The Year of Second Chances, page 3
Gabe’s pink-tipped fingers had pressed a simple gold band into the woven palm of my mitten.
“We should do it together, then,” he said. “We can go back and grow something.”
I had wept with happiness. Gabe wiped my tears before they could freeze.
Now, I plucked wayward grass from the soft soil surrounding the zucchini, added six gourds to the pile of tomatoes. We had recorded the growth of our little backyard garden meticulously, made decisions based on changing heat and rainfall patterns. This year it hadn’t thrived without him. I tried to mimic what I’d seen him do, but I couldn’t protect the waxy leaves from getting blanched by too much sun, couldn’t prevent the heavy rainfall from uprooting the kale and the spinach altogether. I tried to imagine someone else kneeling beside me, someone who wasn’t Gabe, and saw only a blank outline. Someone who might want me to do dumb things like go to professional sports games—overpriced, Gabe and I always agreed—or someone who wore too much cologne or tried to get me to listen to his podcasts. Someone who might want kids, and those kids would come out looking nothing like the kid I imagined, the kid with Gabe’s eyes and hair. Aren’t you curious? I heard a little voice in my head. Sure. Curious like you look over the ledge of a deep well and wonder what’s at the bottom. Curious like you look up at the stars when you’re camping in the north and get your breath taken away by the distant, colorless void.
I stomped through the still-dewy grass toward the back door. Maybe someday, I would tell Theo. Maybe next year, though the only thing on my calendar for next year was combing through Gabe’s graphing notebooks, using whatever he’d jotted to return the garden to its former glory. The thought comforted me.
“You want zucchini bread?” I asked Theo, setting my bucket inside the back door.
“You have to read this,” Theo said.
“I’m going to delete it.” I kicked off my clogs.
“No, you’re not.” Theo sounded smug, but when I looked at him, he was smiling gently.
I sighed, braced myself, and leaned over his shoulder. The site page was navy blue and pale pink, with blocky font separated into squared-off sections, each with a bolded prompt and what was supposed to be my answer. A simple bubble logo shone in the upper left corner next to my name and photo.
Robin L, 33, Brokenridge
Describe yourself in five words or less . . .
Just let me do it.
A huff of a laugh escaped me. I could hear myself saying that exact refrain, let me do it, reaching for a tangle of cords over Gabe’s shoulder as he fumbled with frustration, making the rounds to each colleague who had filled out their expenses incorrectly, sliding the restaurant’s financial records toward myself as I sat across the desk from my mom.
Top three accomplishments . . .
Certified Best Birthday Gift-Giver Ever. Self-identified Sudoku champion.
“Self-identified. Psh.”
Theo turned his head.
I pointed at the section I was reading. “I got on the leaderboard, like, three times on my app.”
Zucchini bread won Best Baked Good at the Lee County Fair four years in a row—would have been five but someone couldn’t resist eating it and it got disqualified . . .
“That was Gabe who ate it, right?” Theo said.
I nodded, smiling at the memory of finding him standing in the baked-goods tent, eating the loaf with his fingers, not a care in the world. “He thought the judging was already over.”
Three things you wish you could change about the world . . .
Only three?
The smile on my face grew.
I’m looking for . . .
Handyman. Iron Chef. Green thumb.
“Of course,” I muttered. He’d basically described himself. He wasn’t wrong.
My eyes wandered back to the top of the profile, toward the photo. It had been a while since I’d seen it, but I recognized it from the lock screen on Gabe’s phone. He’d taken it from his bike. He went out on long rides every day, but on weekends he would ride slow so I could come along on my secondhand Schwinn, him weaving easily as I pumped beside him. That day he had called my name. I’d turned, saw he was pointing his camera at me, and lifted my hands from the handlebars. My hair had blown back from my face, and I was beaming, a little surprised at my own skill. He’d caught me right as my gaze had locked on him, and you could tell by the look, the happiness in my eyes was about much more than the trick.
