A Clean Slate. Laura Caldwell

him. Although still pissed off about him being made partner ahead of me, about him possibly knowing that I would be fired, I felt much better now that I’d gotten my dose of rage. And oddly enough, I felt a tipsy contentment around me. It’d been eons since Laney and I had had a late-night chat like this, a fact that made me sad. It was Laney who’d been with me every step of the way though the traumas of high school, the newfound freedom of college and the often painful days of early adulthood, and yet it was Ben I’d ended up spending so much time with. Ben, who’d eventually decided that the time meant nothing.

      “He is such a fucker,” I said, the margaritas making my tongue loose, causing me to repeat myself over and over.

      Laney gave me a light smack on the arm. “Stop already. It’s unhealthy. Let’s talk about something else.”

      “Name it.”

      “Are you sure you’re all right with this no-memory thing? I mean, you’ve had a lot going on today, and it’s all right to fall apart.”

      I turned on my side to face her. “I feel better than I ever have.”

      “Well, don’t think that you have to put on a tough act. You can still fall apart if you want.”

      “Nope. I’ve done enough of that.”

      Laney was silent for a second, and I could hear the whoosh of cars passing by her building. “It’s just that something was definitely wrong. Something more than Ben and the job,” she said.

      “It was obviously something that didn’t matter.”

      “Maybe.”

      Her tone made me feel a little chilly, and I buried myself deeper under her duvet. What was it that I hadn’t told anyone? Did it matter now? On one hand, if whatever it was could explain why I couldn’t remember this summer, I wanted to know it. For some reason, I truly wanted to learn why this odd memory loss had happened to me. But on the other hand, if I remembered those five months, wouldn’t I just slip back into that depression? I wanted the whys and the hows of the situation, but I feared the details. I felt as if my memory was a house of cards, wobbly and shaky and hollow inside. I was afraid that if I came too close to that emptiness, that missing time, everything would fall in on me.

      “Look, Lane,” I said, “I’ve already spent too much time on whatever it was, and maybe that’s why I feel so good now, because I let myself be depressed until I couldn’t be depressed anymore.”

      “Shouldn’t you try to figure out more about what was going on with you during that time? I could help you, you know. We could go talk to Ellen or somebody, maybe do some research.” Laney’s voice sounded so sweet, so helpful and slightly worried, and it made me tremble a little inside.

      I squeezed her arm, as much to reassure her as myself. “It’s okay. As far as I can tell, nothing good happened during those months, right?”

      “Right,” she said, a hint of doubt lingering in her voice.

      “Right.” I rolled over, turning my back to her. “And what you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

      6

      On Sunday, I suffered an intense headache. I usually didn’t feel so bad after a night of drinking, but I probably hadn’t been drinking much for five months. I tried not to think about the headaches Laney had told me about, the ones I suffered during those months I was holed up in my apartment.

      After Laney plied me with ibuprofen, she and I joined Gear and the rest of his High Gear band to watch the Bears game at a little corner pub. I’m not sure what I expected of Laney’s latest boyfriend—maybe heroin at halftime?—but he wasn’t exactly the stereotypical dude in a heavy metal band. Oh sure, he had the requisite tattoos on his arms (barbed wire on the right, some Chinese lettering on the left) and he wore a ripped black T-shirt and black army boots, but Gear was warm and friendly, too, which surprised me.

      “So this is the infamous Kelly,” he said when Laney introduced us.

      “Infamous? I hope that’s a good thing.” I held out my hand, but he pulled me into a hug. He smelled like shaving cream and cigarettes.

      “You’re infamous because Laney Bug is always talking about you.”

      “Laney Bug?” I looked over my shoulder at Laney, who groaned a little, probably realizing that she would never be able to live down this nickname. I could almost see us at age ninety, me taunting her, Oh Laney Bug, can you bring me my tea, please?

      The rest of Gear’s band weren’t quite as outgoing or sweet, but we spent a happy afternoon with them eating pizza, watching football and screaming at the TV when the Bears messed up. I drank a few beers in a hair-of-the-dog effort, and didn’t think about anything else for hours—not Ben or my town house or my lack of employment.

      Monday morning, I rolled over in Laney’s bed and stretched, feeling, once again, intensely headachy from the alcohol. Apparently, I couldn’t hold my liquor like I used to. I heard the hum of Laney’s hair dryer from the bathroom, followed by the clatter of makeup on the tile floor and Laney’s curse.

      “You okay in there, Laney Bug?” I yelled, stretching my legs under her comfy duvet.

      “Late,” she called back, ignoring my use of her new nickname. “Totally late.”

      A second later, she tore out of the bathroom, yanked open her closet and stepped into a pair of shoes.

      “What time did you get up?” I asked.

      “Six.”

      I turned and squinted at her bedside clock. It was eight-thirty. “And what have you been doing?”

      “Answered e-mail, did a Tae-Bo tape, returned a few phone calls.”

      “Okay, now I feel like a lazy ass.”

      “You need to take it easy.” She picked up her purse by the bedside and squeezed my shoulder. “Stay as long as you want, all right? And call me at work if you need anything.”

      “Thanks.” I watched her run into the kitchen and grab an apple out of a bowl. “Have a good day!” I called, but she was already out the door.

      With Laney gone, the apartment seemed empty and vast. I swallowed some Advil, then took one of the books from her shelf, a memoir about a woman who’d followed the Grateful Dead. I figured that maybe I’d lie in bed all day and read. The book wasn’t that interesting, though, at least not after the first three acid trips, and within an hour I was antsy. I knew I should probably go back to my own apartment, but the thought brought only a queasy feeling.

      To thank Laney for everything she’d done for me lately, I ignored the pain in my head and the nausea in my stomach and cleaned up her place. Then I made myself a bowl of granola and decided I’d just spend a lazy day in front of the TV.

      The first few hours went okay, especially after my headache eased. I watched the news and business stations, trying to catch up on the market, studying the Bloomberg as I used to for the ticker symbols that signaled the retail stocks. There were a couple of surprises, a few stocks that were way higher than when I’d followed them, and I found myself analyzing the rest of the market and how it might affect these companies. After a while, though, I didn’t care all that much. It was a relief just to flip the channel.

      Next, I tried the talk shows and the soaps, which kept my interest for a whole forty minutes. What, exactly, was I going to do with the rest of my day? A better question—what had I done when I was home for five months? I couldn’t fathom it.

      A thought came to me. Laney had said that I had more than enough money to live on because of the severance pay from Bartley Brothers and the sale of my town house. But what if I’d somehow spent that money during those five months? Laney had assumed I was holed up in that high-rise, but what if I’d actually been blowing the cash on God-knows-what, maybe a sailboat or a Porsche for Ben or a diamond engagement ring for myself?

      I