I know I’m her ghost. The one that lingers in the corners of her memory, waiting to strike—when some song by Bruce Springsteen plays, or when she drives by our old favorite diner, or when it rains and she remembers us stuck in the gym at school waiting for the worst of Hurricane Floyd to pass, or when she wears the shirt from the concert we almost didn’t make it home from because her car broke down, or when she sees someone take too long to pick their avocados at the grocery store, or when she eats a cheesesteak from the lousy place at the mall that we loved, or when just about anything happens. I know because she haunts me, too. We aren’t dead. Just dead to each other.
She calls my phone several days in a row, but leaves only one voicemail. “It’s not super important so no rush. But call back when you can. Please. I know it’s been forever. I’m sorry about that. I mean it’s not like you’ve called either, but I’m still sorry. Anyway—call me.”
Who even calls anymore?
We haven’t spoken for nearly a decade. We haven’t even come across each other on social media. But our phone numbers from high school haven’t changed. I’ve moved around and across the country. She’s still there, back home where I left her. My best friend. More sister than friend. We loved like sisters and fought like sisters.
I don’t call back and, for a little while, she seems to give up. Then she finally texts. “Are you ghosting me?”
I text back. “Now or ten years ago?”
We go silent for another few days before she tries again.
She calls to tell me that her car finally officially died. The one we’d practically lived in together for a meaningful era of our lives. “I know it seems incredibly dumb for me to reach out like this after so long to tell you about the car but—I don’t know. I just—I associate that car with you, with us still, and it just seemed ridiculous for you not to know that it really is gone forever now.” A long pause. “After so many false alarms.” She laughs. I don’t.
No, that is not ridiculous, I want to tell her. You’re ridiculous. Why would I care about your car dying? I’ve had actual loved ones pass away in the last decade and haven’t heard one word from you. For fuck’s sake, I’m going to be someone’s wife in a few days and you have no idea he exists. I want to tell her off, but of course I don’t.
Before I realize I’m talking aloud, I say, “I’m getting married back home this Sunday. At that old farmhouse they rent out now. The one down the street.” In a past life, we used to bust into it some nights, filling its crumbling walls with blunt smoke and drunk laughter, and then stumble through the cornfield to walk home. “Nothing fancy. Just some twinkle lights, drinks, cake, and dancing. If you’re not doing anything, maybe you should stop by.”
Stop by at my wedding? Why haven’t I hired someone yet to follow me around and periodically tell me to shut the fuck up? She used to be that someone.
“Oh!” Thank god she is just as surprised to hear me say it as I am. She will probably politely decline. “I mean, sure. I am free. I’d love to.”
“Really?”
*
She isn’t wrong or exaggerating the significance of her car to our history. The death of the car is yet another in a long line of deaths of everything that tied us together. Our lives, once so intertwined and inextricable, are now defined by distance.
Anytime we wander back into our memories, our ghosts are seated side by side in her dead car. I was her passenger princess before the term even existed. She’d make sure to show up late to pick me up, knowing that arriving early or even on time would mean she’d find me in my towel, listening to music. She drove us on quiet winding roads to the diner, where our cranky waitress would greet us with, “oh not you two again,” and the booth of uniformed firefighters, her other regulars, would remind us that they were her favorites. We’d sass back about their suspenders or how they were balding under their helmets, but the waitress would take their side, playfully roasting us until we surrendered. Then we’d drink bad coffee and she would order a salad but steal my french fries as we talked about everything from her hating school to my boyfriend drama.
When she dropped out of community college, she started working at the video rental spot, but sometimes between shifts she’d drive the two hours to my dorm so we could watch Arrested Development over tequila and tuna rolls. My roommates considered her an honorary resident of our suite. She’d whip out a sarcastic one liner in every conversation and do eerily perfect impressions of Lucille Bluth when least expected, making them laugh until breathing was physically painful.
