the rest of our money on tequila shots and margaritas. The photo in my hands was taken right before the last bus back across the border, and both Laney and I were rosy with drink, huge careless smiles playing on our faces.
As I dug deeper, I hit on smaller photos, rounded at the corners, taken when 3x5 was the usual photographic dimension. One of my favorites was there—Laney and I standing in front of a row of gray lockers, my Nikon on a strap around my neck, Laney clutching a clipboard to her chest. It had been taken only three days after we’d met, and once again, I had a near perfect memory of that day. We’d been just outside the yearbook office when someone had said they needed a photo of us for the staff section. Both Laney and I wore too much makeup and tidal wave bangs—bangs that arched above our foreheads and came to rest below one eye. Right before the photo was taken, Laney leaned in and threw her arm around me, a gesture that made me nearly weak with relief. I’d hated being new in the school, but after that moment, I knew I was going to be okay.
I picked through the basket, looking for pictures of my old boyfriends, thinking that maybe the breakup with Ben had something to do with the memory loss, and maybe I wouldn’t remember my exes. But I easily found and remembered a picture of my high school boyfriend, Ted, whom I’d lost my virginity to in the stockroom of the convenience store where he worked, and Steve, my college boyfriend, who looked stoned as he posed in front of one of the landscapes he’d painted.
Laney has always called me a serial monogamist, but it’s not really an accurate term. While it’s true that I’ve had almost as many boyfriends as I’ve had first dates, I don’t go from one to another to another without a break. In fact, I’ve always tried to avoid that pattern, having seen my mother date a long string of guys, only to end up with heartbreak. Instead, I have serious boyfriends, and if we break up, then I’m alone—no blind dates, no pickups in bars—until I find someone I truly, truly want to go on a date with. Laney claims this trait has weeded out far too many candidates and leaves no room for flings. Her point is that flings are, by design, to be had with completely inappropriate men—the ones you find attractive, but would never date for one reason or another. And yet the whole fling thing has always seemed a waste of time to me, particularly given my goal of being married with one kid by the time I’m thirty-five.
I picked up a stack of pictures toward the bottom of the basket and quickly discarded them one by one onto the coffee table like a blackjack dealer. With each slap of a picture, I mentally listed the who, where and when, building up a confidence that most of my memory was intact. Senior prom with Ted, me in a hideous chartreuse gown that make me look jaundiced; Laney and me after a football game, clearly about to pass out; on the beach in Florida with Laney’s sister, Sophia; Laney’s kleptomaniac college roommate, Tara. When I came to one of Laney, Dee and me, my hands froze. I’d been a senior in college, full of myself and how cool I was. Dee was still in high school and had used the trip as an excuse to “check out the campus,” when what she really wanted was to drink beer and hang out with me.
In the photo, Dee’s light brown hair is short, and she’s laughing—as she so often was—sandwiched between Laney and me, her head turned slightly toward mine. The pain of losing her rushed in like a hurricane.
According to Ellen Geiger, the psychiatrist I’d seen, everyone who suffers the loss of a loved one ruminates (her word) on the last time they spoke to or saw the person. I was not the patient to change that pattern. For months afterward, it was all I could think about—the last time I’d spoken to Dee and the last time I’d seen her, in January.
Dee had driven up from the University of Illinois to visit me, and we’d spent the weekend in our usual way—shopping during the day with Mom for clothes and boots and jewelry we didn’t need, and at night going out with Ben and Laney, regaling them with stories of the astounding mix of freaks and psychopaths our mother used to date. Ben and Laney adored Dee as much as I did. It was hard not to. She had a little-girl way of holding her head down and drawing her eyes up that made you want to take care of her, and yet she could drink like a Russian soldier. And that laugh of hers was impossible not to love—a buoyant, soft-at-first chuckle that grew into a belly laugh.
On Monday morning, when Dee was supposed to leave, it was a silver-gray day, the sidewalks slick with ice, the city covered in a freezing fog. I had an early meeting, and so I was gone before she got up, leaving a note to help herself to breakfast and have a safe trip back. The usual banalities. She called me at work, though, wanting to chat, telling me about some dream she had about lobsters, relating a story she’d seen on the news that morning, and finally asking me where I kept the coffee filters.
“Third cabinet from the fridge.” I tried not to sound annoyed. Dee loved long, chatty phone conversations (I didn’t) and she was always calling me at work during her study breaks, hoping for an hour-long talk.
“What about bagels?” Dee asked. “Do you have any bagels?”
“I don’t know, Dee, look around.” I scrolled through my e-mails, anxious to get back to work. My meeting had been disastrous, and the market had just opened.
“Maybe I should visit Mom at work before I leave. What do you think?”
“Whatever you want.”
“I haven’t even seen her office yet. Where’s the building? It’s somewhere on Michigan, right?”
“Michigan and Randolph.”
“Yeah, maybe I’ll just stop in. Although I do have two papers to write.”
At that point, Ronald Han, my boss, who was known around the office as Attila the Han, stopped by my desk and stood over me with a frown, brandishing a stack of faxes. He drew a line across his neck with his finger.
“I’ve got to go, Dee.”
“Oh, all right. But what do you think? Should I pop in to see Mom?”
Attila slapped the faxes on his palm.
“I think you should just get on the road.” I deduced that if she stopped in to see Mom, she might very well “pop in” to see me, too, and it was proving to be a much too hectic day for visitors.
“Yeah, you’re probably right.”
“Okay, see you then,” I said, and hung up.
Two hours later, I got a call from the state police, and two hours after that I saw Dee for the last time when I identified her bloody body at Cook County Hospital.
The memory of that morning reverberated in my brain now until I had a hard time breathing, wondering if maybe I was going under again, if I would soon forget this moment, too. But after a second, the air was a little clearer, and I was still there, still holding her picture, still missing her like crazy. At least, I consoled myself, I remembered. I seemed to recall everything about myself and my history except the very recent past.
With that thought, I picked up Laney’s latest basket of pictures, the ones taken during the last few years, and sure enough, I seemed to recognize all those as well. Actually all but one—a photo of Laney and me leaning together at a lunch table. I recognized the restaurant, a brunch place where we frequently met on Sunday mornings to dissect our weekends. Based on our clothes, the photo had probably been taken in summer…but I couldn’t remember having this picture taken at all. My earlier confidence evaporated, leaving a hollow feeling in my stomach.
I noticed how odd I looked in the photo. It wasn’t my hair, which was pulled back the way I used to often wear it, or my outfit of khaki shorts and a T-shirt. It was my face, and the utter lack of a genuine expression on it. My head was next to Laney’s,
