Both of them

“I miss you, Nattie.” When she said this, resting her glossy head on my shoulder, I almost cried. They would have been big, messy sobs if I had given in, sour-tasting tears of frustration, of sleeplessness, of loneliness.

“Remember senior year?” I said instead, choosing the happy past over my lacking present. “Remember picking me up in the green comet every single day of the whole year, and how we used to sing along with the radio so loud we were both hoarse by the time we got to school?”

Funny how this bed seems so empty, so great-big, when I crawl into it at the end of one exhausting day after another, and funny how when Taylor finally stumbles into it at three or four in the morning, smelling like two packs of Marlboros tinged with bitter sweat, he seems to be a thousand miles away, his huddled form so distant I’d need a map and compass just to touch him. I liked it better when we were sharing the double bed he’d had since he was a little boy, before Walker and Diana surprised us with this super-sized mattress when we came home from Hawaii. Back then, sleeping was a close thing, a near one, and I always woke up with Taylor’s strong body curled around me, his silky sunshine-smelling hair tickling my chin, his head comfortingly heavy on my chest. In that bed I could pretend I had lived his whole life through with him—from dreamy little elf boy to silly, self-conscious fifteen-year-old, all the way to today, to grown up man, to husband and to father. But in this bed there’s no resonance of his past: there’s just the practicality of the real world, of today and of him and of me, and it echoes so loud in the empty space between us that most mornings I wake up deaf and dumb from it.

Now though, with Kate leaning on the dark cherry headboard next to me, Comedy Central blasting from the plasma screen across the room, surrounded by haphazard stacks of six months’ worth of Cosmo, Vogue, and Lucky, it at last feels like a cozy, homey place. Like someplace I wish I didn’t ever have to leave.

“Whenever I think of senior year, Mrs. Parker’s face always flashes in front of me and I can’t even imagine why.” Kate buried her face in the spine of her magazine, stifling her giggles with its glossy slick pages. “I still can’t even begin to guess why she hated us so much, even when we didn’t do anything wrong. Well. Anything that she knew about, anyways.”

“How about that time she made us spend an entire week sitting in the hallway writing essays about the importance of education, and all we did was flirt with the hot student teacher from across the hall?” As I spoke, a single brown drip slid down the side of the Ben and Jerry’s fudge ripple pint we’d gorged on earlier, and I watched it soak through the clean white of my still crisply new wedding sheets, probably staining its way down to the mattress pad, to the mattress under that.

I could tell what she was thinking, just by the slant of her eyebrows, by the evil grin that curled the edges of her lips. “Natalie, sweetheart, showing him your tits through the window in the classroom door hardly counts as flirting.”

“Excuse Me! That was totally you.” We both did it, actually, a hundred thousand years ago when we were stupid and silly and felt drunk every minute of every day, drunk in a way that I’ve only just pinned down in my long silent months mostly alone with a crying baby and basic cable—it wasn’t from the beer we drank or the pot we smoked. It was from the power of being young, being beautiful, and being free and crazy and capable of absolutely anything that could be imagined.

“I’ve never had much of anything here to show, not even enough impress a student teacher at Newman high, I don’t think.” I ran my fingers through Kate’s long hair, smooth and pliant just like it always was, back when I saw her every day and never stopped for one heartbeat being jealous of her exotic pale face and the perfect, swooping brows she never once had to wax.

“I can think of someone who likes that region ridiculously well….”

“I never thought it would be true, you know. Not really.” She flopped dramatically into a prone position on the bed, dislodging a shower of magazines that fell with a series of dull clumps onto my shiny new hardwood floor. “Which is weird, because.... Hi. Look at me. Being hot was never in question, but somehow it didn’t make sense. That someday I’d love someone so much it would set me free, in this sick, Hallmark cardy way—free not to care that I was flat-chested or had bad breath in the morning or was bitchy when the painters were in.”

We were silent for a while, watching Jimmy Fallon on an old SNL repeat and just being comfortable together. It was always like this with Kate, easy and silly and fun and serious all at once, and I had missed her so much. There’s no one in Tulsa who belongs to me like she does, and no one in Tulsa that I belong to like I do to her. We were the two wise men in fake beards the December too few kids volunteered for the Christmas pageant, after all. We dressed up together every year for a decade, for more, first for trick-or-treating, then for for prom after prom. The year her mom and dad got divorced she spent every night in my bed for six months, and to this day I don’t think either set of our parents know it. She practiced field hockey with me, even though she was on varsity when we were freshmen and so much better than me that it wasn’t even funny, and I went to all her auditions with her. If I had a sister, I’ve always known it would be impossible to be any closer to her than I am to Kate.

With him, it’s different. When I spend time with Taylor, I always feel like a super-strong vacuum is sucking all the oxygen out of the room, making me helpless and woozy and dizzy even when he just looks at me, making me explode from the inside out when he touches me. Being with Kate is the exact opposite, like she makes it so I can do anything in the world I want, maybe even fly if I tried hard enough.

“Isn’t it stupid, what we used to worry about? I can’t imagine having the energy to care. I haven’t shaved my legs in literally three weeks, and I sleep with Taylor all the same. Because…whatever. Because legs get hairy, and that’s fine.”

“Jesus! If senior-year-you heard twenty-year-old-you saying that, you would have killed yourself.” She’s moving the drippy ice cream pint to a pile of magazines on the floor, absently rubbing at the already-set stain on the sheets.

“Yeah? How about you? What were you saying the other day about your roommate being so loud you can’t study? Since when has my friend Kate ever been interested in seeing the inside of a book?” I tickled her side, right where I knew it would make her writhe away from my touch.

