Recursion - Blake Crouch Page 0,4
clearing of air to the point where he finally understands her and she understands him.
But in person, it never feels right. He can’t bring himself to say what’s in his heart, which always feels clenched and locked up, encased in scar tissue. The awkwardness doesn’t bother him like it used to. He has made peace with the idea that part of life is facing your failures, and sometimes those failures are people you once loved.
“I wonder what she’d be doing today,” Julia says.
“I hope she’d be sitting here with us.”
“I mean for work.”
“Ah. A lawyer of course.”
Julia laughs—one of the greatest sounds he’s ever encountered—and he can’t remember the last time he heard it. Beautiful but also crushing to experience. Like a secret window into the person he used to know.
“She would argue about anything,” Julia says. “And she usually won.”
“We were pushovers.”
“One of us was.”
“Me?” he says with faux outrage.
“By five years old, she had you pegged as the weak link.”
“Remember the time she convinced us to let her practice backing up in the driveway—”
“Convinced you.”
“—and she drove my car through the garage door?”
Julia snorts a laugh. “She was so upset.”
“No, embarrassed.” For a half second, his mind’s eye conjures the memory. Or at least a piece of it. Meghan behind the wheel of his old Camry, the back half punched through the garage door, her face red and tears streaming down it as she white-knuckle-clenched the steering wheel. “She was tenacious and smart and would’ve done something interesting with her life.” He finishes his coffee and pours another cup from the stainless-steel French press they’re sharing.
“It’s nice to talk about her,” Julia says.
“I’m glad I finally can.”
The waiter comes to take their food orders, and the butterfly returns, alighting on the surface of the table next to Barry’s still-folded napkin. Stretching its wings. Preening. He tries to push the idea out of his mind that it’s Meghan, somehow haunting him on today of all days. It’s a stupid notion, of course, but the thought persists. Like the time a robin followed him for eight blocks in NoHo. Or on a recent walk with his dog in Fort Washington Park, when a ladybug kept landing on his wrist.
As the food arrives, Barry imagines Meghan sitting at the table with them. The rough edges of adolescence sanded down. Her entire life ahead of her. He can’t see her face, no matter how hard he tries, only her hands, in constant motion as she talks, the same way her mother moves when she’s confident and excited about something.
He isn’t hungry, but he makes himself eat. It seems like there’s something on Julia’s mind, but she just picks at the remains of her frittata, and he takes a drink of water and another bite of his sandwich and stares at the river in the distance.
The Hudson comes from a pond in the Adirondacks called Lake Tear of the Clouds. They went there one summer when Meghan was eight or nine. Camped in the spruce trees. Watched the stars fall. Tried to wrap their minds around the notion that this tiny mountain lake was the source of the Hudson. It’s a memory he returns to almost obsessively.
“You look thoughtful,” Julia says.
“I was thinking of that trip we took to Lake Tear of the Clouds. Remember?”
“Of course. It took us two hours to get the tent up in a rainstorm.”
“I thought it was clear.”
She shakes her head. “No, we shivered in the tent all night and none of us slept.”
“You sure about that?”
“Yes. That trip was the foundation of my never-again wilderness policy.”
“Right.”
“How could you forget that?”
“I don’t know.” The truth is he does it constantly. He is always looking back, living more in memories than the present, often altering them to make them prettier. To make them perfect. Nostalgia is as much an analgesic for him as alcohol. He says finally, “Maybe watching shooting stars with my girls felt like a better memory.”
She tosses her napkin on her plate and leans back in her chair. “I went by our old house recently. Wow, it’s changed. You ever do that?”
“Every now and then.”
In actuality, he still drives past their old house anytime he has business in Jersey. He and Julia lost it in a foreclosure the year after Meghan died, and today it barely resembles the place they lived in. The trees are taller, fuller, greener. There’s an addition above the garage, and a young family lives there now. The entire façade