to catch up on The World Outside from the beginning, click here
NOW
Joanna stayed with Mary for a week before heading back to Connecticut and the end of her college career. The visit was hard for all of the expected reasons—Mary was distracted; her loyalty, which had once been solely to Joanna, was now split between two people who didn’t know each other; their time together was much too short; Joanna felt pressure to temper her own need to discuss Erik, lest she spoil Mary’s good mood. But it was hard in unanticipated ways too. Mary was marrying a man whom, for all intents and purposes, she’d just met, a man who might be sent anywhere in the country. The girl who’d lain across Joanna’s bed seven years ago and dreamed of settling down for good in Grace might never get to live there again. But she was happy. For all of Joanna’s shock and best-friend worry, she could see that Mary was happy. In love, radiant. And Joanna couldn’t help but compare the two of them.
If she had asked, would Erik have moved to New York to be with her? He might have, Joanna thought, but he wouldn’t have been happy there. Maine was in his blood. Yet it was in her blood too, and she no longer felt compelled to be there. Why was that? For the first two years of college, sure, it had been because everything else was so exciting, but she couldn’t say that anymore.
Joanna turned the question around in her mind: if he asked her, would she move back home to be with him? She had to admit she didn’t know. A year earlier, she would have said no, unequivocally. She’d loved him then (as she did now), but giving up what she’d found in college would have felt like too high a price to pay. And now?
What would Josh have done? He loved Grace as much as any of them did, but he had been eager to leave too. Maybe he really had been planning to come home after Rio…but maybe not. In Joanna’s mind, he would be forever frozen in that final moment in the airport, walking away from them. She didn’t have an image of him returning.
+++
The morning that Joanna had to catch the train back to Connecticut, Mary took her out for an early breakfast near the station. She had an agenda, she said, for their last hour before saying goodbye.
“One,” she said, holding up a finger. She grinned. “Will you be my maid of honor?”
Joanna gasped so loudly that the couple at the next table looked over. She clapped her hands over her mouth and the two of them shook with silent laughter. Joanna nodded, still covering her mouth, her eyes squeezed shut in gratitude that, for this moment at least, she was simply happy. Mary clapped her hands and leaned her elbows on the table, wiping tears from her eyes.
“Okay, that brings us to number two. Andy’s starting his residency in Virginia—in September.”
Virginia? September? Joanna thought, dismayed—the first was too far away, the second much too soon.
“His uncle, thank God, has a place down there and is letting us have free rent if we just fix up a few things and pay utilities,” Mary continued. “But…with a honeymoon, and moving, and getting settled, and everything, it means we have to get married soon. Like, as in June 16th.”
“June 16th? Five months from now?”
“Yeah—I know it’s crazy, but we want everything to be simple anyway. Really simple. I mean, beautiful. But as cheap and DIY as it needs to be. Can you help me pull this off, O Maid of Honor?”
Joanna’s head started spinning again, thinking about how all of this would change her last semester and of what it would mean to say goodbye to Mary, for who knew how long, in June. September had sounded bad enough.
Ultimately, of course, what could Joanna say? She nodded and said she’d do whatever Mary needed her to do.
“Thank you,” Mary breathed. “Okay, last thing.” She stared at Joanna for a minute and looked so nervous that Joanna felt a prickle on the back of her neck. “As you know,” she began, glancing at Joanna and then down at the table, “You’ve been my best friend for my whole life, and, aside from Andy now, you’re the most important person in it. But.” She blew a breath through pursed lips and paused for a second. “I know this might be weird, but…I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t at least invite Erik to the wedding.”
Of all her pronouncements thus far, that one gave Joanna pause. She sat back in her chair and absorbed the idea for a few seconds. Mary mistook her silence for anger and began to babble.
“I don’t expect him to come, of course,” she said in a rush. “I just…I mean, he would hear about it, and how awkward would that be? But if you say no, of course I won’t, it’s just…we all had this group, you know? And he was a part of that. And I don’t even know when I would ever see him again, after the wedding. It just feels like a way to honor, like, how we all were together. It felt like the right thing to do. But—no. Of course not. It’s a stupid thing for me to say, Joey; forget I even brought it up, okay?”
Mary was so busy explaining herself, she wasn’t letting Joanna get a word in. Finally, she laid her hand on Mary’s arm to stop the barrage and leaned forward. “This is your wedding. Invite whoever you want,” she said with a nonchalance that she did not feel.
