She never saw what was coming.
In 2009, she got an e-mail forwarded to her from her dad, originally written by Doug Harrington. It said: Respectfully, would you please ask your daughter to stop sending Ben money. She wrote back to her father to say she had no idea what Doug was talking about. She hadn’t spoken to Ben since they’d gotten lunch in 2005. That was the last she heard from him until the fall of 2011.
She’d just arrived in Ecuador and was taking some time to travel the country before she began teaching in Quito. It was in a hostel in the north, this small, out-of-the-way town called Cayambe, where she logged on to a computer with its greasy keyboard to check her e-mail. Her mom had written to tell her that Ben had set fire to his apartment in Los Angeles. Rather than reading the despondent obits on music-nerd sites—inflating Ben far beyond the reality of his lackluster career, Stacey found herself poring through pictures of the two people he’d killed: Christina and Eduardo Zayas, both twenty-nine, newly married. She bit into the side of her tongue as she scrolled past a picture of Christina rock climbing and one of Eduardo angrily jabbing his finger at another actor in the play Wait Until Dark.
She realized she had no quarters. While she waited on a waitress to come back to the cash register, she brought up the last e-mail Lisa ever wrote to her. Back in 2004, she’d said: I’m sorry about everything. Be well.
How hard her heart had beat, how she’d broken a sweat like a fever, how she’d wanted to scream and throw her laptop through her dorm window when she read that years ago. Even if she took Janet’s advice, she couldn’t reply to this. She opened a fresh e-mail. She didn’t type Lisa’s address. She mostly just wanted to stare at the white space.
The young man at the counter was still staring at her. He was short and wore an unruly beard like a stage prop, a greasy head of hair combed straight and humorless with a sheen that caught the fluorescents. He was dressed like a skateboarder or a grunge rock bassist, badly but unassumingly. While she tapped her dollar bill against the counter and worried over the blank screen, he simply stared and stared, and she resisted the urge to snap at him, What’s the problem here, bro?
“Can I help you?” The waitress appeared, and she stuffed the phone back in her purse and slid her dollar across the counter.
“Just four quarters.”
She was older, gray hair and a haggard, drooping face, skeins of weariness embedded in deep wrinkles. She click-clacked away at the register until it popped open. Scooping out the quarters, she nodded at Stacey’s arm, “That’s a nifty tattoo.”
“Thank you.”
“What’s it mean?”
“It’s from a poem.”
The cursive script ran up the inside of her forearm from the spot where the Romans put the nails in Jesus’s wrists to just short of the elbow pit. “ ‘All dreams of the soul end in a beautiful man’s or woman’s body,’ ” the waitress read. “Sexy.”
“I thought so. It’s Yeats.”
“Can’t say I know that one. You ever read John Hardee?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“ ‘While hollering and breathing so long so deep / Memory came on and dove down to my sleep / Dreaming this memory of space all around / Silence becomes breath becomes thought becomes sound.’ ” She winked. “Look him up.”
“Shit.” And she was filled with that sensation of interconnection, of Deep Time and all the myriad notions of wonder it promised. “I will.”
The waitress hoisted a coffeepot and walked away.
Lisa had been her classmate since the sixth grade, but Stacey was sure they had not spoken more than ten words to each other until she joined the volleyball team in high school. Along with Kaylyn and Hailey Kowalczyk, Lisa was an Elmwood kid, and over at Grover Street Elementary Stacey and Tina had deep reservations about the trashy cliques from Rainrock Road. (And don’t even get eleven-year-old Stacey started on what “jerkstores” they had at Rutherford Hayes Elementary; if you told young Stacey she’d grow up to date a cocky Hayes boy, she would’ve threatened to puke on your shoes.) That’s how the social taxonomy of small-town high school works. You can know of a person for years without actually knowing her. Though they’d grown close through volleyball and their boyfriends, the second semester of their junior year both Lisa and Stacey took Mr. Masoncup’s notoriously easy earth science class, where they learned all about dirt. Studying for one of Mase’s exams was how Stacey discovered Lisa’s obsession with popping zits.
“You have one on your back,” she told Stacey gleefully. “I saw it at practice when you were changing.”
“Perv.”
“I’d really appreciate it if you let me take a crack at it.”
She protested, and the conversation brewed into a healthy argument, their memorization of mycelium and other dirt components entirely forgotten.
“It’s big, it’s white, it’s right on your shoulder blade. I need it. I want it.”
“You’re disgusting. And strange. You’re too strange.”
She twirled a finger at the sky. “Look, Miracle, you can act like a little muffin crumpet all you want, but I’m not helping you pass this test till I get at that sweet zit.”
“Muffin crumpet?”
Even stones get run down by flowing water, though, and eventually Stacey caved. She sat with her shirt off, hunched forward to stretch her back skin per Lisa’s instructions, and she could see her face in the dresser mirror, zipped tight with concentration.
“Han, you look like a psycho.”
“Just hold still.”
The knobs of her spine each looked like a knot in a rope, and she felt self-conscious about the size and number of moles that peppered her skin. Lisa bore down on it with two thumbs, and Stacey felt that little pop, even heard it, and cried out.
“Oh yeah,” Lisa breathed, examining the pus on the tip of her thumb.
“You’re so weird!” But she was laughing.
“Holy shit.” Lisa stared at her back with a particle physicist’s sense of wonder. “Look at that fucking thing bleed.”
Stacey had always noticed women physically, but this didn’t seem aberrant. She was self-conscious about her own awkward frame for long enough that her gazes felt like jealousy, not longing. By the time summer rolled around, after their respective breakups with Ben and Bill, Stacey was spending almost all of her time with Lisa. They might have shared a conversation about the dual solace they could provide now that their boyfriends had graduated, but if so Stacey couldn’t recall it. They both had summer volleyball, trekking all over the state to play in scrimmages and tournaments. Lisa was the best setter on the team, could deliver a meaty ball into Stacey’s palm right at the height of her jump. This was when Lisa began badgering her to read more. She and Dan Eaton were little bookworm neighbor friends from childhood. Then she and Ashcraft had traded tomes (though Stacey remained convinced he didn’t actually read anything—he just liked upending his jock stereotype). Lisa hated having people in her orbit who were not readers. At that point Stacey had no idea she even liked literature. Other than the Bible, The Baby-Sitters Club novels, the Left Behind series, and the first couple of Harry Potters, she never picked up a book outside of class (this now seemed as incredible as the fact that she used to blow a boyfriend). Then Lisa got ahold of her that summer. Even though Stacey wrinkled her nose at the weight and length of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, she finished it in three nights, and Lisa rolled her eyes like No shit.