Lauren Blakely - Every Second With You

I point to the screen, but I can’t speak, because the memories spring free, set loose from the dark corners of my mind, colliding in a carousel of images—spending days upon days at their house in the summers, my parents nowhere to be seen, as I ran along the beach, and swam in the ocean, and told stories after I made sandcastles with them.

These people.

I’m back in time, and the salty ocean breeze skims my arms, the warm rays of the sun beat down, and their voices fill my ears.

Voices I haven’t heard in years. Faces I haven’t seen since I was young.

It’s not as if I repressed the memories. I simply had no way to access them. The key was missing, and I couldn’t open the drawer where they were kept. Now, the drawer spills over with images, with voices, and laughter, and breezes, and nights eating pizza on their deck, and learning to swim.

That’s what I remember. And I remember this, too—no one was fighting, no one was fucking, and no one was asking anything more of me than I could give.

“They’re adorable,” Kristen says, wrapping her arm around me, and pulling me in close. “They look like totally cool people. Not just weird creepy grandparents with blue hair and smelly clothes. But they look like real people. The kind I’d cast to play the cool grandparents in a movie where the girl reconnects with them,” she says, brushing a strand of hair behind my ear as she reaches for my phone. She presses it into my palm. “Call them.”

I swallow tightly, trying to contain the lump in my throat. “I don’t know what to say,” I croak out.

“Start with hello.”

It’s eight in the evening here, so it’s five in California. I dial, and for some reason I feel like my future hangs in the balance as I wait for the first ring.

Then someone picks up, and in the background I hear the bustle of a restaurant—plates being stacked, cooks shouting orders, and the chatter of patrons. In a bright and happy voice that sounds like sunshine, a woman speaks. “Welcome to Once Upon a Sandwich. This is Debbie. How may I help you this fine Tuesday evening?”

I open my mouth to speak, but words don’t come. Kristen squeezes my hand, and that small gesture somehow reconnects my vocal cords. “Hi. This is Harley. I think I’m your granddaughter, and I just got all your birthday cards.”

I hear a crash as the phone clatters to the ground and there’s a shriek, then more noises, and that voice again. “My city girl!”

City girl.

Like the cards said. Like the stories they promised to tell me.

“I guess that’s me? I’m the city girl in the stories?”

“That’s you, oh my god, is it really you? After all these years? I never thought we’d hear from you again.”

And I’m laughing, and crying. “Well, that makes two of us, because I never even realized you were trying to reach me. I didn’t get any of your cards until a few days ago.”

“Happy belated birthday then, Harley. Those are your stories.”

“My stories?”

“You made up all those stories the summer you lived with us when you were six. You used to go to the beach and build sandcastles, and ask us to make up stories with you, so together we created all these tales about living in the city and coming to the sand. And we wrote them all down, and you made us promise to share them with you every year on your birthday.”

“And you did,” I say, and there’s something like reverence in my voice, because it feels like a miracle, in some small way, that an adult in my life kept a promise.

“You’ll think this is silly. But I think it’s fate,” I whisper to Trey the next night as we lie in bed in the dark, tangled up in each other.

“What do you mean?”

“It just explains so much. My love of sandwiches, and the stories I write about animals.”

He raises an eyebrow, skeptical. “Really? I mean, I think it’s great that you found them, but how is that fate? Sandwiches are just sandwiches.”

I swat him with a pillow. “I’m not saying they’re soul-defining traits. But I also think there are parts of me that were shaped by them. And maybe this is a small part of me—that I like sandwiches. But it feels like something. And that I like fantastical stories about talking animals. And I think it’s the small parts of us that add up and make us who we are.”

I inch closer, my hands tucked together under my cheek. “But I also feel like I’m not just from her. I’m not just from Barb, and the way she tried to mold me. That, somehow, a piece of me held onto something good. Like, I was clutching something precious and fragile, and maybe all I could hold onto was sandwiches and animals, but I held onto them, Trey. Don’t you see? Even in some tiny way. Even though I didn’t know why and I never even thought about it, but they were there. In me. For years. And I never let them go. And maybe I’m more than my mom, more than my love-addicted heart, more than a call girl.”