“Really?” Mary leaned forward too, squeezing Joanna’s arms, and then she flopped back in her chair, the weight of this conversation lifting off her shoulders. They spent the rest of the time before Joanna had to leave leafing through the stack of bridal magazines that Mary had lugged to the coffeeshop and tearing out pictures to use for inspiration. At one point, Joanna glanced across the table and saw Mary bent over an image of a rustic table setting, her brow furrowed, and she thought to herself, This is how grownups are friends.
A little while later, she laid her head back against the padded headrest and listened as the train wheels began to click-clack down the tracks. She was close to falling into a a desperately needed rest when it hit her: as hard as she’d worked to avoid it, she’d have to go home now, whether she wanted to or not.
+++
One Tuesday in February, Coop sent Joanna an email, asking her to meet him at the campus coffee shop that evening. She was surprised to realize that she was, in fact, free, having closed a show the previous weekend and with no audition until that Friday. Her body didn’t know what to do with the time off, and she jumped at the chance to sit down with someone who could maybe tell her what to do.
Coop waited until she was seated across from him, her purse on the floor next to her chair, her latte steaming in front of her, before he pushed his coffee—black—to the side, leaned forward, and asked her urgently, “What’s going on with you this year?”
Joanna actually leaned back in her seat, she was that thrown off by the bluntness of his question. Hedging, she asked him what he meant, to which he raised an eyebrow and gave her a look that said Are you kidding me?
“For three years, I’ve been able to rely on you to arrive early, stay late, attend last-minute rehearsals, take on extra work, shine in every class in the entire department, volunteer for the most thankless of tasks. And you’ve still always seemed like you wanted to be doing more. And this year—” He spread his hands out in front of him, indicating a wide swath of nothing. “It seems like you’re barely awake. Your work in Shoshana’s play last year was incredible, truly. The best I’ve seen from anyone in…years, and certainly the best I’ve seen from you, but, frankly, you haven’t approached that level since. Not even close.”
Joanna looked down into her drink, mesmerized by the way the foam shifted with her every exhalation.
“Jo?” Coop said gently a few moments later. “I may be overstepping here, but does your…affect—or lack thereof—this year have anything to do with the young man you introduced me to last spring?”
“How did you know about that?” Joanna asked sharply, looking into his face for the first time since he’d started talking.
Coop lifted one shoulder in a wry semi-shrug. “Theater is a small world,” he said simply. “Theater at a small school is smaller still.” He tented his hands and rested his chin on his fingertips. “Let me guess: he didn’t like your performance—or, to be more precise, the fact of your performance—and he let you know it in no uncertain terms. Am I right?”
To hear the last twelve months of emotion reduced to half a sentence jarred Joanna, but he was essentially correct, so she nodded slowly.
“What do you think he was reacting to?”
“He said…” She sighed, a long, weary sigh. “He said that it felt like he was watching me having sex with another man. In front of a paying audience.” Using his actual words would have painted him in too negative a light, but she could tell Coop understood when he sat back in his chair and folded his hands in his lap.
“Ah,” he said. He looked at her pointedly. “Not an actor, then, I take it?”
“Hardly.” Remembering how bumbling and awkward Erik had been in their theater class in high school, Joanna lifted one corner of her mouth in a small smile. It felt like a very, very long time ago.
“Forgive me, Jo, but you’re not doing well, are you?”
Coop was a hell of a teacher, a hell of a director, but he didn’t normally insert himself into his students’ personal lives. The concern in his voice was what finally broke Joanna. She began to cry, right there at the table, not caring that the café was buzzing with other students, many of whom were now staring openly at her.
“I miss him, Coop,” she moaned finally. “He asked me to marry him that night, and I said no, and he just…walked out!”
“Marriage…” Coop nodded his head thoughtfully a few times, not saying anything. “He sounds like a worthy young man. His complete disregard for your talent notwithstanding,” he added with a smile.
“He is.” Joanna nodded, sniffling and wiping her nose with the insufficient napkin her cup had been resting on. Her tears had stopped falling, but she could feel that her face was still red and pinched. “I haven’t spoken to him since, but my best friend is getting married at home this summer, and I’m just…dreading when I finally have to see him.”