“Since I left high school, of course. Without your bad influence, I returned to my normal, bookish self.” If only either of us had a bookish bone in our bodies, things would have been different. I would be in college, her roommate, probably, studying design at MIT, or philosophy at the Sorbonne, or maybe the ancient near east at the University of Chicago. I wonder if we’d even still manage to be friends in a world so twisted and warped to have produced versions of Kate and Natalie that loved books.

“God. Don’t make me laugh. The only reason you passed English junior year was because you watched so much Wishbone on PBS.”

“Now I love it, though. School.” Kate headed off my impending chortle with an elbow to the ribs.   “I love the books and the papers and the lab assignments, because it’s like all of a sudden it’s about thinking, not about learning. Which is what we’ve been doing all along, even if Mrs. Parker thought that together the two of us added up to the antichrist.” Her voice petered away to mystified silence. This time neither of us were watching the TV, or looking at the magazines, or doing anything but taking in the spacious, nearly-bare room I’ve shared with Taylor for almost a year.

“I can’t even believe it, Nattie. But I think it finally happened, what we always wanted—” She whispered it like the most amazing, most precious secret ever, her voice quiet and soft and awed. “We’re finally grownups. For real. No more high school, no more dim inbred Georgia boys. And this. You’ve got a house. I live in fourteen square feet of cinderblock hell, but you have a spare bedroom and a Jacuzzi tub and a husband, for God’s sake.”

“And someday, I’ll have you as a sister-in-law and we’ll have barbeques every Sunday and our daughters will be best friends. Can you imagine the terrible duo as parents, Kate? The masters of the bedtime and the puke bucket.” I rolled onto my side next to her, smiling wide for the first time in forever.

“Sicko! Parenthood isn’t all fascism and bodily fluids.”

“It sort of is, though. And you should believe me, because we both know I learned about it the hard way.” My mother always said that God arranged for the gag reflex to disappear as soon as girls had babies, but I’ve since learned she’s a liar. Babies are smelly, moist in unexpected places, and one traumatic bodily fluid incident after another. And motherhood isn’t the world’s thickest set of rose colored glasses, either. It doesn’t hide all gross badnesses. But maybe she was right in a way—because when I hold Ezra’s warm, sturdy little body to my breast, it’s not disgusting like I thought it would be. It hurts a little when he bites, but it’s mostly magic. It’s me doing what a million generations have done before me, even if I’m imperfect and flighty and can’t really do long division. I’m sustaining life out of nothing, using only this body that I used to hate for not being tall and blonde and curvy.

“If you had a time machine, would you go back? To senior year, maybe. Or eighth grade?” Kate’s sticking her unimaginably long legs straight into the air, bracing her lower back with her hands as she straightens them perfectly, gracefully, an Olympic gymnast in my bed.

Sometimes I think I might do it. To go back home and have my room all to myself again, not filled up with mom’s sewing supplies like it was the last time I was in town. To have time to catch fireflies and to play soccer in front of the middle school, to go home to parents who paid the bills and tucked me into bed at night, to a healthy meal I didn’t have to make or convince someone else to eat. But things were different when I had that life, and mostly they weren’t better. “If it meant I had to go back to eighth grade as it really was, I wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t ever be without him again.”

“'Him who?’ is the question, though.”

“Both of them, stupid. Both of them.” Before my words had a chance to dissipate into the cool late-afternoon stillness, the steady beats of footfalls on the stairs broke into the room, shattering the stillness of our shared secrets.

“Gesh. It’s like all my dreams come true—the two greatest loves of my life in one bed!” it was Taylor, of course, and the breeze of hot, smoky sweet air that is his aura blanketed the room. He stood in the doorway for a second, watching the two of us sprawled carelessly about, and smiled a special smile just for me before rocketing himself between us, snuggling down into the bed, down into both of our embraces.

“Zac would kill me if he came in right now. Kill me dead, a bloody pulp on your new floor, Nattie.” I pressed an easy kiss on his heated temple, and watched Kate do the same across from me. I don’t know what I would do if they didn’t like each other, the only two people in the whole world who add up to be my other half. But I don’t need to worry about it, even if Kate doesn’t quite have the ring to prove her membership in the Hanson family. Even if she and Zac aren't heading headlong for matrimony, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars, I know Taylor would have accepted her as an integral part of me, and now an integral part of him, too.

“It would be worth it, almost.”

“Worth losing me forever?!?” He’s scandalized, playful, one hand slipping up under my shirt.

“But before I lost you, I’d have you.” This time I was the whispering one, breathing my hushed words hot into his ear.

After ten minutes more just lolling there together, a warm ball of happiness on my irreparably rumpled bed sheets, I finally got up. To pee, to return to full grownuphood and put the ice cream in the sink where it wouldn’t do any further damage. Washing my hands afterwards, I heard them talking, soft voices drifting in around the closed door.

“I’m glad you’re here over break, Kate. She misses you so much, sometimes it’s all I can do even to make her smile.” Taylor's voice was serious and sad, almost more so than I’ve ever heard it in the past.

 “She never says she misses me, you know—not ever. But I know she does. And I miss her, too. Like crazy, so bad it hurts.” I could hear the edge of my own tears grinding in Kate’s voice, and in response I did what Taylor had done—ran at full speed to the foot of the bed and threw myself between them.

 “I love you guys. Both of you.” I memorized the feel of the moment, the smell of Kate’s hair and the weight of Taylor’s hand on my stomach, all the little things that I needed to remember forever, would die if I ever forgot.