We Want What We Want Read online

  Bridget laughed.

  “Bitches be crazy,” Angela went on, shaking her head and making air quotes with her fingers. Bridget didn’t know what, or whom, she was quoting.

  Angela sighed. “I shouldn’t complain, though,” she said. “He keeps us in frogs and fresh sheets.”

  Bridget laughed again. She was enjoying herself more than she’d expected to. They ordered another bottle of wine, which Angela chose because it was organic and sulfate-free. “I can’t taste the difference,” Bridget said.

  “You’ll thank me tomorrow,” Angela said.

  Around them, the hotel swelled with people sitting alone, stroking their phones with one hand while eating or drinking with the other. Even when it was full, the place was quiet. By ten o’clock, the bar was empty again and the street outside was dark. It was a government city, sedate in its schedules.

  “I’m not sure I can drive,” Bridget said to Angela.

  “Why don’t you come upstairs for a while first?”

  She nodded. The room was decorated in surprisingly offensive shades of mauve and green. Angela’s things were flung everywhere, her suitcase open on the closet floor, handouts from the day’s seminars scattered on the desk, wet towels dampening the carpet. Bridget lay down on the bed, and Angela sat next to her. It seemed lovely to be there, with her head on Angela’s lap.

  “I’m sorry you’re sick,” she said, and Angela nodded, stroking her hair. Bridget turned then, and wrapped her arms around Angela’s waist. The two of them fell asleep that way, body to body, flushed cheek against warm leg, an embrace that was not about sex but not not about it either, a hunger for touch somehow satisfied by this middle distance, this mutual understanding. Later, when Bridget thought about the night in the hotel, she would remember how Angela, down at the bar, had said with sudden sobriety, “Nobody takes care of me,” and then laughed, dismissing her self-pity with a toss of her pale hair.

  * * *

  —

  They swore to keep in better touch, but didn’t. Once Angela was back in Vancouver, her social media accounts took a turn from organic cooking and home decorating to alternative health and New Age spirituality. She was doing chelation and oxygen therapy. She smudged her home with sage. Her thinking seemed dire. She was preoccupied with the tensions in the Middle East and believed that global conflict was imminent. She adopted two cats because she wanted her son to experience as much joy as possible before the world came to an end. But she and her son both turned out to be allergic, and #catproblems accompanied most of her posts.

  Then came a year when Sam—always the steady one, the implacable base—almost died of heart trouble. For months, Bridget took care of him and their family, and, when he was better, their marriage was better, too; it had solidified under the stress, like a building settling on its foundation. During this time Bridget rarely went online. She found it hurtful to see other people’s smiling, healthy families or, even worse, to hear about lives that seemed as fragile as her own; she didn’t need to be reminded that everyone’s happiness was in jeopardy.

  When she checked back in, Angela was gone. All her accounts had disappeared. An email sent to her in-box went unanswered. Bridget didn’t have her phone number and couldn’t find one listed. One evening, while the kids were in the basement watching a movie with their friends, she sat down and wrote a letter by hand, mailing it to the last address she could find for Angela. “We’re all fine now. Just wondering what’s new. How are those pesky cats?”

  As she had so many years earlier, Angela wrote back quickly. She no longer had the cats, she wrote, with a lack of explanation that was slightly ominous. She and Charles had gotten divorced, “on good terms more or less,” and she now lived in a little cottage outside the city. “A little cottage” sounded to Bridget like a euphemism for something, though she wasn’t sure what. Angela had decided that her symptoms were caused by an allergy to electricity, so she lived without it. She had a woodstove and candles. She didn’t use computers and was reading a lot. “I feel a bit better every day,” she wrote, a statement that seemed to herald its own contradiction. Of her son she said little.

  Bridget wrote back, wishing her well, and the correspondence seemed to die a natural death; there was no habitual rhythm in Bridget’s life for such letters. When, a year later, her cell phone lit up with a Vancouver area code, she assumed that it was Angela, but the voice that greeted her was low and commanding and male.