Coop waved his hand in front of his face, dismissive now, and leaned forward again. “Miss Beaulieu, I am not qualified to give you counsel on how to speak to your ex-boyfriend. What I am interested in is your career.” Joanna smiled, despite herself. This was the Coop she was used to—focused to the point of insensitivity. He continued. “You are not the first young woman whose boyfriend has tried to dictate how she may express herself. And you won’t be the last. How do you plan to handle this? What are you going to choose? I do believe you have the talent necessary to go further than a small college’s theater program can take you, but it’s up to you. Talent alone won’t get you there; you need tenacity too. This is one hell of a way to earn a living. There is nothing else like it in the world, but it only works if…well, if it works.”
Joanna watched him speak, his words seeping into her.
“You will not be able to bring the heart to it that you’ll need—believe me—if your loyalties are always so divided. I’m sorry for what happened with your…young man. He seemed likable enough, maybe even more so than most. But he isn’t everything. If theater is it for you, don’t sell yourself short.”
Neither of them spoke for a couple of minutes. Joanna’s latte, which she still hadn’t tasted, was now lukewarm and not very appetizing, but she took a small sip anyway and thought about what he’d said.
If theater is it for you…
For the last ten years, theater had been it for her. But she just wasn’t sure it was anymore. And she didn’t know what that meant, or what to do about it.
She’d lost Josh. She’d lost Erik. For all intents and purposes, she was about to lose Mary. She still had theater, but she was bereft, empty. Shouldn’t she still at least be satisfied now, if she had everything she needed, even if she was a little sad at what she’d lost too?
She was so far from satisfied.
Her time with Shoshana that summer had been the longest in her memory without theater, and she really hadn’t missed it. And now, in her senior year, she had performed in four shows so far, but, when all was said and done, none of them had meant anything to her at all.
But so what? What did that mean—that she should go home and marry Erik because she couldn’t think of anything better to do?
Joanna looked back at Coop, still feeling distressed, but she could tell that he had said his piece and wasn’t going to offer her anything more.
“Coop,” she began, and then, unable to think of how to complete the thought, sighed and just said Thanks instead.
“It is most sincerely my pleasure,” he assured her. “You are a joy to work with—when you’re all there. I want you to figure this out. It would be too bad if you left your best years behind you at tiny Roosevelt College.”
He pressed her hand with his and left the café. Joanna stayed where she was, thinking over what he’d said, until the girl behind the counter told her she needed to start closing up.
The sky was dark when Joanna walked out onto the Green. She shivered in the sudden cold—she’d been nervous and too hot earlier and had only brought a sweatshirt. She looked up at the night sky, flooded with ambient light and little else. It had been so long since she’d seen the stars at home; she could barely even remember what Erik had missed about them when he was last down here. She put her head down, folded her arms tightly across her chest, and started for home.
Josh’s face appeared in her mind, clear as if he were standing in front of her. She remembered the night of the carnival, when he’d come into her room to talk before bed. He’d said how hard it was for him to let her go but that he was doing it. She wondered if he had seen any of this coming—maybe he would have been just as angry with her last year as Erik had been. But. On the other hand, he was the first one to even imply that she could figure out life on her own. That didn’t give her any direction, but it did offer her some comfort.
“Love you, Josh,” she whispered as she reached her front door and let herself in. She was ashamed at how long it had been since she’d thought about him. Now that she’d begun, more moments came to mind as she walked to her room. She closed her door, laid down on her bed and, for the next several hours, allowed her mind to wander wherever it wanted to go. For the first time in years, she concentrated on the small things about her brother: he had never put the cap back on the toothpaste; he had loved riding his bike in the rain; he had taught her more in one hour on the bunny slope than an expensive ski instructor had taught her in three weeks of lessons. She remembered how the tops of his shoulders would pinken, redden, and peel every summer, before finally settling into a deep, rich tan; she remembered, too, that certain quality of his voice—its loudness and underlying strength.
