The Picture

THE PICTURE

A week goes by. And another. Another. I develop a routine. In the mornings, I get my coffee from the Good Mug. I make small talk with Oskar and whoever else is around from town. We talk about how it’s getting cold outside, about how it’s getting dark early. We talk about what TV shows we’re bingeing, complain about the characters. We talk about what fruit is good at the market.

After, I go to school. The students are afraid of me. I find the rumors they spread about me ironic, considering my recent discovery about Sophie. They think that I’m the one with some kind of dark power, that I’m the one responsible for the now-infamous Chris Bersten spider incident.

But . . . they behave now. So . . .

I eat lunch in my classroom and avoid other staff, especially Jill, who has assumed that because I went to see her once about something work related, she has free rein to ask me personal questions. She asks, as I stand horrified in front of the vending machine in the teachers’ lounge, if I’m single.

“Uh . . . yeah,” I say, because for some reason I feel obligated to answer despite the question being inappropriate, verging on unprofessional. I never did learn how to set boundaries.

“This might be forward of me,” she says, “but I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask!”

She figured wrong.

“I know someone, a friend of my husband’s. His name is Pascal. He’s from Vermont, very handsome. Great catch. I really think you two would hit it off. If you’re interested! Only if you’re interested.”

“Um,” I say. “Thank you for thinking of me. But I just got out of a relationship.”

“Oh, no!” she says with such an overt display of pity it’s legitimately nauseating.

“I’m fine,” I say, wishing Sophie were around with her understated empathy, with her lack of patience for despair. “Just not ready to date.”

“You let me know if you change your mind!” she says. “He’s really, really handsome!”

With that, she leaves me alone to squirm in the lingering discomfort of the interaction.

I tell Sophie about it that night while we’re prepping potatoes in my apartment.

“I guess she was just trying to be nice,” I say.

“A lot of people just try,” Sophie says, lacerating a sprout. “Trying doesn’t absolve you.”

“Oof,” I say.

She rubs salt on a clean spud and carefully inserts it into a tinfoil cage. “I didn’t invent the truth, Annie.”

“Didn’t you, though?”

“Don’t flatter me, pet,” she says. “My poor ego can barely fit into this dress.”

She’s in a new dress. It’s a deep purple velvet. From the remaining fabric, she made me a matching ensemble, pants and a top with cap sleeves. When she gave it to me, she told me, “We don’t need to wear them at the same time.” But we do. We are. We look like we’re a late-seventies glam-rock duo.

I haven’t been back to Sophie’s since the ghost-in-the-pool incident. Now she comes over here. We cook and talk, and I’ve introduced her to Netflix. She says she’ll never forgive me, but I know she already has.

“Would you consider it?” she asks me, now slicing some scallions.

“Consider what? Going on a date? With supposedly handsome Pascal from Vermont?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. Probably not.”

She doesn’t say anything. A spider gathers up the rogue scraps of blemished potato skin and onion, slowly rolling them toward the trash.

“Do you think I should?”

“I can’t tell you what to do,” she says.

“You can tell me what you think. I want your opinion.”

“I think you’d be setting yourself up for disappointment,” she says, “though I am who I am and live how I live.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m never going to advocate looking for a romantic partner, especially not a male partner,” she says, and pauses to shudder. “I don’t much care for men. Or romance. I think both are a waste of time. And I’m someone with a lot of time.”

“Tell me how you really feel.”

“That is how I really feel,” she says, not picking up on my sarcasm.

“Yeah, I mean, I guess I get it,” I say. “I understand where you’re coming from.”

A blatant lie.

I used to be convinced that no one was okay with being alone. I thought anyone who claimed happiness with their single status was sad and delusional. I still believe that, but now I know there’s one exception. Sophie.

We put the potatoes in the oven and wait for them to cook. We shred a block of cheese, and when the potatoes are ready, we cut through their crispy, salty skin and stuff the cheese inside, along with the onions and some sautéed mushrooms. We eat them on the couch while watching a documentary about the British royal family, Sophie’s new favorite subject.

“In my day, royals killed one another,” she says. “Now they stand around and get divorced!”

“Is that a good thing or bad thing?”

“I don’t know! It’s all so horrifying. Yet fascinating.”

She’s obsessed.

At some point I start to doze off. Sophie puts a blanket over me and a glass of water on the coffee table.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says, petting my hair.

Sophie never sleeps over. I couldn’t really picture her sleeping on a couch; she’s too glamorous for that. But I wonder if there’s another reason. Some rule I don’t know about. Does she sleep at all?