“Even if you never talked to Debbie, you’re already more. You’re you, and you are everything in the world to me. Every. Single. Thing.”

As he spoons me and snuggles in close I try once more to explain what feels so wondrous to me. “It feels like hope,” I tell him.

Hope.

Harley

As September rolls into October, the colors flood the trees in Manhattan and the change in the calendar erases the heat, replacing it with sheets of chilly fall air. Then we slide into November, and my jeans don’t fit well anymore. I move up a size, hoping to stave off maternity clothes because those belly panels aren’t ugly beautiful. They’re just plain ugly.

Over the last few months, I’ve aced my English classes, helped Kristen find a new roommate—hint, it was easy, her boyfriend Jordan is moving in—and managed to attend several SLAA meetings each week, sharing victories and challenges each time.

Victories—not looking at that wretched book’s Amazon page again. Not caring about it. Donating to Goodwill the dress I wore to the gala with Mr. Stewart. Falling deeper in love with Trey Westin. I even meet his parents, and I’m surprised by how pleasant they are. They ask me all sorts of questions about school, and what I’m studying. I don’t think we ever discuss anything beyond school, but they smile and they’re cordial, and all things being equal, I don’t want to hurl my shoes at them like I would if I brought Trey to meet my mom.

Then there are the other things that happen.

Like learning that my grandmother’s favorite books are the Harry Potter series, that she loves big epic swoony movies that make her cry, that she was born and raised in San Diego, and that’s where my mom met my dad. But she doesn’t talk about him much, which is fine with me. Because he never tried to find me and she did try, so I don’t want to know him, I want to know her. She asks me if I’m eating healthy for the baby, and I say I am, and then she whispers in a hushed tone that if I want to feel the baby kicking I should drink a Coke. “The doctors won’t tell you this because they act like Coke is the worst thing in the world, but my oh my, does that get a little bugger jamming around in your belly.”

I laughed when she said that. “I haven’t felt the baby kick yet.”

“Soon, soon. And it’s like your whole world tilts on its axis. And time splits—everything that happened before the first kick and everything after.”

She’s had two babies—my dad, of course, and a daughter, who lives an hour away from her.

I never knew my dad had a sister.

Debbie and I talk several times a week, and we email, and we text, too. Which is the oddest thing. She’s sixty-two, and I know that’s not old, and I know that’s not unusual, but it’s odd for me to find pictures on my phone late at night of the sunset over the ocean, or of their dog chasing tennis balls, or just of the sandwich she made for dinner with the caption yum.

I know, too, that she likes to name her sandwiches after stories and animals—The Raccoon’s Tale, The Aardvark’s Fable, The Fox’s Yarn—and that we’re going to see them in two weeks.

Yes, we as in Trey and me. I’m leaving New York for the first time in years, after Trey finishes his last college class ever. But before I see them, I am seeing the person who kept me from them because I want to know why.

Trey

Harley shivers. The wind is fierce today, and late November is punishing us with frigid temperatures that are like ice lashing our skin. She wears a thick coat, and has a scarf wrapped around her neck, some kind of purple fluffy thing that Joanne knit for her.

Her so-called one-year scarf, since that’s how long we’ve been in recovery. That’s also how long we’ve known each other.

“Can you believe I met you a year ago, and you’re finally introducing me to your mom?” I say, teasing her as I hold open the door to the sushi restaurant where we’re meeting the witch.

She rolls her eyes as we walk inside. “I know. It’s only because I’m so embarrassed of you, Trey. That’s the reason.”

The hostess takes our coats, and then Harley turns to me. “Thank you for coming with me to do this.”

“You know I’m by your side,” I say, reaching for her hand. I can tell she’s nervous. I wonder if her crazy mom is nervous. But I have a feeling that woman doesn’t know nerves. She lives her life with blinders, oblivious to anyone but her.

The restaurant is noisy and black—black tile, black tables, black uniforms on the waiters. We follow the hostess to a table near the sushi bar, where several chefs in white jackets wield huge steely knives that slice fish so quickly the silver is like a blur. Then I feel Harley’s grip tighten and I know she has her mom in her crosshairs now. We’ve reached her table and I lay eyes for the first time on the woman who nearly destroyed the love of my life.