She cried, quietly, easily, and copiously that night, remembering this lost person. In the time after his death, all anyone had talked to her about was how good Josh had been, how handsome and how kind. All of that was true, but to focus on those qualities at the exclusion of everything else only cheapened who he’d really been. He’d been special, yes, but he hadn’t been a saint. He’d slept with girls and never called them. He’d paid older guys to buy him drinks. He’d skipped school if the weather was nice or if he just wanted to. And—he had wasted most of the last eighteen months of his life, not speaking to his best friend. Maybe even worse, he had made Joanna feel like she had to choose between her feelings for Erik and her loyalty to him. She had spent longer than she should have, feeling guilty for dating Erik, but it occurred to her that night, for the first time: she wasn’t the one who’d done anything wrong. He had—he’d let his protection of her go too far that time, and he had caused an unnecessary rift in the process.
She remembered all of that that night and more. She focused until she could recall the particular frequency of his knuckles to dry and crack in the wintertime, the concentration he was capable of maintaining during endless Star Trek marathons, the intensity with which he’d watched over her. It took most of the night, but somewhere in its midst, she felt like she had finally conjured up the full person, the full Josh. She held him in her mind for as long as she could stand, and then she let him go. She watched him walk away from them in that airport, and she heard his voice through the scratchy connection saying Te amo, and she said goodbye to her brother, once and for all.
She cried a little then, but not overwhelmingly. She laid still for several minutes, poking at her raw nerves, gingerly testing her state of mind. She was okay. Not good. But okay.
+++
An idea—thrilling and terrifying—slowly coalesced in Joanna’s mind over the next couple of days, and, that Friday, she walked into the theater just before her scheduled audition time and found Coop in the booth where she’d hoped he’d be. He was testing the lights and making notes on a pad of paper—despite his distraction, he left the booth when she asked him if they could talk. They sat next to each other in the last row.
“I’m not going to audition for the show,” she told him, having decided that direct was the best route. Coop looked surprised, but he didn’t respond. “I’m…not going to audition for any of the shows left this semester.” She had rehearsed this speech a dozen times in her room that morning, but hearing the words come out of her mouth still felt like cutting off the branch she was sitting on. She just hoped there was something down there to break her fall.
“So I take it you’ve decided. Back home then? Back to…what was his name again?”
“Erik. And yes. I mean, no.” Joanna sighed. “Yes to home. No to Erik. Or—I mean, I don’t know, but that’s not why I’m saying this.”
Coop waved his hand in front of his face, exactly as he had at the café, and cut her off. “If you don’t mind, my dear, I’m not particularly interested in the reasons. I’m busy at the moment, preparing for the students who want to be here. Goodbye.”
Without even a look over his shoulder, he went back into the booth and closed the door, leaving Joanna feeling like a faucet prematurely cut off. She’d only gotten the first part of her speech out; she’d wanted to tell him about Josh, and about what her thoughts about him had meant to her just a few nights earlier, and that she wasn’t giving up on theater—she was just giving herself time, needed time, to…to see what was next. She realized now, too, that she had wanted him to put up a fight—whether she would have acquiesced, she didn’t honestly know, but it would have been nice to know how needed she was here—and that he, truly, had said all he was going to say.
Finally, there was nothing holding her here. She heard Coop’s voice behind the booth’s window—Going dark, he said—just before the house lights went out.
She got the hint. She stood up to leave and felt her way to the door, knowing it would be the last time she’d walk out of this building. Light-headed, distracted, and momentarily blinded by the lobby lights, she almost bumped into another young woman who had just walked in.
“Oh!” she exclaimed as they narrowly avoided each other. The other woman had an audition sheet in her hand, a purse hanging on one shoulder, and a nervous, excited look of anticipation on her face. Joanna had never seen her before, but she had the wide-eyed look of a freshman.
“Sorry,” Joanna mumbled.
“That’s okay.” She had a breathy voice and a toothy smile. She looked a little like Joanna, actually—dark hair, green eyes, self-consciously artistic outfit. She was taller, though, and thinner than Joanna herself would probably ever be. “Um—do you know who I’m supposed to report to for my audition?”
“You’re a little early,” Joanna reassured her. “Sarah should be here any minute to get people settled in.”
“Okay.” The girl looked relieved and sat down in one of the lobby chairs.
“Break a leg,” Joanna told her. She turned to go.
“Are you auditioning too?” the girl called after her.
Joanna paused, one hand pushing the door open. She felt old, wondering where this girl would be when she was this close to graduating. Maybe she’d be lucky; maybe she’d still feel she was making the right decisions. She took a breath in and held it for a moment. “No,” she said, finally. “I’m not.”