  “This is Dr. Charles Adebayo. We met at my wedding,” he said.

  “Yes, I remember,” Bridget said, confused. She was sitting in her car, listening to music, while Mellie fought her way through a soccer game in terrible blustery weather.

  “My former wife is ill,” Charles said. There was a solemnity to his voice that was hard to reconcile with the laughing man of years ago. It was the voice of a man who’d had practice speaking about difficult topics and knew to provide them careful containment. “She would like for you to visit, and I would like so as well.”

  “Is this the electricity thing?” Bridget asked. She looked out over the dismal soccer field, more mud than grass, where teenage girls were flinging themselves around with abandon. Mellie was her aggressive child, a lover of tackles and hits; Bobby always played defense. They were both more wholesome, her children, than she’d had any right to expect.

  On the phone, Charles sighed, a long, soft note. “We are not sure,” he said. “Angela continues to believe that she suffers from electromagnetic hypersensitivity. I believe she may have other significant health problems, but she refuses to see a doctor or be tested. We hope that you can persuade her to do so.”

  “Me? Why?” Bridget said. She felt capable only of single syllables, beyond which tens, hundreds of lengthier questions loomed.

  “Because you are her best friend.”

  On the field, Mellie went down hard, and Bridget involuntarily straightened in her seat, but a few seconds later her daughter bounced up again, laughing. She shook her ankle and high-stepped in a circle, as if she were doing the hokey-pokey. And then everyone was running again. Bridget caught her breath, sometimes, when she saw how athletic her daughter was, how reckless her grace, how fully she possessed her youth.

  The other thing happening in the car—the phone call, the man’s voice, his bewildering request—did not seem real compared to Mellie’s loping stride as she deftly stole the ball and toyed with it, her skittering feet driving it toward the net and then past the goalie. Mellie clasped her hands over her head and glanced over at the car. Bridget honked the horn. I saw.

  “Are you there?” Charles said. “The situation may be critical. We request that you come as soon as you are able.”

  Bridget didn’t say, “I haven’t talked to Angela in years.” She didn’t say, “I would have thought she had closer friends.” She simply agreed to answer the summons.

  * * *

  —

  She landed in a drizzle of rain that continued all the way from the airport to the hospital where Charles worked, obscuring the city behind a swish of windshield wipers. Traffic moved slowly and she saw nothing but other cars and a horizonless sky.

  Angela’s son was waiting at the hospital, too. He was all gangly legs in skinny jeans, his eyes half-hidden beneath his hair. Charles wore a purple shirt and yellow tie, strangely buoyant colors that contrasted sharply with the gravity of his expression. Over the shirt he wore a white coat. He gripped his son’s thin shoulder with a strength that was clearly both dominant and reassuring.

  They drank coffee and talked about Angela. Charles mentioned Angela’s weight loss and her “ideation.” The son’s eyes were partly closed, as if he were trying to fall asleep. At last Charles wrote down directions to the cottage—“you won’t find it with a GPS”—and suggested that she arrive in the early morning, when Angela was most hospitable. He didn’t explain what he meant by “hospitable.” T
hen he asked his son whether he had any messages for his mother. The boy shook his head.

  * * *

  —

  The drive to Angela’s cottage took her through emerald hills made brilliant by the previous day’s rain. The city fell away, then the suburbs, and then she passed through small towns with no posted names. The road Charles had instructed her to take dwindled from asphalt to gravel to mud, and Bridget began to worry that her economy rental car wasn’t up to the task. Her phone reception shrank to a single bar. Then the road ended. Charles had said, “You will have to park and walk.” She stepped out into woods that smelled like fir and mushrooms, earthy and chilled, and hoped that the tiny clearing between two trees was the start of a trail. She crashed through it, the loudest thing around. Everything else was still, as if some kind of bad magic had blanketed the place. But, before she could get too worried, she saw Angela’s cottage, a normal and well-maintained post-and-beam with geraniums in planters out front.