---

—I wake up late the next morning and meet Sophie for coffee at the farmers market. It’s starting to get chilly. Sophie wears a long, soft leather jacket that cinches at the waist. I wear a blue puffy coat that she finds hilarious. She pokes at it and giggles.

We walk around town and eat a late lunch at the diner. We each get grilled cheese and share a side of fries.

“Darling,” she says, “I might go home after this.”

“Okay,” I say.

“Is that all right?” she asks. “I hate to abandon you, but I’m feeling so tired today. New moon. And with Mercury in retrograde . . .”

She rolls her eyes.

“Yeah,” I say. “Of course.”

I didn’t know she could get tired. I’m always the one passing out early or calling it a night. Maybe she’s sick of me. We have been spending a lot of time together.

When we’re done eating, Tom hurries over to clear our plates. He doesn’t leave a bill. He never charges us. Of everyone in town, I think he’s the most terrified of Sophie.

She hugs me on the sidewalk.

“I’ll drop by tomorrow afternoon,” she says. “We can have tea.”

“Only if you’re up to it.”

She winks at me, then turns on her heel and walks off.

On the way home, I stop in Simple Spirits and get a bottle of Pinot Grigio that Alex recommends. She’s always got a sour look on her face. I can’t tell if it’s because of my association with Sophie or if she judges me because it’s fairly obvious that I drink too much.

I tell myself that I’ll have a glass. A single glass. I tell myself that I won’t immediately change into sweatpants and pull my hair back in a low ponytail like I’m the backwoods murder suspect in a low-budget crime show reenactment.

Act like a real, functioning human being,I beg myself as I climb the stairs to my apartment. Read a book. For the love of God, read a book!

But sure enough, after five minutes of walking around my apartment, pretending I’m not about to do exactly what I’m about to do, I do it.

I change into sweatpants, pull my hair back in a low ponytail, open the bottle of wine, not bothering to get a glass, and sit on the couch. I reach for the remote to put something on TV, but “accidentally” grab my phone instead.

Sam texted me again last weekend. He wrote, Annie . . .

I was with Sophie, so I didn’t respond. But I’m not with her now.

I know I shouldn’t talk to him. It’s better for me not to. A few days this past week, I woke up, and he wasn’t the first thing I thought about. I didn’t open my eyes and instantaneously feel the crushing ache that reminds me I’m without him. One day, I didn’t even think about him until I was eating my lunch, picking the crusts off of my uninspired turkey-and-mayo sandwich, something he used to criticize me for.

“The crusts won’t kill you!” he’d say.

“Where’s your proof?” I’d ask.

He’d groan. “It’s wasteful.”

“I give them to you,” I say. “No waste.”

As I sat there decrusting my sandwich, I wondered if he’d known that one day he wouldn’t be around to eat them. Maybe that was why he objected so strongly.

I lost my appetite, but I ate the sandwich anyway, not wanting it to go to waste.

Now, on my couch, trying to resist the urge to reach out to him, I come up with the idea to instead look at old pictures of us. For some reason, this seems like a good alternative.

A few pics in, I realize this is hands down the stupidest decision I’ve ever made.

The last picture we took together was a week before we broke up. We got ice cream sandwiches to celebrate the first warm day of the season, those magical hours in early spring when you no longer need a jacket, when the sun is high and bright, when the birds are extra chatty. It’s one of the rare occasions when everyone in the city is in a good mood, probably because the trucks are out and everyone’s eating ice cream.

Our fingers got so sticky from the ice cream sandwiches that, when we’d finally got some napkins from a generous street vendor and went to wipe our hands, the napkins stuck. Sam managed to take a selfie of us holding up our napkin fingers. We were making miserable faces, but you can see in our eyes that we were happy.

There’s a video of us on Valentine’s Day in which he’s working his way through the massive box of chocolates that he got for me, eating all of the undesirables. The molasses chews and weird nougats.

“I’m doing this for you!” he says, grimacing as he bites into what looks like a chocolate-covered turd. “Ugh!”

“This is so romantic,” I say, turning the camera around, capturing me laughing maniacally while he whines in the background.

I haven’t spent a Valentine’s Day single since I was thirteen. How will I cope with the endless stream of hearts and flowers and the onslaught of Hallmark gooeyness, knowing that I’m thirty and alone and that the person I have loved for so long doesn’t want me anymore? Knowing that Jill is somewhere out there pitying me. Knowing that pretty much everyone pities anyone single on Valentine’s Day.

Maybe not Sophie, but she doesn’t count.

