we bought the Moonstone and the Hillworths’ house next door and all the scratched and broken-down furniture in both. Kelly and I had worked in hotels our entire adult lives, and now we owned one that needed us as much as we needed it. Kelly’s brothers thought we were crazy, but they knew once we’d made up our minds there was no turning back.
That was over four years ago and I still think about Penny every day. I talk to her when I walk the beach and I ask her what she would do about this or that. I’ve asked her about Jane and if I should worry, and in the roar of the ocean I hear her say keep watch but let her be. Each time I head back up the beach and come upon the Moonstone, I remember the first time I saw it and Kelly’s face smiling at me in the crazy wind. And later that night, the two of us crawling into bed in that room that sits so close to the sea. After we turned out the lights, I tucked under the blankets and thanked God. For Kelly, for this life. And for Penny, who helped me survive growing up in Worcester, getting through college, and convincing me to move to New York. And into the dark I thanked Penny directly, for being my best friend, for agreeing to go to rehab in Seattle, for getting sober, and for staying out there long enough for me to check in that night at the Holiday Inn. I shivered as I imagined all the possible outcomes if any one thing had happened differently along the way. If my parents had moved us to some other neighborhood in Worcester when I was a kid. If Penny had never met Chloe and never tried heroin. If I’d picked the Econo Lodge or the Days Inn that night in Seattle. If I’d left New York one day before, or after. If Kelly’s employee hadn’t called in sick. If Penny’s girlfriend had slept at her house instead of the dorms the night those kids turned up. If Penny had locked her windows. I curled into Kelly and burrowed as deeply as I could into her back. I remember the tissue-thin, pale yellow T-shirt she wore, pressing my face to it and feeling her warm skin on the other side. And I remember thinking this is what it feels like to be home. Here. In the space around and between us. This fabric, this skin, this smell, this woman.
For most of that night I was awake, wondering at it all, the pattern that seemed to emerge when I laid out every fluke and chance encounter, puzzling through all the possible signs and meanings; but any trace of a design disintegrated when I remembered the chaos and brutality of the world, the genocide and the natural disasters, all the agony. I never felt so small, so humbled, by the vastness of the universe and the fragility of life. I studied the water-stained ceiling in the room and imagined the things it had seen, the people. Who else had huddled here, pressed into someone they loved as if they were the last thing on earth that mattered? Who else prayed that morning would never come? Prayed they’d never have to leave this bed and let go.