Chicago, IL. January 1992.
When Jenny Adler shows up to her first day at a new job, she hopes it can be as simple as it is on paper - a few short months of doing paperwork and answering phone calls before she moves on to the next thing. It was never...
IT WAS ALMOST AS IF NOTHING HAD CHANGED between her and Robert. They kept writing their letters, of course, but though it seemed like they were maybe expressing themselves a little more openly now, nothing about it struck Jen as being beyond the ordinary progression of a friendship. Nor would she have wanted to change that—it was becoming a comforting routine to read his letter each day and respond to it.
Their encounters, too, were polite as always – usually just a quick hello, the covert sliding of a letter across her desk, and some light banter if there was time to fit it in. She held true to her word and bought a box of Gushers the morning after they went to the museum and then snuck him a pack out of her purse on Monday morning. He'd made a surprised face when he popped a red one into his mouth and bit into it. She nearly giggled.
"I see what you meant," he told her.
It was in those moments, the times when they got to carry any real face-to-face conversation, that she had a harder time forgetting about what transpired at the museum. The way his fingers felt when they brushed against the back of hers, familiar and wildly unfamiliar at the same time. How safe she had felt for that brief moment she was in his arms. She had fallen asleep that night still thinking of him, his words echoing in her mind. You don't have to hide, Jen.
In a way, she didn't mind having to grapple with this maelstrom of feelings towards him because it meant that for one week, she spent most of her time thinking about him and only him instead of constantly worrying about her parents or Nora or anything else. It really did feel like she'd surrendered over some of her stress to him. The embers of that feeling she once knew, the relief that came when you allowed yourself to be consoled, had blazed back up into a flame and seared away some of her pain. She hadn't fully come down from that emotional high yet.
But all good things had to come to an end eventually. She was due a visit to her parents.
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Jen felt like she'd lost her way at sea and now she was drowning. Or, rather, she'd been doing perfectly fine at sea until a giant kraken came out of nowhere and destroyed her boat.
She kept praying for the drowning to end, for a feeling of numbness or indifference to finally wash over her. Feeling nothing surely had to be better than feeling like this. But it had only been a week since the accident, since everything she knew about her mother was splintered apart, and she woke up each morning feeling even worse than she did the one prior.
She was laying in her bed now, staring at the ceiling. Her head throbbed with the persistent headache she'd given herself trying to absorb it all. She was supposed to be in Italy right now, roaming the streets with her peers. Instead she was here, struggling to learn how to cope with her mom's broken body and her broken family and somehow driving all the way to Chicago for classes on top of all of that.
She knew from the moment she saw her mother in the recovery room that there was no way she'd be able to leave her family now. She looked so fragile, bandaged and bruised and entangled with all sorts of tubes and machines that horrified Jen. The school had been accommodating and quickly found new classes for her, but she had to keep her head buried in her books so that no one would see her cry. She was devastated. By all of it.