Panic floods my lungs, and suddenly I’m struggling to breathe. I can hear my heart pounding like an angry neighbor. I’m sweating. Or maybe I’m crying. Probably both.

In the midst of this anxiety fit, it seems I’ve dialed Sam.

Because it’s ringing. Until it’s not ringing. Until he’s saying, “Annie? Hey!”

“Hi,” I say. I clear my throat. “Hey.”

“What’s up? How are you?” he asks. “I thought you were ignoring me.”

“No,” I say. “Just busy.”

“Molding impressionable young minds?”

“Sure,” I say. I tuck my feet underneath me, making myself as small as possible. I feel safer this way.

“So you weren’t ignoring me?”

“No,” I say. “I’m actually busy. New job. New apartment. New friends.”

“Other teachers?”

“No,” I say. “They’re all pretty cliquey.”

“It is high school.”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Good you’re making friends, though.”

I don’t know why I called him. Was it to hear his voice? Was it to figure out why he’s been trying to reach me? Was it to ask him if it’s really too late to fix this? To repair our relationship, go back to how it was at the beginning. Get the spark back. Have sex on the living room floor and afterward snicker at our carpet burns.

Can I? Should I? Ask if we can go back to the start? Be more assertive, push harder like I know I should have that day in April.

“I thought you might have seen . . . ,” he says.

“Seen what?”

He doesn’t respond, and enough time passes that I feel it necessary to pull the phone away from my ear to check that the call didn’t get disconnected.

It didn’t.

Finally, he says, “Tell me more about what you’ve been up to.”

“Um . . . ,” I say. “I’ve been hanging out a lot with my friend Sophie. She’s . . . she’s a really interesting person.”

“Cool, cool,” he says. He sounds distracted.

“Samantha.”

“Andy.”

These are the names we use when one of us is testing to see if the other person is actually listening.

“What’s going on?” I ask him. “What’s going on with you?”

“I’ve got a new archnemesis,” he says. “I call him the Middleman. He goes around eating all the cream out of the middles of Oreos. Then he reseals the packages and puts them back on the shelves.”

“What a monster.”

“The worst this city has ever seen.”

I could go on, indulge in the back-and-forth, but I really don’t feel like it. I’m too sad.

“I meant, what’s been going on with you? Alter ego. Otherwise known as Sam.”

“Oh, oh,” he says. “Right. Sam.”

“Yep.”

He takes another long pause. He exhales. It’s the kind of exhale that precedes bad news. You know it when you hear it. The sound echoes in your bones.

“Annie,” he says, “the reason I’ve been trying to get in touch with you, and why I thought you might be ignoring me, is I posted some pictures.”

“Okay. On what. Myspace?”

Sam and I were never particularly active on what we jokingly called “the Internets.” We both have dormant Facebook pages we use for occasional stalking of former classmates and tracking birthdays, but we were never the type to post updates about what was going on in our lives or to seek out new platforms.

“No,” he says. “Actually, I didn’t post. I got tagged.”

“Okay.”

“There’s a picture of me with a girl.”

“Okay.”

“We’re together in the picture. It’s a picture of us together. I thought maybe you saw it.”

“I didn’t,” I say. But . . . I’ve got my laptop now. So . . . in a matter of seconds, that will change.

“I thought maybe it upset you. I wouldn’t have put it up myself.”

“Yeah,” I say.

It’s on his Facebook. Tagged from Instagram? A picture of him looking at the petite redhead who is sitting on his lap, looking back at him. Her hand is on his face. His hand is on her ass. Their noses are almost touching. Their foreheads are touching.

There’s nothing to interpret.

The photo is a bomb I’ve just swallowed. I’m listening to the faint tick, awaiting the inevitable explosion.

Pretty soon, any second, I’ll be blown to smithereens. It’ll hurt so bad I won’t know what to do.

“I would rather have told you about it first,” he says.

“You are telling me about it,” I say. “I didn’t see it. You’re telling me. Now I know. I’m hearing it from you. There’s a picture.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I wanted to tell you about Shannon.”

Shannon.

“Okay, well, I mean, how long has this been up? Like, I’m sure there were still some people who didn’t know we weren’t together anymore. And this is how they found out probably,” I say. “I mean, it’s a little disrespectful. You’re friends with my dad on Facebook.”

“Does your dad not know we broke up?”

“That’s not your business,” I say. The explosion is budding. A heat rises within my chest.

“So no?”

“Yes, he knows. I told him I was moving and gave him my new address,” I say. “Is that a satisfactory answer? Is that sufficient?”

I don’t think I’ve ever raised my voice to him before. I don’t like the way it feels. I’m out of control. I’m burning.

