When I looked at the loose white gauze wrapped around her left wrist, it made me quiver, and I felt sick and shaky. I softened my tone, reached across the divide between us, laid my fingertips close to her arm, then pulled back. I took my mala bracelet out of my purse, tucked it into her left hand, and squeezed, my fingers lingering on hers. To my horror, I felt the corners of my eyes sting as my mascara mixed with my tears. There really wasn’t any point, I knew, of breaking down, upsetting Gina now that she was calm.
She did not say, “I’m in remorse.” She said, she never really intended to kill herself. She said, she just wanted to cut herself. How good it felt. Then she said nothing, and I said nothing too. No scolding. No admonishments. No show of anger. At that moment, I was too afraid of life.
I had the thought then, of a quote that came to me—I think it was Kahlil Gibran who said it—that ‘one can never truly know happiness until they’ve suffered pain,’ or words to that effect, and I thought to myself what a crock of shit that was. And I thought then too, that sometimes things can only be what they are and nothing more, even when you’d like them to be.
Gina blew a ring into the clean air. Puff, Poof. A soft scent of smoke drifted and then hung in the air behind her. When she finally spoke, she humbled me.
“I wish I were like you,” she said in that soft voice of hers, focussing in on her cigarette. She raised her eyes to me then, for the first time. “Confident.”
I’d like to say I turned to her then held her and told her I’d stay. I’d like to say I was the one who saved her. But I wasn’t. I turned and walked away and saved myself instead.
A few weeks after I leave London, Gina calls to say she and Rome have moved in together, into our old apartment on Adelaide Street. She says he and Dave got jobs at the slaughterhouse, so now they could afford a phone.
Gina laughs when I squeal and say, “ew!”
“Rome’s the strong, silent type,” she says, “and Dave says he can handle it as long as he doesn’t have to look the cows in the eye.”
Pretty soon, Gina is two and a half months pregnant, so she gets her greatest wish after all when Rome proposes to her on her birthday. She mails me a Polaroid picture of herself, sitting on top of those same stairs at the house on Adelaide Street, showing off her engagement ring, and smiling. She asks me if I’ll be her maid of honour at the wedding, and I say, of course, I will.
Shortly before their wedding Gina comes home from work at the Ponderosa one day and finds Rome kissing the girl who was staying with them. In her hormonal state, she races into the kitchen and grabs a steak knife, and stabs Rome in the stomach. He holds a tea towel over his wound, clutching at his stomach in disbelief. The girl calls 911, and the young couple from downstairs throws them out after the ambulance leaves.
Rome doesn’t press charges and tells the lawyers in court at the preliminary hearing that he and Gina love each other and still want to marry. They crash on Ruby and Dave’s couch until they find a new place.
After hearing all this, I am horrified at Gina’s insane, violent behaviour and feel glad I left, thinking it could have been me. I beg off being Gina’s maid of honour, citing the distance as too difficult, but I still go to their wedding on the May 24th long weekend anyway. It’s in a Catholic Church, one of those big Italian weddings where the women come to the ceremony at noon in hair curlers and stretch pants and then go home and wait around for hours until it’s time to get dolled up for a reception with five hundred people and a big five-course Italian dinner. Gina invites me to her mother’s house for the wait with the women and it seems like just one big ordinary happy family.
Gina takes me into her bedroom and tells me she lost the baby the week before the wedding, from all the stress and commotion she says, with Rome and the move. It’s the first time she’s ever let me see her cry. She looks so sad deep down in her eyes but later, in her fairy tale wedding dress, surrounded by family and her bridesmaids and a flower girl, with Rome beside her beaming proudly, she looks the most radiant I’ve ever seen her. At that moment, I am hopeful, thinking for the first time that maybe her life with Rome will turn out to be a good one after all.
Later that night, during the reception, after Rome has removed the wedding garter with his teeth and tossed it into the crowd—Gina’s something borrowed, something blue—she throws her bouquet over her shoulders and into a group of single women, and I catch it.
“I guess I didn’t ruin your summer after all,” Gina says when she sees me look over at Dave, and he looks back at me.
I wrap my arms around her and smile, and she nestles her face against my cheek. I smell Baby Shampoo and Panna Cotta and wine. She lifts her eyes to gaze at me apologetically, and we both laugh and then begin to cry. Who needs those goddamned absent mothers everywhere? When we’ve got this.
In my memory, I leave Gina on the front steps of the old house where we lived, sitting in the sun, looking serene, with a soft breeze that blows back her fine hair. She gives me a faint smile, sucks in on her Export A, and blows the smoke back towards me. She holds it between the middle and forefinger of her right hand, pinky out, and blows on her nails, gauze wrapped around her left wrist as if she didn’t have a care in the world. And even though Gina will always be this way in my mind—a strong, confident girl for whom life rolls right off her back—I think that maybe this is the only way we ever really know anyone, the only way we choose to see the people we have known and with whom we’ve shared the saddest and most profound moments of their lives.
And now, on days when I look back, and I recall her there, sitting all alone on the edge of the bathtub, wearing her short-sleeved white blouse and a robe, where it’s night and the moon dapples through the dark violet hue of the skyline, shining a ray through the top of the window, when I can’t block out the picture of her, as she walks down the stairs, I see her tread along the cobblestone pathway until she’s gone from sight, where I look away as she vanishes into the darkness beneath a rustle of blossoming bushes, and into the moonlight, dripping in rose petals—it is then that I choose to remember the way it was at the beginning of that summer, when we were both once like moons, often shining full and bright.