  “It is best if you approach her gently,” Charles had said.

  Bridget didn’t knock on the door. She stood in front of the house, allowing herself to be seen. How she knew to do this she couldn’t have said. It was a calculation made on instinct. There was a flicker of movement at a window, and Bridget turned in a full circle, taking in the dense and quiet woods, the pine branches dripping, the surprisingly rapidly drifting clouds. Sam and the kids were visiting his parents this weekend; they had planned a cookout and a horror-movie marathon with the cousins. They would hardly think of her.

  Behind her, the reluctant opening of a wooden door.

  Angela stood silhouetted like a girl in a fairy tale. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and her blond hair was in a long braid, the way she used to wear it. She was very thin. One hand rested on some kind of machine from which tubing ran up her arms, under her nose, and around the top of her head. Her whole face twitched, either with tremors or an attempt to smile; Bridget wasn’t sure. “Do you know me?” she said.

  Angela nodded. Her eyes were cloudy, marbled. “I shouldn’t let you in,” she said. “For your own good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m in self-isolation. What I have may be contagious.”

  Bridget didn’t ask what she had. “I don’t care,” she said. “I want to see you.”

  Angela turned and disappeared into the house. The open door was not an invitation. Bridget spent some moments staring at the darkness where her friend had been. After a while, a window above her opened and a sealed plastic package was thrown down to the ground. It was a medical kit, which, when she tore it open, turned out to contain a surgical mask, plastic gloves, and shoe covers. She put it all on obediently and waited until Angela came back to the door and nodded, satisfied.

  Bridget followed Angela through a foyer and into a dim room; the far wall held large windows but they were crowded with greenery that let in almost no light. As her eyes adjusted, she saw that the room was comfortable, with couches and armchairs and a woodstove in the corner. Angela settled into one of the chairs with the machine at her feet like a pet.

  “Charles must have called you,” she said. Her voice was raspy, asthmatic, and it made her tone hard to interpret.

  “He did,” Bridget said. She didn’t want to talk about Charles, didn’t want the freight of marital disagreement in the room. She leaned forward, putting her hands on her knees, and saw her friend recoil. “Tell me how you are,” she said.

  Angela stared past her. “There’s a light,” she said. “When I close my eyes at night, I see it and think it’s waiting for me. Sometimes I think it’s my father. You know he died.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I remember when your father died,” Angela said. Her eyes grew sharper. “You changed so much. I didn’t understand at the time, but I do now.”

  Even years later, the mention of her father shifted a weight in Bridget’s stomach, tilted her center of gravity. The sadness of his death was still a sinkhole that she could fall into and be swallowed by.

  “My mother got married again,” she told Angela. “To a dentist named Dennis. Dennis the dentist. She has these beautiful movie-star teeth now. Veneers, I guess they are? She seems happy. They have a time-share in Florida. So.”

  Angela bared her own teeth, which were not beautiful, small and brown, little emblems of decay. “Would you like some tea?” she said.

  “Yes,” Bridget said. “Let’s have tea. You rest. I’ll make it.”

  She had anticipated putting together a tray of biscuits or bread and jam, brewing a pot, and serving it with sugar and milk. But there was no food in Angela’s cottage. The cupboards held only bottles: capsules of bee pollen, vitamins, apple-cider vinegar. Next to a teapot on the counter was a bowl holding what looked like loose tea leaves; they smelled like mushrooms, like the forest outside. She boiled water on the woodstove, brought a tray into the living room with two cups. Angela’s legs were now tucked beneath her. Her head lolled to the side at a violent angle, as if her neck could no longer support its weight. She was asleep.