Do it as a favor to me, Gabe had said.
Theo watched as I clicked around to the profile’s settings. Make profile visible?
My mouse hovered. Theo grabbed my shoulder excitedly, shaking it. I clicked. He cheered.
For you, I told Gabe in my head. I’ll do it for you.
3
The dorkiest thing about me is . . .
My watch. But no one will be laughing during the apocalypse when I know what time it is.
That night I assembled a collection of sticky pads I’d gotten free from work and sat in Gabe’s old home office with a fruity wine cooler my mom had left in my fridge. Theo and I had tinkered a bit with my online self—but for the most part, the Gabe-approved version of Robin was doing its job. Since making my profile active that morning, I’d received fourteen matches, each with their accompanying message. A pulsing animation of a bubble rested beside each name in the inbox. I began to read their profiles.
Damian R, 28, Minneapolis
My friends call me . . .
Naruto because I run funny lol.
I dream of . . .
Starting my own record label, shout-out to @mplshype on SoundCloud.
Next to Damian’s name, I clicked on one of the animated insects, watching it light up and multiply, fluttering off the screen. I clicked over to the next greeting, reviewing the profile attached:
Hector F, 35, White Bear Lake
A typical day . . .
Working out, eating, work, working out, eating.
My secret is . . .
I’m an open book. Just ask.
I found myself pressing the bubble again, and again, until every message was highlighted, like a combination of an old Barbie computer game and a slot machine at the Red Lyon.
Hi, sweetie, wrote someone named Jens T. How are you? Pretty good, I said. His profile had a picture of him with a beautiful, chubby orange cat. I like your cat, I told him. That’s Tito, he said. Cute, I replied and returned to the endless stream of profiles.
Devansh M, 38, Minneapolis
Favorite recipe . . .
My mom’s daal or hot wings, depends on my mood.
At a wedding, I’ll be the one . . .
Why don’t you bring me as your plus-one and find out???
Another chime. To my message complimenting his cute cat, Jens had responded, You have a pussy you want to show me? He added an emoji with its tongue sticking out. I choked on a bite of lasagna. Um, no, I typed and deleted the message chain.
Your cute, said Damian R. His photos were different versions of the same, sleepy selfie. You’re pretty cute, too, I responded, cautious now.
I refreshed the inbox. Another wave of messages.
Thomas R, 30, Saint Paul
Why I’m here . . .
Trying to find someone to fuck me before we all die.
Currently binge watching . . .
This app is a hellhole, I want to die, seriously kill me.
Thomas R, I wrote on a yellow note after reviewing his profile. Deeply depressed.
Your profile is funny, I responded to his initial greeting, hoping that his pleas to be killed were a cynical joke. I guess, said Thomas. So what did you today, he added, without punctuation. I began to respond, paused, and saw Thomas had already written, I would fuck you, for the record. Prolly wouldn’t be able to keep it up though. I felt my eyes widen at the image he was conjuring. Sorry, Thomas added. I’m kinda drunk lol. I tried to shake off the thought with my own sugary gulp of wine cooler and deleted the message.
Damian had gotten back to me; he was very suspicious. He accused me of being a bot and a scammer. I’m not, I’m real, I tried to tell him, but he had blocked my account.
Good god, I texted Theo. What the hell did you get me into?
No response. It was a Saturday night—he was probably at the Red Lyon again. All the other friends I could contact for advice were those that Gabe and I shared. As much as I’d told Theo I was immune, I did care what people thought—if not for me, then for the sake of do-no-wrong Mayor Gabe. That’s what he didn’t really consider when he orchestrated this, not only how I would be perceived by his Brokenridge fan club but what it said about him, me being so eager to forget. What it said about our marriage. It was good, goddamn it.
The best.
A wave of anger bubbled up as I clicked through more profiles. Why was he making me do this?
Men in groups of men with suits. Men in the driver’s seat of their cars. Looking for a baddie with her own money. Just looking for my best friend. I animated more bubbles. I threw sticky notes with names in the trash.
