Nell by Nancy Thayer

clear road to anywhere, because she wasn’t sure where she’d been or where she was. She was just lost. And it seemed that when she tried to remember parts of her past, she found that they had been carried away, out of sight, beyond memory, and she could only remember scenes of her life, scenes sailing past too quickly to catch.
    She was thirty-eight, and she had lost so many people.
    She had lost Laura very early. Laura had gotten pregnant shortly after that trip and had married her boyfriend. They lived in a tiny apartment, and talented Laura spent her time there taking care of twins, while her young husband worked at a factory in the day and went out drinking with the boys at night. Laura had been every bit as attractive and talented as Nell, both girls knew that. But their situations had changed. Nell was envious of Laura for about fifteen minutes, during Laura’s wedding shower, when her friends had given her three sexy beribboned peignoirs and Laura had shown off her diamond engagement ring. But Nell had never been envious of Laura after that, especially not the time she saw her coming out of Sears with two babies squalling in a basket.
    When Nell went off to college in Iowa City, she wrote to Laura regularly, but Laura never replied. During Christmas vacation her freshman year, Nell had gone to Laura’s house with presents. But Laura had been cold. She had looked so much older, so beaten down, that Nell wanted to cry. Still, Nell had cooed and oohed over the babies and acted as if the minutiae of Laura’s life—the blue spotted ashtray on the Salvation Army table, the curtains Laura had sewn for the bathroom window—were marvels. Laura had not been taken in by Nell’s effusiveness.
    “Nell,” she had said when Nell was leaving, “please don’t come here again. I know you want to remain friends, but honestly, I just can’t bear to see you. I can’t stand reading your letters. I can’t stand knowing about your life. I need to have friends who are doing what I do, raising babies, making tuna and potato chip casseroles. When I think of what you ’re doing—well, it sends me into a depression so serious that I sometimes think of killing myself.”
    “God, you don’t mean that, Laura!” Nell had cried.
    “I do mean that,” Laura had said. She managed a wry smile because at that moment the babies awoke and began to wail. “Oh, don’t worry, I won’t commit suicide. I won’t find the time or the energy to commit suicide. But please, do me a favor and don’t write me again. Don’t come to see me again. I don’t want to know you or anything about you. It’s too hard for me to bear.”
    Nell had complied with her friend’s request. She had not seen Laura again.
    One time, in their junior year of high school, they had worked on a play about Anastasia, the woman who claimed to be the long-lost surviving daughter of themurdered Czar Nicholas and Czarina Alexandra. They had taken turns being the pleading young amnesiac Anastasia and the skeptical old noblewoman grandmother to whom she appeals. They had played one particular scene over and over again with each other, wishing they were on the Broadway stage so they could thrill the world as much as they thrilled themselves with their passionate acting. At the end of the scene, the grandmother had come to believe that Anastasia was her own, and the two women had embraced, weeping with joy at having found each other. Then, in high school, in their teens, Nell and Laura had believed all that—that life was a process of people discovering each other, that life would be a series of joyful embraces, breathtaking revelations, passionate reunions. They had thought that only through death would people be taken from them.
    How little they had known. Nell had written Laura when she was divorced from Marlow. Now she won’t envy me, Nell had thought. But Laura had never replied. She was really gone from Nell’s life.
    Laura had been Nell’s best childhood friend.