There was one time in the summer before junior year when we both ditched work. She drove us along the river in Pennsylvania to the beach in New Jersey where we spent the whole day reading on our blankets and complaining about sand on our books and trying not to get stung by jellyfish whenever we were brave or reckless enough to walk along the water’s edge. The waves washed new ones up on the shore every few minutes or so and we’d admire their brilliant vibrant blues and purples before the sea submerged our ankles. Our dramatic selves would then start screaming that the jellyfish had gotten us in anticipation of it being true.
And when I woke up one night at college just in time to discover a guy from my World Religions class pinning me down, my clothes mostly off, and his voice in my ear saying over and over again that I should be quiet, that I should calm down, she drove along the highway at 2 AM, not stopping until she was in my bed. She held me until morning as I stared blankly at the wall.
*
She calls again the day before the wedding to ask if we have a registry. I tell her we don’t need anything else but she insists. I text her the link and say we just want kitchen things that’ll last. I hear her pause and then, almost like she can’t help herself, she says, “hopefully the marriage lasts a long time, too.” Not too harsh, but a nod to my tumultuous unsuccessful past relationships. Or maybe I’m reading into it something that isn’t there. Maybe she’s just trying to be nice and I’m mixing her up with an old version of herself, the ghost I try to forget.
She was my best friend and I loved her. But she could also be mean. For no reason and with me as her preferred target. She would fight anyone else for saying a bad word about me but she loved saying some herself. If she was the one organizing a group get together, it wasn’t uncommon for her to exclude me on purpose. It’s like saving your worst behavior for the one you know loves you most and will forgive you and offer another chance over and over until they can’t anymore. Until it’s too late to repair the lasting and building damage.
But I knew where some of it stemmed from. She was always a step or two ahead of feared rejection. If she left me out of the group, then she wasn’t the one being left out by someone else. The way she’d compensate for her insecurities was to sometimes try to give me new ones I didn’t already have. I was used to it and swallowed my feelings. I was not the best at handling conflict.
There was also some resentment on her end—coupled with guilt on mine—as my life followed the boring predictable path we thought both of ours would and hers didn’t. I tried to support her, but it was like she was too ashamed to let me witness her struggling. She’d push me away as roughly and definitively as she could and then come back just as I’d wonder if this time was really the end. I could handle all that, as much as it hurt. But then it crescendoed to her going gradually silent on me for several months while I went through one of the hardest times of my life and when I repeatedly called her, internally begging her to be there for me, she couldn’t do it.
I was suffering through the diagnosis and treatment of a range of mysterious linked autoimmune conditions, spending much of my time in ER waiting areas and hospital beds after a lifetime of relative good health. I can still hear the whir and clicks of the machines surrounding me in my empty room when all my other visitors had left, listening to the phone ring and ring, knowing she’d never answer it. I felt so utterly alone and abandoned by her and I could not fathom why she chose this most vulnerable of times to do it. When she came around with a heartfelt but too familiar apology, asking if I was doing better and saying it had all been too much for her, I had long since closed that door in my heart. I’m sure she has regrets now and so do I. But I don’t know if we’re meant to find our way back to each other.
How do you tell an old friend who has been haunted by the memory of you and is hopeful something can be salvaged now that she broke your heart and that you can’t risk it happening again? We didn’t date each other. We were never in love. And yet our break up haunts me more than any of my past boyfriends.
*
There is a knock on the door of the small room where my bridesmaids are helping me get ready. They’re a collection of women I love from college and grad school and my last few years as a teacher. None of these friendships are as volatile or unreliable or fun or intimate as the one I’d cherished and fought so hard to keep with her. These are lighter, steadier, but maybe a little too polite and polished. But that’s how I prefer it these days. Just easier that way. The joy is not as intense, somewhat dulled even when it’s there, but it’s a fair trade off for safety from such brutal pain.
As she enters the room and joins us, the mood shifts. The others all smile at her before purposefully moving away into their own conversations to let us be alone and awkward together. She comes to stand behind my chair and gazes at my reflection in the mirror.