Their eyes all look so sad, I texted Theo.
Just pick one, he replied.
But I was afraid of poking the bears, afraid of being propositioned again. Was I a prude? To be fair, the closest I had ever been to dating was going to the Walmart parking lot at various Brokenridge boys’ invitation, watching them do Jackass-inspired stunts in my periphery, pretending to ignore them.
Hi. Hey. Hey. What’s up. Wyd. Are you real? Good evening.
Only one Bubbl message was more than one sentence. Colin Q: Who’s got two thumbs and thinks you’re cute? This guy!
What about this one? I screenshotted Colin Q’s profile and sent it to Theo. In his featured picture, he was standing in front of a Christmas tree, arm around an older lady who was probably his grandmother, both of them wearing Santa hats.
Thank you, I wrote cautiously to Colin Q. I like your Santa hat. God, I hoped he wouldn’t interpret that sexually. What if he was nice? What if I began to like him? This is how we would have to tell people we met—hunched over each other’s photos and images of digital bubbles.
The night I fell in love with Gabe, it was the Friday before winter break our first year at the University of Minnesota. I had come back from a Nutrition final to a voice mail. My father had had his third heart attack. Welp, kid, Daddy went to . . . I remember my mother repeating in the recording, trying to finish the sentence Daddy went to heaven, and there was something so infantile in those words. I remember feeling sick at the thought of driving home, of having to comfort her. I had lost him, too, I kept thinking. I wanted to be a baby, too.
And yet by crying first, my mom had somehow beat me to it. Someone would have to be sober and calm in the coming weeks, for Theo’s sake. But that would be tomorrow, I figured that night, so I’d drunk most of a fifth of Captain Morgan with my hallmates.
At some point I’d tried to wander home from a party. The windchill was probably in the single digits but all I felt was a warm, deep-end-of-the-swimming-pool feeling. Ahead of me, a tall figure in a dark coat crossed the street, ducking against the cold. He had seemed familiar, but in my drunken state, I couldn’t believe it. This was who I encounter in the middle of the night, in the sprawling metro area of Minneapolis–Saint Paul: Gabe Carr.
I would call Gabe my high school sweetheart, but for the four years we were two locker blocks away, we barely exchanged a word. There are yearbook pictures of us from that time: Gabe, rail thin in dorky khakis, leather bracelet of a wannabe punk, holding the most unpunk thing imaginable—a voter-registration clipboard.
Me on the other end of the yearbook, front and center with the rest of the Future Business Leaders of America, short and compact like Mom, Scandinavian-pale arms sticking out of a supposedly professional sleeveless number I found on the clearance rack at Kohl’s.
That night, he and I seemed to be the only two people moving through the campus. As he pulled out the keys to open the door to his dorm, I called to him, my cold-numbed lips barely able to form his name. “Gabe Carr.”
He turned, squinted. He was wearing that same thin-lipped smirk he wore in the yearbook, a look I would eventually fall in love with. “Robin Lindstrom?”
“I was lost, so I followed you,” I said, shivering. “You didn’t see me?”
“I thought I saw someone, but I wasn’t sure.”
“You should be more careful,” I said drunkenly.
His eyes darted back to the glowing entryway of the dorm. “You want to come in for a second?”
We’d sat on two love seats facing each other in the dorm’s lobby, our coats still on, Gabe’s headphones around his neck. His jaw had grown sharper, I remember noticing, and his face and lips had filled out to balance his jutting nose. His lankiness seemed to have more substance, too. There were veins in his hands I hadn’t noticed before, shoulders that had spread underneath his wool coat. We began to talk, shallowly at first, and yet soon I found myself sharing things I hadn’t told anyone else, how afraid I was that I wasn’t smart enough to be there, that I was a hick.
He’d been feeling the same way, he told me, and he was starting to realize he’d been kind of an asshole to everyone he met this year, just to keep them from talking down to him. I was the first person from Brokenridge he’d run into, he said, and it was such a relief to be seen as his old self, his real self.