  Bridget left the tea. She took off the surgical mask, hiked to the car, and drove to the nearest store, where she bought some root vegetables and rice and fruit. Back at the cottage, Angela was still asleep in the chair, and Bridget arranged a blanket over her lap, tucking it in at the sides. Then she cooked the vegetables and strained them into a broth. She cooked the rice to a bland pudding. She mashed sweet potatoes into a puree. When Angela woke up, Bridget spooned the broth into her mouth, wiping away dribbles with a tea towel. Angela did not object; she parted her lips like a baby. Later, Bridget moved her to the couch. Bridget herself slept in Angela’s bed upstairs, which was narrow and hard. The next day, more broth, a little rice. She read aloud to Angela from the only material on hand, old copies of Chatelaine and Reader’s Digest that must have been left behind by some previous occupant; she couldn’t imagine Angela buying them. She read recipes, “Laughter, the Best Medicine” columns, stories about brave pets and remarkable women. It was hard to tell whether Angela was listening; she mostly lay back with her eyes closed, her fingers playing idly with the tubing of her machine.

  Once evening fell, Bridget lit a fire in the stove and fed Angela again. When she was about to go upstairs, Angela grabbed her hand and said, “Please, no.” So she took some pillows and cushions from the armchairs and made a bed for herself on the floor.

  In the morning, Angela’s eyes looked brighter. She disconnected herself from the machine long enough to take a short walk around the house. Afterward, they sat outside and drank Angela’s terrible tea, which tasted like moss and feet. Angela had allowed Bridget to dispense with the mask, saying only, “I suppose you’ve been exposed. I just hope your immune system is stronger than mine.”

  “Does your son come here to visit you?” Bridget asked her. She didn’t mention that she had seen him in the city. Angela’s eyes brimmed with tears, and she shook her head.

  “I lost him,” she said.

  “But why?” Bridget said. After two nights at the cottage, her eyes and skin ached. She couldn’t stop thinking about hamburgers and red wine. She wondered what Sam and the kids were eating, watching, what jokes they’d be making later that she wouldn’t understand.

  “Bridge,” Angela said. It was a sunny, windy day and her fine hair was lifted in the breeze, floating up and away as if it wanted to escape her. “You must understand,” she said. Her voice was patronizing, kind, and sad, as if she were a parent explaining death to a child. “With what I have,” she said, “I’m past the point of no return.”

  “Come home with me,” Bridget said impulsively. “Stay at my house. We’ll watch movies on the couch and eat junk food.” She could feel Angela recoil but kept going, unable to stop. “We’ll drink wine and stay up too late. You can meet my kids. You’ll like them, Angela. They’ll make you laugh.”

>   They were holding hands now. Some geese flew overhead in a V formation, and the trees swayed back and forth, as if they, too, were seeking touch. In one of Angela’s magazines, Bridget had read an article about a scientist who had proven that trees could form a kind of friendship, twining their roots together. Sometimes one tree would curve its branches away from the other’s, so that its friend got enough sun to survive. Angela said nothing, and the trees fell silent, too, as if to make sure that Bridget heard her refusal.

  * * *

  —

  She didn’t see Angela again. She flew home to her family, leaving the cottage stocked with soups and stews, and fell gladly back into the mad routine of extracurricular activities and conference calls and neighborhood dinner parties. For a while she tried to stay in touch with Charles, but he never sounded pleased to hear from her; she understood that she had failed him. He finally removed Angela from the cottage by force, and she spent time in and out of hospitals. She didn’t respond to Bridget’s letters, and Charles said she refused to use a phone.

  “How long do you think she can go on like this?” Bridget asked him the last time they spoke.

  “I cannot hazard a guess,” he said, and hung up.

  Bridget stood in her kitchen, watching the wind twist maple leaves off a tree in the yard. The kids were upstairs in their rooms. Bobby was going away to college next year; Mellie the year after that. Sam was traveling more for work these days. Bridget would soon be stripped back to herself. Sometimes she thought of this aloneness as a luxury. Sometimes she was afraid of it. Sometimes she saw her life as a tender thing that was separate from herself, a tiny animal she had happened upon by chance one day and decided to raise. It was terrifying to think how small it was, how wild, how easily she could fit it in the palm of her hand.