“Annie,” he says. His voice is calm, and somehow that’s worse. “There are going to be pictures.”

“We broke up five minutes ago.”

“We broke up five months ago! Six, actually.”

“After almost ten years!”

“No,” he says. “It was eight years, and the last two barely counted. We were together, but we weren’t really. You know what I’m saying. It wasn’t how it used to be between us. It wasn’t the same.”

I smell the smoke. I can taste it.

“This was your decision,” I say. “And you made me leave.”

“It was our decision,” he says. “Don’t pin this on me. It wasn’t working and you know that.”

“I thought we were going to get married! You blindsided me. You just gave up!” I’m yelling now. Crying and yelling.

“Annie. Come on. That’s not true.”

“It is true. You gave up, and I was the one who had to suffer for it. Pick up my whole life and start over. And you’re just there. Doing the same thing. In our apartment. At bars with random girls.”

“Shannon isn’t some random girl,” he says. “She’s my girlfriend. We’re together.”

I look down, expecting to see my skin blistering. Fat translucent bubbles. Visual proof of the sensation I feel, of the pain. I touch my face, and there are no lesions, no gaping wounds, no sticky recessions of skin. I’m on fire. I’m on fire, but I have nothing to show for it.

“Annie?”

“Okay,” I say.

“It happened,” he says. “Sometimes things happen sooner than you expect.”

“Sure.”

“Sure?”

“What else do you want me to say?”

“Fair,” he says. “I don’t want this to change anything. She knows that we’re close and that you’re a part of my life. As friends. She’s good with it.”

“Good,” I say. “I’m glad she approves.”

“Annie, don’t be like that.”

“Like what?” I ask.

“All right,” he says. “I reached out as a courtesy.”

“A courtesy? A courtesy! Wow,” I say. “Should I send a picture of you in to the National Enquirer? ‘Good guys! They do exist!’ ”

“Why are you being so sarcastic?” he asks.

“I’m sarcastic. Did you forget this fun fact about me?”

“You’re never sarcastic to me,” he says. “We were always nice to each other. Always.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s hard to be nice right now. I’m sorry.”

There’s a faint sensation on my hand. It’s a spider. A big one. Big enough that I can see its individual eyes. So many of them, all looking up at me.

All of a sudden, it rears back. It lifts one of its front legs and waves it back and forth. It’s also shaking its head.

It does not approve of my apology.

“That’s okay,” Sam says. “It’s a weird situation. It’s hard. I just thought you should hear it from me. Now you know.”

“Now I know.”

The spider plops back down on all of its legs. It’s still shaking its head.

I wonder if it’s Sophie. I wonder if she can see what the spiders see. She’ll be so mad if she finds out that I called Sam. So disappointed. I can’t tell her. I can’t face her.

I move my hand over to the coffee table and gently wiggle the spider off. It crosses its front legs and turns its back to me to signal its discontent.

“Nothing’s changed,” Sam says. “We’re still friends.”

“Nothing’s changed,” I echo. How dense can he be?

Or is it me? Am I the one who’s being unreasonable? We have been broken up for about six months. How did I not anticipate this? It actually never crossed my mind that he would move on. That he would really go on to date someone else. To fuck someone else. To get a new girlfriend.

I guess I was operating on the phantom hope that we might get back together.

I stare at the picture. I can’t really see Shannon’s face; she’s in profile. She looks cute. Pretty. Beautiful even. Maybe.

I wish that I could prick my finger and fall into a long deep sleep, and that when I woke up, there’d be a hot guy there at my bedside totally enamored with me.

The spider begins to pace on the table. I don’t know what it wants from me.

“All right, Annie, I’ll let you go,” Sam says. “We’ll talk soon. I want to hear more about life in Rowan.”

“Sure.”

“All right. I am sorry, Annie. I am.”

“Okay. Bye, Sam.”

“Bye.”

I hear him hang up. I can’t move. I can’t put the phone down. I can’t do anything but cry.

There’s a knock on my door.

I can’t open it, but I don’t need to.

I watch as the dead bolt unlocks itself. As the knob turns. As the door swings open.

Sophie’s there. In her magnificent black feathered coat, and a new matching black feathered hat.

“Oh, pet,” she says.

I don’t ask her how she knows. I can’t move my mouth. I remain motionless.

She pulls the phone from my hands and vanishes it somewhere. She sits next to me on the couch and pulls my head to her shoulder. She strokes my hair.

---

—Sometime later, Sophie gets up and returns with a cup of tea.

“Drink this, and then go to sleep,” she says.