“And who is your real self?” I had asked. In the distance, we could hear more partygoers returning, laughing, making selections from the vending machines.
“I don’t know what to call it,” I remember Gabe saying, smiling as he lifted his thin hands lamely, color rising in his cheeks. “Why—what would you say?”
I should have expected the question, but I couldn’t answer. He didn’t know what to call his real self, and I didn’t know, either. But right then, Gabe was the only person who could understand what the Dad-shaped hole would look like in our family, in our town, in me. Tears ran down my cheeks. Gabe’s eyebrows knit together in confusion. After a silence, I told him.
“When?” he asked.
“Today,” I said and wiped my nose.
Gabe stood up from his love seat. I remember bracing for panic or shame that I had revealed too much for a high school acquaintance but found none. He made his way around the coffee table that separated us and sat on the cushion next to mine. Then he lifted his arms, waiting. His face looked stiff and nervous, but he kept them raised. I leaned, and his arms landed around my shoulders. I circled mine around his waist. He smelled like wool and men’s deodorant. We were still wearing our coats, I realized.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, and I could hear the words through his chest. “I liked your dad. Everyone liked your dad.”
In my teenage mind, that’s when it began to feel like fate that he should be the one I followed home. I found that I liked his arms around me and mine curling around him, the way I could wrap them fully around his torso, how it felt to have his thin frame against my chest.
In the morning, I woke up when Gabe’s giant metalhead roommate had walked in from the shower and found us spooning on top of the covers, still fully clothed. Over watery coffee and biscuits in the Union, I’d told Gabe I should probably get on the road, that I would have to return home that day to start planning for Dad’s service, and maybe I’d see him around in Brokenridge over Christmas. I remember his brown eyes following me as I stood and refastened my coat. “I was going to go home, too,” he said, his jaw tight as he set aside his nerves. “You want company for the drive?”
From that day on, Gabe and I would be inseparable, first as shadows that followed each other through our childhood houses over winter break—Gabe doing the dishes without being asked after the funeral reception, me walking his parents’ German shepherds on lung-freezing January nights—and then as fixtures in each other’s lives as we returned to school, my mother requesting I pass the phone to Gabe, Gabe’s father asking what kind of meat I preferred for Easter, both as assumed plus-ones for various cousins’ weddings. In an effort to find privacy, we would spend precious gas money driving to small campgrounds we scouted on the internet, finding new ways to bend in the back of my car to accommodate Gabe’s height, marveling in the strange awakenings that arose from accidental touches, and when the accidental touches became purposeful, the new sounds arising from our throats, the new reasons to visit the drugstore.
My laptop speakers trilled. Colin Q had replied to my comment about his hat. My nana wears it better.
I clicked through Colin Q’s other pictures. He had a pleasant, watery-blue gaze, and sandy-colored thinning hair. He seemed to be onstage a lot. Maybe he was an actor.
After that first year together, I knew I wanted Gabe’s thin hips against mine every night of my life, his arms secure across my chest, his long hands playing with my hair. I wanted him as a constant, functioning part of me, breathing air into my lungs, jigsawing my every thought and feeling with his own. It seemed insane, to attach to someone so immediately with such force, such certainty. Even as young as I was, I knew it would make more sense to sort out my feelings when my mind was less clouded with grief. But why wait, I remember thinking. Why delay?
Would you like to go out on a date? I asked Colin Q.
Wow, Colin Q wrote. He began to type, then stopped.
I slammed the laptop closed.
As I rinsed my dishes, my heart beat against my chest too hard, as if it were scolding me. I picked up Gabe’s Far Side coffee cup, which I’d been drinking out of every day since he went into hospice. Sometimes I still wrapped myself in his heavy coat. Sometimes I would put my thumb on the worn buttons of his old game controllers.
I pulled up the Bubbl app on my phone. A reply from Colin Q. I like your style! Meeting would be fun!