“You look so beautiful,” she says.
“Thanks. So do you,” I tell her. “Honestly it’s still kind of surreal that you’re here.” I try to sound happier than I feel. I don’t even know how I feel, but I aim for something warmer than this ambiguous fog inside my chest.
“It means a lot—you letting me be here for you. For this.”
I didn’t think I’d ever be able to trust her to be there for me again. She knows it, too. “It’s nice that you want to. How have you been doing?”
“Good. I live with my boyfriend and we’re wedding videographers. I would’ve been happy to do yours if—” She trails off but we both know what is left unsaid. I would’ve been happy to do yours if I had known about it sooner.
“But I’m actually working on a documentary film, too,” she says. “I’ll let you know if it ever goes anywhere.”
“Are you serious?” I’m as startled as I am thrilled for her. I hear my tone—how raw it sounds. I’m wondering why she couldn’t have had her shit together sooner, when I needed her. I feel terrible for this silent thought. Somehow it feels like she hears me thinking it. “That is so wonderful,” I tell her.
We fall quiet, looking for a way to continue. “(Nothing but) Flowers” by Talking Heads is playing from the little speaker attached to my phone and I’m humming it almost to distract myself from looking up at her face too often. When we do catch eyes in the mirror, she’s humming it, too. Everyone is still talking, ignoring us and the song. She starts singing the lyrics to me in a low voice as she plays with my hair and brushes some stray tendrils back from my face. I wait for a verse or two before I add my voice to hers. Her fingers comb through my hair a little less gently and unsettle some of the work the stylist had just done. I wonder if some part of her wants to yank a few hairs out from the root, as punishment for my giving up on us. But the idea vanishes as quickly as it comes. The song ends and so does our moment.
*
After the reception, she congratulates me again and we say good night. I walk with her to the door of the farmhouse. We stare at each other briefly as she puts her coat on and prepares to leave. We share a stilted hug. “Let’s not let this happen again,” she says. “Let’s not let it be another ten years before we do this.”
As I watch her walk away across the field to the road, I know I might not see her again for another ten years or maybe longer than that. We might be attending someone’s funeral or maybe one of us will be at the other’s funeral. The sudden ache of this possibility feels like it could kill me.
I run after her and grab her wrist and spin her back around to face me. “We were both lying just then. Being polite. But let’s not let it be another ten years. Let’s laugh and hug once a week. Or every day if we want to. I love you. I’ve always loved you. We can try again. We’ll start over.” She’s crying. I’m crying. We fall into each other’s arms. Friendship is a lifelong effort between two people who love each other deeply. It’s a lifelong effort between two people who hate each other a little, too.
I look down at my arms. They are outstretched, but they hold no one. I look up. She’s further away now. I’m missing my chance to make what I just imagined a reality.
She turns back to look at me over her shoulder. I stop and wait. For a moment in time, I know we are both thinking all the same things. My throat starts to hurt. She lifts her hand and waves. I wave back. I see us slowly fading to translucence until we are nothing more than ghosts lingering in the attics of each other’s minds. Ghosts of what was and what will never be.
I want to take up smoking again, just one more time, and pretend we’re seventeen. Sitting in her car together, singing and straining to hit the high notes between drags and coughing fits, blissfully unaware that we’d need our lungs for many more years to come. That version of us could sing and smoke and argue and eat and laugh and hug every day. But the people we are now? I don’t know yet. I guess we’ll see.
***
Anna Vangala Jones is the author of Turmeric & Sugar: Stories (Thirty West, 2021). Her writing has appeared in Longform Fiction’s Best of 2018, Wigleaf, X-R-A-Y, Necessary Fiction, HAD, and Berkeley Fiction Review, among others. Find her online at annavangalajones.com.
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image: Ashley Beresch. Check out more of her work on Instagram @ashleyberesch
Rejection Letters 