“Are you leaving?” I ask. The tremble in my voice makes me sound like a child.

She puts a hand on my cheek and nods.

“You’ll be all right,” she says, “though the tea tastes terrible.”

“What is it?”

“Mushroom. My own blend,” she says. “It will make you feel better. I promise you that. You trust me, yes?”

“Yes,” I say. “Thank you.”

“I’ll be back in the morning,” she says. “If I stay tonight, tomorrow night will only be more difficult.”

“Yeah. You’re probably right.”

“Probably?”

“You’re right.”

She smiles without teeth.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “You were tired. You wanted to rest tonight. You must be so sick of me.”

“Don’t be silly. You were in distress. I’m here. I want to be here. That’s what friends are for,” she says. “Isn’t it?”

“I’m a burden on anyone close to me,” I say, thinking of Sam and every other person I’ve ever latched onto, squeezed and leaned on until they had enough. Old boyfriends, camp bunkmates, recess friends. I make someone the center of my universe until they buckle under the weight. It’s habitual. Now that Sam is gone, I’m doing it to Sophie.

“You’re not a burden to anyone but yourself,” she says. “Drink your tea. Get some sleep. Good night.”

As she leaves, I notice the spider from earlier is in her hair, its legs clutching the strands.

When the door closes, the silence rises up against me. It takes shape. I don’t know what time it is. It feels like I’m neck-deep in a nightmare. I wish it were a nightmare.

I want to look at the picture again.

I want to analyze the look on his face. I want to compare it to the pictures of us.

The stink of the mushroom tea distracts me.

I slip off of the couch onto the floor, stretch my legs out underneath the coffee table. My arms are slack. I can’t stiffen my wrists. I rock myself forward and sip from the mug.

Sophie was right. This tea is truly repulsive. It’s thick. It drags its nails across my tongue, squirms down my throat. But once it’s inside me, once it’s settled, it begins to warm me. Soothe me.

I take another sip. And another.

A brightness erupts inside my head. It splits into twin stars, one in each eyeball, twirling in my vision. Spinning, spinning.

Another sip and I’m up. I’m testing out my new body. It’s made of lightning.

I reach down and pick up the mug. There are little bits floating in it. Dark leaves. Tiny black seeds. Dried mushrooms. Flowers.

I finish drinking the tea. I swallow some of the flowers. The mushrooms. I don’t know if I’m supposed to.

I trust that I’ll be okay.

I dance around my apartment to music I can’t hear. But it’s there. I know it’s there. The spiders are dancing, too. They wave their limbs. I wave mine. I have just as many. Just as many as them.

Too many.

I raise my arms up. I try to count them. They multiply quickly, split at the ends into several hands. My collection of fingers, I notice, is not all fingers. Some of them are different. Ribs. Rib bones. I’ve got rib bones functioning as extra fingers.

Because I am a creature, an amalgam of bones. I’m a femur, a kneecap, a fragment of jaw. One of my arms isn’t an arm, or not just an arm. It’s extended by vertebrae.

I’m rearranging.

My torso is a sack of transparent skin. I can see my organs pulsating inside, wet lungs, a pulpy red heart, liver dark and smooth, stomach like a naked bird. I reach up for my head to see if it’s still there, and it is, only the texture is wrong. My distorted skull feels something like cardboard. Like an empty box. There are voids where my eyes should be.

But then how am I seeing?

My tongue. My tongue is like a huge sponge, wagging out of my mouth, spit bubbling, popping, murmuring.

I try to speak, but my tongue has expanded. It extends to the far reaches of my mouth. It presses up against my cheeks. It’s like a marshmallow in the microwave. It’s going to explode. My tongue is going to explode.

I stuff my fingers in my mouth to try to make space. So many fingers. So many rib bones.

That’s when I realize I don’t have any teeth.

I begin wailing, but the sound is trapped behind the wall of my tongue.

My teeth. Where are they? Where did they go?

I pull my hands out of my mouth. They’re covered in something. A slimy membrane. Glossy saliva. I try to shake it off, but that only forges my fingers together, so my hands are now like oven mitts.

Fleshy, webbed mitts.

There’s a dense noise ahead of me. A hearty plop.

I feel around in the bog of colors and find it.

My tongue.

Wearing a crown of my teeth.

“There you are,” I say, only I can’t make words without my tongue or my teeth. And even if I could, it wouldn’t matter, because the laughter is too loud.

Who’s laughing at me? Why?

Or am I laughing? Is it me?

It is.

I pull at the dog-eared pages of the universe and fold myself up inside of it.